There are lots of checks and balances in the education system. Politicians don't make all of the decisions you have listed in a vacuum. Frankly, in a lot of jurisdictions its not politicians that make those decisions at all.
Regardless of certain high-profile controversies. Most of what is taught in public education is far from controversial. How do you vote if you can't read? How do you pay taxes if you can't do math? How do you get a job and contribute to the economy if you can't do either of those things.
And student blogs are being censored at private schools as well as public ones. How does doing away with public schools help that issue?
I know you're joking, but how about this for an idea:
A hybrid kernel. Open source drivers are compiled into the kernel. There is a API for closed-source drivers to run in user-space.
Does not violate GPL. Little compromise to stability. Developers who only want to do closed-source drivers can do so. Developers have incentive to open source their drivers in order to have better performance and take advantage of newer kernel features (the internal APIs are updated with the kernel, the external APIs stay fixed and fall behind the feature curve).
Win. Win. Win.
Unless its just a philosophical question, in which case... rant away open source crazies.;)
That makes a nice story for people who need to believe that a literal interpretation of the Bible allows for the universe to be 15 billion years old. The only problem is that it is not true.
(Bad Transliteration): Vayihee erev, vayihee bokeyr, yom ha-shaynee. (Literal Translation): And there is evening, and there is morning, day the second.
Its the same word for "day" that's used everywhere else in Hebrew (in the Bible and otherwise).
I don't believe we provide universal education because everyone has a right to an eduction. I believe we provide universal education because it is in everyone's best interest, both economically and civically. Where do you get educated workers for your business if poor people have nowhere to go to get educated? How much easier would it be to influence people's votes if those people have no education?
Well you could always communicate by writing. Because Hebrew survived as a Torah and Bible study language, we understand pretty well how the written language works.
It is supposed that the stories pre-date the Torah, but if you believe that, then you already do not believe it was divinely inspired on Mt. Sinai, so the basis for believing the stories have any significance is falsified. In other words, if you believe the stories enough to want to learn from the original writers why they wrote what they did, then you should believe they wrote in Hebrew. If you don't believe they wrote in Hebrew, then you shouldn't have any reason to believe the stories are divinely inspired.
The YHWH issue is a red herring. There was one word in Hebrew that no one was allowed to pronounce. Clearly you do not need that word in order to communicate in Hebrew, otherwise, how were they communicating back then.
"Alhtough, I'd also like to find out how they plan on asking since no one speaks sandscrit/cuneiform anymore (or whatever language was used back then). We may be able to read it, but I don't think anyone actually speaks it. "
Um, you do know that the Torah is written in Hebrew, don't you? I think there's a few million people in the world that speak Hebrew fluently.
"The turbines are less than 1D apart. The image assumes that the wind is blowing in one direction. It assumes the whole craft would move to face the wind. I don't want to be too hard on him, but it seems that he was having fun with some image program without thought for the physics involved."
How inefficient would that spacing be? (Not sarcastic, I really don't know.) If its just "somewhat less efficient", but would be much cheaper to build and operate, then it might work out. Sometimes engineers get focused on only one side of the problem (most efficient turbine placement) and ignore the other side of the problem (most efficient to build and maintain). The best engineers balance cost and efficiency to get something that makes the most economic sense.
"The world needs both the dreamers and the realists."
Hear, hear.
I often think about Columbus. His contemporaries knew the earth was round, they just thought you'd never make it across all that ocean. And they would have been right, except there happened to be a continent less than a third of the way along. In hindsight, its a little weird that they thought there would have been nothing out there, but if there hadn't been at least some islands to stop at, Columbus never could have made it all the way across (not enough provisions).
Oh, didn't know that. I looked it up and you might be able to do as little as 3 diameters, but your point stands.
However, you'd have other options besides just making the rectangular platform bigger. You could use smaller turbines. You could change the shape of the platform (long and narrow so the turbines are in a line instead of a square). You could mount a single turbine on a much smaller platform and run cables between the platforms so that only one platform would need the battery and hydrogen generation stuff.
There's still no new technology required to do any of those things. The engineering work would be straight-forward (although non-trivial).
No "breakthrough" required for patents. You merely need to invent something new and non-obvious. An example I reference occassionally is a guy that invented a cam shaft that results in up to 3% more fuel efficiency. Its not a breakthrough, he just designed a slightly more efficient cam shaft.
Also, its not 45 patents, its 2 patents that include 45 claims. The number of claims in a patent is effectively meaningless. Its just the list of what the invention consists of. Also remember that this thing includes hydrogen generation, battery storage of the power and is self-propelled for moving out of the way of storms. There's plenty of places where someone could have come up with a better way to do something or other. Its not clear that you couldn't make off-shore floating wind turbines work without those patents, though.
The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory did a feasibility study on these types of floating turbine farms and found that they could be built using existing technology and provide electricity at approximately $0.05/kWh. The turbines studied did not include the battery storage and hydrogen production described in the article above.
Have you ever seen how big oil platforms are? BP's Thunder Horse is 112m wide, 136m long, and 130m high. It weighs 60,000 tons. GE's biggest turbines are 75m tall at the hub and weigh 300 tons. You could easily place one of these turbines at each of the four corners of Thunder Horse.
All the technology to build large and tall platforms, anchor them to the ocean floor, connect them under the sea to the land, disconnect them when a storm is coming so they can be moved out of the way, reconnect them, maintain them, etc. already exists in the oil platform industry.
These things probably are not as tall as oil platforms. They connect to land through cable which is relatively cheap to manufacture and install compared to pipelines which have to be carefully laid on the ocean floor and have to be designed not to leak oil all over the place. Living quarters would be drastically simpler because turbine maintenance takes many fewer workers than oil drilling (Thunder Horse has facilities for 229 workers to be stationed there semi-permanently). They don't need the same level of safety as oil rigs since they are not pumping and storing an environmentally sensitive substance. They don't need all the drilling and pumping equipment that oil rigs do (wind turbines are vastly less costly/complicated than oil rig equipment).
Can't comment on cost/return. Clearly if there's no return they won't get built, but the technology all exists and these things would be much, much cheaper than oil platforms.
Sigh... disconnect cable, attach cable to buouy, raise anchor, tow platform away (or include propellers on platform to sail away). This is the same process used by oil rigs.
Re:How is this different than 300 items in a folde
on
Mac OS X 10.4.3 Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
The Desktop folder is always on screen and all items are visible. Most folders that contain 300 items only show a portion of those items at a time. If my hypothesis is correct, a folder with 300 items opened full-screen with all items showing should result in the same slowdown (or close to it -- as the desktop is a special case and might work slightly differently than a typical folder).
1) It wasn't a buffer overflow. It was a filesystem error caused by trying to add the 32,769th file to a file system which uses 16-bits to track files.
2) They didn't upload a new software version. The uploaded a script that could operate on the flash system without mounting it, so they could delete enough files to mount the flash system. They then had to re-upload some files that had been corrupted. They didn't have to upload a new OS, since it really didn't do anything wrong. The error was in continuing to upload files to the rover after a script to delete old files had failed to upload. They knew there was a file count limit, but the guy that was responsible for uploading the delete script failed to inform the other guys uploading files that the delete script upload failed and there wasn't as much free space as he had previously told them. I think they did tweak some settings, though, so that a file system error would not reboot the whole machine, but would just shut down the process associated with the error.
3) The concern that the rover would get tangled did result in a pretty long delay while they tested an alternative route to get off the platform. So the rover was effectively "stuck" in place (didn't move) although it wasn't literally stuck in place (couldn't move).
The difference between the relative velocity and the center-of-mass velocity is immaterial. But you do have a good point that the relative velocity of the two halves is not huge. I guess you'd want to make sure you had the fuel to catch it, fuel to fix your now changed orbit, and a way to fix the snapped tether (or an extra tether).
Add to your analysis that you probably only need to generate a fraction of a g (1/3?, 1/2?), and a tether is even simpler. You'd want to make sure that you could recover from a broken tether, though -- i.e. have enough fuel to stabilize your orbit and make it back to Earth. You'd lose the physiologic benefit of the g forces, so you wouldn't try to land on Mars if it happened outbound.
Your argument fails the logic test. If Brittanica is better than the Wikipedia, why would you ever use the Wikipedia?
Wikipedia must be better than Brittanica in some way(s). Yet if Wikipedia is better in some ways, and Brittanica in others, how can you say whether one is absolutely better than the other.
Therefore, neither is better. But they are different, and each has its use. Different does not have to mean that they are completely unrelated products, because they obviously are not, it just means that the measures we use to rate each one are different enough that it becomes hard to compare the two options.
In other words, there's a difference between Brittanica providing better information and Brittanica being better. You've given a couple examples of why/when Wikipedia is better.
To use your restaurant example, there's a difference between the fine restaurant having better food, and the fine restaurant being better (although we often use that phrasing as shorthand). There's plenty of times when McDonald's is the better choice for a variety of reasons (usually not the food, though).
Wikipedia is not better than a professionally edited encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is not worse than a professionally edited encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is, however, different than a professionally edited encyclopedia.
It is a work-in-progress, so a priori it cannot be judged based on the worst entries. Maybe its time for some type of rating system for articles, or maybe allow articles to branch into "Release x.x" and "In Development". We certainly don't judge Linux based on incomplete/buggy code under development. We rate it on what gets released.
Lot of geeks on this site. Apparently not a lot of economists.
Monoplolists don't have the "ability to absolutely set the price to whatever the producer wants". If Microsoft charged a million dollars for each copy of Windows, would they sell any? There's still a supply and demand curve, and the producer still optimizes profit by setting the price where the curves meet. The only difference with a monopolist is that the supply curve is further out (higher price at any quantity) than in a market with perfect competition.
And the DVD market is far from a monoploy. There's more than one producer of DVDs, and movies are as good substitutes for each other as lots of other items (cars come to mind...).
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There are lots of checks and balances in the education system. Politicians don't make all of the decisions you have listed in a vacuum. Frankly, in a lot of jurisdictions its not politicians that make those decisions at all.
Regardless of certain high-profile controversies. Most of what is taught in public education is far from controversial. How do you vote if you can't read? How do you pay taxes if you can't do math? How do you get a job and contribute to the economy if you can't do either of those things.
And student blogs are being censored at private schools as well as public ones. How does doing away with public schools help that issue?
I know you're joking, but how about this for an idea:
... rant away open source crazies. ;)
A hybrid kernel. Open source drivers are compiled into the kernel. There is a API for closed-source drivers to run in user-space.
Does not violate GPL.
Little compromise to stability.
Developers who only want to do closed-source drivers can do so.
Developers have incentive to open source their drivers in order to have better performance and take advantage of newer kernel features (the internal APIs are updated with the kernel, the external APIs stay fixed and fall behind the feature curve).
Win.
Win.
Win.
Unless its just a philosophical question, in which case
That makes a nice story for people who need to believe that a literal interpretation of the Bible allows for the universe to be 15 billion years old. The only problem is that it is not true.
(Bad Transliteration): Vayihee erev, vayihee bokeyr, yom ha-shaynee.
(Literal Translation): And there is evening, and there is morning, day the second.
Its the same word for "day" that's used everywhere else in Hebrew (in the Bible and otherwise).
I don't believe we provide universal education because everyone has a right to an eduction. I believe we provide universal education because it is in everyone's best interest, both economically and civically. Where do you get educated workers for your business if poor people have nowhere to go to get educated? How much easier would it be to influence people's votes if those people have no education?
Well you could always communicate by writing. Because Hebrew survived as a Torah and Bible study language, we understand pretty well how the written language works.
It is supposed that the stories pre-date the Torah, but if you believe that, then you already do not believe it was divinely inspired on Mt. Sinai, so the basis for believing the stories have any significance is falsified. In other words, if you believe the stories enough to want to learn from the original writers why they wrote what they did, then you should believe they wrote in Hebrew. If you don't believe they wrote in Hebrew, then you shouldn't have any reason to believe the stories are divinely inspired.
The YHWH issue is a red herring. There was one word in Hebrew that no one was allowed to pronounce. Clearly you do not need that word in order to communicate in Hebrew, otherwise, how were they communicating back then.
"Alhtough, I'd also like to find out how they plan on asking since no one speaks sandscrit/cuneiform anymore (or whatever language was used back then). We may be able to read it, but I don't think anyone actually speaks it. "
Um, you do know that the Torah is written in Hebrew, don't you? I think there's a few million people in the world that speak Hebrew fluently.
"The turbines are less than 1D apart. The image assumes that the wind is blowing in one direction. It assumes the whole craft would move to face the wind. I don't want to be too hard on him, but it seems that he was having fun with some image program without thought for the physics involved."
How inefficient would that spacing be? (Not sarcastic, I really don't know.) If its just "somewhat less efficient", but would be much cheaper to build and operate, then it might work out. Sometimes engineers get focused on only one side of the problem (most efficient turbine placement) and ignore the other side of the problem (most efficient to build and maintain). The best engineers balance cost and efficiency to get something that makes the most economic sense.
"The world needs both the dreamers and the realists."
Hear, hear.
I often think about Columbus. His contemporaries knew the earth was round, they just thought you'd never make it across all that ocean. And they would have been right, except there happened to be a continent less than a third of the way along. In hindsight, its a little weird that they thought there would have been nothing out there, but if there hadn't been at least some islands to stop at, Columbus never could have made it all the way across (not enough provisions).
The engineering challenge you site is not required to make floating wind turbines cost effective, it merely makes them even more cost effective.
Oh, didn't know that. I looked it up and you might be able to do as little as 3 diameters, but your point stands.
However, you'd have other options besides just making the rectangular platform bigger. You could use smaller turbines. You could change the shape of the platform (long and narrow so the turbines are in a line instead of a square). You could mount a single turbine on a much smaller platform and run cables between the platforms so that only one platform would need the battery and hydrogen generation stuff.
There's still no new technology required to do any of those things. The engineering work would be straight-forward (although non-trivial).
No "breakthrough" required for patents. You merely need to invent something new and non-obvious. An example I reference occassionally is a guy that invented a cam shaft that results in up to 3% more fuel efficiency. Its not a breakthrough, he just designed a slightly more efficient cam shaft.
Also, its not 45 patents, its 2 patents that include 45 claims. The number of claims in a patent is effectively meaningless. Its just the list of what the invention consists of. Also remember that this thing includes hydrogen generation, battery storage of the power and is self-propelled for moving out of the way of storms. There's plenty of places where someone could have come up with a better way to do something or other. Its not clear that you couldn't make off-shore floating wind turbines work without those patents, though.
The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory did a feasibility study on these types of floating turbine farms and found that they could be built using existing technology and provide electricity at approximately $0.05/kWh. The turbines studied did not include the battery storage and hydrogen production described in the article above.
Have you ever seen how big oil platforms are? BP's Thunder Horse is 112m wide, 136m long, and 130m high. It weighs 60,000 tons. GE's biggest turbines are 75m tall at the hub and weigh 300 tons. You could easily place one of these turbines at each of the four corners of Thunder Horse.
All the technology to build large and tall platforms, anchor them to the ocean floor, connect them under the sea to the land, disconnect them when a storm is coming so they can be moved out of the way, reconnect them, maintain them, etc. already exists in the oil platform industry.
These things probably are not as tall as oil platforms. They connect to land through cable which is relatively cheap to manufacture and install compared to pipelines which have to be carefully laid on the ocean floor and have to be designed not to leak oil all over the place. Living quarters would be drastically simpler because turbine maintenance takes many fewer workers than oil drilling (Thunder Horse has facilities for 229 workers to be stationed there semi-permanently). They don't need the same level of safety as oil rigs since they are not pumping and storing an environmentally sensitive substance. They don't need all the drilling and pumping equipment that oil rigs do (wind turbines are vastly less costly/complicated than oil rig equipment).
Can't comment on cost/return. Clearly if there's no return they won't get built, but the technology all exists and these things would be much, much cheaper than oil platforms.
Sigh ... disconnect cable, attach cable to buouy, raise anchor, tow platform away (or include propellers on platform to sail away). This is the same process used by oil rigs.
The Desktop folder is always on screen and all items are visible. Most folders that contain 300 items only show a portion of those items at a time. If my hypothesis is correct, a folder with 300 items opened full-screen with all items showing should result in the same slowdown (or close to it -- as the desktop is a special case and might work slightly differently than a typical folder).
Three nitpicks
1) It wasn't a buffer overflow. It was a filesystem error caused by trying to add the 32,769th file to a file system which uses 16-bits to track files.
2) They didn't upload a new software version. The uploaded a script that could operate on the flash system without mounting it, so they could delete enough files to mount the flash system. They then had to re-upload some files that had been corrupted. They didn't have to upload a new OS, since it really didn't do anything wrong. The error was in continuing to upload files to the rover after a script to delete old files had failed to upload. They knew there was a file count limit, but the guy that was responsible for uploading the delete script failed to inform the other guys uploading files that the delete script upload failed and there wasn't as much free space as he had previously told them. I think they did tweak some settings, though, so that a file system error would not reboot the whole machine, but would just shut down the process associated with the error.
3) The concern that the rover would get tangled did result in a pretty long delay while they tested an alternative route to get off the platform. So the rover was effectively "stuck" in place (didn't move) although it wasn't literally stuck in place (couldn't move).
How many times do you think you'd be able to say "B.S." in 1000 years.
The difference between the relative velocity and the center-of-mass velocity is immaterial. But you do have a good point that the relative velocity of the two halves is not huge. I guess you'd want to make sure you had the fuel to catch it, fuel to fix your now changed orbit, and a way to fix the snapped tether (or an extra tether).
"... and you wish to create 1 g ..."
Add to your analysis that you probably only need to generate a fraction of a g (1/3?, 1/2?), and a tether is even simpler. You'd want to make sure that you could recover from a broken tether, though -- i.e. have enough fuel to stabilize your orbit and make it back to Earth. You'd lose the physiologic benefit of the g forces, so you wouldn't try to land on Mars if it happened outbound.
Fuel cells are always ten years away. Fusion power is always thirty years away. Its been that way for forty years.
Your argument fails the logic test. If Brittanica is better than the Wikipedia, why would you ever use the Wikipedia?
Wikipedia must be better than Brittanica in some way(s). Yet if Wikipedia is better in some ways, and Brittanica in others, how can you say whether one is absolutely better than the other.
Therefore, neither is better. But they are different, and each has its use. Different does not have to mean that they are completely unrelated products, because they obviously are not, it just means that the measures we use to rate each one are different enough that it becomes hard to compare the two options.
In other words, there's a difference between Brittanica providing better information and Brittanica being better. You've given a couple examples of why/when Wikipedia is better.
To use your restaurant example, there's a difference between the fine restaurant having better food, and the fine restaurant being better (although we often use that phrasing as shorthand). There's plenty of times when McDonald's is the better choice for a variety of reasons (usually not the food, though).
Wikipedia is not better than a professionally edited encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is not worse than a professionally edited encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is, however, different than a professionally edited encyclopedia.
It is a work-in-progress, so a priori it cannot be judged based on the worst entries. Maybe its time for some type of rating system for articles, or maybe allow articles to branch into "Release x.x" and "In Development". We certainly don't judge Linux based on incomplete/buggy code under development. We rate it on what gets released.
Where do I find these "twins in latex" of which you speak? :)
If there are so many good CEO candidates running around, how come so many companies have bad CEOs?
Its not the supply of people willing to be CEO that's important. Its the supply of people able to be a top quality CEO. That's a much smaller number.
Lot of geeks on this site. Apparently not a lot of economists.
Monoplolists don't have the "ability to absolutely set the price to whatever the producer wants". If Microsoft charged a million dollars for each copy of Windows, would they sell any? There's still a supply and demand curve, and the producer still optimizes profit by setting the price where the curves meet. The only difference with a monopolist is that the supply curve is further out (higher price at any quantity) than in a market with perfect competition.
And the DVD market is far from a monoploy. There's more than one producer of DVDs, and movies are as good substitutes for each other as lots of other items (cars come to mind...).