I just got done working at this computer service based business in where I was making 36k/year. I'm worth 55k/year
In that case, I'm worth $2M/year!!
Get a clue. You are worth exactly what an employer is willing to pay you. If you think it's too low, either renegotiate or get another job offer. You can't just pluck a number out of the air and say that you deserve it - it's idiocy like that that caused the whole dot.com implosion.
Well, the charges that we were giving customers was insane. If it was after hours and on a weekend, they were being charged like $400 an hour for computer service. Granted it was pry to fix one or two of their servers or something but still, that's some serious income for the company and yet I get to see none.
So why don't you set yourself up as a contractor and bill hourly?
Neither are stocks. If you're not going to be in either one for 5 years minimum then you might as well spend your money gambling.
I hear this 5 year figure bandied about a lot, but it's rubbish. If you had invested your money in 1997 in an S&P500 or FTSE-100 tracker (generally reckoned to be the safest form of equity investment), you would be sitting on a loss today. In fact, you would have been better off leaving the money in a deposit account.
You need to be thinking in terms of 10, 20 or even 30 years.
As a matter of fact I am looking forward to the Baby Boomers retiring because I will be able to secure a government (Municipal, Provincial or Federal) job position that will last me till the retirement and will pay above average wage for the next 25-30 years. Plus the pension benefits are insane. I don't need to contribute to my pension plan for the rest of my life once I get me one of those jobs.
Ah, a typical Canadian. You're going to get it worse than most. Who pays for all these goverment jobs and their lavish perks? Why, the private sector taxpayer, of course. After all, since public sector employers are paid out of taxes, the taxes they themselves pay aren't real money that can be spent by a government; it's just circulating money that originated from private sector taxation back to itself.
If you're earning an above average wage, then by definition, a majority of the population are earning less than you... where does the money come from the support your wages? What happens when, inevitably, the private sector cannot cope with the demands of the State and its dependants? Why, the whole system collapses of course, and people like you will rightly be judged as parasites by an outraged mob of people who have actually worked for a living and now find that after a lifetime of supporting people like you that they are destitute themselves.
We're screwed, my friends
on
Generation Wrecked
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Andrea Tinker, professor of Social Gerontology at King's College, London recently published the results of research into the way that the changing age distribution of the population is affecting different generations. Her conclusion is that today's under 30s are the first generation who can expect lower living standards than their parents. In this writeup, I will present some British demographic statistics, and my own hypothesis as to the underlying reason for Professor Tinker's conclusion.
In 1999, about 20% of Britain's population was over 60. This is predicted to rise to 34% by 2050, with half that number over 80. Fewer children are being born: 91 live births per 1000 women in 1961, dropping to only 55 in 2000. In the 25-29 age group, the drop is even more dramatic, from 178/1000 in 1961 to 95/1000 in 2000.
Between 1993 and 2000 the number of under-25s owning their own property has fallen from 21% to 19%. The number of 25-29 year olds living with parents rose from 18% in 1978 to 23% in 1998.
The number of 25-35 year olds living alone rose from 2% in 1973 to 12% in 2000. The average age of a first time house buyer is now 35. The average household income is GBP 24,000/year - the average mortgage exceeds GBP 140,000.
Tax relief on mortgages and grants for university education have been slashed. Professor Tinker believes that people born within the last 30-40 years face paying 1/3 of their lifetime's earnings in taxes just to support pensioners born before them.
In 1997, Gordon Brown started taxing pension funds. It is estimated that GBP 100 billion has already been siphoned off - money that belonged to current contributors. The principle of compound interest means that the people who suffer the most will be the most recent joiners. Meanwhile, MPs recently voted themselves a 20% boost in the pensions - funded by the taxpayer.
It is clear that the trend is towards fewer taxpayers supporting more pensioners. I believe that this is no coincidence, rather that the generation(s) born since 1970 were systematically and deliberately set up by the policy makers of the so-called "baby boomer" generation.
They set up a system for healthcare and pensions under which taxation is immediately paid out to recipients, rather than being invested for growth and the purchase of an annuity in a real pension system. They did this at a time when they knew that their own contributions would be minimal, given the population's age distribution at the time. Quite cynically, they decided that it would be easier to levy punitive taxation on their own children and grandchildren than invest for their own futures.
The money they saved by doing so, they poured into the housing market, driving up prices and placing mortgages out of the reach of many first time buyers. This created massive inflation in property prices - almost 20%/year at present - which they benefitted immensely from, already being owners of at least one property.
The state education system has been systematically wrecked. Grammar schools and the Assisted Places Scheme which sponsored children to attend fee-paying schools have been abolished, as the baby boomers further try to pull the ladder up after themselves. These same baby boomers, who once swore never to trust anyone over 30, are now in positions of responsibility and have carefully structured corporations to ensure that today's under 30s cannot enjoy privileges such as a job-for-life that the baby boomers enjoyed. They are scrapping defined-benefits pension schemes, after making sure that they got them for themselves, at the expense of those currently paying into employer's pension funds - us.
We are also paying the price for their disasterous social experiments. Soaring crime rates and falling literacy rates originate in the pseudo-liberal ideals of the baby boomers, who knew that they would escape scot free while their children and grandchildren would pick up the pieces for them. Rather than being the unfortunate result of a well-intentioned experiment than didn't work out, it is indicative of the baby boomer's defining attitudes: firstly, that nothing matters to them more than instant gratification, and secondly that they will never have to face any consequences for their actions.
What can we do? It may be too late; huge damage has already been done to the economic and social fabric of our country. The only hope is that when those of us born since 1970 are in power, that we use that power wisely: to ensure that not a penny of our our generation's money is wasted on or by those that came before us. Let them live on the pensions that they knowingly intended for us, with the standards of healthcare and accomodation that they intended for us, and let us invest our own money in our own future and our own children.
Are even technical users ignorant on how UNIX handles time, time zones, and time conversion?
Maybe this has been fixed by now (AFAIK as of SunOS 5.8 it hasn't) but Unix' handling of timezones has always been pretty lame. For example, if you want to change timezone in your shell (and for processes subsequently spawned) you just set the TZ environment variable. If you want to change the system time globally, su to root and use the date command, and running processes will see it next time they ask the OS for the time. OK so far. But if you want to change the timezone globally, for running processes, you can't because time zone comes from init - at the very least you have to stop and restart processes after setting TZ, and if you're going to do that, you might as well edit/etc/default/init and reboot!
Re:Fill in the blanks:
on
Wartrapping?
·
· Score: 4, Funny
1. Buy the honeypot from this Van Strien fellow, packaged as "a security tool for corporate Wi-Fi users" with "a beautiful user interface". Estimated cost: _____ 2. Maintain it. Estimated cost: ______ per month. 3. Keep someone on the payroll to watch for suspicious activity. Estimated cost: _____ per month. 4. When suspicious activity is found.... um... what exactly do you do then?
we are talking about the indian railway ticket reservation, aren't we? as a german citizen i would be really pissed if our railway ticket reservation would be in english instead of german. (btw, it is optional in english for tourists)
That's a fair point, but remember that German is spoken throughout Germany as the primary language, whereas there are 15 or so languages in common use throughout India. It would be impossible to use one of those without one group being favored, and the rest being upset about it. There are two options: use a lingua franca like English, or make the system work in all languages. I've worked on applications that do a dozen or so languages, and it adds massively to the cost. For example, development slows to a crawl when you have to get the only Russian speaker to check that a screen looks right, then fixing it for him breaks the layout of the Greek screen.
One of the nice things about English is that it has been able to easily absorb words from elsewhere. There are German words in there, French, Indian, Japanese, you name it. And it's easier to learn than German (no genders on nouns, no Dative case) even tho' English, German and Dutch are closely related.
Apart from artificial languages like Esperanto, English is probably the best candidate for a universal language.
Kim Rossmo was also one of the first to suggest vancouver had a serial killer [robert pickton,pig farmer],which the VPD dissmissed promptly.The VPD also drummed Rossmo out via the old boys network because of interdept politics/powerplays
Rossmo would never have fitted in anyway. A cop with a PhD? You could probably count 'em on one hand.
Would "security through obscurity" be a good thing here?
I saw a cop on CNN say she wouldn't release any suspected description, because if it was off, everyone would be looking for someone who matched it and would be more likely to ignore someone who didn't. So this is an example of security through obscurity adding value.
1) When a customer purchases an XBox (or any game system for that matter) are you intrinsically "signing" an end-user agreement in the purchase that makes modding the device illegal
Well, if you aren't, then the GPL isn't binding either, since you aren't intrinsically "signing" anything when you use GPL'd code. Why is it that the EULA is wrong, but the GPL, BSD license etc are OK? After all, in the Unix community (or the traditional Unix community, at any rate) programmers and users were largely indistinguishable, so using source code is analogous to using a consumer application.
Huh? Moderated as Interesting? It is highly ignorant. Have you ever tried to learn foreign languages yourself?
Sure, I've lived and worked in half a dozen countries. I speak a little Dutch and a little French, enough to get by and do business. My personal observation is that almost everyone who has to interact with foreigners prefers to do so in English. Put a Spaniard, an Italian and a German to work together, and they'll all revert to English. The French and the Dutch people I worked with spoke to each other in English, and not just because there were English people present (we could have spoken French if they'd let us, but they insisted on English).
requires noticable effort and for most people who have no special talent for learning languages means spending a lot of time and/or money on studying
You'll need to check your local McDonald's to compare. I bet the India one is about the third the price. So - with all due respect, you appear to be wrong. We could of course cooperate on a more thorough comparative study if you wish.
I don't know if we have the Chicken McGrill here (I am in England), I can't find it on their website (only looked briefly, couldn't see prices) but my rationale for McDonalds as a comparator was based on an article in The Economist. They seem to have thought about this quite carefully.
Very few people who are truly that crazy have access to hypersonic ballistic nukes. Add to that the difficulty of hitting a ribbon one meter wide and a fraction of a milimeter thick with a ballistic missile. The chances of someone taking it out at far range are fairly slim.
I have to confess that I have no idea whether they do or they don't - after all, the US and UK are about to fight a war on the basis that they do, or at least will soon, have strategic weapons.
And the beauty of a nuke, if you can call it that, is that you can miss by miles and the pressure wave will still take our your target very effectively.
The thing is, if the whole world is given access to space, There won't be that much motivation to destroy the means to that access.
All it needs is for one maniac to declare that the space elevator is an abomination against allah, and that's all the motivation they need right there.
The exclusion zone idea fails when the attacker doesn't care about their own lives. Can the elevator protect itself against a ballistic nuke travelling at hypersonic speeds? It doesn't matter that a satellite will instantly pinpoint the launch site; they want to be martyred anyway!
Securing the elevator will probably be at least as hard as building it.
Re:Swapping Values Without Using a Temporary Varia
on
The Python Cookbook
·
· Score: 2
a,b = b,a
Pretty sure it works the same way in MATLAB, too, but I don't have mine here to check...
you'll promote the concept of space travel, you'll make money
Only one thing will promote the concept of space travel and make money in space, and that's wholesale commercialization, such as mining, manufacturing and power generation, then evetually colonization as an offshoot of needing workers for the space-based industries.
Anything else is just fluff, massively and unsustainably subsidized by the political pork barrel.
Also is this a setback for NASA? Possibility, but I think there is a larger issue for NASA here.
The sad fact is that anything that is bad for NASA is probably good for the space industry. NASA is a massively inefficient bureaucracy and its gotten that way because it was always a prestige organization that never had to justify its existance economically.
About the best thing the US govt. could do would be to pay off or securitize NASA's debt, then sell it in an IPO. As a private company, it would be highly incentivized to both produce useful work and capture the public's imagination.
That's one small step for television, but one giant leap for degrading space travel.
Degrading? NASA and its cronies have the bizarre idea that the only people who should go into space are those with the "right stuff" but what I see is a bunch of people playing with expensive toys and not producing anything that advances manned space exploration.
The people who deserve to go into space are anyone and everyone who can justify their place there economically. Whether that's a scientist doing product development, a tourist spending money earned on earth, an industrialist mining asteroids or a porn star shooting videos, all have a better claim on space than some astronaut who commutes to NEO and back just for the sake of it, on the taxpayer's dime.
The things that we should be alarmed is Microsoft's is on the upper hand: It has OT font's for all indic languages besides input engines, OTF rendering support & BillG who is making his 3rd visit to India has already signalled the need for localisation.
It has these things because it spent time and money to make them. Even tho' it can be reproduced for negligible cost, information of any kind is not free.
The ethos of the Open SOurce movement was always that if you needed something and it didn't exist, you had the tools and simply made it. Nowadays if it doesn't show up on Google stright away, people just give up or worse, complain without actually doing anything themselves.
So, the English speakers not only get the ticket without having to stand in line, they also get an (unfair) advantage because they know English, they're more likely to get the ticket, or will have a earlier position in the waiting list.
Why is it unfair? There are no barriers to learning English, after all. And given that English is the de facto lingua franca (yes, I am aware of the irony of using that phrase), anything that encourages more people to learn English can only be a good thing.
I don't know much about Hindi, but can it be represented and manipulated by a computer as easily as US7ASCII? That is a crucial advantage of English over non-ASCII (or EBCDIC) languages, Unicode or no.
This won't work for McDonald's, because a cheeseburger is stale if you ship it (and because the shipping is higher than the difference), but why not for software or consumer electronics? I'm surprised this hasn't become the standard way to buy stuff.
People do do this, it's called the "grey market". The EU say it's illegal, but retailers are doing it anyway.
I guess with software, you might only sell localized versions overseas which would be useless in domestic markets. IIRC, the licence you get with certain products only allows it to be used in the territory in which it was bought (someone told me this when we were thinking of going into the grey market to supply just-released Apple Powerbooks to Europe).
I'd like to get some of the gadgets they get in Asian markets that never make it to the West; if you could get them at bargain prices because of currency exchanges, so much the better!
There's no reason you can't do this, unless import tarriffs make it economically unfeasible. If there was a good economic case, I'm sure the Asian companies would be doing it already.
Granted, it is just a plant, but aren't there some unsettling moral connotations of this? There has never been an organism that has acted in this way.
There are many, many species that automatically commit suicide or are killed by their peers as a normal part of their lifecycle - usually just after mating or just after their children are born/hatched. Their DNA simply has no more use for them once it has been passed on.
Wuut? Cleter. I think I'm gonna try out that new fangled calcumalator I bawwt last year. Lemme se. foooorty-fiyve thousand, wheh! that's a biggun, hit that there divide key, how many days in a year, Cleter? 365? Is dat right. Alright. Where wuz I. Right. That divide button. And three-hunndrid-sixty-fiyve! Holly, hell, Cleter! The avrage 'merican eats 128 pounds a food a day. I'll be. I ate that much, I wouldn't be crappin' for a week, now would I?
It's an average figure... obviously some Americans will be using billions of pounds of newly mined minerals (you know, people who own steel mills, oil refineries and so forth) then selling it on to the rest of the country. Some of those will be shipyards, auto factories, civil engineers and so on, each of which will sell on its products.
What is the ratio of the weight of the minerals in a skyscraper to the weight of the workers in that skyscraper? What about a ship? Even an ordinary SUV is a few thousand pounds of minerals. 45000 lbs/person is not an unreasonable figure at all.
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I just got done working at this computer service based business in where I was making 36k/year. I'm worth 55k/year
In that case, I'm worth $2M/year!!
Get a clue. You are worth exactly what an employer is willing to pay you. If you think it's too low, either renegotiate or get another job offer. You can't just pluck a number out of the air and say that you deserve it - it's idiocy like that that caused the whole dot.com implosion.
Well, the charges that we were giving customers was insane. If it was after hours and on a weekend, they were being charged like $400 an hour for computer service. Granted it was pry to fix one or two of their servers or something but still, that's some serious income for the company and yet I get to see none.
So why don't you set yourself up as a contractor and bill hourly?
Neither are stocks. If you're not going to be in either one for 5 years minimum then you might as well spend your money gambling.
I hear this 5 year figure bandied about a lot, but it's rubbish. If you had invested your money in 1997 in an S&P500 or FTSE-100 tracker (generally reckoned to be the safest form of equity investment), you would be sitting on a loss today. In fact, you would have been better off leaving the money in a deposit account.
You need to be thinking in terms of 10, 20 or even 30 years.
As a matter of fact I am looking forward to the Baby Boomers retiring because I will be able to secure a government (Municipal, Provincial or Federal) job position that will last me till the retirement and will pay above average wage for the next 25-30 years. Plus the pension benefits are insane. I don't need to contribute to my pension plan for the rest of my life once I get me one of those jobs.
Ah, a typical Canadian. You're going to get it worse than most. Who pays for all these goverment jobs and their lavish perks? Why, the private sector taxpayer, of course. After all, since public sector employers are paid out of taxes, the taxes they themselves pay aren't real money that can be spent by a government; it's just circulating money that originated from private sector taxation back to itself.
If you're earning an above average wage, then by definition, a majority of the population are earning less than you... where does the money come from the support your wages? What happens when, inevitably, the private sector cannot cope with the demands of the State and its dependants? Why, the whole system collapses of course, and people like you will rightly be judged as parasites by an outraged mob of people who have actually worked for a living and now find that after a lifetime of supporting people like you that they are destitute themselves.
Andrea Tinker, professor of Social Gerontology at King's College, London recently published the results of research into the way that the changing age distribution of the population is affecting different generations. Her conclusion is that today's under 30s are the first generation who can expect lower living standards than their parents. In this writeup, I will present some British demographic statistics, and my own hypothesis as to the underlying reason for Professor Tinker's conclusion.
Fewer children are being born: 91 live births per 1000 women in 1961, dropping to only 55 in 2000. In the 25-29 age group, the drop is even more dramatic, from 178/1000 in 1961 to 95/1000 in 2000.
It is clear that the trend is towards fewer taxpayers supporting more pensioners. I believe that this is no coincidence, rather that the generation(s) born since 1970 were systematically and deliberately set up by the policy makers of the so-called "baby boomer" generation.
They set up a system for healthcare and pensions under which taxation is immediately paid out to recipients, rather than being invested for growth and the purchase of an annuity in a real pension system. They did this at a time when they knew that their own contributions would be minimal, given the population's age distribution at the time. Quite cynically, they decided that it would be easier to levy punitive taxation on their own children and grandchildren than invest for their own futures.
The money they saved by doing so, they poured into the housing market, driving up prices and placing mortgages out of the reach of many first time buyers. This created massive inflation in property prices - almost 20%/year at present - which they benefitted immensely from, already being owners of at least one property.
The state education system has been systematically wrecked. Grammar schools and the Assisted Places Scheme which sponsored children to attend fee-paying schools have been abolished, as the baby boomers further try to pull the ladder up after themselves. These same baby boomers, who once swore never to trust anyone over 30, are now in positions of responsibility and have carefully structured corporations to ensure that today's under 30s cannot enjoy privileges such as a job-for-life that the baby boomers enjoyed. They are scrapping defined-benefits pension schemes, after making sure that they got them for themselves, at the expense of those currently paying into employer's pension funds - us.
We are also paying the price for their disasterous social experiments. Soaring crime rates and falling literacy rates originate in the pseudo-liberal ideals of the baby boomers, who knew that they would escape scot free while their children and grandchildren would pick up the pieces for them. Rather than being the unfortunate result of a well-intentioned experiment than didn't work out, it is indicative of the baby boomer's defining attitudes: firstly, that nothing matters to them more than instant gratification, and secondly that they will never have to face any consequences for their actions.
What can we do? It may be too late; huge damage has already been done to the economic and social fabric of our country. The only hope is that when those of us born since 1970 are in power, that we use that power wisely: to ensure that not a penny of our our generation's money is wasted on or by those that came before us. Let them live on the pensions that they knowingly intended for us, with the standards of healthcare and accomodation that they intended for us, and let us invest our own money in our own future and our own children.
Are even technical users ignorant on how UNIX handles time, time zones, and time conversion?
/etc/default/init and reboot!
Maybe this has been fixed by now (AFAIK as of SunOS 5.8 it hasn't) but Unix' handling of timezones has always been pretty lame. For example, if you want to change timezone in your shell (and for processes subsequently spawned) you just set the TZ environment variable. If you want to change the system time globally, su to root and use the date command, and running processes will see it next time they ask the OS for the time. OK so far. But if you want to change the timezone globally, for running processes, you can't because time zone comes from init - at the very least you have to stop and restart processes after setting TZ, and if you're going to do that, you might as well edit
1. Buy the honeypot from this Van Strien fellow, packaged as "a security tool for corporate Wi-Fi users" with "a beautiful user interface". Estimated cost: _____
2. Maintain it. Estimated cost: ______ per month.
3. Keep someone on the payroll to watch for suspicious activity. Estimated cost: _____ per month.
4. When suspicious activity is found.... um... what exactly do you do then?
You forgot:
5. Profit!
we are talking about the indian railway ticket reservation, aren't we? as a german citizen i would be really pissed if our railway ticket reservation would be in english instead of german. (btw, it is optional in english for tourists)
That's a fair point, but remember that German is spoken throughout Germany as the primary language, whereas there are 15 or so languages in common use throughout India. It would be impossible to use one of those without one group being favored, and the rest being upset about it. There are two options: use a lingua franca like English, or make the system work in all languages. I've worked on applications that do a dozen or so languages, and it adds massively to the cost. For example, development slows to a crawl when you have to get the only Russian speaker to check that a screen looks right, then fixing it for him breaks the layout of the Greek screen.
One of the nice things about English is that it has been able to easily absorb words from elsewhere. There are German words in there, French, Indian, Japanese, you name it. And it's easier to learn than German (no genders on nouns, no Dative case) even tho' English, German and Dutch are closely related.
Apart from artificial languages like Esperanto, English is probably the best candidate for a universal language.
Kim Rossmo was also one of the first to suggest vancouver had a serial killer [robert pickton,pig farmer],which the VPD dissmissed promptly.The VPD also drummed Rossmo out via the old boys network because of interdept politics/powerplays
Rossmo would never have fitted in anyway. A cop with a PhD? You could probably count 'em on one hand.
Would "security through obscurity" be a good thing here?
I saw a cop on CNN say she wouldn't release any suspected description, because if it was off, everyone would be looking for someone who matched it and would be more likely to ignore someone who didn't. So this is an example of security through obscurity adding value.
1) When a customer purchases an XBox (or any game system for that matter) are you intrinsically "signing" an end-user agreement in the purchase that makes modding the device illegal
Well, if you aren't, then the GPL isn't binding either, since you aren't intrinsically "signing" anything when you use GPL'd code. Why is it that the EULA is wrong, but the GPL, BSD license etc are OK? After all, in the Unix community (or the traditional Unix community, at any rate) programmers and users were largely indistinguishable, so using source code is analogous to using a consumer application.
Be careful what you wish for: you might get it.
Huh? Moderated as Interesting? It is highly ignorant. Have you ever tried to learn foreign languages yourself?
Sure, I've lived and worked in half a dozen countries. I speak a little Dutch and a little French, enough to get by and do business. My personal observation is that almost everyone who has to interact with foreigners prefers to do so in English. Put a Spaniard, an Italian and a German to work together, and they'll all revert to English. The French and the Dutch people I worked with spoke to each other in English, and not just because there were English people present (we could have spoken French if they'd let us, but they insisted on English).
requires noticable effort and for most people who have no special talent for learning languages means spending a lot of time and/or money on studying
So does anything worthwhile. What's your point?
You'll need to check your local McDonald's to compare. I bet the India one is about the third the price. So - with all due respect, you appear to be wrong. We could of course cooperate on a more thorough comparative study if you wish.
I don't know if we have the Chicken McGrill here (I am in England), I can't find it on their website (only looked briefly, couldn't see prices) but my rationale for McDonalds as a comparator was based on an article in The Economist. They seem to have thought about this quite carefully.
Very few people who are truly that crazy have access to hypersonic ballistic nukes. Add to that the difficulty of hitting a ribbon one meter wide and a fraction of a milimeter thick with a ballistic missile. The chances of someone taking it out at far range are fairly slim.
I have to confess that I have no idea whether they do or they don't - after all, the US and UK are about to fight a war on the basis that they do, or at least will soon, have strategic weapons.
And the beauty of a nuke, if you can call it that, is that you can miss by miles and the pressure wave will still take our your target very effectively.
The thing is, if the whole world is given access to space, There won't be that much motivation to destroy the means to that access.
All it needs is for one maniac to declare that the space elevator is an abomination against allah, and that's all the motivation they need right there.
The exclusion zone idea fails when the attacker doesn't care about their own lives. Can the elevator protect itself against a ballistic nuke travelling at hypersonic speeds? It doesn't matter that a satellite will instantly pinpoint the launch site; they want to be martyred anyway!
Securing the elevator will probably be at least as hard as building it.
a,b = b,a
Pretty sure it works the same way in MATLAB, too, but I don't have mine here to check...
you'll promote the concept of space travel, you'll make money
Only one thing will promote the concept of space travel and make money in space, and that's wholesale commercialization, such as mining, manufacturing and power generation, then evetually colonization as an offshoot of needing workers for the space-based industries.
Anything else is just fluff, massively and unsustainably subsidized by the political pork barrel.
Also is this a setback for NASA? Possibility, but I think there is a larger issue for NASA here.
The sad fact is that anything that is bad for NASA is probably good for the space industry. NASA is a massively inefficient bureaucracy and its gotten that way because it was always a prestige organization that never had to justify its existance economically.
About the best thing the US govt. could do would be to pay off or securitize NASA's debt, then sell it in an IPO. As a private company, it would be highly incentivized to both produce useful work and capture the public's imagination.
That's one small step for television, but one giant leap for degrading space travel.
Degrading? NASA and its cronies have the bizarre idea that the only people who should go into space are those with the "right stuff" but what I see is a bunch of people playing with expensive toys and not producing anything that advances manned space exploration.
The people who deserve to go into space are anyone and everyone who can justify their place there economically. Whether that's a scientist doing product development, a tourist spending money earned on earth, an industrialist mining asteroids or a porn star shooting videos, all have a better claim on space than some astronaut who commutes to NEO and back just for the sake of it, on the taxpayer's dime.
The things that we should be alarmed is Microsoft's is on the upper hand: It has OT font's for all indic languages besides input engines, OTF rendering support & BillG who is making his 3rd visit to India has already signalled the need for localisation.
It has these things because it spent time and money to make them. Even tho' it can be reproduced for negligible cost, information of any kind is not free.
The ethos of the Open SOurce movement was always that if you needed something and it didn't exist, you had the tools and simply made it. Nowadays if it doesn't show up on Google stright away, people just give up or worse, complain without actually doing anything themselves.
So, the English speakers not only get the ticket without having to stand in line, they also get an (unfair) advantage because they know English, they're more likely to get the ticket, or will have a earlier position in the waiting list.
Why is it unfair? There are no barriers to learning English, after all. And given that English is the de facto lingua franca (yes, I am aware of the irony of using that phrase), anything that encourages more people to learn English can only be a good thing.
I don't know much about Hindi, but can it be represented and manipulated by a computer as easily as US7ASCII? That is a crucial advantage of English over non-ASCII (or EBCDIC) languages, Unicode or no.
This won't work for McDonald's, because a cheeseburger is stale if you ship it (and because the shipping is higher than the difference), but why not for software or consumer electronics? I'm surprised this hasn't become the standard way to buy stuff.
People do do this, it's called the "grey market". The EU say it's illegal, but retailers are doing it anyway.
I guess with software, you might only sell localized versions overseas which would be useless in domestic markets. IIRC, the licence you get with certain products only allows it to be used in the territory in which it was bought (someone told me this when we were thinking of going into the grey market to supply just-released Apple Powerbooks to Europe).
I'd like to get some of the gadgets they get in Asian markets that never make it to the West; if you could get them at bargain prices because of currency exchanges, so much the better!
There's no reason you can't do this, unless import tarriffs make it economically unfeasible. If there was a good economic case, I'm sure the Asian companies would be doing it already.
It means that Reynold's number ... is < 2300, sorry!
This product claims to reduce the turbulance by containing the fog inside a "laminar flow", whatever that means.
It means that Reynold's number
Re = Rho v D
-------
mu
Re: Reynold's number
Rho: density
v: velocity
D: length or diameter
mu: viscosity.
Ah, this brings back memories...
Granted, it is just a plant, but aren't there some unsettling moral connotations of this? There has never been an organism that has acted in this way.
There are many, many species that automatically commit suicide or are killed by their peers as a normal part of their lifecycle - usually just after mating or just after their children are born/hatched. Their DNA simply has no more use for them once it has been passed on.
Wuut? Cleter. I think I'm gonna try out that new fangled calcumalator I bawwt last year. Lemme se. foooorty-fiyve thousand, wheh! that's a biggun, hit that there divide key, how many days in a year, Cleter? 365? Is dat right. Alright. Where wuz I. Right. That divide button. And three-hunndrid-sixty-fiyve! Holly, hell, Cleter! The avrage 'merican eats 128 pounds a food a day. I'll be. I ate that much, I wouldn't be crappin' for a week, now would I?
It's an average figure... obviously some Americans will be using billions of pounds of newly mined minerals (you know, people who own steel mills, oil refineries and so forth) then selling it on to the rest of the country. Some of those will be shipyards, auto factories, civil engineers and so on, each of which will sell on its products.
What is the ratio of the weight of the minerals in a skyscraper to the weight of the workers in that skyscraper? What about a ship? Even an ordinary SUV is a few thousand pounds of minerals. 45000 lbs/person is not an unreasonable figure at all.