Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Life the Universe and Everything
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
Mostly Harmless
Young Zaphod Plays it Safe
...or is having 2 "sixth" books in the "trilogy" part of the joke?
Books are invaluable because they track a lot of things that happened before the Internet !
Remember those days when a bulletin board was an actual board, when a spreadsheet was in paper, or even when one would assume a program was written, not typed. And don't tell me Google libraries and other scanning projects will let me find that information with metadata, indexations, search engines and a coffee to go, because I won't believe you when told that I, with my weak thirty-years old memory and poor understanding of search engines complexity, will be able to find what piece of information I want from a 5 petabyte indexed database.
Let me take an example: I am currently reading a riveting history of aeronautics published in 1963... I could never find the same "insights into the future" (what will the Apollo spacecraft look like ? the gap in nuclear deterrence, the russians have a 100 megaton vector with a 2000 miles radius while the US is working on Polaris and Midgetman 500 kilotons and less than 1000 miles radius, etc.) in a new history of aeronautics... At best those info could be found in a very specialized study of the aeronautics in the cold war, but what else would be lost in time ?
That book, that knowledge, that history is so important to me, that I hope people in the future will find as valuable to have physical traces of the unfolding history of today in some other form than 60 gigabytes database dumps cassettes or a low resolution poorly scanned pdf book on someone's SSD in malaysia online from 1am to 5am.
I agree with you that purely informational straight-to-the-fact news post are better off in a database because the information is often in the title and its date. But there other kind of texts that should be intended to exist for the generations to come, and I think this information is better kept printed in a sturdy hard-cover book than in a scrambled binary stream somewhere on a hard drive, because no one will ever look there in a few decades.
the military procurement machine goes on designing and buying immensely complex weapons
today's key word in the military is "short sensor to shooter loop", which is achieved by networking detectors and binding them to communication systems with high range + bandwith + cryptographic capabilities.
These systems are inherently expensive: it is hard and time consuming to make two items communicate with each other when they were not conceived from the start to do it.
that have no conceivable use and do not improve the security of this country (the U.S.A.)
This is arguable...
We do not need an air superiority fighter/bomber/sigint/ewar platform like this. (Notice how it does everything...baaaad sign.)
The fact that it can assume all those kind of missions does not mean that it cannot do any single one of them particularly well : with its supercruise and weight/lift ratio it can be a great interceptor, with its stealth and low flying capabilities it can be a good attack aircraft, it is also designed as an excellent ewar aircraft with its remote sensors fusion and electronically scanned array radar (or is it the F-35 ?)
The fact that an aircraft design is a compromise between contradictory factors is not so true nowadays with fly-by-wire, advanced materials and very powerful engines. It was true in the 70s when the F-117 was designed for a single mission profile because the compromises made prevented it to be used for anything else (even flying the same route at low altitude over Bosnia)
On the bottom line, conceiving a weapons system today (you do not simply "build a plane", but also a whole lot around it to make the most out of it) takes quite a lot of years nowadays, so having the F-22 and F-35 already built and being "debugged" and logging experience with such systems is NOT money thrown down the drain.
Of course, this is only useful if the military can keep people with experience in their ranks, which is why I agree with you on the latter part of your post:
What we really need to spend some money on is people: we need to attract and keep competent officers and soldiers in the Army (or the USMC, if you've given up on the Army), we need to pay these people what they're worth, give them decent benefits, and raise personnel standards throughout.
I did not read the OOXML proposal, I understand that there has been numerous remarks on the technical ground only. Those comments have been partly addressed by Microsoft and therefore another round of discussion on this proposal is in order.
What astounds me is that there is so much shadowness, hidden agendas, personal interests, overt corruption and manipulation in the process! I mean, what do these people evil people think will happen if OOXML becomes an ISO standard? Do they have vested interests in Microsoft Corp.? Do they have shares in software companies making OOXML editors? Do they think that Microsoft will send them big crates of dollars (the greenback being so low, I don't know what people outside U.S. would do with that) if they 'win'?
What will happen if OOXML becomes a standard? Won't there be any more choice for individual governments to choose their own computer format for exchanging documents? ISO will only have one more reference in its catalog, and everybody will move on?
The only thing I am very looking forward is for prosecutors to investigate the interests I was talking about earlier, find who is behind it, and go berserk on his/her/their ass(es).
Lindbergh was not safety-first! From the official website: http://www.charleslindbergh.com/history/jumps.asp
Even before the days of flying the mail, Lindbergh had been a barnstorming wing walker and exhibition parachutist. About the reason why he chose a single-engine plane: http://www.charleslindbergh.com/plane/index.asp
His equation was simple: less weight (one engine, one pilot) would increase fuel efficiency and allow for a longer flying range. The Orteig prize did not specify that the crew was to be limited to one pilot, and so French ace Nungesser and copilot Coli took off to have their shot at it, in a bigger "better" plane designed specifically for this crossing. Yet it was untested and was lost over the Atlantic. (same page)
[...] Windows 7 release [...] about 2013, at which point it will have half the initially promised feature set and require at least a 40-core processor to work properly. [...]
Will I be able to play Duke Nukem Forever on Windows 7 in collaboration mode with my Xbox 900 ?
Look, ma'! I have a comment ref. to DNF on Slahsdot, for real!
The reality is that the Soviet Navy simply never hoped to match the blue-water capabilities of the US Navy, thus the use of the long-range bomber and the cruise missile as the primary attack weapon against surface combatants. Large numbers of Soviet bombers were tasked to naval aviation regiments throughout the Cold War.
The Soviet surface Navy would not have matched the capability of the US Navy for the simple reason that for three quarter of the year a fair share of its fleet would have been hardly mobile on the arctic coast, and the rest of it would have been trapped in the Black Sea and an easy target for Europe's and US's forces.
OTOH, their submarines could have left discreetly the harbors in the north, attack carrier fleets with cruise missiles and torpedoes, and possibly deploy ballistic missiles very close to the US coasts making it very hard for homeland defences to intercept them...
The russian learned that lesson from the Nazi's Kriegsmarine emphasis on U-boats: it was their most effective weapon against convoys and did have an important effect at one point (and it was their only weapon since the Luftwaffe did not use "strategic" bombers, range-wise).
Of course nowadays I would not bet on a submarine's lifespan in the days of satellite surveillance and modern-days torpedoes and long-range UCAVs...
It is often companies (example: http://www.eres.fr/) in the luxury business that leave visitors on Flash-only websites. Their main concern:
no alteration of presentation, the appearance is the same regardless of your screen resolution, browser agent, etc.
limited copy protection, since you cannot copy paste text selections or images
Why can't they understand that the Web I want is a repository of browsable information ? Not a glossy stylish magazine with advertisments every other page and small-lettered content deeply buried inside !
"Pure HTML" : you said it all! Let's purify the Web!
(Forgive my english, I am a bit rusty on writing skill)
Slashdot Mirror
But they have nukes too...
Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy Restaurant at the End of the Universe Life the Universe and Everything So Long and Thanks for all the Fish Mostly Harmless Young Zaphod Plays it Safe
Young Zaphod Plays it Safe was a short story: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_zaphod_plays_it_safe
Books are invaluable because they track a lot of things that happened before the Internet !
Remember those days when a bulletin board was an actual board, when a spreadsheet was in paper, or even when one would assume a program was written, not typed. And don't tell me Google libraries and other scanning projects will let me find that information with metadata, indexations, search engines and a coffee to go, because I won't believe you when told that I, with my weak thirty-years old memory and poor understanding of search engines complexity, will be able to find what piece of information I want from a 5 petabyte indexed database.
Let me take an example: I am currently reading a riveting history of aeronautics published in 1963... I could never find the same "insights into the future" (what will the Apollo spacecraft look like ? the gap in nuclear deterrence, the russians have a 100 megaton vector with a 2000 miles radius while the US is working on Polaris and Midgetman 500 kilotons and less than 1000 miles radius, etc.) in a new history of aeronautics... At best those info could be found in a very specialized study of the aeronautics in the cold war, but what else would be lost in time ?
That book, that knowledge, that history is so important to me, that I hope people in the future will find as valuable to have physical traces of the unfolding history of today in some other form than 60 gigabytes database dumps cassettes or a low resolution poorly scanned pdf book on someone's SSD in malaysia online from 1am to 5am.
I agree with you that purely informational straight-to-the-fact news post are better off in a database because the information is often in the title and its date. But there other kind of texts that should be intended to exist for the generations to come, and I think this information is better kept printed in a sturdy hard-cover book than in a scrambled binary stream somewhere on a hard drive, because no one will ever look there in a few decades.
the military procurement machine goes on designing and buying immensely complex weapons
today's key word in the military is "short sensor to shooter loop", which is achieved by networking detectors and binding them to communication systems with high range + bandwith + cryptographic capabilities.
These systems are inherently expensive: it is hard and time consuming to make two items communicate with each other when they were not conceived from the start to do it.
that have no conceivable use and do not improve the security of this country (the U.S.A.)
This is arguable...
We do not need an air superiority fighter/bomber/sigint/ewar platform like this. (Notice how it does everything...baaaad sign.)
The fact that it can assume all those kind of missions does not mean that it cannot do any single one of them particularly well : with its supercruise and weight/lift ratio it can be a great interceptor, with its stealth and low flying capabilities it can be a good attack aircraft, it is also designed as an excellent ewar aircraft with its remote sensors fusion and electronically scanned array radar (or is it the F-35 ?)
The fact that an aircraft design is a compromise between contradictory factors is not so true nowadays with fly-by-wire, advanced materials and very powerful engines. It was true in the 70s when the F-117 was designed for a single mission profile because the compromises made prevented it to be used for anything else (even flying the same route at low altitude over Bosnia)
On the bottom line, conceiving a weapons system today (you do not simply "build a plane", but also a whole lot around it to make the most out of it) takes quite a lot of years nowadays, so having the F-22 and F-35 already built and being "debugged" and logging experience with such systems is NOT money thrown down the drain.
Of course, this is only useful if the military can keep people with experience in their ranks, which is why I agree with you on the latter part of your post:
What we really need to spend some money on is people: we need to attract and keep competent officers and soldiers in the Army (or the USMC, if you've given up on the Army), we need to pay these people what they're worth, give them decent benefits, and raise personnel standards throughout.
I did not read the OOXML proposal, I understand that there has been numerous remarks on the technical ground only. Those comments have been partly addressed by Microsoft and therefore another round of discussion on this proposal is in order.
What astounds me is that there is so much shadowness, hidden agendas, personal interests, overt corruption and manipulation in the process! I mean, what do these people evil people think will happen if OOXML becomes an ISO standard? Do they have vested interests in Microsoft Corp.? Do they have shares in software companies making OOXML editors? Do they think that Microsoft will send them big crates of dollars (the greenback being so low, I don't know what people outside U.S. would do with that) if they 'win'?
What will happen if OOXML becomes a standard? Won't there be any more choice for individual governments to choose their own computer format for exchanging documents? ISO will only have one more reference in its catalog, and everybody will move on?
The only thing I am very looking forward is for prosecutors to investigate the interests I was talking about earlier, find who is behind it, and go berserk on his/her/their ass(es).
[...] Windows 7 release [...] about 2013, at which point it will have half the initially promised feature set and require at least a 40-core processor to work properly. [...]
Will I be able to play Duke Nukem Forever on Windows 7 in collaboration mode with my Xbox 900 ?
Look, ma'! I have a comment ref. to DNF on Slahsdot, for real!
The site is as bloat-free as can be, and yet is full of meaning :
The Soviet surface Navy would not have matched the capability of the US Navy for the simple reason that for three quarter of the year a fair share of its fleet would have been hardly mobile on the arctic coast, and the rest of it would have been trapped in the Black Sea and an easy target for Europe's and US's forces.
OTOH, their submarines could have left discreetly the harbors in the north, attack carrier fleets with cruise missiles and torpedoes, and possibly deploy ballistic missiles very close to the US coasts making it very hard for homeland defences to intercept them...
The russian learned that lesson from the Nazi's Kriegsmarine emphasis on U-boats: it was their most effective weapon against convoys and did have an important effect at one point (and it was their only weapon since the Luftwaffe did not use "strategic" bombers, range-wise).
Of course nowadays I would not bet on a submarine's lifespan in the days of satellite surveillance and modern-days torpedoes and long-range UCAVs...
- no alteration of presentation, the appearance is the same regardless of your screen resolution, browser agent, etc.
- limited copy protection, since you cannot copy paste text selections or images
Why can't they understand that the Web I want is a repository of browsable information ? Not a glossy stylish magazine with advertisments every other page and small-lettered content deeply buried inside !"Pure HTML" : you said it all! Let's purify the Web!
(Forgive my english, I am a bit rusty on writing skill)