A thing to remember though is that the average cost of developing a new drug easily runs into hundreds of millions of dollars and that they need to make that back to stay in business.
Not that I'm against making life saving drugs available to anyone who needs them, but if that's what you want to do then everybody should bear the cost (through taxes), not just shareholders of pharmaceutical companies.
Yeah, weird summary. You can't lift 2000lb with a kite. According to wikipedia, the same gentleman was responsible for building the world biggest ever camera at 1400lb so maybe that's where the confusion comes from.
I've always thought that things coming down from space have a tendency to burn up in the atmosphere, but on the other hand chunks of that space shuttle landed all over the place. Can someone who knows what they're talking about enlighten me as to how much of this satellite is likely to survive?
Most of it will burn up on reentry. Depending on how large it is and the materials used, there will probably be many small pieces of debris reaching the ground across hundreds of miles.
Which brings me to something else: do these satellites have some sort of self destruct mechanism? What was to stop, say, the Soviets or Chinese from going up and physically stealing a very expensive satellite that presumably contains technology/information we don't want them getting their hands on?
The same thing that stops them from say seizing a US ship somewhere on the ocean and ripping out its radar and other technology. Its piracy and it would invite if not all out war then at least some sort of major retaliation by the US.
Speculation is one way to put it, crazy conspiracy theory is another.
So AT&T CEO decides to drop 1 million customers and 1 billion in market cap (!?) in order to send a message to Apple not to bid on the wireless spectrum auction, that's his theory? If I was an AT&T shareholder I'd be wondering why not just phone them instead...
Is this the same guy who predicted Apple and Intel merging
In the piece, entitled Open-Source Warfare, Charette describes the cheap, inexpensive, but clever ways that militants are adapting to modern warfare.
Such as? I couldn't find much at all in the article except for some vague references to IEDs and cell phones, terrorist manuals found on the internet (most of which, according to TFA are terribly inaccurate) and ridiculous comments such as the one about PS2 being used as a missile guidance system. Sounds like someone came up with a new buzzword "open source warfare" and thought it was so cool that it warranted a 5 page article. People have used guerrilla tactics forever and I don't see anything terribly new here except perhaps detonating bombs remotely using a cellphone.
Ok, bye, bye karma but I never understood this idea, so popular on slashdot, that downloading stuff that you didn't pay for is somehow not stealing. The only argument I hear is that the recording industry is a bunch of assholes so its ok to take from them as much as you can. But every industry is like that, the only difference is that music and movies are easier to steal than say cars or clothes or insurance policies.
Can anybody fill me in as to why downloading music without paying for it is ok?
Photoshop is one of those apps where the users (at least the ones who tend to pay for it), graphic designers etc. are usually power users who spend all day with it and make heavy use of keyboard shortcuts and are used to its quirky interface. Changing too much of the UI at once could affect the productivity of a whole lot of people. Not that it matter too much since photoshop is the only choice for them so they'll just have to learn it again but still...
Re:Find a cure for cancer first
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You can't fix everything by throwing enough CPU cycles at it. Someone has to figure out how to apply those cycles to the problem first. Sifting through the SETI data happens to be a good problem for this kind of approach. If you can write a program that will find a cure for cancer given enough computing power, I'm sure people would be happy to donate it.
Well it depends on the specific science program, its impossible to generalize. There is a certain amount of funding for science available in this country and it has to be spread around. There are countless things that could be done if the resources were unlimited, but they are not. Say if SETI cost a one billion a day, would it still be worth it? Obviously not. So there is a line somewhere and someone has to decide and its easy to criticize when that someone is not you.
Still not very precise are we... Good thing they are not supported by advertising. I can just imagine a pitch to the advertisrs: We have between 3m and 12m visitors a week and between 5% and 65% are located in North America and between 9% and 48% of those are your target audience......
Ok, so not reading the article I get, who has the time. I am getting used to people not reading the summary either. But not reading the title of the article is just too much! Thats it, you are expelled from slashdot!
And how appropriate that the story itself is spam for this techluver blog.
In any case, I wonder why don't they do this kind of sting operations to catch spammers more often. Just the lack of resources or will I guess. If we could somehow link spammers to terrorism I'm sure we'd see this kind of thing a lot more often. Like manufacture a story that Al Qaeda is financed by sales of penis enlargement pills or something?
Well, strange as it seems, the lottery in this case IS a good bet. You have 1 in 175 mil. chance of winning, but the prize is $370 mil. for a 1 dollar bet.
Think of it this way, there are 175 mil. possible number combinations and one of them is going to win. All you have to do is buy all possible combinations. It will cost you $175 mil. and you are guaranteed to win the jackpot. One major complication is that there is a certain probability that you will have to share the jackpot with other winners so you'd have to take that into consideration, but then think of all the smaller prizes that you will also pick up.
You'll never see a bet like that offered in a casino. The only reason it is offered there is that there weren't any winners in several rounds so the money carries over. The lottery company had already made its money so they are still ahead even after they pay out the 370 mil.
"Online media distribution system" isn't a proper noun, it's a description, and is a perfectly accurate and easily-understandable way to summarize what Kazaa is
There is a difference between "online file sharing system" which is what the rest of the world calls it and "online media distribution system". I am surprised they didn't go for "online intellectual property stealing system", I guess they decided on a slightly more subtle approach.
Damn, another one gets away on a technicality. I can just imagine heavyjeffmc, sitting in his mother's basement, overflowing his chair, enjoying his loot of stolen south park episodes and van halen songs, surrounded by candy bar wrappers and empty soda cans, laughing at his victory. Some people get it all for free while the poor pop singers and movie stars have to bust their asses earning a living. There is no justice in this world, I tell ya...
The comparison seems a little bit unfair on the Shuttle.
First of all, does the Soyuz figure of 25 mil include the cost of the launch vehicle or just the spacecraft? A search for per launch cost of Soyuz gives me figures from 40-60 mil.
Secondly, Shuttle has a maximum payload of 50,000lb, Soyuz is more in the region of 15,000lb. That gives about $200 mil for 4 Soyuz launches versus $450 mil per one Shuttle launch for equivalent amount of cargo. Of course there is the initial cost of the shuttle as well to take into account but unlike Soyuz that is spread over multiple launches.
Still, he only thing that really matters is the cost per pound of payload and Soyuz still beats Shuttle by a long way.
I'm all for people being enterprising and making a little money - say 10% or at most 20% above face value. But anything over that is taking advantage of the fans, and preying on their obsessive love of the sports they love.
Sorry about the rant, but comments like this (and people who mod them up) drive me up the wall! Its amazing how many people simply don't this whole liberty business. Who exactly are you to decide how much profit someone else should make or not make? Should every business be restricted to making 10-20% profit or only the particular ones that you don't like? You know how much profit Starbucks makes on a cup of latte, or a perfume company on a tiny bottle of scented water that they sell for $75? What on earth is wrong with a person buying a ticket for $100 and then selling it for a $1,000, or a $1,000,000 if there is a buyer who wants the ticket and is willing to spend that much.
If you have a house, and the property prices happen to go through the roof, would you sell it at below market value because you'd feel bad about making a profit on it? If you are selling your 1984 Corolla and some billionaire, for whatever reason, decides to offer you $100,000 for it would you refuse because thats too much profit for you? Well maybe you would, but that doesn't make it any less wrong to force other people to do it.
If a team wants to attach whatever conditions they want to the sale of the ticket (such as resale not allowed) that is their business, but the state making the resale for profit illegal is simply ridiculous. Have they ever heard of retail in MA?
Are they just making the rules up randomly or something?
Pretty much. The idea is to make people feel safer because they are doing something. What that something is is less important, they might as well require passengers to do a tap dance or whatever amuses them the most
Think about it. People on long haul flights in tiny uncomfortable seats are usually tense, tired and easily pissed off. Having some jerk talking on the phone in the next seat for hours might well be the final straw! That means someone will FINALLY get killed for talking loudly on the cellphone.
Fox News will have a around the clock news coverage of the incident, and therefore all the idiots out there that don't realize it yet will finally hear the news that it is actually rude to make unwilling bystanders a part of their shitty little lives by shouting their boring ass conversations in their ear. Maybe then five or six percent of them will become more considerate, therefore making the world a slightly better place for all of us.
Way to go Emirates Airlines, I've never heard of you before, but if I ever need to fly to Emirates you will be my number one choice!
Slashdot Mirror
A thing to remember though is that the average cost of developing a new drug easily runs into hundreds of millions of dollars and that they need to make that back to stay in business.
Not that I'm against making life saving drugs available to anyone who needs them, but if that's what you want to do then everybody should bear the cost (through taxes), not just shareholders of pharmaceutical companies.
Yeah, weird summary. You can't lift 2000lb with a kite. According to wikipedia, the same gentleman was responsible for building the world biggest ever camera at 1400lb so maybe that's where the confusion comes from.
Projectile weight = few pounds. Ship weight = 50,000 tons. I think the ship will win
I've always thought that things coming down from space have a tendency to burn up in the atmosphere, but on the other hand chunks of that space shuttle landed all over the place. Can someone who knows what they're talking about enlighten me as to how much of this satellite is likely to survive?
Most of it will burn up on reentry. Depending on how large it is and the materials used, there will probably be many small pieces of debris reaching the ground across hundreds of miles.
Which brings me to something else: do these satellites have some sort of self destruct mechanism? What was to stop, say, the Soviets or Chinese from going up and physically stealing a very expensive satellite that presumably contains technology/information we don't want them getting their hands on?
The same thing that stops them from say seizing a US ship somewhere on the ocean and ripping out its radar and other technology. Its piracy and it would invite if not all out war then at least some sort of major retaliation by the US.
Great, now just make a reader that doesn't slow my system down to a crawl while opening a 100K document.
Speculation is one way to put it, crazy conspiracy theory is another.
So AT&T CEO decides to drop 1 million customers and 1 billion in market cap (!?) in order to send a message to Apple not to bid on the wireless spectrum auction, that's his theory? If I was an AT&T shareholder I'd be wondering why not just phone them instead...
Is this the same guy who predicted Apple and Intel merging
In the piece, entitled Open-Source Warfare, Charette describes the cheap, inexpensive, but clever ways that militants are adapting to modern warfare.
Such as? I couldn't find much at all in the article except for some vague references to IEDs and cell phones, terrorist manuals found on the internet (most of which, according to TFA are terribly inaccurate) and ridiculous comments such as the one about PS2 being used as a missile guidance system. Sounds like someone came up with a new buzzword "open source warfare" and thought it was so cool that it warranted a 5 page article. People have used guerrilla tactics forever and I don't see anything terribly new here except perhaps detonating bombs remotely using a cellphone.
Ok, bye, bye karma but I never understood this idea, so popular on slashdot, that downloading stuff that you didn't pay for is somehow not stealing. The only argument I hear is that the recording industry is a bunch of assholes so its ok to take from them as much as you can. But every industry is like that, the only difference is that music and movies are easier to steal than say cars or clothes or insurance policies.
Can anybody fill me in as to why downloading music without paying for it is ok?
Photoshop is one of those apps where the users (at least the ones who tend to pay for it), graphic designers etc. are usually power users who spend all day with it and make heavy use of keyboard shortcuts and are used to its quirky interface. Changing too much of the UI at once could affect the productivity of a whole lot of people. Not that it matter too much since photoshop is the only choice for them so they'll just have to learn it again but still...
I think it's obvious where they got the idea for the design of the robot. Just compare the two images, similarities are obvious:
http://file.shanghaidaily.com/News/Image//2007/2007-11/2007-11-08/20071108_337360_01.jpg
http://hubpages.com/u/49849_f260.jpg
You can't fix everything by throwing enough CPU cycles at it. Someone has to figure out how to apply those cycles to the problem first. Sifting through the SETI data happens to be a good problem for this kind of approach. If you can write a program that will find a cure for cancer given enough computing power, I'm sure people would be happy to donate it.
Well it depends on the specific science program, its impossible to generalize. There is a certain amount of funding for science available in this country and it has to be spread around. There are countless things that could be done if the resources were unlimited, but they are not. Say if SETI cost a one billion a day, would it still be worth it? Obviously not. So there is a line somewhere and someone has to decide and its easy to criticize when that someone is not you.
Still not very precise are we... Good thing they are not supported by advertising. I can just imagine a pitch to the advertisrs: We have between 3m and 12m visitors a week and between 5% and 65% are located in North America and between 9% and 48% of those are your target audience ......
Ok, so not reading the article I get, who has the time. I am getting used to people not reading the summary either. But not reading the title of the article is just too much! Thats it, you are expelled from slashdot!
And how appropriate that the story itself is spam for this techluver blog.
In any case, I wonder why don't they do this kind of sting operations to catch spammers more often. Just the lack of resources or will I guess. If we could somehow link spammers to terrorism I'm sure we'd see this kind of thing a lot more often. Like manufacture a story that Al Qaeda is financed by sales of penis enlargement pills or something?
Well, strange as it seems, the lottery in this case IS a good bet. You have 1 in 175 mil. chance of winning, but the prize is $370 mil. for a 1 dollar bet.
Think of it this way, there are 175 mil. possible number combinations and one of them is going to win. All you have to do is buy all possible combinations. It will cost you $175 mil. and you are guaranteed to win the jackpot. One major complication is that there is a certain probability that you will have to share the jackpot with other winners so you'd have to take that into consideration, but then think of all the smaller prizes that you will also pick up.
You'll never see a bet like that offered in a casino. The only reason it is offered there is that there weren't any winners in several rounds so the money carries over. The lottery company had already made its money so they are still ahead even after they pay out the 370 mil.
"Online media distribution system" isn't a proper noun, it's a description, and is a perfectly accurate and easily-understandable way to summarize what Kazaa is
There is a difference between "online file sharing system" which is what the rest of the world calls it and "online media distribution system". I am surprised they didn't go for "online intellectual property stealing system", I guess they decided on a slightly more subtle approach.
Damn, another one gets away on a technicality. I can just imagine heavyjeffmc, sitting in his mother's basement, overflowing his chair, enjoying his loot of stolen south park episodes and van halen songs, surrounded by candy bar wrappers and empty soda cans, laughing at his victory. Some people get it all for free while the poor pop singers and movie stars have to bust their asses earning a living. There is no justice in this world, I tell ya...
Ok, I was talking about the maximum payload capacity for the launch vehicle: http://www.fas.org/spp/guide/russia/launch/soyuz.htm 7,300kg = about 15,000lb
The comparison seems a little bit unfair on the Shuttle.
First of all, does the Soyuz figure of 25 mil include the cost of the launch vehicle or just the spacecraft? A search for per launch cost of Soyuz gives me figures from 40-60 mil.
Secondly, Shuttle has a maximum payload of 50,000lb, Soyuz is more in the region of 15,000lb. That gives about $200 mil for 4 Soyuz launches versus $450 mil per one Shuttle launch for equivalent amount of cargo. Of course there is the initial cost of the shuttle as well to take into account but unlike Soyuz that is spread over multiple launches.
Still, he only thing that really matters is the cost per pound of payload and Soyuz still beats Shuttle by a long way.
I agree, no more Soviet Russia jokes here. They are only funny in Soviet Russia
I'm all for people being enterprising and making a little money - say 10% or at most 20% above face value. But anything over that is taking advantage of the fans, and preying on their obsessive love of the sports they love.
Sorry about the rant, but comments like this (and people who mod them up) drive me up the wall! Its amazing how many people simply don't this whole liberty business. Who exactly are you to decide how much profit someone else should make or not make? Should every business be restricted to making 10-20% profit or only the particular ones that you don't like? You know how much profit Starbucks makes on a cup of latte, or a perfume company on a tiny bottle of scented water that they sell for $75? What on earth is wrong with a person buying a ticket for $100 and then selling it for a $1,000, or a $1,000,000 if there is a buyer who wants the ticket and is willing to spend that much.
If you have a house, and the property prices happen to go through the roof, would you sell it at below market value because you'd feel bad about making a profit on it? If you are selling your 1984 Corolla and some billionaire, for whatever reason, decides to offer you $100,000 for it would you refuse because thats too much profit for you? Well maybe you would, but that doesn't make it any less wrong to force other people to do it.
If a team wants to attach whatever conditions they want to the sale of the ticket (such as resale not allowed) that is their business, but the state making the resale for profit illegal is simply ridiculous. Have they ever heard of retail in MA?
Are they just making the rules up randomly or something?
Pretty much. The idea is to make people feel safer because they are doing something. What that something is is less important, they might as well require passengers to do a tap dance or whatever amuses them the most
Think about it. People on long haul flights in tiny uncomfortable seats are usually tense, tired and easily pissed off. Having some jerk talking on the phone in the next seat for hours might well be the final straw! That means someone will FINALLY get killed for talking loudly on the cellphone.
Fox News will have a around the clock news coverage of the incident, and therefore all the idiots out there that don't realize it yet will finally hear the news that it is actually rude to make unwilling bystanders a part of their shitty little lives by shouting their boring ass conversations in their ear. Maybe then five or six percent of them will become more considerate, therefore making the world a slightly better place for all of us.
Way to go Emirates Airlines, I've never heard of you before, but if I ever need to fly to Emirates you will be my number one choice!
Hmmm, so who do I want to keep my medical records with, Google or Microsoft ..... Anybody has an accurate evil-o-meter handy?