They won't, but you can embarass TrustE in the press by asking and then publicizing the correspondence.
In its early days, TrustE meant something, but they've sold out completely. Now they're even running ads for Bonded Spammer, er Sender.
Read TrustE's own "Watchdog Reports". In the last six months, TrustE never took any enforcement action whatsoever based on a complaint. They get 100-200 complaints every month, and do nothing.
Over the past five years, according to their own figures, they've requested that a web site operator make some change about once a year.
All other complaints are described, in their words, as "Issue Handles with no changes necessary to the Privacy Statement nor the Site".
America overeducates its population. It's not about education itself. It's about getting more education than the other job applicants. Young Americans are thus locked into a futile, expensive competition that most of them are inevitably doomed to lose. Education has become an arms race, and as with other arms races, the only limit on cost is how much money is available.
The Honda Insight does have regenerative braking, but only on the front, driven, wheels. So it can't use regenerative braking very aggressively; the car would spin out. The friction brakes have to do most of the work.
The key to efficient driving is not to brake hard. Modern engines are relatively efficient in acceleration; you put fuel in, and you get kinetic energy out. All you get out of brakes is heat.
With 4WD, it might be different. More braking could be regenerative.
What this guy is really complaining about is that the configuration "system" for UNIX and Linux is lousy. It historically consisted of editing textfiles, with no checking that the values or syntax were meaningful. There's been some progress, but not much.
There is a French version of COBOL. Not only are the keywords in French, but the syntax is French, so that, as with English COBOL, statements can be valid sentences in a natural language.
They need to come up with a standardized way to interface tuner cards in TVs or generic set top boxes.
There's a standard, called OpenCable, but the cable industry hates it. There's a huge battle going on right now, involving the "broadcast flag", the FCC's rules on opening up the cable box market, the consumer TV industry, and the content people.
The cable industry certified to the FCC that they were in compliance with the OpenCable standard as of January 1, 2000.
Ask your cable provider for the supposedly-available "digital POD" (a smart-card like device that handles the encryption) and see how far you get.
How much launch capacity would it take to put up an O'Neill habitat? How much cost per person?
Automated mining and mass drivers on the moon - yeah, right.
Compared to operating in low earth orbit, operating in Antarctica or undersea on the continental shelf is easy, safe, and cheap.
Rocketry is stuck for the most basic of reasons - chemical fuels are not powerful enough. That was known in the 1950s, and it hasn't gotten any better since the 1960s. The X-prize people aren't even trying for orbit. Rotary Rocket was at least trying to get into orbit, even if their craft was 97%+ fuel and a little weight growth killed the project. Anything that makes it to orbit is almost all fuel or so fragile the reliability will be poor. Usually both. After almost fifty years of satellite launches, putting satellites in orbit works only 80-90% of the time.
Without nuclear propulsion or a theoretical breakthrough like antigravity, space travel is going nowhere
Atmospheric pressure at ground level on Mars is around 9 millibars. That's under 1% of Earth's atmospheric pressure. In Earth's atmosphere, that
pressure is reached around 105,000 feet altitude. That's not much of an atmosphere.
He doesn't have a clue about the history of Sears. "Messy headquarters", indeed. The Sears, Roebuck "works" in Chicago was very organized in the early catalog years. Otto Doering designed the Sears order fulfillment center, with conveyors, chutes, bins, elevators, pneumatic tubes and railroad tracks. He invented the "schedule system". Nobody had ever had a business like that before, with every transaction different but handled in a very organized way. Without computers, even.
Each incoming mail order was opened and read, then assigned a bin number and a 45-minute time slot. Pull tickets, with bin numbers, were filled out for each item and sent by pneumatic tube to different departments all over the "plant", where stock pickers took the item off a shelf and sent the item to the order assembly bins via conveyor. There, this being pre-bar-code, people grabbed the items off the conveyor as it passed the appropriate bin, and dropped the item with pull ticket in the bin.
At the end of the time period for the current orders, all the filled bins were pulled and replaced with empty bins. The filled bins were sent off by conveyor to outgoing order processing, where the contents of the bin were checked against the original order, the appropriate bookkeeping operations were performed, and the order was shipped.
Note how this works. The information moves, in the form of pick slips, and the merchandise moves, but there's little searching for merchandise. The order picking people don't move very far. In any one area, the people in that area know where the items in their area are (and they're all numbered, of course) so they can quickly pick items and put them on their outgoing conveyor. Order binning involves no paperwork; it's just putting items with numbered tags in bins. Order final assembly and checking starts with all the merchandise and paperwork in one place, and the people doing that work on only one order at a time, so that's straightforward. Packing and shipping consists of putting the contents of a bin in a box and adding a label created at order final assembly.
In its day, the Sears, Roebuck center was considered a marvel of commerce.
Order fulfillment operations still work a lot like that. Barcoding and computers have substantially reduced the number of people involved, but everybody still has bins and timeslots.
We were closer to nuclear propulsion forty years ago, with NERVA, Kiwi, Phoebus, and Orion.
Several of those were actually built. Today, it's all vaporware.
If it weren't for psuedoscience, NASA wouldn't get any funding.
Earth is the only worthwhile real estate in the solar system. Mars and Luna are both essentially airless. Venus is way too hot. Everything else is worse. Even the places we've explored have boring geology. Space is boring.
Rocketry has hit a wall. After sixty years of rocketry, the things still barely work.
In aviation, sixty years took us from the Wright Brothers to the Boeing 707. In rocketry, by 1970 we had the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle. In the 35 years since, there's been essentially no progress. (Even if the X-prize succeeds, it will have accomplished less than Yuri Gagarin did in 1961.)
If it weren't for psuedoscience and hype about space, NASA would be funded like ocean exploration. NASA would be on the Discovery Channel, like Jacques Costeau, asking for money.
Psuedoscience keeps the funding flowing.
Tellurium is about $14/lb. Gallium, by comparison, is about $1000/lb, which is why gallium-arsenide photocells, which can reach 30% efficiency, aren't widely used.
World production of tellurium is only about 100 metric tons. Gold production is 25 times larger. Tellurium is cheap because it is produced as a byproduct of copper smelting. Nobody mines tellurium directly at present. So there may be a supply problem if demand increases substantially.
This is the first real laser weapon. Unlike most of the stuff to come out of BMDO/MDA, this thing is expected to be useful.
It's a joint US-Israeli effort, which gives it some reality.
We're not talking about ICBMs here. This is aimed more at Katyusha batteries, a WWII truck-mounted launcher for 48 tube-launched unguided rockets. Those things had a range of about 5Km back in WWII. Their accuracy is poor, but they're cheap and can fire many rockets in the general direction of the target.
Syria uses Katyusha batteries, and has been developing improved versions.
Patriot anti-missiles are too expensive to use against those things. The defenders would run out of Patriots long before the attackers ran out of Katyushas. So there's a real application for a laser weapon here. It won't stop all the incoming rockets, but cutting down a few thousand to a few hundred is a big win.
It's worth reading the orders of the Iraq Provisional Authority. It's an Ashcroft wet dream. Order 14 allows arbitrary suppression of newspapers and broadcast stations, including seizure and confiscation. But Order 25 gives stronger property rights and three levels of appeal to other businesses.
Also in those orders is a copyright extension act for Iraq. Only to 50 years, and no DMCA, though.
After ten years of C++ programming, I'm underwhelmed with C++. It's broken, and Strostrup is in denial about its flaws. If C++ wasn't broken, we wouldn't have needed Java or C# or Objective-C, which, after all, look a lot like C++.
The basic problem with C++ is that, alone amongst major programming languages, it has hiding without safety, which is a terrible combination. C has neither hiding nor safety. Java, Perl, Python, Ada, and LISP have hiding with safety. This has nothing to do with efficiency. There are some basic bad design decisions in C++. Some of them come from C, and some of them come from early C++.
The end result is a mess.
The best the C++ community has been able to do is to impose religious dogma, in the form of "patterns", on C++ usage. This sort of works, but not very well. Witness Microsoft's endless buffer overflow problems. Switching to C++ has not helped at all.
It's not getting any better, either. The C++ language development community is dominated by people who like to do really l33t things with templates.
I wish there were something decent and mainstream to program in.
(And don't go on about Eiffel or Sather or Z or Haskell; those are going nowhere.)
Slashdot Mirror
If you use "root", someday you will be rooted.
In its early days, TrustE meant something, but they've sold out completely. Now they're even running ads for Bonded Spammer, er Sender.
Read TrustE's own "Watchdog Reports". In the last six months, TrustE never took any enforcement action whatsoever based on a complaint. They get 100-200 complaints every month, and do nothing. Over the past five years, according to their own figures, they've requested that a web site operator make some change about once a year. All other complaints are described, in their words, as "Issue Handles with no changes necessary to the Privacy Statement nor the Site".
America overeducates its population. It's not about education itself. It's about getting more education than the other job applicants. Young Americans are thus locked into a futile, expensive competition that most of them are inevitably doomed to lose. Education has become an arms race, and as with other arms races, the only limit on cost is how much money is available.
Now there's a scary thought.
Once this ties in with slots...
The key to efficient driving is not to brake hard. Modern engines are relatively efficient in acceleration; you put fuel in, and you get kinetic energy out. All you get out of brakes is heat.
With 4WD, it might be different. More braking could be regenerative.
If you're involved in configuration, go take a look at Susan Kare's original Macintosh control panel. Now think really, really hard about how to get to something that intutive.
They must be a smaller operation than I thought.
But when? Before trial, yes. Before asking for a guilty plea? No, apparently.
There is a French version of COBOL. Not only are the keywords in French, but the syntax is French, so that, as with English COBOL, statements can be valid sentences in a natural language.
There's a standard, called OpenCable, but the cable industry hates it. There's a huge battle going on right now, involving the "broadcast flag", the FCC's rules on opening up the cable box market, the consumer TV industry, and the content people.
The cable industry certified to the FCC that they were in compliance with the OpenCable standard as of January 1, 2000. Ask your cable provider for the supposedly-available "digital POD" (a smart-card like device that handles the encryption) and see how far you get.
Lame, really lame.
Compared to operating in low earth orbit, operating in Antarctica or undersea on the continental shelf is easy, safe, and cheap.
Rocketry is stuck for the most basic of reasons - chemical fuels are not powerful enough. That was known in the 1950s, and it hasn't gotten any better since the 1960s. The X-prize people aren't even trying for orbit. Rotary Rocket was at least trying to get into orbit, even if their craft was 97%+ fuel and a little weight growth killed the project. Anything that makes it to orbit is almost all fuel or so fragile the reliability will be poor. Usually both. After almost fifty years of satellite launches, putting satellites in orbit works only 80-90% of the time.
Without nuclear propulsion or a theoretical breakthrough like antigravity, space travel is going nowhere
Atmospheric pressure at ground level on Mars is around 9 millibars. That's under 1% of Earth's atmospheric pressure. In Earth's atmosphere, that pressure is reached around 105,000 feet altitude. That's not much of an atmosphere.
Each incoming mail order was opened and read, then assigned a bin number and a 45-minute time slot. Pull tickets, with bin numbers, were filled out for each item and sent by pneumatic tube to different departments all over the "plant", where stock pickers took the item off a shelf and sent the item to the order assembly bins via conveyor. There, this being pre-bar-code, people grabbed the items off the conveyor as it passed the appropriate bin, and dropped the item with pull ticket in the bin.
At the end of the time period for the current orders, all the filled bins were pulled and replaced with empty bins. The filled bins were sent off by conveyor to outgoing order processing, where the contents of the bin were checked against the original order, the appropriate bookkeeping operations were performed, and the order was shipped.
Note how this works. The information moves, in the form of pick slips, and the merchandise moves, but there's little searching for merchandise. The order picking people don't move very far. In any one area, the people in that area know where the items in their area are (and they're all numbered, of course) so they can quickly pick items and put them on their outgoing conveyor. Order binning involves no paperwork; it's just putting items with numbered tags in bins. Order final assembly and checking starts with all the merchandise and paperwork in one place, and the people doing that work on only one order at a time, so that's straightforward. Packing and shipping consists of putting the contents of a bin in a box and adding a label created at order final assembly.
In its day, the Sears, Roebuck center was considered a marvel of commerce.
Order fulfillment operations still work a lot like that. Barcoding and computers have substantially reduced the number of people involved, but everybody still has bins and timeslots.
We were closer to nuclear propulsion forty years ago, with NERVA, Kiwi, Phoebus, and Orion. Several of those were actually built. Today, it's all vaporware.
Earth is the only worthwhile real estate in the solar system. Mars and Luna are both essentially airless. Venus is way too hot. Everything else is worse. Even the places we've explored have boring geology. Space is boring.
Rocketry has hit a wall. After sixty years of rocketry, the things still barely work. In aviation, sixty years took us from the Wright Brothers to the Boeing 707. In rocketry, by 1970 we had the Saturn V and the Space Shuttle. In the 35 years since, there's been essentially no progress. (Even if the X-prize succeeds, it will have accomplished less than Yuri Gagarin did in 1961.)
If it weren't for psuedoscience and hype about space, NASA would be funded like ocean exploration. NASA would be on the Discovery Channel, like Jacques Costeau, asking for money. Psuedoscience keeps the funding flowing.
The original had a pneumatic tube attachment.
The Airborne Laser is a research project; it's unlikely to be deployed. This ground-based thing is close to being a deployed defense system.
Tellurium is about $14/lb. Gallium, by comparison, is about $1000/lb, which is why gallium-arsenide photocells, which can reach 30% efficiency, aren't widely used.
World production of tellurium is only about 100 metric tons. Gold production is 25 times larger. Tellurium is cheap because it is produced as a byproduct of copper smelting. Nobody mines tellurium directly at present. So there may be a supply problem if demand increases substantially.
We're not talking about ICBMs here. This is aimed more at Katyusha batteries, a WWII truck-mounted launcher for 48 tube-launched unguided rockets. Those things had a range of about 5Km back in WWII. Their accuracy is poor, but they're cheap and can fire many rockets in the general direction of the target. Syria uses Katyusha batteries, and has been developing improved versions.
Patriot anti-missiles are too expensive to use against those things. The defenders would run out of Patriots long before the attackers ran out of Katyushas. So there's a real application for a laser weapon here. It won't stop all the incoming rockets, but cutting down a few thousand to a few hundred is a big win.
It's worth reading the orders of the Iraq Provisional Authority. It's an Ashcroft wet dream. Order 14 allows arbitrary suppression of newspapers and broadcast stations, including seizure and confiscation. But Order 25 gives stronger property rights and three levels of appeal to other businesses.
Also in those orders is a copyright extension act for Iraq. Only to 50 years, and no DMCA, though.
Soon, the MPAA will put ones in movies that cause phones to report in to the MPAA.
It's a shell now, like PARC. Sad.
After ten years of C++ programming, I'm underwhelmed with C++. It's broken, and Strostrup is in denial about its flaws. If C++ wasn't broken, we wouldn't have needed Java or C# or Objective-C, which, after all, look a lot like C++.
The basic problem with C++ is that, alone amongst major programming languages, it has hiding without safety, which is a terrible combination. C has neither hiding nor safety. Java, Perl, Python, Ada, and LISP have hiding with safety. This has nothing to do with efficiency. There are some basic bad design decisions in C++. Some of them come from C, and some of them come from early C++. The end result is a mess.
The best the C++ community has been able to do is to impose religious dogma, in the form of "patterns", on C++ usage. This sort of works, but not very well. Witness Microsoft's endless buffer overflow problems. Switching to C++ has not helped at all.
It's not getting any better, either. The C++ language development community is dominated by people who like to do really l33t things with templates.
I wish there were something decent and mainstream to program in. (And don't go on about Eiffel or Sather or Z or Haskell; those are going nowhere.)