Bull had nothing to do with Iran or nukes. He was developing giant, militarily-useless space-launch artillery for Iraq. He also developed some of the best field artillery bought by countries around the world, as well as some other projects such as an improved SCUD nose cone. He was assassinated in Belgium, likely by Israel.
Yet other manufacturers don't take that attitude. Go look at TI or Analog devices. Full datasheets right there, often running to hundreds of pages reasonably priced development boards, often free samples. Broadcom claims to have features such as DSP and GPU built in to this chip, but I don't know what use they are supposed to be if they are totally undocumented. Supposedly about 98% of the FLOPS in this thing are in the GPU, but good luck getting at them.
Most of those questions are answered in the comment thread on the article. No individual layers released until their PCB designer gets back. The picture shown does not include power or ground planes, so the missing ground is likely hidden. The connectors being used will require some through-hole components. The GPIO headers will be on the final release, but unpopulated.
The biggest omission to my mind is the lack of mounting holes or other fixtures. (I'm not sure where you see "plenty of empty space". Even getting screw holes to fit would require some thought, it seems to me.) The screenshot was also pretty useless for determining the exact mechanical placement and dimensions of the connectors, which is the only important thing for those designing cases. Someone in the comment thread did mark and label the rough outlines of the connectors, though. The connector placement also seems not at all designed for usability, or with any thought to future case design but purely to make the cheapest possible board.
"How big would a model of an i7 be if made at the same scale as the mock-up?"
The working replica appears to be about 56cm on a side, (50,000x what it would be on a 32nm process) an i7 is about 15mm on a side, so 15mm x 50000 = 750m
The original 4004 was about 12 mm^2 on a 10micron process, 2300 transistors. To make it work 3 other chips of about the same size are needed. The linear shrink factor would be 312.5, and the original die was about 3.5 mm, so a 4004 at 32nm would be about 11 microns on a side, (just larger than the original line width!), or 22 microns with the other chips included. The clock speed is not easy to figure, but with such a small circuit should be on the order of 1-10GHz. Figuring 7.4 GHz (10000x faster) and 25,000 times smaller (including all 4 chips) and 70,000 IPS for the original, 1 cm^2 of these should deliver 1.4E14 IPS using about 200,000 4004s.
Actually doing such a shrink would involve a complete redesign, some extra area would be needed to replace external passive components, and the circuitry needed to allow communication among a such a large array of processors could easily take more area than the processors themselves. The actual performance could be over 100 times lower than calculated, but should still be over 1 TIPS/cm^2.
On your point "B": MIT charges about $40,000 per year. Lets say that is 30 weeks of instruction, 16 hours per week. After deducting the 62% of students receiving $22,611 average aid, call it $17,400 receipts/student/yr. That is over $36 per classroom hour per student, (a penny a second) even before the gouging on dorm rooms. (~$900/month for $300 worth of space)
A big lecture class has about 300 students, so that is about $11,000 per classroom hour, 4 hours a week, 15 weeks a semester = $650,000. Lets say there are 30 TAs, each making $25,000/yr for 4 classes per year, or $6,250 for the class, and round the total TA expenses up to $200k. Let's add $50K for the professor(s). (Probably a gross overestimate - they teach more than 2 classes a year for around $100K.) The amphitheater and maintenance are paid from the endowment, the labs are paid for from the endowment and the equipment from the high added fees for lab courses, so that is a profit of over $400,000 for just one class. Even doubling the costs means $150,000 profit from one single class. Even an intimate seminar with just 8 students gives a likely profit of about $150/hr, even after expenses of $50,000/lecturer/yr/(24 credit hours) = ~$140/hr expenses. Classroom expenses shouldn't reduce the expense more than $10-$20 hr - and even that is generous, considering the actual out of pocket is just maintenance, electricity and heat - the land was given, the buildings were built with donations, and are fully depreciated and have no mortgages.
MIT is making money hand over fist. How they are laundering their obscene, exploitative profits and making it look like they are the non-profit they claim to be is a good question. The first thing to look at is administration and padded overhead.
No, it's not patents that are the problem as such, it's bad, obvious, over-broad, incomprehensible patents and ridiculously expensive litigation that are the problems. This means one can never know if one is infringing, nor can one afford to defend oneself.
On the other hand, as an inventor I won't release anything I come up with. Without a patent I have no way to get anyone to pay me rather than just take the idea. I don't have the money to get a patent. $10K x n hundreds of inventions is more than I'll likely make in my life, and even one patent would mean going into debt for years, with less than a 2% chance of breaking even. That patent would take about three years to issue, then I'd need another million at least to be able to enforce it, otherwise there would be no point in getting it - a patent is only a license to sue. If I try to license the rights, or enforce the patent against infringers rather than trying to overcome insurmountable barriers to market entry, the dweeb-hordes on the internet will be calling me a patent troll. Even if none of the above applied, I'd still need vast sums to bring anything to market which even for a great invention would entail getting royally screwed by the money-men. If I worked for a corporation, they'd just use my ideas and give me nothing - or more likely, claim my ideas and sit on them. So, fuck it. Anything I come up with will die with me.
I imagine most inventors who aren't completely naive have come to similar conclusions, and the others have mostly given up after beating their heads against the wall. This is why there is less innovation today in the USA, particularly innovation that actually makes it to market.
Since you say everything should be on a purely capitalist money basis, just out of curiosity: what's the market rate for your mom? What's that? Maybe you aren't as against regulation as you thought.
Your views on economics seem to come from the plutocrats' pet think tanks. Ricardo's "iron law of wages" is that wages must be sufficient for subsistence. If not, either the supply of workers will diminish due to deaths, or the government will have to take up the slack to prevent those deaths and the taxes required will be more that would be needed to simply pay the workers a living wage to begin with. The current minimum wage is set at around the bare subsistence level (not counting medical care or transportation in most cases, and constantly shrinking due to inflation).
Ricardo would agree with you on the idea of a purely "market-based" wage system, but despite his basic insight, his arguments in that direction are a string of non-sequiturs mixed with falsehoods: he starts with the false assumption that increasing population means increasing prices for necessities and then asserts that this proves that wages should not be regulated, as this would interfere with contracts - despite having stated in the same paragraph that workers have no choice but to take whatever they're offered if they are to have any subsistence, thus making the contract under duress and with no bargaining power or legal protection for the worker at all. History since Ricardo, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, shows that employers will either abuse such power or will be at a competitive disadvantage to those who do.
Really wages often aren't set by the nebulous, all-powerful "market" so much as by specific forces that that term tries to sweep under the rug: geography, custom, personal relationships, perceptions and social power (though rent-seeking, regulation (particularly licensure), and the drive to convert worthless shareholder profits into valuable management compensation certainly also play a role). None of the minimum wage increases has hurt the economy - in fact, they increased the size of the market by providing more people capable of buying, not only the bare necessities but also other goods because the minimum wage provides a floor that gives a social/ customary reference point for setting wages for most hourly workers in the bottom half of the distribution.
(Another good take on Ricardo, this time on his theory of comparative advantage, and how its assumptions have been ignored by free-trade zealots is here. Short form: Ricardo says comparative advantage only holds if there are no externalities; nations trade only goods and services, not debt and assets; the factors of production are only domestically and not internationally mobile; long-term growth is caused by short-term efficiency; there are no economies of scale; and here is no cross-border investment. None of these being even approximately true, free trade will often lead to worse economic outcomes both for specific nations and for the world economy than managed trade and even outright protectionism.)
Yeah! If Amazon doesn't step up to the plate against this kind of abuse of authors, authors will know that down the road Amazon probably intends on crushing them just as the publishers did.
The publisher had rejected these works that were later published on Amazon. These rejections happened before the publisher accepted her novel. The short story collections were published elsewhere before the novel was accepted, and went out of print (or at least contract) before the novel was accepted. One of the two collections was republished on Amazon before the novel contract was signed, the other was republished after the contract was signed.
In any event, the publisher can not claim rights over past works not a part of the contract, nor can it interfere with her publishing other works which are not a part of the contract. She is not an employee, and cannot be bound by contract terms in restraint of trade, or impairing her ability to earn a living at her profession selling to other publishers. If the publisher now wants rights to other books, let them negotiate for that - she is under no obligation to agree, though, and they are obligated by the contract they have already signed, no matter whether the author gives them what they want or not in other negotiations.
Not only were the short story collections she published with Amazon already published by other publishers, they had been submitted to the Big 6 publisher who is currently breaching its contract. The Big 6 publisher had specifically said that they did not want to publish the short story collections, and the author has the rejection notices to prove it.
So the publisher basically hasn't got a leg to stand on. Their interpretation of the contract is void, in restraint of trade, tortured to justify their fear and hatred of the possibility of any competition from Amazon, even when no such threat exists in this case. Further, they are trying to effectively exert ownership over works that are not only NOT under contract, but had specifically been rejected by them, and to claim rights to put out of print without further compensation all the author's past works and works up to two years in the future (when they are contractually obligated to publish her novel).
She has an excellent chance of prevailing in court, for far more than the advance - this firm is trying to destroy her career, to make sure she is never published by anyone but Amazon if she publishes anything with Amazon. This is really a case that the NY AG and the Justice Department could slam-dunk on multiple counts, too.
Santa Claus is imaginary, therefore has imaginary mass, but his energy is real (causes parents to do a lot of work) E =gamma mc^2, which can only be true if gamma is imaginary.
gamma= 1/(1- (v/c)^2)^(1/2) = an imaginary number iff v > c, therefore if Santa Claus is imaginary, he must move faster than light.
Well, if velocity is distance/time along a direction, relativity just redefines distance and time and direction rather than saying the velocity has changed. Examples: the advance of the perihelion of Mercury - relativity says that there is a shorter distance around that orbit near the bottom of a big gravity well, so Mercury has less distance to travel, thus the planet's phase advances. Relativity also says that time runs more slowly close to a sun, and the space-time warp results in the observed bending of light. But the phenomenon is essentially indistinguishable from light moving through a region with a gradient of increasing refractive index matching the gradient of gravity, and increasing the refractive index is equivalent to decreasing the speed of light. Light does not move faster than it would in "empty, field-free space" (a favorite phrase of Einstein'd, BTW), but it does move more slowly in a gravitational field if we treat it as a euclidean rather than a warped space, and the answers come out the same either way. The refractive-index view is more easily visualized, and makes a good heuristic for teaching, and doing GR in a flat spacetime is even mathematically valid. (With a mixed-signature Clifford algebra, though.)
The meta-mod idea is broken. It only tells you if the herd agrees with your tastes. The tastes of a careful, free-thinking mod are going to be different from the herd, just as much as those of a spiteful troll mod. Either will be weeded out.
On the rare occasions I get mod points (twice in a week about a month or two ago, not any for years before, nor any after, despite having posts modded up about twice a week and down once a week.) I use points when I get them to point out the best comments that no one has modded up, or rarely, ones that have already been modded up but are spectacular, or ones that were unfairly modded down (I always browse at -1). My mods are about 3 or 4 to 1 up vs. down. I mod down only the most hateful and clueless posts. I can only surmise that metamods disagree with my tastes for well-stated unconventional points of view and this prevents me from getting points to hand out.
There's a better site in Ecuador. Also, gas guns are expensive and finicky.
A track made of conventional, passive coils carrying a sled cradle with either permanent magnets or conventional electromagnets gives a maglev which will be much cheaper. Use this to launch a reusable ramjet 1st stage which needs only about mach 1 or so to get going and you have either a shorter track or lower g-forces. The ramjet has much better Isp than a rocket and can be more robust and simple for reusability than a conventional rocket. This gets you up to about mach 5 at over 100,000 feet with a good angle. Either stage to a conventional rocket for a normal launch or switch to internal oxidizer to get to mach 13 and and rendezvous with a rotovator tether tip, transfer the payload capsule and land the 1st stage as an airplane. Fly the 1st stage most of the way back as a ramjet. Use a wing parachute for controlled low-speed landing, powered by the remaining fuel and oxidizer used in a smaller rocket engine. Landing gear can be light - no need to be able to raise gear, support high loads or high speeds.
I estimate (guess) that this will cut about 25% of the payload, they will lose or wreck 5% of the returning vehicles, it will take about 20% of the new manufacturing cost of a vehicle to refurbish and recertify the vehicle after it lands (8% of customer launch cost), and new vehicle manufacturing cost is 40% of overall customer launch costs (the rest being design costs, range costs, overhead and profits). If the added design, manufacturing and added risk costs of the recovery system are low, it looks like it barely might make economic sense now, but if the payload penalty or loss rates are lower or refurbishing is cheaper, it could make a profit.
"Errrr, the Shuttle proved that reusability *wasn't* fiscally viable."
No, the Shuttle proved that making a spaceship into an airplane makes even less sense than making an airplane into a car. It was just the wrong way to do reusable launch. As rocket pioneer Bob Truaxnoted back in the 80s, the airplane features accounted for nearly 2/3 of the weight (1/68 payload/liftoff for the Shuttle vs.1/25 for Saturn V).
You can certainly make a craft reusable for less than 3x the base weight. But the real driver of costs is not weight, it's complexity, and the airplane-like portions of the shuttle added hundreds of thousands of parts and innumerable interfaces. Together with the common but misguided western aerospace mindset of trying make everything as light as possible, engineered from scratch and tested and documented in fabulous detail, this made the Shuttle the most expensive launch vehicle ever. Despite the expense of so many parts being bespoke milled by teams of elves out of solid unobtainium, the overall system those parts formed was still kludgy, unreliable and dangerous.
To make the most economical launch, reusability is essential, but it can't be done with vehicles that have been pared down to the last gram. Weight, when properly used, leads to robustness and far lower costs per pound in the design - and the fixed overhead of the design is a main driver of overall program costs, especially for low numbers of launches (and that's all launch vehicles types so far). The most significant driver of design, construction and refurbishment costs is the number of parts in the design, followed by tolerances, material types and the manufacturing methods needed to make the parts. The size and weight of those parts is much less important.
So a good reusable design sets a realistic target launch cost based on a realistic number of launches, uses the simplest possible design with the fewest possible parts made from available materials to moderate tolerances using common manufacturing techniques, and designs the maximum payload capacity possible under those constraints. This will be much more lift than the market thinks it needs, but payload engineering could cost a fifth or a tenth as much if the payloads weighed two or three times what they do today, since the cost drivers of complexity and over-engineering operate in payloads even more than launch vehicles.
Truax applied these principles back in the early 60s with the Sea Dragon, which was a fully fleshed-out design with over $1M in design studies and preliminary tests (early 60s dollars, ~7.4 times that in today's money). The costs were calculated carefully and independently verified - in today's money, the Sea Dragon would need $20B for development, including test flights, over a period of six years, and a direct per-launch cost of $90-$180M for up to 1.1M pounds payload to low-earth orbit. That's $165 -$330 direct costs per kilo at max payload. Spreading the development costs over 150 launches would roughly double that to $330 - $660/kg. (For comparison the Falcon 9 launch costs $5300/kg, and the Shuttle several times that, at least $30K/kg.)
How did he get such a low cost? He designed it big. (500 feet long, 75 feet wide / 152m x 24m). Rockets are mostly tanks, tubes and shells - their dry weight goes roughly as the square of their size, while their capacity goes as the cube. Tolerances on big parts are much less critical. Material is available in common sizes - no special milling down to ribbed foil, and some of what was gained in the cube-square advantage can be spent on using common alloys rather than fancy, expensive ones, and the rest (and then some) in making it stronger. (The design was for aluminum tanks and 18% Ni maraging stainless steel for nearly everything else, including the engines. Propellant fraction 89%, vs. 93-95% for conventional desig
Fuel is still only part of the price. On most routes with only 40% of the seats filled, I expect the numbers will come out to be around $0.20 per statute mile breakeven for the airline, which is still a bit more than I'd be willing to pay. With 80% filled, the price falls by half. The capacity factor is the biggest determinant of ticket prices, more even than fuel. (Which is why the enormous A380 only makes sense for a handful of routes... and even when the passenger volume is high enough, on short routes more frequent flights do better - people don't want to layover 20 hours for a 2-hour flight)
What about Queens? Seriously, listening to someone who sounds like Fran Drescher (The Nanny) for six hours a day could scar a child for life. Check out this clip of her attempting French (first 45 seconds). I'm absolutely in favor of discriminating against the more egregious New York and Boston accents.
Also, accents shade into dialect, which shades into totally different languages. Some of the older rural southern Blacks I have met make Uncle Remus sound like BBC received pronunciation - usually 8/10ths incomprehensible, different vocabulary, common vocabulary with different meanings, or pronounced in a way that makes it have nearly nothing in common phonologically with the the word in any other variety of English, tenses totally different, grammar mangled beyond recognition. Some say that Joel Chandler Harris' transcription of negro folk tales dialect was racist and made up. No, he actually soft-pedaled the dialect to make it possible for the average reader to decode. When listening in real life, one can't spend half a minute puzzling out what something like: "Hit was tech en go wid um, too, mon, en w'en dey make up der mines w'at hatter be done, 'twant mo'n menshun'd 'fo, hit wuz done. Well, dey 'lected dat dey hatter hol' er 'sembly fer ter sorter straighten out marters en hear de complaints, en w'en de day come dey wuz on han'." means, particularly when the actual sounds are less distinct than in in the transcribed version and the boundaries between words are often unclear, not to mention that actual daily conversation of most dialect speakers is much less polished than that of a storyteller.
A more accurate transcription of the modern rural deep south black dialect of the older generation would be more like this: "Ih wuh tuhengo wid um, tumon, en wendy make upda mines wuhdahbe duhn, wont moan menshun'd fopy duhn. Welldy lected dat dey haddah hola sembly ferda soda straiten ow madda en hearduh complainse, en wendy day come dey wuddon han."
("It was touch and go with them, too, man, and when they made up their minds what had to be done, it wasn't more than mentioned before it was done. Well, they elected that they had to hold an assembly for to sort of straighten out matters and hear the complaints, and when the day came they were on hand.")
I don't think that general education classes should be taught in dialects foreign to students, whether Gullah, valley girl, surfer dude, slurvian, or whatever. The common dialects of TV, radio, politics (and 99% of native speakers within minor, mutually intelligible variations) should be the standard in classrooms. If the kids need to learn that as a second language, then that's what should happen, but it's rare now for such kids not to be actually non-native speakers - native speakers usually pick up the mainstream dialect and accent from TV.
I don't think Utes are the kind of Indians we're talking about here.
There is a line, I' not sure where exactly it should be drawn, but certainly this is well on the other side:
Ladle Rat Rotten Hut
Wants pawn term dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage honor itch offer lodge, dock, florist. Disk ladle gull orphan worry putty ladle rat cluck wetter ladle rat hut, an fur disk raisin pimple colder Ladle Rat Rotten Hut.
Wan moaning Ladle Rat Rotten Hut's murder colder inset.
"Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, heresy ladle basking winsome burden barter an shirker cockles. Tick disk ladle basking tutor cordage offer groin-murder hoe lifts honor udder site offer florist. Shaker lake! Dun stopper laundry wrote! Dun stopper peck floors! Dun daily-doily inner florist, an yonder nor sorghum-stenches, dun stopper torque wet strainers!"
"Hoe-cake, murder," resplendent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, an tickle ladle basking an stuttered oft.
Honor wrote tutor cordage offer groin-murder, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut mitten anomalous woof.
"Wail, wail, wail!" set disk wicket woof, "Evanescent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut! Wares are putty ladle gull goring wizard ladle basking?"
"Armor goring tumor groin-murder's," reprisal ladle gull. "Grammar's seeking bet. Armor ticking arson burden barter an shirker cockles."[the rest of the story is at the link]
1.8M people who work in the same size units of the same types as the VA, doing the same things. A single or even 10 site program, you would have a point, but really the only big difference between the NHS and VA is the need for some more hardware and a relatively modest amount of customization compared to the vast system available free off the shelf, at least 80% of which will work unchanged and could have been in use within a year or two at a cost at least an order of magnitude less.
Slashdot Mirror
Bull had nothing to do with Iran or nukes. He was developing giant, militarily-useless space-launch artillery for Iraq. He also developed some of the best field artillery bought by countries around the world, as well as some other projects such as an improved SCUD nose cone. He was assassinated in Belgium, likely by Israel.
Yet other manufacturers don't take that attitude. Go look at TI or Analog devices. Full datasheets right there, often running to hundreds of pages reasonably priced development boards, often free samples. Broadcom claims to have features such as DSP and GPU built in to this chip, but I don't know what use they are supposed to be if they are totally undocumented. Supposedly about 98% of the FLOPS in this thing are in the GPU, but good luck getting at them.
Most of those questions are answered in the comment thread on the article. No individual layers released until their PCB designer gets back. The picture shown does not include power or ground planes, so the missing ground is likely hidden. The connectors being used will require some through-hole components. The GPIO headers will be on the final release, but unpopulated.
The biggest omission to my mind is the lack of mounting holes or other fixtures. (I'm not sure where you see "plenty of empty space". Even getting screw holes to fit would require some thought, it seems to me.) The screenshot was also pretty useless for determining the exact mechanical placement and dimensions of the connectors, which is the only important thing for those designing cases. Someone in the comment thread did mark and label the rough outlines of the connectors, though. The connector placement also seems not at all designed for usability, or with any thought to future case design but purely to make the cheapest possible board.
If the 4004 was actually 12 mm square rather than 12 square mm, then the above numbers need to be adjusted by a factor of 12.
"How big would a model of an i7 be if made at the same scale as the mock-up?"
The working replica appears to be about 56cm on a side, (50,000x what it would be on a 32nm process) an i7 is about 15mm on a side, so 15mm x 50000 = 750m
The original 4004 was about 12 mm^2 on a 10micron process, 2300 transistors. To make it work 3 other chips of about the same size are needed. The linear shrink factor would be 312.5, and the original die was about 3.5 mm, so a 4004 at 32nm would be about 11 microns on a side, (just larger than the original line width!), or 22 microns with the other chips included. The clock speed is not easy to figure, but with such a small circuit should be on the order of 1-10GHz. Figuring 7.4 GHz (10000x faster) and 25,000 times smaller (including all 4 chips) and 70,000 IPS for the original, 1 cm^2 of these should deliver 1.4E14 IPS using about 200,000 4004s.
Actually doing such a shrink would involve a complete redesign, some extra area would be needed to replace external passive components, and the circuitry needed to allow communication among a such a large array of processors could easily take more area than the processors themselves. The actual performance could be over 100 times lower than calculated, but should still be over 1 TIPS/cm^2.
I agree.
On your point "B":
MIT charges about $40,000 per year. Lets say that is 30 weeks of instruction, 16 hours per week. After deducting the 62% of students receiving $22,611 average aid, call it $17,400 receipts/student/yr. That is over $36 per classroom hour per student, (a penny a second) even before the gouging on dorm rooms. (~$900/month for $300 worth of space)
A big lecture class has about 300 students, so that is about $11,000 per classroom hour, 4 hours a week, 15 weeks a semester = $650,000. Lets say there are 30 TAs, each making $25,000/yr for 4 classes per year, or $6,250 for the class, and round the total TA expenses up to $200k. Let's add $50K for the professor(s). (Probably a gross overestimate - they teach more than 2 classes a year for around $100K.) The amphitheater and maintenance are paid from the endowment, the labs are paid for from the endowment and the equipment from the high added fees for lab courses, so that is a profit of over $400,000 for just one class. Even doubling the costs means $150,000 profit from one single class. Even an intimate seminar with just 8 students gives a likely profit of about $150/hr, even after expenses of $50,000/lecturer/yr/(24 credit hours) = ~$140/hr expenses. Classroom expenses shouldn't reduce the expense more than $10-$20 hr - and even that is generous, considering the actual out of pocket is just maintenance, electricity and heat - the land was given, the buildings were built with donations, and are fully depreciated and have no mortgages.
MIT is making money hand over fist. How they are laundering their obscene, exploitative profits and making it look like they are the non-profit they claim to be is a good question. The first thing to look at is administration and padded overhead.
No, it's not patents that are the problem as such, it's bad, obvious, over-broad, incomprehensible patents and ridiculously expensive litigation that are the problems. This means one can never know if one is infringing, nor can one afford to defend oneself.
On the other hand, as an inventor I won't release anything I come up with. Without a patent I have no way to get anyone to pay me rather than just take the idea. I don't have the money to get a patent. $10K x n hundreds of inventions is more than I'll likely make in my life, and even one patent would mean going into debt for years, with less than a 2% chance of breaking even. That patent would take about three years to issue, then I'd need another million at least to be able to enforce it, otherwise there would be no point in getting it - a patent is only a license to sue. If I try to license the rights, or enforce the patent against infringers rather than trying to overcome insurmountable barriers to market entry, the dweeb-hordes on the internet will be calling me a patent troll. Even if none of the above applied, I'd still need vast sums to bring anything to market which even for a great invention would entail getting royally screwed by the money-men. If I worked for a corporation, they'd just use my ideas and give me nothing - or more likely, claim my ideas and sit on them. So, fuck it. Anything I come up with will die with me.
I imagine most inventors who aren't completely naive have come to similar conclusions, and the others have mostly given up after beating their heads against the wall. This is why there is less innovation today in the USA, particularly innovation that actually makes it to market.
How many of the cars you mentioned are actually manufactured in America and exported, rather than being made abroad?
Since you say everything should be on a purely capitalist money basis, just out of curiosity: what's the market rate for your mom? What's that? Maybe you aren't as against regulation as you thought.
Your views on economics seem to come from the plutocrats' pet think tanks. Ricardo's "iron law of wages" is that wages must be sufficient for subsistence. If not, either the supply of workers will diminish due to deaths, or the government will have to take up the slack to prevent those deaths and the taxes required will be more that would be needed to simply pay the workers a living wage to begin with. The current minimum wage is set at around the bare subsistence level (not counting medical care or transportation in most cases, and constantly shrinking due to inflation).
Ricardo would agree with you on the idea of a purely "market-based" wage system, but despite his basic insight, his arguments in that direction are a string of non-sequiturs mixed with falsehoods: he starts with the false assumption that increasing population means increasing prices for necessities and then asserts that this proves that wages should not be regulated, as this would interfere with contracts - despite having stated in the same paragraph that workers have no choice but to take whatever they're offered if they are to have any subsistence, thus making the contract under duress and with no bargaining power or legal protection for the worker at all. History since Ricardo, particularly in the 19th and early 20th centuries, shows that employers will either abuse such power or will be at a competitive disadvantage to those who do.
Really wages often aren't set by the nebulous, all-powerful "market" so much as by specific forces that that term tries to sweep under the rug: geography, custom, personal relationships, perceptions and social power (though rent-seeking, regulation (particularly licensure), and the drive to convert worthless shareholder profits into valuable management compensation certainly also play a role). None of the minimum wage increases has hurt the economy - in fact, they increased the size of the market by providing more people capable of buying, not only the bare necessities but also other goods because the minimum wage provides a floor that gives a social/ customary reference point for setting wages for most hourly workers in the bottom half of the distribution.
(Another good take on Ricardo, this time on his theory of comparative advantage, and how its assumptions have been ignored by free-trade zealots is here. Short form: Ricardo says comparative advantage only holds if there are no externalities; nations trade only goods and services, not debt and assets; the factors of production are only domestically and not internationally mobile; long-term growth is caused by short-term efficiency; there are no economies of scale; and here is no cross-border investment. None of these being even approximately true, free trade will often lead to worse economic outcomes both for specific nations and for the world economy than managed trade and even outright protectionism.)
Yeah! If Amazon doesn't step up to the plate against this kind of abuse of authors, authors will know that down the road Amazon probably intends on crushing them just as the publishers did.
The publisher had rejected these works that were later published on Amazon. These rejections happened before the publisher accepted her novel. The short story collections were published elsewhere before the novel was accepted, and went out of print (or at least contract) before the novel was accepted. One of the two collections was republished on Amazon before the novel contract was signed, the other was republished after the contract was signed.
In any event, the publisher can not claim rights over past works not a part of the contract, nor can it interfere with her publishing other works which are not a part of the contract. She is not an employee, and cannot be bound by contract terms in restraint of trade, or impairing her ability to earn a living at her profession selling to other publishers. If the publisher now wants rights to other books, let them negotiate for that - she is under no obligation to agree, though, and they are obligated by the contract they have already signed, no matter whether the author gives them what they want or not in other negotiations.
Not only were the short story collections she published with Amazon already published by other publishers, they had been submitted to the Big 6 publisher who is currently breaching its contract. The Big 6 publisher had specifically said that they did not want to publish the short story collections, and the author has the rejection notices to prove it.
So the publisher basically hasn't got a leg to stand on. Their interpretation of the contract is void, in restraint of trade, tortured to justify their fear and hatred of the possibility of any competition from Amazon, even when no such threat exists in this case. Further, they are trying to effectively exert ownership over works that are not only NOT under contract, but had specifically been rejected by them, and to claim rights to put out of print without further compensation all the author's past works and works up to two years in the future (when they are contractually obligated to publish her novel).
She has an excellent chance of prevailing in court, for far more than the advance - this firm is trying to destroy her career, to make sure she is never published by anyone but Amazon if she publishes anything with Amazon. This is really a case that the NY AG and the Justice Department could slam-dunk on multiple counts, too.
No need for string theory to wrap that package.
Santa Claus is imaginary, therefore has imaginary mass, but his energy is real (causes parents to do a lot of work)
E =gamma mc^2, which can only be true if gamma is imaginary.
gamma= 1/(1- (v/c)^2)^(1/2) = an imaginary number iff v > c,
therefore
if Santa Claus is imaginary, he must move faster than light.
Well, if velocity is distance/time along a direction, relativity just redefines distance and time and direction rather than saying the velocity has changed. Examples: the advance of the perihelion of Mercury - relativity says that there is a shorter distance around that orbit near the bottom of a big gravity well, so Mercury has less distance to travel, thus the planet's phase advances. Relativity also says that time runs more slowly close to a sun, and the space-time warp results in the observed bending of light. But the phenomenon is essentially indistinguishable from light moving through a region with a gradient of increasing refractive index matching the gradient of gravity, and increasing the refractive index is equivalent to decreasing the speed of light. Light does not move faster than it would in "empty, field-free space" (a favorite phrase of Einstein'd, BTW), but it does move more slowly in a gravitational field if we treat it as a euclidean rather than a warped space, and the answers come out the same either way. The refractive-index view is more easily visualized, and makes a good heuristic for teaching, and doing GR in a flat spacetime is even mathematically valid. (With a mixed-signature Clifford algebra, though.)
The meta-mod idea is broken. It only tells you if the herd agrees with your tastes. The tastes of a careful, free-thinking mod are going to be different from the herd, just as much as those of a spiteful troll mod. Either will be weeded out.
On the rare occasions I get mod points (twice in a week about a month or two ago, not any for years before, nor any after, despite having posts modded up about twice a week and down once a week.) I use points when I get them to point out the best comments that no one has modded up, or rarely, ones that have already been modded up but are spectacular, or ones that were unfairly modded down (I always browse at -1). My mods are about 3 or 4 to 1 up vs. down. I mod down only the most hateful and clueless posts. I can only surmise that metamods disagree with my tastes for well-stated unconventional points of view and this prevents me from getting points to hand out.
There's a better site in Ecuador. Also, gas guns are expensive and finicky.
A track made of conventional, passive coils carrying a sled cradle with either permanent magnets or conventional electromagnets gives a maglev which will be much cheaper. Use this to launch a reusable ramjet 1st stage which needs only about mach 1 or so to get going and you have either a shorter track or lower g-forces. The ramjet has much better Isp than a rocket and can be more robust and simple for reusability than a conventional rocket. This gets you up to about mach 5 at over 100,000 feet with a good angle. Either stage to a conventional rocket for a normal launch or switch to internal oxidizer to get to mach 13 and and rendezvous with a rotovator tether tip, transfer the payload capsule and land the 1st stage as an airplane. Fly the 1st stage most of the way back as a ramjet. Use a wing parachute for controlled low-speed landing, powered by the remaining fuel and oxidizer used in a smaller rocket engine. Landing gear can be light - no need to be able to raise gear, support high loads or high speeds.
I estimate (guess) that this will cut about 25% of the payload, they will lose or wreck 5% of the returning vehicles, it will take about 20% of the new manufacturing cost of a vehicle to refurbish and recertify the vehicle after it lands (8% of customer launch cost), and new vehicle manufacturing cost is 40% of overall customer launch costs (the rest being design costs, range costs, overhead and profits). If the added design, manufacturing and added risk costs of the recovery system are low, it looks like it barely might make economic sense now, but if the payload penalty or loss rates are lower or refurbishing is cheaper, it could make a profit.
"Errrr, the Shuttle proved that reusability *wasn't* fiscally viable."
No, the Shuttle proved that making a spaceship into an airplane makes even less sense than making an airplane into a car. It was just the wrong way to do reusable launch. As rocket pioneer Bob Truax noted back in the 80s, the airplane features accounted for nearly 2/3 of the weight (1/68 payload/liftoff for the Shuttle vs.1/25 for Saturn V).
You can certainly make a craft reusable for less than 3x the base weight. But the real driver of costs is not weight, it's complexity, and the airplane-like portions of the shuttle added hundreds of thousands of parts and innumerable interfaces. Together with the common but misguided western aerospace mindset of trying make everything as light as possible, engineered from scratch and tested and documented in fabulous detail, this made the Shuttle the most expensive launch vehicle ever. Despite the expense of so many parts being bespoke milled by teams of elves out of solid unobtainium, the overall system those parts formed was still kludgy, unreliable and dangerous.
To make the most economical launch, reusability is essential, but it can't be done with vehicles that have been pared down to the last gram. Weight, when properly used, leads to robustness and far lower costs per pound in the design - and the fixed overhead of the design is a main driver of overall program costs, especially for low numbers of launches (and that's all launch vehicles types so far). The most significant driver of design, construction and refurbishment costs is the number of parts in the design, followed by tolerances, material types and the manufacturing methods needed to make the parts. The size and weight of those parts is much less important.
So a good reusable design sets a realistic target launch cost based on a realistic number of launches, uses the simplest possible design with the fewest possible parts made from available materials to moderate tolerances using common manufacturing techniques, and designs the maximum payload capacity possible under those constraints. This will be much more lift than the market thinks it needs, but payload engineering could cost a fifth or a tenth as much if the payloads weighed two or three times what they do today, since the cost drivers of complexity and over-engineering operate in payloads even more than launch vehicles.
Truax applied these principles back in the early 60s with the Sea Dragon, which was a fully fleshed-out design with over $1M in design studies and preliminary tests (early 60s dollars, ~7.4 times that in today's money). The costs were calculated carefully and independently verified - in today's money, the Sea Dragon would need $20B for development, including test flights, over a period of six years, and a direct per-launch cost of $90-$180M for up to 1.1M pounds payload to low-earth orbit. That's $165 -$330 direct costs per kilo at max payload. Spreading the development costs over 150 launches would roughly double that to $330 - $660/kg. (For comparison the Falcon 9 launch costs $5300/kg, and the Shuttle several times that, at least $30K/kg.)
How did he get such a low cost? He designed it big. (500 feet long, 75 feet wide / 152m x 24m). Rockets are mostly tanks, tubes and shells - their dry weight goes roughly as the square of their size, while their capacity goes as the cube. Tolerances on big parts are much less critical. Material is available in common sizes - no special milling down to ribbed foil, and some of what was gained in the cube-square advantage can be spent on using common alloys rather than fancy, expensive ones, and the rest (and then some) in making it stronger. (The design was for aluminum tanks and 18% Ni maraging stainless steel for nearly everything else, including the engines. Propellant fraction 89%, vs. 93-95% for conventional desig
The network, however, uses GPS time signals. Everything ultimately uses GPS time signals. Even labs with cesium and maser clocks use GPS time signals.
Fuel is still only part of the price. On most routes with only 40% of the seats filled, I expect the numbers will come out to be around $0.20 per statute mile breakeven for the airline, which is still a bit more than I'd be willing to pay. With 80% filled, the price falls by half. The capacity factor is the biggest determinant of ticket prices, more even than fuel. (Which is why the enormous A380 only makes sense for a handful of routes... and even when the passenger volume is high enough, on short routes more frequent flights do better - people don't want to layover 20 hours for a 2-hour flight)
What about Queens? Seriously, listening to someone who sounds like Fran Drescher (The Nanny) for six hours a day could scar a child for life. Check out this clip of her attempting French (first 45 seconds). I'm absolutely in favor of discriminating against the more egregious New York and Boston accents.
Also, accents shade into dialect, which shades into totally different languages. Some of the older rural southern Blacks I have met make Uncle Remus sound like BBC received pronunciation - usually 8/10ths incomprehensible, different vocabulary, common vocabulary with different meanings, or pronounced in a way that makes it have nearly nothing in common phonologically with the the word in any other variety of English, tenses totally different, grammar mangled beyond recognition. Some say that Joel Chandler Harris' transcription of negro folk tales dialect was racist and made up. No, he actually soft-pedaled the dialect to make it possible for the average reader to decode. When listening in real life, one can't spend half a minute puzzling out what something like:
"Hit was tech en go wid um, too, mon, en w'en dey make up der mines w'at hatter be done, 'twant mo'n menshun'd 'fo, hit wuz done. Well, dey 'lected dat dey hatter hol' er 'sembly fer ter sorter straighten out marters en hear de complaints, en w'en de day come dey wuz on han'." means, particularly when the actual sounds are less distinct than in in the transcribed version and the boundaries between words are often unclear, not to mention that actual daily conversation of most dialect speakers is much less polished than that of a storyteller.
A more accurate transcription of the modern rural deep south black dialect of the older generation would be more like this: "Ih wuh tuhengo wid um, tumon, en wendy make upda mines wuhdahbe duhn, wont moan menshun'd fopy duhn. Welldy lected dat dey haddah hola sembly ferda soda straiten ow madda en hearduh complainse, en wendy day come dey wuddon han."
("It was touch and go with them, too, man, and when they made up their minds what had to be done, it wasn't more than mentioned before it was done. Well, they elected that they had to hold an assembly for to sort of straighten out matters and hear the complaints, and when the day came they were on hand.")
I don't think that general education classes should be taught in dialects foreign to students, whether Gullah, valley girl, surfer dude, slurvian, or whatever. The common dialects of TV, radio, politics (and 99% of native speakers within minor, mutually intelligible variations) should be the standard in classrooms. If the kids need to learn that as a second language, then that's what should happen, but it's rare now for such kids not to be actually non-native speakers - native speakers usually pick up the mainstream dialect and accent from TV.
I don't think Utes are the kind of Indians we're talking about here.
There is a line, I' not sure where exactly it should be drawn, but certainly this is well on the other side:
Ladle Rat Rotten Hut
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Wan moaning Ladle Rat Rotten Hut's murder colder inset.
"Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, heresy ladle basking winsome burden barter an shirker cockles. Tick disk ladle basking tutor cordage offer groin-murder hoe lifts honor udder site offer florist. Shaker lake! Dun stopper laundry wrote! Dun stopper peck floors! Dun daily-doily inner florist, an yonder nor sorghum-stenches, dun stopper torque wet strainers!"
"Hoe-cake, murder," resplendent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut, an tickle ladle basking an stuttered oft.
Honor wrote tutor cordage offer groin-murder, Ladle Rat Rotten Hut mitten anomalous woof.
"Wail, wail, wail!" set disk wicket woof, "Evanescent Ladle Rat Rotten Hut! Wares are putty ladle gull goring wizard ladle basking?"
"Armor goring tumor groin-murder's," reprisal ladle gull. "Grammar's seeking bet. Armor ticking arson burden barter an shirker cockles."[the rest of the story is at the link]
1.8M people who work in the same size units of the same types as the VA, doing the same things. A single or even 10 site program, you would have a point, but really the only big difference between the NHS and VA is the need for some more hardware and a relatively modest amount of customization compared to the vast system available free off the shelf, at least 80% of which will work unchanged and could have been in use within a year or two at a cost at least an order of magnitude less.