Grow a sense of humor. Not everybody is a humorless fanatic like you and the rest of your fellow crazies. This is a situation where metamod actually worked for a change.
I also noticed you picked the most rational-sounding part of the comment. That kind of cherry-picking won't work, anyone who sees your post has already read above it on the thread.
If you need a factual basis for the humor content, check out MS comtributions to your Fearless Leader at OpenSecrets. You already know the result of the payoff, DOJ rolling over and playing dead with respect to an antitrust suit against MS that they had already won
if they don't insist on an exciting trip
on
After the X Prize
·
· Score: 1
>a href="http://www.jpaerospace.com">JP Aerospace probably can deliver the goods. They're the ultra-high altitude freight blimp-to-orbit project. I hope they go for it.
Why don't you come up with a list of claims made by Black Box Voting that didn't check out as fact as judged by computer experts not on Diebold's or the payroll of an Election Department of a Diebold customer?
Take all the time you like at Little Green Footballs, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh's site, and Free Republic.
Good luck, you'll need it.The moderators who modded you up must get their news from the same "sources" you do.
Neither does it increase your credibility among anybody who hasn't drunk the Kool-Aid.Blogspace works even better for disseminating attractive lies among True Believers than for distributing facts.
How many right-wing bloggers still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and had WMDs which will be discovered someday?
Most Windows software runs either faster or at the same speed as it does on the beast itself.
A quick look at Codeweavers will reveal that "Most Windows software" DOES NOT RUN on even the commercialware version of WINE. That's why I'm running Win4Lin over FC2.
This is something I've been wondering about for a long time Haven't gone past wondering because I don't have the electronic hardware setup required to build the first one.
p
Price a 100CD audio jukebox vs a 100 DVD-R data jukebox if you're wondering why I'd be thinking about this.
NO amount of conservation by us will noticeably affect global warming or the coming of peak oil or the continuing upward trend in the price of energy, which is an indirect tax on everything we do for business or pleasure.
The growth in energy demand from the industrializing Third World dwarfs anything we can do in this area.
Conservation is fun stuff, but if we are to survive the consequences of past and present energy policy, we need to get to work on the real problem.
We need to be looking at energy replacement instead, and that energy should be a lot cleaner and a lot cheaper than we are buying today.
The author pointed out that the future "hydrogen economy" is a cruel hoax perpetrated by the ignorant and by people who find the technologies so l33t and k3w1 that they haven't noticed that hydrogen is an inefficient energy distribution medium that might be uneconomic even if the price of electricity were $0.000 per KWh.
We are best off growing our own crude oil and prcessing and distributing it using existing infrastructure.
Biodiesel even when grown using ridiculously energy and labor intensive food crops is at rough parity with diesel fuel drilled in the middle east. We can do better than this, turning our sewage treatment plants into energy farms for algae that transforms raw sewage into crude oil should be a lot cheaper.
Remember the article here about $250/ton transport to LEO?
The NASA proposal for the Space Power Satellite showed that the system would be profitable even at launch costs of $400/kg.
What does 25% a pound to orbit using an extension of a 200 year old technology suggest to you?
Hopefully, more than it suggests to our political and corporate leadership.
If we can sell electricity directly to the Third World cheaper than they can buy oil to make it with, that's a lot of carbon dioxide and general pollution that isn't going to be happening.
We can replace fossil fuel, both as oil and as coal with solar energy packaged as cheaper and cleaner replacements.
For more information, click here. This includes links to the relevant UNH / NASA / DOE / space transportation sites.
> but the government sucks at just about everything they do.
Sure. Look at the ARPANET which evolved into the communications medium we are using right now. Look at the history of the Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electricification. Look at the Interstate Highway network.
Look at all the pissed off customers in areas where local governments are running fiber to the home, who are getting better and cheaper broadband Internet access and frequently, cable TV access than ever before.
How dare governments act against monopolies!
Fact is, there are some things the government frequently does do better than the private sector. We don't contract out the operation of our military to Microsoft.
The non-Libertarian fanatic simply figures that there are some things the government does best, some things best done by the private sector, and tries to make sure that each does what it does best.
I've been free-lance writing for 17 years. I have no trouble working in my pajamas or stark naked, it's just a matter of good work habits that don't require a boss to supervise them.
The only way I'd go back to an office would be for a lot more money or for a change to go back into building new technology.
If your management is dangerously incompetent, the time to look for a new job is NOW, don't wait to find out that your last assignment training your cheaper replacements.
But don't blow up your bridges with them, they might want you to show up as a consultant to clean up the mess your replacement made. At several times your old hourly rate.
Companies are already finding that their intellectual property is getting stolen, and their lawyers don't know the legal turf well enough to be able to enforce their contracts.
The other bad news about outsourcing is that savings are at best, about 20% for anything more complex than putting a Nike sneaker together. While the hourly rate is lower overseas, the cost of building infrastructure, workarounds where one can't build infrastructure, coordinating work across timezones, etc. become much more significant.
IMHO, offshoring is just another Bad Idea in the form of a management fad. Remember Theory X? Theory Y?
I think the fad will run its course, but the damages to business in outsourcing companies (e.g. kids in school are already avoiding IT / tech courses on the basis that the jobs aren't there) may take a generation to fix, and some Fortune 500 companies doing "bet the company" projects with outshoring won't survive the fad.
But the CEOs will get golden parachutes, so all will be OK in the end.
A voucher system that demands accountability for results from the voucher school, that forbids funds being used for sectarian religious education, and has enforcement mecnanisms to back this up will make it possible for us to exchange tax dollars for schools that might actually educate people.
Note that there is no reason why a public school that chooses to comply with the new rules that can get parents to send kids there can not survive.
Here's a draft of a voucher initiative designed to do just that. Needless to say, nobody has tried to turn it into law, the people who want to start voucher schools have NO interest in money with accountability. any more than the public schools want to be held accountable.
Maybe google is your friend.
However, since it probably isn't, try clicking here.
The moderators who marked your astroturf "informative" should quit. I found your post via metamod... and marked your "Informative" rating "unfair", since "Stupid" and "Astroturf" are unavailable.
What?s more, monitoring and control are also available across the Internet. Over an authenticated, secure internet connection, users can monitor and adjust the temperatures of a single thermostat or their entire house.
Just what are they telling us is "secure" and "authenticated", and has anyone tried to break into it?
IMHO, using an internal https server would be a good start on security.
I've been predicting Net appliance hacking for years. Imagine finding your hot tub has been set to the boiling point by script kiddies.
And if either of us had a 1 sentence solution to that, we would be in Oslo discussing it, not on/.
You seem to be under the delusion that governments and NGOs care what we think. If you aren't connected or sufficiently wealthy to buy your way into the "connected", they are simply not interested in anything you have to say, though the NGOs wiil be happy to accept your tax-deductible contributions.
For instance, here's a one sentence solution to the energy crisis and global warming: Replace fossil fuel with (probably cheaper) algae biomass biodiesel, and build NASA's space power satellite system using the JP Aerospace blimp-to-orbit as a launch platform for less than 1/1000 the price NASA based its original SPS cost projections on.
OK, it's a long sentence. Details at the URL below.
University of New Hampshire is continuing the research on algae biomass for growing cheap crude oil.
It has to be cheaper than growing fuel from food crops, algae can be grown from sewage, and the processing steps can probably be completely automated.
A no-cost fertilizer source and drastically reduced labor costs have to beat the usual process of growing crops, algae doesn't waste energy on making leaves, stalks, or roots and these items don't have to be processed as waste since they don't exist.
It isn't the flashy things that are going to do it. It is a lot of people doing dull things.
Conservation is no longer an option with respect to stopping either global climate change or running out of oil.
The Third World will happily burn up any oil we conserve. They are industrializing rapidly. One reason why the price of oil isn't terrorism, it's that the oil nations are pumping at record levels to meet the new demand from places like India and China.
We need energy replacement strategies which are cheap enough that the Third World will adopt them in preference to buying oil from the Middle East.
Check my sig for info on the cheapest possible way to grow crude oil (algae biomass) and what's probably the cleanest way to meet electricity demand in the long run.
The vehicle's design is not really street-safe - this will be a problem as more efficient, lighter cars share the road with Hummers.
It sucks that the kid died, but this should be a setback for solar-powered motor vehicle on highways. The safety problems are very probably unsolvable. Bicycles have been on the roads for over a century and motorcycles for almost as long. No technological solution for what happens when car meets bike that keeps the bike or the rider intact has been found. This suggests to me that there isn't one. If a road-safe solar vehicle can't be built, there is no point in pursuing this technology as more than a dangerous hobby any further.
More to the point, this is NOT an environmental solution. Safety issues aside, every barrel of oil that is conserved by the industrialized countries will be burned by an industrializing Third World, unless carbon-neutral solutions to replace fossil fuel cheaper than the current ones can be found. Therefore, conservation-based approaches to either global warming or running out of oil are uniformly unworkable, no matter how cool the technologies are.
We need energy replacement, not energy conservation.
The place for solar cells is in orbital solar arrays as part of a solar power satellite network. Power availablilty 24/7/365, no concerns about weather, and no SUV will ever run into a cell array and take it offline. However, this is better adapted as a solution for central station power generation facilities.
We're better off learning how to grow our own oil than conserve it. I like this technology, but we are better off as a society investing the $169B it's going to take to build algae biomass energy farms to replace foriegn oil imports. BTW, biomass is basically carbon-neutral, the carbon that is burned is extracted in the form of carbon dioxide.
We're better off buying cheaper cars and light bulbs and putting the difference into taxes to be spent on subsidizing energy farm development if we actually want to make a difference either from the standpoint of global warming or from the standpoint of not providing the oil producers of the Middle East more money to make trouble for the West with.
The question of US/EU conservation is no longer especially relevant to the global warming picture. Worrying about this is part of a conventional wisdom that is obsolete and that we no longer have time for anymore.
The Third World will happily burn any oil we don't in the pursuit of the cheapest possible industrialization and consumer goods. Imagine ever Chinese and Indian family with a car. Get the idea? Unless we can find them and ourselves a better and cheaper alternative. Algae biomass is probably it.
With respect to cheap energy in general, check my sig. The good news is that real solutions are within reach.
the origin of property ownership
on
Lawyers In Space...
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The origin of property ownership basically comes down to one armed person or an armed group standing on a piece of land saying "This belongs to me/us, take it away from us if you can."
I don't think the concept of property ownership or "common rights of humanity" will really mean much of anything unless and until we actually have people up there representing themselves or a government to assert a property claim.
I prefer private ownership, nobody is going to put their own investment into a piece of property they do not have a legal right to, and if there is no private investment, there is no space colonization or industrialization.
As to why this issue is likely to become a "live" one long before the lawyers expect it to, follow the link in my sig.
If the FBI shuts him down, I won't be donating to his legal defense via PayPal.
Every method of human communications has been used to get secrets where they weren't supposed to be going. E-mail, the Web, Usenet, P2P, and even snailmail, are merely the most modern examples. P2P is special because?
The problem is the idiots who made them available to begin with. These documents didn't just appear on P2P because of some special evil that pulled them out of Rick Wallace's asshole, they appeared because imbeciles either set their P2P setups to make their entire HDs available or put them there themselves. The solution is better security. There are some systems that do not need Kazaa or Gnutella installed.
Legislation to shut down P2P will only help America's internal enemies of freedom in the *AA organizations.
Perhaps he isn't one of the people who knows that space flight for $250/ton to orbit will be possible Real Soon Now.
Perhaps he hasn't heard about things like global warming and running out of oil and that the NASA Space Power Satellite can solve both of those problems. Or figured that the people who can solve these problems stand to make one hell of a lot of money out of it. Space-based solar power appears to be the logical replacement for coal.
Mankind traditionally has been willing to go to dangerous places in search of profit and there's no reason why space can't be one of them if the price to orbit is dropped radically. This goal is now within reach.
Perhaps we have a man who has made great scientific contributions a generation ago but is fundamentally irrelevant now. All he's interested in is making a bigger rice bowl for his friends who are interested in the kind of science that can be done with unmanned probes. That isn't what it's about anymore. Figuring out how to explore space is about human survival now, not getting tons of rocks from alien planets to study.
For more information about solutions to energy problems that include space, go to my page and follow the links. They make a hell of a lot more sense than Van Allen does.
Slashdot Mirror
I also noticed you picked the most rational-sounding part of the comment. That kind of cherry-picking won't work, anyone who sees your post has already read above it on the thread.
If you need a factual basis for the humor content, check out MS comtributions to your Fearless Leader at OpenSecrets. You already know the result of the payoff, DOJ rolling over and playing dead with respect to an antitrust suit against MS that they had already won
>a href="http://www.jpaerospace.com">JP Aerospace probably can deliver the goods. They're the ultra-high altitude freight blimp-to-orbit project. I hope they go for it.
Have you noticed that you have a strange, unaccoutable desire to nuke your Linux install and put XP on your computer?
When you see a picture of Bill Gates, do you find yourself wanting to grovel?
Take all the time you like at Little Green Footballs, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh's site, and Free Republic.
Good luck, you'll need it.The moderators who modded you up must get their news from the same "sources" you do.
Neither does it increase your credibility among anybody who hasn't drunk the Kool-Aid.Blogspace works even better for disseminating attractive lies among True Believers than for distributing facts.
How many right-wing bloggers still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and had WMDs which will be discovered someday?
Are you one of them?
Here is a list of the problems I've had that could be attributed to the use of AMD on my workstations:
Above space left intentionally blank.
A quick look at Codeweavers will reveal that "Most Windows software" DOES NOT RUN on even the commercialware version of WINE. That's why I'm running Win4Lin over FC2.
This is something I've been wondering about for a long time Haven't gone past wondering because I don't have the electronic hardware setup required to build the first one. p Price a 100CD audio jukebox vs a 100 DVD-R data jukebox if you're wondering why I'd be thinking about this.
The growth in energy demand from the industrializing Third World dwarfs anything we can do in this area.
Conservation is fun stuff, but if we are to survive the consequences of past and present energy policy, we need to get to work on the real problem.
We need to be looking at energy replacement instead, and that energy should be a lot cleaner and a lot cheaper than we are buying today.
The author pointed out that the future "hydrogen economy" is a cruel hoax perpetrated by the ignorant and by people who find the technologies so l33t and k3w1 that they haven't noticed that hydrogen is an inefficient energy distribution medium that might be uneconomic even if the price of electricity were $0.000 per KWh.
We are best off growing our own crude oil and prcessing and distributing it using existing infrastructure.
Biodiesel even when grown using ridiculously energy and labor intensive food crops is at rough parity with diesel fuel drilled in the middle east. We can do better than this, turning our sewage treatment plants into energy farms for algae that transforms raw sewage into crude oil should be a lot cheaper.
Remember the article here about $250/ton transport to LEO?
The NASA proposal for the Space Power Satellite showed that the system would be profitable even at launch costs of $400/kg.
What does 25% a pound to orbit using an extension of a 200 year old technology suggest to you?
Hopefully, more than it suggests to our political and corporate leadership.
If we can sell electricity directly to the Third World cheaper than they can buy oil to make it with, that's a lot of carbon dioxide and general pollution that isn't going to be happening.
We can replace fossil fuel, both as oil and as coal with solar energy packaged as cheaper and cleaner replacements.
For more information, click here. This includes links to the relevant UNH / NASA / DOE / space transportation sites.
Sure. Look at the ARPANET which evolved into the communications medium we are using right now. Look at the history of the Tennessee Valley Authority and rural electricification. Look at the Interstate Highway network.
Look at all the pissed off customers in areas where local governments are running fiber to the home, who are getting better and cheaper broadband Internet access and frequently, cable TV access than ever before.
How dare governments act against monopolies!
Fact is, there are some things the government frequently does do better than the private sector. We don't contract out the operation of our military to Microsoft.
The non-Libertarian fanatic simply figures that there are some things the government does best, some things best done by the private sector, and tries to make sure that each does what it does best.
The only way I'd go back to an office would be for a lot more money or for a change to go back into building new technology.
But this isn't for everybody.
But don't blow up your bridges with them, they might want you to show up as a consultant to clean up the mess your replacement made. At several times your old hourly rate.
Computerworld Today 9/9/04
Companies are already finding that their intellectual property is getting stolen, and their lawyers don't know the legal turf well enough to be able to enforce their contracts.
The other bad news about outsourcing is that savings are at best, about 20% for anything more complex than putting a Nike sneaker together. While the hourly rate is lower overseas, the cost of building infrastructure, workarounds where one can't build infrastructure, coordinating work across timezones, etc. become much more significant.
IMHO, offshoring is just another Bad Idea in the form of a management fad. Remember Theory X? Theory Y?
I think the fad will run its course, but the damages to business in outsourcing companies (e.g. kids in school are already avoiding IT / tech courses on the basis that the jobs aren't there) may take a generation to fix, and some Fortune 500 companies doing "bet the company" projects with outshoring won't survive the fad.
But the CEOs will get golden parachutes, so all will be OK in the end.
Read it, recommend it, don't agree with him on that point.
Note that there is no reason why a public school that chooses to comply with the new rules that can get parents to send kids there can not survive.
Here's a draft of a voucher initiative designed to do just that. Needless to say, nobody has tried to turn it into law, the people who want to start voucher schools have NO interest in money with accountability. any more than the public schools want to be held accountable.
The moderators who marked your astroturf "informative" should quit. I found your post via metamod... and marked your "Informative" rating "unfair", since "Stupid" and "Astroturf" are unavailable.
Just what are they telling us is "secure" and "authenticated", and has anyone tried to break into it?
IMHO, using an internal https server would be a good start on security.
I've been predicting Net appliance hacking for years. Imagine finding your hot tub has been set to the boiling point by script kiddies.
You seem to be under the delusion that governments and NGOs care what we think. If you aren't connected or sufficiently wealthy to buy your way into the "connected", they are simply not interested in anything you have to say, though the NGOs wiil be happy to accept your tax-deductible contributions.
For instance, here's a one sentence solution to the energy crisis and global warming:
Replace fossil fuel with (probably cheaper) algae biomass biodiesel, and build NASA's space power satellite system using the JP Aerospace blimp-to-orbit as a launch platform for less than 1/1000 the price NASA based its original SPS cost projections on.
OK, it's a long sentence. Details at the URL below.
It has to be cheaper than growing fuel from food crops, algae can be grown from sewage, and the processing steps can probably be completely automated.
A no-cost fertilizer source and drastically reduced labor costs have to beat the usual process of growing crops, algae doesn't waste energy on making leaves, stalks, or roots and these items don't have to be processed as waste since they don't exist.
The farmers get cheaper fuel out of it.
Conservation is no longer an option with respect to stopping either global climate change or running out of oil.
The Third World will happily burn up any oil we conserve. They are industrializing rapidly. One reason why the price of oil isn't terrorism, it's that the oil nations are pumping at record levels to meet the new demand from places like India and China.
We need energy replacement strategies which are cheap enough that the Third World will adopt them in preference to buying oil from the Middle East.
Check my sig for info on the cheapest possible way to grow crude oil (algae biomass) and what's probably the cleanest way to meet electricity demand in the long run.
It sucks that the kid died, but this should be a setback for solar-powered motor vehicle on highways. The safety problems are very probably unsolvable. Bicycles have been on the roads for over a century and motorcycles for almost as long. No technological solution for what happens when car meets bike that keeps the bike or the rider intact has been found. This suggests to me that there isn't one. If a road-safe solar vehicle can't be built, there is no point in pursuing this technology as more than a dangerous hobby any further.
More to the point, this is NOT an environmental solution. Safety issues aside, every barrel of oil that is conserved by the industrialized countries will be burned by an industrializing Third World, unless carbon-neutral solutions to replace fossil fuel cheaper than the current ones can be found. Therefore, conservation-based approaches to either global warming or running out of oil are uniformly unworkable, no matter how cool the technologies are.
We need energy replacement, not energy conservation.
The place for solar cells is in orbital solar arrays as part of a solar power satellite network. Power availablilty 24/7/365, no concerns about weather, and no SUV will ever run into a cell array and take it offline. However, this is better adapted as a solution for central station power generation facilities.
The solution for motor vehicle power? Switch to diesel engines and grow crude oil in energy farms. Even food-grain crop based biodiesel is comparable to price to bin Laden's Finest Middle East oil product, and algae-based biomass grown as part of sewage treatment promises to be quite a bit cheaper than growing it from fuel crops.
For more discussion of the implications of this, check my sig.
We're better off buying cheaper cars and light bulbs and putting the difference into taxes to be spent on subsidizing energy farm development if we actually want to make a difference either from the standpoint of global warming or from the standpoint of not providing the oil producers of the Middle East more money to make trouble for the West with.
The question of US/EU conservation is no longer especially relevant to the global warming picture. Worrying about this is part of a conventional wisdom that is obsolete and that we no longer have time for anymore.
The Third World will happily burn any oil we don't in the pursuit of the cheapest possible industrialization and consumer goods. Imagine ever Chinese and Indian family with a car. Get the idea? Unless we can find them and ourselves a better and cheaper alternative. Algae biomass is probably it.
With respect to cheap energy in general, check my sig. The good news is that real solutions are within reach.
I don't think the concept of property ownership or "common rights of humanity" will really mean much of anything unless and until we actually have people up there representing themselves or a government to assert a property claim.
I prefer private ownership, nobody is going to put their own investment into a piece of property they do not have a legal right to, and if there is no private investment, there is no space colonization or industrialization.
As to why this issue is likely to become a "live" one long before the lawyers expect it to, follow the link in my sig.
Every method of human communications has been used to get secrets where they weren't supposed to be going. E-mail, the Web, Usenet, P2P, and even snailmail, are merely the most modern examples. P2P is special because?
The problem is the idiots who made them available to begin with. These documents didn't just appear on P2P because of some special evil that pulled them out of Rick Wallace's asshole, they appeared because imbeciles either set their P2P setups to make their entire HDs available or put them there themselves. The solution is better security. There are some systems that do not need Kazaa or Gnutella installed.
Legislation to shut down P2P will only help America's internal enemies of freedom in the *AA organizations.
Perhaps he hasn't heard about things like global warming and running out of oil and that the NASA Space Power Satellite can solve both of those problems. Or figured that the people who can solve these problems stand to make one hell of a lot of money out of it. Space-based solar power appears to be the logical replacement for coal.
Mankind traditionally has been willing to go to dangerous places in search of profit and there's no reason why space can't be one of them if the price to orbit is dropped radically. This goal is now within reach.
Perhaps we have a man who has made great scientific contributions a generation ago but is fundamentally irrelevant now. All he's interested in is making a bigger rice bowl for his friends who are interested in the kind of science that can be done with unmanned probes. That isn't what it's about anymore. Figuring out how to explore space is about human survival now, not getting tons of rocks from alien planets to study.
For more information about solutions to energy problems that include space, go to my page and follow the links. They make a hell of a lot more sense than Van Allen does.