Of course the other argument is that, percentage wise he doesn't actually give that much...
Thats because when you're the riches person in the world, the vast majority of your money exists as ownership of companies. If Gates were to try to sell off his 1 billion shares of MSFT, it would severely criple the company's finances because he likely wouldn't be able to find a buyer @market.
While I'm sure that his success is fundamentally driven by ego, you cannot say that he doesn't give an enormous amount back to society.
I played Call to Duty on XBox 360 in a best buy and I have to say the game play was incredibly good. The only frustration I had with it was that I couldn't figure out the preset controls.
The game was smooth, very intense and very detailed. The resolution was absolutely insane. It was waaaay better than the original xbox, so I don't quite understand where this guy is coming from.
There are some people who are quite simply PS2 religious and maybe this guy is one of them.
Yeah but an oil rig is a centralized system. There are only a handful of oil rigs to move when something bad is coming their way.
Also because oil rigs are big, huge machines devoted to a specific area, with a staff of a 50 people or so, it is extremely expensive and extremely durable.
In order to use wind power in the ocean, you need to have a decentralized system with hundreds (if not thousands or tens of thousands) of platforms working autonomously. You can't even devote 1 person per platform without completely ballooning the cost of the system. Now because its a decentralized system, how do you move a hundred platforms out of the way of a large storm?
This is great until the next Cat 4 Hurricane, then the whole system goes to hell. The problem with floating platforms is that if they are connected directly to the grid, then they are connected via a cable. You can't just drive something that tethered out of the way of a hurricane.
On the other hand, if you do not have them connected directly to the grid and generating power that way, then they'd need massive batteries to store energy until they can be shipped elsewhere.
I suppose if they are devoting all their energy towards electrolysis to make hydrogen, that that could be a solution, but I'm not entirely buying the idea.
...that was until the commercial fishing and technology came along to start wiping them out
You know, its a really really simple thing to solve: Don't eat fish and nobody will catch them.
I personally hate fish. Problem solved.
I have to say, I do somewhat agree with you. Regardless of the money being spent in Iraq right now, NASA is notorious for not knowing where billions of dollars are spent. When large amounts of money go missing, there should be a criminal investigation, because it means that somebody is getting a massive paycheck. The Feds are all over the state and local governments when some crook runs off with some money, but when was the last time you saw anyone in the federal government get cited for embezzlement? I absolutely cannot believe that it never happens on the federal level. Its just never investigated.
Your method would never work anyways because you need an atomic clock in order to get the accuracy needed for useful GPS. The formula is as simple as Rate * Time=Distance for the speed of light to travel from the beacon to the device, however you need the time to about 6 or 7 decimal places to measure any actual distances.
There are some tricks that allow your GPS device to have an accuracy of an atomic clock (since the GPS satelite has an atomic clock), but I'm not sure the same trick could be applied for other beacons broadcasting time in microseconds.
What?? Blame the admin for the machine crashing? These guys were running around trying to get SAP support from various vendors and you're blaming the admin? Perhaps, MAYBE, just this once it was a problem with Linux? MAYBE its the lib dependency hell that every long term Linux user has encountered?
Fission involves putting a shit-ton of purified Uranium in a confined location. Granted the purification process isn't simple, but the concept of fission is. The concept of a space elevator is so mind-bogglingly complicated from a pure mathematical stand point that it cracks me up every time this topic comes up on Slashdot (every other week). It draws the suckers out of the woodwork and puts them on display for everyone to see. Space Elevators are pure science fiction and although science fiction has predicted some technological advances in the past, the space elevator certainly will not be one that comes to fruition.
Everyone needs to realize that nobody alive today will live to see a space elevator in use. It's not going to happen for a variety of reasons. The most obvious is the fact that the material to be used to create the elevator cable is still highly theoretical that it could be put to such a use. Yes, carbon nanotubes have been created, but within a lab and only a miniscule amount.
Nuclear power is only cheap if you measure its cost with an archaic accounting system that cannot apply a major future expense to the period of production that brings that expense about. Most of the cost in the current technology is in handling the waste products over a very long future period. An appropriate solution to recycling or permanently storing nuclear waste is no closer today than it was in 1960.
Maintaining the waste is a miniscule expense in the grand scheme of things. The USA has produced enough nuclear waste from Nuclear Power generation to fill a single football field a meter or two high. Small space, small problem. Burying the crap under Yucca Mountain and maintaining it indefinately is a ridiculously small price to pay for humans to survive on the planet with clean air and water.
We are more likely to see economical cold fusion power generation sooner than we will see an economical solution to the waste problems of fission technology.
Not true. The likelyhood of anyone alive witnessing economical cold fusion is extremely sparse. Nuclear Power right now, at this very moment is economical and the infrastructure to transport that power already exists. The storage facilities face all kinds of social battles because of misinformation disperced by organizations like Green Peace. The fact of the matter is that Nuclear Power does not pollute the air or water, does not produce greenhouse gasses, produces magnitudes less waste overall than fossil fuels and exists today. The current management of waste is to bury it under a mountain in concrete facilities until we know what to do with it. If we never find a solution, then at worse, we move it deeper underground.
Playing off Nuclear Energy like its a destructive source of energy is simply ignorant.
I'll say it again: the local authorities WERE doing what they could to prevent this. Your assertion that they weren't is simply incorrect. You Are Wrong.
For example, local authorities commandeered busses to evacuate the poor, right? Wrong. They did nothing because they didn't take the threat seriously.
3. Shouldn't have been living there? By that same logic, NO ONE should live in New York City because we all know that it's vulnerable to terrorists - they've attacked the WTC TWICE and the local government has done NOTHING to prevent it. And no one should live in California, it's all earthquakes and wildfires. Won't someone do something to prevent earthquake damage? Think of the children! You can name off some good reason not to live almost anywhere in the USA.
NYC can independently afford to protect itself from terrorism. NYC is also placed at the front line, not because its a city or because of its geographical location, but rather because of American foreign policy.
New Orleans should have spent the last 30 years zoning the low lying areas and preventing development. The Mayor should also have spent his time rounding up busses for people to leave in before the storm hit, rather than sit on his ass and "ride it out", then blame everyone but himself for the tragedy.
I assure you, you're the shit head. You're emotional and irrational because you feel badly for these people, but not because it was a totally and completely preventable disaster which proper planning would have PREVENTED from ever occuring. Everyone knew this was a disaster waiting to happen, but nobody felt like doing anything about it.
If the Feds stuck their nose in and told a city where they can and cannot develop, the monkeys would be running through the street screaming foul.
The city of New Orleans should have zoned properly. They've known this was an issue since 1960. That is plenty of time to grandfather out development in dangerous flood zones.
The problem is that no politician wants to be the bad guy when it comes to urban development. I have no pity for New Orleans city government. There should be criminal investigations.
What, you think you're the only person on the planet who thought N.O. was vulnerable? You've been trumpeting this danger to the mountaintops, and yet no one would listen?
No shit head. I'm saying that the local government didn't do anything to prevent this and that the Federal Government shouldn't bother fixing city problems. The fact of the matter is that nobody should have been living in the area to begin with and I can guarentee you that they'll move back once the water is pumped out... Yes, PUMPED out because N.O. is in a ditch.
Its not the federal governments responsiblity to plan cities and protect them from natural disasters. The fact of the matter is that it was only a matter of time before a massive storm hit New Orleans, a city which is 15 ft below sea level, below a river that runs through the city, bordering the Gulf of Mexico and protected only by levees and pumps, and so a natural disaster of this proportion was expected. The politicians of New Orleans are the only ones to blame here. Their complete lack of planning and preparation has produced thousands of deaths.
I'll donate money this time to help them out, but after they recover and rebuild their city in their watering hole, I will not donate a penny to help them out when the next storm hits.
This isn't a matter of shitty luck. This is a matter of negligence which is bound to be repeated in short time.
The part that I fail to understand is that when ice melts, it actually takes up less volume as a liquid. So floating ice (arctic) would actually cause the shore line lower.
Ask the Dept of Defense. Asking Slashdot about DoD guidelines is like asking an elementary school for details about the space shuttle. No offense to/. community.
... invented the MP3 player. Which is what the iPod is. They can argue over interfaces and such, but Apple was relatively late in the game wrt MP3 players. So this entire argument that Apple is better than MS in this case is silly because Apple is trying to patent something that was invented years earlier.
I would think that if the probes were not capable of course correction that they would need to factor in relativity, specifically if they want to land within a certain area on Mars.
Nuclear fallout occurs for a mere tens of years. Uranium 238 might have an extremely long half life, its all fissioned away in the nuclear reaction. Hence the reason why people are able to live and/or visit fallout locations, such as Hiroshima, Nagasaki and all the H-bomb ground zeros in Nevada or New Mexico or where ever they are.
I've always wondered why we can't just nuke the polar caps or bombard it with asteroids to produce enough water vapor to make it at least have liquid water. I assume it'd cool off and re-freeze at some point, but I wonder if there's a critical limit where the atmosphere would be thick enough to absorb heat from the Sun and keep the water/co2 from refreezing.
It has nothing to do with adversity. It has to do with hostility towards what you may consider "the enemy". My point is that the hostility makes your opinnion appear irrelevent and biased. This guy is getting a trial by fire and he hasn't even been asked any legitimate questions yet.
I called you a douche not to make a personal attack, but rather to describe your appearence wrt your attitude. When I say 'you' I really mean everyone who is attacking this guy for being 'Microsoft' rather than being the guy in charge of investigating Linux platforms and inquiring about his opinnion and Microsoft's stance on certain issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the other argument is that, percentage wise he doesn't actually give that much...
Thats because when you're the riches person in the world, the vast majority of your money exists as ownership of companies. If Gates were to try to sell off his 1 billion shares of MSFT, it would severely criple the company's finances because he likely wouldn't be able to find a buyer @market.
While I'm sure that his success is fundamentally driven by ego, you cannot say that he doesn't give an enormous amount back to society.
I played Call to Duty on XBox 360 in a best buy and I have to say the game play was incredibly good. The only frustration I had with it was that I couldn't figure out the preset controls.
The game was smooth, very intense and very detailed. The resolution was absolutely insane. It was waaaay better than the original xbox, so I don't quite understand where this guy is coming from.
There are some people who are quite simply PS2 religious and maybe this guy is one of them.
Yeah but an oil rig is a centralized system. There are only a handful of oil rigs to move when something bad is coming their way.
Also because oil rigs are big, huge machines devoted to a specific area, with a staff of a 50 people or so, it is extremely expensive and extremely durable.
In order to use wind power in the ocean, you need to have a decentralized system with hundreds (if not thousands or tens of thousands) of platforms working autonomously. You can't even devote 1 person per platform without completely ballooning the cost of the system. Now because its a decentralized system, how do you move a hundred platforms out of the way of a large storm?
This is great until the next Cat 4 Hurricane, then the whole system goes to hell. The problem with floating platforms is that if they are connected directly to the grid, then they are connected via a cable. You can't just drive something that tethered out of the way of a hurricane.
On the other hand, if you do not have them connected directly to the grid and generating power that way, then they'd need massive batteries to store energy until they can be shipped elsewhere.
I suppose if they are devoting all their energy towards electrolysis to make hydrogen, that that could be a solution, but I'm not entirely buying the idea.
...that was until the commercial fishing and technology came along to start wiping them out You know, its a really really simple thing to solve: Don't eat fish and nobody will catch them.
I personally hate fish. Problem solved.
I have to say, I do somewhat agree with you. Regardless of the money being spent in Iraq right now, NASA is notorious for not knowing where billions of dollars are spent. When large amounts of money go missing, there should be a criminal investigation, because it means that somebody is getting a massive paycheck. The Feds are all over the state and local governments when some crook runs off with some money, but when was the last time you saw anyone in the federal government get cited for embezzlement? I absolutely cannot believe that it never happens on the federal level. Its just never investigated.
Slashdot bends over to smell it.
Your method would never work anyways because you need an atomic clock in order to get the accuracy needed for useful GPS. The formula is as simple as Rate * Time=Distance for the speed of light to travel from the beacon to the device, however you need the time to about 6 or 7 decimal places to measure any actual distances.
There are some tricks that allow your GPS device to have an accuracy of an atomic clock (since the GPS satelite has an atomic clock), but I'm not sure the same trick could be applied for other beacons broadcasting time in microseconds.
What?? Blame the admin for the machine crashing? These guys were running around trying to get SAP support from various vendors and you're blaming the admin? Perhaps, MAYBE, just this once it was a problem with Linux? MAYBE its the lib dependency hell that every long term Linux user has encountered?
Fission involves putting a shit-ton of purified Uranium in a confined location. Granted the purification process isn't simple, but the concept of fission is. The concept of a space elevator is so mind-bogglingly complicated from a pure mathematical stand point that it cracks me up every time this topic comes up on Slashdot (every other week). It draws the suckers out of the woodwork and puts them on display for everyone to see. Space Elevators are pure science fiction and although science fiction has predicted some technological advances in the past, the space elevator certainly will not be one that comes to fruition.
Everyone needs to realize that nobody alive today will live to see a space elevator in use. It's not going to happen for a variety of reasons. The most obvious is the fact that the material to be used to create the elevator cable is still highly theoretical that it could be put to such a use. Yes, carbon nanotubes have been created, but within a lab and only a miniscule amount.
I think everyone is too laxy to open those PDFs, so why do you explain what it is for us...
There are flaws in IE that have been known for better than 6-8 months and still there is no fix.
Ok, sure... I'll bite. I don't buy it. Name ONE risky security flaw that has been known for 6 months without being patched by Microsoft.
Nuclear power is only cheap if you measure its cost with an archaic accounting system that cannot apply a major future expense to the period of production that brings that expense about. Most of the cost in the current technology is in handling the waste products over a very long future period. An appropriate solution to recycling or permanently storing nuclear waste is no closer today than it was in 1960.
Maintaining the waste is a miniscule expense in the grand scheme of things. The USA has produced enough nuclear waste from Nuclear Power generation to fill a single football field a meter or two high. Small space, small problem. Burying the crap under Yucca Mountain and maintaining it indefinately is a ridiculously small price to pay for humans to survive on the planet with clean air and water.
We are more likely to see economical cold fusion power generation sooner than we will see an economical solution to the waste problems of fission technology.
Not true. The likelyhood of anyone alive witnessing economical cold fusion is extremely sparse. Nuclear Power right now, at this very moment is economical and the infrastructure to transport that power already exists. The storage facilities face all kinds of social battles because of misinformation disperced by organizations like Green Peace. The fact of the matter is that Nuclear Power does not pollute the air or water, does not produce greenhouse gasses, produces magnitudes less waste overall than fossil fuels and exists today. The current management of waste is to bury it under a mountain in concrete facilities until we know what to do with it. If we never find a solution, then at worse, we move it deeper underground.
Playing off Nuclear Energy like its a destructive source of energy is simply ignorant.
I'll say it again: the local authorities WERE doing what they could to prevent this. Your assertion that they weren't is simply incorrect. You Are Wrong.
8 0/flpc21109012015
For example, local authorities commandeered busses to evacuate the poor, right? Wrong. They did nothing because they didn't take the threat seriously.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/050901/4
3. Shouldn't have been living there? By that same logic, NO ONE should live in New York City because we all know that it's vulnerable to terrorists - they've attacked the WTC TWICE and the local government has done NOTHING to prevent it. And no one should live in California, it's all earthquakes and wildfires. Won't someone do something to prevent earthquake damage? Think of the children! You can name off some good reason not to live almost anywhere in the USA.
NYC can independently afford to protect itself from terrorism. NYC is also placed at the front line, not because its a city or because of its geographical location, but rather because of American foreign policy.
New Orleans should have spent the last 30 years zoning the low lying areas and preventing development. The Mayor should also have spent his time rounding up busses for people to leave in before the storm hit, rather than sit on his ass and "ride it out", then blame everyone but himself for the tragedy.
I assure you, you're the shit head. You're emotional and irrational because you feel badly for these people, but not because it was a totally and completely preventable disaster which proper planning would have PREVENTED from ever occuring. Everyone knew this was a disaster waiting to happen, but nobody felt like doing anything about it.
If the Feds stuck their nose in and told a city where they can and cannot develop, the monkeys would be running through the street screaming foul.
The city of New Orleans should have zoned properly. They've known this was an issue since 1960. That is plenty of time to grandfather out development in dangerous flood zones.
The problem is that no politician wants to be the bad guy when it comes to urban development. I have no pity for New Orleans city government. There should be criminal investigations.
What, you think you're the only person on the planet who thought N.O. was vulnerable? You've been trumpeting this danger to the mountaintops, and yet no one would listen?
No shit head. I'm saying that the local government didn't do anything to prevent this and that the Federal Government shouldn't bother fixing city problems. The fact of the matter is that nobody should have been living in the area to begin with and I can guarentee you that they'll move back once the water is pumped out... Yes, PUMPED out because N.O. is in a ditch.
Its not the federal governments responsiblity to plan cities and protect them from natural disasters. The fact of the matter is that it was only a matter of time before a massive storm hit New Orleans, a city which is 15 ft below sea level, below a river that runs through the city, bordering the Gulf of Mexico and protected only by levees and pumps, and so a natural disaster of this proportion was expected. The politicians of New Orleans are the only ones to blame here. Their complete lack of planning and preparation has produced thousands of deaths.
I'll donate money this time to help them out, but after they recover and rebuild their city in their watering hole, I will not donate a penny to help them out when the next storm hits.
This isn't a matter of shitty luck. This is a matter of negligence which is bound to be repeated in short time.
The part that I fail to understand is that when ice melts, it actually takes up less volume as a liquid. So floating ice (arctic) would actually cause the shore line lower.
Ask the Dept of Defense. Asking Slashdot about DoD guidelines is like asking an elementary school for details about the space shuttle. No offense to /. community.
... invented the MP3 player. Which is what the iPod is. They can argue over interfaces and such, but Apple was relatively late in the game wrt MP3 players. So this entire argument that Apple is better than MS in this case is silly because Apple is trying to patent something that was invented years earlier.
I would think that if the probes were not capable of course correction that they would need to factor in relativity, specifically if they want to land within a certain area on Mars.
Nuclear fallout occurs for a mere tens of years. Uranium 238 might have an extremely long half life, its all fissioned away in the nuclear reaction. Hence the reason why people are able to live and/or visit fallout locations, such as Hiroshima, Nagasaki and all the H-bomb ground zeros in Nevada or New Mexico or where ever they are.
I've always wondered why we can't just nuke the polar caps or bombard it with asteroids to produce enough water vapor to make it at least have liquid water. I assume it'd cool off and re-freeze at some point, but I wonder if there's a critical limit where the atmosphere would be thick enough to absorb heat from the Sun and keep the water/co2 from refreezing.
It has nothing to do with adversity. It has to do with hostility towards what you may consider "the enemy". My point is that the hostility makes your opinnion appear irrelevent and biased. This guy is getting a trial by fire and he hasn't even been asked any legitimate questions yet.
I called you a douche not to make a personal attack, but rather to describe your appearence wrt your attitude. When I say 'you' I really mean everyone who is attacking this guy for being 'Microsoft' rather than being the guy in charge of investigating Linux platforms and inquiring about his opinnion and Microsoft's stance on certain issues.