Except that if you just gave him the money he'd have no more need to succeed than the current bureaucracy. No, Private enterprise works because if you fail it's your welfare that's on the line. So I propose instead:
Offer $10 billion to the first private company to get to the moon. $1 billion for each of the first 5 after. Plus a bonus of $100 Million for each landing a company does.
Now your favourite companies (e.g. spacex, scaled composites), you may wish to be nice to and offer them very attractive loans that would have to be paid back at a certain date (say 2020). This would mean that they could get capital to do their development with and would also give them a very hard date they had to meet. i.e. they have to reach the moon by 2020, or are left with a bill for e.g. $5billion that they can't pay without a landing. Now I know there are a few flaws in this - a company could just take the money, never intend to do a landing and plan to go bankrupt as soon as the loans are called in - so you would have to make things a bit more complex in terms of funding, but I think the basics have to be better than the current bureaucracy.
Maybe not, but it might well have behind it * Environmentalists * The companies that build Trains * Electricity companies (assuming they make this electric)
However: * IME Environmentalists shoot themselves in the foot as often as not * There are very few American companies that build trains so they won't be very powerful * I bet some idiot decides to run these things on diesel because it would have lower initial investment costs - thereby ruining some of the environmental benefits
1. nuclear reactors make dangerous, deadly waste 2. the waste is deadly, effectively, forever 3. we can't find a safe place to store it 4. we can't safely move it to storage
Taking each point: 1. Lots of things make deadly waste, many chemical processes create vast amounts of horrendous chemicals, (cyanide springs to mind as a popular one). However over the years we've learned to deal with these toxic products; I see no reason we can't do the same with the waste products a nuke plant produces. At least they're not being dumped straight into the atmosphere.
2: False. Reprocessing gives you a bunch of material with long half lives (hundreds of thousands of years). And a very small amount of material with very short half lives (in the order of years. A long half life means that it isn't very radioactive and therefore safe, certainly no more radioactive than the uranium we originally dug up. Earlier comments have compared the radioactivity of the average human to being less than that of depleted uranium because we have lots of carbon 14 in us. A short half life means it is very radioactive but it won't be radioactive for long. worst case scenario you're storing it for 60 years or so. With reprocessing there is no long term storage problem.
3. Even without reprocessing, there are plenty of safe places to store it, the problem is politically acceptable places.
4. I've yet to see any evidence there is a problem with the transport methods that have been in place for the last 50 years. Please prove me wrong.
c. You need to prove there is a conspiracy and not just ignorance and fear such as you yourself are showing.
You are aware that there are different frequencies of microwaves yes? Some that do agitate water (and heat it up) and others that don't. As long as the power satellite uses one of the frequencies that don't, then yes I'd happily spend an indefinite amount of time in its path. Just like I'll consume as much plutonium as you're willing to consume caffeine.
Good god man what is your attention span like? If it's not good in 5 minutes you're giving up? How do you go through life if you give up at something after 5 minutes of trial? How do you study? Read Novels? Cook Food? Engage in foreplay? Seriously there's a lot more to life than instant gratification.
You know I'd be with PRS here but for 2 things: 1) It's Google's right to choose not to show the content if they're not prepared to pay the bill 2) PRS isn't able to say who it represents. As soon as it says this that is as good as an admission that it isn't passing the money onto the artists in the way that it claims that it does.
Do you want one that does as much as possible in what it considers the public good, or as little as possible and leaves the market and people to sort themselves out. At one extreme you have capitalism, at the other you have socialism; I'm not saying anyone is inherently better than the other, but realise that by encouraging spending public money on encouraging your agenda of more science that that is what you are doing.
If you're going to say that XYZ is a good thing and here is the undeniable proof behind it, then that may be the sensible thing to do, but realise that taxes are effectively the mob taking money from you at gunpoint - sometimes this is in the best interest of society but in this case where you have a public body trying to condition young children into their preferred way of thinking then that evidence had better be pretty concrete.
Nope. You're completely liable for things outside of your control. This is thanks to the Because Act. This little known piece of international legislation is, in fact, at the heart of many of the most prominent legal actions in the world today. Much loved by the RIAA, MPAA and the US due to it's implicit allowal for random search and seizure, legal 'fishing trips', non-judicially warranted wire taps, and it's espousal of 'guilty until proven guilty' legislature; the entire text of the Because Act has been reproduced below:
Ok at least I understand why the costs of those lengthened warranties is such a problem, I had assumed that many of the parts would be interchangeable; or where they weren't a new drive issued.
My reason for wanting it isn't quite as obvious as it might seem: 2 jobs ago I designed carrier spec Telecomms gear, this stuff had to be specced to last 20 years, we had to guarantee it for 20 years. These days I'm much more in the consumer space where expected lifetimes of products are in the 2 to 3 year range. The difference in emphasis on reliability between the two that we as engineers had was paramount, we had a very different design philosophy to get that reliability and it is that difference in quality and durability that I am interested in from my hard drives, not the replacement drive that 4 years later I could probably buy for a 10th the price of what I paid in the first place.
Yes RAID should come to the rescue again, but I try and buy quality stuff and this is a very strong sign to me that Seagate has stopped thinking about quality and durability and is now all about getting product out of the door.
Thanks for being so informative on this issue, as others have said what techies normally want honest information not bluffing off, this is the best thing I have heard about the problem.
I've used seagate extensively for the last decade mainly because of my positive experience with the warranty returns system. That is now pretty much at an end because of the dropping of the 5 year warranty; if you guys don't trust your drives to last then why should I? If they hide and conceal issues then you've lost faith. I've always lived by a rule that I can cope with anyone making (almost) any mistake, that's fine, everyone makes mistakes; it's how we deal with these problems that tell me if I want to work with someone again. Until you posted Seagate made a whole bunch of mistakes and dealt with them badly so I won't want to deal with them again. If Seagate were to be as officially open and helpful as you have been then that would almost be worth the lost faith from the rest of their poor decisions.
To iterate what I've said elsewhere my problem with this fix is that it is applied to all drives at once - that is not acceptable risk management in anybody's book. Hardware breaks, software has errors, we know and acknowledge this, just don't have your flashing software go out of its way to fix/break as many things as possible at once. Without that error if the "fix" had broken the drive permanently I wouldn't have minded if Seagate was honest about this as soon as it knew the issue existed and if they communicated the fix (RMAing for example) as soon as it was available then that would have been fine - that's why I have a RAID...
I guess I just tell you this to acknowledge my gratitude to you for your efforts here and to try and communicate my frustrations surrounding Seagate's recent activities to someone in the organisation. Why oh why though did they have to drop the 5 year warranty, now I'm stuck with WD...
Please don't use cheap desktop hardware and then whine about it not being server grade.
bad web hosting company, bad!
I see you've missed what the I in RAID stands for.
No the problem I have with this is that it works on all drives at once, you can't tell it to just do one at once - that to me is what is the biggest problem.
i.e. any hard drive system should accept that stuff goes wrong, and therefore how do we minimise the chances of this, an update that must be applied to all drives at once is maximising risk.
I don't know how Seagate actually got its good name.
Simple, your product may be coated with excrement, but if everyone else's is pure excrement, then your one with just a slight coating will probably sell better (unless you're selling fertiliser)
I used to like Maxtor in spite of the noise, but WD has pretty much been my best friend all along. Today I will hardly buy anything else.
Then your experience is the exact opposite of mine. I've had over a dozen seagate drives over the past decade and a bit and had 2 failures, I've had about 5 WD drives and about 6 failures (2 of the drives had to be replaced twice, and one 3 times). As for Maxtor I've had about 3 failures out of about 4 drives, Seagate always replaced the drives under warranty, Maxtor refused to replace them even though they were in warranty.
Although now I've typed this there is nothing surer now than I'll go home tonight and find my raid array toast as 3 seagate drives have died simultaneously...
Actually one of the problems with pebblebeds (and why they are my lest favourite form of nukes) is that the carbon shell around the pebble makes it next to impossible to reprocess them.
I see your point, but I guess from their view once they deliver it their work is done. Things are then totally in someone else's hands. For a deliverable on a project timescale it kind of makes sense. Their target date is the thing they can effect. Misleading yes, but understandable.
Well apart from the mission control stuff they'll eventually start to do, but according to the videos on their site they haven't built that bit yet so I guess they're relying on someone else for that at the moment.
Best isn't a term you use in test programs. At a certain temperature a chip will run at a certain speed or it won't. All that's going on here is that Intel will be altering its binning process to separate out the chips that are capable of running at 75 degrees from those that can't.
Not really any different at all from the current process of binning based on speed grade. All it'll be is a different set of parameters in the test structures will cause the chip to go into a different bin.
Now what interests me is that if google are guaranteeing to run these chips at a minimum temperature and therefore could increase the yield by accepting chips that would otherwise have been a failure because they couldn't run at a cold temperature...
Well I'm not the OP but I don't do PC gaming just console(Xbox 360 or Wii):
"For example, a lot of indie games are PC exclusives because the developer isn't a big enough company for a WiiWare license."
Unfortunately in that case I can't play it, (unless they do a Linux version). I'm sure there's some gold out there, but the signal to noise ratio has IME not been worth it.
Frankly I see computer games as being for fun and not as another job - hearing what people go through to get games running on a PC sounds far too much like the bits of my job that I hate to pay for the privilege of doing it.
"And let the copyright be valid only 5 years after the death of that person to let it be able to cover for funeral costs in case that's needed."
A problem with death + 5 years is that for very lucrative works (e.g. Harry Potter) then it becomes profitable for people to assassinate the author simply in order to get rid of copyright on a work.
Death + 50 years or at a push 20 years might do it, and the current 75 years is too long - especially when it is extendable e.g. Mickey Mouse never going out of copyright...
Slashdot Mirror
So actually quite straightforwards then?
If that's true then all these impossibly difficult things that NASA keeps talking up suddenly seem even more suspect
Except that if you just gave him the money he'd have no more need to succeed than the current bureaucracy. No, Private enterprise works because if you fail it's your welfare that's on the line. So I propose instead:
Offer $10 billion to the first private company to get to the moon. $1 billion for each of the first 5 after. Plus a bonus of $100 Million for each landing a company does.
Now your favourite companies (e.g. spacex, scaled composites), you may wish to be nice to and offer them very attractive loans that would have to be paid back at a certain date (say 2020). This would mean that they could get capital to do their development with and would also give them a very hard date they had to meet. i.e. they have to reach the moon by 2020, or are left with a bill for e.g. $5billion that they can't pay without a landing.
Now I know there are a few flaws in this - a company could just take the money, never intend to do a landing and plan to go bankrupt as soon as the loans are called in - so you would have to make things a bit more complex in terms of funding, but I think the basics have to be better than the current bureaucracy.
Really, according to the numbers I get:
US: Just over 9 Million km^2
Europe: Just over 10 Million km^2
Maybe not, but it might well have behind it
* Environmentalists
* The companies that build Trains
* Electricity companies (assuming they make this electric)
However:
* IME Environmentalists shoot themselves in the foot as often as not
* There are very few American companies that build trains so they won't be very powerful
* I bet some idiot decides to run these things on diesel because it would have lower initial investment costs - thereby ruining some of the environmental benefits
Why? Works fine in Europe - and the land area of the USA is smaller than that of Europe.
Jumping in:
1. nuclear reactors make dangerous, deadly waste
2. the waste is deadly, effectively, forever
3. we can't find a safe place to store it
4. we can't safely move it to storage
Taking each point:
1. Lots of things make deadly waste, many chemical processes create vast amounts of horrendous chemicals, (cyanide springs to mind as a popular one). However over the years we've learned to deal with these toxic products; I see no reason we can't do the same with the waste products a nuke plant produces. At least they're not being dumped straight into the atmosphere.
2: False. Reprocessing gives you a bunch of material with long half lives (hundreds of thousands of years). And a very small amount of material with very short half lives (in the order of years.
A long half life means that it isn't very radioactive and therefore safe, certainly no more radioactive than the uranium we originally dug up. Earlier comments have compared the radioactivity of the average human to being less than that of depleted uranium because we have lots of carbon 14 in us.
A short half life means it is very radioactive but it won't be radioactive for long. worst case scenario you're storing it for 60 years or so.
With reprocessing there is no long term storage problem.
3. Even without reprocessing, there are plenty of safe places to store it, the problem is politically acceptable places.
4. I've yet to see any evidence there is a problem with the transport methods that have been in place for the last 50 years. Please prove me wrong.
c. You need to prove there is a conspiracy and not just ignorance and fear such as you yourself are showing.
I was referring to this:
http://www.atomicinsights.com/may95/plutonium_eff.html
You are aware that there are different frequencies of microwaves yes? Some that do agitate water (and heat it up) and others that don't. As long as the power satellite uses one of the frequencies that don't, then yes I'd happily spend an indefinite amount of time in its path.
Just like I'll consume as much plutonium as you're willing to consume caffeine.
Good god man what is your attention span like? If it's not good in 5 minutes you're giving up?
How do you go through life if you give up at something after 5 minutes of trial? How do you study? Read Novels? Cook Food? Engage in foreplay?
Seriously there's a lot more to life than instant gratification.
You know I'd be with PRS here but for 2 things:
1) It's Google's right to choose not to show the content if they're not prepared to pay the bill
2) PRS isn't able to say who it represents. As soon as it says this that is as good as an admission that it isn't passing the money onto the artists in the way that it claims that it does.
Depends what you want from your government.
Do you want one that does as much as possible in what it considers the public good, or as little as possible and leaves the market and people to sort themselves out. At one extreme you have capitalism, at the other you have socialism; I'm not saying anyone is inherently better than the other, but realise that by encouraging spending public money on encouraging your agenda of more science that that is what you are doing.
If you're going to say that XYZ is a good thing and here is the undeniable proof behind it, then that may be the sensible thing to do, but realise that taxes are effectively the mob taking money from you at gunpoint - sometimes this is in the best interest of society but in this case where you have a public body trying to condition young children into their preferred way of thinking then that evidence had better be pretty concrete.
Nope. You're completely liable for things outside of your control. This is thanks to the Because Act. This little known piece of international legislation is, in fact, at the heart of many of the most prominent legal actions in the world today. Much loved by the RIAA, MPAA and the US due to it's implicit allowal for random search and seizure, legal 'fishing trips', non-judicially warranted wire taps, and it's espousal of 'guilty until proven guilty' legislature; the entire text of the Because Act has been reproduced below:
Because Act
1. Because.
1.1. Just, because.
hate to reply to myself, but it occurred to me you could also have BDSM for AIs by:
chmod a-w file2
sudo cp -f file1 file2
Although what AIs think about the sticky bit would be another issue...
It'd be easy to make for them they just need to watch the reproductive act for machines:
cp big_muscular_file innocent_looking_file
although finding candidates above 18yo for this process could be tricky...
Ok at least I understand why the costs of those lengthened warranties is such a problem, I had assumed that many of the parts would be interchangeable; or where they weren't a new drive issued.
My reason for wanting it isn't quite as obvious as it might seem:
2 jobs ago I designed carrier spec Telecomms gear, this stuff had to be specced to last 20 years, we had to guarantee it for 20 years. These days I'm much more in the consumer space where expected lifetimes of products are in the 2 to 3 year range.
The difference in emphasis on reliability between the two that we as engineers had was paramount, we had a very different design philosophy to get that reliability and it is that difference in quality and durability that I am interested in from my hard drives, not the replacement drive that 4 years later I could probably buy for a 10th the price of what I paid in the first place.
Yes RAID should come to the rescue again, but I try and buy quality stuff and this is a very strong sign to me that Seagate has stopped thinking about quality and durability and is now all about getting product out of the door.
Thanks for being so informative on this issue, as others have said what techies normally want honest information not bluffing off, this is the best thing I have heard about the problem.
I've used seagate extensively for the last decade mainly because of my positive experience with the warranty returns system. That is now pretty much at an end because of the dropping of the 5 year warranty; if you guys don't trust your drives to last then why should I? If they hide and conceal issues then you've lost faith. I've always lived by a rule that I can cope with anyone making (almost) any mistake, that's fine, everyone makes mistakes; it's how we deal with these problems that tell me if I want to work with someone again. Until you posted Seagate made a whole bunch of mistakes and dealt with them badly so I won't want to deal with them again. If Seagate were to be as officially open and helpful as you have been then that would almost be worth the lost faith from the rest of their poor decisions.
To iterate what I've said elsewhere my problem with this fix is that it is applied to all drives at once - that is not acceptable risk management in anybody's book. Hardware breaks, software has errors, we know and acknowledge this, just don't have your flashing software go out of its way to fix/break as many things as possible at once. Without that error if the "fix" had broken the drive permanently I wouldn't have minded if Seagate was honest about this as soon as it knew the issue existed and if they communicated the fix (RMAing for example) as soon as it was available then that would have been fine - that's why I have a RAID...
I guess I just tell you this to acknowledge my gratitude to you for your efforts here and to try and communicate my frustrations surrounding Seagate's recent activities to someone in the organisation. Why oh why though did they have to drop the 5 year warranty, now I'm stuck with WD...
Please don't use cheap desktop hardware and then whine about it not being server grade. bad web hosting company, bad!
I see you've missed what the I in RAID stands for.
No the problem I have with this is that it works on all drives at once, you can't tell it to just do one at once - that to me is what is the biggest problem.
i.e. any hard drive system should accept that stuff goes wrong, and therefore how do we minimise the chances of this, an update that must be applied to all drives at once is maximising risk.
I don't know how Seagate actually got its good name.
Simple, your product may be coated with excrement, but if everyone else's is pure excrement, then your one with just a slight coating will probably sell better (unless you're selling fertiliser)
I used to like Maxtor in spite of the noise, but WD has pretty much been my best friend all along. Today I will hardly buy anything else.
Then your experience is the exact opposite of mine. I've had over a dozen seagate drives over the past decade and a bit and had 2 failures, I've had about 5 WD drives and about 6 failures (2 of the drives had to be replaced twice, and one 3 times). As for Maxtor I've had about 3 failures out of about 4 drives, Seagate always replaced the drives under warranty, Maxtor refused to replace them even though they were in warranty.
Although now I've typed this there is nothing surer now than I'll go home tonight and find my raid array toast as 3 seagate drives have died simultaneously...
In that case you may find this interesting: http://web.archive.org/web/20070303162910/http://www.sustainablenuclear.org/PADs/pad8301cohen.html
Actually one of the problems with pebblebeds (and why they are my lest favourite form of nukes) is that the carbon shell around the pebble makes it next to impossible to reprocess them.
I should have posted the link - Apologies
I see your point, but I guess from their view once they deliver it their work is done. Things are then totally in someone else's hands. For a deliverable on a project timescale it kind of makes sense. Their target date is the thing they can effect. Misleading yes, but understandable.
Well apart from the mission control stuff they'll eventually start to do, but according to the videos on their site they haven't built that bit yet so I guess they're relying on someone else for that at the moment.
Best isn't a term you use in test programs. At a certain temperature a chip will run at a certain speed or it won't.
All that's going on here is that Intel will be altering its binning process to separate out the chips that are capable of running at 75 degrees from those that can't.
Not really any different at all from the current process of binning based on speed grade. All it'll be is a different set of parameters in the test structures will cause the chip to go into a different bin.
Now what interests me is that if google are guaranteeing to run these chips at a minimum temperature and therefore could increase the yield by accepting chips that would otherwise have been a failure because they couldn't run at a cold temperature...
Well I'm not the OP but I don't do PC gaming just console(Xbox 360 or Wii):
"For example, a lot of indie games are PC exclusives because the developer isn't a big enough company for a WiiWare license."
Unfortunately in that case I can't play it, (unless they do a Linux version). I'm sure there's some gold out there, but the signal to noise ratio has IME not been worth it.
Frankly I see computer games as being for fun and not as another job - hearing what people go through to get games running on a PC sounds far too much like the bits of my job that I hate to pay for the privilege of doing it.
"And let the copyright be valid only 5 years after the death of that person to let it be able to cover for funeral costs in case that's needed."
A problem with death + 5 years is that for very lucrative works (e.g. Harry Potter) then it becomes profitable for people to assassinate the author simply in order to get rid of copyright on a work.
Death + 50 years or at a push 20 years might do it, and the current 75 years is too long - especially when it is extendable e.g. Mickey Mouse never going out of copyright...