What if this person had blinded someone and caused the plane or helicopter to crash, possibly killing many people?
What if, at the very moment he was shining his laser at the constellation of Leo, a burst of wind turbulence took the pilots by surprise and caused the plane to careen out of the sky.
This is entirely person A's fault. No one forced him to sell anything to Person B. Person A is free to sell the product is a form which isn't so easily copied and redistributed. Person A is free to interview potential buyers more closely. There is no limit to productive ways to solve this problem aside from assuming that the taxpaying public is a cash cow for personal pursuits.
Good business partners make you rich, bad business partners make themselves rich. That's the way of life. It's not like this very basic tenet has changed since the beginning of time. Political lobbies and legal zealots are doing a very remarkable job of fooling themselves. The politicians don't care. They just like the perks.
32 of those hours will be spent by upper management deciding if they want the contract. 24 of those hours will be spent by the PM filling out the required cost analysis and estimate. 32 of those hours will be spent by upper management holding business meetings with the potential client to determine if the estimate is agreeable. 24 of those hours will be spent by the PM revising the estimate at the request of upper management. 8 hours spent obtaining client approval. 32 hours spent writing a project plan and summary. 32 hours spent chasing down every upper managers and QA auditors whose signatures are required on the project plan and summary. 32 more hours spent rewriting the project plan and summary to fulfill the requests of the upper managers and QA auditors. 32 hours spent researching the existing technology to support the proposed project plan and summary. 160 hours following the test plan.
Are we over budget?
32 hours negotiating with the client for more funding. 40 more hours finalizing the work. 80 hours writing up the required reports demanded by upper management, QA, and the client.
Let's try a new discussion thread:/. insider trading. Who can be the first to tell me which fabrication plants are going to get the lucrative production contracts for these players? I just want to know where to put my money to earn a profit.
The principal effect of this increase in actual and effective power is that earth stations are no longer 100-foot dish reflectors with cryogenically-cooled maser amplifiers costing as much as $10 million (1960 dollars) to build. Antennas for normal satellite services are typically 15-foot dish reflectors costing $30,000 (1990 dollars). Direct-broadcast antennas will be only a foot in diameter and cost a few hundred dollars
For people who claim to know so much about masers, you weren't very quick to point out that they've been tried and discarded.
Feel free to peruse the other historical references to inferior technology here.
It's called differential equations in economics. You might look into it. Basic cost of living is fairly constant no matter who you are. If you're take home pay is triple the base cost of living then it's in your interest to hedge the numbers to make it look like you're paying a larger share of the taxes... if for no other reason than you get to troll the less priveleged portions of society.
Results 1 - 10 of about 558,000 for MASER [definition]. (0.16 seconds
Yeah... and after hit 40, they're all about geneaology of the maser family.
Are you serious? MASERs have been around for a long time (since 1953) and are well-documented
Trivia typically is well-documented--in sites devoted to it. Try google for "satellite maser". It looks like they're fancy clocks, not for communications. You know, I bet there's a technological reason for that.
You know. If you google for "maser", you get about 40 obscure trivia hits.
If you google for "microwave assisted chemistry", you get about 4000 relevant real world hits, many links to papers published in professional journals, most at major university research groups, and many at multi-million dollar corporations.
So exactly what is it about this exciting new technology called a "maser" that you know that the profitable industry doesn't?
The practical implication of this is that one must greatly increase the output power to get a modest increase in performance. For example, in order to double the range, the transmitted power would have to be increased 16-fold.
Which is related to the signal dispersion as it travels the extra distance.
Microwaves are _not_ necessarily non-directional
If you can pinpoint microwaves to the level that we can pinpoint lasers there are a number of companies who manufacture microwaves for running chemical reactions who would love to chat with you. Uneven heating is still their biggest problem and it could be resolved by having a focal point scanning the reaction vessel the way a CRT scans the screen.
No, the highest tax bracket is 35%... and the vast majority are taxed far less--between 10% and 25% of their last dollar
You're figuring different numbers, then. I was losing 35% of my paycheck when I was working for McD's part time in high school. Wouldn't that be somewhat close to the lowest tax bracket?
Do you have numbers which show GDP vs. total federal budget? The linked pic shows the discretionary budget at 782 billion. I'm of the belief that the GDP is somewhere around 13 trillion. So the discretionary budget is somewhere around 6% of the GDP. Our total expenditures should be somewhat close to GDP + trade deficit. We can't spend more than we make, so our total income should be close to GDP + trade deficit. There's also the consideration that the tax contribution of the largest corporations and wealthiest Americans makes up the largest portion of the tax pool (and they love to complain how they pay the highest percentage of taxes). If I'm losing 41% of my paycheck directly (not counting indirect taxes on gas, electricity, net connection, or the taxes on commerce which bump up the total cost of a product on a store shelf which is eventually shouldered by me, the consumer)...
There's still a big discrepency between the 6% discretionary budget (which include DoE and DoD according to the linked pic) and the 40% that I can watch without looking close. That translates to a nearly 6x overhead.
If it's not obvious to you then, well, feel free to continue to argue. I'm hoping this post reaches people who will put more thought into it.
It's not MS bashing. It's an observation of a fact of life in every business sector. Profits will always supersede quality. Any PR attempt to patch quality is just that: A PR ruse for bumping up profits.
This is more or less applicable depending upon the company and the members of upper management but it's nearly universally applicable when a company achieves the power and clout of MS. When a company can buy courts and tell entire international organizations to buzz off no one should attempt to drum up sympathy for them.
782 billion for the discretionary budget. That adds up to what, about 6% of the GDP? But if the governments take 35% of my paycheck, plus another 6% of what I can keep when I spend it, that's at least 41%. I don't think my income is as heavily taxed as some, so the average figure may be closer to 50%. I would expect that the the GDP can't be much greater than the sum of everyone's salaries. It seems logical that the two numbers should be fairly well correlated. Companies can't sell more than we can buy and I think we're running a trade deficit so the GDP may even be less than the sum of everyone's salaries. Savings are all reinvested by banks at some point so even savings would eventually in good part be counted in GDP. The sum of everyone's yearly paycheck should be close to GDP + trade deficit... total expenditures.
Given a little room for accounting ledger shenanigns it's reasonable to say that the anyone who defends taxes by citing roads and defense isn't watching their money very closely.
the world is now, somehow, magically safe for Democracy and no longer in need of military and intelligence capability
I doubt there was ever a secret about spy satellites. I bet the Chinese, and the former Soviets, have each and every one of them happily mapped as soon as they're in orbit. I don't suspect it's tough to watch launches, and then track space junk until something makes a "beep". In the interest of avoiding a global misunderstanding it may even be a requirement that nations report space launches to an international authority.
So, if we put aside the obvious answer of concealing a money laundering scheme (and I would never suggest that our infallible politicians would ever become involved in such a thing), why else would we need to keep a satellite a secret?
1) They could use laser or microwave or some other tight beam to communicate their data back to friendly earth stations, or even hand it off to other satellites.
Microwaves are nondirectional. A laser transmission is intriguing but I doubt that it's technological viable quite yet.
2) They don't have to communicate all of the time, they could just wait until over friendly territory and do scrambled high speed bursts of data.
True, but the people monitoring satellites will also be aware of this ahead of time. I cited SETI for a reason because the same technical details are applicable: we have no idea when the signal is coming, what frequency it's on, or what the code for the signal is. At least, in the industry of mapping satellites, one knows that eventually a signal will show up in particular regions with at least some earthly form of tranmission technology.
I think if we can make a bomber stealthy, with a few billion here and there we can probably make spy sats that are damn near invisible too.
A good part of a bomber being stealthy is the element of surprise and speed. Bombers are fast they typically only take a particular route once. Satellites are slow and in a regular orbit. Heck, if nothing else, we could track it like they track asteroids or pieces of space junk--just another hunk of physical object. I hear they can track pieces of space junk as small as a tennis ball. Yet, this particular physical object seems to emit a burst of radiation every once in a while.
I'm afraid it still doesn't make sense. It seems, then, that the best way to pump up the threat of piracy is to increase production 500 fold, then point to warehouses full of junk CDs and say "Look at all these unsold copies! The pirates are killing us!"
A pirate is one who... receives one or more copies of a commercial, copyrighted work without having paid the owner of the copyright (or their assignee) for the right to do so.
I don't buy feminine hygiene products, yet I receive their commercials on a nightly basis. Am I a pirate?
Miller beer had a really good commercial on the radio one time. I only ever heard it once. Most commercials get played for months or years on end. I e-mailed and called Miller asking if I could obtain a copy of that commercial because I liked it so much. They said that, due to copyright issues, they were unable to send a copy of the commercial to me.
But everyone should know that if they're in a business where stealing is a legitimate and/or uncombatable threat, then investment will certainly dwindle and flow to other, likely profitable places.
There are no laws to protect drug dealers, yet they never go away. Is Hollywood any better that they deserve our protection? If drug dealers don't die out, why should we be afraid that Hollywood will?
who more or less starts any C programming by defining 8 global variables "reg1... reg8" and proceeds from there, without comments
That reminds me so much of someone else I knew, when they were still a programmer, that I just have to post a reply to chuckle. I'd mod you funny if I could.
Perhaps, I'm not an expert, but unless this can be demonstrated openness is required.
I agree that the secrecy probably isn't doing much good. On clear nights in rural areas it's relatively easy to find six or seven satellites crossing the sky. Probably those are only commercial satellites but still spy satellites can't be beyond the realm of electronic monitoring. Even if the transmissions are heavily encrypted it would be easy enough for passive monitoring equipment to triangulate positions just by the fact that at XXX MHz (or some algorithmically modulated frequency) there's a regular signal.
I don't think the US is the only nation on the planet that has conceived of SETI like arrays to map satellites. So, with this very reasonable doubt in mind, why else would this sort of funding be secret except to conceal lucrative contracts to Wall Street businessmen who spend a significant amount of time mapping political connections and funneling money into the correct avenues?
You're a twit. You've always been a twit and you'll always be a twit. You made me a foe? I give a hoot. Go blow it out your hind-end.
As for social security benefits. Mine are slashed by 12% already, and I won't be eligible to start collecting for another 35 years, wait, make that 38, wait make that 42. At this rate, the eligibility date will keep getting bumped up to the point where I'm dead before I can start collecting. Yet it still costs 12.5% every week.
I suppose you think "pyramid scheme" only refers to those hokey meetings where they give out free pizza.
I've looked for, "administrative bloat, graft, and corruption" and had a hard time finding it.
Okay. That's all you needed to say. Either you live in an ivory tower or you're trolling.
For example, the Social Security Administration is lauded as one of the most efficient orginizations on Earth
Oh. That's why it's going bankrupt and needs to be overhauled. That's why the retirement age keeps getting bumped up a few extra years and benefits gets slashed on a regular basis.
Medicare is a health care system manager with only 3% overhead
Even if you could cite a link to back this claim up I'm sure it's a product of a careful massaging of the numbers.
I've worked with a lot of government agencies and have seen them all model efficiency on a variety of fronts
Slashdot Mirror
What if this person had blinded someone and caused the plane or helicopter to crash, possibly killing many people?
What if, at the very moment he was shining his laser at the constellation of Leo, a burst of wind turbulence took the pilots by surprise and caused the plane to careen out of the sky.
I think both are equally likely.
This is entirely person A's fault. No one forced him to sell anything to Person B. Person A is free to sell the product is a form which isn't so easily copied and redistributed. Person A is free to interview potential buyers more closely. There is no limit to productive ways to solve this problem aside from assuming that the taxpaying public is a cash cow for personal pursuits.
Good business partners make you rich, bad business partners make themselves rich. That's the way of life. It's not like this very basic tenet has changed since the beginning of time. Political lobbies and legal zealots are doing a very remarkable job of fooling themselves. The politicians don't care. They just like the perks.
There are 300 hours allotted for the project.
32 of those hours will be spent by upper management deciding if they want the contract.
24 of those hours will be spent by the PM filling out the required cost analysis and estimate.
32 of those hours will be spent by upper management holding business meetings with the potential client to determine if the estimate is agreeable.
24 of those hours will be spent by the PM revising the estimate at the request of upper management.
8 hours spent obtaining client approval.
32 hours spent writing a project plan and summary.
32 hours spent chasing down every upper managers and QA auditors whose signatures are required on the project plan and summary.
32 more hours spent rewriting the project plan and summary to fulfill the requests of the upper managers and QA auditors.
32 hours spent researching the existing technology to support the proposed project plan and summary.
160 hours following the test plan.
Are we over budget?
32 hours negotiating with the client for more funding.
40 more hours finalizing the work.
80 hours writing up the required reports demanded by upper management, QA, and the client.
*AA: BOHICA.
Radar detectors, speed guns, copy protection, eavesdropping...
/. insider trading. Who can be the first to tell me which fabrication plants are going to get the lucrative production contracts for these players? I just want to know where to put my money to earn a profit.
Let's try a new discussion thread:
Troll uncovered
The principal effect of this increase in actual and effective power is that earth stations are no longer 100-foot dish reflectors with cryogenically-cooled maser amplifiers costing as much as $10 million (1960 dollars) to build. Antennas for normal satellite services are typically 15-foot dish reflectors costing $30,000 (1990 dollars). Direct-broadcast antennas will be only a foot in diameter and cost a few hundred dollars
For people who claim to know so much about masers, you weren't very quick to point out that they've been tried and discarded.
Feel free to peruse the other historical references to inferior technology here.
Why is this fair to make some people pay more???
It's called differential equations in economics. You might look into it. Basic cost of living is fairly constant no matter who you are. If you're take home pay is triple the base cost of living then it's in your interest to hedge the numbers to make it look like you're paying a larger share of the taxes... if for no other reason than you get to troll the less priveleged portions of society.
Results 1 - 10 of about 558,000 for MASER [definition]. (0.16 seconds
Yeah... and after hit 40, they're all about geneaology of the maser family.
Are you serious? MASERs have been around for a long time (since 1953) and are well-documented
Trivia typically is well-documented--in sites devoted to it. Try google for "satellite maser". It looks like they're fancy clocks, not for communications. You know, I bet there's a technological reason for that.
But you don't seem to mind living in a country where your tax dollars support them, or where you are protected by them.
That would be a good point if we lived in a nation where we were free to vote with our tax dollars.
You know. If you google for "maser", you get about 40 obscure trivia hits.
If you google for "microwave assisted chemistry", you get about 4000 relevant real world hits, many links to papers published in professional journals, most at major university research groups, and many at multi-million dollar corporations.
So exactly what is it about this exciting new technology called a "maser" that you know that the profitable industry doesn't?
From here.
At a distance of 200m, the width of the radar beam can usually cover all 4 lanes of traffic travelling in both direction
From space I guess that would be pretty nondirectional.
And from here
The practical implication of this is that one must greatly increase the output power to get a modest increase in performance. For example, in order to double the range, the transmitted power would have to be increased 16-fold.
Which is related to the signal dispersion as it travels the extra distance.
Microwaves are _not_ necessarily non-directional
If you can pinpoint microwaves to the level that we can pinpoint lasers there are a number of companies who manufacture microwaves for running chemical reactions who would love to chat with you. Uneven heating is still their biggest problem and it could be resolved by having a focal point scanning the reaction vessel the way a CRT scans the screen.
No, the highest tax bracket is 35% ... and the vast majority are taxed far less--between 10% and 25% of their last dollar
You're figuring different numbers, then. I was losing 35% of my paycheck when I was working for McD's part time in high school. Wouldn't that be somewhat close to the lowest tax bracket?
Do you have numbers which show GDP vs. total federal budget? The linked pic shows the discretionary budget at 782 billion. I'm of the belief that the GDP is somewhere around 13 trillion. So the discretionary budget is somewhere around 6% of the GDP. Our total expenditures should be somewhat close to GDP + trade deficit. We can't spend more than we make, so our total income should be close to GDP + trade deficit. There's also the consideration that the tax contribution of the largest corporations and wealthiest Americans makes up the largest portion of the tax pool (and they love to complain how they pay the highest percentage of taxes). If I'm losing 41% of my paycheck directly (not counting indirect taxes on gas, electricity, net connection, or the taxes on commerce which bump up the total cost of a product on a store shelf which is eventually shouldered by me, the consumer)...
There's still a big discrepency between the 6% discretionary budget (which include DoE and DoD according to the linked pic) and the 40% that I can watch without looking close. That translates to a nearly 6x overhead.
If it's not obvious to you then, well, feel free to continue to argue. I'm hoping this post reaches people who will put more thought into it.
It's not MS bashing. It's an observation of a fact of life in every business sector. Profits will always supersede quality. Any PR attempt to patch quality is just that: A PR ruse for bumping up profits.
This is more or less applicable depending upon the company and the members of upper management but it's nearly universally applicable when a company achieves the power and clout of MS. When a company can buy courts and tell entire international organizations to buzz off no one should attempt to drum up sympathy for them.
And some malicious website will have an exploit which turns this anti-spyware into a remote code execution tool.
782 billion for the discretionary budget. That adds up to what, about 6% of the GDP? But if the governments take 35% of my paycheck, plus another 6% of what I can keep when I spend it, that's at least 41%. I don't think my income is as heavily taxed as some, so the average figure may be closer to 50%. I would expect that the the GDP can't be much greater than the sum of everyone's salaries. It seems logical that the two numbers should be fairly well correlated. Companies can't sell more than we can buy and I think we're running a trade deficit so the GDP may even be less than the sum of everyone's salaries. Savings are all reinvested by banks at some point so even savings would eventually in good part be counted in GDP. The sum of everyone's yearly paycheck should be close to GDP + trade deficit ... total expenditures.
Given a little room for accounting ledger shenanigns it's reasonable to say that the anyone who defends taxes by citing roads and defense isn't watching their money very closely.
the world is now, somehow, magically safe for Democracy and no longer in need of military and intelligence capability
I doubt there was ever a secret about spy satellites. I bet the Chinese, and the former Soviets, have each and every one of them happily mapped as soon as they're in orbit. I don't suspect it's tough to watch launches, and then track space junk until something makes a "beep". In the interest of avoiding a global misunderstanding it may even be a requirement that nations report space launches to an international authority.
So, if we put aside the obvious answer of concealing a money laundering scheme (and I would never suggest that our infallible politicians would ever become involved in such a thing), why else would we need to keep a satellite a secret?
1) They could use laser or microwave or some other tight beam to communicate their data back to friendly earth stations, or even hand it off to other satellites.
Microwaves are nondirectional. A laser transmission is intriguing but I doubt that it's technological viable quite yet.
2) They don't have to communicate all of the time, they could just wait until over friendly territory and do scrambled high speed bursts of data.
True, but the people monitoring satellites will also be aware of this ahead of time. I cited SETI for a reason because the same technical details are applicable: we have no idea when the signal is coming, what frequency it's on, or what the code for the signal is. At least, in the industry of mapping satellites, one knows that eventually a signal will show up in particular regions with at least some earthly form of tranmission technology.
I think if we can make a bomber stealthy, with a few billion here and there we can probably make spy sats that are damn near invisible too.
A good part of a bomber being stealthy is the element of surprise and speed. Bombers are fast they typically only take a particular route once. Satellites are slow and in a regular orbit. Heck, if nothing else, we could track it like they track asteroids or pieces of space junk--just another hunk of physical object. I hear they can track pieces of space junk as small as a tennis ball. Yet, this particular physical object seems to emit a burst of radiation every once in a while.
I'm afraid it still doesn't make sense. It seems, then, that the best way to pump up the threat of piracy is to increase production 500 fold, then point to warehouses full of junk CDs and say "Look at all these unsold copies! The pirates are killing us!"
A pirate is one who ... receives one or more copies of a commercial, copyrighted work without having paid the owner of the copyright (or their assignee) for the right to do so.
I don't buy feminine hygiene products, yet I receive their commercials on a nightly basis. Am I a pirate?
Miller beer had a really good commercial on the radio one time. I only ever heard it once. Most commercials get played for months or years on end. I e-mailed and called Miller asking if I could obtain a copy of that commercial because I liked it so much. They said that, due to copyright issues, they were unable to send a copy of the commercial to me.
Sometimes... things are just so screwed up...
But everyone should know that if they're in a business where stealing is a legitimate and/or uncombatable threat, then investment will certainly dwindle and flow to other, likely profitable places.
There are no laws to protect drug dealers, yet they never go away. Is Hollywood any better that they deserve our protection? If drug dealers don't die out, why should we be afraid that Hollywood will?
who more or less starts any C programming by defining 8 global variables "reg1 ... reg8" and proceeds from there, without comments
That reminds me so much of someone else I knew, when they were still a programmer, that I just have to post a reply to chuckle. I'd mod you funny if I could.
Perhaps, I'm not an expert, but unless this can be demonstrated openness is required.
I agree that the secrecy probably isn't doing much good. On clear nights in rural areas it's relatively easy to find six or seven satellites crossing the sky. Probably those are only commercial satellites but still spy satellites can't be beyond the realm of electronic monitoring. Even if the transmissions are heavily encrypted it would be easy enough for passive monitoring equipment to triangulate positions just by the fact that at XXX MHz (or some algorithmically modulated frequency) there's a regular signal.
I don't think the US is the only nation on the planet that has conceived of SETI like arrays to map satellites. So, with this very reasonable doubt in mind, why else would this sort of funding be secret except to conceal lucrative contracts to Wall Street businessmen who spend a significant amount of time mapping political connections and funneling money into the correct avenues?
Tin foil umbrellas rule. I have two.
You're a twit. You've always been a twit and you'll always be a twit. You made me a foe? I give a hoot. Go blow it out your hind-end.
As for social security benefits. Mine are slashed by 12% already, and I won't be eligible to start collecting for another 35 years, wait, make that 38, wait make that 42. At this rate, the eligibility date will keep getting bumped up to the point where I'm dead before I can start collecting. Yet it still costs 12.5% every week.
I suppose you think "pyramid scheme" only refers to those hokey meetings where they give out free pizza.
I've looked for, "administrative bloat, graft, and corruption" and had a hard time finding it.
Okay. That's all you needed to say. Either you live in an ivory tower or you're trolling.
For example, the Social Security Administration is lauded as one of the most efficient orginizations on Earth
Oh. That's why it's going bankrupt and needs to be overhauled. That's why the retirement age keeps getting bumped up a few extra years and benefits gets slashed on a regular basis.
Medicare is a health care system manager with only 3% overhead
Even if you could cite a link to back this claim up I'm sure it's a product of a careful massaging of the numbers.
I've worked with a lot of government agencies and have seen them all model efficiency on a variety of fronts
Ivory tower, troll, or blindfold?