I work and live near the Great Salt Lake, though I am a recent transplant. My understanding is that its levels cycle like this naturally, so whatever lives there has had to adapt to that. It's not like this is some kind man-made disaster that will kill off the shrimp population. Utah has just had like 5 very dry years. When it starts raining more, whatever they build out there will become a scenery for the shrimp. I'm also hoping it starts to stink less, too. Sometimes it reeks with a vengeance.
tho it has many things in common with a republic, a system similar to that of the USA can in theory be implemented usign a monarchy as well.
Ironically, the President has more real power in the Democracy/Republic of the United States than the Queen/King currently has in the monarchy of Great Britain.
I agree. This nation, functioning under the Constitution as it was written, is the best form of government I've seen. I would also note that, although parties do play a useful role, the Constitution did not mention them at all (in fact, in the early days, it was almost as good as treason to belong to the "opposition" party).
In resonse to the parent's comments about the democracy vs. the republic, I would note that the effect was not just to keep the dumb commoners from making the decisions. It was more to prevent the dumb commoners from making knee-jerk decisions. If every issue were to be determined by referendum, you get stupid knee-jerk reactions and the "tyrrany of the majority." Thus every legislative action had to be approved by the popularly-elected House and the indirectly-elected Senate. That way, the people got a voice, and the States got a voice. The populace, as a body, is much too fickle to make good decisions. Unfortunately, in effect, the popularly-elected Senate has pretty much given the reigns over to the ignorant masses. The politicians rely on CNN polls to tell them what the people want, and then they try to make sure that the people thing they're giving them what they want (note that the level of reliance on opinion polls varies directly with the proximity of an election where any given politician's seat is contested). Also, it's interesting that the one of the justifications for popular Senate elections was to decrease the influence of special interests, when the effect has been, in fact, to magnify those effects many fold. I'll still take the U.S. over any other place, but it certainly is not the nation the Framers envisioned, and getting back on course will likely take as many generations of positive reform as we have had generations of straying.
I suppose commercial interests are good because they drive science and technology at a much faster pace than the government, burdened with rules and regulations and bureaucracy, can ever hope to do.
Actually, what industry is not burdened with is reliability and predictability requirements. Intel can push super-fast, super-hot processors out the door because, for the market that buys them, failures are not truly catastrophic (they're not meaningless -- we had a server crash at work this morning, and it was a major pain in the butt, but nobody died). In military and space applications, a single hardware failure can cost many millions of dollars and often lives. Or, it can mean that you are at the mercy of your adversary because your weapon systems do not work adequately. The reason that critical government-owned systems tend to have older technology is that those technologies are proven and predictable. Also, you will always be behind the bleeding edge when you demand things like process controls, radiation hardening and ruggedization. It's true that government agencies have some inherent inefficiency, but the fact that they pay a premium for old solid-state technology is not necessarily a sympton of that.
I'll chant "Go HP!" when they dump that man-woman Carly Fiorina in a cardboard box on the side of the street, with a swift kick in the ribs for good measure. It takes a truly sick mind to devolve the reputable manufacturer of some of the best instrumentation and the best calculators into nothing more than a mediocre PC shop. Until they dump that ho-bag and bring "Agilent" (WTF?!? That's not even a word!!!) back into the fold, I will never be able to have any respect for them, Linux or not.
I've never heard of somebody actually losing award fees.
More precisely, negative award fees, which is a reduction in award fee (not loss of it altogether). I didn't want to go into a big explanation, but you're right, it's rare for a contractor to totally lose a contract, even if they're behind schedule and over budget. I was just pointing out that there really is accountability, because I have seen our customer give us negative award fees, which means lost profit, which gets lots of management attention. You do not want to be the person associated with that. I have also seen what you describe, where a contractor overruns and then uses inertia to ask for more money, time after time. Generally, there is borderline illegal fraternization going on in those cases, but it's not usually something you can do anything about. I will say that I am proud to work for a company that does not use that business model, unlike some of our competitors who will remain unnamed (*cough*)SAIC(*cough*).
Just to add to what you said...
I work for a government contractor involved in a program where high-reliability and traceability and other non-standard requirements are vital. So, yes, we may pay 10 to 100 times the commercial cost for a transistor that is electrically identical to one you could buy at Radio Shack for $0.50. However, we are purchasing a known assembly process, lot-date code traceability and lots of extra screening and testing, all of which is necessary, and none of which you get with your cheap Radio Shack transistor. And contrary to popular belief, we do not get a blind eye if we overrun or deliver sub-par products. Those things lead to lost award fees, which in turn makes share holders mighty angry. So, when people start whining about the "excessive" cost of military and space electronics, they need to remember that sending a man to Mars or the Moon is not a garage hobby project.
You realize that only one of those is something the Federal Gov't should do, don't you? Lowering taxes is a good thing for the federal government to do, and should always be (but never is) accompanied by reducing the size of government and getting its fingers out of a few pies. The Federal Government should not be poking its nose in the broadband infrastructure or cleaning up my city. Those are services that should be the prerogative of local governments. As for socializing medicine, it's a noble goal to provide free medical care to everyone, but that's not the federal government's business either. Providing for the needs of the citizens should be the responsibility of the states. It makes perfect sense to do things the way they are defined in the Constitution, because accountability tends to vary inversely with the size of the constituency. It's a lot harder to pork up a local project and get away with it than it is to pork up a federal program, where you have several layers of insulation from the actual voters. Space exploration is one of the few things the Federal Government should have its fingers in.
You've obviously never been to Texas, where the Southern Baptists supplement their Sunday worship at the chapel with their Friday worship at the Altar of the Pigskin. $256B is quite a reasonable tithe.
You're missing one very important point here, which is the actual reason
that I have such a problem with the misnomer "centrifugal force."
Now let's assume a spherical cow. His name is Bob.
Bob is in a centrifuge, perhaps the kind that is found
at an amusement park, where you are smashed against the wall
and the floor drops out. The centrifuge is spinning at full
speed, and Bob is pinned to the wall, when suddenly, through some freak
accident of quantum physics, the wall disappears instantaneously. What happens to Bob?
If you believe in "centrifugal force," this mythical force that is pushing you out against the wall, you would think that Bob will go flying outward radially.
Of course, you know better than that. The tangential force will fling Bob out, meaning that his motion will be perpendicular to the radial component. That is why I pick nits over "centrifugal force." It leads to the commonly held misconception that a body is being pushed outward.
Everyone can get their underpants in a know and call me pedantic, but this is one of my Physics pet peeves. The process cannot use "centrifugal force" to create thin layers of anything, because there is no such thing as "centrifugal force". A body in circuilar motion will have radial and tengential acceleration components. Since F=ma, you can only ascribe forces to your acceleration components. More likely, it is the tangential force that spreads the stuff into thin layers.
No, I'm betting it gets cancelled before it has a chance to get that far. I've seen the previews, and for the most part, it just looks silly and contrived. Sort of like "The Practice" spent a steamy night in a seedy motel with "Minority Report," and this was the unhappy result.
I'd really like to meet the prosecutor willing to try some poor schmo for using some old OS to connect to the internet, even if that computer were used for some gross criminal act. Your analogy of a gun left in the yard for anybody to use breaks down for several reasons. First, a cracker is, by definition, already using a computer. He doens't need your buggy computer to break into the hospital. He's just using it to add a layer of complexity in tracking him. Now, imagine some professional hit man with an entire arsenal of guns, who happens to come across one that you own and uses it to commit a crime. The ol' DA is going to have a tough time prosecuting the original gun owner, regardless of how the gun was found. Especially when it comes out that the trigger man was an experienced professional who knew how to find and exploit vulnerable, privately-owned firearms. The only place a criminal negligence charge would make sense would be if you provided the only access that person had to a firearm (for example, if the killer were your child, and the DA can demonstrate that you reasonably should have been able to anticipate his actions and exercise some parental control, the charge might stand). The second reason the analogy breaks down is that even a buggy old OS requires some kind of criminal exploit of a known vulnerability to compromise. If you so much as put a cheap $1.50 pad lock on your shed where you keep your gun, the DA will have a tough time with a criminal negligence case, unless he can show that you somehow advertised that the weapon was there and ready for the picking by anybody wishing to kill a cop. The only way to get the computer equivalent of "leaving the gun on your lawn" would be to do something like post you IP address and root password on www.hackthehospitalandkillsomebody.com. The point of criminal negligence is that you did something that you knew, or should have known, posed a grave danger to others. Can you make a case that it is common knowledge that using a buggy, old OS can endanger others? If you're a DA, Are you really going to prosecute my mother-in-law for using her old Compaq with a completely unpatched copy of Windows 95 and AOL 4 to e-mail her grandkids and do genealogy research? If so, are you prepared for the huge political fallout and major negative publicity?
Fortunately, there is a difference between criminal proceedings and civil proceedings. Yes, the family of the victim may sue you for any number of things, because basically anybody can sue anybody for anything. However, they will have an uphill battle for two reasons:
1. No lawyer is going to want to touch it, because you are a private citizen who is presumably not ridiculously wealthy, so there really is very little chance of the lawyer's cut being worth the time. If you are very obviously somehow in the wrong, he may try it, hoping to get a payout from your home insurance policy. However, that brings us to point two.
2. Unless he can show some kind of obvious and gross negligence, he's going to have a hard time convincing the jurors that you are responsible.
The fact that somebody can file a frivolous law suit does not guarantee an automatic payout. In this case, your hardest battle is probably trying to get a lawyer to take your case. Now, if you happen to be a huge, monied corporation, or a grossly wealthy individual, then everything changes and you have shady lawyers beating down your door begging to take the case, hiring all sorts of "experts" of dubious reputations and paying off jurors when they get the chance. See, it's all about the money, and unless the lawyers smell a lot of it, they're not going to bother.
Think about this one for just a minute. If some gang banger breaks into your house and steals a gun, and then uses it to rob a bank, and it the process kills a police officer, with whom does the fault lie? Is it with you for not having your gun properly secured against all possible kinds of break-ins? Is it with the manufacturer of the house or the manufacturer of your gun safe for not building a system immune to all types of breaches? Or is it with the guy who broke into your house, breached whatever security you had in place, stole your gun, and used it to commit capital murder? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm sure many Slashdotters would read your post and think, "That's right, make those stupid Windows lusers responsible for not keeping their machines patched, and while we're at it, let's send Bill Gates to prison for his crap OS too!" That same line of thinking, applied to the scenario above, would land you strapped to a gurney in recompense for somebody else's crime. Let's be a little more realistic.
You'll never find an actual full quote of him saying that, because it was a deliberately misquoted sound-bite.
However, you will find a quote of him saying something about taking the lead in the Senate for creating the Internet (I can't remember the exact quote off the top of my head, and I'm not going to go hunting around for it). So, despite what the Gore apologists would like us all to believe, the intent was essentially the same: Gore was indeed trying to take credit for the Internet being what it is. It was political grandstanding, plain and simple. I'm still not sure why Gore supporters are so defensive about this. Every politician in the country wants to tell you that he is a great scientist, economist, diplomat, inventor, innovator, negotiator, statesman and is responsible for the latest sunrise. Of course, if they could actually do any of those things, they'd have REAL jobs.
Strip-mining the Moon won't be nearly as unpopular as doing so here on Earth. ^_-
I think you are sorely underestimating the fanaticism of environmentalists. I have heard many complaints about what a tragedy it would be to "screw up" that dead gray rock just like we have earth.
DISCLAIMER: I think the moon-rock-weapon scenario is stupid, but I would like to say one thing.
What you describe for the moon rock is basically what we do with ICBMs (they are, after all, ballistic missiles). The guidance system gets the thing up into space, rotatest a platform, and fires off the RV(s). The RV itself has absolutely no guidance or ability to change course. It does have Inertial Navigation and radar, but those just tell it when and if to detonate. The majority of the flight is basically the equivalent of taking a big cone and throwing it through space at your target. Given that, we can still pretty much hit an area the size of a football field, and with a 300 kT business end, it doesn't make much difference if you hit the wrong end zone.
The problem with MAD, though, is we've lost both the M and the A. Who else can match our arsenal?
Umm, Russia? Yes, "End of the Cold War" notwithstanding, at last count, they actually have MORE ground-based warheads than we do (though fewer sea-based warheads). Furthermore, they recently announced that they have developed a new delivery vehicle that is capable of penetrating our ABM defense systems (sorry, no link, since I didn't get that info off the internet. Google if you want). Now, I know that they're theoretically supposed to be our friends now and all, but the truth is, they could turn on a dime and go the other way. And if you're interested in knowing what would happen once we all start firing, check out
The Effects of Nuclear Weapons.
It's considered the definitive unclassified reference on Nuclear Weapons effects.
Bottom line: We should still be plenty scared of our Russian friends. Which is just as well. MAD has worked as a deterrent for the past 50 years. As long as we are all scared of each other, nobody is crazy enough to pull the trigger.
OT, but true: A group in my Senior Design class actually tried to design something like this that could be used on factory floors or other loud environments. Turns out that it's a lot harder than it looks, and they never could get the thing to work. They still graduated, I guess.
One EMP burst and every automobile that has an Engine Control Computer within range of the EMP is dead. =/
Which, incidentally, is most of the United States for a High Altitude Burst approximately over Omaha. And, since the opening volley of a nuclear war is likely to be several High Altitude bursts, basically, every electronic device in the U.S., Canada and Mexico is screwed. And don't think your piddly little UPS will save you. Your computer, your car and your television are all toast!
I can top that. The guy who moved my piano was making a nice six figure salary. He wasn't particularly built and didn't have any special skills. He just had a couple of necessary tools and a truck.
I think the industry's response to this will be some sort of mail-in program if your DVD is scratched. Some studios actually already do this. Of course, if your movie is stolen, you may be SOL. Unless you have a receipt and/or register your DVD. It seems reasonable enough to me, I think a judge might accept it.
Actually, Jack Valenti fully supports your right to have a backup copy of the DVD that you bought. A direct Valenti quote from The CNN article:
"If you buy a DVD you have a copy. If you want a backup copy you buy another one."
What a simple, fair and logical solution! So I never want to hear anybody ever again say that Jack Valenti is an enemy to fair use rights. He clearly has only your best interests in mind.
Slashdot Mirror
What's sad is that I bet most of the pasty-fleshed kids around this site don't even get this joke. Or is it sad that I do?
I work and live near the Great Salt Lake, though I am a recent transplant. My understanding is that its levels cycle like this naturally, so whatever lives there has had to adapt to that. It's not like this is some kind man-made disaster that will kill off the shrimp population. Utah has just had like 5 very dry years. When it starts raining more, whatever they build out there will become a scenery for the shrimp. I'm also hoping it starts to stink less, too. Sometimes it reeks with a vengeance.
In resonse to the parent's comments about the democracy vs. the republic, I would note that the effect was not just to keep the dumb commoners from making the decisions. It was more to prevent the dumb commoners from making knee-jerk decisions. If every issue were to be determined by referendum, you get stupid knee-jerk reactions and the "tyrrany of the majority." Thus every legislative action had to be approved by the popularly-elected House and the indirectly-elected Senate. That way, the people got a voice, and the States got a voice. The populace, as a body, is much too fickle to make good decisions. Unfortunately, in effect, the popularly-elected Senate has pretty much given the reigns over to the ignorant masses. The politicians rely on CNN polls to tell them what the people want, and then they try to make sure that the people thing they're giving them what they want (note that the level of reliance on opinion polls varies directly with the proximity of an election where any given politician's seat is contested). Also, it's interesting that the one of the justifications for popular Senate elections was to decrease the influence of special interests, when the effect has been, in fact, to magnify those effects many fold. I'll still take the U.S. over any other place, but it certainly is not the nation the Framers envisioned, and getting back on course will likely take as many generations of positive reform as we have had generations of straying.
Just to add to what you said...
I work for a government contractor involved in a program where high-reliability and traceability and other non-standard requirements are vital. So, yes, we may pay 10 to 100 times the commercial cost for a transistor that is electrically identical to one you could buy at Radio Shack for $0.50. However, we are purchasing a known assembly process, lot-date code traceability and lots of extra screening and testing, all of which is necessary, and none of which you get with your cheap Radio Shack transistor. And contrary to popular belief, we do not get a blind eye if we overrun or deliver sub-par products. Those things lead to lost award fees, which in turn makes share holders mighty angry. So, when people start whining about the "excessive" cost of military and space electronics, they need to remember that sending a man to Mars or the Moon is not a garage hobby project.
You realize that only one of those is something the Federal Gov't should do, don't you? Lowering taxes is a good thing for the federal government to do, and should always be (but never is) accompanied by reducing the size of government and getting its fingers out of a few pies. The Federal Government should not be poking its nose in the broadband infrastructure or cleaning up my city. Those are services that should be the prerogative of local governments. As for socializing medicine, it's a noble goal to provide free medical care to everyone, but that's not the federal government's business either. Providing for the needs of the citizens should be the responsibility of the states. It makes perfect sense to do things the way they are defined in the Constitution, because accountability tends to vary inversely with the size of the constituency. It's a lot harder to pork up a local project and get away with it than it is to pork up a federal program, where you have several layers of insulation from the actual voters. Space exploration is one of the few things the Federal Government should have its fingers in.
You've obviously never been to Texas, where the Southern Baptists supplement their Sunday worship at the chapel with their Friday worship at the Altar of the Pigskin. $256B is quite a reasonable tithe.
You're missing one very important point here, which is the actual reason that I have such a problem with the misnomer "centrifugal force." Now let's assume a spherical cow. His name is Bob. Bob is in a centrifuge, perhaps the kind that is found at an amusement park, where you are smashed against the wall and the floor drops out. The centrifuge is spinning at full speed, and Bob is pinned to the wall, when suddenly, through some freak accident of quantum physics, the wall disappears instantaneously. What happens to Bob? If you believe in "centrifugal force," this mythical force that is pushing you out against the wall, you would think that Bob will go flying outward radially. Of course, you know better than that. The tangential force will fling Bob out, meaning that his motion will be perpendicular to the radial component. That is why I pick nits over "centrifugal force." It leads to the commonly held misconception that a body is being pushed outward.
Everyone can get their underpants in a know and call me pedantic, but this is one of my Physics pet peeves. The process cannot use "centrifugal force" to create thin layers of anything, because there is no such thing as "centrifugal force". A body in circuilar motion will have radial and tengential acceleration components. Since F=m a, you can only ascribe forces to your acceleration components. More likely, it is the tangential force that spreads the stuff into thin layers.
No, I'm betting it gets cancelled before it has a chance to get that far. I've seen the previews, and for the most part, it just looks silly and contrived. Sort of like "The Practice" spent a steamy night in a seedy motel with "Minority Report," and this was the unhappy result.
I'd really like to meet the prosecutor willing to try some poor schmo for using some old OS to connect to the internet, even if that computer were used for some gross criminal act. Your analogy of a gun left in the yard for anybody to use breaks down for several reasons. First, a cracker is, by definition, already using a computer. He doens't need your buggy computer to break into the hospital. He's just using it to add a layer of complexity in tracking him. Now, imagine some professional hit man with an entire arsenal of guns, who happens to come across one that you own and uses it to commit a crime. The ol' DA is going to have a tough time prosecuting the original gun owner, regardless of how the gun was found. Especially when it comes out that the trigger man was an experienced professional who knew how to find and exploit vulnerable, privately-owned firearms. The only place a criminal negligence charge would make sense would be if you provided the only access that person had to a firearm (for example, if the killer were your child, and the DA can demonstrate that you reasonably should have been able to anticipate his actions and exercise some parental control, the charge might stand). The second reason the analogy breaks down is that even a buggy old OS requires some kind of criminal exploit of a known vulnerability to compromise. If you so much as put a cheap $1.50 pad lock on your shed where you keep your gun, the DA will have a tough time with a criminal negligence case, unless he can show that you somehow advertised that the weapon was there and ready for the picking by anybody wishing to kill a cop. The only way to get the computer equivalent of "leaving the gun on your lawn" would be to do something like post you IP address and root password on www.hackthehospitalandkillsomebody.com. The point of criminal negligence is that you did something that you knew, or should have known, posed a grave danger to others. Can you make a case that it is common knowledge that using a buggy, old OS can endanger others? If you're a DA, Are you really going to prosecute my mother-in-law for using her old Compaq with a completely unpatched copy of Windows 95 and AOL 4 to e-mail her grandkids and do genealogy research? If so, are you prepared for the huge political fallout and major negative publicity?
1. No lawyer is going to want to touch it, because you are a private citizen who is presumably not ridiculously wealthy, so there really is very little chance of the lawyer's cut being worth the time. If you are very obviously somehow in the wrong, he may try it, hoping to get a payout from your home insurance policy. However, that brings us to point two.
2. Unless he can show some kind of obvious and gross negligence, he's going to have a hard time convincing the jurors that you are responsible.
The fact that somebody can file a frivolous law suit does not guarantee an automatic payout. In this case, your hardest battle is probably trying to get a lawyer to take your case. Now, if you happen to be a huge, monied corporation, or a grossly wealthy individual, then everything changes and you have shady lawyers beating down your door begging to take the case, hiring all sorts of "experts" of dubious reputations and paying off jurors when they get the chance. See, it's all about the money, and unless the lawyers smell a lot of it, they're not going to bother.
Think about this one for just a minute. If some gang banger breaks into your house and steals a gun, and then uses it to rob a bank, and it the process kills a police officer, with whom does the fault lie? Is it with you for not having your gun properly secured against all possible kinds of break-ins? Is it with the manufacturer of the house or the manufacturer of your gun safe for not building a system immune to all types of breaches? Or is it with the guy who broke into your house, breached whatever security you had in place, stole your gun, and used it to commit capital murder? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'm sure many Slashdotters would read your post and think, "That's right, make those stupid Windows lusers responsible for not keeping their machines patched, and while we're at it, let's send Bill Gates to prison for his crap OS too!" That same line of thinking, applied to the scenario above, would land you strapped to a gurney in recompense for somebody else's crime. Let's be a little more realistic.
What you describe for the moon rock is basically what we do with ICBMs (they are, after all, ballistic missiles). The guidance system gets the thing up into space, rotatest a platform, and fires off the RV(s). The RV itself has absolutely no guidance or ability to change course. It does have Inertial Navigation and radar, but those just tell it when and if to detonate. The majority of the flight is basically the equivalent of taking a big cone and throwing it through space at your target. Given that, we can still pretty much hit an area the size of a football field, and with a 300 kT business end, it doesn't make much difference if you hit the wrong end zone.
Bottom line: We should still be plenty scared of our Russian friends. Which is just as well. MAD has worked as a deterrent for the past 50 years. As long as we are all scared of each other, nobody is crazy enough to pull the trigger.
OT, but true: A group in my Senior Design class actually tried to design something like this that could be used on factory floors or other loud environments. Turns out that it's a lot harder than it looks, and they never could get the thing to work. They still graduated, I guess.
I can top that. The guy who moved my piano was making a nice six figure salary. He wasn't particularly built and didn't have any special skills. He just had a couple of necessary tools and a truck.
"If you buy a DVD you have a copy. If you want a backup copy you buy another one."
What a simple, fair and logical solution! So I never want to hear anybody ever again say that Jack Valenti is an enemy to fair use rights. He clearly has only your best interests in mind.