> Maintaining "imperial" measurements just gives away more > jobs to emerging markets. Or rather, it SHOVES them away.
How does requiring work to be done in units not used in emerging markets, move jobs to those markets? I suppose that requiring documentation in English shoves it to places where no one speaks it, and requiring payment in dollars moves it to the Euro zone (since Chinese currency is pegged to the dollar rather than freely floating, it is just the same as being in rational rather than integral dollars)?
The protectionism implicit in using English (not Imperial, btw) measurements may not please foreigners, but they don't pay taxes or vote.
> Surely compatibility with other nation's efforts is > worth half the cost of one shuttle launch
Docking collars on spacecraft are small enough to build using any system that is needed, including Sumerian cubits if necessary. The expense would come in converting EVERYTHING to use metric dimensions, especially given that there was supposed to be a big savings reusing proven shuttle component designs rather than designing everything from scratch (and the legacy components are obviously expressed in Imperial units, for the most part).
Stages lost before docking do not need to be compatible with the ISS or anything else but the Ares equivalent of the Saturn V's third stage ring.
By publishing your URL as above? You are right. That is far too difficult for anybody, or any program, to use. You would have to save your favorite URLs in a table of bookmarks, or something; perhaps have an HTTP tag to encapsulate other URLs. Both of these ideas are clearly insane.
> The Iranian people alone need to decide the outcome here, without > interference by any power, both outside and inside their country.
Too late. No candidate that was not approved by the mullahs was allowed to run, in the first place. This entire matter is like complaining that the Blue Simms Party in Parador was stealing the election from the Red Simms Party.
> During the revolution in Russia, intellectuals... were quite literally lined up against the wall and shot
As the Useful Idiots (Soviet term, that) were no longer needed. The Chekists then eliminated them, lest they overthrow Stalinist "Socialism" (aka Communist Tyranny) and replace it with something closer to actual Socialism (which would never have allowed the 1930s Ukrainian Famine).
> Unless I am missing something obvious, I would say it is the lack of intellectuals that fuels socialism.
Yep, you missed the obvious. Communism isn't Socialism, either in theory or practice. The October Revolution wasn't Socialism; it was the Communist Party taking over.
> If it protected the ring from the core explosion it should protect us from Betelgeuse at 500 light years.
Well, it hasn't, yet (for any story in the Known Space series, with the possible exception of One Face), because the wave of radiation isn't due for about 30,000 years or so. More than enough time for the Fleet of Worlds to make it to the next galaxy, if the Puppeteers choose to do so.
Actually, I expect that by the time the wave gets too close, the denizens of Known Space will have figured out how to put entire worlds into stasis for the duration, then turn off the field. At this point, the only problem will be deciding how or if we aid the Outsiders and/or Star Seeds.
Alternately, the Teela Brown gene will be so spread out through the human populace that someone will just luck into a way to avoid the whole problem.
>... that maybe if everyone could see how small we really > are, more would have a sense of humility then do now.
Because no one was a megalomaniac in the nineteenth or earlier centuries, when you could still see the stars, even in Europe. No one had a Napoleon Complex, then.
> Why do you think companies like Westinghouse and Texas Instruments are still around,
Westinghouse is around because David Letterman is considered funny, and NCIS interesting. The company that *was* Westinghouse became CBS, after it bought the network and sold all the real Westinghouse parts except for the broadcasting network (about 20 radio and TV stations, which was rolled into CBS TV and radio).
The "Westinghouse" that makes washers and dryers is White Appliances. The one that makes nuclear reactors is a division of Siemans. Other parts were folded or sold to other companies. Some of the surviving pieces got the right to the name, which the CBS people didn't want.
In short, Westinghouse is dead. Only the name remains, to confuse consumers.
Oh, and Westinghouse Air Brake (the other Westinghouse) is still around, but doesn't even use the WABCO name that they did in the 1970s, let alone the Westinghouse one. I *think* that they still use the W in their acronym.
It's equivalent to saying "I think an IT expert turned judge would be more likely to reach a fair decision in technology cases than an a judge that doesn't know how to send email would".
So Microsoft's lawyers are all unable to send emails?
You might get a more informed opinion, but a fair opinion is going to be an entirely separate matter. For instance, a succession of Southern slave-owning judges who heard the Amistad case all ruled the same way, the way that their backgrounds would seemingly have made unlikely.
They ought to get down on their well-worn knees and thank their imaginary deity that President Obama decided to pick the most conservative judge on his short list of possible nominees. Can you imagine if he'd picked one of the openly gay judges that were on his short list? Every right-winger in American would have shit on the floor, crying uncontrollably and demanding a do-over of the 2008 election.
And no Democrats would wonder (if not recoil) at such a choice? If I were a Republican Senator (or candidate for 2010), what I would really want would be for Obama to nominate an unrepentant member of the Weathermen or Angela Davis, so that his own party would reject his choice.
> Looks to me like the Shuttle design was always > incompetent, and we just tried to pretend it wasn't.
It wasn't incompetent, but it WAS badly proxmired.
> When we used captured German scientists we had good rocket kit.
No, when we devoted 4% of the total US Government budget to NASA. Since Nixon canceled half the remaining Apollo flights (after the hardware was bought and paid for), the Space Station, and let the Shuttle be proxmired down from a geostationary orbit capable craft to what we now have, things haven't gone as well.
> Perhaps, while we're over in Europe, we could ask the > French how to build a successful supersonic passenger jet,
Why? They never had one. Just something that required huge subsidies to keep flying, until losing one of the birds let them ground the rest permanently, rather then restart the subsidies. Boeing didn't drop out of the competition because they couldn't figure out how to make one, but because they couldn't figure out how to make money from building one (or even five), or how any airline could make a profit operating one. As it happens, neither could AirFrance, British Airlines (now Airways), or the consortium that built the Concordes.
> Reminds me of Cingular purchasing AT&T, then rebranding as AT&T.
SBC bought AT&T, then renamed itself AT&T (which it was part of, prior to the Great Divestiture).
AT&T (nee SBC) then bought BellSouth, which meant that it owned all of Cingular (60% SBC, 40% BSouth, before that), so it decided to use the AT&T brand for its wireless services, while keeping the Cingular brand, too (consumers liked the Cingular brand, businesses the AT&T brand).
Cingular had earlier bought AT&T Wireless (aka AWS), which, despite the name, was not part of AT&T anymore, having been spun off years earlier.
> I have glimpsed the unremarkable almost face driving by and was prfoundly unimpressed.
Having been driven by it once, years ago, I could only agree that the road view wasn't worth seeing. However, according to a number of sources that I have read, the view from the road was not nearly as good as the view that one would get hiking near it. Certainly it didn't match an old painting of the formation that I once saw, nor the image on the state coin.
> Why don't they put up a stone face of an old man that REALLY looks like a stone face of an old man
Right. Because audio-animatronics are **so** realistic. Maybe you could put state birds around it, and animate them, too, like the Tiki Room at Disneyworld (if it is still there).
I can understand why the NH settlers liked the idea of the Old Man in the Mountain, but it is gone now. Replacing it is like moving the Earth's axis to keep Polaris as the North Star as it drifts farther from the actual center of the visible sky dome.
In sums greater than 20 cents, pennies are not legal tender. You can, but are not required, to accept them as payments, just as in the US one could, but is not required to, accept Swiss Francs or Euros for a debt.
I imagine it is fairly similar with other coins, but I do not know what the limit is.
OTOH, when I pay something over a wire or on the Internet, *I* have to pay a fee either to pay or to reverse a payment, just as there is a fee to stop a check. This sounds like some juvenile attempt at humor, not a real and tested strategy to solve the problem by bankrupting the law firm. Otherwise, corporations would do the same thing whenever they lost a case, rather than paying lawyers to appeal it.
> Claiming these games "desensitize" people to violence is > also insane seeing how nobody objects to CSI and Law and Order.
CSI and "Law and Order" desensitize people to the police. You never see them going after bad cops, or DAs who murder their wives, and almost never after CSIs or cops who railroad defendants because they seemed the most likely suspect (CSI did this once, where the ex-CSI who got Catherine Willows out of stripping and into CSI is shown, decades after, to have railroaded a guilty defendant, rather than wait for another killing by that defendant with better evidence, so at least partial kudos to them). The CSIs never screw up their tests, or skip them as too expensive to run (and those who do are invariably the "bad" CSIs in Administration, or the Sheriff who murdered Warrick last season).
I do not object to these programs, but I know people who do, for the above reasons.
> Why the heck are baby monitors on 2.4GHz anyway?
It is an unlicensed band. Anyone can use it, and no one can (legally) complain, since they "knew" that it was a free-for-all (it is hidden in the fine print in your router directions, probably).
> Why can't they operate on lower frequencies, like > the 900MHz bands? 900MHz goes through walls better, too.
Because those are all licensed bands, with only the selected providers allowed to operate their (your cell phone can use it only to connect to a licensed provider) equipment in your area.
Yes, but - right now there is a multi-year clinical test on humans going on where BCG is being tested for safety... it's only been used since 1928, in billions of doses. But that wasn't in the USA, so therefore it must be tested for a few years
So? Blame Congress, who passed laws after the thalidomide mess (despite the FDA's prior powers being enough to delay its use in the USA until the problems appeared in the rest of the world) that increased the safety and effectiveness testing requirements.
hereby delaying a possible cure(!!) for autoimmune diabetes mellitus.
And this can't be done in Europe or Asia, I suppose? Extensive Human Trials done in the rest of the world is always better than mere animal testing. Anyway, "possible cures" covers everything NOT proven to not work.
Another ten years and there might be light in the tunnel, if the big pharma will let the research continue.
Except that Big Pharma isn't the problem, if the problem is the FDA. At least get your boogeymen and Evil Masterminds Seeking to Destroy or Enslave the Rest of Humanity straight.
> an explanation why cell phone service providers are > charging ludicrous fees for text messages of 160 characters?
No, but how about:
Because people PAY those fees!
?
It doesn't matter if it actually PAID them to send lots of SMS messages (it doesn't, if they saturate the control channels); if people are willing to pay stupid prices for something, then it is immoral not to charge them. As W.C.Fields put it, "Never give a sucker an even break."
If you disagree, try buying a provider and including it for free, without raising the base price, and see if you can take over the market. See if you can even survive.
Slashdot Mirror
> Maintaining "imperial" measurements just gives away more
> jobs to emerging markets. Or rather, it SHOVES them away.
How does requiring work to be done in units not used in emerging markets, move jobs to those markets? I suppose that requiring documentation in English shoves it to places where no one speaks it, and requiring payment in dollars moves it to the Euro zone (since Chinese currency is pegged to the dollar rather than freely floating, it is just the same as being in rational rather than integral dollars)?
The protectionism implicit in using English (not Imperial, btw) measurements may not please foreigners, but they don't pay taxes or vote.
> Surely compatibility with other nation's efforts is
> worth half the cost of one shuttle launch
Docking collars on spacecraft are small enough to build using any system that is needed, including Sumerian cubits if necessary. The expense would come in converting EVERYTHING to use metric dimensions, especially given that there was supposed to be a big savings reusing proven shuttle component designs rather than designing everything from scratch (and the legacy components are obviously expressed in Imperial units, for the most part).
Stages lost before docking do not need to be compatible with the ISS or anything else but the Ares equivalent of the Saturn V's third stage ring.
By publishing your URL as above? You are right. That is far too difficult for anybody, or any program, to use. You would have to save your favorite URLs in a table of bookmarks, or something; perhaps have an HTTP tag to encapsulate other URLs. Both of these ideas are clearly insane.
> The Iranian people alone need to decide the outcome here, without
> interference by any power, both outside and inside their country.
Too late. No candidate that was not approved by the mullahs was allowed to run, in the first place. This entire matter is like complaining that the Blue Simms Party in Parador was stealing the election from the Red Simms Party.
> During the revolution in Russia, intellectuals ... were quite literally lined up against the wall and shot
As the Useful Idiots (Soviet term, that) were no longer needed. The Chekists then eliminated them, lest they overthrow Stalinist "Socialism" (aka Communist Tyranny) and replace it with something closer to actual Socialism (which would never have allowed the 1930s Ukrainian Famine).
> Unless I am missing something obvious, I would say it is the lack of intellectuals that fuels socialism.
Yep, you missed the obvious. Communism isn't Socialism, either in theory or practice. The October Revolution wasn't Socialism; it was the Communist Party taking over.
> If it protected the ring from the core explosion it should protect us from Betelgeuse at 500 light years.
Well, it hasn't, yet (for any story in the Known Space series, with the possible exception of One Face), because the wave of radiation isn't due for about 30,000 years or so. More than enough time for the Fleet of Worlds to make it to the next galaxy, if the Puppeteers choose to do so.
Actually, I expect that by the time the wave gets too close, the denizens of Known Space will have figured out how to put entire worlds into stasis for the duration, then turn off the field. At this point, the only problem will be deciding how or if we aid the Outsiders and/or Star Seeds.
Alternately, the Teela Brown gene will be so spread out through the human populace that someone will just luck into a way to avoid the whole problem.
> ... that maybe if everyone could see how small we really
> are, more would have a sense of humility then do now.
Because no one was a megalomaniac in the nineteenth or earlier centuries, when you could still see the stars, even in Europe. No one had a Napoleon Complex, then.
Because all the believers will give it up when they cannot make their own sightings anymore, and have to depend on newspapers' astrology columns?
> How do you suppose a 700 B.C. cave dweller would take a Jet airliner landing and passengers disembarking?
Jacob's Ladder
The religious event/dream/whatever, not the crappy film with Tim Robbins.
> Why do you think companies like Westinghouse and Texas Instruments are still around,
Westinghouse is around because David Letterman is considered funny, and NCIS interesting. The company that *was* Westinghouse became CBS, after it bought the network and sold all the real Westinghouse parts except for the broadcasting network (about 20 radio and TV stations, which was rolled into CBS TV and radio).
The "Westinghouse" that makes washers and dryers is White Appliances. The one that makes nuclear reactors is a division of Siemans. Other parts were folded or sold to other companies. Some of the surviving pieces got the right to the name, which the CBS people didn't want.
In short, Westinghouse is dead. Only the name remains, to confuse consumers.
Oh, and Westinghouse Air Brake (the other Westinghouse) is still around, but doesn't even use the WABCO name that they did in the 1970s, let alone the Westinghouse one. I *think* that they still use the W in their acronym.
So Microsoft's lawyers are all unable to send emails?
You might get a more informed opinion, but a fair opinion is going to be an entirely separate matter. For instance, a succession of Southern slave-owning judges who heard the Amistad case all ruled the same way, the way that their backgrounds would seemingly have made unlikely.
And no Democrats would wonder (if not recoil) at such a choice? If I were a Republican Senator (or candidate for 2010), what I would really want would be for Obama to nominate an unrepentant member of the Weathermen or Angela Davis, so that his own party would reject his choice.
> alt.news.slashdot?
I should think comp.news.slashdot, surely!
> Looks to me like the Shuttle design was always
> incompetent, and we just tried to pretend it wasn't.
It wasn't incompetent, but it WAS badly proxmired.
> When we used captured German scientists we had good rocket kit.
No, when we devoted 4% of the total US Government budget to NASA. Since Nixon canceled half the remaining Apollo flights (after the hardware was bought and paid for), the Space Station, and let the Shuttle be proxmired down from a geostationary orbit capable craft to what we now have, things haven't gone as well.
> Perhaps, while we're over in Europe, we could ask the
> French how to build a successful supersonic passenger jet,
Why? They never had one. Just something that required huge subsidies to keep flying, until losing one of the birds let them ground the rest permanently, rather then restart the subsidies. Boeing didn't drop out of the competition because they couldn't figure out how to make one, but because they couldn't figure out how to make money from building one (or even five), or how any airline could make a profit operating one. As it happens, neither could AirFrance, British Airlines (now Airways), or the consortium that built the Concordes.
> Reminds me of Cingular purchasing AT&T, then rebranding as AT&T.
SBC bought AT&T, then renamed itself AT&T (which it was part of, prior to the Great Divestiture).
AT&T (nee SBC) then bought BellSouth, which meant that it owned all of Cingular (60% SBC, 40% BSouth, before that), so it decided to use the AT&T brand for its wireless services, while keeping the Cingular brand, too (consumers liked the Cingular brand, businesses the AT&T brand).
Cingular had earlier bought AT&T Wireless (aka AWS), which, despite the name, was not part of AT&T anymore, having been spun off years earlier.
Please keep this simple history straight :-)
> Slashdot editors posting stories that are days old? Never!
Evidently, this is the exception that proves the rule.
Normally, they wait until a story is a month or two old, but someone screwed up and posted it before its time.
> I have glimpsed the unremarkable almost face driving by and was prfoundly unimpressed.
Having been driven by it once, years ago, I could only agree that the road view wasn't worth seeing. However, according to a number of sources that I have read, the view from the road was not nearly as good as the view that one would get hiking near it. Certainly it didn't match an old painting of the formation that I once saw, nor the image on the state coin.
> Why don't they put up a stone face of an old man that REALLY looks like a stone face of an old man
Right. Because audio-animatronics are **so** realistic. Maybe you could put state birds around it, and animate them, too, like the Tiki Room at Disneyworld (if it is still there).
I can understand why the NH settlers liked the idea of the Old Man in the Mountain, but it is gone now. Replacing it is like moving the Earth's axis to keep Polaris as the North Star as it drifts farther from the actual center of the visible sky dome.
In sums greater than 20 cents, pennies are not legal tender. You can, but are not required, to accept them as payments, just as in the US one could, but is not required to, accept Swiss Francs or Euros for a debt.
I imagine it is fairly similar with other coins, but I do not know what the limit is.
OTOH, when I pay something over a wire or on the Internet, *I* have to pay a fee either to pay or to reverse a payment, just as there is a fee to stop a check. This sounds like some juvenile attempt at humor, not a real and tested strategy to solve the problem by bankrupting the law firm. Otherwise, corporations would do the same thing whenever they lost a case, rather than paying lawyers to appeal it.
> Claiming these games "desensitize" people to violence is
> also insane seeing how nobody objects to CSI and Law and Order.
CSI and "Law and Order" desensitize people to the police. You never see them going after bad cops, or DAs who murder their wives, and almost never after CSIs or cops who railroad defendants because they seemed the most likely suspect (CSI did this once, where the ex-CSI who got Catherine Willows out of stripping and into CSI is shown, decades after, to have railroaded a guilty defendant, rather than wait for another killing by that defendant with better evidence, so at least partial kudos to them). The CSIs never screw up their tests, or skip them as too expensive to run (and those who do are invariably the "bad" CSIs in Administration, or the Sheriff who murdered Warrick last season).
I do not object to these programs, but I know people who do, for the above reasons.
> When it comes down to "brass tax", degrees
That is brass tacks , not "tax"
> Why the heck are baby monitors on 2.4GHz anyway?
It is an unlicensed band. Anyone can use it, and no one can (legally) complain, since they "knew" that it was a free-for-all (it is hidden in the fine print in your router directions, probably).
> Why can't they operate on lower frequencies, like
> the 900MHz bands? 900MHz goes through walls better, too.
Because those are all licensed bands, with only the selected providers allowed to operate their (your cell phone can use it only to connect to a licensed provider) equipment in your area.
Whoosh!
That almost no other country has it in their constitution is precisely the GP's point.
So? Blame Congress, who passed laws after the thalidomide mess (despite the FDA's prior powers being enough to delay its use in the USA until the problems appeared in the rest of the world) that increased the safety and effectiveness testing requirements.
And this can't be done in Europe or Asia, I suppose? Extensive Human Trials done in the rest of the world is always better than mere animal testing. Anyway, "possible cures" covers everything NOT proven to not work.
Except that Big Pharma isn't the problem, if the problem is the FDA. At least get your boogeymen and Evil Masterminds Seeking to Destroy or Enslave the Rest of Humanity straight.
> In a cooperative deal with Disney, it will now be rebranded as TweetyPie Live,
Except that Tweety Pie (the bird) is a Warner Brothers property, not Disney.
Failed your Cartoon Lore exam, I see. You maroon!
> an explanation why cell phone service providers are
> charging ludicrous fees for text messages of 160 characters?
No, but how about:
Because people PAY those fees!
?
It doesn't matter if it actually PAID them to send lots of SMS messages (it doesn't, if they saturate the control channels); if people are willing to pay stupid prices for something, then it is immoral not to charge them. As W.C.Fields put it, "Never give a sucker an even break."
If you disagree, try buying a provider and including it for free, without raising the base price, and see if you can take over the market. See if you can even survive.