There is no question it is an amazing technology. As an engineer I can only say, wow!.
But as a taxpayer...
And each bullet costs just two times the GDP of the entire village the terrorist is hailing from! And we will make up for it in volume too!
Some times I wonder if it would be cheaper to feed, cloth, provide healthcare and house all the Afghans than what we spent on military over there. Afghanistan hardly has 30 million people. Per capita income is 500$ a year. Just 15 billion dollars total. We spent 1 trillion dollars in the war over there. Our government is borrowing at historically low rate, 10 year t-bills go at 2.5%, the interest charges on that debt alone is 25 billion dollars a year!
I don't know if it would have worked. But the idea goes like, take a large well defended perimeter. Free food, clothing, hospitals and homes inside. Let people in after disarming them. Expand the area as more and more people move in. We might be able to take in 90% of the population inside, standing obediently at the breadline and the hospital waiting rooms. I don't know. May be an idiot slashdot keyboard warrior.
No need to wait for Fourth of July any more. Once this technology is fully deployed in all airports by TSA you would be seeing this. . The large donut and the thick pillar are parts of the Van de Graff generator.
Even dogs don't have hearing acute enough to tell the difference. It is as idiotic as asking for certificate of authenticity for the weasel-poop coffee. If you can't tell the difference in taste, why bother drinking poop coffee? If you need an oscilloscope to tell the difference what is big point in buying this sound card?
When these politicians give tax payer money to private companies to create "jobs" the tax payers get such a raw deal.
If we just put the trillion in the bank at 4% interest rate, you would get 40 billion dollars a year, It could pay 1 million people 40K a year. None of these projects ever create even a large fraction of a million jobs. Even if it uses the money to hire half million people to dig a trench and the other half to close it up it would provide greater economic impact to the economy than such boondongles.
Solar panel prices are falling through the roof, scratch that, there is no damage to the roof. Some studies show that SolarPV might deliver electricity cheaper than grid in 25 states in just two years. Energy storage price break through is likely to happen first to homes than cars because storage for home does not have weight, volume and crashworthiness constraints. Already utility companies are worried and doing what they do best. Lobby the local government and utility commissions.
But one sure fire way to keep their customers tied to the grid is to encourage electric cars. If every home is charging two or three cars overnight they might not be able to ditch the grid. Since night load for the utilities is just 66% to 70% of peak day time load they can serve this market without additional investment in power plants.
Peeling off a large customer base from gasoline companies to the grid would be in the long term interests of the electric utilities. Why aren't they doing it?
Almost every gasoline car sold in America today can go 300 miles on a tank of gas and in 10 minutes be refueled to go another 300. So most people don't rent cars. If the car rental companies come up with some kind of monthly fee based car rental program targeted towards electric car owners, it would be creating a new market segment for itself. May be a 10$ a month plan that gives you access to cars/pickups at some fixed rate. Or a 20$ a month plan that gives so many rental-days which get accumulated in the account. Many pricing models would work. Throw in some free charging when the customer has checked out a gas car, allow them to choose between cars, pickup trucks and moving vans... Or a 250$ a year plan that gives 14 rental days sold through electric car dealerships... or electric car makers...
Helping a big part of American car owners to switch to electric cars would create a huge market segment for the gas car rental companies. Why aren't they doing it?
Yeah, why can't we empower most human beings to be programmers? Hey, why not empower them to be hedge fund managers or rocket scientists? If Joe sixpack wakes up one day and feels like picking up a scalpel and perform a simple appendectomy why shouldn't he be able to do it? Why are we stopping him?
Even with training most people could not paint a simple landscape or compose new music or even come up with an original joke. So why should everyone be "empowered" to be programmers? Who is stopping them anyway? Heck we don't even have the equivalent of AMA that can sue people for programming without a license. In fact that rant would have more validity against the legally chartered professional organizations that have the monopoly in issuing credentials and stopping people from practicing law, medicine, accounting etc without license.
I agree with you. I mean, if I have a class JonSkeet and I need to create an instance of it, I would not name it Westley. Bad programming practice.
Joking aside, your post here clearly shows that you belong to the all time great people list. People with good name recognition who are not jerks are quite rare.
The animation studios are all in Bangalore. Except for a few script writers and some production managers, almost all other jobs are in India. For your information look at the movie of Superstar Rajnikant, Enthiran the Robot. An all Indian production.
There is a threat to Hollywood dominance too. Bollywood, the Indian cinema was the only one that withstood the assault of Hollywood while the French, German movie industries collapsed. Bollywood movies are as silly as the Hollywood ones but it connects with the Eastern audience well. Another movie by the Superstar, called Muthu, is a cornier than the farmlands of Iowa. Friendship, sacrifice, moral values, suffering while taking the high road... it got it all. That became a super hit in Japan! Got rave reviews contrasting the great inspiring storyline of that cornfest with the triteness of Hollywood.
Even Hollywood would not save America's bacon for long
Dead on buddy. Exactly what happened in feudal Europe.
The the 9% machinery operators and the 10% riot suppressors have children who might not make it to the 9% or the 10%. They are the ones who will provide aid, logistics, intelligence to the mass of 80%. But if the social machinery operating and the riot suppressing become hereditary, then the situation becomes stable. Children of 1% stay in 1%. Children of the 9% and 10% stay in their "station", since they realize how lucky they are for not being in the 80%, and they fear being dropped into the unwashed masses, they enforce the system with great vigor. That is exactly how caste system in India and the mandarin system in China and the feudal system in Europe survived for centuries.
Among the 9% machinery operators, the top one advice the 1%. They already are pushing the society to a less socially mobile system. Inherited wealth outstrips earning your way into the system. By calling estate duty death tax they are able to pass wealth down the generation more with less attrition. The super high tuition rates is merely an identification system to distinguish the 9% and 1% from the rest so that they are on the track to get the jobs. Basically we are setting up the stage for a few centuries of rule by the 1% with the help of the riot suppressors and the social machinery operators.
When farming fell from 90% to 3% of work force in USA, it was an exporting nation. America was just sucking in jobs from India and China. Those countries were so politically naive they did not even know they were being decimated in the economic warfare then. Now as the manufacturing has fallen below 20%, where are we sucking in jobs from?
. Technological innovation usually leads to increased employment, as lower manufacturing costs lead to increased production, and expansion of non-automated jobs.
1. People who lose jobs are not the ones who are going to get the newly created jobs.
2. World population finally seems to have started stabilizing. It took longer to add the last billion than the previous billion. We are still adding but heading towards 9.5 billion rather than 12 billion. So number of new jobs created is less than the number of jobs being lost to automation.
3. Most people can only do regular humdrum routine jobs. We evolved to hunt/gather do routine things. Not be on an ever accelerating treadmill of productivity and intellectual labor. I have performed at the top 1% of intellectual labor treadmill for 30 years now. Frankly I am tired. It ain't as much fun as people make it out to be. It is not sour grapes or anything, I got adequate returns for the labor. Still, I now realize routine humdrum jobs are the staple for humanity.
At some point, there will not be enough people with money to continue buying their stuff.
It will happen.
It has happened already. First time it is lapping up the shores of the West. Transferring
wealth from countries that could protect themselves in economic warfare (India, China)
to military nations. Then from parts of European nations to others. Then from the lower
economic strata of the rich countries to the richer people, in the last 35 years. Now finally
there is no one left to sustain a productive economy. And the rich people are sitting on
piles and piles of cash. Natural next step is the middle class of G7 nations waking up
to the reality they are going to be thrown off the ship too.
We have talked to the experts. Extracted their wisdom. Encoded it into machine readable rules. Proved that all the expertise has been extracted by the 99.9% up time.
So, naturally, the next step is to fire all those people who would no longer have something to contribute. As a purely added bonus all these people fresh out of things to contribute happen to be with years and years of experience, which means seniority and high pay.
The mid level bean counter would think, "well, I should be able to fire at least 20 of them. Savings of 2 million on pay, another million in benefits, almost 10 mill over three years. Even if I have to let the SOBs CEO and CFO grab a mill each, I should be able to get at least 250 K for myself. Time to fire up power point, 'Work Force Optimization due to the increased Efficiency achieved by the AI system. By Gottah Avemyb Onus, Sr Vice President, Hatchet Division'"
89 wells out of the thousands accounted for most of the miniquakes. Four wells accounted for 20% of all seismic activity. Such uneven distribution obeys the power rule. 80% of income earned by 20% of workers, 80% of crime committed by 20% of criminals, 80% of academic papers authored by 20% of the authors etc.
But it would be impossible to hold the owners of these four wells accountable for anything. There are "experts" available for hire whose specialization is to muddy the waters and raise enough reasonable doubt among the jury and the public. There is so much of money to be made by fracking and it has so much of political support it would be difficult to do anything. By the time their power wanes and something could be done the real culprits would have cashed their shares and moved on to the next venture.
I am very sure Google lawyers will be pointing out to Goldman lawyers the exact clause and paragraph where Goldman pledged the everlasting life and soul of all the board of directors to Google when they clicked on the "accept" button of the EULA agreement of the Gmail.
... a novelist or script writer or something. Imagine Hitchcock or Stephen King before they made it big. They must have such dark thoughts, some of them committed to paper. Easy to imagine the "script" as a thinly veiled attempt by a depraved individual to distance himself from his perverted fantasies. Well, they did not have internet then, and they had the sensibility to pitch it as novel or script.
If the mail has not yet been delivered, then Google can stop the deliver and bill Goldman for the cost of stopping the delivery. If it has already been delivered, it is the property of the recipient. You can't do anything about it. At best Goldman can go after the recipient and get a gag order from the court. But Google is out of the picture.
Our company moved to google+. I am still not able to figure out a way to keep my corporate profile visible only to the corporation. The circles user interface does not make it obvious which email id is being added to which circle. So many of my personal friends and acquaintances have added my corporate profile in their circles. I see my personal profile in the friend list of colleagues.
Only reason no one is complaining seriously is because no one takes google + seriously.
He is not the first Nobel Laureate to be fascinated by the drums and vibrating membranes. Sir C V Raman, of the Raman Effect fame, was intrigued by the Indian drums, the Tabla and the mridangam. He published why and how they produce harmonics (paywall) back in 1920s. A synopsis.
In some sense it is not a surprise because his main work was on vibrating electromagnetic fields, and the natural modes of vibration of circular membranes is a very good way to practice the mathematics of vibrations.
In the heydays, immediately after the IPO, when Netscape stock price was zooming up, Marc Andreesen boasted, "The desktop is irrelevant. OS is irrelevant. The Browser is the new king of the hill" (not an exact quote). Microsoft took the threat seriously, fought hard, fought dirty, and killed Netscape as a company. But it could not kill the idea. It won the battle with Netscape but lost the war with the browser.
Once someone with serious financial muscle, namely Google, took up the idea, it was game over for the desktop. Google docs has much smaller set of features compared to Microsoft Office. But it is enough to meet 100% of the needs of 90% of the population. It is also enough to meet 90% of the needs of the remaining 10%. Mere 10% of the user base using these bells and whistles for just 10% of the time. ChromeOS is based on a Linux kernel. Android pads and phones are based on Linux. Linux has taken over the server market. It has been the decade of Linux.
In a meta sense, the old PC desktop market was based on selling everyone the superset of needs of all the users. Grandma wanting a machine to look at pics of grandkids was buying a machine capable of developing C++ projects or doing video editing. Once Apple broke the market into two pieces, content creators and content consumers it was a true paradigm shift. But even grandma needs to type a letter once in a while. The browser is enough to meet that need,
Similar shift will happen in automobiles. Everyone is buying a machine that can refuel/recharge in 10 minutes to go another 250 miles. Even the second and the third car of the family is bought with the same mind set. But it can change very quickly. Solar is picking up. It is cost effective for people to ditch the grid. Utilities are looking for a way to keep them in the grid. Grabbing a piece of the transportation energy market would be very attractive to them. When Big Oil gets a real well financed competitor well versed in dirty local politics, the electric utilities, that is when electric cars will take off.
There are many technologies maturing. Basic range of 100 miles is well within reach. Range extending options based on rentable charged batteries, battery swaps, towable range extending battery packs, range extending IC engines are all possible. The challenge is not the technology, but the investment needed for infrastructure.
Slashdot Mirror
But as a taxpayer ...
And each bullet costs just two times the GDP of the entire village the terrorist is hailing from! And we will make up for it in volume too!
Some times I wonder if it would be cheaper to feed, cloth, provide healthcare and house all the Afghans than what we spent on military over there. Afghanistan hardly has 30 million people. Per capita income is 500$ a year. Just 15 billion dollars total. We spent 1 trillion dollars in the war over there. Our government is borrowing at historically low rate, 10 year t-bills go at 2.5%, the interest charges on that debt alone is 25 billion dollars a year!
I don't know if it would have worked. But the idea goes like, take a large well defended perimeter. Free food, clothing, hospitals and homes inside. Let people in after disarming them. Expand the area as more and more people move in. We might be able to take in 90% of the population inside, standing obediently at the breadline and the hospital waiting rooms. I don't know. May be an idiot slashdot keyboard warrior.
No need to wait for Fourth of July any more. Once this technology is fully deployed in all airports by TSA you would be seeing this. . The large donut and the thick pillar are parts of the Van de Graff generator.
Even dogs don't have hearing acute enough to tell the difference. It is as idiotic as asking for certificate of authenticity for the weasel-poop coffee. If you can't tell the difference in taste, why bother drinking poop coffee? If you need an oscilloscope to tell the difference what is big point in buying this sound card?
That bug is so stupid it shows up 14 years late to the party. Geez.
If we just put the trillion in the bank at 4% interest rate, you would get 40 billion dollars a year, It could pay 1 million people 40K a year. None of these projects ever create even a large fraction of a million jobs. Even if it uses the money to hire half million people to dig a trench and the other half to close it up it would provide greater economic impact to the economy than such boondongles.
Most delivery fleets can go electric, they have predictable routes, a home base, time to charge and the range is not very critical to them.
But one sure fire way to keep their customers tied to the grid is to encourage electric cars. If every home is charging two or three cars overnight they might not be able to ditch the grid. Since night load for the utilities is just 66% to 70% of peak day time load they can serve this market without additional investment in power plants.
Peeling off a large customer base from gasoline companies to the grid would be in the long term interests of the electric utilities. Why aren't they doing it?
Helping a big part of American car owners to switch to electric cars would create a huge market segment for the gas car rental companies. Why aren't they doing it?
Even with training most people could not paint a simple landscape or compose new music or even come up with an original joke. So why should everyone be "empowered" to be programmers? Who is stopping them anyway? Heck we don't even have the equivalent of AMA that can sue people for programming without a license. In fact that rant would have more validity against the legally chartered professional organizations that have the monopoly in issuing credentials and stopping people from practicing law, medicine, accounting etc without license.
Joking aside, your post here clearly shows that you belong to the all time great people list. People with good name recognition who are not jerks are quite rare.
I saw another Tamil movie of a murder victim reincarnating as a house fly to take revenge. The kind of graphics and CGI done by them is incredible.
There is a threat to Hollywood dominance too. Bollywood, the Indian cinema was the only one that withstood the assault of Hollywood while the French, German movie industries collapsed. Bollywood movies are as silly as the Hollywood ones but it connects with the Eastern audience well. Another movie by the Superstar, called Muthu, is a cornier than the farmlands of Iowa. Friendship, sacrifice, moral values, suffering while taking the high road... it got it all. That became a super hit in Japan! Got rave reviews contrasting the great inspiring storyline of that cornfest with the triteness of Hollywood.
Even Hollywood would not save America's bacon for long
The the 9% machinery operators and the 10% riot suppressors have children who might not make it to the 9% or the 10%. They are the ones who will provide aid, logistics, intelligence to the mass of 80%. But if the social machinery operating and the riot suppressing become hereditary, then the situation becomes stable. Children of 1% stay in 1%. Children of the 9% and 10% stay in their "station", since they realize how lucky they are for not being in the 80%, and they fear being dropped into the unwashed masses, they enforce the system with great vigor. That is exactly how caste system in India and the mandarin system in China and the feudal system in Europe survived for centuries.
Among the 9% machinery operators, the top one advice the 1%. They already are pushing the society to a less socially mobile system. Inherited wealth outstrips earning your way into the system. By calling estate duty death tax they are able to pass wealth down the generation more with less attrition. The super high tuition rates is merely an identification system to distinguish the 9% and 1% from the rest so that they are on the track to get the jobs. Basically we are setting up the stage for a few centuries of rule by the 1% with the help of the riot suppressors and the social machinery operators.
When farming fell from 90% to 3% of work force in USA, it was an exporting nation. America was just sucking in jobs from India and China. Those countries were so politically naive they did not even know they were being decimated in the economic warfare then. Now as the manufacturing has fallen below 20%, where are we sucking in jobs from?
. Technological innovation usually leads to increased employment, as lower manufacturing costs lead to increased production, and expansion of non-automated jobs.
1. People who lose jobs are not the ones who are going to get the newly created jobs.
2. World population finally seems to have started stabilizing. It took longer to add the last billion than the previous billion. We are still adding but heading towards 9.5 billion rather than 12 billion. So number of new jobs created is less than the number of jobs being lost to automation.
3. Most people can only do regular humdrum routine jobs. We evolved to hunt/gather do routine things. Not be on an ever accelerating treadmill of productivity and intellectual labor. I have performed at the top 1% of intellectual labor treadmill for 30 years now. Frankly I am tired. It ain't as much fun as people make it out to be. It is not sour grapes or anything, I got adequate returns for the labor. Still, I now realize routine humdrum jobs are the staple for humanity.
At some point, there will not be enough people with money to continue buying their stuff. It will happen.
It has happened already. First time it is lapping up the shores of the West. Transferring wealth from countries that could protect themselves in economic warfare (India, China) to military nations. Then from parts of European nations to others. Then from the lower economic strata of the rich countries to the richer people, in the last 35 years. Now finally there is no one left to sustain a productive economy. And the rich people are sitting on piles and piles of cash. Natural next step is the middle class of G7 nations waking up to the reality they are going to be thrown off the ship too.
So, naturally, the next step is to fire all those people who would no longer have something to contribute. As a purely added bonus all these people fresh out of things to contribute happen to be with years and years of experience, which means seniority and high pay.
The mid level bean counter would think, "well, I should be able to fire at least 20 of them. Savings of 2 million on pay, another million in benefits, almost 10 mill over three years. Even if I have to let the SOBs CEO and CFO grab a mill each, I should be able to get at least 250 K for myself. Time to fire up power point, 'Work Force Optimization due to the increased Efficiency achieved by the AI system. By Gottah Avemyb Onus, Sr Vice President, Hatchet Division'"
But it would be impossible to hold the owners of these four wells accountable for anything. There are "experts" available for hire whose specialization is to muddy the waters and raise enough reasonable doubt among the jury and the public. There is so much of money to be made by fracking and it has so much of political support it would be difficult to do anything. By the time their power wanes and something could be done the real culprits would have cashed their shares and moved on to the next venture.
I am very sure Google lawyers will be pointing out to Goldman lawyers the exact clause and paragraph where Goldman pledged the everlasting life and soul of all the board of directors to Google when they clicked on the "accept" button of the EULA agreement of the Gmail.
... a novelist or script writer or something. Imagine Hitchcock or Stephen King before they made it big. They must have such dark thoughts, some of them committed to paper. Easy to imagine the "script" as a thinly veiled attempt by a depraved individual to distance himself from his perverted fantasies. Well, they did not have internet then, and they had the sensibility to pitch it as novel or script.
If the mail has not yet been delivered, then Google can stop the deliver and bill Goldman for the cost of stopping the delivery. If it has already been delivered, it is the property of the recipient. You can't do anything about it. At best Goldman can go after the recipient and get a gag order from the court. But Google is out of the picture.
Only reason no one is complaining seriously is because no one takes google + seriously.
Oh, I forgot. He was 64 years old at that time.
First Law of Superpowerdynamics: Only well muscled young men with washboard abs and manboob pecs get super powers
Second Law of Superpowerdynamics: Superpowers will make you wear your underwear over your pants.
In some sense it is not a surprise because his main work was on vibrating electromagnetic fields, and the natural modes of vibration of circular membranes is a very good way to practice the mathematics of vibrations.
So that there is one for each flavor of ice cream in Baskin Robbins.
Once someone with serious financial muscle, namely Google, took up the idea, it was game over for the desktop. Google docs has much smaller set of features compared to Microsoft Office. But it is enough to meet 100% of the needs of 90% of the population. It is also enough to meet 90% of the needs of the remaining 10%. Mere 10% of the user base using these bells and whistles for just 10% of the time. ChromeOS is based on a Linux kernel. Android pads and phones are based on Linux. Linux has taken over the server market. It has been the decade of Linux.
In a meta sense, the old PC desktop market was based on selling everyone the superset of needs of all the users. Grandma wanting a machine to look at pics of grandkids was buying a machine capable of developing C++ projects or doing video editing. Once Apple broke the market into two pieces, content creators and content consumers it was a true paradigm shift. But even grandma needs to type a letter once in a while. The browser is enough to meet that need,
Similar shift will happen in automobiles. Everyone is buying a machine that can refuel/recharge in 10 minutes to go another 250 miles. Even the second and the third car of the family is bought with the same mind set. But it can change very quickly. Solar is picking up. It is cost effective for people to ditch the grid. Utilities are looking for a way to keep them in the grid. Grabbing a piece of the transportation energy market would be very attractive to them. When Big Oil gets a real well financed competitor well versed in dirty local politics, the electric utilities, that is when electric cars will take off.
There are many technologies maturing. Basic range of 100 miles is well within reach. Range extending options based on rentable charged batteries, battery swaps, towable range extending battery packs, range extending IC engines are all possible. The challenge is not the technology, but the investment needed for infrastructure.