I think it is naive to believe that politics and legality will have much effect on curbing the amateur genetic engineers. It is no more difficult than building your own computer, or building a decent telescope, and it gets easier every day, as used equipment from all the gene companies here in Silicon Valley is making its way into the local surplus market.
Well, not quite. You can build a very good computer for under $1,000, and I believe a very good telescope for about the same amount. Having recently been involved in setting up a cell bio lab on a shoestring (by the standards of the field) budget, I'd say you're not going to be doing any reliable work of the sort you're talking about without a $50,000 investment or so. Which isn't out of range of the enthusiastic amateur experimenter, certainly -- I know at least a few people who've spent that much on computer goodies -- but it takes a little more planning and forethought than a computer or a telescope does.
And, of course, there's the knowledge issue. Genetic engineering, or any other kind of serious molecular biology, is hard -- we're not going to be seeing Gene Splicing In A Nutshell on the shelves any time soon. As a Comp. Bio. student, one of the few in the program with a serious background in both CS and biology, I see the problems that the students (and, for that matter, the professors) who are strictly from the CS side have in understanding the biology. These are smart, hard-working people, but the fact is it takes years of experience to really "get" molecular biology in any useful fashion.
(Note that I'm not denigrating CS -- a bio PhD and a CS PhD are about equally well-educated, IMO. But at the amateur level, it's a hell of a lot easier to get started hacking code than hacking genes.)
In the long run, I think you're right. The knowledge and the equipment are out there, and will become steadily more available, and a generation or two down the line we will almost certainly see teenagers pounding out real viruses in their parents' basements (and won't that be fun) -- hopefully, those same teenagers, once they're grown up a bit, will be the ones who go on to make real and lasting contributions to biology and medicine, just like teenage hackers often grow up to be the best programmers and CS researchers. But right now we're at the "mainframe" stage of biology, where the genome -- like the computer a couple of generations ago -- is a rather arcane piece of machinery with high barriers to entry.
All kidding aside, isn't obliteration by some natural force exactly what the "Earth First" people are asking for when they advocate the cessation and regression of the industrial revolution?
[sigh] No. The Earth Firsters are naive, but they're not evil. They believe that if we all start living the way they say we should, we'll have a sustainable future for ourselves and future generations. They're wrong about this, of course -- the way out of our current ecological problems is the invention of new technology that makes more efficient use of resources, not trashing the technology we already have and returning to a mythical primitive utopia -- but that's a far cry from wanting to see the human race, and a hell of a lot of other life on Earth as well, wiped out by a cataclysm.
... but it will only ever happen if We The People (for those outside the US, insert patriotic identifier for yourself and your fellow citizens here) stand up and demand it. And the way to do that is by voting for politicians who have an understanding of the value of implementing such a technology. In 2000, we did vote for such a candidate -- to forestall any stupid "invented the internet" jokes, I'm going to say that yes, damn it, Al Gore did have as much as any politican possibly could to bring the internet into existence, at a time when George W. Bush probably barely had any idea what a computer was -- but legal machinations prevented him from taking the office to which he was rightfully elected.
Good luck changing things now. Once-free overnments all over the world are moving in the direction of less openness, not more. In the US, the Freedom of Information Act is just about dead as a consequence of the "War On (Drugs/Terror/Iraq/villain of the month)". The irony is, of course, that at least some repressive governments are opening up, just a bit; at this point, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if we see electronically open government in China before we see it in the US, or Great Britain, or France, or Germany, or Japan. (Depressed, but not surprised.)
Once upon a time, the US government was taking steps in this direction. FOIA requests, even by e-mail, were answered more often than not. Sites like FedStats still remain as monuments to a genuine initiative, during the last decade, to making the government's vast store of information a resoucre of the people, by the people, and for the people. Enjoy it while you can, folks, because right now the trend is toward taking this stuff away, not expanding it.
And for God's sake, keep voting. The fraud machinery that stole the 2000 election is powerful, but it's not unbeatable. Yet.
The Federal Government provides nothing. It has no money of its own. Every cent comes from the taxpayer. There is no reason that a taxpayer should have to pay twice for any government service. Alternatively, taxes should be cut and all services should be offered on a pay-for-what-you-use system. Governments and NGOs need to learn that they can't have it both ways - that's nothing more than common theft.
Of course, the government mints the money you use, and provides security for that money in numerous ways, and (theoretically) enforces the laws that keep people from stealing that money from you, and...
I'm assuming that you live in the US. If you believe the government is stealing your money, you have several alternatives:
1) Find something in the Constitution that prohibits the government from taxing and/or spending your money as it is, and challenge the relevant section of tax or budget law in court; or
2) Vote for candidates for elected office who will tax and/or spend less; or
3) Run for office yourself on a platform of lower taxes and/or less spending.
4) If none of the above work, you can always leave and try to find someplace to live that will let you keep more of your money. Lotsa luck.
who between them are responsible for a hell of a lot more of the nation's critical computer infrastructure than Microsoft
I feel obligated to remind you that Microsoft has a 95% share of the market.
Not of the critical stuff, they don't. (Actually, I believe their desktop share is down to 90% or so, with Apple and various open-source *x's -- mostly Linux -- each having about 5%. But that's neither here nor there.) The servers that run the really critical stuff are predominantly IBM and Sun (and to some degree HPaq) iron running various *x flavors, databases like Oracle and DB2, and, for those that share their content with the outside world, doing so via Apache.
Craig Mundie, who oversees the company's Trustworthy Computing initiative, told an audience Wednesday that in response to the threat of terrorist cyberattacks, Microsoft would deploy security fixes to its installed base of hundreds of millions of computers worldwide in the coming year -- even if those fixes break applications in use by customers.
Funny, I don't see Sun or IBM or Oracle or the Apache people -- who between them are responsible for a hell of a lot more of the nation's critical computer infrastructure than Microsoft -- going all nuts over security since Sept. 11th. Why, those unpatriotic scum! They must be terrorists themselves! Report them to John Ashcroft immediately! And remember to buy only Microsoft(r) products... or the terrorists will have won(tm).
There's a quote by Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."
Unfortunatley, I think it's bullshit. The only thing that changes the world nowadays is money and weapons.
Ouch.
I'd argue that money and weapons -- particularly the latter -- generally don't change the world; instead they act to keep it as it is, to keep it going through the same depressing cycles of destruction that the world has always known. There's nothing about, e.g., the situation in the current Middle East that would have seemed unfamiliar to a Roman of the late Empire. "Oh, having trouble with the Persians again, eh? What a surprise..."
And yet... the world we live in is better than the world of that cynical Roman. And it's better not because of money and weapons, but because in the interstices -- while most people were concerned with making money or fighting wars or simple survival -- there were people making things happen. Between the Caesars and the Bushes came Galen, Bacon, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Newton, Rembrandt, Watt, Einstein, and thousands of others whose names don't come as readily to mind but who each made a real and lasting contribution to the way we live. The work of the artists and scientists and engineers outlives the work of the kings and generals, in the end.
Well, I think the size of the mirror used might make it impractical for a soldier to carry one of these things around in a pair of goggles.;) Also, it's a lot harder to apply adaptive optical techniques to lenses than to mirrors -- I work for a microscopy company (not as an optical engineer, granted, but that's what a lot of my coworkers do, and I hear them bitching) and we've had a hell of a time applying adaptive optical techniques to anything -- we have one product based on this idea that's only started shipping this year. I suspect the problems with lens-based telescopes and binoculars would be even worse, since the lenses in question are so much bigger.
That being said, I would be very surprised if there weren't military spy satellites, and perhaps reconnaisance planes, already using this.
They used to say that about FORTRAN and COBOL too....
Quote from a friend of mine who recently took her shiny new CS degree (based on doing almost all her academic programming in to a job fair and tried to find a job:
"Half the people I talked with wanted to know if I knew FORTRAN!"
Now, granted, this may reflect the area where we live (Denver) being very heavy on aerospace... but it's something to keep in mind.
So what happened to her? Well, she never did get a job from anyone she talked to at the job fairs. Fortunately, she was able to get a job at her Dad's company (something she was trying to avoid, not because it's a bad place to work, but because, you know, her boss is her Dad.) Some of her coding she does in Java. But a good half of what she does is in... wait for it... COBOL.
Me, I develop in PHP and SQL, so what the hell do I know?;)
Re:Perhaps some competition would help?
on
Redirecting NASA
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· Score: 2
If China follows through on the plans it's talked about, you'll see a revival of that old competitive spirit soon enough. "Mr. President, we must not allow the Chinese to establish an orbital gap!"
Yes, yes, everyone who's ever had an algorithms class knows that O(c n) = O(n) and that O(c) = O(1). But everyone who's ever written production code also knows that in practice, algorithms aren't O(n) or O(n^2) or some other O(f(n)) where f(n) has all the constants stripped out. They're best described as O(c1 f(n) + c2), where f(n) is n^2 or e^n or log(n) or some such -- and for large, or even not-so-large, values of c1 and c2, and for small, or even not-so-small, values of n, that can make all the difference. O(c n) != O(n) for practical purposes when c = 10 and n = 100. For instance.
I used to think this to, but Titan has even less gravity than Mars yet keeps an atmosphere that is about 50% thicker than Earths.
Titan's also a lot colder than Mars.
The criterion for keeping an atmosphere, if I remember correctly, is for the mean velocity of gas molecules at the ambient temperature to be less than 10% of escape velocity. That keeps the fraction of molecules _at_ escape velocity low enough for evaporation to be negligible.
So, a colder world can get away with a shallower gravity well.
So, I've got to ask... how does this explain Venus?
Re:I remember when it was the best...
on
Altavista Renewed
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· Score: 2
I'd settle for a search engine that could handle regular expressions. The differences between UK and US English spellings can be a problem.
Yeah, that would be nice. You can kind of fake it with Booleans like "... AND (color OR colour) AND..." but it would be nice not to have to.
If any search engine ever implements regexps, I'll bet it'll be Google.
Parent was marked as a troll, which isn't quite fair -- it's abrasive, but mostly it shows a lack of comprehension.
Here's the deal: the vast majority of Mac users, including me, are interested in functionality, efficiency, etc. Almost all of us have had substantial exposure to the Windows world (I work in a shop that's just about 50/50, and administer both) and have decided that for our own uses, Macs just work better. The aesthetics are a bonus. A nice bonus, sure, just like it's a nice bonus when you drive a car that gets good performance and good mileage, is highly reliable, and looks good too. But I'd use a PC without regard to aesthetics if there were any PC OS that delivered the ease of use, functionality, and reliability I get with Mac OS X, at a substantially lower cost. Except... there isn't.
The significant thing about guys like this photographer is not that they're representative of Mac users, because they're not, but that they exist at all. The Mac fails to inspire that kind of fanatic loyalty in 99 44/100 % of Mac users -- but Windows fails inspire that kind of fanatic loyalty in 100% of PC users. Think about that for a while.
Um, I don't think you read my post very carefully.
---
You: People who think Palladium is evil because it's from Microsoft are just like people who think NASA faked the Moon landings.
Me: No, people who think Palladium is evil because it's from Microsoft are just like people who think the Soviet space agency was lying when it denied that its personnel were getting killed.
You: That proves my point!
---
You may not understand the context here. NASA has a lot of flaws, but lying about its missions isn't one of them; every time there's a failure (whether or not loss of life is involved) it's dissected in gory detail, in public. OTOH, the Soviet space program was under no more obligation than the rest of the Soviet government to reveal its fuckups, and (as we now know) they did suffer a number of rather horrific accidents that make the Challenger disaster look like small potatoes. This was something that everyone kind of suspected all along, but we had to wait until the end of the Cold War for our suspicions to be confirmed. The Soviets didn't help their own case at all with pre-emptive press releases that said, in essence, "That big boom at Baikonur that your satellites picked up, that was just, um... a problem with a test of a new engine, that's right! No dead cosmonauts and ground crew here, nosirree. Nothing to see, move along, move along..."
So the point is (in case you still haven't gotten it) that Microsoft has a history of lying too. They lie about their intentions, they lie about standards compliance, they lie about openness. They try to control every new technology that comes along, and if they can't control it, they try to crush it. This behavior is a matter of public record. So when people who pay attention to this history express some suspicion of Palladium, we're being entirely reasonable -- just as those who expressed suspicion about the safety record of the Soviet space program were being entirely reasonable. Those who believe NASA faked the Moon landings, OTOH, have no reasonable grounds for their suspicions.
Do you get it now? Jesus, I can't believe I wasted that much time in explaining this to someone who probably isn't going to get it anyway...
Oh, yawn. If NASA had a history dating from its inception of faking missions, then you'd have some grounds for comparison. Slashdotters' distrust of Palladium is more akin to doubting the old Soviet space agency's rather vehement denials that personnel were killed every time there was a mysterious explosion at Baikonur.
Maybe they can get someone to prove / disprove the existance of God for us too!
Heh. That's funny, but it brings up an important point. I'd love it if the NIH or the CDC or some other government agency concerned mainly with biology would spend $15,000 -- or $150,000, or $1.5 million; in any case I'd consider it money well spent -- to come up with a point-by-point refutation of creationism, and publicize the hell out of it. Creationists (including the "intelligent design" crowd) belong in exactly the same camp as the "moon landing was a hoax" people, Holocaust-deniers, flat-Earthers, etc. IMO this would be a much better expenditure of my tax dollars than just about any current government program.
Unfortunately, with the current administration, we're a lot more likely to see our tax dollars going to religious schools that teach the reverse...
Yeah, ok I did. It said that the Battle of Verdun was in 1916. Which means it was World War 1, not 2.
What was it you were saying again?
What I'm saying is that the character of the French people did not somehow magically deteriorate between the wars; the field commanders who were devastated by the Germans in WW2 had been young lieutenants and captains in WW1, and had fought bravely and capably at Verdun and other bloodbaths. The difference was that the quality of the German and French armies was roughly equal in WW1, while the Germans were much, much better than the French (and everyone else, at least at first) in WW2. But "better" here is a technical judgement, not a moral one.
... I've really got to say something about this. I know it's meant to be funny, but it's not, at least to anyone who has the slightest grasp of military history.
Well, I must assume then that Commissioner Mario Monti couldn't be French then, or the EU would have surrendered by now.
The French didn't roll over in WW2. They were beaten, on the battlefield, by an army which was at the time far and away the best in the world. What the Germans did to France, they could easily have done to Russia, England, and even the US, if it hadn't been for space and cold, the English Channel, and the Atlantic Ocean, respectively. Anyone who thinks cowardice is a French national characteristic should go count the graves at Verdun.
At the very least, do a Google search on the phrase "ils ne passeront pas" before you post stuff like this.
The Register's coverage brought up an interesting question that I wouldn't mind seeing answered: can people who made stock deals based on the leaked decision, before it was officially posted (which of course was supposed to be after the close of markets) be prosecuted for insider trading? My gut tells me they can't, because it was the Court's screwup that leaked the decision, but the SEC might not agree...
They drop the priced 50%, they go from generally decent profits and occasional losses to big losses all the time. Sales would go up, but not fast enough to get them out of the rut they were in during the Amelio days -- they were selling lots of machines and had a viable long-term stragegy, but people didn't buy Macs because quarter after quarter of red ink had Wall Street convinced that Apple was going out of business soon and so a Mac purchase would be wasted money.
Also, a lot of the price premium you pay goes into R&D (vs. the "Windows tax" you pay when you buy a new PC from just about any major maker, which goes straight into Microsoft's PR and legal departments.) The reason Apple's software is "insanely great" -- and their hardware, if not i.g., is pretty damn good -- is because they spend the time and money (especially the money) to do things right.
Yes, yes, Linux has accomplished great things with a largely open, low-cost development model. But there are a few viable ways to develop great software -- open source is one (although it's worth noting that an awful lot of Linux goodness comes from paid developers) and real corporate R&D is another; perhaps the best model is what Apple's doing, which is combining the two. The MS way, which involves a complete lack of real R&D and a team of developers which seems dedicated mostly to ripping off other people's work, is not one of these ways.
Before you write this off as mindless anti-MS, pro-Apple propaganda, consider this: I was one of the very few who did switch from PC to Mac during the Amelio years. I did so because I realized just how bad MS software (which I'd been using for years) was getting, and I decided that I didn't mind paying a few more bucks if it got me a computer that did what I wanted it to, when I wanted it to, with a minimum of fuss. And I've never regretted that decision.
Based on the reading I've done, the main concern of the Founders was that small states not lose their voice vs. big states. Thus we have equal representation in the Senate, the EC, etc. If you have information to the contrary, please provide citations.
(I'll note that the other alternative, that their intention was to provide a voice for rural voters vs. urban, doesn't work either -- EC-wise, Florida is interesting because it has several rather large cities.)
Yes, I've often thought going back to that would be a good idea. Not only might it, as you say, inject a degree of civility into the campaign; more importantly, it would mean that the opposition party's candidate would be the President of the Senate, and thus able to cast tie-breaking votes. It would be a nice addition to the list of checks and balances. (Of course that wouldn't mean much if the Senate were dominated by either major party, but it would certainly be interesting in situations like the current one.)
Slashdot Mirror
And, of course, there's the knowledge issue. Genetic engineering, or any other kind of serious molecular biology, is hard -- we're not going to be seeing Gene Splicing In A Nutshell on the shelves any time soon. As a Comp. Bio. student, one of the few in the program with a serious background in both CS and biology, I see the problems that the students (and, for that matter, the professors) who are strictly from the CS side have in understanding the biology. These are smart, hard-working people, but the fact is it takes years of experience to really "get" molecular biology in any useful fashion.
(Note that I'm not denigrating CS -- a bio PhD and a CS PhD are about equally well-educated, IMO. But at the amateur level, it's a hell of a lot easier to get started hacking code than hacking genes.)
In the long run, I think you're right. The knowledge and the equipment are out there, and will become steadily more available, and a generation or two down the line we will almost certainly see teenagers pounding out real viruses in their parents' basements (and won't that be fun) -- hopefully, those same teenagers, once they're grown up a bit, will be the ones who go on to make real and lasting contributions to biology and medicine, just like teenage hackers often grow up to be the best programmers and CS researchers. But right now we're at the "mainframe" stage of biology, where the genome -- like the computer a couple of generations ago -- is a rather arcane piece of machinery with high barriers to entry.
... but it will only ever happen if We The People (for those outside the US, insert patriotic identifier for yourself and your fellow citizens here) stand up and demand it. And the way to do that is by voting for politicians who have an understanding of the value of implementing such a technology. In 2000, we did vote for such a candidate -- to forestall any stupid "invented the internet" jokes, I'm going to say that yes, damn it, Al Gore did have as much as any politican possibly could to bring the internet into existence, at a time when George W. Bush probably barely had any idea what a computer was -- but legal machinations prevented him from taking the office to which he was rightfully elected.
Good luck changing things now. Once-free overnments all over the world are moving in the direction of less openness, not more. In the US, the Freedom of Information Act is just about dead as a consequence of the "War On (Drugs/Terror/Iraq/villain of the month)". The irony is, of course, that at least some repressive governments are opening up, just a bit; at this point, I honestly wouldn't be surprised if we see electronically open government in China before we see it in the US, or Great Britain, or France, or Germany, or Japan. (Depressed, but not surprised.)
Once upon a time, the US government was taking steps in this direction. FOIA requests, even by e-mail, were answered more often than not. Sites like FedStats still remain as monuments to a genuine initiative, during the last decade, to making the government's vast store of information a resoucre of the people, by the people, and for the people. Enjoy it while you can, folks, because right now the trend is toward taking this stuff away, not expanding it.
And for God's sake, keep voting. The fraud machinery that stole the 2000 election is powerful, but it's not unbeatable. Yet.
I'm assuming that you live in the US. If you believe the government is stealing your money, you have several alternatives:
1) Find something in the Constitution that prohibits the government from taxing and/or spending your money as it is, and challenge the relevant section of tax or budget law in court; or
2) Vote for candidates for elected office who will tax and/or spend less; or
3) Run for office yourself on a platform of lower taxes and/or less spending.
4) If none of the above work, you can always leave and try to find someplace to live that will let you keep more of your money. Lotsa luck.
Let's roll.(tm)(r)(c)
I'd argue that money and weapons -- particularly the latter -- generally don't change the world; instead they act to keep it as it is, to keep it going through the same depressing cycles of destruction that the world has always known. There's nothing about, e.g., the situation in the current Middle East that would have seemed unfamiliar to a Roman of the late Empire. "Oh, having trouble with the Persians again, eh? What a surprise
And yet
Well, I think the size of the mirror used might make it impractical for a soldier to carry one of these things around in a pair of goggles. ;) Also, it's a lot harder to apply adaptive optical techniques to lenses than to mirrors -- I work for a microscopy company (not as an optical engineer, granted, but that's what a lot of my coworkers do, and I hear them bitching) and we've had a hell of a time applying adaptive optical techniques to anything -- we have one product based on this idea that's only started shipping this year. I suspect the problems with lens-based telescopes and binoculars would be even worse, since the lenses in question are so much bigger.
That being said, I would be very surprised if there weren't military spy satellites, and perhaps reconnaisance planes, already using this.
Aaargh. That should be "... (based on doing almost all her academic programming in Java) to a job fair ..." above, of course.
"Half the people I talked with wanted to know if I knew FORTRAN!"
Now, granted, this may reflect the area where we live (Denver) being very heavy on aerospace
So what happened to her? Well, she never did get a job from anyone she talked to at the job fairs. Fortunately, she was able to get a job at her Dad's company (something she was trying to avoid, not because it's a bad place to work, but because, you know, her boss is her Dad.) Some of her coding she does in Java. But a good half of what she does is in
Me, I develop in PHP and SQL, so what the hell do I know?
If China follows through on the plans it's talked about, you'll see a revival of that old competitive spirit soon enough. "Mr. President, we must not allow the Chinese to establish an orbital gap!"
Yes, yes, everyone who's ever had an algorithms class knows that O(c n) = O(n) and that O(c) = O(1). But everyone who's ever written production code also knows that in practice, algorithms aren't O(n) or O(n^2) or some other O(f(n)) where f(n) has all the constants stripped out. They're best described as O(c1 f(n) + c2), where f(n) is n^2 or e^n or log(n) or some such -- and for large, or even not-so-large, values of c1 and c2, and for small, or even not-so-small, values of n, that can make all the difference. O(c n) != O(n) for practical purposes when c = 10 and n = 100. For instance.
If any search engine ever implements regexps, I'll bet it'll be Google.
Parent was marked as a troll, which isn't quite fair -- it's abrasive, but mostly it shows a lack of comprehension.
... there isn't.
Here's the deal: the vast majority of Mac users, including me, are interested in functionality, efficiency, etc. Almost all of us have had substantial exposure to the Windows world (I work in a shop that's just about 50/50, and administer both) and have decided that for our own uses, Macs just work better. The aesthetics are a bonus. A nice bonus, sure, just like it's a nice bonus when you drive a car that gets good performance and good mileage, is highly reliable, and looks good too. But I'd use a PC without regard to aesthetics if there were any PC OS that delivered the ease of use, functionality, and reliability I get with Mac OS X, at a substantially lower cost. Except
The significant thing about guys like this photographer is not that they're representative of Mac users, because they're not, but that they exist at all. The Mac fails to inspire that kind of fanatic loyalty in 99 44/100 % of Mac users -- but Windows fails inspire that kind of fanatic loyalty in 100% of PC users. Think about that for a while.
Um, I don't think you read my post very carefully.
... a problem with a test of a new engine, that's right! No dead cosmonauts and ground crew here, nosirree. Nothing to see, move along, move along ..."
...
---
You: People who think Palladium is evil because it's from Microsoft are just like people who think NASA faked the Moon landings.
Me: No, people who think Palladium is evil because it's from Microsoft are just like people who think the Soviet space agency was lying when it denied that its personnel were getting killed.
You: That proves my point!
---
You may not understand the context here. NASA has a lot of flaws, but lying about its missions isn't one of them; every time there's a failure (whether or not loss of life is involved) it's dissected in gory detail, in public. OTOH, the Soviet space program was under no more obligation than the rest of the Soviet government to reveal its fuckups, and (as we now know) they did suffer a number of rather horrific accidents that make the Challenger disaster look like small potatoes. This was something that everyone kind of suspected all along, but we had to wait until the end of the Cold War for our suspicions to be confirmed. The Soviets didn't help their own case at all with pre-emptive press releases that said, in essence, "That big boom at Baikonur that your satellites picked up, that was just, um
So the point is (in case you still haven't gotten it) that Microsoft has a history of lying too. They lie about their intentions, they lie about standards compliance, they lie about openness. They try to control every new technology that comes along, and if they can't control it, they try to crush it. This behavior is a matter of public record. So when people who pay attention to this history express some suspicion of Palladium, we're being entirely reasonable -- just as those who expressed suspicion about the safety record of the Soviet space program were being entirely reasonable. Those who believe NASA faked the Moon landings, OTOH, have no reasonable grounds for their suspicions.
Do you get it now? Jesus, I can't believe I wasted that much time in explaining this to someone who probably isn't going to get it anyway
Oh, yawn. If NASA had a history dating from its inception of faking missions, then you'd have some grounds for comparison. Slashdotters' distrust of Palladium is more akin to doubting the old Soviet space agency's rather vehement denials that personnel were killed every time there was a mysterious explosion at Baikonur.
Unfortunately, with the current administration, we're a lot more likely to see our tax dollars going to religious schools that teach the reverse
At the very least, do a Google search on the phrase "ils ne passeront pas" before you post stuff like this.
The Register's coverage brought up an interesting question that I wouldn't mind seeing answered: can people who made stock deals based on the leaked decision, before it was officially posted (which of course was supposed to be after the close of markets) be prosecuted for insider trading? My gut tells me they can't, because it was the Court's screwup that leaked the decision, but the SEC might not agree ...
They drop the priced 50%, they go from generally decent profits and occasional losses to big losses all the time. Sales would go up, but not fast enough to get them out of the rut they were in during the Amelio days -- they were selling lots of machines and had a viable long-term stragegy, but people didn't buy Macs because quarter after quarter of red ink had Wall Street convinced that Apple was going out of business soon and so a Mac purchase would be wasted money.
Also, a lot of the price premium you pay goes into R&D (vs. the "Windows tax" you pay when you buy a new PC from just about any major maker, which goes straight into Microsoft's PR and legal departments.) The reason Apple's software is "insanely great" -- and their hardware, if not i.g., is pretty damn good -- is because they spend the time and money (especially the money) to do things right.
Yes, yes, Linux has accomplished great things with a largely open, low-cost development model. But there are a few viable ways to develop great software -- open source is one (although it's worth noting that an awful lot of Linux goodness comes from paid developers) and real corporate R&D is another; perhaps the best model is what Apple's doing, which is combining the two. The MS way, which involves a complete lack of real R&D and a team of developers which seems dedicated mostly to ripping off other people's work, is not one of these ways.
Before you write this off as mindless anti-MS, pro-Apple propaganda, consider this: I was one of the very few who did switch from PC to Mac during the Amelio years. I did so because I realized just how bad MS software (which I'd been using for years) was getting, and I decided that I didn't mind paying a few more bucks if it got me a computer that did what I wanted it to, when I wanted it to, with a minimum of fuss. And I've never regretted that decision.
Based on the reading I've done, the main concern of the Founders was that small states not lose their voice vs. big states. Thus we have equal representation in the Senate, the EC, etc. If you have information to the contrary, please provide citations.
(I'll note that the other alternative, that their intention was to provide a voice for rural voters vs. urban, doesn't work either -- EC-wise, Florida is interesting because it has several rather large cities.)
Yes, I've often thought going back to that would be a good idea. Not only might it, as you say, inject a degree of civility into the campaign; more importantly, it would mean that the opposition party's candidate would be the President of the Senate, and thus able to cast tie-breaking votes. It would be a nice addition to the list of checks and balances. (Of course that wouldn't mean much if the Senate were dominated by either major party, but it would certainly be interesting in situations like the current one.)