There are already a ton of commercials in the YouTube content already. They just have to figure out how to tap into that. Companies are already getting free advertising when their funny/stupid ad gets uploaded and has hundreds of thousands of views in a few days.
I've got it. They should send a letter to the ad agency or product company explaining that their ad is being watched by viewers without them having paid YouTube for showing it. They can threaten litigation or to delete the ad unless they pay to support the "free" advertising. Heck, start a subscription service where a company's or ad agency's commercials will not be automatically deleted. Instead they get unlimited viewing privileges. There's probably a model for that idea floating out there somewhere...
Still with me? If I'm sitting here, minding my own business, and suddenly the +10 Ultra Sword of Power pops into my hands, and there is no mechanism within the laws of the universe that would allow a +10 Ultra Sword of Power to pop into my hands, then I have proof that God exists.
Now here's the thing - there is no observable action within our universe that can *only* be explained via a supernatural act of God.
I think it's a little stretch to say that we know every observable action in our universe. I'll agree with you that in our modern era the common, repeatable and/or testable actions are typically not "*only*... explained via a supernatural act of God", but you just gave us an example of a uncommon, personal experience. I've never had such an experience, and maybe you haven't had one, but can you claim without a scientific doubt that no one has?
Let me put it this way - 2000 years ago, God was responsible for everything - weather, seasons, birth, death, love... you name it. Slowly but surely over the years, science has chewed away at God's areas of action, such that now we're pretty well reduced to "God created it, but otherwise does nothing". That's a pretty good argument for the probability of the nonexistance of God, isn't it?
As a scientist with some faith, I'd argue that it's evidence that a societal or religious desire for a God that manifests everyday at the physical experience level is likely misplaced. If you're set on that kind of divine influence being the only possible one, then you're right--there's some fairly rational arguments against it. I tend to be a little more open minded and not presume to know what God is or should be. Instead, I have some tendrils of belief, and tempered with my overly logical leanings, I see where my faith evolves. For me it hasn't disappeared based on the evolution of our scientific knowledge to date, but YMMV.
...just because things are peer reviewed doesn't make them fact..
Science isn't about facts. It's about a process of discovering what's most likely or what the best description is with the current data and observations we've made so far. Sometimes these ideas hold together so well against all new data and observations that they can get pretty darn close to "facts" and are so good that we can make extremely accurate predictions, but that doesn't always mean it's the end of the line for discovery, which is what I think of as a "fact".
Papers in Nature, Science, or any other peer-reviewed journal aren't always right. They don't always agree with one another, and they just might be right enough today but really wrong next year. That is the process. It's OK when there are conflicts, it doesn't mean that someone's necessarily done "bad" science.
I like NPR, but for every worthwhile segment there are ten segments on things like the Wisconsin Cheese industry, or the effect of jazz music on the modern housewife, or some truly terrible music that's only included because it's "interesting."
Listening to NPR on the radio is like browsing slashdot on 0. Sure some of the things are very insightful, but the vast majority are not...
You forgot the "...to me" at the end. This is precisely why we need diverse content like NPR and PRI. If they were serving up only everything that everyone "liked", they'd be just like every other crappy news feed out there that's happy to tell you about the latest shooting spree and sex scandal in gory details (over and over and over again until something more "interesting" comes along), but not about anything that takes more than an visceral reaction to digest.
NPR-type of content is about thinking. The end result is that you might think you don't like it, but you are at least given a chance to hear it and challenged to think about it. For a change.
To me, it's no wonder that in areas such as Global Warming, where the underlying assumptions are clearly political (because science is descriptive, not proscriptive--science describes what is happening, it does not demand specific solutions to those problems--yet the entire Global Warming debate is about how society is supposed to make major changes (a proscriptive solution) in order to avert a man-made disaster (hardly a descriptive description), it's no wonder that political forces have been attempting to heavily influence the science.
So, medical science should just be about figuring out how the body works, not how we can make it work better? What's that part called? R&D? Forecasting? Political planning?
When the National Weather Service describes that a hurricane has a high probability to hit, oh, I don't know... New Orleans, or some random coastal city, you're suggesting that they not make specific recommendations for how not to get killed? Are those recommendations from the scientists who study the weather about what we probably should do during severe thunderstorms and tornados too proscriptive for you?
I guess as an astronomer, I shouldn't get too involved in making suggestions for how that asteroid about to hit us that I just discovered and described to you could perhaps be persuaded not to wipe out life on the planet. Surely, that's too political.
Scientists might want to be involved in averting disasters they happen to know something substantial about, you know. Most of us are human. Some of us are evil, but we're still mostly human...
Until my $10^H^H 15^H^H 20 (inflation, you know) buys me a live, in-person, on-demand performance by the artist no matter where I'm located, I am not buying into this "recorded" music line of crap. For 1/5 to 1/10 the price of a honest-to-goodness ticket (well, ignoring the +20% processing/handling fee) for a live performance, they want me to buy this inferior, static (and static-filled!) recording? What a racket. My highly-evolved sense of hearing can't stand resampling of any sort. The subtleties induced in the very cells of the body by harmonic frequencies in the 100 kHz - 10 MHz range define true music, and I will not stand for this insult from the aptly-named "recording" industry.
Now, those video-thingies on the iTMS are pretty cool though... I ponied up my $22.89 for the Schoolhouse Rock collection. That's money well spent!
Having a sexy and slick interface has helped make OSX very popular.
Having a consistent, cross-application interface is likely much more of a driver for OS X than any of the slick eye-candy. The aesthetics might get you to try it out for fun the first time, but the simplicity and consistency are what get you to stay.
I use Linux for a variety of things, but OS X is what's on my desktop and with me on the road. IMHO, the addition of slick-looking interface won't add much to Linux momentum (which is pretty good anyway) without a platform plan for how that interface is implemented.
1. Social interaction breeds confrontation. If this is so, then we are no better than a pack of wolves.
2. We socialize as a mean to confront other human or animals
Like the GP, I also think TF conclusions in the original story are not mutually exclusive, although for more benign reasons. Being social promotes community, which in turn gives a being the sense of a wider existence, belonging, or, perhaps basely, "property". Community can be as close as a family or as wide as a country. Because we are social, any minor confrontation from outside with any part of a community (or within) that one feels they are a member of tends to provoke at least some members of that community, even if they weren't initially involved.
The fact that violence is a vehicle that humans deal with that conflict seems to me to be fairly independent from the fact that their social tendencies enable violence on more grand scales than any of the rest of life on earth.
... with the important exception of when you're running as an Admin user, in which case you don't get this important opportunity to prevent the program from modifying files it shouldn't.
What are you talking about? Admin accounts normally get password popups to do anything like this (system updates, system-wide installers, etc.). Are you saying in this specific instance it doesn't?
OK, well, if the government pushes this, can we get parity to make all paper shredders scan documents as they pass through so we can recover the "lost" documents that certain officials always seem to have a problem finding during corruption and power abuse investigations?
...the top 5% of wage earners (those earning $130,080 or more) paid 54% of all income taxes and had an average tax rate of 20.74%. The top 50% paid 96.5% of income taxes, meaning that the bottom 50% kicked in 3.5%.
You conveniently left out the fact that the top 5% generates 31% of the total income and that the top 50% generates 86%. Suddenly the gap in tax burden isn't quite so "unfair".
Perhaps we should also mention in passing that over the last about two decades, the average tax rate has decreased for that same top 5% nearly 6% whereas the top 50% has decreased only 2%.
Finally, maybe we should mention that from a combination of the last two tables that you pointed us to and this last factoid, it's blindingly clear that the reason the top 5% now contribute 54% of the burden, up from 40% in 1985, is predominantly due to the fact that their share of the total AGI has increased.
Now, all this leaves out another minor element in the whining about who's being fleeced more, which is that income deviates quite far from wealth as you go from the bottom of the top 50% to the bottom of the top 5%. I'm afraid I have a hard time feeling more sympathy for the family whose income is increasing their wealth than for the family who's income is their wealth.
Sadly(?), we now have two terms in the cosmological arena for two, different, unknown causes.
Dark matter is needed to explain a number of different observations that point to an excess of gravitational influence that can not be reconciled with the amount of mass that is detected by radiation. Ideas for the nature of dark matter have ranged from the normal (stellar corpses and/or failed stars) to the exotic (undiscovered elementary particles like the neutralino). Current observations and theories seem to be converging to rule out a normal matter explanation. Dark matter could also be explained by an aspect of gravity that we don't understand yet, but the scientific jury on that is still out despite the "scientific" press assuring us that any one new, barely-published hypothesis as the solution to all our woes. (Sorry, couldn't help myself...)
Dark energy is posited to explain why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, as measured by the latest observations of the structure of the universe. This is the term that is described as a negative pressure that counteracts the influence of gravity at large scales.
Well, since the same 1-5% also tend to represent the business owners who can't seem to figure out how to pay the bottom 50% a decent living wage; offer reasonably priced health-care for their employees; and guarantee a retirement plan for loyal workers that will not be cut off, no, I still find it "not fair". In the name of short-term profit, business has foisted all this onto the individual or society now in the last few decades. If we're going to operate that way, fine. But you can be damn-well sure that a bunch of us are going to expect the social net to expand, not shrink.
I don't think you can believe the overall failure/repair rate from this kind of survey. It's going to be heavily biased towards those of us that have had problems. What you can get from it more reliably is the relative performance of the models and the stats on which components fail more on the various models.
I also don't understand the problem with my salary logic. $100,000/year is a damn good salary by any standard, and I am positive that most people working in the space industry are not making that much.
Not working on JWST or even a NASA project right now, I can't delineate costs for you personally, but I would have modded you down as well. Maybe not for being a troll, but for being uninformed. People on projects don't cost their salary alone. And we're not even talking about just some small overhead. These people all work at institutions (NASA centers, universities, etc.) that are funded by projects like this. You forgot to pay for their benefits, retirement, health care, etc. You forgot to give them a place to work, which may exist right now, but you still have to effectively pay for them to work there, which is not limited to the use of that place's equipment, computers, electricity, water, heat (well, for us right now), and toilets. You're talking about factors of 2-3x their salary, not just 1x. And yes, there certainly are more than 1,000 people contributing to JWST if you counted the secretaries and janitors.
All that's pretty good to do the R&D with little serious equipment purchases. Now as they're getting close to actually building space-worthy components, the equipment costs and contracting associated with that part goes up dramatically. A building, even the world's tallest, has parts you can replace and repair at will, pretty much. Although there's serious engineering and lots of clever bits that must go into it, there is still a difference. Plus, the techniques for making buildings are by-and-large not being developed from scratch like what is typically done for most space-based astronomy projects today.
The mirror isn't 8-feet in diameter (that's HST), it's 6.5 meters. And it's not one piece (which would be too large to launch), it's 18 pieces. It's not made of glass, it's made of beryllium. For it to work as promised, it's surface has to be accurate to incredible tolerances, and you have to ensure that the 18 segments together form an effective surface to those same levels of tolerance. And it has to be highly efficient at reflecting infrared light, which in this case is being done with a layer of gold.
After that you have a telescope, but nothing to do with it. We don't use eyepieces or even just a CCD camera these days, you know. Last time I looked, JWST had 3 instruments being built for it. Each one typically has its own set of complicated optics, detectors, hardware, and software. Although I don't know the exact numbers, these days instruments are typically a significant cost of telescope projects. I would not be surprised if each one costs a least 1/2 the cost of an operating JWST mirror.
As it's being built, you're also paying people to make sure it's going to be useful after it's launched. There's all the software and ground hardware that goes into the setting up an infrastructure for the community to propose their science, the planning and taking of observations, data reduction tools, etc. You don't start that bit the day after it's been completed. And those costs are ongoing, like they are with HST right now.
Now do you want to do some science with it? That costs money too. And unlike your buildings, we astronomers don't (er, can't) pay rent. JWST doesn't make money like your building, and it's cost is not subsided by anyone like your buildings likely are. Every dollar, euro, sweat, and tear is launched up to space with a wish and a prayer. And all we get out is some random new facts about the universe. Hope you like our work.
Now, I can't speak for high-level government officials or contract companies, but I can pretty confidently say that 99% of us in the field who drive the science for these machines are not in it for the money. There are very few personal perks aside from the coolness factor of working on something that a lot of people find fascinating. To a good approximation, this is the c
Although I'm a cynic more often than not, a tiny part of me wonders if this whole thing was a plant by one or more non-idiots to show the wonderful world of DRM to the public (and media) at large. Such a person would be easy to spot since they'd have one seriously huge set of kohones (gender regardless...).
While I understand what this new clause is saying now, what I don't understand is why the license itself is preventing a modification to the parent source. The freedom to create a modified work from a prior GPL licensed work and then explicitly enabling future modified works to be created from your public distribution of your modification was the whole point in the first place, wasn't it?
Even if this new restriction helps maintain proper distribution in the sprit of GPL, it seems to me that placing any clause in the license that restricts your ability to modify the code (not the license/distribution/etc.) for a particular use becomes a slippery slope.
Will you be prevented from using snippets of this GPLv3 web code (which contains a source download mechanism) in an application that has nothing to do with a web application? Let's say you distribute your new non-web app that has a random function collected from such a GPLv3 web app. You distribute your new app with this function under GPLv3 (as did the web-app who's function you're using) and provide source via traditional download methods. Now someone takes your GPLv3 non-web-app and turns it back into a web app. How are they supposed to know they are technically supposed to distribute their code (or just that function?) via some public user interface as the original function did?
Again, I can kind of see some logic in the original thinking to not remove a author-created self-distribution mechanism, but the implementation and implication that code is now "tagged" somehow by GPLv3 to always be auto-distributable looks like a bad idea, at first glance to me.
You bet. Many times. I also read your reply to the GP post at the time many times before replying. GP said:
He claimed there were still more WMDs and didn't give the inspectors time to check it out (and ignored what they were saying).
You then said:
Er, no. There were claims about continued interest in developing weapons which are still reliable.... But at no point did the President jump up and down and scream "He's got millions of ICBMs! Let's go get 'em!" This is what everybody seems to think he said, however.
(emphasis mine)
No, everyone did not think he said there are millions of ICBM's. I'm sorry if I assumed you were just exaggerating to make your point. Obviously you were being serious. Everyone thought he said exactly the quotes I posted, which were from public speeches made before the war. They clearly state that he thought they had such weapons in their possession. Whether they were on ICBMs or not is irrelevant since the second clearly stated thread in those speeches was that Sadam had links to terrorists and therefore those weapons would be available for them to use.
The fact remains that there have been no WMDs found since our second invasion. And credible reports of sites able to produce such things on reasonable timescales are few to none. His explicit link to terrorists has also proved extremely tenuous. History will eventually tells us (hopefully) if this was purely misinformation or organized deceit. What's appalling to me at this point is that there has been little credit taken, apologies made, or change in course based on the fact that this critical "evidence" used as a major part of the justification for the invasion was not true.
This attitude:
Of course, there were other useful objectives in the war too. The goal of social, political, and economic changes in the Middle East is worthy, in my opinion. The strategic position between Iran, Turkey, and Syria is also helpful.
Is what saddens me most about the country today. Our global dominance has reduced the lives of many in the world to an expendable commodity for our prosperity and "security".
But at no point did the President jump up and down and scream "He's got millions of ICBMs! Let's go get 'em!" This is what everybody seems to think he said, however.
Don't change history. Please. We have an administration hard at work trying already...
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. "
"Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."
In both of those speeches, there was little cushioning "weapons of mass destruction" with could produce some day in the future. The language and intent was to make the threat seem imminent.
However, I've never seen anyone seriously argue that Powerbooks are price-competitive with, say, Inspirons, Latitudes, or ThinkPads. Because I'm sorry, they just aint.
What does this mean anymore? If you rip them both apart and examine the junk piles, what they are composed of weighs similar, smells similarly, falls from large heights similarly, and you'd get similar money for the parts.
But...
I work all day on a Dell Latitude, and all evening on a Powerbook, and I can guarantee you that I still consider the PB preferable.
They are not put together the same, don't work the same, don't have the same headaches, don't look the same (on or off), and don't beep the same (well, out of the box...). By definition, if you are free to choose and decided to buy one, you think that one is the better buy, right? You don't bring your shiny new box home and fondle the parts (well, for long...), do you? Don't you turn it on a do something with it? For most of us, preference is more importantly applied to that part of the experience.
And hey, we're all different... except for that guy over there who needs to stop dressing like me. "Price-competative" applies to the whole gamut of differences in the experiences.
Because then google wouldn't have snagged it and made it as huge as it is now. And then they wouldn't have gotten this chance to win the lotto. It's not like google was developing this in secret for the last two years. It's not like they just switched the name a few weeks back when they pulled the "BETA" tag off.
It's just a more profitable form of DNS speculating. And whether the investors win or loose, the lawyers always come out ahead. Funny, that.
Slashdot Mirror
There are already a ton of commercials in the YouTube content already. They just have to figure out how to tap into that. Companies are already getting free advertising when their funny/stupid ad gets uploaded and has hundreds of thousands of views in a few days.
I've got it. They should send a letter to the ad agency or product company explaining that their ad is being watched by viewers without them having paid YouTube for showing it. They can threaten litigation or to delete the ad unless they pay to support the "free" advertising. Heck, start a subscription service where a company's or ad agency's commercials will not be automatically deleted. Instead they get unlimited viewing privileges. There's probably a model for that idea floating out there somewhere...
I think it's a little stretch to say that we know every observable action in our universe. I'll agree with you that in our modern era the common, repeatable and/or testable actions are typically not "*only*
As a scientist with some faith, I'd argue that it's evidence that a societal or religious desire for a God that manifests everyday at the physical experience level is likely misplaced. If you're set on that kind of divine influence being the only possible one, then you're right--there's some fairly rational arguments against it. I tend to be a little more open minded and not presume to know what God is or should be. Instead, I have some tendrils of belief, and tempered with my overly logical leanings, I see where my faith evolves. For me it hasn't disappeared based on the evolution of our scientific knowledge to date, but YMMV.
mh
...just because things are peer reviewed doesn't make them fact..
Science isn't about facts. It's about a process of discovering what's most likely or what the best description is with the current data and observations we've made so far. Sometimes these ideas hold together so well against all new data and observations that they can get pretty darn close to "facts" and are so good that we can make extremely accurate predictions, but that doesn't always mean it's the end of the line for discovery, which is what I think of as a "fact".
Papers in Nature, Science, or any other peer-reviewed journal aren't always right. They don't always agree with one another, and they just might be right enough today but really wrong next year. That is the process. It's OK when there are conflicts, it doesn't mean that someone's necessarily done "bad" science.
I like NPR, but for every worthwhile segment there are ten segments on things like the Wisconsin Cheese industry, or the effect of jazz music on the modern housewife, or some truly terrible music that's only included because it's "interesting."
Listening to NPR on the radio is like browsing slashdot on 0. Sure some of the things are very insightful, but the vast majority are not...
You forgot the "...to me" at the end. This is precisely why we need diverse content like NPR and PRI. If they were serving up only everything that everyone "liked", they'd be just like every other crappy news feed out there that's happy to tell you about the latest shooting spree and sex scandal in gory details (over and over and over again until something more "interesting" comes along), but not about anything that takes more than an visceral reaction to digest.
NPR-type of content is about thinking. The end result is that you might think you don't like it, but you are at least given a chance to hear it and challenged to think about it. For a change.
So, medical science should just be about figuring out how the body works, not how we can make it work better? What's that part called? R&D? Forecasting? Political planning?
When the National Weather Service describes that a hurricane has a high probability to hit, oh, I don't know... New Orleans, or some random coastal city, you're suggesting that they not make specific recommendations for how not to get killed? Are those recommendations from the scientists who study the weather about what we probably should do during severe thunderstorms and tornados too proscriptive for you?
I guess as an astronomer, I shouldn't get too involved in making suggestions for how that asteroid about to hit us that I just discovered and described to you could perhaps be persuaded not to wipe out life on the planet. Surely, that's too political.
Scientists might want to be involved in averting disasters they happen to know something substantial about, you know. Most of us are human. Some of us are evil, but we're still mostly human...
mh
"...might have WMDs. Or Oil."
You mean might be WMDs. Or Oil.
OK, how do you define quality?
Look, it's very simple.
Until my $10^H^H 15^H^H 20 (inflation, you know) buys me a live, in-person, on-demand performance by the artist no matter where I'm located, I am not buying into this "recorded" music line of crap. For 1/5 to 1/10 the price of a honest-to-goodness ticket (well, ignoring the +20% processing/handling fee) for a live performance, they want me to buy this inferior, static (and static-filled!) recording? What a racket. My highly-evolved sense of hearing can't stand resampling of any sort. The subtleties induced in the very cells of the body by harmonic frequencies in the 100 kHz - 10 MHz range define true music, and I will not stand for this insult from the aptly-named "recording" industry.
Now, those video-thingies on the iTMS are pretty cool though... I ponied up my $22.89 for the Schoolhouse Rock collection. That's money well spent!
Having a sexy and slick interface has helped make OSX very popular.
Having a consistent, cross-application interface is likely much more of a driver for OS X than any of the slick eye-candy. The aesthetics might get you to try it out for fun the first time, but the simplicity and consistency are what get you to stay.
I use Linux for a variety of things, but OS X is what's on my desktop and with me on the road. IMHO, the addition of slick-looking interface won't add much to Linux momentum (which is pretty good anyway) without a platform plan for how that interface is implemented.
Like the GP, I also think TF conclusions in the original story are not mutually exclusive, although for more benign reasons. Being social promotes community, which in turn gives a being the sense of a wider existence, belonging, or, perhaps basely, "property". Community can be as close as a family or as wide as a country. Because we are social, any minor confrontation from outside with any part of a community (or within) that one feels they are a member of tends to provoke at least some members of that community, even if they weren't initially involved.
The fact that violence is a vehicle that humans deal with that conflict seems to me to be fairly independent from the fact that their social tendencies enable violence on more grand scales than any of the rest of life on earth.
What are you talking about? Admin accounts normally get password popups to do anything like this (system updates, system-wide installers, etc.). Are you saying in this specific instance it doesn't?
OK, well, if the government pushes this, can we get parity to make all paper shredders scan documents as they pass through so we can recover the "lost" documents that certain officials always seem to have a problem finding during corruption and power abuse investigations?
It's only fair...
You conveniently left out the fact that the top 5% generates 31% of the total income and that the top 50% generates 86%. Suddenly the gap in tax burden isn't quite so "unfair".
Perhaps we should also mention in passing that over the last about two decades, the average tax rate has decreased for that same top 5% nearly 6% whereas the top 50% has decreased only 2%.
Finally, maybe we should mention that from a combination of the last two tables that you pointed us to and this last factoid, it's blindingly clear that the reason the top 5% now contribute 54% of the burden, up from 40% in 1985, is predominantly due to the fact that their share of the total AGI has increased.
Now, all this leaves out another minor element in the whining about who's being fleeced more, which is that income deviates quite far from wealth as you go from the bottom of the top 50% to the bottom of the top 5%. I'm afraid I have a hard time feeling more sympathy for the family whose income is increasing their wealth than for the family who's income is their wealth.
mh
Sadly(?), we now have two terms in the cosmological arena for two, different, unknown causes.
Dark matter is needed to explain a number of different observations that point to an excess of gravitational influence that can not be reconciled with the amount of mass that is detected by radiation. Ideas for the nature of dark matter have ranged from the normal (stellar corpses and/or failed stars) to the exotic (undiscovered elementary particles like the neutralino). Current observations and theories seem to be converging to rule out a normal matter explanation. Dark matter could also be explained by an aspect of gravity that we don't understand yet, but the scientific jury on that is still out despite the "scientific" press assuring us that any one new, barely-published hypothesis as the solution to all our woes. (Sorry, couldn't help myself...)
Dark energy is posited to explain why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, as measured by the latest observations of the structure of the universe. This is the term that is described as a negative pressure that counteracts the influence of gravity at large scales.
Sort of... it shows up anytime you try to use one of the "pro" features, like fullscreen.
So, I ask you: how is this not fair?
Well, since the same 1-5% also tend to represent the business owners who can't seem to figure out how to pay the bottom 50% a decent living wage; offer reasonably priced health-care for their employees; and guarantee a retirement plan for loyal workers that will not be cut off, no, I still find it "not fair". In the name of short-term profit, business has foisted all this onto the individual or society now in the last few decades. If we're going to operate that way, fine. But you can be damn-well sure that a bunch of us are going to expect the social net to expand, not shrink.
I don't think you can believe the overall failure/repair rate from this kind of survey. It's going to be heavily biased towards those of us that have had problems. What you can get from it more reliably is the relative performance of the models and the stats on which components fail more on the various models.
Not working on JWST or even a NASA project right now, I can't delineate costs for you personally, but I would have modded you down as well. Maybe not for being a troll, but for being uninformed. People on projects don't cost their salary alone. And we're not even talking about just some small overhead. These people all work at institutions (NASA centers, universities, etc.) that are funded by projects like this. You forgot to pay for their benefits, retirement, health care, etc. You forgot to give them a place to work, which may exist right now, but you still have to effectively pay for them to work there, which is not limited to the use of that place's equipment, computers, electricity, water, heat (well, for us right now), and toilets. You're talking about factors of 2-3x their salary, not just 1x. And yes, there certainly are more than 1,000 people contributing to JWST if you counted the secretaries and janitors.
All that's pretty good to do the R&D with little serious equipment purchases. Now as they're getting close to actually building space-worthy components, the equipment costs and contracting associated with that part goes up dramatically. A building, even the world's tallest, has parts you can replace and repair at will, pretty much. Although there's serious engineering and lots of clever bits that must go into it, there is still a difference. Plus, the techniques for making buildings are by-and-large not being developed from scratch like what is typically done for most space-based astronomy projects today.
The mirror isn't 8-feet in diameter (that's HST), it's 6.5 meters. And it's not one piece (which would be too large to launch), it's 18 pieces. It's not made of glass, it's made of beryllium. For it to work as promised, it's surface has to be accurate to incredible tolerances, and you have to ensure that the 18 segments together form an effective surface to those same levels of tolerance. And it has to be highly efficient at reflecting infrared light, which in this case is being done with a layer of gold.
After that you have a telescope, but nothing to do with it. We don't use eyepieces or even just a CCD camera these days, you know. Last time I looked, JWST had 3 instruments being built for it. Each one typically has its own set of complicated optics, detectors, hardware, and software. Although I don't know the exact numbers, these days instruments are typically a significant cost of telescope projects. I would not be surprised if each one costs a least 1/2 the cost of an operating JWST mirror.
As it's being built, you're also paying people to make sure it's going to be useful after it's launched. There's all the software and ground hardware that goes into the setting up an infrastructure for the community to propose their science, the planning and taking of observations, data reduction tools, etc. You don't start that bit the day after it's been completed. And those costs are ongoing, like they are with HST right now.
Now do you want to do some science with it? That costs money too. And unlike your buildings, we astronomers don't (er, can't) pay rent. JWST doesn't make money like your building, and it's cost is not subsided by anyone like your buildings likely are. Every dollar, euro, sweat, and tear is launched up to space with a wish and a prayer. And all we get out is some random new facts about the universe. Hope you like our work.
Now, I can't speak for high-level government officials or contract companies, but I can pretty confidently say that 99% of us in the field who drive the science for these machines are not in it for the money. There are very few personal perks aside from the coolness factor of working on something that a lot of people find fascinating. To a good approximation, this is the c
Although I'm a cynic more often than not, a tiny part of me wonders if this whole thing was a plant by one or more non-idiots to show the wonderful world of DRM to the public (and media) at large. Such a person would be easy to spot since they'd have one seriously huge set of kohones (gender regardless...).
While I understand what this new clause is saying now, what I don't understand is why the license itself is preventing a modification to the parent source. The freedom to create a modified work from a prior GPL licensed work and then explicitly enabling future modified works to be created from your public distribution of your modification was the whole point in the first place, wasn't it?
Even if this new restriction helps maintain proper distribution in the sprit of GPL, it seems to me that placing any clause in the license that restricts your ability to modify the code (not the license/distribution/etc.) for a particular use becomes a slippery slope.
Will you be prevented from using snippets of this GPLv3 web code (which contains a source download mechanism) in an application that has nothing to do with a web application? Let's say you distribute your new non-web app that has a random function collected from such a GPLv3 web app. You distribute your new app with this function under GPLv3 (as did the web-app who's function you're using) and provide source via traditional download methods. Now someone takes your GPLv3 non-web-app and turns it back into a web app. How are they supposed to know they are technically supposed to distribute their code (or just that function?) via some public user interface as the original function did?
Again, I can kind of see some logic in the original thinking to not remove a author-created self-distribution mechanism, but the implementation and implication that code is now "tagged" somehow by GPLv3 to always be auto-distributable looks like a bad idea, at first glance to me.
You bet. Many times. I also read your reply to the GP post at the time many times before replying. GP said:
You then said:
(emphasis mine)
No, everyone did not think he said there are millions of ICBM's. I'm sorry if I assumed you were just exaggerating to make your point. Obviously you were being serious. Everyone thought he said exactly the quotes I posted, which were from public speeches made before the war. They clearly state that he thought they had such weapons in their possession. Whether they were on ICBMs or not is irrelevant since the second clearly stated thread in those speeches was that Sadam had links to terrorists and therefore those weapons would be available for them to use.
The fact remains that there have been no WMDs found since our second invasion. And credible reports of sites able to produce such things on reasonable timescales are few to none. His explicit link to terrorists has also proved extremely tenuous. History will eventually tells us (hopefully) if this was purely misinformation or organized deceit. What's appalling to me at this point is that there has been little credit taken, apologies made, or change in course based on the fact that this critical "evidence" used as a major part of the justification for the invasion was not true.
This attitude:
Is what saddens me most about the country today. Our global dominance has reduced the lives of many in the world to an expendable commodity for our prosperity and "security".
Don't change history. Please. We have an administration hard at work trying already...
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/2
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some of the most lethal weapons ever devised. "
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/2
"Our nation enters this conflict reluctantly -- yet, our purpose is sure. The people of the United States and our friends and allies will not live at the mercy of an outlaw regime that threatens the peace with weapons of mass murder."
In both of those speeches, there was little cushioning "weapons of mass destruction" with could produce some day in the future. The language and intent was to make the threat seem imminent.
However, I've never seen anyone seriously argue that Powerbooks are price-competitive with, say, Inspirons, Latitudes, or ThinkPads. Because I'm sorry, they just aint.
What does this mean anymore? If you rip them both apart and examine the junk piles, what they are composed of weighs similar, smells similarly, falls from large heights similarly, and you'd get similar money for the parts.
But...
I work all day on a Dell Latitude, and all evening on a Powerbook, and I can guarantee you that I still consider the PB preferable.
They are not put together the same, don't work the same, don't have the same headaches, don't look the same (on or off), and don't beep the same (well, out of the box...). By definition, if you are free to choose and decided to buy one, you think that one is the better buy, right? You don't bring your shiny new box home and fondle the parts (well, for long...), do you? Don't you turn it on a do something with it? For most of us, preference is more importantly applied to that part of the experience.
And hey, we're all different... except for that guy over there who needs to stop dressing like me. "Price-competative" applies to the whole gamut of differences in the experiences.
Hmmm... your .sig seems to disagree with you :)
Because then google wouldn't have snagged it and made it as huge as it is now. And then they wouldn't have gotten this chance to win the lotto. It's not like google was developing this in secret for the last two years. It's not like they just switched the name a few weeks back when they pulled the "BETA" tag off.
It's just a more profitable form of DNS speculating. And whether the investors win or loose, the lawyers always come out ahead. Funny, that.
iPod nano... ...iMagnifyingGlass not included.