Just $750 million in aerospace funding for FY2007; perhaps it is time to split the ``NA'' from the ``SA'' and give the aeronautics directorate the freedom to pursue its own budget and agenda outside the bondoogle that is the US space programme.
In other words, just turn the clock back those 50 years...
>It's unlikely that this new search engine even approaches Google in its comprehensiveness, or ever will
Is that you, Charles Duell? Should we all just give up now and stop trying?
Say that we're generous and credit the dark web for only 50% of published data. That means there are at least 24 billion pages waiting to be discovered and indexed.
Beyond that, there are yottabytes of human knowledge in written form. Google has established a niche role in presenting data found on the Web and in USENET, but that is a drop in the bucket of all that is known.
I'm certain that it will take decades, but once that knowledge is tapped and harnessed we'll look back at 2008 Google and laugh that anyone could call it ``comprehensive''.
Asking questions such as ``How many atoms are there in four pieces of cheese?'' actually give some reasonable results ( though we didn't get an exact answer ).
There is also a split-view page that performs a simultaneous Hakia and Google search.
> Or do they have a right to privacy about their medical lives except if they work for someone?
Many potential employees have to disclose any medical conditions to would-be employers as part of the application process. The company requires that the applicant forfeit their medical privacy so that they can make a determination as to whether investment in the individual will be recouped through productivity.
I have just had to complete such a declaration process; I wasn't even privy to what the employer and my doctor discussed, though I did see the proforma completed by my optician.
In this instance, the employer is the set of stockholders and the employee is Steve Jobs.
I actually remember this Act being passed - Flight International ran several articles about it, back in the days when they had worthwhile spaceflight coverage. I think Tim Furniss was their spaceflight correspondent at the time.
The Act had several goals. Prior to 1992 there was no straightforward oversight of US-operated remote sensing systems. There was a terrible hullabaloo about Landsat, which required all sorts of regulatory exceptions and special handling, not only for its on-orbit ops but also for the radio links ( FCC was also involved ). The Act was intended to simplify the application for authorisation.
The Act was also intended to make the USA an attractive base for remote sensing operations, thereby retarding the advance of technology in the rest of the World. Again, this was to be achieved by providing a clear regulatory framework to avoid ambiguity and encouraging the dissemination of approved imagery as a US commercial advantage.
Finally, of course, there were the ``security'' considerations. The military didn't make too much of this, considering that at that very point in time they were buying Kometa imagery from the Russians ( they used Soviet / Russian photos of Washington to plan Dolittle's funeral )
>Free AM/FM radio are direct competitors with satellite radio. MP3 players are also direct competition for satellite radio.
Bear with me, as a UKian talking about the US market. Would it also be acceptable for there to be a single cable TV station and a single over-the-air TV station? After all, DVDs and camcorder recordings are direct competitors for peoples' eyeballs if they wish to spend time staring at their plasma screen.
If a person in the US has a satellite radio receiver, there will be only one station to receive. If someone has a cable receiver, should there also not only be a single station? All those TV stations competing with each other is awfully wasteful.
> You don't need more than one browser to write a JavaScript program, you need more than one browser to develop a website.
Indeed. Well actually, you don't even need a browser to execute a JavaScript program.
About two years ago I stumbled across SEE, the Simple ECMAScript Engine. It is a standalone JavaScript interpreter. I find it excellent for teaching the fundamentals and flexibility of JavaScript in a non-Web context. No DOM references, no browser oddities, no picking through a JavaScript Error Console; just the student and the raw language.
You made me laugh, but as with all humour there is a grain of
truth within.
Curiously I spent some time yesterday attempting to estimate
the number of zones currently known to DNS. Perhaps there is
a better approach ( one that, say, inquires against DNS ) but
by using Teh Googler to search for site:.${TLD} I came up with
these order-of-magnitude results:
.com 7,980,000,000
.org 1,950,000,000
.net 2,140,000,000
.info 195,000,000
These numbers just seem insane. Can anyone advise?
> I've seen a fair amount of OpenId around recently. You can sue it on Blogger and LiveJournal. If it's a "last gasp" for a declining technology, how do you back that statement up?
I looked-over the list on openiddirectory.com; 634 participating sites. That's greater than zero, admittedly. Just about.
The story of SSO in e-commerce is brief and inglorious. ebay dropped Passport support in January 2005; Amazon never got onboard; Google established its own intra-domain federation; Yahoo announced OpenID support, then fell silent. Those are the sites that people use.
> Neither Arianespace nor Energiya are going to fund the development of that kind of monster
They don't need to fund the development, they can just dust-down the plans for the Energia launcher ( and rebuild the jigs, and recast the parts etc etc )
Even in its basic, twice-flown configuration it can loft 95 tonnes to LEO. Strap-on derivatives were proposed for 170 tonnes.
And as it was designed to lIft Buran, it is designed to be man-rated.
Around five years ago there was a lot of buzz about federated Web identification. Passport, OpenID and Liberty Alliance date from that era.
I think this was leakage out of the corporate world, where single-sign-on makes sense for employees or vendors operating on a private network.
For a Web world, compartmentalisation of sign-on
is vital. Not only does it protect against compromise, but it also provides ultimate control over authentication. If one no longer wishes to have dealings with a site, it is easy to randomise the password and delete the corresponding e-mail alias.
Web users today are much more phishing-savvy and rely on password safe applications to manage their accounts. This seems like a last gasp from OpenID to convince someone, anyone, of the relevance of SSO.
> I know a hybrid train is currently being developed in the UK, just like a car, with electricity for low speeds and a battery and generator.
All diesel-electric locomotives are ``hybrids'' in the car industry parlance as there is no direct transmission from the engine. The traction motors on the bogies are run from the generator or battery.
The Class 73 British Rail electro-diesel loco was a clever combination of diesel-electric with third-rail electric pick-up, so it could operate anywhere on the South-East Region lines.
>True, the web is much larger now, but I still don't see the point of a web-only machine.
Perhaps you should consider such a machine as a supplement, not a replacement.
I have an old Dell Latitude that I use for checking news and doing basic research on the web. It draws 18W with the battery removed and
is used nearly every day.
In the next room is a seldom-used dual-core beastie reserved for file storage and photo processing. It draws about 300W with one disk powered-down.
> I'll often want to visit a site I saw the other day but all I can remember is part of one word of the site title
This really surprises me. I don't think I ever look at the title of a page; I'm much more interested in the content. Quick - what's the title of the third tab that you have open? No peeking!
I can often remember a phrase from a page and use a search engine to find it again, but Firefox 3's URL bar is useless in that event.
> One of the great things that FF team did was to allow huge volumes of customization...but allowing the add-ons and creating an environment where they could be created made FF much more than a web browser.
Please, give credit where it is due. The concept of UI extensions derives from Netscape's plans for a skinnable Navigator 5, which led to the development of XUL - developed, you will note, by Netscape, not the Mozilla Foundation.
In-window plug-ins are today's implementation of NPAPI, again developed by Netscape.
Nothing is created from a vacuum ( well, except perhaps the entire Universe ).
> Not cost effective? He went from a $348 bill to a $11 bill..
$300 per month?! More immediately cost effective than a $40K investment would have been some simple energy efficiency measures.
My monthly UK electricity bill, in mid-winter, is a maximum of $33: just over a dollar per day, compared to Mr Case's 60 cents per day bill after his solar installation.
I don't yet have solar panels, or solar water heaters, or a wind turbine; just basic energy-efficient procedures.
> something they can get for next to nothing in the way of costs, unlike oil based products which they have to import.
You'll love this...
Yes, China has vast internal coal potential. Internal in terms of geography - it is far from the coastal regions where it is most needed. Initially the coal was transported by rail, but this used too much precious diesel so instead China now imports coal by sea. Yes, imports.
> Most people on USENET are just dropping anything coming from Google Groups outright.
Google Groups is well overdue for an active Usenet Death Penalty; in my opinion it is the only sanction which will make them take note. It was sufficient to bring Erols and UUNet to their senses. ( There is a conspiracy theory that Google is deliberately flooding Usenet; a UDP would disprove this in addition to forcing action ).
Similarly, widespread blacklisting of Google Mail may be the only means of controlling the huge increase in spam. At present, a few individuals and companies are blacklisting but this is inadequate to make Goliath pay attention.
> gthumb-import (Which uses gphoto) to talk to the camera and bring in the RAW files.
Not being familiar with this tool, what is the advantage of just rsyncing the files over USB mass storage? Seems to be adding a layer of complexity for no realy gain.
> Unfortunately it also removes any bias toward competence, skill, intelligence, etc
As opposed to the current system, which ensures such competencies by...
Seriously though, the Athenians had a similar lottery scheme for all male citizens over 30. There were usually around 500 representatives who each served once for one year. Most were part-timers. I would think that over a population a random selection would even-out high or low biases.
Not this again! NASA is not a space agency, it is an aeronautics and space agency. What you see at Canaveral is a small part of the agency's overall work.
Dryden, Glenn, Ames; every day innovative work goes on at those sites.
> NASA was created to get America to the Moon first
NASA was created by the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 to supplant NACA. Its mandate was the whole spectrum of aerospace research and human / robotic space exploration.
JFK's ``We choose to go to the Moon'' speech was in 1962.
Re:C# isn't a language...
on
Head First C#
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
> but you really should try to modern-up your skillset if you code for a living
Modern? Simula67 introduced an implementation of OO with objects, classes and inheritance in... guess what year?
OO should only be one paradigm in the programmer's toolkit; applying it to all problems is unwise. Procedural, OO, AO, DO, functional, logic; they're all equally valid across an unbounded problem space.
> Simply put, NO one but lawyers or lawyer wannabes reads the > terms of service because the average man on the street can't > understand it
Throwing one's hands in the air and saying ``only lawyers can read this'' is, in my opinion, an excuse for laziness. Sorry if that offends. It's almost like the perverse pride that some people have when they say ``oh I know nothing about computers''.
I and everyone I know reads the TOS and decline to use the site if they are unacceptable. I have boycotted many sites for this reason. Yes, many TOS declarations require concentration and time to read, but there is no secret impenetrable Masonic language.
Would the ``average man on the street'' accept a loan or mortgage without reading the T&Cs because ``they are too hard''? Would he decline to read a bus timetable because ``it is too hard''?
Slashdot Mirror
50 years of aeronautics research on a steadily declining budget:
http://www.aeronautics.nasa.gov/technical_excellence.htm
Just $750 million in aerospace funding for FY2007; perhaps it is time to split the ``NA'' from the ``SA'' and give the aeronautics directorate the freedom to pursue its own budget and agenda outside the bondoogle that is the US space programme.
In other words, just turn the clock back those 50 years...
>even though it's practically a no-op to convert from US to UK english.
Consider, though, it is actually quite expensive to relocate the keyboard to the right-hand side for the UK market.
>It's unlikely that this new search engine even approaches Google in its comprehensiveness, or ever will
Is that you, Charles Duell? Should we all just give up now and stop trying?
Say that we're generous and credit the dark web for only 50% of published data. That means there are at least 24 billion pages waiting to be discovered and indexed.
Beyond that, there are yottabytes of human knowledge in written form. Google has established a niche role in presenting data found on the Web and in USENET, but that is a drop in the bucket of all that is known.
I'm certain that it will take decades, but once that knowledge is tapped and harnessed we'll look back at 2008 Google and laugh that anyone could call it ``comprehensive''.
This morning in work we've been playing with this ``semantic'' search engine:
http://www.hakia.com/
It's based on the Yahoo! BOSS API.
Asking questions such as ``How many atoms are there in four pieces of cheese?'' actually give some reasonable results ( though we didn't get an exact answer ).
There is also a split-view page that performs a simultaneous Hakia and Google search.
These are promising times for Web search.
> Or do they have a right to privacy about their medical lives except if they work for someone?
Many potential employees have to disclose any medical conditions to would-be employers as part of the application process. The company requires that the applicant forfeit their medical privacy so that they can make a determination as to whether investment in the individual will be recouped through productivity.
I have just had to complete such a declaration process; I wasn't even privy to what the employer and my doctor discussed, though I did see the proforma completed by my optician.
In this instance, the employer is the set of stockholders and the employee is Steve Jobs.
I actually remember this Act being passed - Flight International ran several articles about it, back in the days when they had worthwhile spaceflight coverage. I think Tim Furniss was their spaceflight correspondent at the time.
The Act had several goals. Prior to 1992 there was no straightforward oversight of US-operated remote sensing systems. There was a terrible hullabaloo about Landsat, which required all sorts of regulatory exceptions and special handling, not only for its on-orbit ops but also for the radio links ( FCC was also involved ). The Act was intended to simplify the application for authorisation.
The Act was also intended to make the USA an attractive base for remote sensing operations, thereby retarding the advance of technology in the rest of the World. Again, this was to be achieved by providing a clear regulatory framework to avoid ambiguity and encouraging the dissemination of approved imagery as a US commercial advantage.
Finally, of course, there were the ``security'' considerations. The military didn't make too much of this, considering that at that very point in time they were buying Kometa imagery from the Russians ( they used Soviet / Russian photos of Washington to plan Dolittle's funeral )
>Free AM/FM radio are direct competitors with satellite radio. MP3 players are also direct competition for satellite radio.
Bear with me, as a UKian talking about the US market. Would it also be acceptable for there to be a single cable TV station and a single over-the-air TV station? After all, DVDs and camcorder recordings are direct competitors for peoples' eyeballs if they wish to spend time staring at their plasma screen.
If a person in the US has a satellite radio receiver, there will be only one station to receive. If someone has a cable receiver, should there also not only be a single station? All those TV stations competing with each other is awfully wasteful.
> You don't need more than one browser to write a JavaScript program, you need more than one browser to develop a website.
Indeed. Well actually, you don't even need a browser to execute a JavaScript program.
About two years ago I stumbled across SEE, the Simple ECMAScript Engine. It is a standalone JavaScript interpreter. I find it excellent for teaching the fundamentals and flexibility of JavaScript in a non-Web context. No DOM references, no browser oddities, no picking through a JavaScript Error Console; just the student and the raw language.
http://www.adaptive-enterprises.com.au/~d/software/see/
BSD-licensed, of course. I have no affiliation with the project other than as a satisfied user.
You made me laugh, but as with all humour there is a grain of truth within.
Curiously I spent some time yesterday attempting to estimate the number of zones currently known to DNS. Perhaps there is a better approach ( one that, say, inquires against DNS ) but by using Teh Googler to search for site:.${TLD} I came up with these order-of-magnitude results:
These numbers just seem insane. Can anyone advise?
> I've seen a fair amount of OpenId around recently. You can sue it on Blogger and LiveJournal. If it's a "last gasp" for a declining technology, how do you back that statement up?
I looked-over the list on openiddirectory.com; 634 participating sites. That's greater than zero, admittedly. Just about.
The story of SSO in e-commerce is brief and inglorious. ebay dropped Passport support in January 2005; Amazon never got onboard; Google established its own intra-domain federation; Yahoo announced OpenID support, then fell silent. Those are the sites that people use.
SSO has flopped on the web, thankfully.
> Neither Arianespace nor Energiya are going to fund the development of that kind of monster
They don't need to fund the development, they can just dust-down the plans for the Energia launcher ( and rebuild the jigs, and recast the parts etc etc )
Even in its basic, twice-flown configuration it can loft 95 tonnes to LEO. Strap-on derivatives were proposed for 170 tonnes.
And as it was designed to lIft Buran, it is designed to be man-rated.
http://www.buran-energia.com/energia/energia-desc.php
> Is having 1 global ID really wise?
Around five years ago there was a lot of buzz about federated Web identification. Passport, OpenID and Liberty Alliance date from that era.
I think this was leakage out of the corporate world, where single-sign-on makes sense for employees or vendors operating on a private network.
For a Web world, compartmentalisation of sign-on is vital. Not only does it protect against compromise, but it also provides ultimate control over authentication. If one no longer wishes to have dealings with a site, it is easy to randomise the password and delete the corresponding e-mail alias.
Web users today are much more phishing-savvy and rely on password safe applications to manage their accounts. This seems like a last gasp from OpenID to convince someone, anyone, of the relevance of SSO.
> I know a hybrid train is currently being developed in the UK, just like a car, with electricity for low speeds and a battery and generator.
All diesel-electric locomotives are ``hybrids'' in the car industry parlance as there is no direct transmission from the engine. The traction motors on the bogies are run from the generator or battery.
The Class 73 British Rail electro-diesel loco was a clever combination of diesel-electric with third-rail electric pick-up, so it could operate anywhere on the South-East Region lines.
>True, the web is much larger now, but I still don't see the point of a web-only machine.
Perhaps you should consider such a machine as a supplement, not a replacement.
I have an old Dell Latitude that I use for checking news and doing basic research on the web. It draws 18W with the battery removed and is used nearly every day.
In the next room is a seldom-used dual-core beastie reserved for file storage and photo processing. It draws about 300W with one disk powered-down.
Different tools for different jobs.
> I'll often want to visit a site I saw the other day but all I can remember is part of one word of the site title
This really surprises me. I don't think I ever look at the title of a page; I'm much more interested in the content. Quick - what's the title of the third tab that you have open? No peeking!
I can often remember a phrase from a page and use a search engine to find it again, but Firefox 3's URL bar is useless in that event.
Thankfully, Konqueror remains sane.
> One of the great things that FF team did was to allow huge volumes of customization...but allowing the add-ons and creating an environment where they could be created made FF much more than a web browser.
Please, give credit where it is due. The concept of UI extensions derives from Netscape's plans for a skinnable Navigator 5, which led to the development of XUL - developed, you will note, by Netscape, not the Mozilla Foundation.
In-window plug-ins are today's implementation of NPAPI, again developed by Netscape.
Nothing is created from a vacuum ( well, except perhaps the entire Universe ).
> Not cost effective? He went from a $348 bill to a $11 bill..
$300 per month?! More immediately cost effective than a $40K investment would have been some simple energy efficiency measures.
My monthly UK electricity bill, in mid-winter, is a maximum of $33: just over a dollar per day, compared to Mr Case's 60 cents per day bill after his solar installation.
I don't yet have solar panels, or solar water heaters, or a wind turbine; just basic energy-efficient procedures.
> something they can get for next to nothing in the way of costs, unlike oil based products which they have to import.
You'll love this...
Yes, China has vast internal coal potential. Internal in terms of geography - it is far from the coastal regions where it is most needed. Initially the coal was transported by rail, but this used too much precious diesel so instead China now imports coal by sea. Yes, imports.
http://www.economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10795813
China is currently consuming around 30% of global coal production.
> Most people on USENET are just dropping anything coming from Google Groups outright.
Google Groups is well overdue for an active Usenet Death Penalty; in my opinion it is the only sanction which will make them take note. It was sufficient to bring Erols and UUNet to their senses. ( There is a conspiracy theory that Google is deliberately flooding Usenet; a UDP would disprove this in addition to forcing action ).
Similarly, widespread blacklisting of Google Mail may be the only means of controlling the huge increase in spam. At present, a few individuals and companies are blacklisting but this is inadequate to make Goliath pay attention.
> gthumb-import (Which uses gphoto) to talk to the camera and bring in the RAW files.
Not being familiar with this tool, what is the advantage of just rsyncing the files over USB mass storage? Seems to be adding a layer of complexity for no realy gain.
> Unfortunately it also removes any bias toward competence, skill, intelligence, etc
As opposed to the current system, which ensures such competencies by...
Seriously though, the Athenians had a similar lottery scheme for all male citizens over 30. There were usually around 500 representatives who each served once for one year. Most were part-timers. I would think that over a population a random selection would even-out high or low biases.
> Honestly, I think we need a new Space Agency,
Not this again! NASA is not a space agency, it is an aeronautics and space agency. What you see at Canaveral is a small part of the agency's overall work.
Dryden, Glenn, Ames; every day innovative work goes on at those sites.
> NASA was created to get America to the Moon first
NASA was created by the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 to supplant NACA. Its mandate was the whole spectrum of aerospace research and human / robotic space exploration.
JFK's ``We choose to go to the Moon'' speech was in 1962.
> but you really should try to modern-up your skillset if you code for a living
Modern? Simula67 introduced an implementation of OO with objects, classes and inheritance in... guess what year?
OO should only be one paradigm in the programmer's toolkit; applying it to all problems is unwise. Procedural, OO, AO, DO, functional, logic; they're all equally valid across an unbounded problem space.
> Simply put, NO one but lawyers or lawyer wannabes reads the
> terms of service because the average man on the street can't
> understand it
Throwing one's hands in the air and saying ``only lawyers can read
this'' is, in my opinion, an excuse for laziness. Sorry if that
offends. It's almost like the perverse pride that some people have
when they say ``oh I know nothing about computers''.
I and everyone I know reads the TOS and decline to use the site
if they are unacceptable. I have boycotted many sites for this
reason. Yes, many TOS declarations require concentration and time
to read, but there is no secret impenetrable Masonic language.
Would the ``average man on the street'' accept a loan or mortgage
without reading the T&Cs because ``they are too hard''? Would he
decline to read a bus timetable because ``it is too hard''?