When you buy a share the only person who benefits is the person who sold it to you. It helps the company not at all
Is it not also possible that the person buying the share benefits as well? If a trade wasn't mutually beneficial (at least from the respective points of view of the people involved) then it wouldn't happen.
Think of the alternative: a person invests in a company, but can't ever get their capital back unless the company buys them out. So either capital investment becomes slower and riskier than it was in medieval times, or else companies have to keep huge capital in reserve for whenever someone wants to get out (i.e., the company becomes a bank that just so happens to be engaged in some other business). It may seem obvious in retrospect, but corporations and stock markets were major innovations that have contributed to centuries of economic growth.
The length of the cable is significantly shorter (by thousands of km), therefore the latency is pretty much guaranteed to be shorter. I don't think latency is as big a motivation as some would believe, but reduced latency is always a plus.
Oh, you mean you were looking for the article that describes the extremely confidential technical design review that NASA has done on the Dragon capsule, to see if it is space-worthy and (potentially) human-usable. Yes, I am quite certain we will see that posted next week.
Well, the crew isn't being strapped to the outside of the capsule, now are they? The article is about how a crew might feel about the accommodations inside the Dragon capsule, so why the hell wouldn't they have a bunch of interior shots?
If you want images of the exterior of the craft, use your search engine of choice: the internet shall provide.
If you are worried about the social and environmental impact of your smartphone, you aren't going to be satisfied by any of the options on the market. A consolation prize, if you will, would be to purchase a used phone. You can get even the latest phones on the used market, and in so doing you prevent it from ending up in a landfill or "recycler" in the third world. Plus, the social and environmental impact of that phone has already been made. I won't say your conscience gets off scot free, but you could argue (to yourself and others) that those impacts are borne more by the original purchaser than you, the second purchaser. You can't fix the harm that originally went into making the phone, but you can prevent additional harm by not purchasing a new one.
This calculus works for lots of things besides smartphones. The one I particularly like is to consider buying a used honda civic that gets 35+ mpg as a replacement for a gas guzzler, rather than purchasing a new prius.
Farmers don't work from home. They work outside the home, frequently a rather large distance away
That may be true for industrial farms in developed nations (thinking principally of the American midwest, where farms and ranches measured in miles aren't uncommon), but for the majority of farmers in this world, past and present, they work (or worked) a couple of acres at most (enough to feed their family), and so their home is usually only a few minutes walk away.
Not all prosthetic hands are controlled via EMGs. Actually, the majority are what are called "body powered." Through the socket and harness, you tension a cable using the shoulder and back muscles, and that is used to control the hand. Typically, the cable directly actuates the prosthesis, like the cable on a bike directly actuating the brakes. In other cases, the cable is a linear potentiometer, and the prosthesis uses that input to actuate motors. It may sound like a kludge, but wearers can achieve impressive function. It's not a replacement for a good hand, but compared to a non-functioning hand, could provide her with a great benefit.
You don't have an appreciation for the current state of the art in upper limb prostheses. They are getting better all the time, but they are a far cry from restoring the dexterity, speed, range of motion, and fine control of a normal hand. Present prostheses, and forecasting out into the next decade, are functional replacements, but they are far from superior.
When evaluating whether a company is a good investment as a dividend stock, one will often look at the dividend compared to the share price, also called the yield. Lots of blue-chip companies have yields of 1 - 5%. One could think of it in similar terms to the yield on a bond. This is one reason why people are putting huge amounts of money into the stock market - despite the volatility of share prices (even though, on the whole, they've been trending upwards for a year or two), certain classes of stock are yielding much better than other places you could put your money (e.g., savings accounts, treasury bonds, etc.)
One philosophy of stock buybacks is for a company to execute it when it feels that it is undervalued (i.e., still buying low, compared to a future high). It is not unreasonable to think that Apple still has room to grow.
While Apple throws around lawsuits like toilet paper, I think that, like Foxconn, they'll leave it alone. For one, there's the Streisand Effect to consider - filing suit will allow the whole case to live on, and with a higher profile. Second, it won't do any good - even if Apple can demonstrate damages, which I doubt, it's not like Daisey could cough up enough money to matter. Third, it presents an avenue for real investigation in a court of law, where every undercover investigation and audit could be admissible, and Foxconn workers subpoenaed and testify.
No one owns the Moon, or has any sovereign rights to it. The things that are on the Moon are still the property of where they originated. So while from a legal standpoint the Russians can go traipsing around in Neil Armstrong's footprints, literally, the moment they set foot on the Apollo 11 descent stage, they're busted. Of course, it is like the old Zen koan: if a Russian steps on a lander and no one is there to see him, does he get busted?
There have been some rumblings of a new lunar treaty that would make the landing sites off limits to new visitors as a matter of historical preservation. This would apply not only to nations, but private enterprises within those nations (I'm looking at you Google!)
It sure can become much more efficient than the idiotic cables that build the Internet today
Compared to reconstructing the our communications network using ephemeral particles that can barely be detected, that require billion-dollar particle accelerators to create, and are easily drowned out by the deluge of neutrinos ejected by the Sun, yes, cables are stupid, as in stupidly easy.
The launch of a rocket isn't a secret, and the resulting orbit isn't, either. Even if the satellite makes an orbital change afterwards (unlikely, given the price and how expensive orbital maneuvers are), it's probably large enough to be trackable on radar. Even if it isn't clear what it is in the database (a spy satellite? a rocket fairing? ET?), those who care will know that it's there and can plan around it.
He had one "data center", with no redundancy. A bit of a contradiction, yeah?
No, it is not. If you care about risk mitigation and disaster recovery for mission-critical systems, one data center is not redundant, no matter how many spare parts and idled servers it has. One flood, equipment failure, or act of sabotage could bring everything to a screeching halt. If you care about keeping these systems up and running all the time (and, no matter your politics, keeping the email of the white house running is pretty damned important), you need alternate sites.
If you reread my post, you'll see I was talking about rooftop installations. But rooftops alone probably won't be enough: the land area of a typical city isn't big enough to support its energy needs through rooftop photovoltaic, and bringing in the gigawatts necessary from millions of farmsteads hundreds of miles away probably isn't effective with current technology. We'll probably need to carpet large swaths of land, in addition to other generating sources, too. In energy technology, there is no silver-bullet.
And considering my UID is some 250,000 lower than yours, I am insulted by the notion that I'm young and ignorant, you insensitive clod!
Meh, the world isn't lacking in area that could be covered with solar panels. Cost for the modules is running about half the cost of the whole system, with installation about 1/3, and the "balance of system" for a grid-tie the remaining sixth. I think price per watt, of an installed system, is the metric people care about. If it requires twice the rooftop, but the modules cost half as much, and the installation costs are only 50% greater (power electronics are a wash), then you likely come out ahead.
The energy stored in a flywheel is I * omega ^ 2. With the materials we have available now and the size you want to allocate to such a thing, manufacturers have found it works best to have a flywheel with a modest moment of inertia and crank the rotational rate way up high (100,000 rpm for starters). To keep the flywheel from spontaneously shattering, high speed flywheels are mostly made from carbon fiber. And with the flywheel spinning so fast, the only way to keep them from losing energy to friction is to have them spin in a vacuum on magnetic bearings. Then you add in a high efficiency motor/generator, with some serious power electronics to commute the phases at ~kW power levels. These are all proven technologies (see Beacon Power), but compared to a bank of lead acid batteries, it isn't an affordable solution for a home.
This company isn't a solar panel manufacturer, per se, but rather a company that wants to manufacture semiconductor wafers that are thinner than you can get right now, with less waste. So, they are like those enterprising fellows that sold the shovels and pickaxes to gold prospectors back in the day. They didn't care who struck it rich so long as they could sell the equipment and supplies to all comers. They aren't Xerox or a publishing company; these guys want to sell reams of paper.
This is great stuff – an innovation that can benefit the whole industry. There are other companies that are working along similar lines, though with different technology. 1366 Technologies is one that comes to mind.
Modern physics is unable to describe how electrons really work/interact with other subatomic particles in a way that makes sense.
What do you mean by "makes sense?" We can describe the interaction of electrons with other subatomic particles to more-or-less arbitrary precision (better than we can measure in experiments, anyway). There are some subatomic interactions that can be predicted, using QED/QCD, out to 10+ decimal places, and subsequently confirmed by experiment. Clearly the modern physics description made pretty good sense to those who developed the theory, made the prediction, then designed and executed the experiments. What is more, it can be described qualitatively to anyone curious over the course of a few lectures. Whether it "makes sense" to the general population in a way that, say, our experience with falling rocks allows us to make (some) sense of gravity is, I would argue, irrelevant.
Who said that the structure of the universe (or, rather, our descriptions thereof) should "make sense" and jive with our experience and intuition? We ended up stuck with geocentricism for thousands of years because of that reasoning.
Stacking any two clocks on top of each other would cause them to drift due to relativistic effects. The only reason atomic clocks are special in this regard is that you can actually measure the effect over the course of something less than a few million years.
Slashdot Mirror
Is it not also possible that the person buying the share benefits as well? If a trade wasn't mutually beneficial (at least from the respective points of view of the people involved) then it wouldn't happen.
Think of the alternative: a person invests in a company, but can't ever get their capital back unless the company buys them out. So either capital investment becomes slower and riskier than it was in medieval times, or else companies have to keep huge capital in reserve for whenever someone wants to get out (i.e., the company becomes a bank that just so happens to be engaged in some other business). It may seem obvious in retrospect, but corporations and stock markets were major innovations that have contributed to centuries of economic growth.
The length of the cable is significantly shorter (by thousands of km), therefore the latency is pretty much guaranteed to be shorter. I don't think latency is as big a motivation as some would believe, but reduced latency is always a plus.
Oh, you mean you were looking for the article that describes the extremely confidential technical design review that NASA has done on the Dragon capsule, to see if it is space-worthy and (potentially) human-usable. Yes, I am quite certain we will see that posted next week.
Well, the crew isn't being strapped to the outside of the capsule, now are they? The article is about how a crew might feel about the accommodations inside the Dragon capsule, so why the hell wouldn't they have a bunch of interior shots?
If you want images of the exterior of the craft, use your search engine of choice: the internet shall provide.
If you are worried about the social and environmental impact of your smartphone, you aren't going to be satisfied by any of the options on the market. A consolation prize, if you will, would be to purchase a used phone. You can get even the latest phones on the used market, and in so doing you prevent it from ending up in a landfill or "recycler" in the third world. Plus, the social and environmental impact of that phone has already been made. I won't say your conscience gets off scot free, but you could argue (to yourself and others) that those impacts are borne more by the original purchaser than you, the second purchaser. You can't fix the harm that originally went into making the phone, but you can prevent additional harm by not purchasing a new one.
This calculus works for lots of things besides smartphones. The one I particularly like is to consider buying a used honda civic that gets 35+ mpg as a replacement for a gas guzzler, rather than purchasing a new prius.
That may be true for industrial farms in developed nations (thinking principally of the American midwest, where farms and ranches measured in miles aren't uncommon), but for the majority of farmers in this world, past and present, they work (or worked) a couple of acres at most (enough to feed their family), and so their home is usually only a few minutes walk away.
Not all prosthetic hands are controlled via EMGs. Actually, the majority are what are called "body powered." Through the socket and harness, you tension a cable using the shoulder and back muscles, and that is used to control the hand. Typically, the cable directly actuates the prosthesis, like the cable on a bike directly actuating the brakes. In other cases, the cable is a linear potentiometer, and the prosthesis uses that input to actuate motors. It may sound like a kludge, but wearers can achieve impressive function. It's not a replacement for a good hand, but compared to a non-functioning hand, could provide her with a great benefit.
You don't have an appreciation for the current state of the art in upper limb prostheses. They are getting better all the time, but they are a far cry from restoring the dexterity, speed, range of motion, and fine control of a normal hand. Present prostheses, and forecasting out into the next decade, are functional replacements, but they are far from superior.
When evaluating whether a company is a good investment as a dividend stock, one will often look at the dividend compared to the share price, also called the yield. Lots of blue-chip companies have yields of 1 - 5%. One could think of it in similar terms to the yield on a bond. This is one reason why people are putting huge amounts of money into the stock market - despite the volatility of share prices (even though, on the whole, they've been trending upwards for a year or two), certain classes of stock are yielding much better than other places you could put your money (e.g., savings accounts, treasury bonds, etc.)
One philosophy of stock buybacks is for a company to execute it when it feels that it is undervalued (i.e., still buying low, compared to a future high). It is not unreasonable to think that Apple still has room to grow.
While Apple throws around lawsuits like toilet paper, I think that, like Foxconn, they'll leave it alone. For one, there's the Streisand Effect to consider - filing suit will allow the whole case to live on, and with a higher profile. Second, it won't do any good - even if Apple can demonstrate damages, which I doubt, it's not like Daisey could cough up enough money to matter. Third, it presents an avenue for real investigation in a court of law, where every undercover investigation and audit could be admissible, and Foxconn workers subpoenaed and testify.
Before the comprehension-side of the my brain caught up, for a moment I thought we were talking about Google going out for a hunt on the savanna.
No one owns the Moon, or has any sovereign rights to it. The things that are on the Moon are still the property of where they originated. So while from a legal standpoint the Russians can go traipsing around in Neil Armstrong's footprints, literally, the moment they set foot on the Apollo 11 descent stage, they're busted. Of course, it is like the old Zen koan: if a Russian steps on a lander and no one is there to see him, does he get busted?
There have been some rumblings of a new lunar treaty that would make the landing sites off limits to new visitors as a matter of historical preservation. This would apply not only to nations, but private enterprises within those nations (I'm looking at you Google!)
Trace it back far enough and everyone's forebear was some big gasbag star
What a wasted life!
Compared to reconstructing the our communications network using ephemeral particles that can barely be detected, that require billion-dollar particle accelerators to create, and are easily drowned out by the deluge of neutrinos ejected by the Sun, yes, cables are stupid, as in stupidly easy.
The launch of a rocket isn't a secret, and the resulting orbit isn't, either. Even if the satellite makes an orbital change afterwards (unlikely, given the price and how expensive orbital maneuvers are), it's probably large enough to be trackable on radar. Even if it isn't clear what it is in the database (a spy satellite? a rocket fairing? ET?), those who care will know that it's there and can plan around it.
No, it is not. If you care about risk mitigation and disaster recovery for mission-critical systems, one data center is not redundant, no matter how many spare parts and idled servers it has. One flood, equipment failure, or act of sabotage could bring everything to a screeching halt. If you care about keeping these systems up and running all the time (and, no matter your politics, keeping the email of the white house running is pretty damned important), you need alternate sites.
If you reread my post, you'll see I was talking about rooftop installations. But rooftops alone probably won't be enough: the land area of a typical city isn't big enough to support its energy needs through rooftop photovoltaic, and bringing in the gigawatts necessary from millions of farmsteads hundreds of miles away probably isn't effective with current technology. We'll probably need to carpet large swaths of land, in addition to other generating sources, too. In energy technology, there is no silver-bullet.
And considering my UID is some 250,000 lower than yours, I am insulted by the notion that I'm young and ignorant, you insensitive clod!
Meh, the world isn't lacking in area that could be covered with solar panels. Cost for the modules is running about half the cost of the whole system, with installation about 1/3, and the "balance of system" for a grid-tie the remaining sixth. I think price per watt, of an installed system, is the metric people care about. If it requires twice the rooftop, but the modules cost half as much, and the installation costs are only 50% greater (power electronics are a wash), then you likely come out ahead.
The energy stored in a flywheel is I * omega ^ 2. With the materials we have available now and the size you want to allocate to such a thing, manufacturers have found it works best to have a flywheel with a modest moment of inertia and crank the rotational rate way up high (100,000 rpm for starters). To keep the flywheel from spontaneously shattering, high speed flywheels are mostly made from carbon fiber. And with the flywheel spinning so fast, the only way to keep them from losing energy to friction is to have them spin in a vacuum on magnetic bearings. Then you add in a high efficiency motor/generator, with some serious power electronics to commute the phases at ~kW power levels. These are all proven technologies (see Beacon Power), but compared to a bank of lead acid batteries, it isn't an affordable solution for a home.
This company isn't a solar panel manufacturer, per se, but rather a company that wants to manufacture semiconductor wafers that are thinner than you can get right now, with less waste. So, they are like those enterprising fellows that sold the shovels and pickaxes to gold prospectors back in the day. They didn't care who struck it rich so long as they could sell the equipment and supplies to all comers. They aren't Xerox or a publishing company; these guys want to sell reams of paper.
This is great stuff – an innovation that can benefit the whole industry. There are other companies that are working along similar lines, though with different technology. 1366 Technologies is one that comes to mind.
And here I thought ion cannons were only useful for disabling Star Destroyers. Now we can use them to disable the evil Oil Empire!
What do you mean by "makes sense?" We can describe the interaction of electrons with other subatomic particles to more-or-less arbitrary precision (better than we can measure in experiments, anyway). There are some subatomic interactions that can be predicted, using QED/QCD, out to 10+ decimal places, and subsequently confirmed by experiment. Clearly the modern physics description made pretty good sense to those who developed the theory, made the prediction, then designed and executed the experiments. What is more, it can be described qualitatively to anyone curious over the course of a few lectures. Whether it "makes sense" to the general population in a way that, say, our experience with falling rocks allows us to make (some) sense of gravity is, I would argue, irrelevant.
Who said that the structure of the universe (or, rather, our descriptions thereof) should "make sense" and jive with our experience and intuition? We ended up stuck with geocentricism for thousands of years because of that reasoning.
Stacking any two clocks on top of each other would cause them to drift due to relativistic effects. The only reason atomic clocks are special in this regard is that you can actually measure the effect over the course of something less than a few million years.