Baby steps, if we want to go on to bigger and better things then we need to build up some momentum... get the space programme rolling, inspire some more public interest in space, test the technology out and etc.
Plus it can only help the people running the show to do a few relatively simple missions before trying anything ambitious.
I assume that they do the shit they do for a reason other than pissing everyone off on purpose, so that would imply that it helps their bottom line. Or at least it does until people catch on, and go elsewhere.
At this point they could improve the service, which has the downside (from their point of view) of removing the advantage to the bottom line, and may not actually help their image - the people that are really interested won't be won over quickly and will stay suspicious, the people that aren't that interested won't notice the change and will continue with the impression that the service sucks.
They *could* improve the service whilst simultaneously launching a PR campaign to make it well known that they've improved the service, which might be more successful in winning people over, but still carries the cost of yknow... actually improving the service.
If they assume that the people who know things are mostly a lost cause, and focus on the people who are actually likely to be persuaded, then they could have just as much success with just the PR campaign, possibly more success if you factor in the savings from keeping the service as it is.
You can't trust them to do what's good for the customer, but you can trust them to do what's good for their profits... if they could do better by making the service better then some analyst or advisor would have pointed this out already.
As far as I can tell the difference between the GPL and BSD licenses is basically the difference between a project, and a piece of code.
Under BSD, they put out a project, it's open, and you can take bits and build it into something of your own, at which point it is your project, do what you like with it
With GPL the person who wrote the code wants all of their code to remain 'open' wherever it goes, so if you swipe some of their coding and put it in your own module, to make that module proprietary would be locking up their code. Although of course, the original source remains open...
Still, it makes the Extend (or maybe the Extinguish) part of the "3 E's" strategy harder if you have to give back everything you add.
If you get mugged, you know your stuff's been stolen and can report it and have it cancelled before they do any real damage.
If it's stolen out of insecure online transaction then you have no idea anything's happened until you see your statement, or your card gets denied, or the bank calls, or whatever happens to be the first indicator that the shit has hit the fan.
The way things seem to be going sometimes, I get the impression that the media companies and "content" producers would like it to be a one-way connection from corporation to consumer, like TV is.
You get to choose from a regulated selection of providers (analogous to TV channels) who serve up their own content. All nice and regulated. Put up some high cost-barriers to setting up such a channel, and the internet becomes like every other medium - a way for the big companies to push their content to a passive audience.
Just look at radio - started out open, anyone who could transmit could communicate, then it got regulated. Written media started out expensive (had to hire a team of scribes to make copies) became cheap with the advent of printing, then as mass printing and distribution became more expensive you had to have yourself a publisher or be a large newspaper.
FPS gaming is probably one of the more demanding uses of an input device - requires a lot of speed, precision and ease of movement.
Ever see anyone who prefers playing with a touchscreen, or really anything other than a mouse?
I guess graphic design is also demanding on the input device, precision being more important than speed there, and then the tablet type interface comes into it's own, but integrating it into the screen would just make everything uncomfortable.
Long discussion short, you want your eyes to be looking at a different place than you want to be holding your hands for a protracted period of time.
Has anyone proposed a large stone door, with spaces for 9 jewels and/or ancient artifacts of some kind?
Once we have that in place, we take the 9 items that open the door and put them in smaller secure facilities scattered around a largish area, but not too large... maybe the size of a smallish country, preferably somewhere with a couple of major towns within walking distance of each other.
Give each site some kind of theme too... like maybe one has ice everywhere, or plants, or fire... oh, and in the rooms that actually contain the items, trap in a small population of dangerous animals and flood the place with low level radiation - something interesting should mutate.
That should keep out just about everyone, except for "The Chosen One" who shows up 10 thousand years later. He'll round up the keys, go in and die, and everyone else will re-learn that the place is freakin' dangerous. There - a warning, easy as pie.
"Infected files launch IE and load a page that asks the user to download a codec"
I'd know there was something severely wrong at the point when IE opened all by itself... I doubt I'd get as far as actually downloading a codec to run an antivirus on it.
They're in that order so that we can order robots to do things that are dangerous or damaging for themselves.
e.g. Go to Mars
> Can't, might hurt my wrist Well what are you going to do?
> Can't go outside, might get hit by a meteor, I guess I'll just sit here and play video games Damn you lazy robots!
> Oww, carpal tunnel How ironic
I find the argument that lack of proof on either side means we can't draw a conclusion particularly facetious. Consider the claim "there's an invisible, intangible, silent, odourless, rabbit living inside your computer"
You can't demonstrate this to be false, I can't demonstrate it to be true, so I guess to be logical we'll have to both be agnostic about the rabbit.
Sound like a heap of bullshit to you? Yeah, that's what you sound like.
There is no sensible way to differentiate a world in which the rabbit I described exists from one where it does not, this renders the claim meaningless. By analogy, "There is a God" becomes a meaningless claim at around the point when you realise there is no possible evidence that would convince a theist that they are wrong.
Oh great, now the universe is using the "up to" con on us. We expect 4000 stars, it delivers 1000, but we have to grin and bear it because of the Terms of Service we agreed to by being born... same old story.
Ever seen that low-sodium alterno-salt? Supposed to be healthier by having less Na in it, but NaCl with the Na removed just makes chlorine... which is toxic... which is bad.
(I assume they actually replace the sodium chloride with some other chloride that tastes the same, or possibly just some inert white crystal that they pretend is salt)
I've already seen adverts boasting about how many patents company X have.
I forget who it was (some car manufacturer... might have been Audi) but the advert went along the lines of "we filed more patents than NASA while inventing this car" to make it sound like some amazing, god-sent new technology
There was an analogy I heard once relating Creation to a game of Snooker, and the different ways you can progress from the start (all the balls in a triangle in the middle of the table) to the end game where all the balls are in the pockets.
You could either go around the table, dropping all the balls directly into the pockets, or play the game of snooker and pot them in one at a time, or pull off a masterful starting shot that leads to the balls all ricocheting around and all going into a pocket.
Directly placing them in would be the standard Creationist "God did it all, no evolution" answer. Potting them one by one is Theistic Evolution - intervention along the way to nudge things towards the eventual goal. The one-shot method would seem to be the most skilful way of doing things, and would imply God setting things up in such a way that natural processes work things out in the end, without any intervention being necessary.
I'm an atheist myself, but if I were to believe in God, I'd think that any being worthy of the name would be able to make that kind of master-stroke; set things up in such a way that the goal is realised of it's own accord, without the need to constantly help things along.
Slashdot Mirror
Baby steps, if we want to go on to bigger and better things then we need to build up some momentum... get the space programme rolling, inspire some more public interest in space, test the technology out and etc.
Plus it can only help the people running the show to do a few relatively simple missions before trying anything ambitious.
Could get yourself the 64-bit version of XP... except they probably aren't selling it any more.
Still, you could get it from other sources.
Or the "PIRATE-IP" bill.
I assume that they do the shit they do for a reason other than pissing everyone off on purpose, so that would imply that it helps their bottom line. Or at least it does until people catch on, and go elsewhere.
At this point they could improve the service, which has the downside (from their point of view) of removing the advantage to the bottom line, and may not actually help their image - the people that are really interested won't be won over quickly and will stay suspicious, the people that aren't that interested won't notice the change and will continue with the impression that the service sucks.
They *could* improve the service whilst simultaneously launching a PR campaign to make it well known that they've improved the service, which might be more successful in winning people over, but still carries the cost of yknow... actually improving the service.
If they assume that the people who know things are mostly a lost cause, and focus on the people who are actually likely to be persuaded, then they could have just as much success with just the PR campaign, possibly more success if you factor in the savings from keeping the service as it is.
You can't trust them to do what's good for the customer, but you can trust them to do what's good for their profits... if they could do better by making the service better then some analyst or advisor would have pointed this out already.
As far as I can tell the difference between the GPL and BSD licenses is basically the difference between a project, and a piece of code.
Under BSD, they put out a project, it's open, and you can take bits and build it into something of your own, at which point it is your project, do what you like with it
With GPL the person who wrote the code wants all of their code to remain 'open' wherever it goes, so if you swipe some of their coding and put it in your own module, to make that module proprietary would be locking up their code. Although of course, the original source remains open...
Still, it makes the Extend (or maybe the Extinguish) part of the "3 E's" strategy harder if you have to give back everything you add.
If you get mugged, you know your stuff's been stolen and can report it and have it cancelled before they do any real damage.
If it's stolen out of insecure online transaction then you have no idea anything's happened until you see your statement, or your card gets denied, or the bank calls, or whatever happens to be the first indicator that the shit has hit the fan.
The way things seem to be going sometimes, I get the impression that the media companies and "content" producers would like it to be a one-way connection from corporation to consumer, like TV is.
You get to choose from a regulated selection of providers (analogous to TV channels) who serve up their own content. All nice and regulated. Put up some high cost-barriers to setting up such a channel, and the internet becomes like every other medium - a way for the big companies to push their content to a passive audience.
Just look at radio - started out open, anyone who could transmit could communicate, then it got regulated. Written media started out expensive (had to hire a team of scribes to make copies) became cheap with the advent of printing, then as mass printing and distribution became more expensive you had to have yourself a publisher or be a large newspaper.
FPS gaming is probably one of the more demanding uses of an input device - requires a lot of speed, precision and ease of movement.
Ever see anyone who prefers playing with a touchscreen, or really anything other than a mouse?
I guess graphic design is also demanding on the input device, precision being more important than speed there, and then the tablet type interface comes into it's own, but integrating it into the screen would just make everything uncomfortable.
Long discussion short, you want your eyes to be looking at a different place than you want to be holding your hands for a protracted period of time.
Has anyone proposed a large stone door, with spaces for 9 jewels and/or ancient artifacts of some kind?
Once we have that in place, we take the 9 items that open the door and put them in smaller secure facilities scattered around a largish area, but not too large... maybe the size of a smallish country, preferably somewhere with a couple of major towns within walking distance of each other.
Give each site some kind of theme too... like maybe one has ice everywhere, or plants, or fire... oh, and in the rooms that actually contain the items, trap in a small population of dangerous animals and flood the place with low level radiation - something interesting should mutate.
That should keep out just about everyone, except for "The Chosen One" who shows up 10 thousand years later. He'll round up the keys, go in and die, and everyone else will re-learn that the place is freakin' dangerous. There - a warning, easy as pie.
"Infected files launch IE and load a page that asks the user to download a codec"
I'd know there was something severely wrong at the point when IE opened all by itself... I doubt I'd get as far as actually downloading a codec to run an antivirus on it.
They're in that order so that we can order robots to do things that are dangerous or damaging for themselves.
e.g.
Go to Mars
> Can't, might hurt my wrist
Well what are you going to do?
> Can't go outside, might get hit by a meteor, I guess I'll just sit here and play video games
Damn you lazy robots!
> Oww, carpal tunnel
How ironic
An atheistic view of topics like the origins of the universe or of what happens at death is not the same thing as Atheism.
Atheism means you don't believe there to be a God, that's all. Whatever else you believe is up to you.
Don't forget to have a child stoned if they swear at their parents.
And for God's sakes, don't even think about wearing clothes made from mixed fibres.
I find the argument that lack of proof on either side means we can't draw a conclusion particularly facetious. Consider the claim "there's an invisible, intangible, silent, odourless, rabbit living inside your computer"
You can't demonstrate this to be false, I can't demonstrate it to be true, so I guess to be logical we'll have to both be agnostic about the rabbit.
Sound like a heap of bullshit to you? Yeah, that's what you sound like.
There is no sensible way to differentiate a world in which the rabbit I described exists from one where it does not, this renders the claim meaningless. By analogy, "There is a God" becomes a meaningless claim at around the point when you realise there is no possible evidence that would convince a theist that they are wrong.
If I had mod points I'd be clicking the little mod-point-giving dropdown thingy by now.
Anyone else feel like doing that on my behalf?
Oh great, now the universe is using the "up to" con on us. We expect 4000 stars, it delivers 1000, but we have to grin and bear it because of the Terms of Service we agreed to by being born... same old story.
I couldn't care less about the use, or disuse, of the word whom, but "all intensive purposes"?
The phrase is "all intents and purposes"
I'm British, I would still use "doomsday"
Unless referring to the actual Domesday book of course.
Checked mine, says its not compatible with FF3
:-)
No action required
Or we wait a couple of decades for the dinosaurs to die out, and the current generation of file-sharers to get into the government.
Ever seen that low-sodium alterno-salt? Supposed to be healthier by having less Na in it, but NaCl with the Na removed just makes chlorine... which is toxic... which is bad.
(I assume they actually replace the sodium chloride with some other chloride that tastes the same, or possibly just some inert white crystal that they pretend is salt)
I have yet to meet man who can outrun bullet.
I've already seen adverts boasting about how many patents company X have.
I forget who it was (some car manufacturer... might have been Audi) but the advert went along the lines of "we filed more patents than NASA while inventing this car" to make it sound like some amazing, god-sent new technology
There was an analogy I heard once relating Creation to a game of Snooker, and the different ways you can progress from the start (all the balls in a triangle in the middle of the table) to the end game where all the balls are in the pockets.
You could either go around the table, dropping all the balls directly into the pockets, or play the game of snooker and pot them in one at a time, or pull off a masterful starting shot that leads to the balls all ricocheting around and all going into a pocket.
Directly placing them in would be the standard Creationist "God did it all, no evolution" answer. Potting them one by one is Theistic Evolution - intervention along the way to nudge things towards the eventual goal. The one-shot method would seem to be the most skilful way of doing things, and would imply God setting things up in such a way that natural processes work things out in the end, without any intervention being necessary.
I'm an atheist myself, but if I were to believe in God, I'd think that any being worthy of the name would be able to make that kind of master-stroke; set things up in such a way that the goal is realised of it's own accord, without the need to constantly help things along.
I can promise you 6 i's of uptime.
But i^6 being -1, that's not a lot of uptime... if I ever provided you with anything it would be in excess of what I promised.