I think the Federation only court-martials transgenics who, when awakened from their sleeper ships, seduce female Federation officers and incite mutiny on Federation Starships.
And even when convicted, you get a nice little planet to call home and a hottie in a short little officer's skirt to help populate it. Sounds like a heckuva sweet deal to me.
Well, it really is a shame that the Third Reich is still associated with human artificial selection, and that anything that even faintly smells of Eugenics will be demonized, especially in W. Europe, I'm guessing.
Readers of Heinlein and other authors, and fans of RPGs like Traveller, Robotech, etc., know better -- that it's just another tool. But try arguing that to Bible-waving Fundamentalists, or to already paranoid oppressed minorities like homosexuals, Sufis, or Jon Katz.
Fortunately we have a new name for the practice of designing our offspring: "germline engineering." Hopefully it doesn't immediately scare the average Celica-driving Joe. First impressions count.
Really, it's probably too early to begin actively trying to engineer human evolution - for example, they just discovered recently that the mutation causing sickle-cell anemia also provides resistance against malaria. Eventually we will learn enough to engineer better children, or even tailor them for futures as lunar colonists or subterranean arcology dwellers. (Lord knows I have a few specifications for an engineered mistress lying around somewhere.) But if we tinker too soon, too ignorantly, we run the risk of winning the ultimate Darwin Award -- extinction.
In other words, the rule against self-modifying code still applies!
Here in the Midwest, people are bitching about how they are getting screwed by the gas companies, so corners are cut and accidents such as this are more likely to occur.
Hmmm... if anyone had read the coverage, it wouldn't have taken a whole day for someone like me to inform you that the oil spilled was fuel oil for an iron ore cargo ship, owned by a shipping company with a notorious reputation for operating decrepit vessels on the verge of sinking. Your characterization that the reader's demand for gas is responsible for this accident smacks of the worst kind of radical environmentalist FUD.
If you really have to lash out, do so at the major petroleum refining and distribution companies, who are making windfall profits by artifically limiting refinery capacity, lobbying for the government to pressure OPEC to increase production, and doing nothing to stave off the eventual hyperinflation that will occur when the wells do begin to run dry and inflate the cost of everything from cornflakes to computers that depends on petrochemicals and cheap energy to manufacture.
The packetshaper and packethound devices aren't nearly the threat this/. article makes them out to be. It smacks of unnecessary alarmism designed to generate message traffic... Trolling, almost. First of all, these devices are hardware, and that means it ain't free, and so it won't "take over" the net. Second, all a qualified hacker/coder needs is intent to defeat this kind of system; I could propose three strategies right away and I've only allocated a fraction of my attention to it. Lastly, the deployment of these boxxen on networks could be challenged under the First Amendment by a particularly talented ACLU/EFF type law team.
1) Those who RTFM; 2) Those who beg #1 to please reinstall their computer for them because they can't RTFM or get their stuff to work
LOL! How accurate! Here's a real life quote for ya:
"Sure, I could [RTFM] but it's more exciting to think I've screwed up the entire system and lost everything." --My Brother-in-law, VP of Production for a Net Media company, upon calling me for the umpteenth time to help him fix his bleedin' NT nonlinear editing box that he continually fscks with despite how me and a thousand OEM techs have warned him how fragile it is...
Lots of them aren't thinking about it at all, since their minds aren't processing the words flying by
I would guess that mothers of large families would be especially good at this, having lots of experience at monitoring conversations (and other incidental noises) without continually parsing them. Meanwhile, the rest of their mind is thinking about what to have for dinner that evening, or off in Fiji somewhere with a Fabio clone and a ripped bodice. They probably remember the entire conversation as something like this:
I agree - It's the best piece of FUD-clearing I've read in a long time.
And you know, she's been on the receiving end of a lot of crap over the years: insults, defamation, and even what boils down to accusations of murder. I've always reserved a few doubts about Courtney.
But not any more.
After reading this, I am nearly convinced that all the people who have badmouthed Courtney are the ones who she saw through, the ones who tried to screw her and got shut down, the parasites who got flicked off. She's as sharp as a katana and an honest artist as well. The honesty comes from her attitude towards her art, not how you receive her art. (I personally kinda like it, but then I'm partial to female vocalists anyway.)
From now on, I'm going to color anyone who tries to dis Courtney as either a Record Label flunky or a frustrated parasite.
Well, perhaps to a layperson, but to an engineer - not really. The technical hurdles are quite different.
The Ion Engine uses an electric current or catalyst to strip one or more valence electrons from a high-Z gaseous element such as xenon or argon. These electrically charged atoms, ions, are still relatively cold. All that's left to do is accelerate them in the direction opposite to the direction of thrust you need. This is accomplished using the electrical potential of a high-voltage cathode grid. A steady stream of cold ions emerge, and Newton's second law does the rest. The challenges are primarily ones of building large scale high voltage "tubes" and getting the ions to accelerate past the grid instead of just glomming onto it.
In the Plasma Engine, heat is used to excite the gas until thermal collisions strip the electrons from a low-Z gas such as hydrogen, thereby creating a neutral cloud of plasma made up of free electrons and protons. This gas is sent to a second stage where it is inductively heated by magnetic fields (the microwave oven analogy, except using magnets instead of klystron tubes as the "heating" element). The high temperatures created here results in high nozzle pressures (remember PV=nRT?), which causes the plasma to blow out of the hole in the end of the rocket, similar to the way hot gases blow out of the ass end of the familiar chemical rocket. But in the case of the Plasma engine, the nozzle is a third magnetic field. The technical difficulties here are to build high-strength custom magnetic fields, contain the very hot plasmas, and manipulate the plasma, not to mention the immense amount of electric power needed. (Others have already addressed that issue.) Also, the potential for catastrophic failure modes is much greater.
Hmm, I wonder if one could operate a fusion reactor, create all the energy you need to run the plasma engine, plus use the byproduct, helium, as your reaction mass. (But we haven't achieved sustained fusion yet..)
"Coerced"? "have to"? These words must not mean what I think they mean.
Coerced: As in, "you're not cool if you don't wear our clothes," or "everyone wears our clothes; you don't want to be left out," or "this logo isn't marketing, it's fashion. You want to be fashionable, don't you?" This coersion sometimes manifests in the phenomenon known as "peer pressure."
Have To: As in, if you want this Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt, you have to pay $35. As in, if you want these Reebok Cross Trainers you have to pay $95. As in, there ain't no such thing as a free logo-bearing-lunch.
Let me put it this way: My opinion is that I should be getting paid to do their advertising, not pay them. Surely you've encountered that position before; it can't be that foreign.
Those are my objections. Those are the reasons why I shop at Sears and Target and pay less for clothes that do not attempt to sell more copies of themselves like some viral meme or vbs script.
You asked for an explanation of what people object to. Or was that merely rhetorical, backed by no sincere curiosity whatsoever? Sorry to have wasted your time by expressing an answer you didn't like.
... when I read the coverage of the judgement, is the Microsoft reorganization of nearly two years ago, and how it seemed designed to give themselves ground to assert that it would be overly traumatic to split the OS and Applications into seperate companies. At least this was my impression; I never saw anyone in the press or on Slashdot recognize it.
Perhaps you all recall how Bill decided to reorganize the company around "consumer" and "business" products, ending the division between the operating system and applications groups. This announcement was made not long after the DoJ filed suit against Microsoft, and talk of a breakup began murmuring around the net. The timing was too convenient to be a coincidence in my mind.
And now the judgement is in, and it is an order to split the company along its old lines of organization. I predict that MS will soon complain that the company isn't properly organized to divide the OSes from the Applications without hurting both too much. (But first they have to admit that they lost... they don't even seem to be doing that.)
What EXACTLY is the objection to, for instance, people wearing brand names?
Personally, my objection is to being coerced into wearing what consitutes an advertisement, especially if I also have to pay a premium price for the garment. Anything bigger than a Levi's hip pocket tag renders an item of cloting undesireable for me. Usually, I could care less what others are wearing, and I think it has actually become a statement to wear clothes that don't display any brandname or logo.
For the record, I do intentionally wear logos or trademarks of things I genuinely endorse, such as the EFF, User Friendly, or my own employer. But it's an honest choice, not a compliance with whatever fashion trend is mandated by my peers.
But then there's the issue of being inundated with advertisements. I don't always empathize with this one, but I understand it well. Some people feel that it cheapens any experience to see a brand name, logo, or sponsor's slogan displayed too prominently in connection with the event. (Although in some events, like auto racing and soap operas, it has a long tradition.) Being constantly subjected to people wearing unignorable brand names ("Hilfiger" comes to mind) is just another chip out of their lives' integrity.
At some point, yes, Napster will probably mature into another "corp" with all the greed and FUD and everything that goes with it. But that's a long way off...
In this case, they were just protecting their trademark - they have to issue an order or else they lose their own rights to the trademark.
The Offspring don't have to obey the order, however... All Napster has to do is show that they made a reasonable effort to protect their Mark. (I agree with the earlier comment that the smartest thing they could have done, though, would be to send them a license agreement.)
And if the Offspring claim this is a case of "tit for tat," then they're confusing trademarks with copyrights, and aren't as smart as they first appear. It reminds me of playground argument tactics. (Of course, that fits right in with The Offspring's image.)
Only the oxygen can penetrate through to the other side of the disk; the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide gases are stopped in their tracks.
Great. Carbon Monoxide. Even worse than CO2. (I didn't believe the methane equation, anyway - it takes too much energy to create methane from its combustion products.)
For terraforming purposes, it does matter what is done with the carbon. Here on Earth, the carbon goes into making more CO2 respirators: plants. If this device releases even half as much CO as it does O2 (as the balanced equation 2 CO2 - O2 + 2 CO suggests) then it can't be used to terraform Mars. What you need is something that either creates bricks of pure carbon (a la KSR's gigantic mass spectrometer sieves... or was that Greg Bear?) or binds the carbon into a mineral like limestone (a la marine diatoms).
CO is highly poisonous to animals, even in low concentrations, and plants don't handle it well, either. This device is OK for creating an isolated pocket of O2, like a pressurized Martian habitat, but you can't Terraform the planet with it... not for human habitation anyway. And I doubt this was ever proposed, except by underinformed laymen. (Sorry Greenpeace. Find another contrived issue to protest.)
You suggest they blend chunks of the Voodoo5 into tall cups of soft-serve ice cream before shipping? Sounds yummy, but I think it needs a more robust cooling system.
You use this hoary old thing called "surface mail" to upload your bad hardware and download a replacement.
Case of Note: The companies making PowerPC accelerator cards, a market where there is a lot of competition, use this approach quite frequently with new models. Check any Mac Hardware discussion area, MacFixit, xlr8yourmac, or DealMac, and you will find that for every new release of an accelerator card, there are customers who find problems that eventually become "patched" at the factory, and customers who specifically wait until they feel a satisfactory number of patches have been implemented before downloading anything.
3dfx doesn't have any real competition for their Voodoo line (ATI? I said 'real.') so they can afford a brief delay to patch their hardware. For them, it's cheaper than customer support.
You're trying to tell me that it's prohibitively expensive to recreate the MacOS9 interface on top of NeXT/BSD/kernelklink or whatever this community decides it is?
Fine. You get a dock for free. That's great. But don't tell me it's a replacement for a pop-up folder full of aliases. By doing so, I'm given the impression that Apple (i.e., Jobs) doesn't care about the user experience and would rather promote a pet feature. I use pop-up folders heavily. I have a desktop aliases pop-up folder with almost 100 application aliases. Some actually point to applications. Some are preferences files or documents that open applications. But generally they are there so that I can drag and drop icons onto the alias, just as if I had a cluttered desktop full of application icons. And it allows me to maintain my applications and documents in a sensible directory arrangement.
Now tell me how I am going to get this arrangement out of OSX? The dock doesn't appear to robustly support more than a dozen icons or so. And even if they do alter it, it still can't do that job as elegantly as a pop-up folder full of aliases. So I'll just go back to my old System 7 habit of a desktop full of pictureless icons tightly stacked at the bottom of the desktop. (Heck, why am I complaining? I can't even get that kind of efficiency out of my NT workstation.)
Oh, my. A 168-page 'overview.' Yes, I could either read it to acquire the clue, or you could print it out and use it to beat a clue into me. I think the latter would be faster.
[/sarcasm] Nonetheless, I am sincerely grateful for the link.
Replace "a lot of supposed intellectuals" with "everyone who understands the basics of english grammar" and you have my point.
Ahem. I understand English grammar, and its capitalization rules, quite well thank you. However, I resent your inclusion of me into your little supercilious group. You can bait and troll all you want, but leave me out of it.
Oh, and by the way, if you fully commanded the basics of English grammar, you'd know that any word that serves to modify a verb is, by definition, an adverb no matter how it's spelled. The element of style abused by "Think Different" is called usage. And sometimes people do indeed intentionally abuse style in the name of art. It may not be good art, but since when have we denied artistic license to marketdroids?
Apple should concentrate on replacing the OS's creaky innards, and leaving interface changes for future versions.
Hear, hear. Give us pre-emptive multitasking first, and make it work, then do something with the UI.
In fact, I've become persuaded that changes to the UI should be left to third party shareware developers. All but one or two of the UI changes since System 6 that I use were first offered as shareware system extensions (pop-up folders being the only exception I can think of, and I could be wrong about that, too). And even then, some of the best ones from system 6 (who remembers Super Boomerang?) didn't make it into the OS until 8.5 or 9.0.
I'm with you here. Aqua is a clear sign that Apple isn't making the UI choices that we users want. Let the elite users make them, and let natural selection sort them out. Then implement the best in a future release.
Of course, this approach functions the other way, too: If Aqua really blows livid chunks, then third party system extensions will fix it. But to me, that appears to be an ass-backwards way to operate. It's got to be the more expensive way.
As a Commodity: The cost of the material, in volume, is indeed very cheap. Much less than $1 a CD when you talk about megasellers like Mariah Carey or Pearl Jam.
As Compensation for Effort: The artistic, aesthetic nature of the work has some value. The creative act didn't cost anything, but it still has value. This value is a lot harder to put a finger on, but historically it has been the audience member who decides the value. How much did you enjoy the streetcorner guy's steel drum version of Metallica's "Spoonman"? Probably not much more than a buck's worth, if anything. How much do you like Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy? I like the band so much that I spent $100 on their complete works boxed set, and am still happy.
The problem is, all the major labels price their CDs such that your freedom to choose the value of the aesthetic element is removed. Not only are the artist and his work reduced to a commodity, but your power as a consumer is reduced. Now your only option is to pay or not to pay.
So indeed, I agree with Jack Kirk, the record companies have brought this on themselves. I also agree technically that a typical CD costs less than $1 to produce. However, any CD I would want to buy in the first place would probably be worth something more. But I should have some direct voice in establishing that worth.
New space suits were also introduced. Known as MICKEYs, they feature prominent round, black protusions on either side of the helmet, now in jet black.
Uh oh, they'll be having a little problem with the fact that the black and white headgear worn under the helmet are informally called "snoopys" by flight crew.
There's a nice two-page "Working Knowledge" article in the latest Scientific American about modern space suits.
[Hmm... the site doesn't appear to be fully functional... I need to make sure it's not my proxy.]
I think anybody over 5 foot 7 (let's see, that's about 170 cm) is automatically disqualified.
That was true in the days of Apollo, but doesn't apply to shuttle crew anymore. Mission specialists can be anywhere between 58.5 and 76 inches (149 to 193 cm). Pilots must be at least 64 inches (163 cm) tall. Find out more here .
Agnostics are those that don't have the guts to admit there are no higher powers.
Sheesh! That's like Al Gore accusing George Bush of being dull!
Agnostics are the only ones with the guts to admit they don't know.
Real faith, and maintaining it in the face of adversity, does require courage. But that kind of courage is extraordinary. Most people resort to faith out of the simple fear of going to hell.
Heck, I'm Catholic, but that statement was so idiotic I had to say something. Color me baited.
Slashdot Mirror
And even when convicted, you get a nice little planet to call home and a hottie in a short little officer's skirt to help populate it. Sounds like a heckuva sweet deal to me.
Readers of Heinlein and other authors, and fans of RPGs like Traveller, Robotech, etc., know better -- that it's just another tool. But try arguing that to Bible-waving Fundamentalists, or to already paranoid oppressed minorities like homosexuals, Sufis, or Jon Katz.
Fortunately we have a new name for the practice of designing our offspring: "germline engineering." Hopefully it doesn't immediately scare the average Celica-driving Joe. First impressions count.
Really, it's probably too early to begin actively trying to engineer human evolution - for example, they just discovered recently that the mutation causing sickle-cell anemia also provides resistance against malaria. Eventually we will learn enough to engineer better children, or even tailor them for futures as lunar colonists or subterranean arcology dwellers. (Lord knows I have a few specifications for an engineered mistress lying around somewhere.) But if we tinker too soon, too ignorantly, we run the risk of winning the ultimate Darwin Award -- extinction.
In other words, the rule against self-modifying code still applies!
Hmmm... if anyone had read the coverage, it wouldn't have taken a whole day for someone like me to inform you that the oil spilled was fuel oil for an iron ore cargo ship, owned by a shipping company with a notorious reputation for operating decrepit vessels on the verge of sinking. Your characterization that the reader's demand for gas is responsible for this accident smacks of the worst kind of radical environmentalist FUD.
If you really have to lash out, do so at the major petroleum refining and distribution companies, who are making windfall profits by artifically limiting refinery capacity, lobbying for the government to pressure OPEC to increase production, and doing nothing to stave off the eventual hyperinflation that will occur when the wells do begin to run dry and inflate the cost of everything from cornflakes to computers that depends on petrochemicals and cheap energy to manufacture.
How's that for a rant?
The packetshaper and packethound devices aren't nearly the threat this /. article makes them out to be. It smacks of unnecessary alarmism designed to generate message traffic... Trolling, almost. First of all, these devices are hardware, and that means it ain't free, and so it won't "take over" the net. Second, all a qualified hacker/coder needs is intent to defeat this kind of system; I could propose three strategies right away and I've only allocated a fraction of my attention to it. Lastly, the deployment of these boxxen on networks could be challenged under the First Amendment by a particularly talented ACLU/EFF type law team.
LOL! How accurate! Here's a real life quote for ya:
"Sure, I could [RTFM] but it's more exciting to think I've screwed up the entire system and lost everything." --My Brother-in-law, VP of Production for a Net Media company, upon calling me for the umpteenth time to help him fix his bleedin' NT nonlinear editing box that he continually fscks with despite how me and a thousand OEM techs have warned him how fragile it is...
I would guess that mothers of large families would be especially good at this, having lots of experience at monitoring conversations (and other incidental noises) without continually parsing them. Meanwhile, the rest of their mind is thinking about what to have for dinner that evening, or off in Fiji somewhere with a Fabio clone and a ripped bodice. They probably remember the entire conversation as something like this:
Q: Arf arf, arfarfarf, woof?
A: Meow?
Counsel: Grrrrrrrrr!
Q: Woof WOOF!
A: Meowrrreow.
Q: Oink Oink Oink?
Counsel: Heeeee-awww! Heee-awwwwww!
A: Could you read back the question please?
And you know, she's been on the receiving end of a lot of crap over the years: insults, defamation, and even what boils down to accusations of murder. I've always reserved a few doubts about Courtney.
But not any more.
After reading this, I am nearly convinced that all the people who have badmouthed Courtney are the ones who she saw through, the ones who tried to screw her and got shut down, the parasites who got flicked off. She's as sharp as a katana and an honest artist as well. The honesty comes from her attitude towards her art, not how you receive her art. (I personally kinda like it, but then I'm partial to female vocalists anyway.)
From now on, I'm going to color anyone who tries to dis Courtney as either a Record Label flunky or a frustrated parasite.
The Ion Engine uses an electric current or catalyst to strip one or more valence electrons from a high-Z gaseous element such as xenon or argon. These electrically charged atoms, ions, are still relatively cold. All that's left to do is accelerate them in the direction opposite to the direction of thrust you need. This is accomplished using the electrical potential of a high-voltage cathode grid. A steady stream of cold ions emerge, and Newton's second law does the rest. The challenges are primarily ones of building large scale high voltage "tubes" and getting the ions to accelerate past the grid instead of just glomming onto it.
In the Plasma Engine, heat is used to excite the gas until thermal collisions strip the electrons from a low-Z gas such as hydrogen, thereby creating a neutral cloud of plasma made up of free electrons and protons. This gas is sent to a second stage where it is inductively heated by magnetic fields (the microwave oven analogy, except using magnets instead of klystron tubes as the "heating" element). The high temperatures created here results in high nozzle pressures (remember PV=nRT?), which causes the plasma to blow out of the hole in the end of the rocket, similar to the way hot gases blow out of the ass end of the familiar chemical rocket. But in the case of the Plasma engine, the nozzle is a third magnetic field. The technical difficulties here are to build high-strength custom magnetic fields, contain the very hot plasmas, and manipulate the plasma, not to mention the immense amount of electric power needed. (Others have already addressed that issue.) Also, the potential for catastrophic failure modes is much greater.
Hmm, I wonder if one could operate a fusion reactor, create all the energy you need to run the plasma engine, plus use the byproduct, helium, as your reaction mass. (But we haven't achieved sustained fusion yet..)
Coerced: As in, "you're not cool if you don't wear our clothes," or "everyone wears our clothes; you don't want to be left out," or "this logo isn't marketing, it's fashion. You want to be fashionable, don't you?" This coersion sometimes manifests in the phenomenon known as "peer pressure."
Have To: As in, if you want this Tommy Hilfiger T-shirt, you have to pay $35. As in, if you want these Reebok Cross Trainers you have to pay $95. As in, there ain't no such thing as a free logo-bearing-lunch.
Let me put it this way: My opinion is that I should be getting paid to do their advertising, not pay them. Surely you've encountered that position before; it can't be that foreign.
Those are my objections. Those are the reasons why I shop at Sears and Target and pay less for clothes that do not attempt to sell more copies of themselves like some viral meme or vbs script.
You asked for an explanation of what people object to. Or was that merely rhetorical, backed by no sincere curiosity whatsoever? Sorry to have wasted your time by expressing an answer you didn't like.
Perhaps you all recall how Bill decided to reorganize the company around "consumer" and "business" products, ending the division between the operating system and applications groups. This announcement was made not long after the DoJ filed suit against Microsoft, and talk of a breakup began murmuring around the net. The timing was too convenient to be a coincidence in my mind.
And now the judgement is in, and it is an order to split the company along its old lines of organization. I predict that MS will soon complain that the company isn't properly organized to divide the OSes from the Applications without hurting both too much. (But first they have to admit that they lost... they don't even seem to be doing that.)
Personally, my objection is to being coerced into wearing what consitutes an advertisement, especially if I also have to pay a premium price for the garment. Anything bigger than a Levi's hip pocket tag renders an item of cloting undesireable for me. Usually, I could care less what others are wearing, and I think it has actually become a statement to wear clothes that don't display any brandname or logo.
For the record, I do intentionally wear logos or trademarks of things I genuinely endorse, such as the EFF, User Friendly, or my own employer. But it's an honest choice, not a compliance with whatever fashion trend is mandated by my peers.
But then there's the issue of being inundated with advertisements. I don't always empathize with this one, but I understand it well. Some people feel that it cheapens any experience to see a brand name, logo, or sponsor's slogan displayed too prominently in connection with the event. (Although in some events, like auto racing and soap operas, it has a long tradition.) Being constantly subjected to people wearing unignorable brand names ("Hilfiger" comes to mind) is just another chip out of their lives' integrity.
In this case, they were just protecting their trademark - they have to issue an order or else they lose their own rights to the trademark.
The Offspring don't have to obey the order, however... All Napster has to do is show that they made a reasonable effort to protect their Mark. (I agree with the earlier comment that the smartest thing they could have done, though, would be to send them a license agreement.)
And if the Offspring claim this is a case of "tit for tat," then they're confusing trademarks with copyrights, and aren't as smart as they first appear. It reminds me of playground argument tactics. (Of course, that fits right in with The Offspring's image.)
Great. Carbon Monoxide. Even worse than CO2. (I didn't believe the methane equation, anyway - it takes too much energy to create methane from its combustion products.)
For terraforming purposes, it does matter what is done with the carbon. Here on Earth, the carbon goes into making more CO2 respirators: plants. If this device releases even half as much CO as it does O2 (as the balanced equation 2 CO2 - O2 + 2 CO suggests) then it can't be used to terraform Mars. What you need is something that either creates bricks of pure carbon (a la KSR's gigantic mass spectrometer sieves... or was that Greg Bear?) or binds the carbon into a mineral like limestone (a la marine diatoms).
CO is highly poisonous to animals, even in low concentrations, and plants don't handle it well, either. This device is OK for creating an isolated pocket of O2, like a pressurized Martian habitat, but you can't Terraform the planet with it... not for human habitation anyway. And I doubt this was ever proposed, except by underinformed laymen. (Sorry Greenpeace. Find another contrived issue to protest.)
You suggest they blend chunks of the Voodoo5 into tall cups of soft-serve ice cream before shipping? Sounds yummy, but I think it needs a more robust cooling system.
Oops. Yes, you could say that...
You use this hoary old thing called "surface mail" to upload your bad hardware and download a replacement.
Case of Note: The companies making PowerPC accelerator cards, a market where there is a lot of competition, use this approach quite frequently with new models. Check any Mac Hardware discussion area, MacFixit, xlr8yourmac, or DealMac, and you will find that for every new release of an accelerator card, there are customers who find problems that eventually become "patched" at the factory, and customers who specifically wait until they feel a satisfactory number of patches have been implemented before downloading anything.
3dfx doesn't have any real competition for their Voodoo line (ATI? I said 'real.') so they can afford a brief delay to patch their hardware. For them, it's cheaper than customer support.
Fine. You get a dock for free. That's great. But don't tell me it's a replacement for a pop-up folder full of aliases. By doing so, I'm given the impression that Apple (i.e., Jobs) doesn't care about the user experience and would rather promote a pet feature. I use pop-up folders heavily. I have a desktop aliases pop-up folder with almost 100 application aliases. Some actually point to applications. Some are preferences files or documents that open applications. But generally they are there so that I can drag and drop icons onto the alias, just as if I had a cluttered desktop full of application icons. And it allows me to maintain my applications and documents in a sensible directory arrangement.
Now tell me how I am going to get this arrangement out of OSX? The dock doesn't appear to robustly support more than a dozen icons or so. And even if they do alter it, it still can't do that job as elegantly as a pop-up folder full of aliases. So I'll just go back to my old System 7 habit of a desktop full of pictureless icons tightly stacked at the bottom of the desktop. (Heck, why am I complaining? I can't even get that kind of efficiency out of my NT workstation.)
Oh, my. A 168-page 'overview.' Yes, I could either read it to acquire the clue, or you could print it out and use it to beat a clue into me. I think the latter would be faster.
[/sarcasm] Nonetheless, I am sincerely grateful for the link.
Ahem. I understand English grammar, and its capitalization rules, quite well thank you. However, I resent your inclusion of me into your little supercilious group. You can bait and troll all you want, but leave me out of it.
Oh, and by the way, if you fully commanded the basics of English grammar, you'd know that any word that serves to modify a verb is, by definition, an adverb no matter how it's spelled. The element of style abused by "Think Different" is called usage. And sometimes people do indeed intentionally abuse style in the name of art. It may not be good art, but since when have we denied artistic license to marketdroids?
Hear, hear. Give us pre-emptive multitasking first, and make it work, then do something with the UI.
In fact, I've become persuaded that changes to the UI should be left to third party shareware developers. All but one or two of the UI changes since System 6 that I use were first offered as shareware system extensions (pop-up folders being the only exception I can think of, and I could be wrong about that, too). And even then, some of the best ones from system 6 (who remembers Super Boomerang?) didn't make it into the OS until 8.5 or 9.0.
I'm with you here. Aqua is a clear sign that Apple isn't making the UI choices that we users want. Let the elite users make them, and let natural selection sort them out. Then implement the best in a future release.
Of course, this approach functions the other way, too: If Aqua really blows livid chunks, then third party system extensions will fix it. But to me, that appears to be an ass-backwards way to operate. It's got to be the more expensive way.
As a Commodity: The cost of the material, in volume, is indeed very cheap. Much less than $1 a CD when you talk about megasellers like Mariah Carey or Pearl Jam.
As Compensation for Effort: The artistic, aesthetic nature of the work has some value. The creative act didn't cost anything, but it still has value. This value is a lot harder to put a finger on, but historically it has been the audience member who decides the value. How much did you enjoy the streetcorner guy's steel drum version of Metallica's "Spoonman"? Probably not much more than a buck's worth, if anything. How much do you like Led Zeppelin's Houses of the Holy? I like the band so much that I spent $100 on their complete works boxed set, and am still happy.
The problem is, all the major labels price their CDs such that your freedom to choose the value of the aesthetic element is removed. Not only are the artist and his work reduced to a commodity, but your power as a consumer is reduced. Now your only option is to pay or not to pay.
So indeed, I agree with Jack Kirk, the record companies have brought this on themselves. I also agree technically that a typical CD costs less than $1 to produce. However, any CD I would want to buy in the first place would probably be worth something more. But I should have some direct voice in establishing that worth.
Uh oh, they'll be having a little problem with the fact that the black and white headgear worn under the helmet are informally called "snoopys" by flight crew.
There's a nice two-page "Working Knowledge" article in the latest Scientific American about modern space suits.
[Hmm... the site doesn't appear to be fully functional... I need to make sure it's not my proxy.]
That was true in the days of Apollo, but doesn't apply to shuttle crew anymore. Mission specialists can be anywhere between 58.5 and 76 inches (149 to 193 cm). Pilots must be at least 64 inches (163 cm) tall. Find out more here .
Sheesh! That's like Al Gore accusing George Bush of being dull!
Agnostics are the only ones with the guts to admit they don't know.
Real faith, and maintaining it in the face of adversity, does require courage. But that kind of courage is extraordinary. Most people resort to faith out of the simple fear of going to hell.
Heck, I'm Catholic, but that statement was so idiotic I had to say something. Color me baited.