I've thought of active cooling myself.
I always wondered, if you used an active cooling system, where would
you radiate the heat? In other words, you can carry heat away from
the underside of the ship by pumping a fluid through the tiles or whatever,
but then you still have to re-radiate that heat someplace. OK, you might
be able to transform some of the heat into useful work too; but we're
talking about a lot of heat, and even if you got right to the Carnot
efficiency the waste still has to go someplace.
I never got as far as doing the "back of the envelope" calculations
on some substance with a heat capacity to absorb re-entry heat (and light
enough to carry onboard) or the more tricky calculation of how you would conduct
the heat from the underside and radiate it topside. I kind of assumed that
actual aerospace engineers had done the calcs, and decided it just wouldn't work.
Weight kills in space, so I'd be curious to know how much the system weighs
vs tiles or Russian-style ablative coatings. I'm assuming the Russians still
use ablatives. I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong.
For as long as the Internet has been public, it's been an arms race.
The real winners in any arms race are the arms dealers. Of course,
since this is a "cyber" war, the "arms" are software, hardware, and bandwidth.
Under the Federal Reserve system, the value of money is controlled
by a US organization that's insufficiently transparent. Under a gold
standard the value of money is controlled by international traders and
mining cartels. This is better... how?
Gold is "real money". Fine. What people forget is that when you
have "real money" and it gets stolen, it's "really gone". That's right.
No FDIC insurance for fractions of pennies on the dollar. Instead, theft insurance
at rates so high it would effectively negate the inflation protection
you seek, plus add administrative costs. Either that, or you roll the dice,
but if you get ripped off then... well... see the first part of this paragraph.
Of course, to solve these problems we could centralize the storage of gold
and only trade receipts.... followed by... a bunch of other steps tha got us
here in the first place.
Another aspect of all this: we are several generations removed from the days
when metalic standards prevailed. Today's generation buying into the notion of a metalic
fix, has no direct experience with the negative aspects of that system. People in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries *did* know what metallic systems were like, and they
created what we have now to fix that! Now they're dead, and not around to tell you young whippersnappers
what it was like.
All you need is a little persuasion and access to the right kinds of media
Tell that to PG & E. Recently they spent something like $40 million on a proposition that would have forced municipalities to cast a 2/3 vote in order to set up alternative power systems. The initiative was a blatant example of that type of manipulation. The opposition raised a mere $100k. The initiative failed.
The whole episode restored my faith in humanity... somewhat. I was surprised the thing got as many votes as it did. Plainly, the voters need to be educated a bit more; but when legislation is as counterproductive as that prop was, all the money in the world can't pass it.
Amen. Of course, it would be a lot easier if such
a large fraction of our GDP weren't run by the mob. We've got
hit-men (Military-Industrial complex), drug dealers (Big Pharma),
torches (oil and chemical) and numbers-runners (finance).
It's funny how we're re-hashing this on Slashdot 10 years
later. Back then, Slashdot was more heavily dominated by
"this is the year of Linux on the desktop" people. When the ruling
came down, the cognitive dissonance between "Linux is ready" and
"MS is a monopoly" was even more amusing than it is now; but it's
still out there, and it's still funny.
FWIW, I never agreed with the Court's decision. A "PC" should
have included Apples, and "operating system" should have included
Linux, even if it was finnicky back then. Nowadays, Linux isn't
even too finnicky, so IMHO the monopoly just isn't there.
T-mobile told me that if I moved out of service,
there was no termination fee. I wouldn't even have to die. I didn't put that to
the test though.
This is pretty shabby. Anecdotally, I know that
at least one airline will refund your ticket with a
death cert. It's not easy or fast; but they'll do it.
This is just shabby. Nevermind the morality of it,
the bean counters at Verizon should realize that the negative
PR from not cancelling the fee is more costly than the
lost fees.
I'm using IE8 so that explains it.
Once you get past IE8, they are almost the
same. I doubt I'd notice the difference between
any of the others.
IE 9 appears to be in development. Chrome is here NOW
and it's "just a browser", whereas IE upgrades
tend to do more to your system.
However, this wouldn't be the first time MS reacted slowly
to competition; but then started winning. It seems
like that's how it was with browsers in the first place.
Netscape just *ruled* the early days. IE was a joke, but
then it started catching up and passed.
The scripting engine in Chrome is at least twice as fast
as the one in IE, and it's stable. The first thing I noticed
was that Facebook didn't work well in IE. I got sick of Facebook,
and stopped using Chrome for a while. Then I noticed that a
couple sites I use a lot both work reliably in Chrome.
I had been blaming those sites for having bad scripts. Nope. It's IE.
Now, perhaps this is because I went through my IE settings and turned
off anything that I thought might make me vulnerable. I don't run AV,
so I tend to go through all the security tweaks for IE.
Maybe, just maybe, if I set IE back to defaults it would work OK with
the aforementioned sites. I won't do that. So many MS problems are due
to insecure default settings, almost as much as the software itself.
So. There's Chrome, it works on these sites, so I use it. Many people
sitting behind PCs won't try alternative browsers. They'll just think the
site is slow or unreliable.
I don't know what MS is doing with IE. Maybe they're too distracted
with smartphones and Bing. Maybe Google's brain power, revenue, and "momentum"
is just crushing MS in the browser space. Whatever it is, the failure of IE
is now painfully obvious, not just from a security standpoint; but useability.
To reiterate, I suspect the scripting engine, since the sites where I've observed
problems tend seem to be fairly script intensive. Anything that processes AJAX
requests is twice as fast, or faster in Chrome. IE sometimes "forgets" drop-down
settings or refuses to take input. Chrome just works.
Competition is great when you don't have
to talk to your competitors. When you chose
a vendor or a product, competition rules.
If the "competitors" have to sit down and
have lunch every day it's a different story.
I can see two possible things happening.
If a particular team consistantly wins, this
might initially seem like a good thing--you can
just lay off and/or reassign the losers. Now,
how good is that for morale? Even if the winners
really are superior, will the knowledge that they
are out the door if they lose a competition help
them perform? Is that the kind of challenge that
motivates people, or will they just decide to switch
jobs to another company where this doesn't happen?
Are the best and the brightest really going to like
this kind of environment?
Also, the "not the best" programmers might turn out
to be more useful than you think. We may discover that
having people who work at different levels of proficiency
is actually valuable. Maybe those people are better able
to explain the system to non-programmers. Maybe they
are more patient explaining things. You might be taking
the meat and potatoes off your plate with this strategy.
The other possible outcome is that people might collude
to produce similar work. This kind of stuff happens at
factory jobs all the time (don't work too fast, they'll
speed up the line on us).
Why just scrap the plans? Why not have a "hard transfer limit",
and then pop up a Yes/No dialog on the phone that lets you know
you exceeded the limit, and offers you per-minute rates for the
remainder of the month.
That's no different than "all you can eat" buffets. Those
of us who simply want to get full shouldn't have that taken away
just because somebody camped in the restaurant. In fact, that has
happened, and I wager most if not all restaurants with "all you can
eat" now specify a time period.
OK, obviously that's not a practical experimental setup.
How about chosing two contemporary schools, one with computers
and one without? Still flawed, since they are different schools
and it can be difficult to account for things that don't relate
to the experiment.
It may not be practical or ethical to conduct such an experiment
at all. Still though, I'd love to see what happens if you pick two
sets of students in the same school. Group 1 has no school-issued
computer or computer requirement; but may still compute on their
own if they desire (this was essentially how it was when I went to HS).
Group 2 is required to follow the gizmo curriculum.
I firmly believe the non-gizmo group would do just fine, even if you
tested their outcome on computer-related subjects. The ones who are natural
geeks would study them on their own time (much as I did), and the ones
in the gizmo curriculum who aren't geeks would just bitch about "that damn
computer". Of course, as you pointed out, it's all just speculation.
Funny, I thought somebody would cite an example of somebody working
at NASA fresh out of a HS that, in 1968, allowed them to submit batch
jobs. Believe it or not, such things existed and if you had access to
it from your freshman year then maybe you could claim to have "grown up
with computers".
Sailing is OK from a recreational point of view, but unless
we get steam engines, looking for a new continent is a dead end.
What if the warp-drive experiments turn out to be, you know, kind
of dangerous? The kinds of things you don't want to do on earth or
even in LEO? It would be nice to have a decently fast way of getting
out to, oh, say, the Heliopause where you could conduct the experiment
safely. Then, if a shower of warp-speed comets don't get propelled out
of the Oort Cloud and destroy Humanity, we'll know that warp is safe
to operate near the home planet.
They don't have so much money to throw around that they
maintain a staff of monkeys who add "features" that increase
the rendering time by an order of magnitude, break compatability
on half the browsers, and do nothing to enhance the underlying
content.
Everybody harping on autorun. The larger
problem is insecure defaults. Autorun hasn't been
nearly as bad as "Hide file extensions". For people
like myself, it lead to filenames like foo.txt.txt before
I realized that stupidity was turned on. For people who
weren't paranoid enough, it was the legendary HotChick.jpeg.exe
kind of stuff.
But I digress. The real problem is poor default choices.
Again and again. MS needs to realize that you can't pander
too much to the very stupidest users who haven't used their
product EVER. Double-clicking a CD icon, file extensions, and
the permission dialog for Active X controls should be taught
on day one.
In other words, MS needs to back off just a bit from the
cult of useability, and educate the users ever so slightly.
I mean, this is one time when their incredible market share
would be helpful. It's not like all Windows users are just
going to get up and leave. In the long run, it'll help them
stay too.
Give up on the "cup holder" people (CHPs). They will either move
beyond that stage, or they won't; but you can't, Can't CAN'T design
an OS that can be used by CHPs without also making it useful for
script kiddies... unless maybe you go to an AppStore model, and that's
got other issues.
OK, it's not lotto, but close enough. The phrase
"litigation lotto" becomes almost literal. Place your bets.
Round and round, and round the lawyers spin. Where they
stop, nobody knows... because any settlement for emotional
distress will probably be kept quiet.
OK, I'll chew on this one since it's probably
one of the more interesting posts. There are a number
of reasons.
The US has
vast resources and it's difficult to get here.
The Early Europeans had to be hardy enough to endure
sea voyages that would be worse than life rafts today.
They got here, exploited the vast resources, and created
a new and improved system based on the previous empire.
Now they had even more: Vast resources, a unique Republican
form of government, and of course the vast oceans in the way.
The whole thing is a "filter" for high achievers. Anybody who
doesn't appreciate the system doesn't come. The system works well,
the Oceans and/or immigration procedures weed out the weeklings.
Even the current problem with illegal immigrants is doing this.
The smart ones don't get caught. It's a filter.
Of course, we have an incredible running start; but the
jogger looks tired. Everybody talks about how the US isn't
running as hard any more. It's a huge head start though.
It would be interesting to see where this stands 100 years from now.
A futures market for Shroedinger's cat? Sign me up for that.
A few other thoughts along those lines: Warren Buffet said, "In the
short run the market is a voting machine, in the long run it's a weighing machine".
What's interesting about that comment is that he never said what it weighs.
People usually infer that it's the value of the company, since Buffet is a value
investor. OTOH, the market might really be weighing a number of other things.
It might be weighing how much money you have in the first place, since the rich
can afford better equipment and advice. It might be weighing the ping time from
your office to the exchange, as we've seen with high-frequency traders. It might
actually be weighing your skills, and that last one leads to something else.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that skillful players really can beat
the market. Furthermore, let's say that the top 1 % win and the bottom 99
slowly lose. We would expect the 99 to drop out of the market if they were rational.
Therein is a fundamental flaw with economics. It assumes people are rational.
This is Greenspan's self professed mistake, although IMHO he also failed to realize
that firms aren't people and that the people who ran firms into the ground were
behaving rationally with respect to their own self-interest (greed). The people who "believed",
CEOs, contrary to numbers, were less rational.
So the way I see it, bubbles will continue for the same reason Las Vegas
exists. People aren't rational, and nobody really knows where the wheel
will be until we OBSERVE that it has stopped spinning.
Before oil, there was a lot of clearcutting in the eastern US.
A USA awash in oil can afford something like Shenandoah National Park
and the Blueridge Parkway, with oil-fueled cars loaded with sightseers.
If we don't manage to form a proper energy policy, the forest that
we have "saved up" there will start to look like what it was in the 19th century:
fuel for locomotives.
Of course, that probably won't happen until we blast the top off
every mountain in West Virginia to get cola.
Slashdot Mirror
I've thought of active cooling myself. I always wondered, if you used an active cooling system, where would you radiate the heat? In other words, you can carry heat away from the underside of the ship by pumping a fluid through the tiles or whatever, but then you still have to re-radiate that heat someplace. OK, you might be able to transform some of the heat into useful work too; but we're talking about a lot of heat, and even if you got right to the Carnot efficiency the waste still has to go someplace.
I never got as far as doing the "back of the envelope" calculations on some substance with a heat capacity to absorb re-entry heat (and light enough to carry onboard) or the more tricky calculation of how you would conduct the heat from the underside and radiate it topside. I kind of assumed that actual aerospace engineers had done the calcs, and decided it just wouldn't work.
Weight kills in space, so I'd be curious to know how much the system weighs vs tiles or Russian-style ablative coatings. I'm assuming the Russians still use ablatives. I'm sure somebody will correct me if I'm wrong.
This may not be a winnable fight
For as long as the Internet has been public, it's been an arms race. The real winners in any arms race are the arms dealers. Of course, since this is a "cyber" war, the "arms" are software, hardware, and bandwidth.
Under the Federal Reserve system, the value of money is controlled by a US organization that's insufficiently transparent. Under a gold standard the value of money is controlled by international traders and mining cartels. This is better... how?
Gold is "real money". Fine. What people forget is that when you have "real money" and it gets stolen, it's "really gone". That's right. No FDIC insurance for fractions of pennies on the dollar. Instead, theft insurance at rates so high it would effectively negate the inflation protection you seek, plus add administrative costs. Either that, or you roll the dice, but if you get ripped off then... well... see the first part of this paragraph.
Of course, to solve these problems we could centralize the storage of gold and only trade receipts.... followed by... a bunch of other steps tha got us here in the first place.
Another aspect of all this: we are several generations removed from the days when metalic standards prevailed. Today's generation buying into the notion of a metalic fix, has no direct experience with the negative aspects of that system. People in the late 19th and early 20th centuries *did* know what metallic systems were like, and they created what we have now to fix that! Now they're dead, and not around to tell you young whippersnappers what it was like.
All you need is a little persuasion and access to the right kinds of media
Tell that to PG & E. Recently they spent something like $40 million on a proposition that would have forced municipalities to cast a 2/3 vote in order to set up alternative power systems. The initiative was a blatant example of that type of manipulation. The opposition raised a mere $100k. The initiative failed.
The whole episode restored my faith in humanity... somewhat. I was surprised the thing got as many votes as it did. Plainly, the voters need to be educated a bit more; but when legislation is as counterproductive as that prop was, all the money in the world can't pass it.
Amen. Of course, it would be a lot easier if such a large fraction of our GDP weren't run by the mob. We've got hit-men (Military-Industrial complex), drug dealers (Big Pharma), torches (oil and chemical) and numbers-runners (finance).
It's funny how we're re-hashing this on Slashdot 10 years later. Back then, Slashdot was more heavily dominated by "this is the year of Linux on the desktop" people. When the ruling came down, the cognitive dissonance between "Linux is ready" and "MS is a monopoly" was even more amusing than it is now; but it's still out there, and it's still funny.
FWIW, I never agreed with the Court's decision. A "PC" should have included Apples, and "operating system" should have included Linux, even if it was finnicky back then. Nowadays, Linux isn't even too finnicky, so IMHO the monopoly just isn't there.
T-mobile told me that if I moved out of service, there was no termination fee. I wouldn't even have to die. I didn't put that to the test though.
This is pretty shabby. Anecdotally, I know that at least one airline will refund your ticket with a death cert. It's not easy or fast; but they'll do it.
This is just shabby. Nevermind the morality of it, the bean counters at Verizon should realize that the negative PR from not cancelling the fee is more costly than the lost fees.
I'm using IE8 so that explains it. Once you get past IE8, they are almost the same. I doubt I'd notice the difference between any of the others.
IE 9 appears to be in development. Chrome is here NOW and it's "just a browser", whereas IE upgrades tend to do more to your system.
However, this wouldn't be the first time MS reacted slowly to competition; but then started winning. It seems like that's how it was with browsers in the first place. Netscape just *ruled* the early days. IE was a joke, but then it started catching up and passed.
The scripting engine in Chrome is at least twice as fast as the one in IE, and it's stable. The first thing I noticed was that Facebook didn't work well in IE. I got sick of Facebook, and stopped using Chrome for a while. Then I noticed that a couple sites I use a lot both work reliably in Chrome. I had been blaming those sites for having bad scripts. Nope. It's IE.
Now, perhaps this is because I went through my IE settings and turned off anything that I thought might make me vulnerable. I don't run AV, so I tend to go through all the security tweaks for IE.
Maybe, just maybe, if I set IE back to defaults it would work OK with the aforementioned sites. I won't do that. So many MS problems are due to insecure default settings, almost as much as the software itself.
So. There's Chrome, it works on these sites, so I use it. Many people sitting behind PCs won't try alternative browsers. They'll just think the site is slow or unreliable.
I don't know what MS is doing with IE. Maybe they're too distracted with smartphones and Bing. Maybe Google's brain power, revenue, and "momentum" is just crushing MS in the browser space. Whatever it is, the failure of IE is now painfully obvious, not just from a security standpoint; but useability. To reiterate, I suspect the scripting engine, since the sites where I've observed problems tend seem to be fairly script intensive. Anything that processes AJAX requests is twice as fast, or faster in Chrome. IE sometimes "forgets" drop-down settings or refuses to take input. Chrome just works.
I'm pretty sure some veterans would do it for NOTHING if you simply put the word out.
No problem. If it violates our rights, it'll recognize that as a crime in progress, and turn itself off.
Competition is great when you don't have to talk to your competitors. When you chose a vendor or a product, competition rules.
If the "competitors" have to sit down and have lunch every day it's a different story.
I can see two possible things happening. If a particular team consistantly wins, this might initially seem like a good thing--you can just lay off and/or reassign the losers. Now, how good is that for morale? Even if the winners really are superior, will the knowledge that they are out the door if they lose a competition help them perform? Is that the kind of challenge that motivates people, or will they just decide to switch jobs to another company where this doesn't happen?
Are the best and the brightest really going to like this kind of environment?
Also, the "not the best" programmers might turn out to be more useful than you think. We may discover that having people who work at different levels of proficiency is actually valuable. Maybe those people are better able to explain the system to non-programmers. Maybe they are more patient explaining things. You might be taking the meat and potatoes off your plate with this strategy.
The other possible outcome is that people might collude to produce similar work. This kind of stuff happens at factory jobs all the time (don't work too fast, they'll speed up the line on us).
Why just scrap the plans? Why not have a "hard transfer limit", and then pop up a Yes/No dialog on the phone that lets you know you exceeded the limit, and offers you per-minute rates for the remainder of the month.
That's no different than "all you can eat" buffets. Those of us who simply want to get full shouldn't have that taken away just because somebody camped in the restaurant. In fact, that has happened, and I wager most if not all restaurants with "all you can eat" now specify a time period.
OK, obviously that's not a practical experimental setup. How about chosing two contemporary schools, one with computers and one without? Still flawed, since they are different schools and it can be difficult to account for things that don't relate to the experiment.
It may not be practical or ethical to conduct such an experiment at all. Still though, I'd love to see what happens if you pick two sets of students in the same school. Group 1 has no school-issued computer or computer requirement; but may still compute on their own if they desire (this was essentially how it was when I went to HS). Group 2 is required to follow the gizmo curriculum.
I firmly believe the non-gizmo group would do just fine, even if you tested their outcome on computer-related subjects. The ones who are natural geeks would study them on their own time (much as I did), and the ones in the gizmo curriculum who aren't geeks would just bitch about "that damn computer". Of course, as you pointed out, it's all just speculation.
Funny, I thought somebody would cite an example of somebody working at NASA fresh out of a HS that, in 1968, allowed them to submit batch jobs. Believe it or not, such things existed and if you had access to it from your freshman year then maybe you could claim to have "grown up with computers".
The men who sent us to the Moon grew up without computers in the school. Every single one of them.
South Korea == Hyundai
North Korea == Huh?
Sailing is OK from a recreational point of view, but unless we get steam engines, looking for a new continent is a dead end.
What if the warp-drive experiments turn out to be, you know, kind of dangerous? The kinds of things you don't want to do on earth or even in LEO? It would be nice to have a decently fast way of getting out to, oh, say, the Heliopause where you could conduct the experiment safely. Then, if a shower of warp-speed comets don't get propelled out of the Oort Cloud and destroy Humanity, we'll know that warp is safe to operate near the home planet.
They can't afford decent website designers?
They don't have so much money to throw around that they maintain a staff of monkeys who add "features" that increase the rendering time by an order of magnitude, break compatability on half the browsers, and do nothing to enhance the underlying content.
Everybody harping on autorun. The larger problem is insecure defaults. Autorun hasn't been nearly as bad as "Hide file extensions". For people like myself, it lead to filenames like foo.txt.txt before I realized that stupidity was turned on. For people who weren't paranoid enough, it was the legendary HotChick.jpeg.exe kind of stuff.
But I digress. The real problem is poor default choices. Again and again. MS needs to realize that you can't pander too much to the very stupidest users who haven't used their product EVER. Double-clicking a CD icon, file extensions, and the permission dialog for Active X controls should be taught on day one.
In other words, MS needs to back off just a bit from the cult of useability, and educate the users ever so slightly. I mean, this is one time when their incredible market share would be helpful. It's not like all Windows users are just going to get up and leave. In the long run, it'll help them stay too.
Give up on the "cup holder" people (CHPs). They will either move beyond that stage, or they won't; but you can't, Can't CAN'T design an OS that can be used by CHPs without also making it useful for script kiddies... unless maybe you go to an AppStore model, and that's got other issues.
Give me your C65 or I'll detonate the C4.
OK, it's not lotto, but close enough. The phrase "litigation lotto" becomes almost literal. Place your bets. Round and round, and round the lawyers spin. Where they stop, nobody knows... because any settlement for emotional distress will probably be kept quiet.
OK, I'll chew on this one since it's probably one of the more interesting posts. There are a number of reasons.
The US has vast resources and it's difficult to get here.
The Early Europeans had to be hardy enough to endure sea voyages that would be worse than life rafts today.
They got here, exploited the vast resources, and created a new and improved system based on the previous empire.
Now they had even more: Vast resources, a unique Republican form of government, and of course the vast oceans in the way.
The whole thing is a "filter" for high achievers. Anybody who doesn't appreciate the system doesn't come. The system works well, the Oceans and/or immigration procedures weed out the weeklings. Even the current problem with illegal immigrants is doing this. The smart ones don't get caught. It's a filter.
Of course, we have an incredible running start; but the jogger looks tired. Everybody talks about how the US isn't running as hard any more. It's a huge head start though. It would be interesting to see where this stands 100 years from now.
And better yet, he might be able to claim 30 years of experience in Ruby when looking for a job, depending on when he graduated.
A futures market for Shroedinger's cat? Sign me up for that.
A few other thoughts along those lines: Warren Buffet said, "In the short run the market is a voting machine, in the long run it's a weighing machine".
What's interesting about that comment is that he never said what it weighs. People usually infer that it's the value of the company, since Buffet is a value investor. OTOH, the market might really be weighing a number of other things. It might be weighing how much money you have in the first place, since the rich can afford better equipment and advice. It might be weighing the ping time from your office to the exchange, as we've seen with high-frequency traders. It might actually be weighing your skills, and that last one leads to something else.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, that skillful players really can beat the market. Furthermore, let's say that the top 1 % win and the bottom 99 slowly lose. We would expect the 99 to drop out of the market if they were rational. Therein is a fundamental flaw with economics. It assumes people are rational. This is Greenspan's self professed mistake, although IMHO he also failed to realize that firms aren't people and that the people who ran firms into the ground were behaving rationally with respect to their own self-interest (greed). The people who "believed", CEOs, contrary to numbers, were less rational.
So the way I see it, bubbles will continue for the same reason Las Vegas exists. People aren't rational, and nobody really knows where the wheel will be until we OBSERVE that it has stopped spinning.
Before oil, there was a lot of clearcutting in the eastern US. A USA awash in oil can afford something like Shenandoah National Park and the Blueridge Parkway, with oil-fueled cars loaded with sightseers. If we don't manage to form a proper energy policy, the forest that we have "saved up" there will start to look like what it was in the 19th century: fuel for locomotives.
Of course, that probably won't happen until we blast the top off every mountain in West Virginia to get cola.