Thank you, Police Chief, for instructing your officers to diligently persue the matter of a twelve year old being threatened by a sexual predator. I'm sorry you're going to catch heat for trying to follow up on an eyewitness report which, by sheer coincidence, happened to mention a book title. A darn shame that the Internet doesn't understand the difference between a fascist government shooting everybody who takes out a certain book and a democratic government saying "We've got an eyewitness report of someone threatening to sexually molest a little girl in the last couple of hours. He was carrying a book we have absolutely no interest in. Time is of the essence here, could you quick look up in your records who might have it?". Sorry that the lady who jerked you around, forcing you to leave and get a SECOND subpoena because you had to ask to access a whole *two* computer systems (the horrors, I know) will be made to be the hero in all of this.
Don't get me started on trying to get away from the AOL behemoth. You can get to a fraud hotline at your credit card company of choice in mere minutes. "Hiya, this is Patio11: does it count as fraud if I'm getting billed without my consent? Because I've had this recurring charge from AOL for *state length of time greater than zero* after I called them to cancel..." BAM watch your problem go away.
1) The company which actually codes the game provides most of the value to the customer. They get a teeny tiny sliver of the profits. (~10% of retail price is a number I've heard batted about) 2) The company which publishes the game absorbs much of the risk of the venture from the developer, does marketing, and perhaps help secure the big-name license that sells a zillion boxes. They get a pretty decent section of the profits. (~30% of the retail price) 3) The retail store provides an entirely fungible service to the customer. Nobody cares where they buy the game. Yet the retail store takes the largest chunk out of that $60. (~60% of the retail price)
Guess which one of these three players doesn't transition that well onto the Interweb? Sure, *today* you cannot totally launch an A or AAA list title without a box somewhere. That won't be true of A/AAA list titles for forever and its not true of niche titles today (hello, $X billion casual gaming market!) The ultimate nightmare of, e.g., Best Buy is when broadband Internet penetration is high enough to make sure the entire core gaming audience has it. Then they're an order form away from irrelevancy with regards to PC gaming, and perhaps even console gaming. When Nintendo sells a copy of, I don't know, Link to the Past over the Wii downloadable content thing they take 98% of the sale (less 2% for the credit card company) rather than ~40% like they did the first time around.
Oh, I'm making this sound a little easier than it is: you have to convince your audience to buy online, you have to market to get people to your website (or some aggregator of downloadable games, like Direct2Drive or Steam), and you have to figure out some way to make gift purchases by mostly uniformed buyers work (what percentage of games are purchased by Mom?). But with "double your profits!!!" being the motivator these are very solvable issues.
Google will eventually be selling these adds to hundreds of thousands of customers on millions of websides leading to billions in sales. To audit a statistically significant amount of transactions *per website* your anti-fraud budget would have to be positively gigantic. Any sort of "We will occasionally put orders through your system for quality monitoring purposes, you are contractually obligated to process but not ship or bill the orders" clause will be overly intrusive AND useless since people will just identify the orders coming from Google and process them properly then trim from joeblow@actuallypaysmoneyforhisproductsascanbedemo nstratedbythiscredcardreceipt.com .
... you get FFXII, where you have about 30 minutes of cut-scenes (in engine and otherwise) and then two hours of completely irrelevant to anything "travel to this location we'll mark on your map to get your next cutscene". Granted, its not the highlight of the FF series (FFVI, for example, keeps a *strong* narrative even with the player frequently losing control of the action -- well, OK, you sort of need to propel the story yourself after you get to the World of Ruin), but it was absolutely jarring when I'd get thrown out of the story and told to walk through a desert full of barely-disguised Tusken Raiders.
Alright, if you want some rough estimations: we'll consider the effect of a mass change on the earth to be "substantial" if it affects the tides more than having me 1 meter from the ocean* (feel the massive force of my gravitational pull, you pitiful waves!). The average distance to the moon is 382500 km, or 3.825 * 10^8 m. Gravity is inversely proportional to the square of distance, and my mass is about 66 kg (/flex). So, to have as much effect on the tides as I do, you need to have 9.66 * 10^18 kg of mass in a lunar orbit (hey, thats the same order of magnitude of the amount of rock we already calculated about moving -- fancy that!). Conclusion: it would take a couple of million years of one shuttle flight per second to screw up the tides as much from the moon as I screw them up when I go swimming.
Now, I admit, its pretty darn difficult to model the behavior of the entire ocean. Its entirely possible that the next time I go swimming I could cause global catastrophe. I guess I'll just have to take that risk!
* Yeah, I know, technically I'd have to be one meter from the center of the mass of the ocean. Work with me here. The answer is still "distance to the moon squared dwarfs any amount of mass humanity can ever hope to shift".
They were looking for a quick passage to India. India had spices, and spices were valuable enough that getting a ship full of them back home safely was worth an enormous amount of risk to your treasury and personal safety. This contrasts to the moon: we know there is nothing of value there, and even if it is a stepping stone to, say, a colony on Mars (dubious) there is nothing to profitably exploit there, either.
I know there's a bunch of space enthusiasts on/. but hear the guy out. He's correct: the moon does not mass enough to hold more than a trivial atmosphere, so for our entire stay there we'll be one meteor impact away from catastrophe. Our current cost of flying stuff just to orbit is over $7k a pound, and even decreasing that by a factor of a thousand you'll never get commercial mining of the moon because its just the same old rock that we can dig up terrestrially for far, far cheaper and at less risk. One shuttle flight, with a payload of 22 metric tonnes, costs in excess of $900 million (operational expenditure + cost of shuttle program divided by number of flights). Thats, somebody check my math, $40,000 a kilogram just in transportation costs. Can anyone name *any* economic activity on the moon which would be viable at $40,000 per kilogram of product transmitted back to earth? Even if the moon were pure, solid gold you can't turn a profit mining at that cost. And even if you improve the efficiency ("Space elevator! Space elevator!" yeah I know, I've heard the sales pitch before) you come back to the original problem -- its just a really big rock after all.
Tides are a result of the gravitational pull of the moon. Gravity is directly proportional to mass. To alter the gravitational pull of the moon by one hundredth of a percent you'd have to remove a hundredth of a percent of its mass. Thats 7.36 * 10^18 kg, or 7.36 * 10^15 metric tonnes*. Thats, lets see, substantially more than a million times the combined weight of every human on the planet. The space shuttle has a payload of 22 metric tonnes (/flex). Supposing we were to send one shuttle to the moon every second, it would take more than ten million years to move that much mass.
There is no reason to mine the moon, and there are plenty of good reasons not to, but "Oh no the tides will be thrown out of whack" is not one of them.
* Incidentally: try Googling "mass of the moon". Freaky, isn't it.
Slashdot psuedo-socialism aside, there is a difference between profit seeking and prostitution. "You're a prostitute!" isn't an insult because a prostitute accepts money, its because she accepts money *for sex*. Many people accept money, and actively try to maximize how much of it they get, for providing legitimate goods and services. I do it, I'm guessing you do as well: your boss doesn't say "Hey, Detritus, you might as well be prostituting yourself" when you go in and say "Hey boss, I've been putting in long hours and my last three projects were smashing successes for the business, how about a raise?"
Its his business and if he wants to run it in a non-profit-maximizing mode he's free to do so, but I'm wondering at the wisdom of it even from his perspective. Lets say he thinks wealth is corrupting and just would hate, hate, hate his life if he had $500 million a year coming in. Hey, thats defensible. So just *give away the money*. Put 3 little text ads on every screen, collect a couple tens of millions of dollars, and pick an African village or two to raise out of poverty. Or donate some money to St. Jude's. Or scholarships for underprivileged kids. Or a free puppy for everyone in the state of Wyoming. Or, here's a thought, give the money back to the users -- hold a raffle or something, once a week someone gets a pop-up saying "Thanks for using Craigslist. You just won $10 million. No "#$", really, I really hate being rich. This fortune was brought to you by our friends at Google AdSense. Incidentally, we found 34 results matching your search of 'free microwave'."
For the vast majority of things which humans value $500 million will certainly improve your ability to enjoy it. Even the obvious counterexamples "You can't put a price on love" or "Money doesn't help me enjoy my children" are more or less false due to opportunity costs: supposing I was smitten with a beautiful girl, more money means less time working on putting food on my table means more time to gaze into her eyes (hey, get out of my geek fantasy). If I had children (hey, get out of my geek fantasy), even if I had no intentions of spoiling them rotten $500 million would make sure I made every last T-ball game.
Yeah yeah, I know, rah rah Costco you-have-a-corporate-conscience-so-I-can-feel-good -giving-you-money and all that, but WalMart is not nearly as bad a place to work as people make it out to be. Granted, its probably not going to appeal that much to somebody who reads Slashdot, but people beat a path to their door when they open a new store:
When one opened in a not-so-great neighborhood in Chicago, they got 25,000 applications (!) for 325 jobs. (http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-walma rt26.html)
In New Jersey, 8,000 applicants for 350 jobs. (http://www.nysun.com/article/34316)
In Oakland, 11,000 for 400. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c /a/2005/08/17/MNGDPE91AH1.DTL)
I need to get my eye glasses prescription bumped up again. If you look at the page I linked to, it was a comma there (1,793 billion miles, not 1.793 billion miles), not a period. Which changes the calculation by three orders of magnitude. Doing some additional Googling I found that the NHTSA has broken down the numbers for us: there are roughly 1.51 deaths per *hundred million* miles travelled. This means that, by any definition of "miles travelled" the shuttle is less safe.
Paragraph two: "many millions of time more dangerous than a car" was my off-top-of-my-head guestimate before I actually broke out paper and pencil and ran the numbers. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I can tell the difference between 10^1 and 10^6... most days. Maybe I should apply for work designing orbiters...
Can you point to a single result coming from the shuttle program that was worth a human life?
The development of the personal computer, that might be worth someone dying. Or something of great utility like, I don't know, the automobile. The green revolution. The vaccine for polio. A cure for cancer. If a scientist was killed in a laboratory accident trying to develop one of these things we could eulogize him with "Dr. Bob would be happy to know that he died as he lived, in the service of mankind, and in the cause of something greater than any one of us". Can you name, off the top of your head, any of the "science projects" the Challenger crew was carrying with them? Must have been something of great importance to all mankind to risk 7 lives for, right? Well, lets check the books... Here's what the crew died trying to accomplish:
1) Deploying the Tracking Data Relay-2 satellite, a process which is accomplished dozens of times per year without needing to send humans into space. 2) "Shuttle-Pointed Tool for Astronomy (SPARTAN-203)/Halley's Comet Experiment Deployable, a free-flying module designed to observe tail and coma of Halleys comet with two ultraviolet spectrometers and two cameras." This was a nail developed because we already had a hammer and needed something to bang on -- it could just have easily been done with an unmanned craft (and even if it couldn't, "Pictures of the tail of Halley's Comet" is something mankind can do perfectly fine without). 3) FDE Fluid Dynamics Experiment. 4) Comet Halley Active Monitoring Program CHAMP (see #2, also 100% accomplishable from the ground). 5) Phase Partitioning Experiment (PPE) 6) three Shuttle Student Involvement Program (SSIP) experiments (Now, without discounting the massive contributions to science our high school students provide on a regular basis, I'm guessing that adding low gravity to a science fair project does not result in something worth dying for) 7) a set of lessons for Teacher in Space Project (Just like a regular teacher, except she's in space!)
So, which of these projects was worth someone giving their life for? Or, if you prefer, what project ever accomplished by the shuttle program was worth the cost (heck, ignoring the 2% risk of death of everybody on board there's nothing thats been accomplished that was worth the cost of fuel... examination of the effecs of weightlessness on spider webs? Yaaaay?)
... can you point to a single result coming from the shuttle program that was worth a human life?
The development of the personal computer, that might be worth someone dying. The vaccine for polio? A cure for cancer? If a scientist was killed in a laboratory accident trying to develop one of these things we could eulogize him with "Dr. Bob would be happy to know that he died as he lived, in the service of mankind, and in the cause of something greater than any one of us". Can you name, off the top of your head, any of the "science projects" the Challenger crew was carrying with them? Must have been something of great importance to all mankind to risk 7 lives for, right? Well, lets check the books... Here's what the crew died trying to accomplish:
1) Deploying the Tracking Data Relay-2 satellite, a process which is accomplished dozens of times per year without needing to send humans into space.
2) "Shuttle-Pointed Tool for Astronomy (SPARTAN-203)/Halley's Comet Experiment Deployable, a free-flying module designed to observe tail and coma of Halleys comet with two ultraviolet spectrometers and two cameras." This was a nail developed because we already had a hammer and needed something to bang on -- it could just have easily been done with an unmanned craft (and even if it couldn't, "Pictures of the tail of Halley's Comet" is something mankind can do perfectly fine without).
3) FDE Fluid Dynamics Experiment.
4) Comet Halley Active Monitoring Program CHAMP (see #2, also 100% accomplishable from the ground).
5) Phase Partitioning Experiment (PPE)
6) three Shuttle Student Involvement Program (SSIP) experiments (Now, without discounting the massive contributions to science our high school students provide on a regular basis, I'm guessing that adding low gravity to a science fair project does not result in something worth dying for)
7) a set of lessons for Teacher in Space Project (Just like a regular teacher, except she's in space!)
So, which of these projects was worth someone giving their life for? Or, if you prefer, what project ever accomplished by the shuttle program was worth the cost (heck, ignoring the 2% risk of death of everybody on board there's nothing thats been accomplished that was worth the cost of fuel... examination of the effecs of weightlessness on spider webs? Yaaaay?)
The space shuttles have flown a combined total of 420 million miles (see here: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/sts9 2_longhaul_sidebar2.html, and I'm adding in a rough guesstimate of flights up until the most recent fatal disaster) and have suffered a total of 14 fatalities, for one fatality every 30 million miles. In 1994 alone, US cars travelled a combined total of 1.793 billion miles (somebody actually tracks this: your tax dollars at work http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/rtecs/chapter3.html ). If cars were as "safe" as the shuttle were, you would assume about 60 traffic accidents would happen per year.
However, this is really stacking the deck in the shuttle's favor. If you want to be technical about it, my bicycle hurtled hundreds of thousands of miles through space on my morning commute this morning... relative to the position of the sun. Granted, relative to the position of my house the displacement was only about two miles. Almost all of the mileage wracked up by the shuttle was it coasting around orbiting, when the only thing it had to accomplish was "don't spontaneously explode or have every life support system fail at once". If you want to compare times when the shuttle was actually under directed movement (and a realistic likelihood of danger), which would be essentially limited to lift-off and flying back to earth with some very minor positional adjustments once you're in orbit, the shuttle is many millions of times more dangerous than a car. Some back of the envelope math: the trip to orbit is about 200 miles, the trip down the same, and we'll be VERY generous and say the shuttle travels another 100 miles once its up there in positioning changes and whatnot. Thats a total of 500 miles per trip. There have also been 114 shuttle missions over the course of the space program. Thats one death per 4,000 miles. If cars were that much of a deathtrap we'd expect about 450,000 traffic fatalities in 1994. There were about 43,000 last year.
Bonus points: if you charge the deaths to alcohol instead of cars (hey, the cars would have been perfectly safe if the guy hadn't been driving drunk -- thats like charging a passenger airplane for fatalities if it gets hit with a missile), roughly half of the car fatalities vanish. Presumably the shuttle program does not have an alcohol problem.
Your customers running the challenge-response solution need to be told not to, post-haste. We all know that spammers routinely forge email addresses. Accepting at face value the address on a piece of email that you get of dubious veracity, then sending an email to that address saying "Hey, are you really interested in talking to me?", IS spamming. Have your customers jump on the filtering bandwagon with everyone else, it works extremely well 99% of the time and doesn't scream "My time is valuable, the rest of the Internet can go "#$#"$ off".
I live in Japan and am a happy DS owner, although I haven't taken the Lite plunge yet (although some comments in this discussion thread make me pretty curious). DS is approaching a mass market status similar to, I don't know, iPods? You don't have to be a gamer to own a DS. I take classes in Japanese every week and my fifty-something female teacher told me "You know, if you want to improve your handwriting, there is a lot of software for that. I use [DS Brain Training] myself, actually." (Side note to anyone studying Japanese: I swear I have improved my kanji writing ability more in a week with Brain Training than I did with any month of studying at university. Seriously, buy this game.) I even ran into the prototypical little-old-lady at the cleaners who was playing one of the edutainment games (didn't recognize which) in between servicing customers. How popular would a game system have to be in the US when grandmothers other than Old Grandma Hardcore would be playing it?
I registered on RentACoder in hopes of basically freelancing as a summer job and eventually abandoned the idea. The site is extremely popular with overseas coders of varying quality (from worse-than-crud to top-notch), many of whom put in bids which are just ludicrously low if you're duplicating them from a base in the US or another first world nation. Take, for example, a project the complexity of an undergraduate CS lab (not an ACTUAL undergraduate CS lab, although there's no shortage of students using rentacoder to cheat that way): I would assume eight solid hours of effort would get this done. I was thinking of bidding in the $100 range -- $12.50 an hour seemed like a pretty fair valuation for my time for a college student with a specialized skill set working as an independent contractor. Within an hour of the project being posted, there were I kid you not a dozen bids offering to do it for $20. Many of them had the feel of a copy-paste job of questionable English skills, but there were some capable individuals in the bunch. I mean, programming for pocket change beats working at McDonalds, but programming for $2.50 an hour... not a worthwhile proposition I don't think.
Winzip's revenues in 2005 declined to a mere 22.7 million dollars. (http://www.forbes.com/strategies/2006/04/20/ipo-o utlook-corel-cx_sr_0421ipooutlook.html) This is from a program that has been freely available in uncrippled form for, um, forever. (I just got around to finally buying a copy this year -- I figured "I've been using it for like a decade now, its time I was honest about it"). There's a handful of shareware authors with six figure incomes (www.goodsol.com) and more than a few who made a full-time career out of it (who remembers VGAPlanets?).
For folks who run a corporate intranet or lab at a school nudity, spam, and viruses are all "three things which we absolutely can't afford to have popping up on our PCs". They're the ones this product is aimed at, not technologically adept home users with no minors at the keyboard and no moral objections to pornography.
A game is only late until its released, but a space probe which smashes into the body it is orbiting because it doesn't know the difference between feet and meters is gone forever.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you, Police Chief, for instructing your officers to diligently persue the matter of a twelve year old being threatened by a sexual predator. I'm sorry you're going to catch heat for trying to follow up on an eyewitness report which, by sheer coincidence, happened to mention a book title. A darn shame that the Internet doesn't understand the difference between a fascist government shooting everybody who takes out a certain book and a democratic government saying "We've got an eyewitness report of someone threatening to sexually molest a little girl in the last couple of hours. He was carrying a book we have absolutely no interest in. Time is of the essence here, could you quick look up in your records who might have it?". Sorry that the lady who jerked you around, forcing you to leave and get a SECOND subpoena because you had to ask to access a whole *two* computer systems (the horrors, I know) will be made to be the hero in all of this.
I am not a lawyer, these folks are or have consulted one, use at your own risk.
Don't get me started on trying to get away from the AOL behemoth. You can get to a fraud hotline at your credit card company of choice in mere minutes. "Hiya, this is Patio11: does it count as fraud if I'm getting billed without my consent? Because I've had this recurring charge from AOL for *state length of time greater than zero* after I called them to cancel..." BAM watch your problem go away.
Follow the value train:
1) The company which actually codes the game provides most of the value to the customer. They get a teeny tiny sliver of the profits. (~10% of retail price is a number I've heard batted about)
2) The company which publishes the game absorbs much of the risk of the venture from the developer, does marketing, and perhaps help secure the big-name license that sells a zillion boxes. They get a pretty decent section of the profits. (~30% of the retail price)
3) The retail store provides an entirely fungible service to the customer. Nobody cares where they buy the game. Yet the retail store takes the largest chunk out of that $60. (~60% of the retail price)
Guess which one of these three players doesn't transition that well onto the Interweb? Sure, *today* you cannot totally launch an A or AAA list title without a box somewhere. That won't be true of A/AAA list titles for forever and its not true of niche titles today (hello, $X billion casual gaming market!) The ultimate nightmare of, e.g., Best Buy is when broadband Internet penetration is high enough to make sure the entire core gaming audience has it. Then they're an order form away from irrelevancy with regards to PC gaming, and perhaps even console gaming. When Nintendo sells a copy of, I don't know, Link to the Past over the Wii downloadable content thing they take 98% of the sale (less 2% for the credit card company) rather than ~40% like they did the first time around.
Oh, I'm making this sound a little easier than it is: you have to convince your audience to buy online, you have to market to get people to your website (or some aggregator of downloadable games, like Direct2Drive or Steam), and you have to figure out some way to make gift purchases by mostly uniformed buyers work (what percentage of games are purchased by Mom?). But with "double your profits!!!" being the motivator these are very solvable issues.
Google will eventually be selling these adds to hundreds of thousands of customers on millions of websides leading to billions in sales. To audit a statistically significant amount of transactions *per website* your anti-fraud budget would have to be positively gigantic. Any sort of "We will occasionally put orders through your system for quality monitoring purposes, you are contractually obligated to process but not ship or bill the orders" clause will be overly intrusive AND useless since people will just identify the orders coming from Google and process them properly then trim from joeblow@actuallypaysmoneyforhisproductsascanbedemo nstratedbythiscredcardreceipt.com .
... because he won't have them for long.
... you get FFXII, where you have about 30 minutes of cut-scenes (in engine and otherwise) and then two hours of completely irrelevant to anything "travel to this location we'll mark on your map to get your next cutscene". Granted, its not the highlight of the FF series (FFVI, for example, keeps a *strong* narrative even with the player frequently losing control of the action -- well, OK, you sort of need to propel the story yourself after you get to the World of Ruin), but it was absolutely jarring when I'd get thrown out of the story and told to walk through a desert full of barely-disguised Tusken Raiders.
Well, they can't be all bad then.
Alright, if you want some rough estimations: we'll consider the effect of a mass change on the earth to be "substantial" if it affects the tides more than having me 1 meter from the ocean* (feel the massive force of my gravitational pull, you pitiful waves!). The average distance to the moon is 382500 km, or 3.825 * 10^8 m. Gravity is inversely proportional to the square of distance, and my mass is about 66 kg (/flex). So, to have as much effect on the tides as I do, you need to have 9.66 * 10^18 kg of mass in a lunar orbit (hey, thats the same order of magnitude of the amount of rock we already calculated about moving -- fancy that!). Conclusion: it would take a couple of million years of one shuttle flight per second to screw up the tides as much from the moon as I screw them up when I go swimming.
Now, I admit, its pretty darn difficult to model the behavior of the entire ocean. Its entirely possible that the next time I go swimming I could cause global catastrophe. I guess I'll just have to take that risk!
* Yeah, I know, technically I'd have to be one meter from the center of the mass of the ocean. Work with me here. The answer is still "distance to the moon squared dwarfs any amount of mass humanity can ever hope to shift".
They were looking for a quick passage to India. India had spices, and spices were valuable enough that getting a ship full of them back home safely was worth an enormous amount of risk to your treasury and personal safety. This contrasts to the moon: we know there is nothing of value there, and even if it is a stepping stone to, say, a colony on Mars (dubious) there is nothing to profitably exploit there, either.
I know there's a bunch of space enthusiasts on /. but hear the guy out. He's correct: the moon does not mass enough to hold more than a trivial atmosphere, so for our entire stay there we'll be one meteor impact away from catastrophe. Our current cost of flying stuff just to orbit is over $7k a pound, and even decreasing that by a factor of a thousand you'll never get commercial mining of the moon because its just the same old rock that we can dig up terrestrially for far, far cheaper and at less risk. One shuttle flight, with a payload of 22 metric tonnes, costs in excess of $900 million (operational expenditure + cost of shuttle program divided by number of flights). Thats, somebody check my math, $40,000 a kilogram just in transportation costs. Can anyone name *any* economic activity on the moon which would be viable at $40,000 per kilogram of product transmitted back to earth? Even if the moon were pure, solid gold you can't turn a profit mining at that cost. And even if you improve the efficiency ("Space elevator! Space elevator!" yeah I know, I've heard the sales pitch before) you come back to the original problem -- its just a really big rock after all.
Tides are a result of the gravitational pull of the moon. Gravity is directly proportional to mass. To alter the gravitational pull of the moon by one hundredth of a percent you'd have to remove a hundredth of a percent of its mass. Thats 7.36 * 10^18 kg, or 7.36 * 10^15 metric tonnes*. Thats, lets see, substantially more than a million times the combined weight of every human on the planet. The space shuttle has a payload of 22 metric tonnes (/flex). Supposing we were to send one shuttle to the moon every second, it would take more than ten million years to move that much mass.
There is no reason to mine the moon, and there are plenty of good reasons not to, but "Oh no the tides will be thrown out of whack" is not one of them.
* Incidentally: try Googling "mass of the moon". Freaky, isn't it.
Slashdot psuedo-socialism aside, there is a difference between profit seeking and prostitution. "You're a prostitute!" isn't an insult because a prostitute accepts money, its because she accepts money *for sex*. Many people accept money, and actively try to maximize how much of it they get, for providing legitimate goods and services. I do it, I'm guessing you do as well: your boss doesn't say "Hey, Detritus, you might as well be prostituting yourself" when you go in and say "Hey boss, I've been putting in long hours and my last three projects were smashing successes for the business, how about a raise?"
Its his business and if he wants to run it in a non-profit-maximizing mode he's free to do so, but I'm wondering at the wisdom of it even from his perspective. Lets say he thinks wealth is corrupting and just would hate, hate, hate his life if he had $500 million a year coming in. Hey, thats defensible. So just *give away the money*. Put 3 little text ads on every screen, collect a couple tens of millions of dollars, and pick an African village or two to raise out of poverty. Or donate some money to St. Jude's. Or scholarships for underprivileged kids. Or a free puppy for everyone in the state of Wyoming. Or, here's a thought, give the money back to the users -- hold a raffle or something, once a week someone gets a pop-up saying "Thanks for using Craigslist. You just won $10 million. No "#$", really, I really hate being rich. This fortune was brought to you by our friends at Google AdSense. Incidentally, we found 34 results matching your search of 'free microwave'."
For the vast majority of things which humans value $500 million will certainly improve your ability to enjoy it. Even the obvious counterexamples "You can't put a price on love" or "Money doesn't help me enjoy my children" are more or less false due to opportunity costs: supposing I was smitten with a beautiful girl, more money means less time working on putting food on my table means more time to gaze into her eyes (hey, get out of my geek fantasy). If I had children (hey, get out of my geek fantasy), even if I had no intentions of spoiling them rotten $500 million would make sure I made every last T-ball game.
Yeah yeah, I know, rah rah Costco you-have-a-corporate-conscience-so-I-can-feel-good -giving-you-money and all that, but WalMart is not nearly as bad a place to work as people make it out to be. Granted, its probably not going to appeal that much to somebody who reads Slashdot, but people beat a path to their door when they open a new store:
a rt26.html)
c /a/2005/08/17/MNGDPE91AH1.DTL)
When one opened in a not-so-great neighborhood in Chicago, they got 25,000 applications (!) for 325 jobs. (http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-walm
In New Jersey, 8,000 applicants for 350 jobs. (http://www.nysun.com/article/34316)
In Oakland, 11,000 for 400. (http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/
I need to get my eye glasses prescription bumped up again. If you look at the page I linked to, it was a comma there (1,793 billion miles, not 1.793 billion miles), not a period. Which changes the calculation by three orders of magnitude. Doing some additional Googling I found that the NHTSA has broken down the numbers for us: there are roughly 1.51 deaths per *hundred million* miles travelled. This means that, by any definition of "miles travelled" the shuttle is less safe.
n n/TSF2001.pdf
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/TSFA
Paragraph two: "many millions of time more dangerous than a car" was my off-top-of-my-head guestimate before I actually broke out paper and pencil and ran the numbers. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I can tell the difference between 10^1 and 10^6... most days. Maybe I should apply for work designing orbiters...
Can you point to a single result coming from the shuttle program that was worth a human life?
The development of the personal computer, that might be worth someone dying. Or something of great utility like, I don't know, the automobile. The green revolution. The vaccine for polio. A cure for cancer. If a scientist was killed in a laboratory accident trying to develop one of these things we could eulogize him with "Dr. Bob would be happy to know that he died as he lived, in the service of mankind, and in the cause of something greater than any one of us". Can you name, off the top of your head, any of the "science projects" the Challenger crew was carrying with them? Must have been something of great importance to all mankind to risk 7 lives for, right? Well, lets check the books... Here's what the crew died trying to accomplish:
1) Deploying the Tracking Data Relay-2 satellite, a process which is accomplished dozens of times per year without needing to send humans into space.
2) "Shuttle-Pointed Tool for Astronomy (SPARTAN-203)/Halley's Comet Experiment Deployable, a free-flying module designed to observe tail and coma of Halleys comet with two ultraviolet spectrometers and two cameras." This was a nail developed because we already had a hammer and needed something to bang on -- it could just have easily been done with an unmanned craft (and even if it couldn't, "Pictures of the tail of Halley's Comet" is something mankind can do perfectly fine without).
3) FDE Fluid Dynamics Experiment.
4) Comet Halley Active Monitoring Program CHAMP (see #2, also 100% accomplishable from the ground).
5) Phase Partitioning Experiment (PPE)
6) three Shuttle Student Involvement Program (SSIP) experiments (Now, without discounting the massive contributions to science our high school students provide on a regular basis, I'm guessing that adding low gravity to a science fair project does not result in something worth dying for)
7) a set of lessons for Teacher in Space Project (Just like a regular teacher, except she's in space!)
So, which of these projects was worth someone giving their life for? Or, if you prefer, what project ever accomplished by the shuttle program was worth the cost (heck, ignoring the 2% risk of death of everybody on board there's nothing thats been accomplished that was worth the cost of fuel... examination of the effecs of weightlessness on spider webs? Yaaaay?)
... can you point to a single result coming from the shuttle program that was worth a human life? The development of the personal computer, that might be worth someone dying. The vaccine for polio? A cure for cancer? If a scientist was killed in a laboratory accident trying to develop one of these things we could eulogize him with "Dr. Bob would be happy to know that he died as he lived, in the service of mankind, and in the cause of something greater than any one of us". Can you name, off the top of your head, any of the "science projects" the Challenger crew was carrying with them? Must have been something of great importance to all mankind to risk 7 lives for, right? Well, lets check the books... Here's what the crew died trying to accomplish: 1) Deploying the Tracking Data Relay-2 satellite, a process which is accomplished dozens of times per year without needing to send humans into space. 2) "Shuttle-Pointed Tool for Astronomy (SPARTAN-203)/Halley's Comet Experiment Deployable, a free-flying module designed to observe tail and coma of Halleys comet with two ultraviolet spectrometers and two cameras." This was a nail developed because we already had a hammer and needed something to bang on -- it could just have easily been done with an unmanned craft (and even if it couldn't, "Pictures of the tail of Halley's Comet" is something mankind can do perfectly fine without). 3) FDE Fluid Dynamics Experiment. 4) Comet Halley Active Monitoring Program CHAMP (see #2, also 100% accomplishable from the ground). 5) Phase Partitioning Experiment (PPE) 6) three Shuttle Student Involvement Program (SSIP) experiments (Now, without discounting the massive contributions to science our high school students provide on a regular basis, I'm guessing that adding low gravity to a science fair project does not result in something worth dying for) 7) a set of lessons for Teacher in Space Project (Just like a regular teacher, except she's in space!) So, which of these projects was worth someone giving their life for? Or, if you prefer, what project ever accomplished by the shuttle program was worth the cost (heck, ignoring the 2% risk of death of everybody on board there's nothing thats been accomplished that was worth the cost of fuel... examination of the effecs of weightlessness on spider webs? Yaaaay?)
The space shuttles have flown a combined total of 420 million miles (see here: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/sts9 2_longhaul_sidebar2.html, and I'm adding in a rough guesstimate of flights up until the most recent fatal disaster) and have suffered a total of 14 fatalities, for one fatality every 30 million miles. In 1994 alone, US cars travelled a combined total of 1.793 billion miles (somebody actually tracks this: your tax dollars at work http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/rtecs/chapter3.html ). If cars were as "safe" as the shuttle were, you would assume about 60 traffic accidents would happen per year.
However, this is really stacking the deck in the shuttle's favor. If you want to be technical about it, my bicycle hurtled hundreds of thousands of miles through space on my morning commute this morning... relative to the position of the sun. Granted, relative to the position of my house the displacement was only about two miles. Almost all of the mileage wracked up by the shuttle was it coasting around orbiting, when the only thing it had to accomplish was "don't spontaneously explode or have every life support system fail at once". If you want to compare times when the shuttle was actually under directed movement (and a realistic likelihood of danger), which would be essentially limited to lift-off and flying back to earth with some very minor positional adjustments once you're in orbit, the shuttle is many millions of times more dangerous than a car. Some back of the envelope math: the trip to orbit is about 200 miles, the trip down the same, and we'll be VERY generous and say the shuttle travels another 100 miles once its up there in positioning changes and whatnot. Thats a total of 500 miles per trip. There have also been 114 shuttle missions over the course of the space program. Thats one death per 4,000 miles. If cars were that much of a deathtrap we'd expect about 450,000 traffic fatalities in 1994. There were about 43,000 last year.
Bonus points: if you charge the deaths to alcohol instead of cars (hey, the cars would have been perfectly safe if the guy hadn't been driving drunk -- thats like charging a passenger airplane for fatalities if it gets hit with a missile), roughly half of the car fatalities vanish. Presumably the shuttle program does not have an alcohol problem.
Your customers running the challenge-response solution need to be told not to, post-haste. We all know that spammers routinely forge email addresses. Accepting at face value the address on a piece of email that you get of dubious veracity, then sending an email to that address saying "Hey, are you really interested in talking to me?", IS spamming. Have your customers jump on the filtering bandwagon with everyone else, it works extremely well 99% of the time and doesn't scream "My time is valuable, the rest of the Internet can go "#$#"$ off".
I live in Japan and am a happy DS owner, although I haven't taken the Lite plunge yet (although some comments in this discussion thread make me pretty curious). DS is approaching a mass market status similar to, I don't know, iPods? You don't have to be a gamer to own a DS. I take classes in Japanese every week and my fifty-something female teacher told me "You know, if you want to improve your handwriting, there is a lot of software for that. I use [DS Brain Training] myself, actually." (Side note to anyone studying Japanese: I swear I have improved my kanji writing ability more in a week with Brain Training than I did with any month of studying at university. Seriously, buy this game.) I even ran into the prototypical little-old-lady at the cleaners who was playing one of the edutainment games (didn't recognize which) in between servicing customers. How popular would a game system have to be in the US when grandmothers other than Old Grandma Hardcore would be playing it?
I registered on RentACoder in hopes of basically freelancing as a summer job and eventually abandoned the idea. The site is extremely popular with overseas coders of varying quality (from worse-than-crud to top-notch), many of whom put in bids which are just ludicrously low if you're duplicating them from a base in the US or another first world nation. Take, for example, a project the complexity of an undergraduate CS lab (not an ACTUAL undergraduate CS lab, although there's no shortage of students using rentacoder to cheat that way): I would assume eight solid hours of effort would get this done. I was thinking of bidding in the $100 range -- $12.50 an hour seemed like a pretty fair valuation for my time for a college student with a specialized skill set working as an independent contractor. Within an hour of the project being posted, there were I kid you not a dozen bids offering to do it for $20. Many of them had the feel of a copy-paste job of questionable English skills, but there were some capable individuals in the bunch. I mean, programming for pocket change beats working at McDonalds, but programming for $2.50 an hour... not a worthwhile proposition I don't think.
Winzip's revenues in 2005 declined to a mere 22.7 million dollars. (http://www.forbes.com/strategies/2006/04/20/ipo-o utlook-corel-cx_sr_0421ipooutlook.html) This is from a program that has been freely available in uncrippled form for, um, forever. (I just got around to finally buying a copy this year -- I figured "I've been using it for like a decade now, its time I was honest about it"). There's a handful of shareware authors with six figure incomes (www.goodsol.com) and more than a few who made a full-time career out of it (who remembers VGAPlanets?).
For folks who run a corporate intranet or lab at a school nudity, spam, and viruses are all "three things which we absolutely can't afford to have popping up on our PCs". They're the ones this product is aimed at, not technologically adept home users with no minors at the keyboard and no moral objections to pornography.
A game is only late until its released, but a space probe which smashes into the body it is orbiting because it doesn't know the difference between feet and meters is gone forever.