a huge desert from which nothing profitable can come from, not even Helium 3
And your basis for this sweeping declaration is... what, exactly?
there were things to extract, sell, harvest
The Great Plains were once called "the Great American Desert." And with the technology of the time, they were; it took a significant portion of the 19th c. to develop agricultural technology that made farming in, say, Kansas a viable proposition. Once that technology was in place, the "desert" became the breadbasket of the world.
Bolden was a general in the USMC, not the USAF. That being said, as commander of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, he ran an "air force" larger than that of many good-sized countries. Not sure how much in the way of space operations any of the Marine aviation units do, though.
IIRC, when the Mac was at 2% was also before Linux took off outside some very specialized niches. So Mac OS was pretty much the only non-Microsoft OS with any meaningful desktop market share at all, which meant that developers and network administrators could adopt a Windows-only policy without losing anything significant. There's a big difference between "90% Windows, 9% Mac, and 1% Linux" and "98% Windows, 2% Mac, and everything else indistinguishable from statistical noise."
Science fiction is about people, sure. (Which doesn't mean it's not about science, since science is, you know, something that people do.) But fiction in any genre is generally more enjoyable, at least for a lot of people, when it's plausible. With what's generally called "mainstream" fiction, which pretty much means "any fiction that doesn't identifiably belong to science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, historical, romance, or some other easily ghettoized genre," this is a little bit easier -- it takes place in the world in which we currently live and concerns people pretty much like us and the people we know. That being said, there's plenty of implausibility in "mainstream" fiction, and in "genre" fiction it's that much harder because the author has to create a plausible future world, or scary monster, or murder investigation, or what-have-you, in addition to writing believable people doing believable things.
Authors who don't do this, who say in essence, "what the hell, it's SF/F/H/etc. so I can do what I want," are being lazy, and their work suffers as a result. Members of the audience who ignore major aspects of the work are also lazy, and they'll miss out on something important. In science fiction, it's usually the "genre" aspects that people focus on at the expense of the "mainstream" aspects; authors who put all their effort into worldbuilding at the expense of character and plot, for instance, and readers (or watchers, depending on the medium) who think this is perfectly okay and consider the people in the story to be a distraction from the sensawunda stuff. It seems to me that what you're doing is the opposite, claiming that the world doesn't matter, only the people in it. But you have to have both; neither can exist without the other.
The Terminator mythos is a fascinating and generally well-thought-out future world, and its plausibility is well worth debating. The people trying to survive in this world, and the stories of how they do it, are also worth paying attention to. The first Terminator movie, and the terminated-before-its-time Sarah Connor Chronicles, succeeded in both respects. The second movie, IMO not so much, and I didn't bother with the third. I'm looking forward to seeing how Salvation manages. If it fails either as a setting or as a story, well, that's too bad. If it succeeds as both, bravo.
The quote from TFA misses the point entirely. It's not about there "being only one," it's about there being enough users to make Linux (or any OS that isn't from Microsoft) a viable alternative to Windows. If a particular OS has 0.0001% or 0.01% or even 0.1% market share, very few developers are going to develop for that OS. You won't be able to connect your machine running that OS to anyone's network, even if it's technically capable of making the connection, because IT will be paranoid about this unknown platform. Etc. But if you reach 1% or more, that's kind of a magic number. You may still be seen as kind of weird for not following the crowd, but you'll be able to use your computer for the same tasks for which everyone else uses theirs.
I'd say 1% is about what any non-Windows OS needs, as long as the aggregate of "alternative" OSes stays above 5% or so, as is currently the case with Linux + OS X. When the number gets significantly below that, as it did in the days before Linux took off and when you couldn't say "Apple" without first saying "beleaguered," things are pretty rough for anyone who's not running Windows on the desktop, using IE for the web, and writing everything in Word.
The same is true for people. People lie, they renege and they do dishonorable things. You can't rely on them not to change their mind or to keep their promises.
With people you can make individual judgements. You know Alice tends to keep her word and Bob doesn't, so when Alice tells you she'll do something, you can count on it getting done, while if Bob says the same thing, you assume it won't. Sure, Alice might fall down every once in a while and Bob might occasionally exceed your expectations, but you've got a track record to bet on in both cases.
With corporations, you don't have this. A particular corporation might always have been honest and upright before, but all it takes is one employee, one anonymous suit, to make an amoral decision, and all of a sudden anyone who counted on the corporation to do what it said it was going to do is having a really bad day. You'll never know who that suit was; all you'll know about is the effect of the decision. And there's not a damned thing you can do about it, because they have armies of lawyers to back their MBAs up. Which they will do, even if many of the people who work for the corporation, individually, know that what the corporation is doing is wrong.
Why? I don't know. My suspicion is that it's about preserving the dignity of The Government, not the individual people involved. Never admit that The Government ever did anything wrong, ever. It's closely akin to the way people try to turn their ancestors -- or even their entire ethnic groups -- into saints, rather than dealing with the fact that they were, you know, people, and sometimes people do terrible things.
The same argument could be applied to anything that gets preserved beyond the time it would naturally decay, and yet governments do spend a great deal of money preserving historically significant sites and artifacts. Sometimes this is just because it makes economic sense -- I'd be willing to guess that Egypt, for instance, derives a significant portion of its GDP from archaeological tourism -- but there are also intangibles at stake, matters of national identity and collective memory. Given the number of museums scattered around the UK, it's clear that the British government understands this in many cases; the question is why they don't get it in this particular one.
... but I can't help but thinking that the current British government still doesn't want to call too much attention to what their predecessors did to poor Alan Turing.
Apple simple does not believe in the power of the free-market, I guess. Instead of letting the free and unfettered action of the marketplace decide which apps and content will be run on the iPhone, as god himself intended, they have decided that they have to protect...somebody, most likely themselves, from some user somewhere actually making a decision for themselves.
Oh, FFS. Do you really believe that "the power of the free-market" would solve this problem? This is the free market; Apple is a corporation, not a government agency. They're making decisions based on what they think will ultimately lead to the greatest profit. They may very well be wrong, of course, but they're doing what corporations always do when they're, um, free to do so. Which only goes to show that boneheaded bureaucrats are boneheaded bureaucrats, whether they work for the Eeevil Government or the Holy Private Sector. The great Invisible Hand(R)(C)(TM)(Pat.Pend.) can be just as mindlessly destructive, just as inimical to initiative and hard work and individual achievement, as the Specter Of Socialism.
Yes, of course the ROE may specify that the soldier cannot fire without explicit permission from a superior. But the more usual case is for the soldier to be sent out with the understanding that he will use his own judgement as to when to fire or not. GPP made it sound like he was thinking of old-school fighting in which armies deployed in formation and awaited the order for volley fire.
A lot of people don't seem to realize how much judgement individual soldiers, from privates on up, have to exercise in modern armies. I suspect that this is largely the fault of Hollywood rank inflation -- anyone under the rank of captain or so basically doesn't exist in the military as portrayed in movies and TV, with maybe a token senior NCO.
Ah, name calling. I guess that means you've proved your point. Wait, no, it means you gave up once you realized you didn't know what you were talking about.
You start out by being arrogant and insulting, and then claim that it's a mark of inferiority on your opponent's part when he -- after trying for several posts to be reasonable and polite -- finally responds in kind. You may (or may not, of course) know a little something about artifical intelligence, but you're displaying precious little of the organic kind.
We have such machines already. The US DoD, and its counterparts in every industrialized country in the world, run extensive wargames and simulations for every possible scenario, and these days the results of these studies are pretty realistic. And you know what happens? When the people who want to fight the wars get numbers they don't like, they ignore the results and vilify the people who gave them realistic projections, and go to war anyway. Read up on Eric Shinseki for a recent example of this phenomenon, which has happened time and again throughout military history.
Before you say "well drive a car", well if I could find a car for someone my size I would easily drive a car. I cannot find a car that fits someone of my height and girth, thus I HAVE to drive an SUV. I have test driven every major car on the road and cannot fit in anything. Not even a Cadillac. They all have that stupid center console which cuts off any leg room for someone over 6 feet tall.
I'm 6'3", carrying a few more pounds around the middle than I should, and I fit fine into my Toyota Corolla. That's right, not a Camry, a Corolla.
Unless you're 6'10" tall and weigh 400 lbs., you have no excuse. My guess is that you're a fatass who calls himself a "big guy" and drives an SUV to compensate for having a disproportionately small penis. Lose some weight, find a woman who will love you despite your unfortunate deformity, and stop advertising your inadequacy to the rest of the world with your pumped-up deathtank.
3. Science Journalist knows that any reasonably intelligent person will understand the implied "... on the surface of the Earth" appended to the phrase "weighs X pounds," and really doesn't care about that tiny minority of readers whose chief joy in life is showing off how clever they are by telling everyone, in a breathless OMG-I'm-the-first-person-to-notice-this-EVAR tone, that mass and weight are not the same thing.
Well, I honestly think it's a Republican posting. Given the stupidity of the rhetoric we hear from Republican politicians and pundits, the Republicans don't need any help making themselves look bad. Hell, that AC post is downright sophisticated compared to some of what you hear from the likes of DeMint and Limbaugh.
If they're unlikely to buy it - then why are the likely to download it?
Would you pay by the word for everything you read online? Or even by the megabyte? Of course not. There are many things which are worth reading when they're free, or when they come at a fixed cost regardless of quantity, which are not worth paying a price which scales with the amount of content.
Few authors write books for exposure. Exposure doesn't put food on the table or a roof over their heads.
First of all, exposure to an author's old books helps sell new books by that author (if the books are any good, that is) which does help put food on the table. Second, any author who expects to make a living -- or really, any more than a little extra spending money -- from writing is a fool. A very tiny number of authors do end up being able to make a living from their writing, but nobody can predict that in advance. Authors write because they want to write; the money is gravy.
I don't want the government to tax me and then give out grants.
No, you just want the government to tax you (and the rest of us) and then spend those tax dollars enforcing your copyright, presumably until the end of time.
Without some protection of a genetic discovery, it makes no financial sense for a company to actually do the research and discover which genes control an aspect of a plant or animal's composition.
Which is why most such research is done in university labs, not corporate. There has been for decades a perfectly good method of advancing scientific knowledge and turning it into usable technology: academic researchers, paid primarily with public funds, do the basic science, and that fraction of it which turns out to be commercializable gets taken up by corporate engineers. This balance started to fall apart with Bayh-Dole and Diamond v. Chakrabarty, and things have been getting worse ever since.
No, corporate welfare is bad because corporations are legal fictions; they have no natural right to exist. (Please don't bother quoting Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific at me; that particular decision -- or more particularly, the interpretation of that decision -- joins Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson on the list of Dumbest Court Decisions Ever.) Individual welfare is... not good, exactly, but sometimes a regrettable necessity, because people do have a right to exist. If you claim you can't see the difference, you're being deliberately blind.
I don't pity liberals at all. Things that are not human are not worth pity.
You, sir, have just achieved a new low in online political discourse. Anyone who spews any amount of bile, on Slashdot or in any other online forum, will be able to say when called on it, "Well, at least what I said wasn't as bad as what tjstork said!" -- and odds are they'll be right.
Why not let supply and demand do the trick? Right now the costs on the supply side are distorted by the welfare checks the US government doles out to the oil industry on a regular basis; as I note in another post farther down in the thread, ending that practice would probably cause prices to go up, and certainly would leave a great deal of money for helping out the people who would pay more at the pump. New taxes really aren't necessary for this result.
Slashdot Mirror
a huge desert from which nothing profitable can come from, not even Helium 3
And your basis for this sweeping declaration is ... what, exactly?
there were things to extract, sell, harvest
The Great Plains were once called "the Great American Desert." And with the technology of the time, they were; it took a significant portion of the 19th c. to develop agricultural technology that made farming in, say, Kansas a viable proposition. Once that technology was in place, the "desert" became the breadbasket of the world.
Bolden was a general in the USMC, not the USAF. That being said, as commander of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, he ran an "air force" larger than that of many good-sized countries. Not sure how much in the way of space operations any of the Marine aviation units do, though.
It's fascinating how right-wing trolls love to say "Barack Hussein Obama" but hardly ever say "John Sidney McCain III."
IIRC, when the Mac was at 2% was also before Linux took off outside some very specialized niches. So Mac OS was pretty much the only non-Microsoft OS with any meaningful desktop market share at all, which meant that developers and network administrators could adopt a Windows-only policy without losing anything significant. There's a big difference between "90% Windows, 9% Mac, and 1% Linux" and "98% Windows, 2% Mac, and everything else indistinguishable from statistical noise."
"Willing suspension of disbelief" is not the same thing as "believe six impossible things before breakfast."
... and some stories are better than others.
Science fiction is about people, sure. (Which doesn't mean it's not about science, since science is, you know, something that people do.) But fiction in any genre is generally more enjoyable, at least for a lot of people, when it's plausible. With what's generally called "mainstream" fiction, which pretty much means "any fiction that doesn't identifiably belong to science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, historical, romance, or some other easily ghettoized genre," this is a little bit easier -- it takes place in the world in which we currently live and concerns people pretty much like us and the people we know. That being said, there's plenty of implausibility in "mainstream" fiction, and in "genre" fiction it's that much harder because the author has to create a plausible future world, or scary monster, or murder investigation, or what-have-you, in addition to writing believable people doing believable things.
Authors who don't do this, who say in essence, "what the hell, it's SF/F/H/etc. so I can do what I want," are being lazy, and their work suffers as a result. Members of the audience who ignore major aspects of the work are also lazy, and they'll miss out on something important. In science fiction, it's usually the "genre" aspects that people focus on at the expense of the "mainstream" aspects; authors who put all their effort into worldbuilding at the expense of character and plot, for instance, and readers (or watchers, depending on the medium) who think this is perfectly okay and consider the people in the story to be a distraction from the sensawunda stuff. It seems to me that what you're doing is the opposite, claiming that the world doesn't matter, only the people in it. But you have to have both; neither can exist without the other.
The Terminator mythos is a fascinating and generally well-thought-out future world, and its plausibility is well worth debating. The people trying to survive in this world, and the stories of how they do it, are also worth paying attention to. The first Terminator movie, and the terminated-before-its-time Sarah Connor Chronicles, succeeded in both respects. The second movie, IMO not so much, and I didn't bother with the third. I'm looking forward to seeing how Salvation manages. If it fails either as a setting or as a story, well, that's too bad. If it succeeds as both, bravo.
The quote from TFA misses the point entirely. It's not about there "being only one," it's about there being enough users to make Linux (or any OS that isn't from Microsoft) a viable alternative to Windows. If a particular OS has 0.0001% or 0.01% or even 0.1% market share, very few developers are going to develop for that OS. You won't be able to connect your machine running that OS to anyone's network, even if it's technically capable of making the connection, because IT will be paranoid about this unknown platform. Etc. But if you reach 1% or more, that's kind of a magic number. You may still be seen as kind of weird for not following the crowd, but you'll be able to use your computer for the same tasks for which everyone else uses theirs.
I'd say 1% is about what any non-Windows OS needs, as long as the aggregate of "alternative" OSes stays above 5% or so, as is currently the case with Linux + OS X. When the number gets significantly below that, as it did in the days before Linux took off and when you couldn't say "Apple" without first saying "beleaguered," things are pretty rough for anyone who's not running Windows on the desktop, using IE for the web, and writing everything in Word.
The same is true for people. People lie, they renege and they do dishonorable things. You can't rely on them not to change their mind or to keep their promises.
With people you can make individual judgements. You know Alice tends to keep her word and Bob doesn't, so when Alice tells you she'll do something, you can count on it getting done, while if Bob says the same thing, you assume it won't. Sure, Alice might fall down every once in a while and Bob might occasionally exceed your expectations, but you've got a track record to bet on in both cases.
With corporations, you don't have this. A particular corporation might always have been honest and upright before, but all it takes is one employee, one anonymous suit, to make an amoral decision, and all of a sudden anyone who counted on the corporation to do what it said it was going to do is having a really bad day. You'll never know who that suit was; all you'll know about is the effect of the decision. And there's not a damned thing you can do about it, because they have armies of lawyers to back their MBAs up. Which they will do, even if many of the people who work for the corporation, individually, know that what the corporation is doing is wrong.
Hell, many of them weren't even born.
Why? I don't know. My suspicion is that it's about preserving the dignity of The Government, not the individual people involved. Never admit that The Government ever did anything wrong, ever. It's closely akin to the way people try to turn their ancestors -- or even their entire ethnic groups -- into saints, rather than dealing with the fact that they were, you know, people, and sometimes people do terrible things.
The same argument could be applied to anything that gets preserved beyond the time it would naturally decay, and yet governments do spend a great deal of money preserving historically significant sites and artifacts. Sometimes this is just because it makes economic sense -- I'd be willing to guess that Egypt, for instance, derives a significant portion of its GDP from archaeological tourism -- but there are also intangibles at stake, matters of national identity and collective memory. Given the number of museums scattered around the UK, it's clear that the British government understands this in many cases; the question is why they don't get it in this particular one.
... but I can't help but thinking that the current British government still doesn't want to call too much attention to what their predecessors did to poor Alan Turing.
Apple simple does not believe in the power of the free-market, I guess. Instead of letting the free and unfettered action of the marketplace decide which apps and content will be run on the iPhone, as god himself intended, they have decided that they have to protect...somebody, most likely themselves, from some user somewhere actually making a decision for themselves.
Oh, FFS. Do you really believe that "the power of the free-market" would solve this problem? This is the free market; Apple is a corporation, not a government agency. They're making decisions based on what they think will ultimately lead to the greatest profit. They may very well be wrong, of course, but they're doing what corporations always do when they're, um, free to do so. Which only goes to show that boneheaded bureaucrats are boneheaded bureaucrats, whether they work for the Eeevil Government or the Holy Private Sector. The great Invisible Hand(R)(C)(TM)(Pat.Pend.) can be just as mindlessly destructive, just as inimical to initiative and hard work and individual achievement, as the Specter Of Socialism.
Yes, of course the ROE may specify that the soldier cannot fire without explicit permission from a superior. But the more usual case is for the soldier to be sent out with the understanding that he will use his own judgement as to when to fire or not. GPP made it sound like he was thinking of old-school fighting in which armies deployed in formation and awaited the order for volley fire.
A lot of people don't seem to realize how much judgement individual soldiers, from privates on up, have to exercise in modern armies. I suspect that this is largely the fault of Hollywood rank inflation -- anyone under the rank of captain or so basically doesn't exist in the military as portrayed in movies and TV, with maybe a token senior NCO.
Not unlike a low-level soldier who isn't allowed to decide when to fire his weapon, but has to wait for an officer or non-com to tell him to.
Armies haven't worked that way for over a hundred years.
Ah, name calling. I guess that means you've proved your point. Wait, no, it means you gave up once you realized you didn't know what you were talking about.
You start out by being arrogant and insulting, and then claim that it's a mark of inferiority on your opponent's part when he -- after trying for several posts to be reasonable and polite -- finally responds in kind. You may (or may not, of course) know a little something about artifical intelligence, but you're displaying precious little of the organic kind.
We have such machines already. The US DoD, and its counterparts in every industrialized country in the world, run extensive wargames and simulations for every possible scenario, and these days the results of these studies are pretty realistic. And you know what happens? When the people who want to fight the wars get numbers they don't like, they ignore the results and vilify the people who gave them realistic projections, and go to war anyway. Read up on Eric Shinseki for a recent example of this phenomenon, which has happened time and again throughout military history.
Before you say "well drive a car", well if I could find a car for someone my size I would easily drive a car. I cannot find a car that fits someone of my height and girth, thus I HAVE to drive an SUV. I have test driven every major car on the road and cannot fit in anything. Not even a Cadillac. They all have that stupid center console which cuts off any leg room for someone over 6 feet tall.
I'm 6'3", carrying a few more pounds around the middle than I should, and I fit fine into my Toyota Corolla. That's right, not a Camry, a Corolla.
Unless you're 6'10" tall and weigh 400 lbs., you have no excuse. My guess is that you're a fatass who calls himself a "big guy" and drives an SUV to compensate for having a disproportionately small penis. Lose some weight, find a woman who will love you despite your unfortunate deformity, and stop advertising your inadequacy to the rest of the world with your pumped-up deathtank.
3. Science Journalist knows that any reasonably intelligent person will understand the implied "... on the surface of the Earth" appended to the phrase "weighs X pounds," and really doesn't care about that tiny minority of readers whose chief joy in life is showing off how clever they are by telling everyone, in a breathless OMG-I'm-the-first-person-to-notice-this-EVAR tone, that mass and weight are not the same thing.
Well, I honestly think it's a Republican posting. Given the stupidity of the rhetoric we hear from Republican politicians and pundits, the Republicans don't need any help making themselves look bad. Hell, that AC post is downright sophisticated compared to some of what you hear from the likes of DeMint and Limbaugh.
If they're unlikely to buy it - then why are the likely to download it?
Would you pay by the word for everything you read online? Or even by the megabyte? Of course not. There are many things which are worth reading when they're free, or when they come at a fixed cost regardless of quantity, which are not worth paying a price which scales with the amount of content.
Few authors write books for exposure. Exposure doesn't put food on the table or a roof over their heads.
First of all, exposure to an author's old books helps sell new books by that author (if the books are any good, that is) which does help put food on the table. Second, any author who expects to make a living -- or really, any more than a little extra spending money -- from writing is a fool. A very tiny number of authors do end up being able to make a living from their writing, but nobody can predict that in advance. Authors write because they want to write; the money is gravy.
I don't want the government to tax me and then give out grants.
No, you just want the government to tax you (and the rest of us) and then spend those tax dollars enforcing your copyright, presumably until the end of time.
Without some protection of a genetic discovery, it makes no financial sense for a company to actually do the research and discover which genes control an aspect of a plant or animal's composition.
Which is why most such research is done in university labs, not corporate. There has been for decades a perfectly good method of advancing scientific knowledge and turning it into usable technology: academic researchers, paid primarily with public funds, do the basic science, and that fraction of it which turns out to be commercializable gets taken up by corporate engineers. This balance started to fall apart with Bayh-Dole and Diamond v. Chakrabarty, and things have been getting worse ever since.
No, corporate welfare is bad because corporations are legal fictions; they have no natural right to exist. (Please don't bother quoting Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific at me; that particular decision -- or more particularly, the interpretation of that decision -- joins Dred Scott v. Sandford and Plessy v. Ferguson on the list of Dumbest Court Decisions Ever.) Individual welfare is ... not good, exactly, but sometimes a regrettable necessity, because people do have a right to exist. If you claim you can't see the difference, you're being deliberately blind.
I don't pity liberals at all. Things that are not human are not worth pity.
You, sir, have just achieved a new low in online political discourse. Anyone who spews any amount of bile, on Slashdot or in any other online forum, will be able to say when called on it, "Well, at least what I said wasn't as bad as what tjstork said!" -- and odds are they'll be right.
Um ... congratulations, I guess.
Why not let supply and demand do the trick? Right now the costs on the supply side are distorted by the welfare checks the US government doles out to the oil industry on a regular basis; as I note in another post farther down in the thread, ending that practice would probably cause prices to go up, and certainly would leave a great deal of money for helping out the people who would pay more at the pump. New taxes really aren't necessary for this result.