TAIWAN, New China - United States And Nations Air Force officials today reported that their recent losses to rebels supporting the former, communist oligarchy stem mainly from a lack of quarters.
"It's just a basic fact of supply," one anonymous pilot said. "We brought along enough minifacs to churn out drones, and they can build drones mostly from dirt, but the fact is that they need a small amount of metals. It just so happens that the standard American quarter fits their needs perfectly, so the minifacs' manufacturer got a waiver from the government, and now -feed in a quarter, out pops a drone. The rebels can shoot one or two of 'em down; almost the only way we can flush 'em out is to attack in swarms, and that can get expensive real quick." Waiving a handful of dollar bills, he continued, "These things are useless without change."
A cargo ship with several metric tons of yen coins, to be used as an emergency substitute, is due to arrive from Japan later today.
Umm... what about not putting lives at risk by future use of UCAV technologies?
+1, Ironic.
Yeah, I know what you meant, and it's a good direction to go in (so at least war can be less bloody), but...this is the military we're talking about here. The guys who, in the worst of situations, are required to kill the enemy (that being the only way to effectively disable some of the US's enemies), and will likely be required to do so well after the last manned frontline fighter has been retired from official service.
Well...technically, over half of all homo sapiens who have ever lived are alive today, by some counts. And medical science is giving them longer lives, at least in the industrialized areas where most homo sapiens geekus sysadminus live. So it's quite possible, though by no means certain, that the chances are less than 100%. (While it can be argued that the Sun going nova, or heat death of the universe, could end a sysadmin's life if nothing else does before then, there is the theoretical possibility of perpetual escape - emigration to another solar system, then to some other universe which is not in heat death while the current one goes through a, possibly artificially induced, collapse and Big Bang cycle.)
Right, and what are they going to do with that raw data flood? Ok, sure, with enough hard drive space they can log every bit going from here to China and back (changing the tape backups every few seconds, but it's possible in theory). Grepping through that for "osama sez nuke the pentagon at midnite" is way beyond their computational resources.
Problem is, who starts off with the land rights, to sell to others? Any number of organizations whose members have never been Up There will claim to have rights, and even claim to have sold them.
Perhaps a "homesteading" equivalent: once there are enough people actually working and developing land up there to create conflicts, then the people with hardware up there (who are the only ones who can physically do anything about it) could recognize the property rights of someone who has physically developed the claimed land. If you've never been there or sent anything there, and haven't bought from someone who has, then you have no rights. (Guess what? This means the UN has no jurisdiction either, and its treaties are worthless.) Any nation could deal, independently, with those who go up and come back, or who remotely operate machinery from the Earth, but that would be by that nation's own laws. (The US looks promising in that regard, having never signed the no-private-property-in-space treaty.)
Getting in on this a bit late, but...I wonder, would the following format get over that "can't skip a week or two without losing what's going on"?
Make a series out of half hour episodes. Each week, broadcast the new ep preceded by the prior week's ep. Network gets to pad out their schedule while only paying for 13 hours' content (26 eps, one a week for two seasons, times 1/2 hour per ep) before (if) the series catches on; viewers who skip one week can see the "new" ep the next week.
Apparently, the IP addresses counted as "equipment" that had to be replaced, not to mention the email system.
T3 is seeking loss and damages of $7,907 (AU$14,000) for replacing blocked or compromised IP numbers, $2,683 (AU$4,750) for labor costs of technicians to establish an alternative e-mail system, $2,824 (AU$5,000) to purchase a new server computer and $11,296 (AU$20,000) for loss of income it claims to have incurred over a 20-day waiting period for a new Internet connection to be installed.
None of which was necessary. Change business models so as *not* to spam, which was the action requested (and quite probably spelled out in email to the spammer at one point), and none of that moeny would have had to be spent (unless "closing open relays and no longer spamming" counts as "establishing an alternative email system", but that's still brought upon self).
Jeremy Malcolm, an independent Perth-based solicitor who specializes in IT law and is representing McNichol [the defendant], said he wouldn't be putting in a defense straight away and would be applying for a summary judgment in the hopes of not having to go to trial.
Damn straight!
Malcolm described the statement of claim against his client as a ?fairly weak claim?brought about to intimidate a critic of T3 Direct.?
Isn't that the definition of a SLAPP suit in the States?
On the Web at large, yes. I would have to disagree that Slashdot is properly set up to do this, though - but the difference may be that, to me, the necessary "infrastructure" is more of a human issue (for instance, people who know how to evaulate tutorials, and who have a mindset to actually edit the tutorials instead of focus on a news-with-user-comments site) than a technology issue.
Why, yes! And we could call it, oh, say, Technical Documentation Already Available On The Web (TDAAOTW for short). We could shamelessly copy-and-paste from the W3C's articles on XML (nevermind that they'd update their information as they found holes, and might not tell us to update our copy), whatever tutorials we could find by googling on the right words...
Slashdot has a function. Setting up the infrastructure to do tutorials et al properly would distract from its function, and likely not increase the budgeted resources it has to serve its existing function. (If it paid for itself, that'd be a point in its favor, but I don't think it would.)
Nope. It's about draconian laws becoming acceptable elsewhere. If it was only the US passing laws like this, we could possibly emigrate if things got too bad. But that requires somewhere to emigrate to, somewhere without the same conditions we're objecting to.
How about the bozos who insist that all the private contracts be on a cost-plus basis? That is, however much the contractor spends, plus a guaranteed percent profit, is what the government will cover.
Under those circumstances, contractors' engineers who suggest cheaper (or faster, since that means less billable hours) ways to do things tend to get fired because they are provably costing the company money (out of the percent profit at least, if not the base cost).
Raw material resources, perhaps. But how are we going to get up there? NASA's bungled every single attempt it's made to significantly reduce the cost of getting up there, and without that, ain't no terraformin' gonna happen. I'd almost say it's time to get NASA out of the way and/or reduce it to funding, without interference or controls (beyond verification of claims after the claims are made), private attempts to get to orbit and beyond. "Money to first X people to reach this milestone" type programs - say, $100,000, or even just $10,000, to anyone who can launch a sounding rocket to, say, a mile or so, with technology that could feasbly be scaled up to provide manned orbital (or beyond) access, would do so much for current efforts without really taking much out of their budget (though, granted, problem in who determines "feasably").
Currently, the only people likely to get to the Moon in the next ten years, if anyone, are private (read: commercial) US space efforts and China. Even with this bill, I would hold my bets on NASA being able to establish a presence, but at least they have a greater chance of doing so if ordered to do so.
Fine. Then someone needs to counter-propose the abolishment of copyright, then offer as a "compromise" setting copyright back to the USA's original 14 years (with optional renewal for 14 more). Let's see how bold the MPAA is when it understands that the measures it's taking endanger its revenue stream...or will they be determined to go out in a blaze of glory? (That's one bonfire I'd gladly warm my hands to.)
Actually, most of the funding for the X-Prize was spent on promoting the X-Prize. From what I hear, there actually isn't that much prize money left...unless X-Prize can find a new funder, of course.
Doesn't matter about the sabotage. They won't establish a permanent moon base for the same reason we didn't - it just costs too much to justify what they can get out of it. Now, there are those (in the US and other places) working on making access to the Moon (and, indeed, to everything in and above Earth orbit) cheaper; those people will be the only ones who can afford to establish a permanent lunar presence.
It'd be so ironic if the second space race turned out to be China's government vs. these private US efforts, with the US government rendered ineffectual 'cause it neither has the manpower and resources of China's government (once private industry seriously gets going on this, it could hire away anyone talented enough at NASA et al) nor the technological edge of private industry (if it insists on relying on the space shuttle et al; note that Boeing and Lockheed, due to their own internal beauracracies, are effectively part of the "US government" side for this discussion even though they're technically companies too). On one side, communists; on the other, their stated mortal enemies - not just capitalists, but for-profit corporations. And they're both trying to exploit the Moon.
Seriously, that's been predicted since the '80s. Sure, pictures have their uses - human pattern-recognition capability, both visual and otherwise, is continually underutilized - but for communicating back from the human to the computer, for instance to set up the pretty pictures and all those other uses? The one advantage of text that has become somewhat mitigated with time is low bandwidth. Modern human languages are, basically, text and voice because those modes can express so much relative to any other mode...and of the two, text can be used almost everywhere voice can, but voice is not appropriate for many situations.
Oh, I don't know. If it could detect Cinematically Important stuff for me to pay attention to amidst the background noise of marketroids, that might be useful. Especially if it gained a reputation for doing so: all I'd need to do for most meetings would be show up and demonstrate that Navi is detecting no significance in anything that is about to be discussed, so I could get back to work instead of falling asleep in the meeting. (Of course, if it was company-issued, it'd probably be set to always detect the CEO or any other high exec who happened to be present, regardless of actual significance...)
Their most relevant mistake in this case is "cost-plus" contracts, where they pay "however much it costs our contractors, plus a guaranteed profit". This thoroughly discourages any but the most bloated proposals from contractors. Under these circumstances, a contractor's engineer can be fired for suggesting how to save money, because that will cost the contractor the amount saved plus the lost profit on that amount.
This one is endemic to NASA, and is perhaps the primary reason why they are incapable of low-cost space flight. This, alone, could explain why private enterprise could suceed where NASA has utterly failed.
What Wolf said. Heck, one of the groups (ERPS) hasn't even had to use pumps in their flight testing (yet - and that's not for want of tests). And we did knock one together for a few thousand - $4,400, specifically, for our KISS rocket.
I feel sorry for the flight testers that work for Carmack's company.
Don't. He's using sandbags and the like as "flight test" payloads - and that's with the rockets not going more than several feet off the ground (so far, though that may soon change). Good thing, too, since he's aced a few of them.
Slashdot Mirror
2025 or so...
TAIWAN, New China - United States And Nations Air Force officials today reported that their recent losses to rebels supporting the former, communist oligarchy stem mainly from a lack of quarters.
"It's just a basic fact of supply," one anonymous pilot said. "We brought along enough minifacs to churn out drones, and they can build drones mostly from dirt, but the fact is that they need a small amount of metals. It just so happens that the standard American quarter fits their needs perfectly, so the minifacs' manufacturer got a waiver from the government, and now -feed in a quarter, out pops a drone. The rebels can shoot one or two of 'em down; almost the only way we can flush 'em out is to attack in swarms, and that can get expensive real quick." Waiving a handful of dollar bills, he continued, "These things are useless without change."
A cargo ship with several metric tons of yen coins, to be used as an emergency substitute, is due to arrive from Japan later today.
Umm... what about not putting lives at risk by future use of UCAV technologies?
+1, Ironic.
Yeah, I know what you meant, and it's a good direction to go in (so at least war can be less bloody), but...this is the military we're talking about here. The guys who, in the worst of situations, are required to kill the enemy (that being the only way to effectively disable some of the US's enemies), and will likely be required to do so well after the last manned frontline fighter has been retired from official service.
- Anonymous Coward - Red
- Script Kitty (or Kiddie) - Black
- Admin - Blue
- Uber Hacker - White
- Cowboy Neil (or Neal; possibly also Moderator or Editor) - Green
What more alignment do you need for M:tG?Well...technically, over half of all homo sapiens who have ever lived are alive today, by some counts. And medical science is giving them longer lives, at least in the industrialized areas where most homo sapiens geekus sysadminus live. So it's quite possible, though by no means certain, that the chances are less than 100%. (While it can be argued that the Sun going nova, or heat death of the universe, could end a sysadmin's life if nothing else does before then, there is the theoretical possibility of perpetual escape - emigration to another solar system, then to some other universe which is not in heat death while the current one goes through a, possibly artificially induced, collapse and Big Bang cycle.)
Right, and what are they going to do with that raw data flood? Ok, sure, with enough hard drive space they can log every bit going from here to China and back (changing the tape backups every few seconds, but it's possible in theory). Grepping through that for "osama sez nuke the pentagon at midnite" is way beyond their computational resources.
Problem is, who starts off with the land rights, to sell to others? Any number of organizations whose members have never been Up There will claim to have rights, and even claim to have sold them.
Perhaps a "homesteading" equivalent: once there are enough people actually working and developing land up there to create conflicts, then the people with hardware up there (who are the only ones who can physically do anything about it) could recognize the property rights of someone who has physically developed the claimed land. If you've never been there or sent anything there, and haven't bought from someone who has, then you have no rights. (Guess what? This means the UN has no jurisdiction either, and its treaties are worthless.) Any nation could deal, independently, with those who go up and come back, or who remotely operate machinery from the Earth, but that would be by that nation's own laws. (The US looks promising in that regard, having never signed the no-private-property-in-space treaty.)
Getting in on this a bit late, but...I wonder, would the following format get over that "can't skip a week or two without losing what's going on"?
Make a series out of half hour episodes. Each week, broadcast the new ep preceded by the prior week's ep. Network gets to pad out their schedule while only paying for 13 hours' content (26 eps, one a week for two seasons, times 1/2 hour per ep) before (if) the series catches on; viewers who skip one week can see the "new" ep the next week.
I can already see the next generation of spam... "Make $$$$$$$$ free!!!! Sue anti-spammers!!!! "
Or, if this case gets tossed out and anti-spam laws go into effect...
"Make $$$$$$$$ free!!!! Sue spammers!!!! (But not us, please.)"
Apparently, the IP addresses counted as "equipment" that had to be replaced, not to mention the email system.
T3 is seeking loss and damages of $7,907 (AU$14,000) for replacing blocked or compromised IP numbers, $2,683 (AU$4,750) for labor costs of technicians to establish an alternative e-mail system, $2,824 (AU$5,000) to purchase a new server computer and $11,296 (AU$20,000) for loss of income it claims to have incurred over a 20-day waiting period for a new Internet connection to be installed.
None of which was necessary. Change business models so as *not* to spam, which was the action requested (and quite probably spelled out in email to the spammer at one point), and none of that moeny would have had to be spent (unless "closing open relays and no longer spamming" counts as "establishing an alternative email system", but that's still brought upon self).
Jeremy Malcolm, an independent Perth-based solicitor who specializes in IT law and is representing McNichol [the defendant], said he wouldn't be putting in a defense straight away and would be applying for a summary judgment in the hopes of not having to go to trial.
Damn straight!
Malcolm described the statement of claim against his client as a ?fairly weak claim?brought about to intimidate a critic of T3 Direct.?
Isn't that the definition of a SLAPP suit in the States?
On the Web at large, yes. I would have to disagree that Slashdot is properly set up to do this, though - but the difference may be that, to me, the necessary "infrastructure" is more of a human issue (for instance, people who know how to evaulate tutorials, and who have a mindset to actually edit the tutorials instead of focus on a news-with-user-comments site) than a technology issue.
Why, yes! And we could call it, oh, say, Technical Documentation Already Available On The Web (TDAAOTW for short). We could shamelessly copy-and-paste from the W3C's articles on XML (nevermind that they'd update their information as they found holes, and might not tell us to update our copy), whatever tutorials we could find by googling on the right words...
Slashdot has a function. Setting up the infrastructure to do tutorials et al properly would distract from its function, and likely not increase the budgeted resources it has to serve its existing function. (If it paid for itself, that'd be a point in its favor, but I don't think it would.)
Nope. It's about draconian laws becoming acceptable elsewhere. If it was only the US passing laws like this, we could possibly emigrate if things got too bad. But that requires somewhere to emigrate to, somewhere without the same conditions we're objecting to.
who should we blame for the cost overruns ???
How about the bozos who insist that all the private contracts be on a cost-plus basis? That is, however much the contractor spends, plus a guaranteed percent profit, is what the government will cover.
Under those circumstances, contractors' engineers who suggest cheaper (or faster, since that means less billable hours) ways to do things tend to get fired because they are provably costing the company money (out of the percent profit at least, if not the base cost).
Raw material resources, perhaps. But how are we going to get up there? NASA's bungled every single attempt it's made to significantly reduce the cost of getting up there, and without that, ain't no terraformin' gonna happen. I'd almost say it's time to get NASA out of the way and/or reduce it to funding, without interference or controls (beyond verification of claims after the claims are made), private attempts to get to orbit and beyond. "Money to first X people to reach this milestone" type programs - say, $100,000, or even just $10,000, to anyone who can launch a sounding rocket to, say, a mile or so, with technology that could feasbly be scaled up to provide manned orbital (or beyond) access, would do so much for current efforts without really taking much out of their budget (though, granted, problem in who determines "feasably").
Currently, the only people likely to get to the Moon in the next ten years, if anyone, are private (read: commercial) US space efforts and China. Even with this bill, I would hold my bets on NASA being able to establish a presence, but at least they have a greater chance of doing so if ordered to do so.
Fine. Then someone needs to counter-propose the abolishment of copyright, then offer as a "compromise" setting copyright back to the USA's original 14 years (with optional renewal for 14 more). Let's see how bold the MPAA is when it understands that the measures it's taking endanger its revenue stream...or will they be determined to go out in a blaze of glory? (That's one bonfire I'd gladly warm my hands to.)
Actually, most of the funding for the X-Prize was spent on promoting the X-Prize. From what I hear, there actually isn't that much prize money left...unless X-Prize can find a new funder, of course.
Doesn't matter about the sabotage. They won't establish a permanent moon base for the same reason we didn't - it just costs too much to justify what they can get out of it. Now, there are those (in the US and other places) working on making access to the Moon (and, indeed, to everything in and above Earth orbit) cheaper; those people will be the only ones who can afford to establish a permanent lunar presence.
It'd be so ironic if the second space race turned out to be China's government vs. these private US efforts, with the US government rendered ineffectual 'cause it neither has the manpower and resources of China's government (once private industry seriously gets going on this, it could hire away anyone talented enough at NASA et al) nor the technological edge of private industry (if it insists on relying on the space shuttle et al; note that Boeing and Lockheed, due to their own internal beauracracies, are effectively part of the "US government" side for this discussion even though they're technically companies too). On one side, communists; on the other, their stated mortal enemies - not just capitalists, but for-profit corporations. And they're both trying to exploit the Moon.
Imminent death of text predicted! Film at 11.
Seriously, that's been predicted since the '80s. Sure, pictures have their uses - human pattern-recognition capability, both visual and otherwise, is continually underutilized - but for communicating back from the human to the computer, for instance to set up the pretty pictures and all those other uses? The one advantage of text that has become somewhat mitigated with time is low bandwidth. Modern human languages are, basically, text and voice because those modes can express so much relative to any other mode...and of the two, text can be used almost everywhere voice can, but voice is not appropriate for many situations.
Oh, I don't know. If it could detect Cinematically Important stuff for me to pay attention to amidst the background noise of marketroids, that might be useful. Especially if it gained a reputation for doing so: all I'd need to do for most meetings would be show up and demonstrate that Navi is detecting no significance in anything that is about to be discussed, so I could get back to work instead of falling asleep in the meeting. (Of course, if it was company-issued, it'd probably be set to always detect the CEO or any other high exec who happened to be present, regardless of actual significance...)
Show me the real rocket and then we can talk.
g
Low bandwidth: http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/sff_low.mpg and http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/sas02_low.mpg
High bandwidth: http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/sff_high.mpg and http://media.armadilloaerospace.com/sas02_high.mp
And just to plug my own group's rockets: http://cube.erps.org/movies/.
NASA doesn't make mistakes?
Their most relevant mistake in this case is "cost-plus" contracts, where they pay "however much it costs our contractors, plus a guaranteed profit". This thoroughly discourages any but the most bloated proposals from contractors. Under these circumstances, a contractor's engineer can be fired for suggesting how to save money, because that will cost the contractor the amount saved plus the lost profit on that amount.
This one is endemic to NASA, and is perhaps the primary reason why they are incapable of low-cost space flight. This, alone, could explain why private enterprise could suceed where NASA has utterly failed.
Some of them were. Check http://www.armadilloaerospace.com
for details.
What Wolf said. Heck, one of the groups (ERPS) hasn't even had to use pumps in their flight testing (yet - and that's not for want of tests). And we did knock one together for a few thousand - $4,400, specifically, for our KISS rocket.
I feel sorry for the flight testers that work for Carmack's company.
Don't. He's using sandbags and the like as "flight test" payloads - and that's with the rockets not going more than several feet off the ground (so far, though that may soon change). Good thing, too, since he's aced a few of them.