Silly you... That's a picture of an L5 space colony. The current proposal is for an L1 space station. Nor do L's scale linearly, so you can't simply assume that it'll be 1/5 the size.
But perhaps we should really be timing from Yuri Gagarin's first flight...
and then compare that to something more like the time between Leif Ericsson and Jamestown. Prior to Jamestown there were several failed attempts at colonies. Maybe Skylab and Mir compare to Roanoke.
I'd rather not, because I'd rather see something *real* and sustained before I'm gone. One of these months I half expect to see the Administration (Executive or Congress, pick either) elect to abandon and de-orbit.
You get my point. I was merely saying that rather than making obscene profits, the RIAA is obscenely mismanaging money, and probably paying themselves obscene salaries to do so.
It's quite simple any time your expenses are paid from someone else's wallet, and the other guy effectively can't complain.
I'd like to think that Joe Sixpak isn't quite as stupid as we generally think he is. Further, it's his college-age kid who is the real target. We need to tie RIAA (and MPAA) actions into the continuing tech slump, which with DRM, they are. The kids will get it, and hopefully explain it to their parents.
Any time PartyA and PartyB are in a joint venture, and PartyA's expenses are covered by PartyB's share of the profit, *and* there is no reasonable recourse for PartyB to protest...
PartyA has no incentive whatsoever to keep its expenses down. In fact, the best situation for PartyA comes when expenses are really high.
It works for government contractors, and for the RIAA.
At this point, I'm going to put forth the supposition that it really does cost close to $10.00 per CD to fill that music store. I'm going to posit that they're really not making obscene profits selling a $0.25 worth of plastic for $16.00. (The gross margin markup from $10.00 to $16.00 is reasonable, IIUC.)
Instead, I'm going to suggest that the cost situation is all out of line, and they're bleeding expenses at every single turn. If computers were produced and promoted as efficiently as CDs, they'd cost somewhere between a car and a condo.
IMHO, we need a visible campaign. Since you mentioned "buggy whip" I'll suggest an idea my brother and I talked about this past weekend: We need to sell buggy-whips for cars, or at the very least buggy-whip bumper stickers. The tech sector is suffering enough without the RIAA dumping on us. (...like a drowning person climbing on his rescuer.)
So far my kernels and kernel sources have come from "well known" places. For that matter, there are even well known sources for boot/root floppies. You're right, I don't check the source for everything, but I guess I just have to trust my sources.
Anyone who puts up a kernel compiler should also have a way to show trustworthiness. Perhaps one aspect would be to invite inspection by the (much needed) paranoid fringe.
It's a good idea, but how do I *trust* that webserver that just compiled a new kernel for me? I trust kernels from the disto, kernels I build, and maybe a few other places, but that's about it.
As a Vermont resident: (I don't have the generations in the dirt to qualify as a Vermonter.)
There's so much emphasis on the Evils of the Federal Government, but the same crowd doesn't talk about the Evils of Corporatism. Likewise the folks who talk about the Evils or Corporatism don't generally talk about the Evils of the Federal Government.
IMHO, neither side is completely right - or completely wrong. You've got to balance your poisons, and for the most part I like the balance that has been struck in Vermont.
We are in the process of electing not to participate in the Federal "education reform", bypassing the funding to go our own way - a potentially painful decision, but being taken with eyes wide open. We were the last state to get a Wal Mart. We are the only state without a McDonald's in the capital city. We took away Dubya's majority in the Senate, as the Rebuplican party drifted too far to the Christian Right. (My brother holds that the Christian Right isn't conservative - they're liberal with a different set of values.)
It's a balancing act.
person is created at the other end that thinks it'
on
Downloading The Mind
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· Score: 1
In the midst of a college "experiment" I once achieved this feeling: That moment-to-moment you are completely new, having inherited a complete set of memories, motivations, etc from a previous "you" that ceased to exist a moment ago. Both long and short term memories were unaffected, they just weren't "my" memories. It's enough to drive you half nuts - and swear off "expirementation" for the rest of your life.
I read The Fountainhead. It seemed to give me the opposite impression, that the creative urge and the associated integrity was far stronger than the money involved. I started Atlas Shrugged shortly after, and at the time it seemed too formulaic. (It looked like recasting The Fountainhead in the rail business instead of architecture.) Time was short then, so I moved on.
I don't pretend to know all of the fine points, but in the past year, "The Wind Done Gone" was de-published by a copyright suit from the current owners of the "Gone With the Wind" copyright. They alleged it was 'too close', though clearly not verbatim.
George Harrison was successfully sued for a three-note tonal progression in "My Sweet Lord" by some 50's artists. It was eventually ruled, 'subconscious' usage, and therefore not deliberate intent.
I know no details of the verbatim copying argument, but I can think of a few. Reviews, sampled music as part of another musical work, in the French movie Amalie the lead character watches some TV, name some.
Excessive use of copyright can bind things up in currently unknown and unanticipated ways. To allow 'effectively perpetual' copyright, which is *what we have* today, is dangerous. (Who doubts that in a little under 20 years, Disney will buy another 20 year extension?)
Because the purpose behind copyright and patents is to get the works into the public domain, eventually. That way others can build on those works, in a continuation of progress.
The limited time monopoly granted by copyrights and patents is an inducement to the author/inventor to not keep the material secret.
The most creative people don't create because someone's dangling money in front of their noses. They create because they MUST, it's built-in drive. The money's there to give them more time to create, and to release those creations.
Show me something created purely for money, something that has none of that inbuilt *drive* behind it, and I'll show you most of modern American TV.
Re:Whats wrong in it? This is capitalism!
on
Expose on Insider Loans
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· Score: 3, Interesting
If the execs were really worth their salt, I'd have less against them hoarding the pile. I have every respect for someone who built the company by skimping, hard work, smarts, and guts. I can also respect those traits in someone who didn't build the company, entering later. But much of the time I just see silver-spooners who want the good life, and demonstrate no great leadership, capability, or insight.
From another perspective...
Business runs on the commons, and I don't mean to invoke "communism, there". Business runs on an "economy", and the strongest economies have a strong middle class. Yet it seems that tied in with the executive compensation 'thing' is the desire to cut 'costs'. ie - pay as little as possible for workers. Taken to its extreme, it amounts to dismantling the middle class, which appears to be what's happening, today. Without a strong middle class, how can there be a strong (Or perhaps any, doesn't War actually improve the economy by expanding the middle class, when you really think about it?) recovery?
Knowingly taking part in dismantling the middle class amounts to foolishness, IMHO. Foolishness is forgivable in someone with my salary, but for someone making over 100 times as much, it's not. If they're drawing down 100 times as much as me, they'd better be at LEAST 10 times wiser.
Evaluating an exec's actions in executing a layoff, this may me microscopically smart, but it's sure macroscopically stupid. I see where Sun is going to lay off 11% of their workforce. If they're like my employer, the fat has been gone, and they've already cut meat at least once. The layoff makes the quarterly financials look better, but in the long term hurts the company. Assuming a recovery comes, their development plans have been hurt, they've paid 'bronze parachutes' to the laid off, and it's going to cost more to hire and train new workers later to get back on track.
I wonder what would happen if Sun tried an 11% across-the-board pay cut. I know the cost of an employee is roughly double the salary, but if across-the-board included executive compensation, and if no bronze parachutes were awarded, I suspect the savings would be the same. Would the top talent leave? Maybe, maybe not, depends on an old concept called "loyalty". I'd be less inclined to leave if I knew the sacrifice were shared by ALL, if it kept my team together, and if it were temporary. It's hard watching co-workers who are friends lose their jobs in a depressed economy.
Bonus question: Did the Rigas family build Adelphia from scratch? ie: Did they pilfer their own creation, or had they stepped in, later? Don't know, curious. This post comes from an Adelphia connection.
I won't argue about a change from X86 being desirable either but....
IMHO Itanium just isn't the way to go. By some measure if X86 is warty, then Itanium most closely resembles Ben Grimm in his best orange. By other measures perhaps IA64 is a cleaner architecture, but it's proving to be a sonofagun to write compilers for. To me that portends a somewhat moribund future with a highly complex compiler on a highly complex architecture. Even incremental improvements, other than clock speed and cache size ramping will be difficult.
I won't dispute a word you say, since I don't really don't know much about Amtrak. A while back we looked into taking it for a trip, and it just wasn't convenient, largely like you say.
But we seem to have a problem. Here in the good old USA two manifestations are:
Passenger rail travel == Amtrak
Manned space travel == NASA
I'm sure there other examples. Both mentioned entities are troubled, and I'm sure both have good points as well as bad. But the real problem seems to be that we can't get beyond those entities to see beyond them. As Amtrak flounders, nobody else seems willing to go into the field. Most people seem to blame NASA for the lack of anyone else in that field.
Not sure what the solution is, just trying to consolidate the problem.
Don't forget that a poorly set up Windows machine offers shares to the world. It doesn't take cracking, all it takes is a second party on the first party's local subnet to mount those shares, see the neat stuff without reading the NDA, and then publish it. It would be better if both parties were under 18, as someone else mentioned.
To call the Justice Department idiots presumes that they actually *want* any remedies for Microsoft and their purpose is being thwarted. Remember we had a regime change through this, and the new regime change seems to wish the whole thing would just go away. This little twist is not misaligned with the new goals.
We also have a Congress who feels that Amtrak should be paying its own way, and not requiring federal subsidies.
Meanwhile, just how big is the tax infrastructure that's already in place supporting our road and highway system? Road traffic is really *heavily* subsidized by our taxes, and not just the ones at the pump, tires, and vehicle registration.
I've also heard that there's a heavy federal infrastructure involved in air transport, though I know nothing of the breakdown there between private and public sector. I remember Reagan ordering the air traffic controllers back to work, suggesting public sector, there. (I don't remember Taft Hartley being invoked, though it may have.)
It hasn't been that long that the IDE subsystem has been sufficiently stable for wider testing on commonplace hardware.
But according to the list, IDE is better now, and the 2.5 kernel is ready for wider testing.
Which brings up the key question... What are the other system requirements for running the 2.5 kernel? Back in the days of transition out of 2.2, there was a fairly decent list: this compiler, that modtools, etc. I know the new native Posix threads will require glibc 2.3, but is that merged, and what other requirements are there?
A brief kernel 2.5 HowTo by someone in the know would be welcome, about now. It would help others of us begin testing.
In my own nomenclature, I call it "The Bombs to Starships Gap." The deadly interval between when you have the power to destroy your own species and when you are sufficiently mature to not.
(Don't know if I heard it somewhere, or made it up.) (In 4th grade I was in "The Batman Gap," old enough to know it was too cheesy for an adventure show, but too young to appreciate it for the high camp that it was.)
Not because Carl Sagan said so, but examine the basic argument. Kind of like teaching a talking bomb phenomology. The logic is independent of the bearer.
Our civilization cowers in fear at the idea of naughty people getting their hands on nukes. Space is BIG, and any way you cut it, the energy it will take to cross interstellar space makes our total capabilities look like a firecracker. We see how difficult an unsuccessful a time we've had "containing" our mere firecrackers. An interstellar civilization will have ready access to tremendous energies, and it must be reasonably widespread. If they had our self-destructive tendancies, they would have had ample time to fulfill them prior to achieving interstellar capability.
Caveats to this:
An immature race discovered or stole the technology from a mature race. (Footfall, Niven/Pournelle)
Different neighborhood - Imagine multiple inhabitable planets in one solar system. Or how about the nearest start being quite a bit closer? It might be possible to make baby steps to interstellar travel, relieving some of the "pressure cooker" effect we have living on one little planet.
Slashdot Mirror
Silly you... That's a picture of an L5 space colony. The current proposal is for an L1 space station. Nor do L's scale linearly, so you can't simply assume that it'll be 1/5 the size.
But perhaps we should really be timing from Yuri Gagarin's first flight...
and then compare that to something more like the time between Leif Ericsson and Jamestown. Prior to Jamestown there were several failed attempts at colonies. Maybe Skylab and Mir compare to Roanoke.
I'd rather not, because I'd rather see something *real* and sustained before I'm gone. One of these months I half expect to see the Administration (Executive or Congress, pick either) elect to abandon and de-orbit.
You get my point. I was merely saying that rather than making obscene profits, the RIAA is obscenely mismanaging money, and probably paying themselves obscene salaries to do so.
It's quite simple any time your expenses are paid from someone else's wallet, and the other guy effectively can't complain.
I'd like to think that Joe Sixpak isn't quite as stupid as we generally think he is. Further, it's his college-age kid who is the real target. We need to tie RIAA (and MPAA) actions into the continuing tech slump, which with DRM, they are. The kids will get it, and hopefully explain it to their parents.
Any time PartyA and PartyB are in a joint venture, and PartyA's expenses are covered by PartyB's share of the profit, *and* there is no reasonable recourse for PartyB to protest...
PartyA has no incentive whatsoever to keep its expenses down. In fact, the best situation for PartyA comes when expenses are really high.
It works for government contractors, and for the RIAA.
At this point, I'm going to put forth the supposition that it really does cost close to $10.00 per CD to fill that music store. I'm going to posit that they're really not making obscene profits selling a $0.25 worth of plastic for $16.00. (The gross margin markup from $10.00 to $16.00 is reasonable, IIUC.)
Instead, I'm going to suggest that the cost situation is all out of line, and they're bleeding expenses at every single turn. If computers were produced and promoted as efficiently as CDs, they'd cost somewhere between a car and a condo.
IMHO, we need a visible campaign. Since you mentioned "buggy whip" I'll suggest an idea my brother and I talked about this past weekend:
We need to sell buggy-whips for cars, or at the very least buggy-whip bumper stickers. The tech sector is suffering enough without the RIAA dumping on us. (...like a drowning person climbing on his rescuer.)
So far my kernels and kernel sources have come from "well known" places. For that matter, there are even well known sources for boot/root floppies. You're right, I don't check the source for everything, but I guess I just have to trust my sources.
Anyone who puts up a kernel compiler should also have a way to show trustworthiness. Perhaps one aspect would be to invite inspection by the (much needed) paranoid fringe.
don't forget to install the Trojan code, too.
It's a good idea, but how do I *trust* that webserver that just compiled a new kernel for me? I trust kernels from the disto, kernels I build, and maybe a few other places, but that's about it.
As a Vermont resident:
(I don't have the generations in the dirt to qualify as a Vermonter.)
There's so much emphasis on the Evils of the Federal Government, but the same crowd doesn't talk about the Evils of Corporatism. Likewise the folks who talk about the Evils or Corporatism don't generally talk about the Evils of the Federal Government.
IMHO, neither side is completely right - or completely wrong. You've got to balance your poisons, and for the most part I like the balance that has been struck in Vermont.
We are in the process of electing not to participate in the Federal "education reform", bypassing the funding to go our own way - a potentially painful decision, but being taken with eyes wide open.
We were the last state to get a Wal Mart.
We are the only state without a McDonald's in the capital city.
We took away Dubya's majority in the Senate, as the Rebuplican party drifted too far to the Christian Right. (My brother holds that the Christian Right isn't conservative - they're liberal with a different set of values.)
It's a balancing act.
In the midst of a college "experiment" I once achieved this feeling: That moment-to-moment you are completely new, having inherited a complete set of memories, motivations, etc from a previous "you" that ceased to exist a moment ago. Both long and short term memories were unaffected, they just weren't "my" memories. It's enough to drive you half nuts - and swear off "expirementation" for the rest of your life.
I read The Fountainhead. It seemed to give me the opposite impression, that the creative urge and the associated integrity was far stronger than the money involved. I started Atlas Shrugged shortly after, and at the time it seemed too formulaic. (It looked like recasting The Fountainhead in the rail business instead of architecture.) Time was short then, so I moved on.
I don't pretend to know all of the fine points, but in the past year, "The Wind Done Gone" was de-published by a copyright suit from the current owners of the "Gone With the Wind" copyright. They alleged it was 'too close', though clearly not verbatim.
George Harrison was successfully sued for a three-note tonal progression in "My Sweet Lord" by some 50's artists. It was eventually ruled, 'subconscious' usage, and therefore not deliberate intent.
I know no details of the verbatim copying argument, but I can think of a few. Reviews, sampled music as part of another musical work, in the French movie Amalie the lead character watches some TV, name some.
Excessive use of copyright can bind things up in currently unknown and unanticipated ways. To allow 'effectively perpetual' copyright, which is *what we have* today, is dangerous. (Who doubts that in a little under 20 years, Disney will buy another 20 year extension?)
At the moment, Windows, because that's how another family member booted the computer. Other times, Linux.
But I don't consider it art, and according to my brother, Microsoft's primary innovations are in business methods, not software.
An yes, at the moment I do consider Win98SE on par with American TV.
Because the purpose behind copyright and patents is to get the works into the public domain, eventually. That way others can build on those works, in a continuation of progress.
The limited time monopoly granted by copyrights and patents is an inducement to the author/inventor to not keep the material secret.
The most creative people don't create because someone's dangling money in front of their noses. They create because they MUST, it's built-in drive. The money's there to give them more time to create, and to release those creations.
Show me something created purely for money, something that has none of that inbuilt *drive* behind it, and I'll show you most of modern American TV.
If the execs were really worth their salt, I'd have less against them hoarding the pile. I have every respect for someone who built the company by skimping, hard work, smarts, and guts. I can also respect those traits in someone who didn't build the company, entering later. But much of the time I just see silver-spooners who want the good life, and demonstrate no great leadership, capability, or insight.
From another perspective...
Business runs on the commons, and I don't mean to invoke "communism, there". Business runs on an "economy", and the strongest economies have a strong middle class. Yet it seems that tied in with the executive compensation 'thing' is the desire to cut 'costs'. ie - pay as little as possible for workers. Taken to its extreme, it amounts to dismantling the middle class, which appears to be what's happening, today. Without a strong middle class, how can there be a strong (Or perhaps any, doesn't War actually improve the economy by expanding the middle class, when you really think about it?) recovery?
Knowingly taking part in dismantling the middle class amounts to foolishness, IMHO. Foolishness is forgivable in someone with my salary, but for someone making over 100 times as much, it's not. If they're drawing down 100 times as much as me, they'd better be at LEAST 10 times wiser.
Evaluating an exec's actions in executing a layoff, this may me microscopically smart, but it's sure macroscopically stupid. I see where Sun is going to lay off 11% of their workforce. If they're like my employer, the fat has been gone, and they've already cut meat at least once. The layoff makes the quarterly financials look better, but in the long term hurts the company. Assuming a recovery comes, their development plans have been hurt, they've paid 'bronze parachutes' to the laid off, and it's going to cost more to hire and train new workers later to get back on track.
I wonder what would happen if Sun tried an 11% across-the-board pay cut. I know the cost of an employee is roughly double the salary, but if across-the-board included executive compensation, and if no bronze parachutes were awarded, I suspect the savings would be the same. Would the top talent leave? Maybe, maybe not, depends on an old concept called "loyalty". I'd be less inclined to leave if I knew the sacrifice were shared by ALL, if it kept my team together, and if it were temporary. It's hard watching co-workers who are friends lose their jobs in a depressed economy.
Bonus question: Did the Rigas family build Adelphia from scratch? ie: Did they pilfer their own creation, or had they stepped in, later? Don't know, curious. This post comes from an Adelphia connection.
All your ships are belong to us!
You're a naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty, very clever, naughty, naughty girl. Now hold out your wrist while I find the wet noodle.
I won't argue about a change from X86 being desirable either but....
IMHO Itanium just isn't the way to go. By some measure if X86 is warty, then Itanium most closely resembles Ben Grimm in his best orange. By other measures perhaps IA64 is a cleaner architecture, but it's proving to be a sonofagun to write compilers for. To me that portends a somewhat moribund future with a highly complex compiler on a highly complex architecture. Even incremental improvements, other than clock speed and cache size ramping will be difficult.
I won't dispute a word you say, since I don't really don't know much about Amtrak. A while back we looked into taking it for a trip, and it just wasn't convenient, largely like you say.
But we seem to have a problem. Here in the good old USA two manifestations are:
Passenger rail travel == Amtrak
Manned space travel == NASA
I'm sure there other examples. Both mentioned entities are troubled, and I'm sure both have good points as well as bad. But the real problem seems to be that we can't get beyond those entities to see beyond them. As Amtrak flounders, nobody else seems willing to go into the field. Most people seem to blame NASA for the lack of anyone else in that field.
Not sure what the solution is, just trying to consolidate the problem.
Don't forget that a poorly set up Windows machine offers shares to the world. It doesn't take cracking, all it takes is a second party on the first party's local subnet to mount those shares, see the neat stuff without reading the NDA, and then publish it. It would be better if both parties were under 18, as someone else mentioned.
I fear you misunderstand.
To call the Justice Department idiots presumes that they actually *want* any remedies for Microsoft and their purpose is being thwarted. Remember we had a regime change through this, and the new regime change seems to wish the whole thing would just go away. This little twist is not misaligned with the new goals.
So I guess my point is that both road and air travel are heavily subsidized. How can rail hope to compete without a leveled playing field?
We also have a Congress who feels that Amtrak should be paying its own way, and not requiring federal subsidies.
Meanwhile, just how big is the tax infrastructure that's already in place supporting our road and highway system? Road traffic is really *heavily* subsidized by our taxes, and not just the ones at the pump, tires, and vehicle registration.
I've also heard that there's a heavy federal infrastructure involved in air transport, though I know nothing of the breakdown there between private and public sector. I remember Reagan ordering the air traffic controllers back to work, suggesting public sector, there. (I don't remember Taft Hartley being invoked, though it may have.)
It hasn't been that long that the IDE subsystem has been sufficiently stable for wider testing on commonplace hardware.
But according to the list, IDE is better now, and the 2.5 kernel is ready for wider testing.
Which brings up the key question... What are the other system requirements for running the 2.5 kernel? Back in the days of transition out of 2.2, there was a fairly decent list: this compiler, that modtools, etc. I know the new native Posix threads will require glibc 2.3, but is that merged, and what other requirements are there?
A brief kernel 2.5 HowTo by someone in the know would be welcome, about now. It would help others of us begin testing.
Clearly not a candidate for googlewhacking. The combination gives about 1300 hits.
Feel free.
In my own nomenclature, I call it "The Bombs to Starships Gap." The deadly interval between when you have the power to destroy your own species and when you are sufficiently mature to not.
(Don't know if I heard it somewhere, or made it up.)
(In 4th grade I was in "The Batman Gap," old enough to know it was too cheesy for an adventure show, but too young to appreciate it for the high camp that it was.)
Not because Carl Sagan said so, but examine the basic argument. Kind of like teaching a talking bomb phenomology. The logic is independent of the bearer.
Our civilization cowers in fear at the idea of naughty people getting their hands on nukes. Space is BIG, and any way you cut it, the energy it will take to cross interstellar space makes our total capabilities look like a firecracker. We see how difficult an unsuccessful a time we've had "containing" our mere firecrackers. An interstellar civilization will have ready access to tremendous energies, and it must be reasonably widespread. If they had our self-destructive tendancies, they would have had ample time to fulfill them prior to achieving interstellar capability.
Caveats to this:
An immature race discovered or stole the technology from a mature race. (Footfall, Niven/Pournelle)
Alien/xenophobic psychology - Hive minds, Benford's mechs, Saberhagen's beserkers.
Different neighborhood - Imagine multiple inhabitable planets in one solar system. Or how about the nearest start being quite a bit closer? It might be possible to make baby steps to interstellar travel, relieving some of the "pressure cooker" effect we have living on one little planet.