That's not currently a fair comparison to make however. Current unmanned aircraft are nowhere near as capable as an F-22 or an F-35. Sure, in theory, an unmanned craft with comparable performance and capabilities should be somewhat cheaper because you can leave out a bunch of the pilot interface/support/safety gear, but I don't think the difference will be as vast as the cost difference today between an F-22 and a predator drone.
Interestingly enough, I just ran a few numbers on the Bureau of Labor Statistics(bls.gov) inflation calculator. I assumed a $50 price point for SMB (I don't remember exactly what it was, I was only 6 years old at the time), and took 1986 as its first big year (it was released in late '85 according to wikipedia). Anyways, the BLS website says that in 1986, $50.00 had the same buying power as $96.91 in 2008.
Generally any sort of inhabited tunnel/vault/underground space is not just exposed dirt/rock walls and ceiling. There's almost always some sort of lining. I think some of the fancier giant tunnel boring machines used here on earth actually have a system that sprays concrete on the tunnel walls as they digs it out.
Whatever it's made of, there's a number of good reasons to have some sort of liner. It can provide additional structural support. It can stop dust from falling from the walls. It can make the tunnel water-tight(not particularly important on the moon). Depending on how it's built, it can provide a layer to more conveniently run power/lights/whatever. And I'm sure there are some other reasons.
Since concrete will likely be in rather short supply on the moon, maybe these bricks are the best replacement. Plus you still need material to create internal partitions, and no matter how extensive your tunnel city becomes, you're most certainly have some number of surface buildings for various reasons.
Well, if it actually went down the way your son told you, then I think he's learned the wrong lesson. If I was removed from a class over a reason as silly as that, I would make some significant efforts to have either that teacher or his/her superiors have to answer for it. You might have to pester the hell out of them, but it can be done. I'd expect to at least be allowed back into the class, and maybe with an apology from the teacher. The lesson here is to not be such a sissy, and that sometimes you have to push back a little bit when people don't give you some basic respect.
It's a small matter, with at best a small victory, but why not start small when you're still in college?
I'm generally happy to drill a few holes through different parts of the platters and then just whack the whole thing a couple times with a hammer. Sure, someone with a the right equipment and a lot of time on their hands could potentially take the drive apart, and pull some data off the undamaged parts of the disk, but my data isn't worth the trouble.
That being said, I've sometimes smashed them further just for the fun of it, and completely obliterating a drive is a lot harder than you'd originally think. Sure, it stops being functional after you smash it a few times, but it doesn't just bust open and have its guts spill out everywhere. Those little things are solid. It'd be much faster to take one apart with the proper screwdriver set than it is with a claw hammer.
I think you're posting that just because it makes for a sort of silly anecdote, but it illustrates an interesting point. There are a bunch of different levels of "being green," and some of the easier levels to reach are really just simple matters of planning. Reusing waste heat is a great idea, doesn't require any new technology, and if you're planning a new data center, it doesn't intrinsically cost any more money than your previous way of doing things.
You don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to cover your roof with solar panels in order to make your business or home more efficient and "green". Significant steps can be made just by putting a little more thought into how you organize all the pieces you already have.
People aren't going to stop having kids, and people aren't going to stop using technology to extend their lives. Survival and reproduction are the two most fundamental biological impulses that humans have. Reducing global population growth sounds like a good idea on paper, but any efforts to forcefully do so are immoral at best.
But even ignoring that fact, I don't think you're right that it'd be more efficient. It's true that history has generally shown that as standards of living increase, population growth tends to slow. But at the same time, individual consumption goes way up. Africa has birth rates well beyond those of the USA, but are you really trying to make the argument that Africa is more to blame for resource overuse and pollution than the USA is?
The big problem for consumers is that when buying an assembled product such as a computer, there's really no way to determine whether or not it's actually "green" other than by taking their word for it. There's just too many pieces from too many sources for a consumer to realistically track it all down. What needs to happen is the industry needs to rally around a third party grading system that tries to objectively measure and then certify finished products.
The example that comes to mind is the LEED system that is used for buildings. The architecture/construction world has the green building council, and through all that there's some standardized education systems for helping people learn how to do sustainable design, and there's a point system that is used to basically grade buildings on the basis of green/sustainable design/construction/etc. This system allows a building owner/tenants/etc to be confident that their building is actually sustainable, and not just take the architect/contractor's word for it. But it also has other positive side effects, because it gives the architects/contractor's some solid goals to shoot for if they're attempting to design sustainably, and it also gives building component/materials manufacturers good benchmarks to shoot for when designing their individual products.
There are a number of competing systems to LEED, but at least in the US, LEED is the main game in town.
It's very rare for Apple to update any product more than once per year, if even that often. Even just basic speed / disk space bumps don't happen all that regularly. They don't constantly dribble out minor upgrades, although occasionally the new version is little more than a speed bump. More importantly, when a product is updated, the old one doesn't suddenly stop working.
Regardless of Apple's release schedules, I don't see how that really ties into the rest of your argument. Whether Apple releases four completely new laptops or 100 smaller upgrades over the next 8 years, how does that affect whether you keep your current laptop for 2 years or 8? Unless you're suggesting that the industry as a whole should artificially restrain the the inevitable growth of computer power so that you don't feel so bad about having an older machine?
iPods, iPhones, and most certainly this new laptop do not have unreplaceable batteries. The batteries just take a little more work to replace. It's slightly less convenient, but if it's something that only happens once every few years or so, then there are lots of design decisions that could make the tradeoff worthwhile.
I don't know if such an attitude is particularly feasible over the long run for most jobs. Chances are your job requires at least occasional contact with other people, be they coworkers or clients. If you're unable or unwilling to effectively communicate with these people, then a lot of your work is probably going to go to waste.
My office has a guy exactly like that, he has many years of experience and some very valuable technical knowledge, but zero interest in communicating with anyone about his work. As a result, he often creates work that is functional and crisply done, but doesn't actually meet the client's needs, because he didn't bother to listen when he met with the client. Other times, he'll be contributing work for a co-worker's project, but his lack of communication with that project manager throughout the tasks makes it much more difficult for the work to be integrated into the larger project.
This individual is fortunate that occasionally some of his particular technical skills are incredibly valuable, and I think that that is the only reason why he's still around.
Just a nitpick, but Ockham's Razor does not prove anything. Nothing at all. It's just an often times useful assumption to take when making other assumptions. It's not some inherent physical law of nature. It can sometimes lead you in the correct direction, but it is not any sort of real indisputable proof or logic.
At most, a human driver is only going to know the answer to your number 3. Or do you turn around and use binoculars to inspect the tires of every car that follows behind you?
I think that's pretty important to note. MS used some dirty tricks to help it destroy Netscape, but Netscape also played right into their hands by letting their browser languish. I don't know if MS really deserved to win that round of the browser wars, but Netscape deserved to lose.
Luckily for Nintendo they've already made a decent product selling the Wii itself. They're making money faster than they can count it, and Wii's are selling just as quickly as they were two years ago (maybe even faster since availability is somewhat better) I don't think they care in the least if you buy an Xbox360 to sit next to your Wii.
Well, to be fair, Jobs is not an engineer. He's very involved in the way that Apple's products work, although I doubt that at the deep technical level he's got much of an idea how it works.
Your overall point definitely makes some sense. The idea that being a CEO somewhere makes you qualified to be CEO anywhere is silly. It's important that the CEO actually believes in their products. Jobs is prone to hyperbole, and I'm not sure that he actually believes himself when he says that every new product is the best thing Apple has ever done, but I do think that he's truly proud of the products that he's up there on stage introducing. And that pride is a result of a lot of hard work and involvement for him personally, not just the fact that it's going to make him a bunch more money.
Minor nitpick, but I think it's misleading to speak of "functionality" separate from "ease-of-use." One of the roots of Apple's continued success is their understanding that for a very large percentage of consumers, if a particular function isn't easy to use, it might as well not exist. My cellphone technically has a web browser in it, but it's so awkward that it might as well not be there. I haven't used it in years, despite the fact that I've often been in positions where looking something up real quick would've been useful. The same goes for my phone's mp3 player. Despite the laundry list of functionality that was printed on the box it came in, my phone might as well do nothing other than make calls and display the time, because that's all I can use it for without it driving me crazy.
There's two things that my boss does that really upsets me more than anything else. The first one is that he will often promise my time to other people,be it clients/coworkers/consultants/whoever, without first checking with me to see if that time is actually available. Not only does that saddle me with significantly more work than I want to deal with, but it creates a situation where this new task takes up time that I had personally committed to helping someone else, and so I get stuck having to apologize for not keeping up my end of the bargain with them. And even though everyone that works in the office understands how that sort of situation happens, in stressful times, it just serves to create animosity between the different project leaders when one of them "steals" my time from the other. It also makes it nearly impossible for people to create accurate schedules because they have no idea what else will suddenly fall on their desk, or when their help will get randomly pulled away.
The second thing, which in a way causes a lot of the first, is that my boss has a lot of difficulty with setting priorities. As a big boss, he's got dozens of projects under his supervision to at least some degree, and so he tends to wander from crisis to crisis as they arise across all the work in the office. And so whatever the current crisis is, that's what his priority is for that day (or sometimes hour). It's a huge drag on office efficiency, and projects that should take three weeks to get out the door end up taking 6 weeks of work, stretched out over 8 months of on and off progress.
Overall, I'd say one of the most important things is to help your workers stay focused. Lay out the priorities, give them a clear path. I don't mind so much if the endzone is far away and there's a bunch of obstacles in the path, as long as I can see the goalposts.
Yeah, so, the fact that Obama met with Blagojevich right around the election definitely means that he knows all about and is likely involved in the governor trying to sell the seat over the past few weeks. That's definitely the logical conclusion.
Don't be dense just because it helps your agenda. Obama wasn't trying to claim that he's never spoken to Blagojevich. He's claiming that neither he nor his team was involved in or had any knowledge of the crimes that Blagojevich is now accused of.
I dunno, maybe I'm just an idiot, but I personally think that there are a few things that the incoming administration should prioritize over establishing human colonies somewhere other than on the Earth.
But either way, did you go add your question to that website? Why be skeptical when you can go and easily test it.
Uhhh, I get what you're trying to say, but in this context, my response is something along the lines of "So what?"
Obama isn't asking for policy decisions and then promising to enact the ones that get the most votes. They're asking for questions, and having people rank the questions. While I'd certainly be more careful about taking advice from someone less educated, I don't see what's bad about encouraging them to ask questions.
Will certain politically charged questions get strongly upvoted? Most certainly. Does that make this exercise worthless or somehow harmful? Hardly.
People as a whole aren't as stupid as you think. Don't be so biased against uneducated individuals. They have as much a right to address the government with their grievances as you do.
Let's see... designing a very well received mobile phone(with hardly any previous phone development experience, releasing a workable SDK for it, building a scalable and usable application distribution system, and doing an excellent job of marketing the hell out of it all... Nope, Apple hasn't done any work at all.
Yeah, it's certainly not an easy problem. Although the view on it that I would take is that you find a filter than basically bans the really blatant stuff, and what gets through gets through. At the same time you make sure that it is made very clear to the students that certain types of material are unacceptable for accessing with the school's computers, and that there will be consequences to purposefully accessing that content.
The filter is there, more than anything, just to add a layer of seriousness to the rule. Sort of like while the yellow caution tape that they put up around crime scenes isn't a particularly effective barrier against people entering the site, it does create a situation where someone ducking under it and walking around where they shouldn't cannot reasonably claim to be unaware that they were doing something wrong.
It's not so much about shielding kids from the whole world, and more about the fact that school isn't the place for that sort of thing. Making at least a basic effort to restrict access to that sort of content helps reinforce to kids that it's not appropriate in a school setting.
Also it shouldn't be the responsibility for random teachers to be put on the spot to have to deal with stuff like that. In high school it's probably not such a big deal, but for younger children I pity a teacher who has a student bring up a porn website and share it with kids who have not been exposed to that sort of stuff before. Is it going to damage those children and ruin their lives? Probably not, but it's not the job of a third grade teacher (nor should it be) to introduce their students to that, particularly via random porn sites.
You're right that sooner or later kids are going to find that stuff, but that doesn't mean that efforts to control their access to it on a school computer are wrong or worthless.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not currently a fair comparison to make however. Current unmanned aircraft are nowhere near as capable as an F-22 or an F-35. Sure, in theory, an unmanned craft with comparable performance and capabilities should be somewhat cheaper because you can leave out a bunch of the pilot interface/support/safety gear, but I don't think the difference will be as vast as the cost difference today between an F-22 and a predator drone.
Interestingly enough, I just ran a few numbers on the Bureau of Labor Statistics(bls.gov) inflation calculator. I assumed a $50 price point for SMB (I don't remember exactly what it was, I was only 6 years old at the time), and took 1986 as its first big year (it was released in late '85 according to wikipedia). Anyways, the BLS website says that in 1986, $50.00 had the same buying power as $96.91 in 2008.
So in an sense, it was sold for almost $100.
Generally any sort of inhabited tunnel/vault/underground space is not just exposed dirt/rock walls and ceiling. There's almost always some sort of lining. I think some of the fancier giant tunnel boring machines used here on earth actually have a system that sprays concrete on the tunnel walls as they digs it out.
Whatever it's made of, there's a number of good reasons to have some sort of liner. It can provide additional structural support. It can stop dust from falling from the walls. It can make the tunnel water-tight(not particularly important on the moon). Depending on how it's built, it can provide a layer to more conveniently run power/lights/whatever. And I'm sure there are some other reasons.
Since concrete will likely be in rather short supply on the moon, maybe these bricks are the best replacement. Plus you still need material to create internal partitions, and no matter how extensive your tunnel city becomes, you're most certainly have some number of surface buildings for various reasons.
Well, if it actually went down the way your son told you, then I think he's learned the wrong lesson. If I was removed from a class over a reason as silly as that, I would make some significant efforts to have either that teacher or his/her superiors have to answer for it. You might have to pester the hell out of them, but it can be done. I'd expect to at least be allowed back into the class, and maybe with an apology from the teacher. The lesson here is to not be such a sissy, and that sometimes you have to push back a little bit when people don't give you some basic respect.
It's a small matter, with at best a small victory, but why not start small when you're still in college?
Palm built a brand once. Then they squandered it. They could build it again.
Apple went through the same pattern.
I'm generally happy to drill a few holes through different parts of the platters and then just whack the whole thing a couple times with a hammer. Sure, someone with a the right equipment and a lot of time on their hands could potentially take the drive apart, and pull some data off the undamaged parts of the disk, but my data isn't worth the trouble.
That being said, I've sometimes smashed them further just for the fun of it, and completely obliterating a drive is a lot harder than you'd originally think. Sure, it stops being functional after you smash it a few times, but it doesn't just bust open and have its guts spill out everywhere. Those little things are solid. It'd be much faster to take one apart with the proper screwdriver set than it is with a claw hammer.
I think you're posting that just because it makes for a sort of silly anecdote, but it illustrates an interesting point. There are a bunch of different levels of "being green," and some of the easier levels to reach are really just simple matters of planning. Reusing waste heat is a great idea, doesn't require any new technology, and if you're planning a new data center, it doesn't intrinsically cost any more money than your previous way of doing things.
You don't have to spend tens of thousands of dollars to cover your roof with solar panels in order to make your business or home more efficient and "green". Significant steps can be made just by putting a little more thought into how you organize all the pieces you already have.
People aren't going to stop having kids, and people aren't going to stop using technology to extend their lives. Survival and reproduction are the two most fundamental biological impulses that humans have. Reducing global population growth sounds like a good idea on paper, but any efforts to forcefully do so are immoral at best.
But even ignoring that fact, I don't think you're right that it'd be more efficient. It's true that history has generally shown that as standards of living increase, population growth tends to slow. But at the same time, individual consumption goes way up. Africa has birth rates well beyond those of the USA, but are you really trying to make the argument that Africa is more to blame for resource overuse and pollution than the USA is?
The big problem for consumers is that when buying an assembled product such as a computer, there's really no way to determine whether or not it's actually "green" other than by taking their word for it. There's just too many pieces from too many sources for a consumer to realistically track it all down. What needs to happen is the industry needs to rally around a third party grading system that tries to objectively measure and then certify finished products.
The example that comes to mind is the LEED system that is used for buildings. The architecture/construction world has the green building council, and through all that there's some standardized education systems for helping people learn how to do sustainable design, and there's a point system that is used to basically grade buildings on the basis of green/sustainable design/construction/etc. This system allows a building owner/tenants/etc to be confident that their building is actually sustainable, and not just take the architect/contractor's word for it. But it also has other positive side effects, because it gives the architects/contractor's some solid goals to shoot for if they're attempting to design sustainably, and it also gives building component/materials manufacturers good benchmarks to shoot for when designing their individual products.
There are a number of competing systems to LEED, but at least in the US, LEED is the main game in town.
It's very rare for Apple to update any product more than once per year, if even that often. Even just basic speed / disk space bumps don't happen all that regularly. They don't constantly dribble out minor upgrades, although occasionally the new version is little more than a speed bump. More importantly, when a product is updated, the old one doesn't suddenly stop working.
Regardless of Apple's release schedules, I don't see how that really ties into the rest of your argument. Whether Apple releases four completely new laptops or 100 smaller upgrades over the next 8 years, how does that affect whether you keep your current laptop for 2 years or 8? Unless you're suggesting that the industry as a whole should artificially restrain the the inevitable growth of computer power so that you don't feel so bad about having an older machine?
iPods, iPhones, and most certainly this new laptop do not have unreplaceable batteries. The batteries just take a little more work to replace. It's slightly less convenient, but if it's something that only happens once every few years or so, then there are lots of design decisions that could make the tradeoff worthwhile.
I don't know if such an attitude is particularly feasible over the long run for most jobs. Chances are your job requires at least occasional contact with other people, be they coworkers or clients. If you're unable or unwilling to effectively communicate with these people, then a lot of your work is probably going to go to waste.
My office has a guy exactly like that, he has many years of experience and some very valuable technical knowledge, but zero interest in communicating with anyone about his work. As a result, he often creates work that is functional and crisply done, but doesn't actually meet the client's needs, because he didn't bother to listen when he met with the client. Other times, he'll be contributing work for a co-worker's project, but his lack of communication with that project manager throughout the tasks makes it much more difficult for the work to be integrated into the larger project.
This individual is fortunate that occasionally some of his particular technical skills are incredibly valuable, and I think that that is the only reason why he's still around.
Just a nitpick, but Ockham's Razor does not prove anything. Nothing at all. It's just an often times useful assumption to take when making other assumptions. It's not some inherent physical law of nature. It can sometimes lead you in the correct direction, but it is not any sort of real indisputable proof or logic.
At most, a human driver is only going to know the answer to your number 3. Or do you turn around and use binoculars to inspect the tires of every car that follows behind you?
I think that's pretty important to note. MS used some dirty tricks to help it destroy Netscape, but Netscape also played right into their hands by letting their browser languish. I don't know if MS really deserved to win that round of the browser wars, but Netscape deserved to lose.
Luckily for Nintendo they've already made a decent product selling the Wii itself. They're making money faster than they can count it, and Wii's are selling just as quickly as they were two years ago (maybe even faster since availability is somewhat better) I don't think they care in the least if you buy an Xbox360 to sit next to your Wii.
Well, to be fair, Jobs is not an engineer. He's very involved in the way that Apple's products work, although I doubt that at the deep technical level he's got much of an idea how it works.
Your overall point definitely makes some sense. The idea that being a CEO somewhere makes you qualified to be CEO anywhere is silly. It's important that the CEO actually believes in their products. Jobs is prone to hyperbole, and I'm not sure that he actually believes himself when he says that every new product is the best thing Apple has ever done, but I do think that he's truly proud of the products that he's up there on stage introducing. And that pride is a result of a lot of hard work and involvement for him personally, not just the fact that it's going to make him a bunch more money.
Minor nitpick, but I think it's misleading to speak of "functionality" separate from "ease-of-use." One of the roots of Apple's continued success is their understanding that for a very large percentage of consumers, if a particular function isn't easy to use, it might as well not exist. My cellphone technically has a web browser in it, but it's so awkward that it might as well not be there. I haven't used it in years, despite the fact that I've often been in positions where looking something up real quick would've been useful. The same goes for my phone's mp3 player. Despite the laundry list of functionality that was printed on the box it came in, my phone might as well do nothing other than make calls and display the time, because that's all I can use it for without it driving me crazy.
Did you ever look at Scrabulous? If we go by your own criteria that you laid out in your last sentence, then it most certainly was a valid lawsuit.
There's two things that my boss does that really upsets me more than anything else. The first one is that he will often promise my time to other people,be it clients/coworkers/consultants/whoever, without first checking with me to see if that time is actually available. Not only does that saddle me with significantly more work than I want to deal with, but it creates a situation where this new task takes up time that I had personally committed to helping someone else, and so I get stuck having to apologize for not keeping up my end of the bargain with them. And even though everyone that works in the office understands how that sort of situation happens, in stressful times, it just serves to create animosity between the different project leaders when one of them "steals" my time from the other. It also makes it nearly impossible for people to create accurate schedules because they have no idea what else will suddenly fall on their desk, or when their help will get randomly pulled away.
The second thing, which in a way causes a lot of the first, is that my boss has a lot of difficulty with setting priorities. As a big boss, he's got dozens of projects under his supervision to at least some degree, and so he tends to wander from crisis to crisis as they arise across all the work in the office. And so whatever the current crisis is, that's what his priority is for that day (or sometimes hour). It's a huge drag on office efficiency, and projects that should take three weeks to get out the door end up taking 6 weeks of work, stretched out over 8 months of on and off progress.
Overall, I'd say one of the most important things is to help your workers stay focused. Lay out the priorities, give them a clear path. I don't mind so much if the endzone is far away and there's a bunch of obstacles in the path, as long as I can see the goalposts.
Yeah, so, the fact that Obama met with Blagojevich right around the election definitely means that he knows all about and is likely involved in the governor trying to sell the seat over the past few weeks. That's definitely the logical conclusion.
Don't be dense just because it helps your agenda. Obama wasn't trying to claim that he's never spoken to Blagojevich. He's claiming that neither he nor his team was involved in or had any knowledge of the crimes that Blagojevich is now accused of.
I dunno, maybe I'm just an idiot, but I personally think that there are a few things that the incoming administration should prioritize over establishing human colonies somewhere other than on the Earth.
But either way, did you go add your question to that website? Why be skeptical when you can go and easily test it.
Uhhh, I get what you're trying to say, but in this context, my response is something along the lines of "So what?"
Obama isn't asking for policy decisions and then promising to enact the ones that get the most votes. They're asking for questions, and having people rank the questions. While I'd certainly be more careful about taking advice from someone less educated, I don't see what's bad about encouraging them to ask questions.
Will certain politically charged questions get strongly upvoted? Most certainly. Does that make this exercise worthless or somehow harmful? Hardly.
People as a whole aren't as stupid as you think. Don't be so biased against uneducated individuals. They have as much a right to address the government with their grievances as you do.
Let's see... designing a very well received mobile phone(with hardly any previous phone development experience, releasing a workable SDK for it, building a scalable and usable application distribution system, and doing an excellent job of marketing the hell out of it all... Nope, Apple hasn't done any work at all.
Yeah, it's certainly not an easy problem. Although the view on it that I would take is that you find a filter than basically bans the really blatant stuff, and what gets through gets through. At the same time you make sure that it is made very clear to the students that certain types of material are unacceptable for accessing with the school's computers, and that there will be consequences to purposefully accessing that content.
The filter is there, more than anything, just to add a layer of seriousness to the rule. Sort of like while the yellow caution tape that they put up around crime scenes isn't a particularly effective barrier against people entering the site, it does create a situation where someone ducking under it and walking around where they shouldn't cannot reasonably claim to be unaware that they were doing something wrong.
It's not so much about shielding kids from the whole world, and more about the fact that school isn't the place for that sort of thing. Making at least a basic effort to restrict access to that sort of content helps reinforce to kids that it's not appropriate in a school setting.
Also it shouldn't be the responsibility for random teachers to be put on the spot to have to deal with stuff like that. In high school it's probably not such a big deal, but for younger children I pity a teacher who has a student bring up a porn website and share it with kids who have not been exposed to that sort of stuff before. Is it going to damage those children and ruin their lives? Probably not, but it's not the job of a third grade teacher (nor should it be) to introduce their students to that, particularly via random porn sites.
You're right that sooner or later kids are going to find that stuff, but that doesn't mean that efforts to control their access to it on a school computer are wrong or worthless.