1. An overlapped would not have tied the hands of the US military that much anyway; in the face of any serious threat, if Galileo satellites were functioning as an enemy asset, they could fire ASAT weapons at them.
2. EU nations don't want to interfere with US military operations out of a sense of moral duty (at least their governments don't.) They want to secure deals they have made with enemies of the US. None of our governments asked for a mandate to engage in what would basically be proxy warfare against the US.
Even if you can't work around speed limitations, just make a GPS guided drone from a model aircraft. Its still a danger in the hands of a competent and imaginative asymmetric opponent
It was quite an aggressive move to make our network attack the military utility of theirs in the first place. IIRC the whole thing was part of the spat between Bush and Chirac, both of whom are now out of office. Unsurprising that the issue is now resolved, then.
It may at a push be private sector, but its certainly not normal, commercial private sector.
Galileo is ultimately an ESA project, even if they contract out to the private sector. Hopefully, some of the revenue it generates will go into non-profit spaceflight.
The US asked for the Galileo civilian signal to be moved so it didn't overlap with the US military one. In the original scheme, they wouldn't have been able to block civilian Galileo devices in warzones without blocking their own military signal.
The capabilities of Galileo are unaffected. The civilian accuracy is still better than US military accuracy, but now you wouldn't be able to use it anywhere the US military is fighting.
Ever watch Air Crash Investigations (called Mayday in some countries)? Even with redundant GPS, getting rid of air corridors would be a terrible, terrible idea.
I don't mind paying taxes, in fact I think the UK could do with a bit more tax at the higher end, but I don't trust David Cameron at all. Largely because he wants to privatise the NHS instead of raising taxes on the wealthy (low by European standards atm).
Galileo is better (kind of inevitable, being about 30 years newer). Also, I believe the idea is that a GPS system can get back its launch and development costs by licensing receiver chips. This is a profit making enterprise, which hopefully will mean more money in the long run available for other European space endeavours.
This is memory though, and perhaps I was wrong. A combined chip might be able to get acquisition down more than it was implied to me was possible, by some trick utilising both networks at once.
On the other hand, what you are citing is a press release by a company that wants to sell GPS receiver chips. Its in their interest to massage their performance figures. The question is how do *they* define acquisition and when do they measure the start of the acquisition time from. I would want more information.
OK, I'm a European and not massively fond of the US military, but I am going to take exception to this.
The Galileo *civilian* band originally overlapped with the US *military* band. In other words, you could buy an over the counter device that could guide a weapon to a specific grid reference in an area the US was fighting a war. Remember the rocket forces Hezbollah were able to deploy against Israel? Imagine that with GPS targetting that you can't jam without blinding your own forces.
The US asked ESA to pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top not make consumer devices that had dual uses killing US servicemen. ESA said 'ooh, go on you old rascal' and moved the band.
Now, the situation is that both Navstar (the actual name for US GPS; GPS is just the generic name for such a system) and Galileo have civilian and military bands that don't overlap. Either the US and Europe can jam each others signals, completely, without affecting their own military band. Just as the US can achieve exclusive GPS access in Iraq and Afghanistan, France can do just the same when it unilaterally intervenes in one of its old African colonies.
All the change did was move us from a situation where we were screwing the Americans with our network, to one where we have equal power to screw each others network. This doesn't seem massively unreasonable of the US to ask for.
Good news - with this, the repair of the Russian GLONASS network, and the new Chinese Beidou network, a device will have four satellite networks to choose from to get a signal from
Bad news - this likely won't mean it gets a lock on its position any quicker, due to technical reasons. Essentially, the device has to listen for a few seconds to receive the complete signal.
Worse news - each network will require its own proprietary chip, so increased access to GPS networks will come with increased cost, complexity, heat and power issues.
There is a motivation between 'because I love it' and 'because I am getting paid'. There is 'because it needs doing'. This motivation can be seen in action in most shared student houses, with regard to most household chores.
Its a form of intrinsic motivation, and given the theory that any amount of extrinsic motivation (do it for money/not being hit) kills all intrinsic motivation, people may surprise you in the scenario where the boot is off their throats.
Consider situations where normal motivations break down - disasters. People don't act like rational maximisers, screwing each other over to help themselves. They help others. Recall that plane that ditched in the Hudson river? The first rescuers on the scene were passenger boats. The crews weren't paid to mount a rescue, and probably had no pressing desire to work as lifeguards or whatever. They just saw what needed to be done, and did it.
Most of the time, that doesn't happen. You get a bystander effect, as people wait for their familiar authority structures to kick in and tell them what to do. Maybe this doesn't happen in extreme situations due to an obvious lack of legitimate authority, and people are more willing to step up.
Russian oil production has rebounded due to new discoveries. That isn't a repeatable event.
Understand the USSR was a big oil exporter. They fell so far behind in efficiency that their oil exports were more valuable than their finished products. It was at this point that the US and Saudis colluded to lower the price of oil, on purpose.
On the other point, you seem to have a fairly rose tinted view of technological progress. There is no evidence at this point that graphene, or nanotechnology, or fusion, is going to be some kind of holy grail.
1. Resource rich, poor countries exist purely because people have the political and economic power to exploit them.
2. Ingenuity can get us more output for each unit of resource input, but thermodynamically that is a limited process. Our electricity generation, for instance, depends on gas turbines to convert nuclear/chemically produced heat into rotation and then electricity - and they are already within a single digit factor of their theoretical maximum efficiency. Its the low hanging fruit problem - because R&D goes for the cheap ways to improve efficiency first, improvements to efficiency must become more costly over time.
Consider the USSR for a moment. Its system plucked some low hanging fruit (Stalin whipping an agrarian economy into an industrial powerhouse) then its system was unable to make further efficiency gains due to its inherent (economic) conservatism. Its growth tended towards the growth in its energy supply (largely from siberian oil fields) and that supply peaked in 1987, and history caught up with them. This analysis, btw, is backed up by accounts of members of Gorbachev's government (although my version is somewhat simplified, its basically correct). The USSR was killed, not primarily by an ideological crisis, but a thermodynamic one.
IF we are approaching an asymptote of how much useful work we can extract per unit resource under our system, we are in the exact same situation the soviets were in during the 1980s. Just a quick note, AFAIK the 1987 peak was only calculated after the fact...
Capitalism in its most simple form is the natural state of economics, throughout human history.
Bullcrap. Capitalism can't function without contracts, laws, etc. that are anything but 'natural'. What you are unwittingly doing is arguing from truthiness. That something feels 'natural' to you is no indication of its veracity.
The basis of any economic theory boils down to "People respond to incentives."
Bullshit again. The 'rational maximiser' model is so idiotic that not even academic economists believe it anymore. Economic theories based on it are floundering, because they oversimplify the vast complexity of human behaviour.
You're going to have a challenging finding a superior model, but I'd love to hear of one.
You don't need to fully flesh out a complete alternative to point out that the current system is fatally flawed. If you must resort to that fallacy to defend something, it is probably indefensible.
There was no ad-hom. You are clearly too stupid to understand what one is (clue: that wasn't one either)
I pointed out your argument was incorrect, and I insulted you. Argument did not depend on insult, therefore no an ad hom. Writing reams of tedious ideological assumptions changes nothing. You are ignorance (also, not an ad hom, in case you are still confused.)
I thought that too. Providing a baseline income is an idea that appeals right across the political spectrum. The most left-wing party in the UK parliament, the Greens, have it in their manifesto (although with a proviso they don't think it can be afforded right now.) I doubt they share many other ideas with Friedman and Hayek...
Tractors are made out of steel, assembled in a pattern worked out through around 200 years of trial and error, research and engineering by people who the tractor company does not have to pay a penny for. Its lubricated and fueled by a finite, diminishing supply of oil, some of which is also processed into its plastic components. That limited resource was created by natural forces before the first humans ever walked upright, let alone had the idea to 'own' parts of the planet. The idea that the owner of the company that assembled the tractor is the rightful owner of the full value of that tractor is an almost Randian level of arrogance.
Look at students. Look at retired people. Not everyone who isn't in full time employment simply lounges around.
I might agree with the notion that people would become inactive for a while - but maybe that is because they've lived in a society full of crude, external motivation and have never had to look inside themselves for the drive to do something. This, to me, is an even stronger argument against clock-punching culture.
Why disparage people who clean offices or serve food? The only difference between them and your 200k euro developer is that the latter is, for whatever reason, more skilled at feeding a broken system what it wants.
Why can't office cleaners and burger flippers have the lifestyle you describe? If we cut down on pointless office busywork, there would be far fewer offices to clean. If we all had the time to cook our own food, we wouldn't need McDonalds (and would almost certainly be a lot healthier to boot.)
Let me be clear; I am not dissing honest work. I'm dissing the idea of giving up about 40% of your waking hours to punching a clock, shuffling papers, and playing minesweeper when the boss isn't looking.
I myself have gone from paid work to doing a PhD. I've taken a hit to my income (especially as I had to do a Masters first) and am now working harder.
I agree with you completely, I invoke the 'work ethic' as it is the proximate reason for most of us. I'm fully aware that it is a simple propaganda tool for those who don't believe in such a thing and certainly don't practice it.
The MO of the robber-barons is to overstate the role of entrepreneurship, whilst understating the role of labour and raw resources. Thus they can 'sell' their exploitation of the latter two and teach people to shout down any objection as endorsing laziness (see some of the replies above)
Plumbing does pay well and is, if you pardon the allusion, regular work;)
But I'm not convinced money is the only reason why people go into plumbing or . Maybe some people never get into academic subjects at school, but they are decent problem solvers, and have good spatial awareness and manual dexterity. They might want to do a job that Slashdotters look down on because it fits their skills, and will make them useful and respected.
Slashdot Mirror
Two points:
1. An overlapped would not have tied the hands of the US military that much anyway; in the face of any serious threat, if Galileo satellites were functioning as an enemy asset, they could fire ASAT weapons at them.
2. EU nations don't want to interfere with US military operations out of a sense of moral duty (at least their governments don't.) They want to secure deals they have made with enemies of the US. None of our governments asked for a mandate to engage in what would basically be proxy warfare against the US.
Even if you can't work around speed limitations, just make a GPS guided drone from a model aircraft. Its still a danger in the hands of a competent and imaginative asymmetric opponent
It was quite an aggressive move to make our network attack the military utility of theirs in the first place. IIRC the whole thing was part of the spat between Bush and Chirac, both of whom are now out of office. Unsurprising that the issue is now resolved, then.
It may at a push be private sector, but its certainly not normal, commercial private sector.
Galileo is ultimately an ESA project, even if they contract out to the private sector. Hopefully, some of the revenue it generates will go into non-profit spaceflight.
Private space sector? Really?
Because I could've *sworn* the clean room I saw a Galileo satellite being prepared in was owned by ESA...
No.
The US asked for the Galileo civilian signal to be moved so it didn't overlap with the US military one. In the original scheme, they wouldn't have been able to block civilian Galileo devices in warzones without blocking their own military signal.
The capabilities of Galileo are unaffected. The civilian accuracy is still better than US military accuracy, but now you wouldn't be able to use it anywhere the US military is fighting.
Ever watch Air Crash Investigations (called Mayday in some countries)? Even with redundant GPS, getting rid of air corridors would be a terrible, terrible idea.
I don't mind paying taxes, in fact I think the UK could do with a bit more tax at the higher end, but I don't trust David Cameron at all. Largely because he wants to privatise the NHS instead of raising taxes on the wealthy (low by European standards atm).
Also, he is a fucking lizard.
Galileo is better (kind of inevitable, being about 30 years newer). Also, I believe the idea is that a GPS system can get back its launch and development costs by licensing receiver chips. This is a profit making enterprise, which hopefully will mean more money in the long run available for other European space endeavours.
This is memory though, and perhaps I was wrong. A combined chip might be able to get acquisition down more than it was implied to me was possible, by some trick utilising both networks at once.
On the other hand, what you are citing is a press release by a company that wants to sell GPS receiver chips. Its in their interest to massage their performance figures. The question is how do *they* define acquisition and when do they measure the start of the acquisition time from. I would want more information.
OK, I'm a European and not massively fond of the US military, but I am going to take exception to this.
The Galileo *civilian* band originally overlapped with the US *military* band. In other words, you could buy an over the counter device that could guide a weapon to a specific grid reference in an area the US was fighting a war. Remember the rocket forces Hezbollah were able to deploy against Israel? Imagine that with GPS targetting that you can't jam without blinding your own forces.
The US asked ESA to pretty-please-with-sugar-on-top not make consumer devices that had dual uses killing US servicemen. ESA said 'ooh, go on you old rascal' and moved the band.
Now, the situation is that both Navstar (the actual name for US GPS; GPS is just the generic name for such a system) and Galileo have civilian and military bands that don't overlap. Either the US and Europe can jam each others signals, completely, without affecting their own military band. Just as the US can achieve exclusive GPS access in Iraq and Afghanistan, France can do just the same when it unilaterally intervenes in one of its old African colonies.
All the change did was move us from a situation where we were screwing the Americans with our network, to one where we have equal power to screw each others network. This doesn't seem massively unreasonable of the US to ask for.
Good news - with this, the repair of the Russian GLONASS network, and the new Chinese Beidou network, a device will have four satellite networks to choose from to get a signal from
Bad news - this likely won't mean it gets a lock on its position any quicker, due to technical reasons. Essentially, the device has to listen for a few seconds to receive the complete signal.
Worse news - each network will require its own proprietary chip, so increased access to GPS networks will come with increased cost, complexity, heat and power issues.
There is a motivation between 'because I love it' and 'because I am getting paid'. There is 'because it needs doing'. This motivation can be seen in action in most shared student houses, with regard to most household chores.
Its a form of intrinsic motivation, and given the theory that any amount of extrinsic motivation (do it for money/not being hit) kills all intrinsic motivation, people may surprise you in the scenario where the boot is off their throats.
Consider situations where normal motivations break down - disasters. People don't act like rational maximisers, screwing each other over to help themselves. They help others. Recall that plane that ditched in the Hudson river? The first rescuers on the scene were passenger boats. The crews weren't paid to mount a rescue, and probably had no pressing desire to work as lifeguards or whatever. They just saw what needed to be done, and did it.
Most of the time, that doesn't happen. You get a bystander effect, as people wait for their familiar authority structures to kick in and tell them what to do. Maybe this doesn't happen in extreme situations due to an obvious lack of legitimate authority, and people are more willing to step up.
Russian oil production has rebounded due to new discoveries. That isn't a repeatable event.
Understand the USSR was a big oil exporter. They fell so far behind in efficiency that their oil exports were more valuable than their finished products. It was at this point that the US and Saudis colluded to lower the price of oil, on purpose.
On the other point, you seem to have a fairly rose tinted view of technological progress. There is no evidence at this point that graphene, or nanotechnology, or fusion, is going to be some kind of holy grail.
1. Resource rich, poor countries exist purely because people have the political and economic power to exploit them.
2. Ingenuity can get us more output for each unit of resource input, but thermodynamically that is a limited process. Our electricity generation, for instance, depends on gas turbines to convert nuclear/chemically produced heat into rotation and then electricity - and they are already within a single digit factor of their theoretical maximum efficiency. Its the low hanging fruit problem - because R&D goes for the cheap ways to improve efficiency first, improvements to efficiency must become more costly over time.
Consider the USSR for a moment. Its system plucked some low hanging fruit (Stalin whipping an agrarian economy into an industrial powerhouse) then its system was unable to make further efficiency gains due to its inherent (economic) conservatism. Its growth tended towards the growth in its energy supply (largely from siberian oil fields) and that supply peaked in 1987, and history caught up with them. This analysis, btw, is backed up by accounts of members of Gorbachev's government (although my version is somewhat simplified, its basically correct). The USSR was killed, not primarily by an ideological crisis, but a thermodynamic one.
IF we are approaching an asymptote of how much useful work we can extract per unit resource under our system, we are in the exact same situation the soviets were in during the 1980s. Just a quick note, AFAIK the 1987 peak was only calculated after the fact...
Bullcrap. Capitalism can't function without contracts, laws, etc. that are anything but 'natural'. What you are unwittingly doing is arguing from truthiness. That something feels 'natural' to you is no indication of its veracity.
Bullshit again. The 'rational maximiser' model is so idiotic that not even academic economists believe it anymore. Economic theories based on it are floundering, because they oversimplify the vast complexity of human behaviour.
You don't need to fully flesh out a complete alternative to point out that the current system is fatally flawed. If you must resort to that fallacy to defend something, it is probably indefensible.
Nice to know a random slashdot contributor has perfect knowledge of how the entire human race will act
There was no ad-hom. You are clearly too stupid to understand what one is (clue: that wasn't one either)
I pointed out your argument was incorrect, and I insulted you. Argument did not depend on insult, therefore no an ad hom. Writing reams of tedious ideological assumptions changes nothing. You are ignorance (also, not an ad hom, in case you are still confused.)
You do not understand economics, and its scary you think that you do.
I said give people money, and I cited an example of where it could come from. I never suggested just giving people currency. There is a difference.
If you are going to try and sell Randian horseshit, at least get your facts straight.
I thought that too. Providing a baseline income is an idea that appeals right across the political spectrum. The most left-wing party in the UK parliament, the Greens, have it in their manifesto (although with a proviso they don't think it can be afforded right now.) I doubt they share many other ideas with Friedman and Hayek...
Way to miss the point.
Tractors are made out of steel, assembled in a pattern worked out through around 200 years of trial and error, research and engineering by people who the tractor company does not have to pay a penny for. Its lubricated and fueled by a finite, diminishing supply of oil, some of which is also processed into its plastic components. That limited resource was created by natural forces before the first humans ever walked upright, let alone had the idea to 'own' parts of the planet. The idea that the owner of the company that assembled the tractor is the rightful owner of the full value of that tractor is an almost Randian level of arrogance.
Look at students. Look at retired people. Not everyone who isn't in full time employment simply lounges around.
I might agree with the notion that people would become inactive for a while - but maybe that is because they've lived in a society full of crude, external motivation and have never had to look inside themselves for the drive to do something. This, to me, is an even stronger argument against clock-punching culture.
Why disparage people who clean offices or serve food? The only difference between them and your 200k euro developer is that the latter is, for whatever reason, more skilled at feeding a broken system what it wants.
Why can't office cleaners and burger flippers have the lifestyle you describe? If we cut down on pointless office busywork, there would be far fewer offices to clean. If we all had the time to cook our own food, we wouldn't need McDonalds (and would almost certainly be a lot healthier to boot.)
Let me be clear; I am not dissing honest work. I'm dissing the idea of giving up about 40% of your waking hours to punching a clock, shuffling papers, and playing minesweeper when the boss isn't looking.
I myself have gone from paid work to doing a PhD. I've taken a hit to my income (especially as I had to do a Masters first) and am now working harder.
I agree with you completely, I invoke the 'work ethic' as it is the proximate reason for most of us. I'm fully aware that it is a simple propaganda tool for those who don't believe in such a thing and certainly don't practice it.
The MO of the robber-barons is to overstate the role of entrepreneurship, whilst understating the role of labour and raw resources. Thus they can 'sell' their exploitation of the latter two and teach people to shout down any objection as endorsing laziness (see some of the replies above)
Plumbing does pay well and is, if you pardon the allusion, regular work ;)
But I'm not convinced money is the only reason why people go into plumbing or . Maybe some people never get into academic subjects at school, but they are decent problem solvers, and have good spatial awareness and manual dexterity. They might want to do a job that Slashdotters look down on because it fits their skills, and will make them useful and respected.
Also, there is just the possibility plumbers are making a rational choice to maximise their happiness: http://www.cityandguilds.com/24635.html