As these get smaller and smaller, we get closer and closer to a dog pod grid:
Aerostat meant anything that hung in the air. This was an easy trick to pull off
nowadays. Nanotech materials were stronger. Computers were infinitesimal. Power
supplies were much more potent. It was almost difficult not to build things
that were lighter than air. . . .
Given that it was so easy to make things that would float in air, it was not
much of a stretch to add an air turbine. This was nothing more than a small
propeller, or series of them, mounted in a tubular foramen wrought through
the body of the aerostat, drawing in air at one end and forcing it out the other
to generate thrust. A device built with several thrusters pointed along
different axes could remain in one position, or indeed navigate through space.
Each aerostat in the dog pod grid was a mirror-surfaced, aerodynamic teardrop
just wide enough, at its widest part, to have contained a pingpong ball. These
pods were programmed to hang in space in a hexagonal grid pattern, about ten
centimeters apart near the ground (close enough to stop a dog but not a cat,
hence "dog pods") and spaced wider as they got higher. In this fashion a hemi-
spherical dome was limned around the sacrosanct airspace of the New Atlantis
Clave. When wind gusted, the pods all swung into it like weathervanes, and the
grid deformed for a bit as the pods were shoved around; but all of them even-
tually worked their way back into place, swimming upstream like minnows, pro-
pelling the air turbines. The 'bines made a thin hissing noise, like a razor
blade cutting air, that, when multiplied by the number of pods within earshot,
engendered a not altogether cheerful ambience. Enough wrestling with the wind,
and a pod's battery would run down. Then it would swim over and nuzzle its
neighbor. The two would mate in midair, like dragonflies, and the weaker would
take power from the stronger. The system included larger aerostats called nurse
drones that would cruise around dumping large amounts of power into randomly
selected pods all over the grid, which would then distribute it to their neigh-
bors. If a pod thought it was having mechanical trouble, it would send out a
message, and a fresh pod would fly out from the Royal Security installation be-
neath Source Victoria and relieve it so that it could fly home to be decompiled.
Power for an actual helicopter or multirotor is extraordinarily unlikely to ever be sufficient with solar, even in the short term, on a sunny day.
Power for an efficient sailplane is alright for an afternoon... but only barely have we achieved the 48-hour golden timespan with extreme size, expensive materials, good weather, and working the batteries to within an inch of their lives.
Power for a hyperblimp, which is probably the closest to what Stephenson described (but 1-2 orders of magnitude larger), is easy to provide with solar. Expect them reasonably soon in military applications.
There is experimental-but-also-just-barely-workable laser propulsion, and also what I like to call a 'Flying Pole' where a wire-tethered quadrotor sits in one place 100 meters up for a vantage point, indefinitely, with significant practical payload (this is used experimentally by various militaries).
Lastly, there is the holy grail, autonomous swarm launch, landing, and refueling, which allows a large number of quadrotors to blanket an area of several kilometers around with close-in distributed surveillance. With the right code and minimal hardware, and importantly a large enough swarm to justify infrastructure, this is highly practical, the engineering just has to be done. I have my doubts that this will be reliable for a while with small fixed wing drones - the wind and approach makes it a much harder problem than VTOL craft.
In case you're interested, UAV construction is now a large sector of the RC aeromodelling hobby. I've tried to catalog developments on my wiki, http://dronepedia.com , but it's a firehose of information out there. If you want to dip your toes in, check out a day's discussion on http://diydrones.com
Reminds me of one of my graduate classes, which was about designing distributed operating systems for such things (we used TinyOS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TinyOS):
I did it, too. I used TinyOS and Intelmote2 and designed a interface board to integrate Intelmote2 devices with SRV-1 tank robots. nesC has some learning curve, but it was fun experience :)
> As a result, hazardous elements such as the assemblers, the bacteria, and the nanobots were blown into the desert, evolving and eventually forming autonomous swarms. These swarms appear to be solar-powered and self-sufficient, reproducing and evolving rapidly. The swarms exhibit predatory behavior, attacking and killing animals in the wild, using code that Jack himself worked on. Most alarmingly, the swarms seem to possess rudimentary intelligence, the ability to quickly learn and to innovate. The swarms tend to wander around the fab plant during the day but quickly leave when strong winds blow or night falls.
I was speculating about this with a friend the other day.
The problem is the battery recharge time is way more than the flight time. You need better than 1:1 for this to work.
Beamed power (sufficient to power something's lift) is going to have a scary energy density.
Maybe mechanical energy storage is the way to go; use counter-rotating flywheels that you can spin up rapidly, and then bleed off rotational power directly into the fans. Use a battery for powering control circuitry only.
What was the point of this dog pod grid? It sounds like a cross between a surveillance network ("Royal Security") and a simulation of biology (mating, nursing, etc.).
These laws were established in the 1930s when factories would establish franchisees in (what was to them) low-value regions. As they grew more valuable, they would move into the region with factory-owned dealerships & start gouging franchisees. Since then, lobbying power has undoubtedly extended dealership power further than what's generally beneficial. But the starting point, it seems to me, made sense.
"But the starting point, it seems to me, made sense."
It doesn't make sense to me. This could be handled with contracts, not laws. When signing a franchise with a factory, you stipulate that they can't enter your market or otherwise infringe on your territory by doing ___________.
It's a perfectly fine contract clause that unnecessarily turned into a law.
The problem is that during the initial phase of expansion into a virgin territory, it's in the franchisee's short-term interest to compete with other franchisees by omitting that clause. This is to the longer-term detriment of all franchisees.
If you consider that it's in the interest of society to promote a broader prosperity instead of repeated grassfires, then you pass this sort of law regulating commerce. Otherwise, you just end up with a patchwork of factory stores and bankrupt ex-franchisees, along with underserved regions of greater poverty.
The problem with the legislative solution is that all that code is undocumented, thus outliving its original purpose and unbalancing market systems two generations down the road.
Why is the longer-term detriment and bankruptcy of franchisees worse for the broader prosperity of society? If the car manufacturers could undercut them if it weren't for these laws, aren't they just extracting potential customer surplus and transferring it to the franchisees?
And why would some regions be underserved? If they were profitable enough to open a franchise before, what would change?
If you consider that a cornerstone of economics that a economic risk is rewarded when it turns out to have been a good idea, the actions of the dealers undermine the principle. The factory pawns the risk off to a franchisee, until it is shown that the risk is lower than they thought. Then they deprive the risk takers of the reward, or even the ability to pay off the financial burden of taking risk. It harms broader society by discouraging entrepreneurial activity - it stagnates the generation of new business because there is no chance of payoff to anyone who isn't an established player.
Essentially without the protections, the factories found a way to get the reward without the risk.
That's only true if dealerships are a pure commodity, with no first-mover advantage or way for dealerships to differentiate themselves besides price. I'm fairly ignorant about the issue, but I find that idea extremely unlikely.
A franchisee pays the manufacturer a license fee. They get a discount from the list price on the product, but that price is still higher than the manufacturing cost.
So consider what you're suggesting...
A manufacturer has costs of X, and will sell the good in the market for X + M (markup).
The franchisee will purchase the goods from the manufacturer and sell them for X + M + L(license fees per unit) + DM(dealer markup).
So while the manufacturer receives M + L for profits (and could match the dealer prices to receive as much as M + L + DM).. the franchisee receives only DM.
So what you're suggesting is that with the dealers lower profit margin, they could somehow provide better service than the manufacturer (that the manufacturer will not be able to match or exceed).
That is tough. Probably even impossible. Service costs money.
Regarding your last point, the undeserved areas aren't initially profitable. In the feared scenario, the franchisee spends money to develop that market, expecting to make a profit in the long run. The franchisee is taking a risk on this market. This law is meant to protect that risk and keep the dealer from jumping into the market after the franchisee spent their own money to develop it.
You can s/ dealers and franchisees with just about any other field containing pioneers and establishments, which suggests to me the reasoning might not be sound.
Specifically, it just seems that historically franchisees made a bet they had a competitive advantage, and bet wrong. So they codified their position into law instead. Given the expense and scumbaggery of franchise car dealers, I think a lot of people feel the industry could use a "grassfire".
In this particular case, yeah, I think a grassfire is long overdue (like the California chaparral - suppress the fires long enough and you end up burning three counties at a time).
But there are times and places where fire prevention is considered a good thing.
"code is undocumented" great term to use for laws.
I see what you're saying about the interest of the society needing to step in to force the clause instead of relying on the two parties to include it. Can't say I agree yet but it's given me something to think about.
If you can't see why that makes sense, I'm concerned for you. You may disagree that it's the right approach, but to say it's not sensible strains credulity. (As to the idea that individual contractors were well-enough connected with each other to guard against the manufacturer's ability to screw them seems unlikely in 1930...but your foray into anarcho-syndicalism hardly seems the point of this thread, aye?)
They weren't individual contractors, they were wealthy dealership owners, and the proof that they were well connected in their local communities is the effectiveness of their lobby, which created these restrictions in the first place.
Replace car franchise with YouTube and and factories with content creators. Now imaging that Google wants to push laws so that content creators cannot build their own video sites but instead must be licensed to sites like youtube for the simple reason that youtube was a huge and risky investment. If it sounds ridiculous for Google to do the same thing that dealers did why should the dealers be able to do it?
Not the same thing. The product is not the videos, it's the ads. A more appropriate analogy would be Google selling other video sites access to the ad serving technology, then when that site becomes popular, creating special youtube sub-site that serves identical videos, and telling ad purchasers they can buy ads on the new youtube sub-site for $X or on the other site for $y where $x < $y.
The analogy breaks down here, because IP, licensing and so on interfere with direct analogy.
The way the stores are currently set up (or: at least the one in San Diego), the employees can't sell you a car and they don't make any commission or 'referral bonus' or such. It's literally a car, a partial battery assembly frame, and some logo-ized mugs & shirts. Hence there's literally 0 pressure because nobody there can sell you a car. The gal I spoke with was very well informed (even knew the OS that ran the car's dashboard!) but wasn't even bringing up her own 'talking points' -- she gave me a cursory overview & then answered all of my questions.
Texas wanted to be admitted to the union as a slave state. But the Missouri Compromise established the 36°30' parallel as the northern limit of slavery for new states. So Texas gave up its claim and the territory became "No Man's Land".
Fun fact, there's a patch of 20,000 km² of desert between Egypt and Sudan that neither country claims. ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halaib_Triangle ). It's essentially no-man's land, but for countries.
"It's Mary's birthday in 3 days - send her a birthday cupcake?"
I would probably click "yes" if it's < $5.
Not for every FB 'friend', but there's a 'sufficiently close' threshold where, yes, I'd click that button. Even better if it's day-of fulfillment. And I bet I'm not alone.
Yeah this brings about an interesting dilemma; do I really want this crap? Can I reject it or swap it for something of equal value? Store their donation and add it with others' to actually get myself something I want?
Would be interesting if they also added a pooling feature, where if you get multiple gifts, you can combine the original costs of all of them to get something nicer.
Why would that be empty and meaningless? Sure, it's not much effort, but it's nice to know someone was thinking of you. The fact that it's not free gives it more weight than a simple "Happy Birthday" post.
They're not thinking of you because Facebook had to remind them.
Try making your birthday private in Facebook one year and see how many happy birthday messages you get when people aren't prodded by Facebook to care. It's a lot less.
I've reached the number of friends on Facebook where at least ONE person is having a birthday every day.
I probably only post 10-15 "happy birthday!" posts a year. So every day I check to see who's birthday it is. If it's someone I'm close to, then I post something.
If Facebook didn't have them displayed, I would probably have those 15 birthdays written down on a real world calendar, and I'd just check that.
Just a few more poorly measured statistics from me:
I have 1200+ friends, have about 10-15 birthdays a week. Never post on their walls, don't have my birthday listed. Get maybe 10-15 wishes a year on my wall. Text/call about 10-15 people a year (not including family). Before I removed my birthday, I had about 700 friends and would get around 100 wall posts.
Going to try an experiment where I make a random day my birthday, delete all the posts that catch on to the fake birthday, and then change it to a month later. Will post results.
Yeah, I have seen people do this, definitely will get a lot of messages still. Facebook limits the amount of times you can change your birthday, likely because of this.
That doesn't mean that people don't care. I certainly wouldn't able to remember the birthday of all my closest friends, but I do care and am glad to be reminded. On the other hand, there are of course a ton of bday wishes from people who probably don't really care, but is that really a bad thing?
Yeah, I think you can be reasonably good friends with someone and not remember their birthday. Unless you are really focusing on it you are going to have a limited bandwidth for remembering birthdays and likely have more people you genuinely care about sending your best wishes than you can remember.
You were pro-active and took steps to remember the birthdays by sticking them on your calendar. It's different from clicking on a link because Facebook remembered someone's birthday.
Why? Not many people remember many peoples' birthdays: I know that because of Facebook I don't need to proactively ask for and store most friends' birthdays because I'll be actively reminded of them.
In reference to OP, it's a matter of thoughtfulness. A Facebook birthday notification happens whether you're thinking of a person or not. At least, if you put it on your calendar, you had to sacrifice some time and energy.
Not to say that you're less thoughtful for using Facebook reminders; it just seems to promote shallow interactions at times.
It's an interesting idea and relevant to one of the major actions users take on facebook (birthday/well wishes).
I think you're right that it's "sufficiently close", but I'm struggling with how I define that. It's essentially someone close enough that I would give them a gift, but not so close that giving them a gift through FB is too impersonal.
Do you have friends that you call or hang out with on their birthday but don't write on their wall? Most of my fb well wishes are from loose connections. My real friends call, text or hang out with me on my bday. Facebook is the least personal touchpoint I'm available through, but maybe I'm an exception.
PS - I think it's been said, but combining gifts is probably the key here(i.e. everyone chips in to get you something).
I was really hoping he'd respond to the law school student along these lines: "Well, where in your class did you graduate, and why did you think you'd have job prospects as a lawyer? Unless you're in the top 1/3 of your class at a good law school or top 5% of your class at an OK school, getting a job is hard in today's market. Part of the reason law school (and school in general) is so expensive is because we've removed a lot of the risk from the loan side of the equation. We give you 7% money, guaranteed against default, and the schools jack up the prices. That combines with faulty transparency in which some law schools hide employment rates. My guess is that a lot more people are going to law school than should be, and we need to fix the incentives to keep all parties honest about their prospects."
This redditor's reply to that student was along the lines of what you were looking for:
"Unfortunately you went to law school at a time when the job market for your prospective field was wildly oversaturated. I don't really feel like you can blame any politicians for that one.
Best of luck finding a job, though."[1]
Yup. I don't have much sympathy for him, considering he took out $160,000 in debt with only a 50/50 shot to pay it back (that's your chance to get a high enough salary coming out of a top law school to service that debt, outside of Harvard and Yale). His poor decision is further compounded by the fact that he decided to go to law school after the legal market crashed in 2008 and people started to realize how ridiculous first year associate compensation was getting. I'm not really sure why my tax dollars should be bailing out a guy with a college degree who took a six figure gamble (though I suppose we've already set the standard by bailing out those who took gambles much larger than that).
I don't disagree with a single thing you said - but I do find some irony in the fact that this community for the most part is centered around startups - some taking huge risks with either bootstrapped money, or angel money - and the failure rate is often estimated between 30% to 40%.
Sure, and the "woe is me" rate is estimated between 0% and "why don't you fire up that bong again" -- much lower than that of the (formerly) wealthy students that gambled on an expensive education.
The difference is who takes on the risk. With startup investment, the investors risk their money, and if the company dies, the investors take that loss. They do this because they can make a lot of money from the startups that make it big. With student loans, the risk lies with the student.
It's debatable how much the loan thing contributes to the overall price or rate of attendance. 7% sucks for a loan, it's not like they're supply-siding it. I'd put it more on students aren't the best decision makers when the choice is between "attend school or get a job". Not to mention that a large percentage of attendees at the ivies have parents who can pay the bill.
Also, it's worth noting that maybe not for this student, but for last year's class, starting law school in Sep 2008 looked like a great idea and graduating in 2011 looks terrible.
That said, I'm generally on board with the whole 10,000 lawyers at the bottom of the sea sentiment. If this is a market correction, good.
