When the U.S. makes plans to set up a moonbase, it will certainly claim a large section of moon-realty.
Consider what happened in the antarctic. The US is the one player who didn't make a land claim. The antarctic is a far more useful bit of terretory than the moon.
In the modern world you don't need to hold terretory. Indeed, that is basicly why the European empires disolved -- they became far more expensive to hold and run than they were worth. The USA's effective empire in central and south America has given them the advantages of empire (consider where the phrase banana republic came from) for a relatively small expendature in gunboat diplomacy, bribary, political intervention etc.
Basicly, if the USA found something worthwhile having on the moon (be it raw materials or an observation platform or whatever), it could just go for it. They wouldn't need to claim ownership of the land, just make sure they had the strength on-earth to dissuade anyone from putting their oar in.
Well, you must have missed it. We've been to the Moon, 35 years ago.
Er, yes, I pointed out how far from a workable technology that was.
Yes, if we had continued to work forward from there we might have a level of technology to do real earth-moon travel to support an outpost there by now, but the point is that we don't. The USSR moved to learning enough about themedical problems to try for an apollo-style publicity stunt to mars. The USA more or less gave up on manned space exploration, just sending men along for the ride to LEO on the Scuttle. With the fall of the USSR, the USA has taken up their space medicine programme.
Meanwhile, the unmanned space programme has done lots of really fun stuff through most of the solar system. On the whole I think one Cassini is worth more than the whole shuttle programme from day one to when they finally get rid of the embarassing thing.
We've had the technology to base people on the Moon since the 1960's, as well as to travel to Mars.
And they've been hiding this technology inthe same hanger as the ever lasting lightbulb and the car which runs on water?
[...]the Europeans decide to stay in Europe until they invented air conditioning
More to the point is the fact that they didn't set out into the atlantic until they had invented the boat.
Current state of the art in manned space travel is to either:
Stick a test pilot in a can and balance that on the top of a firework, aim that at the moon and pray there isn't a solar storm, a meteor strike or other everyday occurance, or
put some people in an airtight trailer-home just far enough up that the atmospheric drag isn't too bad and pray you can get them back down before their bodies start falling apart.
On the `crossing the atlantic' technology scale, this is somewhere around `grab onto a fallen tree trunk and start paddling West'.
The whole point of space exploration is to put people there
Says who?
People are the most obvious example of fragile components with short working lives which therefore should not be used in space exploration.
Even if you think the only reason for interest in the rest of the universe is to eventually send people (a rather bizzare POV implying a remarkable lack of curiosity), clearly we're well below the level of technology and knowledge at which it makes sense to do that now. Does that mean all space exploration should stop of 50 years or a century?
We need propulsion technology that moves bigger things faster, not smaller things slower.
No, we need to send bigger things further. Ion engines are good for that.
Elapsed time is hardly very important, unless you build your space probes from fragile components with very short working lives. The moon will still be there if your probe takes 10 years to get there, let alone one.
I'd still keep looking for the job where I felt that I made a difference,[...]
Perhaps the HR people can tell that about you. That, after all, is the real job of an HR interview, to weed out the people who clearly can't do the job and the people who would not be worth hiring even if they can do the job. Someone who is looking to move quickly is usually not worth hiring.
It'll be insurers, which stand to save tons of money if they can cure diabetics.
So long as all the big insurers statistically get the same number of type-1 diabetics on their books, they can just past the cost througth to the premiums, and there is no great business advantage to a cure, because they would all end up cutting premiums or adding services until it all leveled out again.
There would be extra income available because cheaper insurance might allow more people to be insured, however they may well be happy to keep a known cash-flow rather than open up the possibility of having to fight for new customers.
Wait, so you're just attacking the government for no reason at all?
Where did I attack your government at all?
I made one small half-serious, half-joke about Shrub's education to lighten up a long comment in response to your massage about Bush.
I said you should be attacking your government without searching for an excuse. It's a fundamental requirement of democracy. The political equivalent of a port scan.
"Here is a young person. He doesn't have a lot of money, so we're not going to waste time helping him find what he wants, since he probably couldn't afford it anyway."
You wish.
Avoiding `helpful' staff is one of the main skills we all have to learn in the modern world, if they do it for you without your doing anything, you are ahead of the game.
However, if you are desperate to be patronised by a minimum wage slave, or a spotty student who'd rather be drinking, all you need to do is pick up a couple of expensive things. Put them down before you get to the check out, and in the meantime you'll be a magnet for every slave in the store.
I bought 200 quids worth of CDs last week (that's real money, not dollars:-)), many of them el-cheapo ones on special offer, so you can imagine the size of the stack I was carrying around the shop. I never realised HMV had that many staff, they must have brought in off-shift acne victims and the staff of other stores to keep up the pressure.
(well, John Peel had died, what better way to commemorate than buying lots of music?)
I was going to look up what "several fortune 100 companies" were using HawkinsOS,[...]
I presume he took the web site down before he posted for exactly that reason. The web site admits this supposed OS doesn't exist. ``under development'', ``release delayed'' etc.
The action packed ``community'' area of his site is worth a visit too. All those beta testers exchanging knowlegable comments...
Is evil. Don't read it. Persuade your friends not to read it. If someone legit sends you some, reply asking them to re-send in a sane format, explaining why.
It's a slim chance, but if enough people get irritated enough from having to re-send enough email, then perhaps we can still get rid of this idiotic idea.
Pretty much every story has a comment either attacking Bush or making fun of Bush
The guy is a big and easy target.
Half the time he and his handlers don't even attempt to avoid being a target, on the assumption that he has split the US so thoroughly that he doesn't have a problem of losing support, and has little or no prospect of gainaing any. Similarly, since the rest of the world couldn't vote against him, his image abroad (and hence to a large extent that of the US) didn't matter.
A classic example was his use of `crusade': for very small rhetorical flourish his script writers made him look like a complete idiot to anyone not swept along by the rhetoric.
As a political strategy it works, it entrenched his position and he's still here. However, it does mean that he is more or less walking around with a `Kick Me' sign on his back so far as non-supporters and the rest of the world are concerned.
For/.ers desperate for a bright side, consider how clearly his fiscal idiocy has proved that MBAs are a joke. Got to be good amunition against your local PHB.
Several fortune 100 companies have already migrated from FreeBSD to HawkinsOS.
Someone should submit this as a full/. story,
Anonymous Coward creates patch set for English which extends the `several' quantifier to cover the case of `0', but refuses to release it to the world because no one adopted his previous patch redefining `sad obsessive git' to mean `Emporer of the Internet with a Huge Cock'.
BTW, what is the point of hiding behind AC but always posting the same paranoid drivel?
MS had it first, and they probably caught it from Apple -- remember when Apple were threatening to sue people (including MS) they claimed had copied the interface Apple had nicked from Xerox?
Suckers may be born every minute, but the scams stay the same. Back when the first animal evolved a mechanism to mark out a territory it opened an ecological niche for a mimic to pretend to own territory it hadn't had to work to get and hold.
They're prettier, and they don't shatter when you stand on them.
If the paper packaged CDs were cheaper -- as for hardback vs paperback books -- I'd see the point.
Also, the cardboard packages are only prettier for a short time IME. folding and unfolding cardboard doesn't do anything for it's aesthetics. And, of course, that means it's second hand value drops like a rock, so fewer people will bother to sell it on which means back catalogue sales are less depressed by the second hand market... OK, I see a business plan here.
However, I agree that making jewel cases from such a brittle plastic must be evidence for some shadowy conspiracy of case manufacturers plotting to maximise replacement sales. But at least you can replace them.
Mostly I just object to the paper packaging on vague ecologoical grounds. Potentially durable goods should be made from durable materials.
Consider audio CDs. A good proportion of these now come in cardboard packaging rather than jewel cases.
These alternative packages were introduced with such names as eco-whatzits and bio-cruft, clearly indicating they expected people to think of audio CDs as a disposable product where the packaging needed to biodegrade.
These manky packages are still being used for some new releases. Indeed sometimes both this and a jewel case version are available -- presumably because some people think of CDs as durables and some as ephemera.
I can easily imagine a future where audio comes on limited life disks with a durable one available for a premium price. Indeed, it could be one way they could make discs competitive with downloads -- sell limited life disks of this week's boy band for a price competitive with legal download services.
Also, there are now DVD by mail services. Their big disadvantage, like video rental, is that you have to get around to sending the thing back. There has been talk of limited play disks you jsut get and throw away, and a biodegradable disk is an obvious extension of that.
Fire 'em all. Layoffs by the hundreds. Destroyed careers. Destroyed credit. Savings lost. Years of effort flushed down a shitpipe.
Only if your definition of `career' is `being only employable by one company'; your credit rating is based on your job title, not your proven earning capability, and your savings were hidden under your boss's chair rather than in a bank.
The business must maintain their earnings and 20% annual growth.
What would happen to those savings if the businesses they are invested in all decided they didn't need to maintain their earnings? Not to mention your pension and your insurance.
Don't do personal stuff on computers you don't have control of.
If work related information leaks this way, then your IT people have just learned a lesson. If they don't learn a lesson, start looking for a job at a less doomed company.
What you're supposed to feel is an iresistable desire to run and get your parents to buy you some merchandising.
If only Lucas hadn't made the mistake of getting a real director to make the second/fifth one, no one would be confused into thinking these were movies rather than adverts.
Since when do the nerds/geeks worry about clothing style?
If someone thinks an over-priced anorak and a pair of escaped-from-the-70s slacks, which would get you thrown out of a baked bean can barcode collectors convention for being embarassingly nerdy, will give them style, they are probably safe from any need to worry.
It's not even good nerd-fodder, wires are SO 20th century!
Slashdot Mirror
Consider what happened in the antarctic. The US is the one player who didn't make a land claim. The antarctic is a far more useful bit of terretory than the moon.
In the modern world you don't need to hold terretory. Indeed, that is basicly why the European empires disolved -- they became far more expensive to hold and run than they were worth. The USA's effective empire in central and south America has given them the advantages of empire (consider where the phrase banana republic came from) for a relatively small expendature in gunboat diplomacy, bribary, political intervention etc.
Basicly, if the USA found something worthwhile having on the moon (be it raw materials or an observation platform or whatever), it could just go for it. They wouldn't need to claim ownership of the land, just make sure they had the strength on-earth to dissuade anyone from putting their oar in.
Er, yes, I pointed out how far from a workable technology that was.
Yes, if we had continued to work forward from there we might have a level of technology to do real earth-moon travel to support an outpost there by now, but the point is that we don't. The USSR moved to learning enough about themedical problems to try for an apollo-style publicity stunt to mars. The USA more or less gave up on manned space exploration, just sending men along for the ride to LEO on the Scuttle. With the fall of the USSR, the USA has taken up their space medicine programme.
Meanwhile, the unmanned space programme has done lots of really fun stuff through most of the solar system. On the whole I think one Cassini is worth more than the whole shuttle programme from day one to when they finally get rid of the embarassing thing.
And they've been hiding this technology inthe same hanger as the ever lasting lightbulb and the car which runs on water?
[...]the Europeans decide to stay in Europe until they invented air conditioning
More to the point is the fact that they didn't set out into the atlantic until they had invented the boat.
Current state of the art in manned space travel is to either:
On the `crossing the atlantic' technology scale, this is somewhere around `grab onto a fallen tree trunk and start paddling West'.
Says who?
People are the most obvious example of fragile components with short working lives which therefore should not be used in space exploration.
Even if you think the only reason for interest in the rest of the universe is to eventually send people (a rather bizzare POV implying a remarkable lack of curiosity), clearly we're well below the level of technology and knowledge at which it makes sense to do that now. Does that mean all space exploration should stop of 50 years or a century?
No, we need to send bigger things further. Ion engines are good for that.
Elapsed time is hardly very important, unless you build your space probes from fragile components with very short working lives. The moon will still be there if your probe takes 10 years to get there, let alone one.
Will the laptop go in your inside pocket when you are going somewhere?
A better comparison might be `wouldn't it be better to buy a Zaurus and a cheap laptop'.
Of course, Sharp are pulling the Zaurus out of north america IIRC.
Perhaps the HR people can tell that about you. That, after all, is the real job of an HR interview, to weed out the people who clearly can't do the job and the people who would not be worth hiring even if they can do the job. Someone who is looking to move quickly is usually not worth hiring.
So long as all the big insurers statistically get the same number of type-1 diabetics on their books, they can just past the cost througth to the premiums, and there is no great business advantage to a cure, because they would all end up cutting premiums or adding services until it all leveled out again.
There would be extra income available because cheaper insurance might allow more people to be insured, however they may well be happy to keep a known cash-flow rather than open up the possibility of having to fight for new customers.
Where did I attack your government at all?
I made one small half-serious, half-joke about Shrub's education to lighten up a long comment in response to your massage about Bush.
I said you should be attacking your government without searching for an excuse. It's a fundamental requirement of democracy. The political equivalent of a port scan.
You wish.
Avoiding `helpful' staff is one of the main skills we all have to learn in the modern world, if they do it for you without your doing anything, you are ahead of the game.
However, if you are desperate to be patronised by a minimum wage slave, or a spotty student who'd rather be drinking, all you need to do is pick up a couple of expensive things. Put them down before you get to the check out, and in the meantime you'll be a magnet for every slave in the store.
I bought 200 quids worth of CDs last week (that's real money, not dollars:-)), many of them el-cheapo ones on special offer, so you can imagine the size of the stack I was carrying around the shop. I never realised HMV had that many staff, they must have brought in off-shift acne victims and the staff of other stores to keep up the pressure.
(well, John Peel had died, what better way to commemorate than buying lots of music?)
I presume he took the web site down before he posted for exactly that reason. The web site admits this supposed OS doesn't exist. ``under development'', ``release delayed'' etc.
The action packed ``community'' area of his site is worth a visit too. All those beta testers exchanging knowlegable comments...
Not only there before your net connection comes up, but the right version for your machine when you come to look things up 2 years from now.
Not on an article about Google Image Search.
Of course, jokes about goat.cx, underpants gnomes, and alien overlords are always confined to their own special purpose stories.
But all your arguments attack Bush[...]
Apart from the last comment I didn't attack Bush at all.
[...]is any excuse to attack the administration
If you need an excuse to take the piss out of the government, you're screwed.
``In Soviet Union, the government takes the pis out of you.''
It's a slim chance, but if enough people get irritated enough from having to re-send enough email, then perhaps we can still get rid of this idiotic idea.
The guy is a big and easy target.
Half the time he and his handlers don't even attempt to avoid being a target, on the assumption that he has split the US so thoroughly that he doesn't have a problem of losing support, and has little or no prospect of gainaing any. Similarly, since the rest of the world couldn't vote against him, his image abroad (and hence to a large extent that of the US) didn't matter.
A classic example was his use of `crusade': for very small rhetorical flourish his script writers made him look like a complete idiot to anyone not swept along by the rhetoric.
As a political strategy it works, it entrenched his position and he's still here. However, it does mean that he is more or less walking around with a `Kick Me' sign on his back so far as non-supporters and the rest of the world are concerned.
For /.ers desperate for a bright side, consider how clearly his fiscal idiocy has proved that MBAs are a joke. Got to be good amunition against your local PHB.
The `disease' here was not copying, that's just good engineering, but attempting to claim what you copied as yours.
[...]Apple licensed from Xerox
Didn't Xerox sue Apple and lose on an out-of-time? They, at least, seemed to think there was copying.
Someone should submit this as a full /. story,
BTW, what is the point of hiding behind AC but always posting the same paranoid drivel?
MS had it first, and they probably caught it from Apple -- remember when Apple were threatening to sue people (including MS) they claimed had copied the interface Apple had nicked from Xerox?
Suckers may be born every minute, but the scams stay the same. Back when the first animal evolved a mechanism to mark out a territory it opened an ecological niche for a mimic to pretend to own territory it hadn't had to work to get and hold.
If the paper packaged CDs were cheaper -- as for hardback vs paperback books -- I'd see the point.
Also, the cardboard packages are only prettier for a short time IME. folding and unfolding cardboard doesn't do anything for it's aesthetics. And, of course, that means it's second hand value drops like a rock, so fewer people will bother to sell it on which means back catalogue sales are less depressed by the second hand market... OK, I see a business plan here.
However, I agree that making jewel cases from such a brittle plastic must be evidence for some shadowy conspiracy of case manufacturers plotting to maximise replacement sales. But at least you can replace them.
Mostly I just object to the paper packaging on vague ecologoical grounds. Potentially durable goods should be made from durable materials.
These alternative packages were introduced with such names as eco-whatzits and bio-cruft, clearly indicating they expected people to think of audio CDs as a disposable product where the packaging needed to biodegrade.
These manky packages are still being used for some new releases. Indeed sometimes both this and a jewel case version are available -- presumably because some people think of CDs as durables and some as ephemera.
I can easily imagine a future where audio comes on limited life disks with a durable one available for a premium price. Indeed, it could be one way they could make discs competitive with downloads -- sell limited life disks of this week's boy band for a price competitive with legal download services.
Also, there are now DVD by mail services. Their big disadvantage, like video rental, is that you have to get around to sending the thing back. There has been talk of limited play disks you jsut get and throw away, and a biodegradable disk is an obvious extension of that.
Only if your definition of `career' is `being only employable by one company'; your credit rating is based on your job title, not your proven earning capability, and your savings were hidden under your boss's chair rather than in a bank.
The business must maintain their earnings and 20% annual growth.
What would happen to those savings if the businesses they are invested in all decided they didn't need to maintain their earnings? Not to mention your pension and your insurance.
Personally, I have always committed my murders while hoverring in the air wth my arms sticking out of my ears.
I find the sight of the victim scuttling back and forwards in panic as I slowly float down making `thrump, thrump' noises most entertaining.
Don't do personal stuff on computers you don't have control of.
If work related information leaks this way, then your IT people have just learned a lesson. If they don't learn a lesson, start looking for a job at a less doomed company.
What you're supposed to feel is an iresistable desire to run and get your parents to buy you some merchandising.
If only Lucas hadn't made the mistake of getting a real director to make the second/fifth one, no one would be confused into thinking these were movies rather than adverts.
If someone thinks an over-priced anorak and a pair of escaped-from-the-70s slacks, which would get you thrown out of a baked bean can barcode collectors convention for being embarassingly nerdy, will give them style, they are probably safe from any need to worry.
It's not even good nerd-fodder, wires are SO 20th century!