Comment Why is this an "ask slashdot"? (Score 4, Insightful) 99
Why is this an "ask slashdot"? You are asking the wrong people.
Why is this an "ask slashdot"? You are asking the wrong people.
The Star Trek economy only works with no scarcity. And while there is a surplus of labor, there is NOT a surplus or resources or energy. And energy is the big one here, as everyone keeps telling us.
OK, I'll tell you different, if it'll make you happy. Energy is an artificial scarcity. Nuclear and space based solar power, or some combination of the two, can pretty easily eliminate that problem.
Sure there is solar, and wind, but they run up against some rather hard resource limitations.
Planet-based renewables, other than breeder reactors, are pretty iffy. Space-based solar (SPS) is very reliable, and doesn't suffer downtime from weather conditions, just like breeders.
(Especially plastics which depend on oil...)
Actually, like food, they depend for a vast amount of their input on CHON (Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen), and on energy.
The more interesting answer to ask for... at some point down the road, will be: "After having trained with both companies, which vehicle would you prefer to crew?".
So many more mistakes:
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As previously noted: the Tritium will remain cryogenically suspended, or it will "boil off". It's not an issue.
As for U-238: cadmium and Neodymium have the same level of "danger" as U-238, and are probably in your cell phone and the bluetooth headset you stick in your ear. They are closely followed by the following, to which you are generally exposed environmentally every day: xenon, molybdenum, barium, gadolinium, osmium, calcium, selenium, platinum, germanium, zirconium (quick, remove your rings!), tungsten, potassium, and bismuth.
http://www.nndc.bnl.gov/chart/
But you know, feel free to get all pedantic, and we can throw in charcoal briquettes, if you want. Imagine the environmental horror, if a train carrying a bunch of Brita water filters derailed, instead of, you know, getting to the store, and having all your drinking water go through them.
P.S.: Pedantry helps no one but alarmists, who want a technical detail hook on which to hang their argument.
So many terrible mistakes...
Deuterium and tritium are not in fact "fissile material", but are inert, non-radioactive materials. The "pellets" are cryogenic hydrogen gas isotopes fond in natural hydrogen.
Fusion is the opposite of fission, and while it's a nuclear process.
The U-238 that they would line the engines with is *also* not "fissile", and is not radioactive (the radioactive isotope is U-235), and is used for neutron absorption from the fusion process to turn the neutrons into heat so that no one is exposed to fast neutrons.
Note that these are *FAST* neutrons; to turn U-238 into Pu-239 requires *SLOW* neutrons. Even if some idiot put the one foot of paraffin required into the combustion chamber between the U-238 and the fusion reaction, it'd be burn out immediately by the temperatures involved (which is why we use reactor reactors to make Pu-239, and not straight Beryllium/Polonium or other less conventional neutron sources).
Basically, if one of these crashed, it would result in a bunch of inert wreckage, just like any other plane crash, although instead of starting a fire or anything, the pellet storage, if breached, would boil off (meaning the hydrogen isotopes would "heat" up to the point they became gas, not that anything would be hot).
In other words, no radiation anywhere.
P.S.: To the idiots who claim "this is how we make Pu-239 today" -- no, we do not use neutrons from fusion reactions to make Pu-239; also, if it were that easy to make Pu-239 *on purpose*, as opposed to *as a by-product of a design intended to avoid its production entirely*, Iraq would have had nuclear weapons already.
We all know what this is really about.
Revenue collection.
It's about the IRS and the state governments not liking that there are 162,037 independent contractors they have to go after for taxes, rather than going after a single choke-point for those same taxes. Thus they would prefer that Uber drivers be employees, rather than contractors.
The answer for Uber is obvious: The cheapest S-corp incorporation runs $39. So to get those 162,037 incorporated as contracting agencies with a single employee would cost $6,319,443.
I'm sure Uber would be happy to pay that out of petty cash. Now the IRS has 162,037 contracting agencies to deal with, all under the total number of employees thresholds that would subject them to most of the government regulations that Uber would be subject to, were they Uber employees.
So they are back in the same regulatory boat they started in, without the ambiguity that regulators are trying to exploit to get their hands on the money, and leaving with exactly the same enforcement issues they wanted to avoid.
They could probably also spin off an "Uber Business Services Division" that charges a flat fee for:
Business license
Business name and/or DBA registration
Account for taxes
Sales tax account
Federal and State Tax ID
Business checking credit accounts
Merchant account (to process credit cards) (or used the new "Uber Payment Provider Gateway" instead)
Insurance (business, liability, property, if applicable)
Accounting software (or use the new "Uber Books" online accounting system)
Or they could just create a damn franchising company, and make them all franchisees, with Uber's take coming as franchise fees.
P.S.: I suggested a similar approach to AirB&B to incorporate them all as actual B&B's...
If I'm reading your multitude of comments on this subject correctly, you're saying, "fuck the wild honeybees, private industry will just make more of them and truck them around more and everything will be okay. yay capitalism!"
Quiet please.
We are having a moment of silence for the wild cows.
If you'd been watching the attack maps, you'd know that:
(1) It's China
(2) It's likely at the government level
If you'd been watching current events, you know that:
(3) China's economy has been crashing, going on three weeks now
(4) They're really unhappy about people taking money out of, and shorting, Chinese stocks, adding to the crash
(5) They've lost $3.25T in market cap since June 12th
(6) That's just over 20% of their Gross National Product
So it's likely they are attacking our financial markets over that.
See also:
"Key things to know about China's market meltdown"
http://www.cnn.com/2015/07/08/...
I'm surprised the researchers were not aware that you can build robots with servos that aren't even in the same room as the "business end" of the robot. Plastic parts don't have to be actuated by locally mounted servos.
As a bonus, you don't have to build tiny servos, or have them packed together in a tiny volume, which drastically reduces the overall cost of the robot itself, as well as them being a heck of a lot easier to repair (making them even cheaper in terms of lifecycle cost).
Test engineer says... big companies need to hire more test engineers.
Are we surprised?
I'm not so sure I agree that this make sense...
Comcast does; they just opened up about a million public WiFi hotspots in peoples houses.
The key difference is that if you spend an hour sorting out your credit card you continue to live the rest of your life afterwards with few ill effects.
Steve Jobs persuaded an engineer to reduce boot time lower than the engineer though possible by making the equivalence argument. It goes something like this:
Average human life expectancy is 71 years.
Humans are on average conscious for 16 hours per day.
Doing the math, this means you would only have to force 414,915 people to spend an hour "sorting out their credit card" before you've effectively done the equivalent time-damage of killing someone.
It's no longer open; you missed it by a day.
GNSO Privacy & Proxy Services Accreditation Issues Working Group Initial Report
https://www.icann.org/public-c...
I am pretty sure the actual cause of the floods... was water.
Also, if they'd just let it float across the Pacific to California, like it used to, it'd solve a lot of problems for everyone.
Since you can always get the information by showing legal cause and obtaining a court order, I really don't see what use de-anonymizing domain name registration serves, other than to make it less expensive to obtain large amounts of information for relatively little cost, as opposed to having to be sure enough of something that you can justify the court order.
The ICANN proposal as it stands is pretty stupid, and Doug Brent would likely have never had his name associated with it while he was COO, and Jon Postel sure as *hell* would not want his name associated with it.
Function reject.
