I think you overestimate the flexibility of the trade, especially among the lower echelons, such as accountants, technicians, and even engineers (except software developers.) I know people here who do PADS work for so many years that they don't know anything else, and the idea to use some other OS is just impossible to them.
Besides, F/OSS systems still have quirks. For example, I deployed OpenFiler a couple of weeks ago, and I can't access it by its DNS name (\\foo\bar) but can if I use the IP address (\\10.0.0.201\bar). DNS itself works fine (can dig and ping.) I did some RTFM and Googling and found that the issue may be in the Kerberos library that needs to be upgraded by compiling from source... Clearly I'm not going to do that on a NAS appliance that is supposed to just work. A Windows server has no such issue, it just works. Anyone but a geek would just throw the OpenFiler out because the issues involved (Kerberos, WINS, time syncronization (NTP) etc.) are just way above the pay grade of an average technician.
It's easy, actually. The cash goes to Chinese workers, and the technology goes to MS (and through it back to China.) Clearly win-win. Add one more win through the fact that the same money will buy far more code in China than in Redmond. Besides, haven't BG complained that he wants more H1B workers? He can have them right where they are made:-)
None of this is unusual. When the USA gives financial aid to countries it often requires that the money (or a good part of it) must be spent on US-manufactured goods and services.
To see for myself I opened the same MS Word 2003 document in its native MS Word and in OO 2.2.0 that I have installed. The result is that MS Word shows the final text (colored as needed) in the page area and the changes in the margin area (titled "Deleted:...", "Formatted:..." and so on.) The OO made no notes on margins, and instead put all the changes, massive deletions and stuff in the main body of the document, so I see page after page after page of deleted (crossed out) text.
Now, I can deal with this if I have to. But when you have employees and when you pay those employees for every minute they spend scrolling up and down, I can see that investment in MS Office is worth it - unless OO becomes exactly like MS Office, with all its bugz, stupidities and weirdness. That's what the users want.
No, since they are all just passengers. If you doubt that, ask yourself if astronauts can steer to fly over Portugal or over Greece when they are in the area. If they can't steer they are not in control.
YMMV or "it all depends", as they used to say in ancient Egypt. Physical activities come with a serious chance of lasting physical harm, whereas a virtual entertainment is as safe as it gets. Teens are driven by hormones and not by knowledge. A kid may get involved in something that police later calls a rape, what do you do then? (regardless of the gender of the kid in question.)
It is definitely up to you to prefer one way or another for your children, but in my unqualified opinion there is nothing wrong with satisfying the temporary chemically induced desire with mere patterns of pixels. Even the most burning need can not withstand viewing of 10,000 pr0n photos that are easily available on Usenet or elsewhere. After the pressure dissipates the kid would be able to actually think before making a commitment. Hormones are a poor substitute for a well considered decision.
It is, of course, possible to argue that one-sided attraction to computers (or their screens) is unhealthy. It may be so. But anything one-sided is unhealthy, and a parent should ensure that dangerous activities are done in VR and reasonably safe activities are done in real life, and not the other way around.
Either long life, or many sites/probes, or all of the above. The planet is really large. IMO, we need tens of areas researched before we can even say that 100 other sites should be similar. If on Earth you studied a patch of Ethiopia it doesn't really tell much about conditions in Greenland. If you are sending colonists then you need to know where to drop them off.
I think the question, as stated, is of limited value. Many of the discoveries are not of "yes/no" type (except the photo of Earth, for example - you got one and that's all you need.) We still do not know many things about Earth, as a comparison, even though most of us live on the planet. Similarly, it is not possible to say "enough" after you briefly inspected only about 15 sq. miles of a territory that is about the same as Earth (Mars: 144,798,465 km^2 vs. Earth, 148,939,100 km^2, counting only dry land.)
If you review the 10 listed discoveries you will see that all of them beg for more data. Dust devils, for example - they might be a tad important for future missions and colonisation, so we'd better study a lot of them before we can guess how hazardous they are. We don't know the abrasive characteristics of the dust, for example, and what about its static charge while are on the subject? It would really suck to travel all the way to Mars just to be zapped by a 100 kV charged dust cloud. Amounts of water-bearing rocks? I'd say it's super important if humans plan to live there, and you can't send people up there without knowing how much water they can obtain from minerals that they can access. Sulfur? Might be a part of a chemical process, and it might be a hazard, then spacesuits must be tested against it (sulfur is chemically active.) You need to know that before you send people; and you also need to know if the sulfur is a local quirk (a volcano?) or it is a common ingredient of the whole planet. And so on. There is study after study after study to be carried out by such robots until we even can say what materials we can reliably depend upon to make fuel for the return of the manned expedition. Otherwise it would be an unpleasant surprise to send machines for rock A and upon landing to discover that only rock B, completely different in every aspect, is present at the site.
10 - Opportunity provides tantalizing glimpse of Victoria crater.
Required extended mission, obviously - rovers did not land near the site.
9 - Evidence of volcanic origin for Gusev crater.
Same as above - you may need to travel for a long time to get to the interesting site.
8 - First meteorite identified on another planet.
Required extended mission - you need to find the meteorite.
7 - Discover of sulfur suggests Mars stink.
May not require an extended mission.
6 - Helps scientists determine that Mars had three distinct geological eras.
Most definitely requires an extended mission, and likely to require far more than that to know those eras in detail. Earth geology is not dead yet even though people study rocks for thousands of years.
5 - Martian dust devils captured on film.
Requires an extended mission, unless the dust devil pays you a visit just when and where you landed.
4 - First shot of Earth from distant planet.
Depends on the landing site and the rotation of Mars.
3 - Photographs Earth-like clouds on Mars.
Likely requires an extended mission, unless those clouds are common and can be always seen.
2 - Helps scientists create first atmospheric temperature profile of Mars.
Most definitely requires an extended mission. It will later take thousands of probes spread over the whole planet, and several years, to create the precise, correct thermal profile that the settlers will require.
1 - First definitive evidence that water flowed on mars, including blueberries, hematite, and silica.
May or may not require an extended mission depending on where the samples were collected.
As far as spam goes...I get as much text message "spim" as I do spam.
In my experience SMS spam was more annoying - at least because I had absolutely no control over the issue. I resolved the problem by calling Sprint and telling them in no uncertain manner to turn the SMS on my phone off, completely and without debate. They did that, and I am happy. If someone needs me badly enough they can always call me.
Text messages as part of a cellphone - can you archive those?
You don't need to, the government does this service for you, and it loves SMS - it's compact and searchable, so unlike that unintelligible voice in some weird language...
Here is the calculation. The terminal velocity is 54 m/s (per Wikipedia). Your body will decelerate over 0.5 m (if you land on your side) - it takes then 0.01 s. The deceleration will be (54-0)/0.01 = 5400 m/s2, or about 540 G.
I'm not a specialist in fluid dynamics either, but I play one at work. The parachute seriously disrupts the air flow. Basically, it stops it completely, and then the gas has to turn on a dime and escape sideways. This creates vortexes that may have extremely high speed layers. These vortexes alter the pressure pattern along the fabric, and the fabric moves to compensate. This changes the pressure pattern again... and you have oscillations. These oscillations can be extremely strong, destroying the fabric in milliseconds. Grab a handkerchief and stick it out of the window of a car at 60 mph - it will vibrate. At 600 mph (airplane) it will be history. At 6,000 mph its destruction will be instantaneous. The advantage of harder constructs is in fact that they do not respond to changes in the environment and therefore are more stable and more reliable and more dependable.
Let's put it this way: What the two rovers currently on Mars have accomplished _together_ in three years could be accomplished by a single human geologist in about three weeks. Probes have a very, very long way to go before they can do a job as good as human - let alone better.
But not cheaper, and not necessarily faster. The latter - because we can make a robot and send it on its way within a couple of years; much faster if we want many of them. But you can't put together a manned expedition anywhere that fast, and the cost of it will consume all the resources for decades. You'd have one expedition flown, and even if one man dies up there it's pretty much over, politically speaking.
Robotic missions at this point have huge advantages. They are inexpensive, and when they fail (which with Mars happens all the time) people only laugh for a week, and then NASA makes another robot probe. There is no Congressional investigation into deaths of 12 astronauts, no prison terms for engineering mistakes, no legal risk of that sort at all.
Additionally, your robots can have specialized equipment that a geologist won't have. Yes, a geologist can look at the rock, and he can decide to dig here or whack a stone there. The same decisions can be made by a geologist sitting in his chair on Earth - with all Earth geologists invited to see, if you wish. A geologist in the field can't tell a chemical composition of the rock without a lab test; a robot can have a built-in lab, but a human would have to lug the sample to a lab at the base, if even there is a chromatograph there. On Earth geologists know our local rocks and can decide based on that knowledge; on Mars every rock is new and you can't tell anything about it until you researched it in full.
Basically, until we solve the problem of cheap descent into a gravity well, and then ascent from it, there is no way to send people there. We need ideally a gravity-based engine, or something to that effect. Until that is available human exploration of Mars would be risky beyond belief, and the colony there won't be self-sustaining for many decades. It would require tons of robots anyway, so why don't we start right there?
Also, you mention lighting a rocket in a supersonic airstream is hard (I'm not sure about that...the combustion chamber is static)
I don't think we can treat the chamber as static when it has to have an opening into the oncoming stream. That stream will be seriously turbulent as it flows around the vehicle, and the pressure in the chamber will be mostly undefined and different for any given volume, with plenty of resonances to add to the fun. IANARS, but I think igniting the engine prior to atmospheric entry would fix most of the problem, as long as the engine itself can define the conditions around its nozzle.
SharePoint is a huge and elaborate Wiki server and a set of plugins for MS Word, Excel etc. so that these apps can open and modify the documents on the server directly. All changes are versioned, and the change history is maintained. The whole paper trail is there - who changed what and when. SharePoint is worth its weight in gold (DVD only, without packaging:-) if you have a team that works on the same set of documents or wants to publish new documents without fear that someone accidentally erases them or overwrites with an old copy. The documents are stored in the SQL Server database.
One catch is that SharePoint is slow, and you need a fairly fast box to run it on.
The MS Project Server is another component that plugs into SharePoint and allows to share MS Project files. In either case an API is apparently provided that allows you to work with local and remote documents.
So what? That doesn't mean they won't find a healthy niche for themselves.
100% of cell phones in USA are sold by network operators or on their behalf (iPhone.) I don't think that a consumer would even know that he can buy a 3rd party phone. Besides, the phone companies would be discouraging this because of many reasons (impossible to support, perceived risk to the network, and most importantly lack of their beloved lock-ins and of the forced use of the network when you don't have to.)
I don't think the first application of this robot is to have it patrol willy nilly.
You are very likely correct; but what about the second, and other applications?
They'd probably send it in when a real cop wouldn't do when dealing with barricaded suspects.
You'd need some Arkonide battle robots for that, complete with force fields and particle weapons, powered by a built-in thermonuclear reactor. The mobile robots that we have today are clumsy, stupid, blind and powerless to inflict any harm (or even taser) an armed and ready opponent. In fact, a closed door will stop such a robot, and the door doesn't even need to be locked - the robot is too stupid to use the door handle. Besides, even if the robot makes it through the suspect will have no qualms spending some 7.62mm ammo on that thing, and the robot will be surely disabled after that.
As my first line implied, it is far more likely that the robots will be first and foremost used as stationary fixtures; a robot can be just a camera and hole in the wall for taser leads - it does not have to be mobile or humanoid. Pedestrian walkways in subway, for example, are an ideal location for such installations - or at any place where the flow of people is regulated, like at entrances to buildings. But once robots have more power they can definitely move, and lack of brains won't stop their proponents.
it would apprehend violent/armed criminals who have an intent to do harm
Intent to do harm??? How can a robot determine that? As a helpful hint, humans have a problem figuring that out - that's why we have courts, juries and appeals. But here a dumb robot is suddenly capable to tell if you have an intent to do harm? For example, can this wonderful robot tell the difference between a weaponless pocket thief and a group of boys armed with super-soakers? Any generic machine would taser the boys and leave the thief alone; to do it the other way around you need to understand far more about our society that a modern excuse for a computer can possibly do.
P.S. Tasering a child can kill the child; if that happens I have no pity for any official who promoted the idea. At this stage of development of an AI I can trust the computer only to show a letter 'a' on the screen when I press the 'a' key.
Maybe you weren't aware of this but every cellular telephone call made in the world goes through international airspace to a satellite in international airspace
I definitely wasn't aware of that - because it is not true. Every cell phone contacts its nearest base station (tower) which is usually on a roof of a building. The base station is connected to the phone network with a cable. Your pocket phone can't reach a base station more than a few miles away, so even 400 miles to LEO is out of question.
There is only one phone network that uses LEO satellites, and it is called Iridium. These phones, and the service, cost astronomical money, and only people who need the worldwide service have them (such as travelers, lone sailors, etc.) These phones have high power transmitters and can reach satellites directly; then the packetized voice is bounced between the satellites until it reaches the destination. This is nothing like your common cell phone network.
You are correct - see here, it's a battery and the charge controller is on the board. I use similar but smaller Panasonic cells in my hardware, so I definitely know that it's my duty to charge them properly (+3.200V over certain resistor and a diode, etc. etc.)
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Besides, F/OSS systems still have quirks. For example, I deployed OpenFiler a couple of weeks ago, and I can't access it by its DNS name (\\foo\bar) but can if I use the IP address (\\10.0.0.201\bar). DNS itself works fine (can dig and ping.) I did some RTFM and Googling and found that the issue may be in the Kerberos library that needs to be upgraded by compiling from source... Clearly I'm not going to do that on a NAS appliance that is supposed to just work. A Windows server has no such issue, it just works. Anyone but a geek would just throw the OpenFiler out because the issues involved (Kerberos, WINS, time syncronization (NTP) etc.) are just way above the pay grade of an average technician.
None of this is unusual. When the USA gives financial aid to countries it often requires that the money (or a good part of it) must be spent on US-manufactured goods and services.
To see for myself I opened the same MS Word 2003 document in its native MS Word and in OO 2.2.0 that I have installed. The result is that MS Word shows the final text (colored as needed) in the page area and the changes in the margin area (titled "Deleted: ...", "Formatted: ..." and so on.) The OO made no notes on margins, and instead put all the changes, massive deletions and stuff in the main body of the document, so I see page after page after page of deleted (crossed out) text.
Now, I can deal with this if I have to. But when you have employees and when you pay those employees for every minute they spend scrolling up and down, I can see that investment in MS Office is worth it - unless OO becomes exactly like MS Office, with all its bugz, stupidities and weirdness. That's what the users want.
No, since they are all just passengers. If you doubt that, ask yourself if astronauts can steer to fly over Portugal or over Greece when they are in the area. If they can't steer they are not in control.
It is definitely up to you to prefer one way or another for your children, but in my unqualified opinion there is nothing wrong with satisfying the temporary chemically induced desire with mere patterns of pixels. Even the most burning need can not withstand viewing of 10,000 pr0n photos that are easily available on Usenet or elsewhere. After the pressure dissipates the kid would be able to actually think before making a commitment. Hormones are a poor substitute for a well considered decision.
It is, of course, possible to argue that one-sided attraction to computers (or their screens) is unhealthy. It may be so. But anything one-sided is unhealthy, and a parent should ensure that dangerous activities are done in VR and reasonably safe activities are done in real life, and not the other way around.
Some books end abruptly when the writer reached the word count that he promised to the publisher.
Either long life, or many sites/probes, or all of the above. The planet is really large. IMO, we need tens of areas researched before we can even say that 100 other sites should be similar. If on Earth you studied a patch of Ethiopia it doesn't really tell much about conditions in Greenland. If you are sending colonists then you need to know where to drop them off.
If you review the 10 listed discoveries you will see that all of them beg for more data. Dust devils, for example - they might be a tad important for future missions and colonisation, so we'd better study a lot of them before we can guess how hazardous they are. We don't know the abrasive characteristics of the dust, for example, and what about its static charge while are on the subject? It would really suck to travel all the way to Mars just to be zapped by a 100 kV charged dust cloud. Amounts of water-bearing rocks? I'd say it's super important if humans plan to live there, and you can't send people up there without knowing how much water they can obtain from minerals that they can access. Sulfur? Might be a part of a chemical process, and it might be a hazard, then spacesuits must be tested against it (sulfur is chemically active.) You need to know that before you send people; and you also need to know if the sulfur is a local quirk (a volcano?) or it is a common ingredient of the whole planet. And so on. There is study after study after study to be carried out by such robots until we even can say what materials we can reliably depend upon to make fuel for the return of the manned expedition. Otherwise it would be an unpleasant surprise to send machines for rock A and upon landing to discover that only rock B, completely different in every aspect, is present at the site.
Required extended mission, obviously - rovers did not land near the site.
9 - Evidence of volcanic origin for Gusev crater.
Same as above - you may need to travel for a long time to get to the interesting site.
8 - First meteorite identified on another planet.
Required extended mission - you need to find the meteorite.
7 - Discover of sulfur suggests Mars stink.
May not require an extended mission.
6 - Helps scientists determine that Mars had three distinct geological eras.
Most definitely requires an extended mission, and likely to require far more than that to know those eras in detail. Earth geology is not dead yet even though people study rocks for thousands of years.
5 - Martian dust devils captured on film.
Requires an extended mission, unless the dust devil pays you a visit just when and where you landed.
4 - First shot of Earth from distant planet.
Depends on the landing site and the rotation of Mars.
3 - Photographs Earth-like clouds on Mars.
Likely requires an extended mission, unless those clouds are common and can be always seen.
2 - Helps scientists create first atmospheric temperature profile of Mars.
Most definitely requires an extended mission. It will later take thousands of probes spread over the whole planet, and several years, to create the precise, correct thermal profile that the settlers will require.
1 - First definitive evidence that water flowed on mars, including blueberries, hematite, and silica.
May or may not require an extended mission depending on where the samples were collected.
In my experience SMS spam was more annoying - at least because I had absolutely no control over the issue. I resolved the problem by calling Sprint and telling them in no uncertain manner to turn the SMS on my phone off, completely and without debate. They did that, and I am happy. If someone needs me badly enough they can always call me.
You don't need to, the government does this service for you, and it loves SMS - it's compact and searchable, so unlike that unintelligible voice in some weird language...
Here is the calculation. The terminal velocity is 54 m/s (per Wikipedia). Your body will decelerate over 0.5 m (if you land on your side) - it takes then 0.01 s. The deceleration will be (54-0)/0.01 = 5400 m/s2, or about 540 G.
I'm not a specialist in fluid dynamics either, but I play one at work. The parachute seriously disrupts the air flow. Basically, it stops it completely, and then the gas has to turn on a dime and escape sideways. This creates vortexes that may have extremely high speed layers. These vortexes alter the pressure pattern along the fabric, and the fabric moves to compensate. This changes the pressure pattern again ... and you have oscillations. These oscillations can be extremely strong, destroying the fabric in milliseconds. Grab a handkerchief and stick it out of the window of a car at 60 mph - it will vibrate. At 600 mph (airplane) it will be history. At 6,000 mph its destruction will be instantaneous. The advantage of harder constructs is in fact that they do not respond to changes in the environment and therefore are more stable and more reliable and more dependable.
But not cheaper, and not necessarily faster. The latter - because we can make a robot and send it on its way within a couple of years; much faster if we want many of them. But you can't put together a manned expedition anywhere that fast, and the cost of it will consume all the resources for decades. You'd have one expedition flown, and even if one man dies up there it's pretty much over, politically speaking.
Robotic missions at this point have huge advantages. They are inexpensive, and when they fail (which with Mars happens all the time) people only laugh for a week, and then NASA makes another robot probe. There is no Congressional investigation into deaths of 12 astronauts, no prison terms for engineering mistakes, no legal risk of that sort at all.
Additionally, your robots can have specialized equipment that a geologist won't have. Yes, a geologist can look at the rock, and he can decide to dig here or whack a stone there. The same decisions can be made by a geologist sitting in his chair on Earth - with all Earth geologists invited to see, if you wish. A geologist in the field can't tell a chemical composition of the rock without a lab test; a robot can have a built-in lab, but a human would have to lug the sample to a lab at the base, if even there is a chromatograph there. On Earth geologists know our local rocks and can decide based on that knowledge; on Mars every rock is new and you can't tell anything about it until you researched it in full.
Basically, until we solve the problem of cheap descent into a gravity well, and then ascent from it, there is no way to send people there. We need ideally a gravity-based engine, or something to that effect. Until that is available human exploration of Mars would be risky beyond belief, and the colony there won't be self-sustaining for many decades. It would require tons of robots anyway, so why don't we start right there?
I don't think we can treat the chamber as static when it has to have an opening into the oncoming stream. That stream will be seriously turbulent as it flows around the vehicle, and the pressure in the chamber will be mostly undefined and different for any given volume, with plenty of resonances to add to the fun. IANARS, but I think igniting the engine prior to atmospheric entry would fix most of the problem, as long as the engine itself can define the conditions around its nozzle.
SharePoint is a huge and elaborate Wiki server and a set of plugins for MS Word, Excel etc. so that these apps can open and modify the documents on the server directly. All changes are versioned, and the change history is maintained. The whole paper trail is there - who changed what and when. SharePoint is worth its weight in gold (DVD only, without packaging :-) if you have a team that works on the same set of documents or wants to publish new documents without fear that someone accidentally erases them or overwrites with an old copy. The documents are stored in the SQL Server database.
One catch is that SharePoint is slow, and you need a fairly fast box to run it on.
The MS Project Server is another component that plugs into SharePoint and allows to share MS Project files. In either case an API is apparently provided that allows you to work with local and remote documents.
You are correct, I guess - there is no value in education. One can talk like an illiterate idiot and still be elected to ... ah, forget it.
There is nothing illicit (unlawful) with fear of MS patches. And automatic updates definitely elicit the said fear.
100% of cell phones in USA are sold by network operators or on their behalf (iPhone.) I don't think that a consumer would even know that he can buy a 3rd party phone. Besides, the phone companies would be discouraging this because of many reasons (impossible to support, perceived risk to the network, and most importantly lack of their beloved lock-ins and of the forced use of the network when you don't have to.)
You can always say: "I test our Internet access by browsing a few selected Web sites and verifying that their content is correct."
You are very likely correct; but what about the second, and other applications?
They'd probably send it in when a real cop wouldn't do when dealing with barricaded suspects.
You'd need some Arkonide battle robots for that, complete with force fields and particle weapons, powered by a built-in thermonuclear reactor. The mobile robots that we have today are clumsy, stupid, blind and powerless to inflict any harm (or even taser) an armed and ready opponent. In fact, a closed door will stop such a robot, and the door doesn't even need to be locked - the robot is too stupid to use the door handle. Besides, even if the robot makes it through the suspect will have no qualms spending some 7.62mm ammo on that thing, and the robot will be surely disabled after that.
As my first line implied, it is far more likely that the robots will be first and foremost used as stationary fixtures; a robot can be just a camera and hole in the wall for taser leads - it does not have to be mobile or humanoid. Pedestrian walkways in subway, for example, are an ideal location for such installations - or at any place where the flow of people is regulated, like at entrances to buildings. But once robots have more power they can definitely move, and lack of brains won't stop their proponents.
Intent to do harm??? How can a robot determine that? As a helpful hint, humans have a problem figuring that out - that's why we have courts, juries and appeals. But here a dumb robot is suddenly capable to tell if you have an intent to do harm? For example, can this wonderful robot tell the difference between a weaponless pocket thief and a group of boys armed with super-soakers? Any generic machine would taser the boys and leave the thief alone; to do it the other way around you need to understand far more about our society that a modern excuse for a computer can possibly do.
P.S. Tasering a child can kill the child; if that happens I have no pity for any official who promoted the idea. At this stage of development of an AI I can trust the computer only to show a letter 'a' on the screen when I press the 'a' key.
You are saying that the iPhone (GSM) won't work on AT&T network? Someone needs to tell Apple...
I definitely wasn't aware of that - because it is not true. Every cell phone contacts its nearest base station (tower) which is usually on a roof of a building. The base station is connected to the phone network with a cable. Your pocket phone can't reach a base station more than a few miles away, so even 400 miles to LEO is out of question.
There is only one phone network that uses LEO satellites, and it is called Iridium. These phones, and the service, cost astronomical money, and only people who need the worldwide service have them (such as travelers, lone sailors, etc.) These phones have high power transmitters and can reach satellites directly; then the packetized voice is bounced between the satellites until it reaches the destination. This is nothing like your common cell phone network.
You are correct - see here, it's a battery and the charge controller is on the board. I use similar but smaller Panasonic cells in my hardware, so I definitely know that it's my duty to charge them properly (+3.200V over certain resistor and a diode, etc. etc.)