NOAA does not build or launch or maintain satellites. They don't. NASA does. That's what they do. NOAA does not have flight ops. NOAA does not have a launchpad. NOAA does not have giant clean room facilities for building satellites. NOAA provides the requirements, NASA builds/launches/maintains the satellites.
And they don't need to. I use a computer with complicated software every day for work. But I don't know how to build that complicated software, or the computer, or the chair I sit on.
There are a lot of companies out there, and a few countries too, that will happily design and put satellites in space for a fee. One of the big problems with government funded research (and I say this as someone who does not have a philosophical opposition to governments funding research) is that sooner or later, government departments see the big pile of money that is available for climate change programs, and want a piece of the action. NASA - because we know space, and can watch the climate from space. The army, because defending the country requires understanding the weather . climate - hence we want some of that action. EPA - because we protect the environment, and therefore we need to get in on the climate science action and therefore want that funding.
Why can't there be one organisation whose job it is to study the earth and climate, and let all other organisations do what they are meant to do, like look out into space, and find ways of protecting the environment without all needing to justifying everything on climate.
Your failure to blend the real world needs like cost, or the capabilities of third world nations, with your imagination is the reason you won't be taken seriously by anyone. You are proposing solutions that don't stand a fat chance in hell of being accepted, or require advancements that won't come for 50 years. Get real dude.
If wealthy countries invest now in those big solutions, developing countries can jump onto those solutions later once they are ready. For example, electric cars might not be an efficient solution for poor Africa right now, but once Africa has developed the necessary infrastructure, electric cars can contribute to emissions reduction.
And many times, the high cost of the solutions is only because we have not developed huge industries and the requisite economies of scale around them.
If we can build (presumably) ships that are sealed enough to protect us from the great vacuum that is space, and that can last years in the great nothingness that is space, then we can certainly build habitats here on earth to survive the most extreme changes in climate.
At the end, a spaceship that will take us to another solar system is essentially a huge dwelling that contains everything we will need to restart life on another planet - there is no guarantee that we will find the necessary building blocks there. So we would not only have to take our food, but the plants that can produce the food, the animals that would provide meat, the bacteria that all plants and animals depend on, the birds and the bees - everything needed to bootstrap another earth.
And this assumes that we can find a planet that contains the right ingredients to support life. All the minerals that are necessary to grow life e.g. the right quantities of magnesium to create chlorophyll. If we were doing this, we might need a thousand years to get it right.
Put it another way, if you were a weary space traveller, and you happened upon an earth who surface had heated to, say, 25 degrees on average, would you settle there and try to make it work, or would you travel on?
There are many technical way of going around those problems even better than a black cab driver would.
For example - medical emergency - every Uber car has the Uber app which could have a big red button to dial an emergency number, and potentially route the Uber to the nearest emergency room.
Vehicle involved in wreck - automatically dial 999 or, even better, send detailed report to emergency services detailing the likely severity of the crash and the location of said crash.
Local emergency - they are not morons you know. They are people who have been driving a while and know how to get around local diversions / detours.
In any case, why have these regulations not been necessary until now? In the UK in particular, private hire cars (of which Ubers are classified as private hire) have been doing alright no problem. This only seems to have become a problem at the very moment that Uber entered. In the UK, Uber is private hire - with an app.
The response to Uber is protectionism pure and simple.
I didn't say every detail of the past will be remembered. I specifically said two things.
1. Anything important will be remembered. Unless there is a major upheaval - WW3 - nuclear apocalypse and back to living in caves, as long as we have computers of one kind or another, we will not lose any knowledge that is important and critical to human survival.
2. The best way to preserve knowledge is to disseminate it, and not to invent new archival methods. Teaching and passing on knowledge between generations is the way to do this.
The reason some of the old knowledge was lost was that it was not useful for most people at that time, and wouldn't be for millennia, and because some people preferred to keep knowledge secret rather than disseminate it.
And also, hanging, drawing and quartering is not important, unless you are ISIS.
I don't think the minutiae of how we live is as important as we like to think. It is interesting, for those who are so inclined, but not critical to our survival as humans.
The vast majority of things that are worth knowing will always be remembered and preserved. If the few that forgotten become necessary, they will be reinvented.
The world will continue spinning. No need for alarm.
The best way to preserved knowledge is to disseminate it widely. Or, to paraphrase Linus Torvalds, someone somewhere will mirror all the really important stuff.
Maybe not brick it (because people might try to fix it).
Just put a huge warning message that the device is dead and can not be used anymore. Give the people a code that they can use to claim a refund, and tell them they don't even have to bring it to a store. They can just chuck it away and claim a refund.
That way, no parent gives it to a young kid, and they scare them enough into getting rid of it.
I would say the opposite is true. We force the most powerful people to pay taxes because, in a democracy, we agree that we decide on these matters by one person-one vote.
If we left it to the most powerful, then it would be us paying taxes to the rich as it used to be in the old feudal system.
Never have insurance... unless it is something you can't afford to lose. The cost of insurance is (expected-loss + insurance-company-overhead + insurance-company-profit). If you self-insure, it is just the expected loss. So never insure anything you can afford to lose. It is a bad bet.
Anyway, it is silly to conjecture about who is responsible for what cost. Here is the answer: Read the launch contract.
Wrong.When you self insure, you do not incur the "expected loss". You incur the "actual loss", which may be nothing, or could be more than anything you have.
If I had a $1m car, if I crashed it, I could lose $1m. But If I insured, I would lose the expected loss plus the overhead and profit margin.
The point of insurance is to remove uncertainty. Insurance is not a bad bet. Even very large companies such as Apple will insure because it is sensible to do so.
If you are self-insuring, you might not be using the funds you set aside wisely.
accepting defeat means losing the useful original meaning
The original meaning is already lost. If you actually use "begs the question" correctly, 90% of your audience will have no idea what you mean, and the other 10% will think you are being pompous. It is best to just avoid the phrase entirely in both writing and speaking.
This +++ When one identifies a phrase or word in transition, it's probably best to avoid it. I'm afraid to use "literally" now because I have no idea how it will be interpreted.
How much rubber and fuel is burned up on a "indy 500" race just so people can drive around in a big oval for hours? That fuel could have went to better uses.
Humans waste things for much less, this is a portable aircraft with a good carry capacity.
I think you wil find that the amount of fuel "wasted" in an actual Oval race is less than the fuel used by all the supporters who flock to watch said race.
Motorsports, at least at the top level, used a negligible amount of fuel compared to other fuel uses.
Now what happened when people smoked away their food stamps? Did we cut them off? No, that would be cruel to the kids. We had to come up with other money from numerous other sources, and the bad behaviors still don't change.
This only seems to be an American problem. Here in the UK, people on benefits are given money. They are even given their rent money and mostly manage to pay their rent rather than drink or smoke it away.
If you treat people like children, they will behave like children. If people can't notice they are hungry or thirsty, and have nowhere to live even when they could afford it, then you have to let them deal with the consequences.
China spent that money to try and avoid going down the hole with the US. The Chinese and the US economies are very intertwined. If China had not shored up the US dollar, US made products would have become cheaper and their own investments would have become worth less. They were acting in self interest, not out of any desire to help the US.
Well, Amazon Video in not available on the Apple TV. However, it is available on the iPhone, and it allows one to "AirPlay" it to the Apple TV. So, when I want to watch something on Amazon TV, I get the iPhone out and watch it on the 40" TV in HD.As soon as it it outputting to AirPlay, the app becomes a remote control of sorts. Oh, and the iPhone also works as a more capable remote for the Apple TV than the official Apple TV remote.
Smartphones are more capable in some respects than PCs. It's a lot harder to do that on a PC without fiddling.
I could say the same about many other pieces of OSS software.
Linux is only technically open source. In reality what goes into the kernel is tightly controlled by Torvalds.
GCC is only technically open source. In reality what goes into GCC is tightly controlled by the GCC steering committee.
Open source doesn't mean that everyone gets to control every piece of software. It means anyone can take that software, makes improvements to it, and release new versions without needing approval from the original authors.
Increasing tax on fuel will have a similar effect.
This idea is stupid - it's a technological solution looking for a problem. What if I buy an efficient car and tweak the engine to make it faster and less efficient. Does it still count as an efficient car?
Tax vehicles by weight if you have to - the heavier they are, the less efficient they tend ot be.
And tax the fuel. The more fuel you use, the more you pay.
Every citizen gets an amount of money which, if they pool together with others, they can survive on. They can then go and find any gainful work that augments their income and they pay tax at the marginal rate. Calibrated correctly, this should get rid of most "welfare" while also having the benefit of removing the means tested mess that is most countries' benefit systems.
Assange is asking for something that Sweden cannot give. Sweden is obliged, by treaty, to consider every extradition request that it receives. IANAL, but I am sure the Swedish government cannot limit the ability of courts to rule on extradition requests in any case.
Assange might as well ask for Sweden to ensure that it won't rain while he is there. His request is just as reasonable.
It's not the political will that is missing. The problem is that a basic income has opponents on both the left and the right.
The left would hate it because it would mean an end to many many state jobs. The kind of jobs such as assessing whether people ought to be on benefit or not. They would also hate the idea that rich people would also get this income, and would demand that it be means tested, thereby negating a large proportion of its benefits. (This is not just theoretical - here in the UK, there is always a consistent demand that certain benefits that are universal (such as the winter fuel allowance and the concessionary bus passes) be restricted so that those who have means do not get them. Never mind that a billionaire such Bernie Ecclestone likely wouldn't use a bus pas anyway, let alone notice the winter fuel allowance they receive).
The right hate it because they have to play to a base that hates the idea of people getting money for nothing. Can you imagine the collective frothing at the mouths if a government implemented a policy to give the work-shy money for doing absolute FA?
The crazy things is, a universal benefit should be something that unites the right and the left for their own reasons. The right tend to want smaller government. Universal income solves that by just crediting the account of every citizen who is alive with the amount, without requiring whole departments to do this. This could even be outsourced to banks. Additionally, such a system should almost certainly remove disincentive to work with some benefit systems.
The left should love it because it guarantees that no one is without, while leaving them free to partake of any activity that please, and as their creativity allows. This would also put pressure on companies to pay their workers well as workers would realistically be able to tell them to go to hell if they don't provide decent salaries and benefits.
Liberals should love this because it restores people's dignity. No one needs to beg for their food in this day and age, and no one needs to be a serf to either private companies or the government.
The problem if that the left hates the rich and the right distrusts the poor. So won't happen. Even though it absolutely makes sense.
I don't mind disagreement- so tell me why the US mint stamps coins, other than having the authority given them by the constitution.
Coins are minted because they are useful as convenience money. Without coins (and in the absence of electronic money), everything would need to cost whole dollars.
Small denomination notes could be created, but notes don't last as long and so would end up more expensive to maintain than coins.
Ideally, the coins ought to cost more to make than their face value (to discourage counterfeiting), but the value of the metal ought to be less than their face value (to discourage people melting them down for the metal).
If the value of the coin is exactly the value of the materials in it there is no benefit from melting it and the cost to make it is more. The point of having it in coin form would be that you wouldn't need to measure each "coin" to determine the value since the amount of materials is known.
This doesn't discourage counterfeiting since one could use a cheaper material that appears to be the real deal.
This doesn't contradict my post at all. What you are saying is that it might be possible for someone to make fake coins for less than their face value, which is what makes counterfeit coins profitable. In an ideal scenario, you wouldn't want that, because counterfeit coins can be a lot harder to detect once they are in circulation.
As an aside, one of the ways counterfeit coins are detected is by their weight. Coins made of similar looking but not quite identical alloys tend to be the wrong weight.
Slashdot Mirror
NOAA does not build or launch or maintain satellites. They don't. NASA does. That's what they do. NOAA does not have flight ops. NOAA does not have a launchpad. NOAA does not have giant clean room facilities for building satellites. NOAA provides the requirements, NASA builds/launches/maintains the satellites.
And they don't need to. I use a computer with complicated software every day for work. But I don't know how to build that complicated software, or the computer, or the chair I sit on.
There are a lot of companies out there, and a few countries too, that will happily design and put satellites in space for a fee. One of the big problems with government funded research (and I say this as someone who does not have a philosophical opposition to governments funding research) is that sooner or later, government departments see the big pile of money that is available for climate change programs, and want a piece of the action. NASA - because we know space, and can watch the climate from space. The army, because defending the country requires understanding the weather . climate - hence we want some of that action. EPA - because we protect the environment, and therefore we need to get in on the climate science action and therefore want that funding.
Why can't there be one organisation whose job it is to study the earth and climate, and let all other organisations do what they are meant to do, like look out into space, and find ways of protecting the environment without all needing to justifying everything on climate.
Your failure to blend the real world needs like cost, or the capabilities of third world nations, with your imagination is the reason you won't be taken seriously by anyone. You are proposing solutions that don't stand a fat chance in hell of being accepted, or require advancements that won't come for 50 years. Get real dude.
If wealthy countries invest now in those big solutions, developing countries can jump onto those solutions later once they are ready. For example, electric cars might not be an efficient solution for poor Africa right now, but once Africa has developed the necessary infrastructure, electric cars can contribute to emissions reduction.
And many times, the high cost of the solutions is only because we have not developed huge industries and the requisite economies of scale around them.
I think there were 400M reasons why they could not do this...
Reply to This
I first read that as a clever pun on the Airbus A400M (as in they wouldn't want to crash an A400M), as well as the $400m price for the deal.
If we can build (presumably) ships that are sealed enough to protect us from the great vacuum that is space, and that can last years in the great nothingness that is space, then we can certainly build habitats here on earth to survive the most extreme changes in climate.
At the end, a spaceship that will take us to another solar system is essentially a huge dwelling that contains everything we will need to restart life on another planet - there is no guarantee that we will find the necessary building blocks there. So we would not only have to take our food, but the plants that can produce the food, the animals that would provide meat, the bacteria that all plants and animals depend on, the birds and the bees - everything needed to bootstrap another earth.
And this assumes that we can find a planet that contains the right ingredients to support life. All the minerals that are necessary to grow life e.g. the right quantities of magnesium to create chlorophyll. If we were doing this, we might need a thousand years to get it right.
Put it another way, if you were a weary space traveller, and you happened upon an earth who surface had heated to, say, 25 degrees on average, would you settle there and try to make it work, or would you travel on?
There are many technical way of going around those problems even better than a black cab driver would.
For example - medical emergency - every Uber car has the Uber app which could have a big red button to dial an emergency number, and potentially route the Uber to the nearest emergency room.
Vehicle involved in wreck - automatically dial 999 or, even better, send detailed report to emergency services detailing the likely severity of the crash and the location of said crash.
Local emergency - they are not morons you know. They are people who have been driving a while and know how to get around local diversions / detours.
In any case, why have these regulations not been necessary until now? In the UK in particular, private hire cars (of which Ubers are classified as private hire) have been doing alright no problem. This only seems to have become a problem at the very moment that Uber entered. In the UK, Uber is private hire - with an app.
The response to Uber is protectionism pure and simple.
I didn't say every detail of the past will be remembered. I specifically said two things.
1. Anything important will be remembered. Unless there is a major upheaval - WW3 - nuclear apocalypse and back to living in caves, as long as we have computers of one kind or another, we will not lose any knowledge that is important and critical to human survival.
2. The best way to preserve knowledge is to disseminate it, and not to invent new archival methods. Teaching and passing on knowledge between generations is the way to do this.
The reason some of the old knowledge was lost was that it was not useful for most people at that time, and wouldn't be for millennia, and because some people preferred to keep knowledge secret rather than disseminate it.
And also, hanging, drawing and quartering is not important, unless you are ISIS.
I don't think the minutiae of how we live is as important as we like to think. It is interesting, for those who are so inclined, but not critical to our survival as humans.
The vast majority of things that are worth knowing will always be remembered and preserved. If the few that forgotten become necessary, they will be reinvented.
The world will continue spinning. No need for alarm.
The best way to preserved knowledge is to disseminate it widely. Or, to paraphrase Linus Torvalds, someone somewhere will mirror all the really important stuff.
Maybe not brick it (because people might try to fix it).
Just put a huge warning message that the device is dead and can not be used anymore. Give the people a code that they can use to claim a refund, and tell them they don't even have to bring it to a store. They can just chuck it away and claim a refund.
That way, no parent gives it to a young kid, and they scare them enough into getting rid of it.
I would say the opposite is true. We force the most powerful people to pay taxes because, in a democracy, we agree that we decide on these matters by one person-one vote.
If we left it to the most powerful, then it would be us paying taxes to the rich as it used to be in the old feudal system.
Always have an insurance
Never have insurance ... unless it is something you can't afford to lose. The cost of insurance is (expected-loss + insurance-company-overhead + insurance-company-profit). If you self-insure, it is just the expected loss. So never insure anything you can afford to lose. It is a bad bet.
Anyway, it is silly to conjecture about who is responsible for what cost. Here is the answer: Read the launch contract.
Wrong.When you self insure, you do not incur the "expected loss". You incur the "actual loss", which may be nothing, or could be more than anything you have.
If I had a $1m car, if I crashed it, I could lose $1m. But If I insured, I would lose the expected loss plus the overhead and profit margin.
The point of insurance is to remove uncertainty. Insurance is not a bad bet. Even very large companies such as Apple will insure because it is sensible to do so.
If you are self-insuring, you might not be using the funds you set aside wisely.
accepting defeat means losing the useful original meaning
The original meaning is already lost. If you actually use "begs the question" correctly, 90% of your audience will have no idea what you mean, and the other 10% will think you are being pompous. It is best to just avoid the phrase entirely in both writing and speaking.
This +++
When one identifies a phrase or word in transition, it's probably best to avoid it. I'm afraid to use "literally" now because I have no idea how it will be interpreted.
I reckon they should interpret it "literally".
Why do we "waste" a lot of our resources?
How much rubber and fuel is burned up on a "indy 500" race just so people can drive around in a big oval for hours? That fuel could have went to better uses.
Humans waste things for much less, this is a portable aircraft with a good carry capacity.
I think you wil find that the amount of fuel "wasted" in an actual Oval race is less than the fuel used by all the supporters who flock to watch said race.
Motorsports, at least at the top level, used a negligible amount of fuel compared to other fuel uses.
But, can they gift me bitcoins (not money) instead?
Now what happened when people smoked away their food stamps? Did we cut them off? No, that would be cruel to the kids. We had to come up with other money from numerous other sources, and the bad behaviors still don't change.
This only seems to be an American problem. Here in the UK, people on benefits are given money. They are even given their rent money and mostly manage to pay their rent rather than drink or smoke it away.
If you treat people like children, they will behave like children. If people can't notice they are hungry or thirsty, and have nowhere to live even when they could afford it, then you have to let them deal with the consequences.
China spent that money to try and avoid going down the hole with the US. The Chinese and the US economies are very intertwined. If China had not shored up the US dollar, US made products would have become cheaper and their own investments would have become worth less. They were acting in self interest, not out of any desire to help the US.
Well, Amazon Video in not available on the Apple TV. However, it is available on the iPhone, and it allows one to "AirPlay" it to the Apple TV. So, when I want to watch something on Amazon TV, I get the iPhone out and watch it on the 40" TV in HD.As soon as it it outputting to AirPlay, the app becomes a remote control of sorts. Oh, and the iPhone also works as a more capable remote for the Apple TV than the official Apple TV remote.
Smartphones are more capable in some respects than PCs. It's a lot harder to do that on a PC without fiddling.
I could say the same about many other pieces of OSS software.
Linux is only technically open source. In reality what goes into the kernel is tightly controlled by Torvalds.
GCC is only technically open source. In reality what goes into GCC is tightly controlled by the GCC steering committee.
Open source doesn't mean that everyone gets to control every piece of software. It means anyone can take that software, makes improvements to it, and release new versions without needing approval from the original authors.
Tell that to Netflix (who, as far as I am aware, still run on AWS).
Increasing tax on fuel will have a similar effect.
This idea is stupid - it's a technological solution looking for a problem. What if I buy an efficient car and tweak the engine to make it faster and less efficient. Does it still count as an efficient car?
Tax vehicles by weight if you have to - the heavier they are, the less efficient they tend ot be.
And tax the fuel. The more fuel you use, the more you pay.
And this does not involve any fancy tech.
Maybe because the odometer doesn't measure fuel use?
There is a fifth way - the citizen's income.
Every citizen gets an amount of money which, if they pool together with others, they can survive on. They can then go and find any gainful work that augments their income and they pay tax at the marginal rate. Calibrated correctly, this should get rid of most "welfare" while also having the benefit of removing the means tested mess that is most countries' benefit systems.
Assange is asking for something that Sweden cannot give. Sweden is obliged, by treaty, to consider every extradition request that it receives. IANAL, but I am sure the Swedish government cannot limit the ability of courts to rule on extradition requests in any case.
Assange might as well ask for Sweden to ensure that it won't rain while he is there. His request is just as reasonable.
It's not the political will that is missing. The problem is that a basic income has opponents on both the left and the right.
The left would hate it because it would mean an end to many many state jobs. The kind of jobs such as assessing whether people ought to be on benefit or not. They would also hate the idea that rich people would also get this income, and would demand that it be means tested, thereby negating a large proportion of its benefits. (This is not just theoretical - here in the UK, there is always a consistent demand that certain benefits that are universal (such as the winter fuel allowance and the concessionary bus passes) be restricted so that those who have means do not get them. Never mind that a billionaire such Bernie Ecclestone likely wouldn't use a bus pas anyway, let alone notice the winter fuel allowance they receive).
The right hate it because they have to play to a base that hates the idea of people getting money for nothing. Can you imagine the collective frothing at the mouths if a government implemented a policy to give the work-shy money for doing absolute FA?
The crazy things is, a universal benefit should be something that unites the right and the left for their own reasons. The right tend to want smaller government. Universal income solves that by just crediting the account of every citizen who is alive with the amount, without requiring whole departments to do this. This could even be outsourced to banks. Additionally, such a system should almost certainly remove disincentive to work with some benefit systems.
The left should love it because it guarantees that no one is without, while leaving them free to partake of any activity that please, and as their creativity allows. This would also put pressure on companies to pay their workers well as workers would realistically be able to tell them to go to hell if they don't provide decent salaries and benefits.
Liberals should love this because it restores people's dignity. No one needs to beg for their food in this day and age, and no one needs to be a serf to either private companies or the government.
The problem if that the left hates the rich and the right distrusts the poor. So won't happen. Even though it absolutely makes sense.
I don't mind disagreement- so tell me why the US mint stamps coins, other than having the authority given them by the constitution.
Coins are minted because they are useful as convenience money. Without coins (and in the absence of electronic money), everything would need to cost whole dollars.
Small denomination notes could be created, but notes don't last as long and so would end up more expensive to maintain than coins.
Ideally, the coins ought to cost more to make than their face value (to discourage counterfeiting), but the value of the metal ought to be less than their face value (to discourage people melting them down for the metal).
If the value of the coin is exactly the value of the materials in it there is no benefit from melting it and the cost to make it is more.
The point of having it in coin form would be that you wouldn't need to measure each "coin" to determine the value since the amount of materials is known.
This doesn't discourage counterfeiting since one could use a cheaper material that appears to be the real deal.
This doesn't contradict my post at all. What you are saying is that it might be possible for someone to make fake coins for less than their face value, which is what makes counterfeit coins profitable. In an ideal scenario, you wouldn't want that, because counterfeit coins can be a lot harder to detect once they are in circulation.
As an aside, one of the ways counterfeit coins are detected is by their weight. Coins made of similar looking but not quite identical alloys tend to be the wrong weight.