As a European independent consultant/developer contracting to a range of clients in the SME and similar sectors I've seen absolutly no impact from outsourcing over the past few years and I'm still scratching my head trying to figure how it could.
The problem is that for my clients the idea that they could develop any system specification sufficently precise to give to an outsourcing company is frankly ludicrous. For example I've been writing a medium sized clothing hire program for a client for the past 6 months. This sounds like an ideal 'specify and hand out to india' project, except that the client really didn't have much idea what they wanted when we started beyond 'we want a hire program', 'here's an old DOS based-system that does something like' and 'we have these bits of paper'. The amount of iteration, exploration, respecification and general systems analysis that has gone on from then is frightening, but hardly unusual. In the process I've crawled though virtually every aspect of the business and even sat in with them on visits to their suppliers, associates and clients. You can't do that from india.
Now, of course I've considered splitting the work by doing the systems analysis myself and subcontracting the rest to india. However because of the iterative nature of the process that's not really feasible, plus the relatively small size of the project would mean setting up overheads etc would negate the cost saving. Some might say that the development process shouldn't be iterative but I should insist on completing and signing off a full spec up front, but while that could be done it wouldn't lead to satisified clients, and my clients do have the wit to realize that.
The same goes for all my clients. I simply don't see how they could replace me by outsourcing to india because they simply don't have the analysis skills to do so. The only way I can see it happening is with a larger 'software' house who can scale by having multiple projects which they outsource for, but do the analysis work here. Trouble is it's difficult to see how the additional overheads of such a company could compete with my almost complete lack of them.
Now, having worked in big business IT a few years ago (financial & manufactoring sectors) I can see how outsourcing would work there because the analysts developed tight specs which were then handled by the programmers - obvious candidates for shipping offshore. Even their though I distinctly remember when I reached analyst (and even analyst/programmer) level that I spent large amounts of time walking around manufacturing plant and talking with people to understand jobs I was adding IT functionality too worked. In fact doing what I do now to some extent, but on an intra-company level.
So, I'm not disputing that development jobs can be outsourced, but surely because of the human interaction needed for much analysis and development work there is a natural limit as to how far it can go and result in satisfied clients. Also, because the use of IT increases all the time in breadth of penetration into the business environment I'd postulate that the general trend for work will be upwards - although there will be a natural impact while the pecentage of work that can be done by outsourcing reaches it's natural effective level, and this impact will be sever in some areas of developer employment but non-existent in others.
Firstly, we have the European Consitution of Human Rights now incorporated directly into our law. It's been suprising how effective this has been since it was introduced.
Secondly, in many ways it's better not to have a written constitution than a written one. Over-simplification, but the difference is that in English/Scots law what is not explicitly prohibited is assumed to be allowed, but under a written constitution it tends to be the other way around - what isn't explicity granted as a right is assumed to be prohibited.
Political connections? I think not. Criminal connections maybe.
Anyway your hopelessly confusing UK and USA society. In an environment like the USA where there are very large numbers of guns - twice as many as people if I remember correctly - then being armed as a measure of self defence does make sense.
But in the UK where guns are still very rare, and even those criminals that do have them in practice largely use them against other criminals (not I'm not saying that is ok, just observing facts) then it makes no sense whatsoever to allow the public to have guns for self defence because the incidental rise in violence due to lethal force being more widely available will easily outstrip the marginal benefit for use in defense of Joe/Joeanna Bloggs against armed criminals.
It's twenty years since I was involved in membrane biochemisty so my knowledge is probably somewhat out of date, but basically *the* problem for any infectious organism is getting across the cell membrane - which is hard. For a virus there's also the additional problem of hijacking the cellular machinery. This is unlike a chemical attack - infection is more like unlocking a door whereas a chemical attack would be kicking it down. Obviously to unlock a door you've got to be able to make a key that fits - hence the pressumed need for a matching biochemistry.
There's a nice article on the 1918 flu structure on the BBC at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3455873.stm which should give you some idea.
Incidently, 'better' in terms of disease organisms is never 'more deadly', quite the reverse. Ebola for example is a very poorly adapted human infection because it kills it's host within a few days. HIV is must better because it doesn't kill for years, and the various common colds are better than all of these because they are very infectious and very mild (victim still moves around so can spread while infected). In fact the best adapted 'disease' organisms can even end up as symbiots rather than parasites.
Well, I suppose you might count it as splitting hairs again, but the original question was about the usual alien super-pathogenic disease thingy;-). Now it's perfectly possible that you might want to count your 8 legged squid-like alien coming along and banging you on the head as a disease, but real diseases, like flu for example, work by interacting with our biochemisty on a very specific level. To take flu again that infects because it can use it's proteins to get across our cell membranes. However the precise structure of these proteins needed is very specific for each species, so not all flu's can infect us. Mutations do occur obviously, but the take home message is that we're not suffering massively deadly flu epedemics on a weekly basis because it *is* so hard - despite flu being one of the most successful virii ever at evolving, mutating and species jumping.
So, if a disease that's been with us for a very long time and evolved in conjunction with our biochemistry finds it hard - despite being highly suitable to doing just that, imagine how very, very much more unlikely it is that something that differs from our biochemistry and has never seen us before is going to find it.
Borland's implementation of Pascal in Delphi is so close to C that it should only take a competant C coder about a week to be up and running to a good standard.
Actually calling Borland's implementation of Pascal in Delphi Pascal is a bit of a streatch IMHO. The language is now so far removed from classic pascal that apart from the bare bones there's not a lot in common.
"As experience with the extremophile microbes indicates, we do not know what is possible or we wouldn't be continually surprised by where we find microbes. "
Indeed. But it's noteworthy that not a single example of a pathogenic archeobacterium has been found. Biochemically archeobacteria are different to us, but not as different as might be expected from a completely alien bug. As I said even if dna/protein based the odds against triplet/amino acid compatibility sufficient for an alien bug's infection machinery to work must be astronomical;-) The fact that there's no archeobacterial pathogens does tend to support this view.
As to species jumping. It's only common if you consider it as a global phenomonon. And a per microbe generation basis it *is* extremely rare. True with avian flue for example we've got a potential nasty example on our hands, but with several million chickens infected in close proximity to humans we've only had a couple of dozen cases of cross-species infection so far and nothing sustainable. Hopefully it will stay that way. Point is though that *even* with flu - a virus successful because it can jump species relatively easily - the actual rate of it happening is still very low on a per infection basis, which suggests that the likelihood of a problem arising from alien bugs is very very low indeed, tending to nil.
Not really true. In fact it's been claimed that the Viking experiments *did* detect life (http://www.biospherics.com/pressrelease/pr073097. htm and many others) , but because our understanding of the conditions under which microbial life could exist were nowhere near as sophisticated in 1972 as they are now (the whole field of extremophile microbiology has really only developed since the 1980's) we didn't actually see what the experiments were telling us.
Difference though is that the Human colonization of the world could proceed incrementally a few dozen miles per generation, wheras Mars is a quantum leap.
For example if each generation moves 50 miles further along than the previous one - an insignificant distance for hunter/gatherers over 25 years each generation - then it only takes 5,000 years to colonize over 10,000 miles - which more than covers Africa to the limits of Eurasia.
Nearest pre-historic analogy I can think of would be the colonization of Australia by the ancestors of the aborigines. There's a deep water gap of about 50 miles between Indonesia and Australia that could never be bridged or shortened by a land bridge in the ice ages and would need to be rafted over, probably as a one-way trip (asia to america in contrast is either bridged or is a series of very short hops at a similar time).
when the French get there it'll be worthwhile staying on Mars for the food. Imagine before that the new martains will be limited to a diet of MacDonalds and Kentucky Fried.
Unstoppable plagues from outer space really are the stuff of science fiction. Virii and Bacilli here on earth have a hard enough time jumping the species barrier as it is - true it happens (and when it does it can be very nasty indeed) but it's an extremely rare event.
The possibility that live from elsewhere could do this are really nil. In fact there's two scenarios here:-
a. By far the most likely is that alien life uses a biochemisty different from our own. There's all sorts of potential reasons why you'd expect this - even if alien life is based on dna/protein the triplet coding could differ, the amino acid set could differ etc etc. Chances of an exact match are very, very low indeed and with it the chances of the alien pathogen being able to attack our biochemistry are extremely low to non-existant.
b. Biochemisty is the same as ours. This is unlikely but if it is true would be very, very interesting indeed as it would be virtually certain we had a common ancestor - which in turn would indicate (galactic) panspermia as championed by wickramasinghe and hoyle. In that cas the species barrier thing still makes infection unlikely, but a minor risk compared to the implications of the find!
Hmm. You are obviously missing a fairly fundemental modification to your setup if your having problems with web browsing over DirecWay. This is one of those things that works like a charm.
Fortunatly it's is easily fixed. See the section on "Improving Browser Performance on Clients" at http://www.copperhead.cc/tips.html.
Basically you simply have to tell IE (or whatever browser you are using) to download 25 or so files in parallel rather than the default 2 or 3. Because of the way sat works those 25 get downloaded at the same speed as the 3 your were requesting previously.
Net result is that browsing runs at the same speed over sat as over cable, but instead of the page filling in individual items over a couple of seconds you get the whole lot at once.
Follow up - been reading down posts below and see several comments about the FAP limits on DirecWay.
Have to say I've never seen a problem, but I'm running under a 'Business' contract not a 'Home' one (~$160 p.m.). I think the FAP limit on that is about 650Mb per day. Of course European availability may differ from the States too - Hughes here seem to keep lobbing satellites up left right and centre.
I'm in Europe - Scottish Highlands - and have been running on satellite for 18 months. I'm using the earlier DirecWay DW4000 system - marketed under a different company reseller here (Bridge Broadband), but still the same thing underneath.
I've found satellite excellent. It's got pluses and minuses compared to 'normal' broadband, but so long as you understand what you're dealing with then it's a really good choice. In fact if I moved back to an area with cable broadband I'd be very tempted to take this dish with me and stick to satellite.
Good things
* Generally there's no problem with contention ratios. I'm contracted for a 512Kb pipe and that's what I get whenever I demand it. Having hear horror stories of cable broadband being slower than dialup because of the contentiion ratios piled on (20:1 +) it's nice to have a fat'ish pipe to yourself. This is probably the single best thing about satellite. (OK, I know there must be contention management somewhere, but I've never seen it).
* Cost. Although upfront costs are high, and running costs not cheap, you do have all that pipe to do what you will with. I've got cable laid to my three neighbours, who I charge 'normal broadband' rates to, so the ongoing cost works out the same, if not slightly cheaper, than cable broadband. Some vendors don't let you do this while others smile benignly on it so check.
* Easy upgrade - if you need more bandwidth the Hughes system can generally give it to you with little or no kit changes. 512Kb is enough for me, but it's nice to know that could increase several times.
* Reliable - reliability seems excellent. True there's the occassional glitch like any system, but because everybody is going through the same earth station problems tends to effect everyone at once so they really pull their finger out. I've found with systems based on local exchanges that if something goes down because only a few'ish local people are effected it can take days to fix.
Bad things
* Ping times are unavoidably long. Around 900ms for most destinations as against 250ms for cable. However this is less of a problem than you'd expect for most things. Web browsers can be tweaked to grab more items in parallel - so total page load time is no different, and downloads/streaming media etc it doesn't matter if you're just a second or so later once it starts. However most games are out and video-conferencing is doubtful (I'm told the system can be optomised to make it possible though but not tried)
* You can get outages in very heavy rain under very thick cloud. This is pretty rare but does happen - but generally it's obvious what the problem is so having a beer for half an hour until the heavy rain passes is a fine solution. Also occassionally had problems in blizzards from a build up of snow on the transmitter.
* Some services occassionaly don't like satellite. For example I quite often find ftp upload is much slower than expected. This may have something to do with the way satellite doesn't transmit/recieve a continous stream of IP packets but collects them together to transmit as larger 'frames'.
Bottom line. Unless you find the ping time problem a killer issue then satellite is a really good rural solution. Like all engineering it helps if you have some understanding and 'machine sympathy'
Well, yes. Personally I find it increasingly alarming that if one mentions any critiscm of Israel one is automatically labelled an anti-semite, which of course is claptrap, and dangerous claptrap too because the real wolf may happen along one day and be ignored.
The best reply I've yet to find to point out that there are ultra-orthodox Jewish groups who are strongly anti-zionist - and pro-palestinian. Neturei Karta for example (http://www.nkusa.org/)
Despite your hot air, and the original posts taunts, there is something of a valid point in there somewhere. There does seem to be a line in American military thinking that believes that a massive show of military force is always the best approach. Now in 80% of cases that's undeniably correct, but using it all the time causes those remaining 20% to throw up all sorts of nasty problems. USA/UK experience in Baghdad/Basra is something of pointer to this maybe?
A similar difference in thinking seemed to be around in WWII. It's noticable that the americans suffered considerably higher casualties on their beaches compared to the UK/ANZAC beaches, despite similar resistence. I believe (but have no link) that later Allied analysis attributed this to the UK/ANZAC forces being much more willing to use unconventional tactics and weapons on their beacheads (some of which worked, some of which didn't) compared to the Americans who just did an 'overwhelming force' type of assault. Of cause by that stage of the war the Brits had suffered so many casualties already that minimizing them was more of a priority compared to the USA which had the manpower to spare.
There are anti-semities about that's true. But what worries me is an increasing propensity of some Israelis and their supporters to label any criticism of Israel as anti-Semite. This is not only intellectually dishonest, it is also dangerous as cheapening words by using them slovenly takes away your weapons when the real thing comes along.
Wasn't it supposed to the "Univerity of North Staffordshire". i.e. Stoke. Famously the place where people on the train from London to Manchester look out the window and say "at least I don't live here"
Once again I think I should praise Cloudmark's SpamNet (http://www.cloudmark.com). Because this system ultimatly relies on people eyeballing spam and designating it as such (but spreading the task around across several million people by a P2P network) it's never going to be fooled for long by anything the spammers can come up with.
OK, it costs a couple of $ every month, but it's supreamly effective. And for the record I've no connection to them - just a very satisfied user.
Yep, and you can model that quite effectively. Check out www.geomantics.com - the GenesisII program actually models the earth's atmosphere which ends up blue because of the model diffraction. The base colour used is black.
hehe. Nice Try. Of course I have no doubt in that what passes for President Bush's brain both neurons have been firing away looking for a re-election publicity stunt. As you say, I doubt if he gives a feck about anything else really.
None the less, that doesn't mean that somehow he'd dropped on the right zeitgeist. Sometimes fools can hit on the right course of action despite themselves. America's been acting like a 3 year old for the past couple of years running around the world playpen swinging it's fists around because it's been frightened by the little kid in the corner poking it in the eye. Action that might cower some of the other kids into a resentful silence, but it's hardly grown-up behaviour.
What it desperatly needs is some affirmation that it can achieve great things so as to get the eye-poking kid back in perspective. A similar thing happend last time in the 1960s - if you read the history at the end of the 1950s/early 60s america did seriously doubt itself and feared that the USSR and communism might offer a more efficient/successful economic/political model than capitalism. Kennedy was instrumental in turning that around and the Gemini/Apollo series was symptomatic of that. By 1970 no-one seriously doubted that the USA/West was the more successful model
America now has to do something that will inspire national pride again in a positive way, and make itself (and hence democracy etc) something that's seen to be succesful. Personally I don't give a feck myself if some brain-dead texan cowboy decides to reach for the stars for his own selfish reasons, just so long as America does reach for the stars again.
As Douglas Adams once observed, a growing and confident civilization looks upwards at the stars while a depressed declining one just looks down at it's shoes.
Since 9/11 America has done far to much shoe-watching. Nothing could be more inspiring than the country pulling itself up and seriously expanding outwards again. This may be at one level bread and circuses, but if it gives Americans (and the West generally) confidence back in themselves, their civilization and it's values then it's a thoroughly good thing.
As a European there's many, many things I dislike about the USA and particularly it's recent behaviour on the international stage - from Iraq to Koyoto. Nevertheless, the values that America (and western civilization generally), are based upon do represent some of the best that humanity has achieved, and when the chips are down I know where we should stand.
So, if the USA is about to shake itself out of it's introspective, somewhat paranoid, behaviour and regain it's confidence and enterprise there's only one thing to say...
"US system might be fucked up but at last doesn't result a fucking genocide every 40 years as it seems to be case with Europe ( last time - just 10 years ago tens of thousands dead in the middle of the fucking Europe)"
Well ignoring historical stuff like the decimation of the American Plains Indians, Slavery, and the treatment of your black minority in general up intil very recently, these days the US exports most of it's genocidal tendencies, like Vietnam, or uses local proxies to carry out the killing for it, like Chile and Honduras.
Pot, Kettle, Black really, although the scary thing about the USA is like Bin Laden, it believes that it has God on it's side and acts with the same moral certainty.
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As a European independent consultant/developer contracting to a range of clients in the SME and similar sectors I've seen absolutly no impact from outsourcing over the past few years and I'm still scratching my head trying to figure how it could.
The problem is that for my clients the idea that they could develop any system specification sufficently precise to give to an outsourcing company is frankly ludicrous. For example I've been writing a medium sized clothing hire program for a client for the past 6 months. This sounds like an ideal 'specify and hand out to india' project, except that the client really didn't have much idea what they wanted when we started beyond 'we want a hire program', 'here's an old DOS based-system that does something like' and 'we have these bits of paper'. The amount of iteration, exploration, respecification and general systems analysis that has gone on from then is frightening, but hardly unusual. In the process I've crawled though virtually every aspect of the business and even sat in with them on visits to their suppliers, associates and clients. You can't do that from india.
Now, of course I've considered splitting the work by doing the systems analysis myself and subcontracting the rest to india. However because of the iterative nature of the process that's not really feasible, plus the relatively small size of the project would mean setting up overheads etc would negate the cost saving. Some might say that the development process shouldn't be iterative but I should insist on completing and signing off a full spec up front, but while that could be done it wouldn't lead to satisified clients, and my clients do have the wit to realize that.
The same goes for all my clients. I simply don't see how they could replace me by outsourcing to india because they simply don't have the analysis skills to do so. The only way I can see it happening is with a larger 'software' house who can scale by having multiple projects which they outsource for, but do the analysis work here. Trouble is it's difficult to see how the additional overheads of such a company could compete with my almost complete lack of them.
Now, having worked in big business IT a few years ago (financial & manufactoring sectors) I can see how outsourcing would work there because the analysts developed tight specs which were then handled by the programmers - obvious candidates for shipping offshore. Even their though I distinctly remember when I reached analyst (and even analyst/programmer) level that I spent large amounts of time walking around manufacturing plant and talking with people to understand jobs I was adding IT functionality too worked. In fact doing what I do now to some extent, but on an intra-company level.
So, I'm not disputing that development jobs can be outsourced, but surely because of the human interaction needed for much analysis and development work there is a natural limit as to how far it can go and result in satisfied clients. Also, because the use of IT increases all the time in breadth of penetration into the business environment I'd postulate that the general trend for work will be upwards - although there will be a natural impact while the pecentage of work that can be done by outsourcing reaches it's natural effective level, and this impact will be sever in some areas of developer employment but non-existent in others.
This is ignorant piffle.
Firstly, we have the European Consitution of Human Rights now incorporated directly into our law. It's been suprising how effective this has been since it was introduced.
Secondly, in many ways it's better not to have a written constitution than a written one. Over-simplification, but the difference is that in English/Scots law what is not explicitly prohibited is assumed to be allowed, but under a written constitution it tends to be the other way around - what isn't explicity granted as a right is assumed to be prohibited.
Molesworth? Is that you?
Political connections? I think not. Criminal connections maybe.
Anyway your hopelessly confusing UK and USA society. In an environment like the USA where there are very large numbers of guns - twice as many as people if I remember correctly - then being armed as a measure of self defence does make sense.
But in the UK where guns are still very rare, and even those criminals that do have them in practice largely use them against other criminals (not I'm not saying that is ok, just observing facts) then it makes no sense whatsoever to allow the public to have guns for self defence because the incidental rise in violence due to lethal force being more widely available will easily outstrip the marginal benefit for use in defense of Joe/Joeanna Bloggs against armed criminals.
Try the BBC site. The original poster is correct, Martin scared the burglers off, then deliberatly shot one in the back as he was running away.
It's twenty years since I was involved in membrane biochemisty so my knowledge is probably somewhat out of date, but basically *the* problem for any infectious organism is getting across the cell membrane - which is hard. For a virus there's also the additional problem of hijacking the cellular machinery. This is unlike a chemical attack - infection is more like unlocking a door whereas a chemical attack would be kicking it down. Obviously to unlock a door you've got to be able to make a key that fits - hence the pressumed need for a matching biochemistry.
There's a nice article on the 1918 flu structure on the BBC at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/3455873.stm which should give you some idea.
Incidently, 'better' in terms of disease organisms is never 'more deadly', quite the reverse. Ebola for example is a very poorly adapted human infection because it kills it's host within a few days. HIV is must better because it doesn't kill for years, and the various common colds are better than all of these because they are very infectious and very mild (victim still moves around so can spread while infected). In fact the best adapted 'disease' organisms can even end up as symbiots rather than parasites.
Well, I suppose you might count it as splitting hairs again, but the original question was about the usual alien super-pathogenic disease thingy ;-). Now it's perfectly possible that you might want to count your 8 legged squid-like alien coming along and banging you on the head as a disease, but real diseases, like flu for example, work by interacting with our biochemisty on a very specific level. To take flu again that infects because it can use it's proteins to get across our cell membranes. However the precise structure of these proteins needed is very specific for each species, so not all flu's can infect us. Mutations do occur obviously, but the take home message is that we're not suffering massively deadly flu epedemics on a weekly basis because it *is* so hard - despite flu being one of the most successful virii ever at evolving, mutating and species jumping.
So, if a disease that's been with us for a very long time and evolved in conjunction with our biochemistry finds it hard - despite being highly suitable to doing just that, imagine how very, very much more unlikely it is that something that differs from our biochemistry and has never seen us before is going to find it.
Borland's implementation of Pascal in Delphi is so close to C that it should only take a competant C coder about a week to be up and running to a good standard.
Actually calling Borland's implementation of Pascal in Delphi Pascal is a bit of a streatch IMHO. The language is now so far removed from classic pascal that apart from the bare bones there's not a lot in common.
"As experience with the extremophile microbes indicates, we do not know what is possible or we wouldn't be continually surprised by where we find microbes. "
;-) The fact that there's no archeobacterial pathogens does tend to support this view.
Indeed. But it's noteworthy that not a single example of a pathogenic archeobacterium has been found. Biochemically archeobacteria are different to us, but not as different as might be expected from a completely alien bug. As I said even if dna/protein based the odds against triplet/amino acid compatibility sufficient for an alien bug's infection machinery to work must be astronomical
As to species jumping. It's only common if you consider it as a global phenomonon. And a per microbe generation basis it *is* extremely rare. True with avian flue for example we've got a potential nasty example on our hands, but with several million chickens infected in close proximity to humans we've only had a couple of dozen cases of cross-species infection so far and nothing sustainable. Hopefully it will stay that way. Point is though that *even* with flu - a virus successful because it can jump species relatively easily - the actual rate of it happening is still very low on a per infection basis, which suggests that the likelihood of a problem arising from alien bugs is very very low indeed, tending to nil.
Not really true. In fact it's been claimed that the Viking experiments *did* detect life (http://www.biospherics.com/pressrelease/pr073097. htm and many others) , but because our understanding of the conditions under which microbial life could exist were nowhere near as sophisticated in 1972 as they are now (the whole field of extremophile microbiology has really only developed since the 1980's) we didn't actually see what the experiments were telling us.
Difference though is that the Human colonization of the world could proceed incrementally a few dozen miles per generation, wheras Mars is a quantum leap.
For example if each generation moves 50 miles further along than the previous one - an insignificant distance for hunter/gatherers over 25 years each generation - then it only takes 5,000 years to colonize over 10,000 miles - which more than covers Africa to the limits of Eurasia.
Nearest pre-historic analogy I can think of would be the colonization of Australia by the ancestors of the aborigines. There's a deep water gap of about 50 miles between Indonesia and Australia that could never be bridged or shortened by a land bridge in the ice ages and would need to be rafted over, probably as a one-way trip (asia to america in contrast is either bridged or is a series of very short hops at a similar time).
when the French get there it'll be worthwhile staying on Mars for the food. Imagine before that the new martains will be limited to a diet of MacDonalds and Kentucky Fried.
Unstoppable plagues from outer space really are the stuff of science fiction. Virii and Bacilli here on earth have a hard enough time jumping the species barrier as it is - true it happens (and when it does it can be very nasty indeed) but it's an extremely rare event.
The possibility that live from elsewhere could do this are really nil. In fact there's two scenarios here:-
a. By far the most likely is that alien life uses a biochemisty different from our own. There's all sorts of potential reasons why you'd expect this - even if alien life is based on dna/protein the triplet coding could differ, the amino acid set could differ etc etc. Chances of an exact match are very, very low indeed and with it the chances of the alien pathogen being able to attack our biochemistry are extremely low to non-existant.
b. Biochemisty is the same as ours. This is unlikely but if it is true would be very, very interesting indeed as it would be virtually certain we had a common ancestor - which in turn would indicate (galactic) panspermia as championed by wickramasinghe and hoyle. In that cas the species barrier thing still makes infection unlikely, but a minor risk compared to the implications of the find!
Hmm. You are obviously missing a fairly fundemental modification to your setup if your having problems with web browsing over DirecWay. This is one of those things that works like a charm.
Fortunatly it's is easily fixed. See the section on "Improving Browser Performance on Clients" at
http://www.copperhead.cc/tips.html.
Basically you simply have to tell IE (or whatever browser you are using) to download 25 or so files in parallel rather than the default 2 or 3. Because of the way sat works those 25 get downloaded at the same speed as the 3 your were requesting previously.
Net result is that browsing runs at the same speed over sat as over cable, but instead of the page filling in individual items over a couple of seconds you get the whole lot at once.
Follow up - been reading down posts below and see several comments about the FAP limits on DirecWay.
Have to say I've never seen a problem, but I'm running under a 'Business' contract not a 'Home' one (~$160 p.m.). I think the FAP limit on that is about 650Mb per day. Of course European availability may differ from the States too - Hughes here seem to keep lobbing satellites up left right and centre.
I'm in Europe - Scottish Highlands - and have been running on satellite for 18 months. I'm using the earlier DirecWay DW4000 system - marketed under a different company reseller here (Bridge Broadband), but still the same thing underneath.
I've found satellite excellent. It's got pluses and minuses compared to 'normal' broadband, but so long as you understand what you're dealing with then it's a really good choice. In fact if I moved back to an area with cable broadband I'd be very tempted to take this dish with me and stick to satellite.
Good things
* Generally there's no problem with contention ratios. I'm contracted for a 512Kb pipe and that's what I get whenever I demand it. Having hear horror stories of cable broadband being slower than dialup because of the contentiion ratios piled on (20:1 +) it's nice to have a fat'ish pipe to yourself. This is probably the single best thing about satellite. (OK, I know there must be contention management somewhere, but I've never seen it).
* Cost. Although upfront costs are high, and running costs not cheap, you do have all that pipe to do what you will with. I've got cable laid to my three neighbours, who I charge 'normal broadband' rates to, so the ongoing cost works out the same, if not slightly cheaper, than cable broadband. Some vendors don't let you do this while others smile benignly on it so check.
* Easy upgrade - if you need more bandwidth the Hughes system can generally give it to you with little or no kit changes. 512Kb is enough for me, but it's nice to know that could increase several times.
* Reliable - reliability seems excellent. True there's the occassional glitch like any system, but because everybody is going through the same earth station problems tends to effect everyone at once so they really pull their finger out. I've found with systems based on local exchanges that if something goes down because only a few'ish local people are effected it can take days to fix.
Bad things
* Ping times are unavoidably long. Around 900ms for most destinations as against 250ms for cable. However this is less of a problem than you'd expect for most things. Web browsers can be tweaked to grab more items in parallel - so total page load time is no different, and downloads/streaming media etc it doesn't matter if you're just a second or so later once it starts. However most games are out and video-conferencing is doubtful (I'm told the system can be optomised to make it possible though but not tried)
* You can get outages in very heavy rain under very thick cloud. This is pretty rare but does happen - but generally it's obvious what the problem is so having a beer for half an hour until the heavy rain passes is a fine solution. Also occassionally had problems in blizzards from a build up of snow on the transmitter.
* Some services occassionaly don't like satellite. For example I quite often find ftp upload is much slower than expected. This may have something to do with the way satellite doesn't transmit/recieve a continous stream of IP packets but collects them together to transmit as larger 'frames'.
Bottom line. Unless you find the ping time problem a killer issue then satellite is a really good rural solution. Like all engineering it helps if you have some understanding and 'machine
sympathy'
Well, yes. Personally I find it increasingly alarming that if one mentions any critiscm of Israel one is automatically labelled an anti-semite, which of course is claptrap, and dangerous claptrap too because the real wolf may happen along one day and be ignored.
The best reply I've yet to find to point out that there are ultra-orthodox Jewish groups who are strongly anti-zionist - and pro-palestinian. Neturei Karta for example (http://www.nkusa.org/)
Despite your hot air, and the original posts taunts, there is something of a valid point in there somewhere. There does seem to be a line in American military thinking that believes that a massive show of military force is always the best approach. Now in 80% of cases that's undeniably correct, but using it all the time causes those remaining 20% to throw up all sorts of nasty problems. USA/UK experience in Baghdad/Basra is something of pointer to this maybe?
A similar difference in thinking seemed to be around in WWII. It's noticable that the americans suffered considerably higher casualties on their beaches compared to the UK/ANZAC beaches, despite similar resistence. I believe (but have no link) that later Allied analysis attributed this to the UK/ANZAC forces being much more willing to use unconventional tactics and weapons on their beacheads (some of which worked, some of which didn't) compared to the Americans who just did an 'overwhelming force' type of assault. Of cause by that stage of the war the Brits had suffered so many casualties already that minimizing them was more of a priority compared to the USA which had the manpower to spare.
There are anti-semities about that's true. But what worries me is an increasing propensity of some Israelis and their supporters to label any criticism of Israel as anti-Semite. This is not only intellectually dishonest, it is also dangerous as cheapening words by using them slovenly takes away your weapons when the real thing comes along.
Wasn't it supposed to the "Univerity of North Staffordshire". i.e. Stoke. Famously the place where people on the train from London to Manchester look out the window and say "at least I don't live here"
Once again I think I should praise Cloudmark's SpamNet (http://www.cloudmark.com). Because this system ultimatly relies on people eyeballing spam and designating it as such (but spreading the task around across several million people by a P2P network) it's never going to be fooled for long by anything the spammers can come up with.
OK, it costs a couple of $ every month, but it's supreamly effective. And for the record I've no connection to them - just a very satisfied user.
Yep, and you can model that quite effectively. Check out www.geomantics.com - the GenesisII program actually models the earth's atmosphere which ends up blue because of the model diffraction. The base colour used is black.
hehe. Nice Try. Of course I have no doubt in that what passes for President Bush's brain both neurons have been firing away looking for a re-election publicity stunt. As you say, I doubt if he gives a feck about anything else really.
None the less, that doesn't mean that somehow he'd dropped on the right zeitgeist. Sometimes fools can hit on the right course of action despite themselves. America's been acting like a 3 year old for the past couple of years running around the world playpen swinging it's fists around because it's been frightened by the little kid in the corner poking it in the eye. Action that might cower some of the other kids into a resentful silence, but it's hardly grown-up behaviour.
What it desperatly needs is some affirmation that it can achieve great things so as to get the eye-poking kid back in perspective. A similar thing happend last time in the 1960s - if you read the history at the end of the 1950s/early 60s america did seriously doubt itself and feared that the USSR and communism might offer a more efficient/successful economic/political model than capitalism. Kennedy was instrumental in turning that around and the Gemini/Apollo series was symptomatic of that. By 1970 no-one seriously doubted that the USA/West was the more successful model
America now has to do something that will inspire national pride again in a positive way, and make itself (and hence democracy etc) something that's seen to be succesful. Personally I don't give a feck myself if some brain-dead texan cowboy decides to reach for the stars for his own selfish reasons, just so long as America does reach for the stars again.
As Douglas Adams once observed, a growing and confident civilization looks upwards at the stars while a depressed declining one just looks down at it's shoes.
Since 9/11 America has done far to much shoe-watching. Nothing could be more inspiring than the country pulling itself up and seriously expanding outwards again. This may be at one level bread and circuses, but if it gives Americans (and the West generally) confidence back in themselves, their civilization and it's values then it's a thoroughly good thing.
As a European there's many, many things I dislike about the USA and particularly it's recent behaviour on the international stage - from Iraq to Koyoto. Nevertheless, the values that America (and western civilization generally), are based upon do represent some of the best that humanity has achieved, and when the chips are down I know where we should stand.
So, if the USA is about to shake itself out of it's introspective, somewhat paranoid, behaviour and regain it's confidence and enterprise there's only one thing to say...
God Bless America.
"US system might be fucked up but at last doesn't result a fucking genocide every 40 years as it seems to be case with Europe ( last time - just 10 years ago tens of thousands dead in the middle of the fucking Europe)"
Well ignoring historical stuff like the decimation of the American Plains Indians, Slavery, and the treatment of your black minority in general up intil very recently, these days the US exports most of it's genocidal tendencies, like Vietnam, or uses local proxies to carry out the killing for it, like Chile and Honduras.
Pot, Kettle, Black really, although the scary thing about the USA is like Bin Laden, it believes that it has God on it's side and acts with the same moral certainty.