Frankly, you're oversimplifying my point. To reiterate, what I'm suggesting is that it's not clear to me what the point is. We know right now that it would be difficult as hell to get water. We know right now that it would be difficult as hell to get equipment up there. What we know right now is that it's going to be expensive.
If it's expensive and its worth it, fine. But I wonder: what is the point? I don't see the point. Tell me.
Give me a a cohesive, comprehensive vision for space exploration and then we can fund it or not instead of framing the argument on a "Gee whiz" footing.
If water on the moon is so difficult to get to that one has to throw a satellite at the surface at 5600 mph, how likely is it that man will be able to inhabit the moon?
Never mind the issues of building vacuum-sealed living quarters and getting mining equipment to the moon and the current low-power density of the solar energy generation mechanism most likely to be used on the moon, how would you get water up there if you have to send a satellite the mass of a full-sized SUV to dig a hole as deep as the lengthof a football field?
It raises the question of why we're spending any time at all on the moon. It can't be lived on, it's unlikely to harbor life, its geology has already been explored. Someone tell me what the point is...
...Also, back in the day [FreeBSD] had a better tcp/ip stack [than Linux] and was generally more stable as a server platform...
I have to agree with this assertion. In the first half of the decade, I ran Linux. I was not running a server platform; I was just running Linux for the desktop because I wasn't able to afford a copy of Windows. On dial-up internet, I noticed significant sluggishness. I was using an external serial modem at the time, so I could see that Netscape or lynx would just be sitting there waiting around with no modem lights blinking.
I switched to FreeBSD and the problems disappeared. Everything flowed really nicely.
Who says they have to throw a hissy-fit? What the client cares about is who can give him the answers and advice when he needs it. If he can find that from someone who can answer an e-mail reliably, he's going to go that route rather than sticking it out with me with my lousy e-mail service.
Jeremy: SLAs are generally a bit of a con. If a customer canâ(TM)t access their email when they need it, that could cost them enormously, either commercially or personally. But all SLAs Iâ(TM)ve seen only offer a small refund for a large outage â" itâ(TM)s really no help at all to the customer. So instead of offering such a miserable token, what we do instead is support independent 3rd party resources like pingdom uptime monitoring and the Email Discussions forum so that prospective customers can get a truly independent and complete view of what we offer.
I'm inclined to agree with this approach. E-mail is how everyone works today. A client e-mails me a task or a request, his way of measuring my worth to him is how fast I finish that task. If I can't reach my e-mail, the potential for injury to my reputation and the relationship with that client because of just that one 2 hours-a-year outage could be a loss of such extent that the e-mail provider couldn't possibly offer me enough compensation.
In other words, information on how well the provider does in practice is much more relevant to me than some clause for token compensation.
The demise of the print newspaper has a few causes. 1. We live in a 24/7 news cycle, with 24 hour news on tv 2. By the time a newspaper is printed & delivered, the "news" isn't new anymore.
Frankly, the day-to-day machinations of government, war, and business are largely irrelevant to most people. Do I really care what congress said about the President's health care proposal today? No, it's not as if I'm going to write a letter to my congressman or to the White House everyday to give them a piece of my mind.
What really matters is the trend -- what's going on with this story in general. Who is for it, who is against it, the arguments for, the arguments against, whether or not one side is full of BS over time is what really matters. I want to know what is happening with the story and TV news' focus on daily press conferences and across-the-aisle battles through press releases are just a distraction from the real story.
I sit through cable news loops whenever I'm at the airport and it's just little sound-bytes of this and that -- I have no idea what the story is by the time CNN moves on. Some guy comes on and says something. Another guy comes on and refutes. I have no idea of who is credible -- the written word has the luxury of time and long attention spans to pull the thread and illustrate whether this guy's point is at all reasonable. TV just doesn't.
TV news is just a distraction.
Newspapers died because they gave away their content online. You can read a reasonable-length, non-long-form online with as much ease as with the print edition. When you give it away for free, people don't renew their print subscriptions. It has nothing to do with bias or some 24-hour news cycle mumbo-jumbo.
Mod parent up -- this is absolutely correct. Scripps' Rocky Mountain News and MediaNews' Denver Post entered into a joint venture, the Denver Newspaper Agency, through which they combined circulation and advertising operations and shared an office building.
Its great news if *anything* can rescue us from the horror that is Sharepoint.
I've never used a worse CMS system (which is what everyone pretends it is) when really its an online document repository.
So true. The search capability makes share point useless to me as a CMS. I put in a search term and end up with a thousand results, none of which is at all relevant to the question I'm trying to answer.
I had the exact opposite experience...My textbooks were my bible. I found that if I needed to reference something, I could usually open the book and land on the right page within a few seconds of grabbing it off the shelf.
I suppose you just had useful textbooks. How novel...
I'm not sure about the rest of the group, but my college math books would have been great candidates for digitization. In all of my math courses:
Three semesters of calculus
Linear algebra
diff eq
I relied on the professor to teach. The books themselves were fairly useless -- the examples were always too simple and the explanations usually had a lot of hand-waving. In any case, I generally left the books on the shelf until homework time, when they came out so that I could copy and evaluate the problem sets for practice.
Never wrote in the books, didn't need to feel a connection with them. Just copied the problems out of them.
Who represented the rights of the user to the court?
Presumably google had an attorney in the court room since google was fighting the disclosure of the user's information. This suggests that google represented the rights of the user to the court.
Seriously. Hit the power switch and go occupy yourself for a minute or so. Drink some coffee. Read some Baudelaire.
I don't always have that kind of time.
I carry my laptop into work daily with the power off. I walk into work and realize, "Shit, I have a meeting in 5 minutes. What room is it in again?" I turn on my laptop and 4 minutes later I finally get Outlook open to check.
Could I get into work earlier or check the meeting location before I leave the house? Sure I could, but shouldn't the technology accommodate me rather than the other way around?
POST is Power On Self Test. It is a diagnostic procedure to make sure the machine is working correctly before continuing on into the OS. This can save a lot of troubleshooting Suppose a second hard drive or some other system device that is not critical to booting the OS? You might think the problem is software/driver related. If the problem is memory failure of some type that doesn't manifest itself until it reaches a temperature or simply a bad bit somewhere up there that isn't read or written until a memory hungry application calls for it, a POST might catch it.
Seriously, when was the last time that your PC's bios POST actually found something amiss? If a hard drive fails, it's pretty obvious. Beside that, HDD failure is very rare.
Failure of memory is even more rare. The only way for it to happen is on install by static-ing it. If the system doesn't work right after you install the memory, it's pretty obvious that the stick install did it without the POST.
I'm sorry, are you suggesting there's something that does bode well for American democracy these days??
Improved access to healthcare would allow folks to spend less time worrying about how they will fund their poor health and more time as engaged citizens.
Although there are diverging takes on how to do this, it seems like most people realize finally that there is something wrong with leaving 46.3M people without health insurance.
If this were true, which it isn't -- most Americans know that North Korea is a very poor totalitarian country and that South Korea is a prosperous democracy that provides many high-technology consumer and industrial exports to the US -- but if this were true, it would be a great tragedy.
There is a tremendous amount of military aid that the United States provides to South Korea and a larger amount of sensitive military equipment that Washington allows South Korea to purchase from US vendors, including variants of the M1 Abrahms tank, the F-16, the F-15, the UH-60 Blackhawk, the sea-borne Aegis fire control system. There are also 25,000 US military personnel stationed in Korea.
If Americans did not understand the resources and secrets that their government is sharing with Seoul, it does not bode well for the American democracy...
The original poster tossed South Korea (which Washington considers to be one of its strongest military allies) with Iran ( which Washington considers part of the so-called "Axis of Evil") and China (which Washington considers one of its strongest rivals), it is unlikely that he knows the difference.
South Korea (the one with Seoul) probably would tell Washington about it, but it's unlikely that China or Iran would. It's more likely that they would exploit the vulnerability in secret.
This is exactly like charging for a lock that was never there. Another analogy -- it is like forcing the thief to pay for the security system that the store owner now feels that he has to buy to prevent future actions.
If he damaged a system by hacking in, that's one thing. He should pay for that. But it's hardly his fault that the holes were there in the first place and he shouldn't be held responsible for funding the software improvements to prevent such actions in the future.
Another expense with Apples is the inability to run new OSes on old hardware.
My Windows machine machine is almost 9 years old, but could run Win 7 with a simple RAM upgrade (from 1/2 gig to 1 gig). Try running 10.6 Snow Leopard on nine-year-old hardware. Or even 5-year-old hardware. The OS requirements are designed to force obsolescence so you HAVE to go-out and get new Apple hardware. You can't even "override" to force an install; you just get blocked. This is why I have a perfectly-good G4 PowerMac, but it stopped being supported only 4 years after I got it (with 10.4), while my ancient PC still gots "juice".
Yeah I know you're going to label me "troll" but it's really just my opinion based-upon owning both systems. The PC was the cheaper route.
The fact that 10.6 won't run on a 5 year old Mac is a coincidence that has its root in the switch from PowerPC to Intel. The fact that 10.6 won't run on 5 year-old hardware is a one time thing and has nothing to do with "planned obsolescence."
You are assuming that market actors are rational. Of course they are not.
Look at oil -- it is incredibly cheap for what it provides, totally non-renewable, and with no known substitute that can do the job for the price. If market actors were rational, they would be hoarding it.
We have already hit the peak of oil production, only about 100 years after we started using it and demand is only going up...
Slashdot Mirror
you suggest that it's not worth finding out.
Frankly, you're oversimplifying my point. To reiterate, what I'm suggesting is that it's not clear to me what the point is. We know right now that it would be difficult as hell to get water. We know right now that it would be difficult as hell to get equipment up there. What we know right now is that it's going to be expensive.
If it's expensive and its worth it, fine. But I wonder: what is the point? I don't see the point. Tell me.
Give me a a cohesive, comprehensive vision for space exploration and then we can fund it or not instead of framing the argument on a "Gee whiz" footing.
If water on the moon is so difficult to get to that one has to throw a satellite at the surface at 5600 mph, how likely is it that man will be able to inhabit the moon?
Never mind the issues of building vacuum-sealed living quarters and getting mining equipment to the moon and the current low-power density of the solar energy generation mechanism most likely to be used on the moon, how would you get water up there if you have to send a satellite the mass of a full-sized SUV to dig a hole as deep as the length of a football field?
It raises the question of why we're spending any time at all on the moon. It can't be lived on, it's unlikely to harbor life, its geology has already been explored. Someone tell me what the point is...
When that probe hits deep within the crater, it will finally puncture the Moon's skin and we all know what happens to a water balloon!
Come on now, we all know that the moon is filled with cheese.
...Also, back in the day [FreeBSD] had a better tcp/ip stack [than Linux] and was generally more stable as a server platform...
I have to agree with this assertion. In the first half of the decade, I ran Linux. I was not running a server platform; I was just running Linux for the desktop because I wasn't able to afford a copy of Windows. On dial-up internet, I noticed significant sluggishness. I was using an external serial modem at the time, so I could see that Netscape or lynx would just be sitting there waiting around with no modem lights blinking.
I switched to FreeBSD and the problems disappeared. Everything flowed really nicely.
Who says they have to throw a hissy-fit? What the client cares about is who can give him the answers and advice when he needs it. If he can find that from someone who can answer an e-mail reliably, he's going to go that route rather than sticking it out with me with my lousy e-mail service.
From the article:
Jeremy: SLAs are generally a bit of a con. If a customer canâ(TM)t access their email when they need it, that could cost them enormously, either commercially or personally. But all SLAs Iâ(TM)ve seen only offer a small refund for a large outage â" itâ(TM)s really no help at all to the customer. So instead of offering such a miserable token, what we do instead is support independent 3rd party resources like pingdom uptime monitoring and the Email Discussions forum so that prospective customers can get a truly independent and complete view of what we offer.
I'm inclined to agree with this approach. E-mail is how everyone works today. A client e-mails me a task or a request, his way of measuring my worth to him is how fast I finish that task. If I can't reach my e-mail, the potential for injury to my reputation and the relationship with that client because of just that one 2 hours-a-year outage could be a loss of such extent that the e-mail provider couldn't possibly offer me enough compensation.
In other words, information on how well the provider does in practice is much more relevant to me than some clause for token compensation.
The demise of the print newspaper has a few causes.
1. We live in a 24/7 news cycle, with 24 hour news on tv
2. By the time a newspaper is printed & delivered, the "news" isn't new anymore.
Frankly, the day-to-day machinations of government, war, and business are largely irrelevant to most people. Do I really care what congress said about the President's health care proposal today? No, it's not as if I'm going to write a letter to my congressman or to the White House everyday to give them a piece of my mind.
What really matters is the trend -- what's going on with this story in general. Who is for it, who is against it, the arguments for, the arguments against, whether or not one side is full of BS over time is what really matters. I want to know what is happening with the story and TV news' focus on daily press conferences and across-the-aisle battles through press releases are just a distraction from the real story.
I sit through cable news loops whenever I'm at the airport and it's just little sound-bytes of this and that -- I have no idea what the story is by the time CNN moves on. Some guy comes on and says something. Another guy comes on and refutes. I have no idea of who is credible -- the written word has the luxury of time and long attention spans to pull the thread and illustrate whether this guy's point is at all reasonable. TV just doesn't.
TV news is just a distraction.
Newspapers died because they gave away their content online. You can read a reasonable-length, non-long-form online with as much ease as with the print edition. When you give it away for free, people don't renew their print subscriptions. It has nothing to do with bias or some 24-hour news cycle mumbo-jumbo.
Mod parent up -- this is absolutely correct. Scripps' Rocky Mountain News and MediaNews' Denver Post entered into a joint venture, the Denver Newspaper Agency, through which they combined circulation and advertising operations and shared an office building.
Its great news if *anything* can rescue us from the horror that is Sharepoint.
I've never used a worse CMS system (which is what everyone pretends it is) when really its an online document repository.
So true. The search capability makes share point useless to me as a CMS. I put in a search term and end up with a thousand results, none of which is at all relevant to the question I'm trying to answer.
I had the exact opposite experience...My textbooks were my bible. I found that if I needed to reference something, I could usually open the book and land on the right page within a few seconds of grabbing it off the shelf.
I suppose you just had useful textbooks. How novel...
I'm not sure about the rest of the group, but my college math books would have been great candidates for digitization. In all of my math courses:
I relied on the professor to teach. The books themselves were fairly useless -- the examples were always too simple and the explanations usually had a lot of hand-waving. In any case, I generally left the books on the shelf until homework time, when they came out so that I could copy and evaluate the problem sets for practice.
Never wrote in the books, didn't need to feel a connection with them. Just copied the problems out of them.
Who represented the rights of the user to the court?
Presumably google had an attorney in the court room since google was fighting the disclosure of the user's information. This suggests that google represented the rights of the user to the court.
Seriously. Hit the power switch and go occupy yourself for a minute or so. Drink some coffee. Read some Baudelaire.
I don't always have that kind of time.
I carry my laptop into work daily with the power off. I walk into work and realize, "Shit, I have a meeting in 5 minutes. What room is it in again?" I turn on my laptop and 4 minutes later I finally get Outlook open to check.
Could I get into work earlier or check the meeting location before I leave the house? Sure I could, but shouldn't the technology accommodate me rather than the other way around?
POST is Power On Self Test. It is a diagnostic procedure to make sure the machine is working correctly before continuing on into the OS. This can save a lot of troubleshooting Suppose a second hard drive or some other system device that is not critical to booting the OS? You might think the problem is software/driver related. If the problem is memory failure of some type that doesn't manifest itself until it reaches a temperature or simply a bad bit somewhere up there that isn't read or written until a memory hungry application calls for it, a POST might catch it.
Seriously, when was the last time that your PC's bios POST actually found something amiss? If a hard drive fails, it's pretty obvious. Beside that, HDD failure is very rare.
Failure of memory is even more rare. The only way for it to happen is on install by static-ing it. If the system doesn't work right after you install the memory, it's pretty obvious that the stick install did it without the POST.
I'm sorry, are you suggesting there's something that does bode well for American democracy these days??
Improved access to healthcare would allow folks to spend less time worrying about how they will fund their poor health and more time as engaged citizens.
Although there are diverging takes on how to do this, it seems like most people realize finally that there is something wrong with leaving 46.3M people without health insurance.
I don't buy that.
The burglar should be responsible for making the property owner whole for what he stole or damaged. He should be responsible for what he changed.
He didn't change anything about the lock. It just become apparent that it was never adequate.
If this were true, which it isn't -- most Americans know that North Korea is a very poor totalitarian country and that South Korea is a prosperous democracy that provides many high-technology consumer and industrial exports to the US -- but if this were true, it would be a great tragedy.
There is a tremendous amount of military aid that the United States provides to South Korea and a larger amount of sensitive military equipment that Washington allows South Korea to purchase from US vendors, including variants of the M1 Abrahms tank, the F-16, the F-15, the UH-60 Blackhawk, the sea-borne Aegis fire control system. There are also 25,000 US military personnel stationed in Korea.
If Americans did not understand the resources and secrets that their government is sharing with Seoul, it does not bode well for the American democracy...
All I can say is that that is a very interesting anecdote that, I think, does challenge the reasoning of myself and others on this thread.
Well played.
The original poster tossed South Korea (which Washington considers to be one of its strongest military allies) with Iran ( which Washington considers part of the so-called "Axis of Evil") and China (which Washington considers one of its strongest rivals), it is unlikely that he knows the difference.
South Korea (the one with Seoul) probably would tell Washington about it, but it's unlikely that China or Iran would. It's more likely that they would exploit the vulnerability in secret.
But the hacker did not cause the bugs to be open. He exposed them.
This is exactly like charging for a lock that was never there. Another analogy -- it is like forcing the thief to pay for the security system that the store owner now feels that he has to buy to prevent future actions.
If he damaged a system by hacking in, that's one thing. He should pay for that. But it's hardly his fault that the holes were there in the first place and he shouldn't be held responsible for funding the software improvements to prevent such actions in the future.
Another expense with Apples is the inability to run new OSes on old hardware.
My Windows machine machine is almost 9 years old, but could run Win 7 with a simple RAM upgrade (from 1/2 gig to 1 gig). Try running 10.6 Snow Leopard on nine-year-old hardware. Or even 5-year-old hardware. The OS requirements are designed to force obsolescence so you HAVE to go-out and get new Apple hardware. You can't even "override" to force an install; you just get blocked. This is why I have a perfectly-good G4 PowerMac, but it stopped being supported only 4 years after I got it (with 10.4), while my ancient PC still gots "juice".
Yeah I know you're going to label me "troll" but it's really just my opinion based-upon owning both systems. The PC was the cheaper route.
The fact that 10.6 won't run on a 5 year old Mac is a coincidence that has its root in the switch from PowerPC to Intel. The fact that 10.6 won't run on 5 year-old hardware is a one time thing and has nothing to do with "planned obsolescence."
You are assuming that market actors are rational. Of course they are not.
Look at oil -- it is incredibly cheap for what it provides, totally non-renewable, and with no known substitute that can do the job for the price. If market actors were rational, they would be hoarding it.
We have already hit the peak of oil production, only about 100 years after we started using it and demand is only going up...
Same thing with helium.
This may or may not impact Pandora, but the service at the center of this dispute was eliminated last spring by Yahoo.