Construction in orbit would eliminate the cost of launch. And that would require a functioning space-faring economy capable of creating such a thing.
When satellites go into geosynchronous orbit from their manufacturers from _above_, the economics may be different. Maybe. Even so, it could be a long long wait.
But I thought we were in for a long long wait for the Iron Curtain to come down, so what do I know?
The same place most of the federal government's activities are authorized: in the parts written in invisible ink.
You'll need your special government-issue glasses that allow you to see the penumbras and emanations and such -- which you get only if you're an elected or appointed federal official.
"I read in Lunaya Pravda today that Luna City Council passed on first reading measure to license, regulate -- and tax -- food vendors operating inside municipal pressure."
That from memory. How'd I do?
Sounds like there might be a semester project in there: review the security of such-and-such a portion of this-or-that open source software. Find a security problem that's validated by the project, automatic A.
Document what you did, how you did it, provide adequate proof that you really did it, and have it graded accordingly. If the open source project has standards for security reviews of its work, and they certify you met them completely, also automatic A.
Teensy problems: if the project doesn't reply to the students' efforts quickly enough, finishing well before the end of the semester won't be soon enough. How to confirm the review really was done?
"Discretionary spending" is a misnomer. Except for the pay of certain few federal officials (federal judges, and perhaps a handful of others), which cannot be decreased during their time in office, it's all discretionary. It's in the Constitution; you can look it up.
When people speak of "non-discretionary" spending, they're referring to the spending done to keep promises of previous generations of politicians, spending which is normally done on auto-pilot. The default is to keep those promises, no matter how outmoded, unwise, unconstitutional or even mathematically impossible.
Everything else is "discretionary spending".
Speaking of all federal spending, not so-called "discretionary spending", is a more useful number, in terms of the future of the republic.
For flinging partisan mud at politicians, past and present, not so much.
Last I heard, being shot or beaten by a cop for no good reason, and then dying at the scene or later of your injuries isn't included in the statistics, at least in the US. Not as murder (obviously) nor as suspicious death at the hands of police nor non-suspicious death at the hands of police or anything. Not tracked in the stats, period.
Specifically, not something the FBI keeps track of, last I heard.
Yep. If Harvard makes unwise investment decisions for emotional/political/emotional-political reasons, it'll mean their endowment will be slightly smaller than insanely huge. Which is still insanely huge. (I'm very good at math.)
"There are people who insist that they can hear the difference between [the old good stuff and the new crappy stuff]", and could win a metric crap ton by demonstrating this ability in double-blind tests, in a wagering situation.
But they're just too modest (or it's just too inconvenient) for them to do so.
Maybe the CEO of Sony could get fired after a lone site displays to its visitors a nastygram about Sony's behavior, which produces a media frenzy?
Or is that an inappropriate use of this tactic, since actual people are actually harmed (a little) by what appears to be actual unlawful behavior of the company, in this case?
One reason Jehovah's Witnesses spend so much time knocking on doors is so they won't spend it on other things that might expose them to ideas and information that could lead them to question their faith.
Or so I've heard.
That may occasionally backfire, if the person on the other side of the door engages them in thoughtful conversation. Or not.
Besides, who has the time? An observant Jew on a Saturday, I suppose.
Come to think of it, the guy who told me he had done that was Jewish.
Did Obama change his mind? Hard to say, given his occupation. Lying and being disingenuous is a normal part of the job. Who knows what he really believes about this, if anything?
Did he change his public position? Yeah.
Is one of those changes more important than the other? I'd have to say, no.
What matters is what a person actually does. IMO. YMMV.
Depending on the game plan -- bootstrap from 18th century technology, or plant a clone of Earth society hauled out of storage lockers, or something else -- there's also the question of what to pack. And what the ancestors of the eventual colonists are to do while traveling.
Maybe they farm, if they're going to travel awake. And practice identifying and smelting ores, and turning trees into houses and waterwheels. Stuff like that. They'll need a lot of room. (And a way to turn metals into imitation ores.) All the while reminding the next generation that they'll need the knowledge in those books to make telegraphs and dynamos, and to refine silicon spice genes. Stuff like that. (See Heinlein's "Orphans in the Sky"/"Universe", and the New Beginnings chapters of "Time Enough for Love")
Or maybe they do something else while traveling awake.
If they travel asleep or frozen, they just need to know how to operate whatever supplies they bring along, when they come to and unpack: Conestoga wagons full of seeds and surrounded by livestock, city-in-a-box robo-kits, whatever.
Remember what happened to the first expedition to Mars, in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land? It ended badly. Classified-beyond-top-secret-out-of-embarrassment badly.
Yeah, I've grown tired of that prompting for my real name, too.
It's also rather hard to find features you don't use much, such as logging out. When I'm away from home, like at the library, I want to do that. I really really want to.
When the clock is about to run out, I don't want to have to try the Google main page, Google Alerts, my YouTube home page, Google Crochet and such to find the inconspicuous part of the obscure page where this is possible.
Yeah, I know it's not that hard a thing to remember, once you know it. But why should we have to remember it? And what about the first time we need to know it, when there's nothing to remember yet?
The phenomenon where high-minded do-gooders want what the low-minded black market purveyors also want is called "the Baptist and the Bootlegger". http://duckduckgo.com/?q=bapti...
The effects of laws don't depend in the slightest on the intentions of their advocates.
That's why apartheid-era racists in South Africa wanted a certain type of law that today's American liberals also want, but for quite opposite reasons. (It's depressing to realize the South African racists had a better understanding of the social phenomena involved about a century ago than American liberals do today. Go figure.)
Or two counter-rotating flywheels. Side-by-side with axes parallel or collinear, doesn't matter, I think. Doubles your chances of a catastrophic failure, though. But have a milder failure of one, and you're back to the gyroscopic effect scenario.
Stop-and-go traffic, or higher speed travel in a straight line, no significant gyroscopic effect with just one flywheel. Well, I guess you could find the weight shifted some from the front wheels to the back ones, or vice versa, depending. If the flywheel didn't release or store too much energy per unit time, it wouldn't be much of a danger.
The gyroscope idea was bandied about in the 1970s, maybe earlier, in a publication called "Environment" (also named "Scientist and Citizen"), and others. The idea seems to have the same kind of staying power as practical atomic fusion -- and as little to show for it, decade after decade: asymptotically approaching not quite practical.
When people use the word "should" they could mean any number of things. It's hard to tell with confidence which the poster means here. Some possibilities.
A moral imperative. You should not murder people.
An ethical imperative. You should keep promises you made, whether in a formal agreement or an implicit one. Don't storm off the set and interrupt production because the director is wearing a pink sweater. Pay for the restaurant meal you ate; the waiter didn't ask you what you wanted to eat out of curiosity, and didn't bring the restaurant's food to you out of generosity.
A practical consideration. You should go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours. A stitch in time saves nine.
A formal theoretical expectation. Jim! I think I've got it. All we have to do is quit feeding them. We quit feeding them, they stop breeding!
An informal theoretical expectation, or an empirical expectation based on experience. If we refactor this code, adding that functionality will be lots quicker. The sun will come up tomorrow.
A personal preference. "The sun'll come out / Tomorrow / Bet your bottom dollar / That tomorrow / There'll be sun!" "Rain, rain, go away. / Come again some other day."
My guess is: A personal preference, but the poster thinks it's a moral imperative, or an ethical imperative.
At least, that's the way I think you should interpret it.
This has nothing to do with minimum wage, but everything to do with the interaction of politics and economics, and the tradeoff between labor-saving devices and labor. It's a supposedly true story.
Milton Friedman was being given a tour by a government official of some public works project in Asia, perhaps a canal.
He asked, "Why are they using shovels instead of bulldozers? It would be much less expensive to do it that way."
The official replied that it was not just a public works project, but also a jobs program. Using shovels instead of bulldozers provided employment, and would boost the economy.
Without missing a beat, Friedman replied, "Oh. Why are they using shovels, instead of teaspoons?"
Slashdot Mirror
Construction in orbit would eliminate the cost of launch. And that would require a functioning space-faring economy capable of creating such a thing.
When satellites go into geosynchronous orbit from their manufacturers from _above_, the economics may be different. Maybe. Even so, it could be a long long wait.
But I thought we were in for a long long wait for the Iron Curtain to come down, so what do I know?
I am shocked, shocked to learn that regulatory capture continues to exist, even after I learned the name for it.
http://duckduckgo.com/?q=regul...
The same place most of the federal government's activities are authorized: in the parts written in invisible ink.
You'll need your special government-issue glasses that allow you to see the penumbras and emanations and such -- which you get only if you're an elected or appointed federal official.
"I read in Lunaya Pravda today that Luna City Council passed on first reading measure to license, regulate -- and tax -- food vendors operating inside municipal pressure." That from memory. How'd I do?
Sounds like there might be a semester project in there: review the security of such-and-such a portion of this-or-that open source software. Find a security problem that's validated by the project, automatic A.
Document what you did, how you did it, provide adequate proof that you really did it, and have it graded accordingly. If the open source project has standards for security reviews of its work, and they certify you met them completely, also automatic A.
Teensy problems: if the project doesn't reply to the students' efforts quickly enough, finishing well before the end of the semester won't be soon enough. How to confirm the review really was done?
For now. So I hear.
They return any of that intercepted refund money?
Well, that's it. If they're that incompetent, I'm just not going to give the IRS any more of my money.
That'll teach 'em.
"Discretionary spending" is a misnomer. Except for the pay of certain few federal officials (federal judges, and perhaps a handful of others), which cannot be decreased during their time in office, it's all discretionary. It's in the Constitution; you can look it up.
When people speak of "non-discretionary" spending, they're referring to the spending done to keep promises of previous generations of politicians, spending which is normally done on auto-pilot. The default is to keep those promises, no matter how outmoded, unwise, unconstitutional or even mathematically impossible.
Everything else is "discretionary spending".
Speaking of all federal spending, not so-called "discretionary spending", is a more useful number, in terms of the future of the republic.
For flinging partisan mud at politicians, past and present, not so much.
Fort Hood, for instance, would be an excellent choice.
Egon: Don't cross the streams.
Last I heard, being shot or beaten by a cop for no good reason, and then dying at the scene or later of your injuries isn't included in the statistics, at least in the US. Not as murder (obviously) nor as suspicious death at the hands of police nor non-suspicious death at the hands of police or anything. Not tracked in the stats, period.
Specifically, not something the FBI keeps track of, last I heard.
Maybe if I had RTFA I would know. And maybe not.
Yep. If Harvard makes unwise investment decisions for emotional/political/emotional-political reasons, it'll mean their endowment will be slightly smaller than insanely huge. Which is still insanely huge. (I'm very good at math.)
"There are people who insist that they can hear the difference between [the old good stuff and the new crappy stuff]", and could win a metric crap ton by demonstrating this ability in double-blind tests, in a wagering situation.
But they're just too modest (or it's just too inconvenient) for them to do so.
Maybe the CEO of Sony could get fired after a lone site displays to its visitors a nastygram about Sony's behavior, which produces a media frenzy?
Or is that an inappropriate use of this tactic, since actual people are actually harmed (a little) by what appears to be actual unlawful behavior of the company, in this case?
One reason Jehovah's Witnesses spend so much time knocking on doors is so they won't spend it on other things that might expose them to ideas and information that could lead them to question their faith.
Or so I've heard.
That may occasionally backfire, if the person on the other side of the door engages them in thoughtful conversation. Or not.
Besides, who has the time? An observant Jew on a Saturday, I suppose.
Come to think of it, the guy who told me he had done that was Jewish.
Did Obama change his mind? Hard to say, given his occupation. Lying and being disingenuous is a normal part of the job. Who knows what he really believes about this, if anything?
Did he change his public position? Yeah.
Is one of those changes more important than the other? I'd have to say, no.
What matters is what a person actually does. IMO. YMMV.
Depending on the game plan -- bootstrap from 18th century technology, or plant a clone of Earth society hauled out of storage lockers, or something else -- there's also the question of what to pack. And what the ancestors of the eventual colonists are to do while traveling.
Maybe they farm, if they're going to travel awake. And practice identifying and smelting ores, and turning trees into houses and waterwheels. Stuff like that. They'll need a lot of room. (And a way to turn metals into imitation ores.) All the while reminding the next generation that they'll need the knowledge in those books to make telegraphs and dynamos, and to refine silicon spice genes. Stuff like that. (See Heinlein's "Orphans in the Sky"/"Universe", and the New Beginnings chapters of "Time Enough for Love")
Or maybe they do something else while traveling awake.
If they travel asleep or frozen, they just need to know how to operate whatever supplies they bring along, when they come to and unpack: Conestoga wagons full of seeds and surrounded by livestock, city-in-a-box robo-kits, whatever.
Remember what happened to the first expedition to Mars, in Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land? It ended badly. Classified-beyond-top-secret-out-of-embarrassment badly.
Of course, that was fiction.
Still, Heinlein's track record is fairly good.
"The Andromeda Strain" was about containing one that got harvested, but poorly.
Yeah, I've grown tired of that prompting for my real name, too.
It's also rather hard to find features you don't use much, such as logging out. When I'm away from home, like at the library, I want to do that. I really really want to.
When the clock is about to run out, I don't want to have to try the Google main page, Google Alerts, my YouTube home page, Google Crochet and such to find the inconspicuous part of the obscure page where this is possible.
Yeah, I know it's not that hard a thing to remember, once you know it. But why should we have to remember it? And what about the first time we need to know it, when there's nothing to remember yet?
Grrr!
Ima gonna steal this. A lot.
"Terrorist Act" is a lot better way to say it than "Patriot Act" or "P.A.T.R.I.O.T Act" or "so-called Patriot Act".
The phenomenon where high-minded do-gooders want what the low-minded black market purveyors also want is called "the Baptist and the Bootlegger". http://duckduckgo.com/?q=bapti...
The effects of laws don't depend in the slightest on the intentions of their advocates.
That's why apartheid-era racists in South Africa wanted a certain type of law that today's American liberals also want, but for quite opposite reasons. (It's depressing to realize the South African racists had a better understanding of the social phenomena involved about a century ago than American liberals do today. Go figure.)
Or two counter-rotating flywheels. Side-by-side with axes parallel or collinear, doesn't matter, I think. Doubles your chances of a catastrophic failure, though. But have a milder failure of one, and you're back to the gyroscopic effect scenario.
Stop-and-go traffic, or higher speed travel in a straight line, no significant gyroscopic effect with just one flywheel. Well, I guess you could find the weight shifted some from the front wheels to the back ones, or vice versa, depending. If the flywheel didn't release or store too much energy per unit time, it wouldn't be much of a danger.
The gyroscope idea was bandied about in the 1970s, maybe earlier, in a publication called "Environment" (also named "Scientist and Citizen"), and others. The idea seems to have the same kind of staying power as practical atomic fusion -- and as little to show for it, decade after decade: asymptotically approaching not quite practical.
When people use the word "should" they could mean any number of things. It's hard to tell with confidence which the poster means here. Some possibilities.
A moral imperative. You should not murder people.
An ethical imperative. You should keep promises you made, whether in a formal agreement or an implicit one. Don't storm off the set and interrupt production because the director is wearing a pink sweater. Pay for the restaurant meal you ate; the waiter didn't ask you what you wanted to eat out of curiosity, and didn't bring the restaurant's food to you out of generosity.
A practical consideration. You should go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours. A stitch in time saves nine.
A formal theoretical expectation. Jim! I think I've got it. All we have to do is quit feeding them. We quit feeding them, they stop breeding!
An informal theoretical expectation, or an empirical expectation based on experience. If we refactor this code, adding that functionality will be lots quicker. The sun will come up tomorrow.
A personal preference. "The sun'll come out / Tomorrow / Bet your bottom dollar / That tomorrow / There'll be sun!" "Rain, rain, go away. / Come again some other day."
My guess is: A personal preference, but the poster thinks it's a moral imperative, or an ethical imperative.
At least, that's the way I think you should interpret it.
This has nothing to do with minimum wage, but everything to do with the interaction of politics and economics, and the tradeoff between labor-saving devices and labor. It's a supposedly true story.
Milton Friedman was being given a tour by a government official of some public works project in Asia, perhaps a canal.
He asked, "Why are they using shovels instead of bulldozers? It would be much less expensive to do it that way."
The official replied that it was not just a public works project, but also a jobs program. Using shovels instead of bulldozers provided employment, and would boost the economy.
Without missing a beat, Friedman replied, "Oh. Why are they using shovels, instead of teaspoons?"