What's the problem? We'll just bank the runway a bit to match the curvature. That way, the pilot can land while banking . And if it rains, the water will run off.the runway. This is BRILLIANT i tell you, BRILLIANT!!!!
I'm starting work right now on a patent application for curved-bodied aircraft to match the runway. If I can get to the PTO before Musk, my future is assured.
(BTW -- you can have either three planes using the runway at once or freedom from crosswinds, not both.)
Technically correct. However, ISS perigee is currently around 400km and drag above that altitude is pretty minimal. It was apparently kept pretty low to simplify resupply. Might want to push it up a bit before mothballing it. It has onboard maneuvering capability although it's not clear how high it can easily be pushed. It's also not clear that there is any coherent plan or capability for a controlled de-orbit.
"Are you proposing to make the aliens pay to maintain the ISS, too?"
That's a Trump issue. He'll handle the negotiations. (Based on what we've seen of Trump's negotiating skills so far, you might want to start preparing your first born son for a life of alien servitude).
We could treat the expensive and largely pointless ISS the way we planned SkyLab. Mothball it, and reactivate it every now and then for a few weeks or months to run experiments that are important enough to justify the expense. Might be useful in that mode and might not even be terribly expensive.
If you can find a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's first novel "Player Piano" you might want to read it. I recall it only vaguely having read it about 60 years ago. It deals with the social impacts of automation. It's quite dark. And sadly, I don't think it'd be all that different if it were written today.
I think everything you say is true. And you're right. It's not equitable.
But that's probably not the issue here. I assume the issue here is the "usual" one of a large corporation manipulating its books so that many of its profits on income generated in a higher tax jurisdiction (e.g. the US) magically gets booked/paid in a country where the taxes are lower. The poster child being Apple which disappeared billions in profits through a "Head Office" in Ireland that existed (exists?) only on paper. No physical office. No employees. Under Irish law, only about 50,000 Euros were taxable. In Apple's case, US taxes will be owed if the loot is ever returned to the US, but I doubt that will happen unless the wretched hive of scum and infamy currently installed in Washington allows the money to be repatriated tax free or at very low rates.
"I don't think there's many blacks and other poor people in those places"
Ah yes, but those that are there have become rich beyond their wildest dreams because money just naturally flows to them when all corporate taxes are eliminated.
"But if you lower the tax rate for large corps to zero, all that money they've got stashed overseas will flow back into the country where it can benefit blacks and other poor people who need money."
You can never be too rich or too thin or have too much data bandwidth?
There's no doubt that much of rural North America needs a lot more bandwidth than they have in order to function well in an increasingly digital economy. But there may not be a real need for huge capacity data pipes except between backbone components. Especially if the IOT debacle works out as badly as it seems likely. Not only do I probably not need an internet enabled toothbrush, even if I did, it probably wouldn't have all that much to say.
Our underground cable TV line snapped many years ago. I think the problem was that the ground here gets saturated by Autumn rains, then freezes to a significant depth in Winter which causes it to heave upwards due to expansion. Then, in Spring the areas exposed to the sun thaw first and sink. Lots of stress -- both lengthways and sideways on that poor chunk of coax. There actually was a short length of conduit in the cable run -- under the neighbor's driveway. But by the time they went to run a new cable, the conduit was full of dirt and they couldn't just ream it out because the phone company had run THEIR service line through it when the neighborhood was initially wired for services. Our neighbor's cable died a similar death a couple of years later.
I think maybe this underground services stuff isn't as straightforward as it sounds.
The feds dictate standards for Interstates for sure. And I assume they have some control over standards for US highway construction. State and local roads? Maybe if they provide any of the funding? But mostly not?
I was thinking about California wrt to fault lines. In much of the state there are faults every few hundred meters and no one knows for sure which ones are active.
Ironically the town I live in in Vermont just dealt with water and sewer lines on our street by spending something over a million dollars to replace the seriously deteriorated ones they put in 40 years ago. That's for less than a mile of road. Hopefully, the replacements will have a longer life. The new roadbed is about six feet deep. gravel, then dirt fill, then 4 inches of R-11 insulation, then more dirt, then more gravel, and finally, asphalt. Water and sewer are a bit deeper. The road made it through the Winter without frost heaves.
But it was a warm Winter.
And no, they did not run conduit for the various services -- cable, phone, power. Although they certainly could have.
Anyone around here here have any practical experience with long runs of conduit in rural areas? I'm all in favor of it if it works. But how do you keep the conduit from filling up with water... at least in places where it rains now and then? And what happens when that water freezes and expands? And is there a problem with critters homesteading in the pipe? And sediment? And what happens where it crosses active slip-strike fault lines? In other words -- What could possibly go wrong?
Also, shouldn't this be a state and local thing, not a federal government thing? I have no problem with the feds doing the R&D and laying out best practices. But if the Feds pay for this, they'll probably have the entire country including every swamp in Florida and dry lake in the Mojave conduited with mil-spec pipes and full time inspectors and mandatory 20 year replacement cycles. While it's probably a better investment than 22 goddamn aircraft carriers, Or the planned massive rollout of overpriced and underperforming F-35 aircraft, I'm not sure it should be that high on our list of national priorities.
"One of the things he's taught me is that when you sign an agreement that says you sign away your rights, that doesn't necessarily mean you actually have signed away your rights."
I think you're likely correct. **BUT** There is no way to know if the John Deere contract is enforceable and to what extent it is enforceable other than to ask a judge or to wait until someone else does so. And no matter what the court decides, the loser will appeal. And the appellate court decision will be appealed of course.Many years (And following a significant transfer of assets from noble citizen farmers and John Deere corporate scum to legal practicioners) the matter will be decided. If John Deere loses, they will most likely come up with a new and somewhat less obnoxious contract that still says you can't modify their software.
I am not a lawyer. Just my view from a healthy distance.
Welcome to Dystopia folks. Tour buses leave on the hour. We are not liable if the denizens here harm you, and you are liable for any damages you inflict on them. Just read and sign this 254 page contract. If you are having trouble reading the 3 point type, you can purchase reading glasses at the ticket counter.
I don't know about you, but if I had "rooted" my tractor, I think the first thing that would get disabled is any way to connect the thing to the Internet (which is, BTW, not all that easy to connect to wirelessly in many rural areas).
Unless GPS satellites will helpfully relay John Deere kill signals, it's a little hard to see how the kill switch is going to work.
Naw. Libertarians believe that companies that oppress users will fail in the marketplace. (Let me know when John Deere, Microsoft, and Apple oppress their way out of the marketplace). I kinda like libertarians. They are often nice people who mean well. And they are frequently quite good on civil liberty issues. But they are remarkably slow learners.
As one of the few Americans who actually knew there was a Canadian election in 2015, it seemed to me that Canadians were mostly tired of Stephen Harper rather than enthused about Justin Trudeau. And keep in mind that if polls have any validity most Americans loathed (and, still loath) both major party candidates and would have welcomed a clone of either of those guys instead of the two godawful options we were presented with.
You're in luck. If you actually open the link, there seem to only be 97 of them. Maybe a few more routine actions will get the list down to something more tractable. Maybe 3 or so.
Apparently neither the judge nor the CBC has ever heard of Larry Walters balloon assisted lawnchair flight in 1982. Nor of his several imitators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Walters was fined $4000(US) -- reduced to $1500 on appeal -- for operating an aircraft within an airport traffic area "without establishing and maintaining two-way communications with the control tower." According to Wikipedia "A charge of operating a "civil aircraft for which there is not currently in effect an airworthiness certificate" was dropped, as it was not applicable to his class of aircraft."
Well yeah, Windows 95 -- if you applied all two dozen service packs -- did pretty much just work. But things have changed quite a lot since then. And not for the better. You've probably been to busy to notice.
Slashdot Mirror
What's the problem? We'll just bank the runway a bit to match the curvature. That way, the pilot can land while banking . And if it rains, the water will run off.the runway. This is BRILLIANT i tell you, BRILLIANT!!!!
I'm starting work right now on a patent application for curved-bodied aircraft to match the runway. If I can get to the PTO before Musk, my future is assured.
(BTW -- you can have either three planes using the runway at once or freedom from crosswinds, not both.)
"The ISS will de-orbit without regular boosts."
Technically correct. However, ISS perigee is currently around 400km and drag above that altitude is pretty minimal. It was apparently kept pretty low to simplify resupply. Might want to push it up a bit before mothballing it. It has onboard maneuvering capability although it's not clear how high it can easily be pushed. It's also not clear that there is any coherent plan or capability for a controlled de-orbit.
"And what's the definition of "fully fund"? Trillions? More???"
Naw. A trillion should handle it ... for now anyway.
"Are you proposing to make the aliens pay to maintain the ISS, too?"
That's a Trump issue. He'll handle the negotiations. (Based on what we've seen of Trump's negotiating skills so far, you might want to start preparing your first born son for a life of alien servitude).
We could treat the expensive and largely pointless ISS the way we planned SkyLab. Mothball it, and reactivate it every now and then for a few weeks or months to run experiments that are important enough to justify the expense. Might be useful in that mode and might not even be terribly expensive.
If you can find a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's first novel "Player Piano" you might want to read it. I recall it only vaguely having read it about 60 years ago. It deals with the social impacts of automation. It's quite dark. And sadly, I don't think it'd be all that different if it were written today.
Wunnerful. Simply Wunnerful
We can look forward to Greek levels of unemployment (20% plus overall, 40% plus for kids).
With all the routine, public facing, jobs jobs taken over by ... wait for it ... Clippy.
I can't tell you how much I look forward to this glorious future.
I think everything you say is true. And you're right. It's not equitable.
But that's probably not the issue here. I assume the issue here is the "usual" one of a large corporation manipulating its books so that many of its profits on income generated in a higher tax jurisdiction (e.g. the US) magically gets booked/paid in a country where the taxes are lower. The poster child being Apple which disappeared billions in profits through a "Head Office" in Ireland that existed (exists?) only on paper. No physical office. No employees. Under Irish law, only about 50,000 Euros were taxable. In Apple's case, US taxes will be owed if the loot is ever returned to the US, but I doubt that will happen unless the wretched hive of scum and infamy currently installed in Washington allows the money to be repatriated tax free or at very low rates.
"I don't think there's many blacks and other poor people in those places"
Ah yes, but those that are there have become rich beyond their wildest dreams because money just naturally flows to them when all corporate taxes are eliminated.
It's a law of nature.
"But if you lower the tax rate for large corps to zero, all that money they've got stashed overseas will flow back into the country where it can benefit blacks and other poor people who need money."
Ah yes -- Tinkle-Down economics.
Has never worked in the past.
But this time it's different.
PR persons. A modern society can't function without lots and lots of professional liars.
(We must close the looming PR gap now or risk being left behind)
You can never be too rich or too thin or have too much data bandwidth?
There's no doubt that much of rural North America needs a lot more bandwidth than they have in order to function well in an increasingly digital economy. But there may not be a real need for huge capacity data pipes except between backbone components. Especially if the IOT debacle works out as badly as it seems likely. Not only do I probably not need an internet enabled toothbrush, even if I did, it probably wouldn't have all that much to say.
Our underground cable TV line snapped many years ago. I think the problem was that the ground here gets saturated by Autumn rains, then freezes to a significant depth in Winter which causes it to heave upwards due to expansion. Then, in Spring the areas exposed to the sun thaw first and sink. Lots of stress -- both lengthways and sideways on that poor chunk of coax. There actually was a short length of conduit in the cable run -- under the neighbor's driveway. But by the time they went to run a new cable, the conduit was full of dirt and they couldn't just ream it out because the phone company had run THEIR service line through it when the neighborhood was initially wired for services. Our neighbor's cable died a similar death a couple of years later.
I think maybe this underground services stuff isn't as straightforward as it sounds.
"But that will also see some execs off to prison for antitrust violations"
You want to jail the job creators? You're flirtin with a Guantanamo Bay vacation there laddie.
The feds dictate standards for Interstates for sure. And I assume they have some control over standards for US highway construction. State and local roads? Maybe if they provide any of the funding? But mostly not?
I was thinking about California wrt to fault lines. In much of the state there are faults every few hundred meters and no one knows for sure which ones are active.
Ironically the town I live in in Vermont just dealt with water and sewer lines on our street by spending something over a million dollars to replace the seriously deteriorated ones they put in 40 years ago. That's for less than a mile of road. Hopefully, the replacements will have a longer life. The new roadbed is about six feet deep. gravel, then dirt fill, then 4 inches of R-11 insulation, then more dirt, then more gravel, and finally, asphalt. Water and sewer are a bit deeper. The road made it through the Winter without frost heaves.
But it was a warm Winter.
And no, they did not run conduit for the various services -- cable, phone, power. Although they certainly could have.
Anyone around here here have any practical experience with long runs of conduit in rural areas? I'm all in favor of it if it works. But how do you keep the conduit from filling up with water ... at least in places where it rains now and then? And what happens when that water freezes and expands? And is there a problem with critters homesteading in the pipe? And sediment? And what happens where it crosses active slip-strike fault lines? In other words -- What could possibly go wrong?
Also, shouldn't this be a state and local thing, not a federal government thing? I have no problem with the feds doing the R&D and laying out best practices. But if the Feds pay for this, they'll probably have the entire country including every swamp in Florida and dry lake in the Mojave conduited with mil-spec pipes and full time inspectors and mandatory 20 year replacement cycles. While it's probably a better investment than 22 goddamn aircraft carriers, Or the planned massive rollout of overpriced and underperforming F-35 aircraft, I'm not sure it should be that high on our list of national priorities.
"One of the things he's taught me is that when you sign an agreement that says you sign away your rights, that doesn't necessarily mean you actually have signed away your rights."
I think you're likely correct. **BUT** There is no way to know if the John Deere contract is enforceable and to what extent it is enforceable other than to ask a judge or to wait until someone else does so. And no matter what the court decides, the loser will appeal. And the appellate court decision will be appealed of course.Many years (And following a significant transfer of assets from noble citizen farmers and John Deere corporate scum to legal practicioners) the matter will be decided. If John Deere loses, they will most likely come up with a new and somewhat less obnoxious contract that still says you can't modify their software.
I am not a lawyer. Just my view from a healthy distance.
Welcome to Dystopia folks. Tour buses leave on the hour. We are not liable if the denizens here harm you, and you are liable for any damages you inflict on them. Just read and sign this 254 page contract. If you are having trouble reading the 3 point type, you can purchase reading glasses at the ticket counter.
I don't know about you, but if I had "rooted" my tractor, I think the first thing that would get disabled is any way to connect the thing to the Internet (which is, BTW, not all that easy to connect to wirelessly in many rural areas).
Unless GPS satellites will helpfully relay John Deere kill signals, it's a little hard to see how the kill switch is going to work.
Naw. Libertarians believe that companies that oppress users will fail in the marketplace. (Let me know when John Deere, Microsoft, and Apple oppress their way out of the marketplace). I kinda like libertarians. They are often nice people who mean well. And they are frequently quite good on civil liberty issues. But they are remarkably slow learners.
As one of the few Americans who actually knew there was a Canadian election in 2015, it seemed to me that Canadians were mostly tired of Stephen Harper rather than enthused about Justin Trudeau. And keep in mind that if polls have any validity most Americans loathed (and, still loath) both major party candidates and would have welcomed a clone of either of those guys instead of the two godawful options we were presented with.
You're in luck. If you actually open the link, there seem to only be 97 of them. Maybe a few more routine actions will get the list down to something more tractable. Maybe 3 or so.
Apparently neither the judge nor the CBC has ever heard of Larry Walters balloon assisted lawnchair flight in 1982. Nor of his several imitators. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Walters was fined $4000(US) -- reduced to $1500 on appeal -- for operating an aircraft within an airport traffic area "without establishing and maintaining two-way communications with the control tower." According to Wikipedia "A charge of operating a "civil aircraft for which there is not currently in effect an airworthiness certificate" was dropped, as it was not applicable to his class of aircraft."
"This is why we use Windows. Shit just works."
Well yeah, Windows 95 -- if you applied all two dozen service packs -- did pretty much just work. But things have changed quite a lot since then. And not for the better. You've probably been to busy to notice.