All of this conservative rhetoric about the government as a bunch of jack booted thugs, and now, they go and do exactly what they claim to oppose.
After three years of total Republican rule, we have the largest and most intrusive government ever. So much for limited government and free enterprise out of the so-called party of limited government and free enterprise.
If Airlines wanted it, Boeing would build it.
on
Son of Concorde
·
· Score: 1
The problem is that even a large subsonic airplane costs billions of dollars to develop. The development cost of a supersonic plane is even more. For a supersonic passenger transport to exist requires MASSIVE government subsidies, and most taxpayers would not want to touch it.
Do people want to go on a 2 hour flight rather than an 8? Yes they do, but, not for 10 times the price. Maybe if it were just double, but not ten times.
Moral of the story: Supersonic transportation for the masses will happen when the masses can actually afford it!
If this argument were true, you would think that the VietNamese, of all people, would still hate us, but, they don't. You would think the Germans hate us, because we flattened their country, but they don't. You would think that the Japanese hate us, because we nuked them twice. But, they don't.
The bottom line is, the arab world hates the west because islam in its present form is a religion so conservative as to make fox news seem positively pinko. The US has a system where priests do not run countries, and the priests overseas, who are running their countries, do not like it.
The US's biggest problem with maintaining a reliable grid is its size. The US has several times the surface area of France, and, it is simply exponentially more difficult to manage a national grid. So, like Europe, the country's power grid is divided into regions, and some are good and some are bad. MISO and NYPP are anemic, southern grids are terrible, and the northeastern PJM interconnect is incredibly good.
In fact, I would take the US PJM interconnect up against France's power grid at any time. That covers about the same area as France, and has withstood several recent blackouts that occurred in other areas.
PJM also has a burgeoning marketplace for congestion management products, dispatches real time prices at any point on its grid for anyone who cares to listen, and a number of other features.
You say we Americans should justify our standard of living, as, if you have the right to judge the way I live.
You don't.
Most of the world is now engaged in the enterprise of sending their goods to the United States at slave wages because they are incapable of creating their own domestic economies. What do the Asian economies do? Export to the USA. What does every economy do? Export to the USA.
Everyone on the planet earth bitches about America and how much Americans consume. But you can fix that. Maybe quit making shit to sell to Americans?
As a US Citizen, I'd be happy if BMW stayed on the whiny side of the Atlantic.
> So GM makes better cars than Ferrari? There are, after all, far more GMs on the road.
A Chevy Malibu SS has 50% of the top speed, similar braking distance (for its top speed), handles better in the snow, and costs anywhere from 1/5th to 1/10th the cost of the Ferrari, has automatic transmission, and gets better gas mileage. It's cheaper to insure...
Better is in the eye of beholder. Ferrari may be the absolute "best", if your goal is to have an uncomfortable car that does nothing but goes nearly 200 mph. But, the better value might actually be the Malibu SS.
> It is just a game.
Most songs are just songs and books are just books. Honestly, we could just go back and ditch the entire information culture and work on farms... we don't --need--- any of this electronic stuff to be able to live to 50.
And, what's the use of slashdot, or the entire internet boom for that matter. What's the use of democracy? Sometimes you have live for more than just somebody's narrow minded practical point of view. Monday Night Football Is important to me.
> and would they have gone to college if not for a ball scholarship?
Sure, why not? Look, if you want to make as much money as an NFL player, do something that improves the quality of life, inspires as many people, as much as an NFL player does.
In a strictly economic sense, the normal supply and demand curve breaks down when there is percieved absolutely not enough supply to supply demand. Last year's and this coming spike in natural gas prices is a perfect example of that. Bottom line is, people panic and want and will pay anything to get it.
Engineering advances pay way more than sports teams. The top most salary of an NFL player is probably 20 million dollars a year. Conversely, an engineer that strikes it stinking rich can dozens if not hundreds of times that. Marc Andreseen was worth, at one time, more than all of the NFL, as is Larry Ellison, Paul Allen, Bill Gates, and so on. Doctors that start their own research companies these days can make billions of dollars, and they do.
2) If you want your local emergency services to make more money, vote for a property tax increase in your community. Organize a drive to give your police and firefighters and EMTs a real wage. If you want your stay at home wife to live like a queen, go out and get some dough for her. Start your own company, devote your life to a goal, and make something with your life, like an NFL Player did.
3) We spend way more money on medicine and medical research than we do on the NFL. The Health care industry is hundreds of billions of dollars, the NFL is only ten.
The moral of the story is that, dollar for dollar, we do care more about advancing science and curing diseases. However, some of us think that there is more to life than just chasing disease.
For us, the NFL is an on field play of life, each game a miniature drama of competitive instinct and human ingenuity. There are so many small battles, tactics, and individual tests in each NFL game, that there is something for everyone to latch onto of interest and most people do. Watch a game once, before you laugh at it, and, appreciate just how good these people really are at what they do. I'll bet you the EMTs will.
PS. Donovan McNabb is no thug, and, he's going to throw for 300 yards tonight and kick the tar out of Green Bay!
Instead of complaining about how someone is overpaid, complain instead about how you are underpaid.
1. Many washed up atheletes were underpaid in their prime. Their getting paid more at the end of their careers is just rewards for previous stellar performance. Plus, they sell seats in the stadium.
2. Consumerism is excellent. In a perfect world, we compete to see who builds the best, not destroys the most. There's no middle ground. The best judge of who built the best is, tada, the consumer.
3. Throwing a ball a precisely as an NFL Quarterback does is extremely hard. If, football were as mindless of a game as you say, you would have no problem receiving a play, analyzing various defenses, deciding which receiver is most likely to be open, all while trying to avoid nearly 2000 lbs of humans intent on your injury. If you could do all of that, in under 2 seconds, then yes, you would be worth 20 million a year and you would not be underpaid.
4. Most NFL players have college degrees, and, many have degrees in hard engineering fields.
Bottom line. NFL Players are smart, and good at what they do. If you ever talked to a pro player, and I have, you would probably find their analysis of a particular play is remarkably in depth.
I mean really, everyone keeps talking about Homeland Security as if solely a Bush ill but keep in mind that the Democrats voted for it too. And, the Democrats on the campaign trail are saying that we need to have MORE.
You know, a lot of environmentalists decry American consumption on one hand and then vote to sustain a non-market ideology that lets people continue to believe they can do exactly what the environmentalists say they should not.
The classic case in point is electricity. In the USA, there is this notion that electricity is a fundamental right and it should essentially cost for nothing. It doesn't. The price of electricity varies wildly based on the fuel supply and the amount of demand. It's pretty academic: the cost of power rises every day as everyone turns on the air conditioners and drops as night falls. Most consumers are shielded from these price fluctuations by their "democrat" friends. If people actually paid market prices for their power, they would probably be so horrified that that noontime A/C cost them an extra $50 a month, they wouldn't use it. Instead, you have utilities scrambling to build more power plants, to burn --all the time---, just to satisfy people running their air conditionrs at noon. It's insane.
And, another thing, why shouldn't utilities be allowed to brown people out. You want to avoid new plant construction? Fine, at peak days, just shut off areas of the city.
The same issues go for every other natural resource. Christ, the dems bitch about the price of gas and blame it on bush, but, right now, any real enviornmentalists would tell you that if Bush raised the price of gas to $5 a gallon to really soak the poor, it would be a dream come true for conservation.
You can't have your cake of cheap energy for the poor and energy conservation at the same time. If you want people to conserve energy, it has to be valuable.
>Which is better? A 4000-pound passenger car that >gets 18 mpg on the highway, or a 3200-pound car
The 4000 pound car has a beautiful sounding engine while the 3200 pound car sounds like a buzzsaw. Come on man, big v8 vs little 4 cylinder. It's gotta be v8. It just sounds and feels so much better.
>Which is better, a light source that draws 60 >watts or a light source with the same light
Flourescent lights give me headaches, thank you. I'll take good old incandescent any day. And I'll add that water saving shower heads are aweful.
>Which is better? Duck hunters poisoning their >future game with lead shot, or a prohibition on
I'm glad they banned lead shot.
> Which is better? Dumping resultant chemicals from manufacturing into natural waterways
I don't like dumping into rivers or lakes either and I support the Chesapeake Bay cleanup effort.
> More efficient home furnaces, better insulating materials that don't cause cancer with repeated exposure
That's good, but I like to keep the windows open as I have a severe distrust of "safe" materials. Indoor air pollution is a drag.
What I'm getting at it is that our drive to replace some of our more wasteful practices with "more efficient" exotic chemicals have placed humans into a chemical soup whose long term health effects are just beginning to be understood. What's up with all the plastic everywhere and the possible links to raised environmental estrogen levels?
Many environmentalists are not the wealthy type because they are closet slackers. They decry everyone else's prosperity and want to shut the people that work down out of jealously. Their beef with the United States is the culture of consumption, the notion of of consumer capitalism. Even if it were environmentally 0 impact, they would have issues with it. Environmentalists want to impose their severe religion on everyone and so their science must be taken with as much a grain of salt as would science from RJ Reynolds. Environmentalists just hate people too much for people to trust their advice.
The Eastern Front in World War II is without a doubt the most savage fight in human history and in that fight Stalingrad was one of the monster battles. It might not be a stretch to say that more Germans and Russians were killed at Stalingrad than at all of America's wars combined. It was a continous block to block urban fight that lasted for several months through the fall and into the freezing dead of winter.
It was a gigantic disaster for the German Army and while Germany would be able to build the tanks, guns, and uniforms to go again at Kursk the following year, the loss of trained men in both the ground units and the Luftwaffe was not ever really made up.
I don't think there is a German or Russian around that does not have some relative killed in the Eastern front.
Oh, there are so many reasons for the German failure on the Eastern Front that you and I could probably fill up this board discussing them. My original remarks were based on Speer's figures of keeping at 50% prewar armaments production through the end of the war.
Yes, Germany ultimately did fail in production, but that was after nearly a year of having essentially no air protection while wave after wave of allied bombers and allied fighters strafed her, and, had lost thousands of men on the initial invasion, the assaults on Stalingrad and Kursk, in Africa, and being slowly drained in Italy.
Even then, by December 1944, the Germans were still able to put together a credible counterattack on Allied forces. Had they more pilots and fuel? who knows?
Hah, here I was thinking I'd have to quit. Now, I'll just get a shot and knock the tumor right out.
Computers are too cheap for this to work
on
Radiofrequency Weapons
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Honestly, our computers where I work at are so frigging old that I wish Al Qaeda would EMP us! People, you have to think this through. If a terrorist attacked the company that I worked at with a local EMP bomb, we would have to buy 100 new computers and we'd be back in business in a few days. Thus, it would be an inconvenience, but, not really that damaging.
If a terrorist attacked the United States with an nuclear power emp bomb, then, Bush would probably nuke the rest of the middle east just for spite. Bush would launch everything at any place that flies the Crescent flag, and probably France too just to be on the safe side.
So, even though we'd be back in the stone age until we got our new computers from Dell / HP / Whoever (which would take a year perhaps), the rest of the world would be a giant crater.
Hitting economic infrastructure is less and less likely to work in any war because we can produce so much stuff so quickly that the disruption would hardly be noticable.
Even in World War II the Allies were oft astonished at the recuperative power of the German Army -- they always had plenty of bullets and planes, and in the end, it was an actual lack of fighting age men that did them in.
Today the recovery capabilities of any modern economy are too awesome to admit. Office buildings can be thrown up overnight. Network cabling can be run quickly. The United States and other modern economies are almost Borg like in their ability to recover from local terrorist attacks. The WTC was a terrible loss, yes, but because of the 3000 people that were killed - not the buildings and physical stuff. To turn the country into a police state for threats that don't really mean that much seems stupid.
In Amiga every window had its own RastPort and its own underlying bitmap. Back in the day it was thought that graphics hardware would eventually be extended to do all the windows as sort of super sprites, but that never happened.
I think the "pledge" system, from an end user perspective, is nearly the same as the pay for the license approach of shareware. In both:
a) the user downloads the program b) if the user uses the program, and likes it, they are encouraged to "register" it to support its continued development.
Perhaps the most reasonable mechanism is to change the licensing model somewhat to differentiate from end users and developers. We could say that open source systems -can- charge money for end users. That way, the dough filters back to the developers and good projects don't die for lack of funding. Developers using open source would pay a tax of some sort to keep the open source system moving.
To differentiate developers from end users, we might require a C/S degree plus some form of certification to actually participate in the open source pool. This would serve as the basis for professionally licensing computer programmers - a long overdue move anyway. The minimum requirement would be a C/S degree + a certification. Not sure if it's right to say any engineering degree will do because C/S is a discipline in its own right and there's theoretical stuff a C/S grad will have that an EE switching over will miss.
Slashdot Mirror
All of this conservative rhetoric about the government as a bunch of jack booted thugs, and now, they go and do exactly what they claim to oppose.
After three years of total Republican rule, we have the largest and most intrusive government ever. So much for limited government and free enterprise out of the so-called party of limited government and free enterprise.
The problem is that even a large subsonic airplane costs billions of dollars to develop. The development cost of a supersonic plane is even more. For a supersonic passenger transport to exist requires MASSIVE government subsidies, and most taxpayers would not want to touch it.
Do people want to go on a 2 hour flight rather than an 8? Yes they do, but, not for 10 times the price. Maybe if it were just double, but not ten times.
Moral of the story: Supersonic transportation for the masses will happen when the masses can actually afford it!
If this argument were true, you would think that the VietNamese, of all people, would still hate us, but, they don't. You would think the Germans hate us, because we flattened their country, but they don't. You would think that the Japanese hate us, because we nuked them twice. But, they don't.
The bottom line is, the arab world hates the west because islam in its present form is a religion so conservative as to make fox news seem positively pinko. The US has a system where priests do not run countries, and the priests overseas, who are running their countries, do not like it.
The US's biggest problem with maintaining a reliable grid is its size. The US has several times the surface area of France, and, it is simply exponentially more difficult to manage a national grid. So, like Europe, the country's power grid is divided into regions, and some are good and some are bad. MISO and NYPP are anemic, southern grids are terrible, and the northeastern PJM interconnect is incredibly good.
In fact, I would take the US PJM interconnect up against France's power grid at any time. That covers about the same area as France, and has withstood several recent blackouts that occurred in other areas.
PJM also has a burgeoning marketplace for congestion management products, dispatches real time prices at any point on its grid for anyone who cares to listen, and a number of other features.
You say we Americans should justify our standard of living, as, if you have the right to judge the way I live.
You don't.
Most of the world is now engaged in the enterprise of sending their goods to the United States at slave wages because they are incapable of creating their own domestic economies. What do the Asian economies do? Export to the USA. What does every economy do? Export to the USA.
Everyone on the planet earth bitches about America and how much Americans consume. But you can fix that. Maybe quit making shit to sell to Americans?
As a US Citizen, I'd be happy if BMW stayed on the whiny side of the Atlantic.
Hey, here's a novel idea. If you want your grandmother to have health care, maybe you should pay for it!
think ours are bad, check out the dock gangs in japan. they are the protectionism of japan!
> So GM makes better cars than Ferrari? There are, after all, far more GMs on the road.
A Chevy Malibu SS has 50% of the top speed, similar braking distance (for its top speed), handles better in the snow, and costs anywhere from 1/5th to 1/10th the cost of the Ferrari, has automatic transmission, and gets better gas mileage. It's cheaper to insure...
Better is in the eye of beholder. Ferrari may be the absolute "best", if your goal is to have an uncomfortable car that does nothing but goes nearly 200 mph. But, the better value might actually be the Malibu SS.
> It is just a game.
Most songs are just songs and books are just books. Honestly, we could just go back and ditch the entire information culture and work on farms... we don't --need--- any of this electronic stuff to be able to live to 50.
And, what's the use of slashdot, or the entire internet boom for that matter. What's the use of democracy? Sometimes you have live for more than just somebody's narrow minded practical point of view. Monday Night Football Is important to me.
> and would they have gone to college if not for a ball scholarship?
Sure, why not? Look, if you want to make as much money as an NFL player, do something that improves the quality of life, inspires as many people, as much as an NFL player does.
I honestly bet you can't.
In a strictly economic sense, the normal supply and demand curve breaks down when there is percieved absolutely not enough supply to supply demand. Last year's and this coming spike in natural gas prices is a perfect example of that. Bottom line is, people panic and want and will pay anything to get it.
1) Football is cheap.
Engineering advances pay way more than sports teams. The top most salary of an NFL player is probably 20 million dollars a year. Conversely, an engineer that strikes it stinking rich can dozens if not hundreds of times that. Marc Andreseen was worth, at one time, more than all of the NFL, as is Larry Ellison, Paul Allen, Bill Gates, and so on. Doctors that start their own research companies these days can make billions of dollars, and they do.
2) If you want your local emergency services to make more money, vote for a property tax increase in your community. Organize a drive to give your police and firefighters and EMTs a real wage. If you want your stay at home wife to live like a queen, go out and get some dough for her. Start your own company, devote your life to a goal, and make something with your life, like an NFL Player did.
3) We spend way more money on medicine and medical research than we do on the NFL. The Health care industry is hundreds of billions of dollars, the NFL is only ten.
The moral of the story is that, dollar for dollar, we do care more about advancing science and curing diseases. However, some of us think that there is more to life than just chasing disease.
For us, the NFL is an on field play of life, each game a miniature drama of competitive instinct and human ingenuity. There are so many small battles, tactics, and individual tests in each NFL game, that there is something for everyone to latch onto of interest and most people do. Watch a game once, before you laugh at it, and, appreciate just how good these people really are at what they do. I'll bet you the EMTs will.
PS. Donovan McNabb is no thug, and, he's going to throw for 300 yards tonight and kick the tar out of Green Bay!
LETS GO EAGLES LETS GO!
Instead of complaining about how someone is overpaid, complain instead about how you are underpaid.
1. Many washed up atheletes were underpaid in their prime. Their getting paid more at the end of their careers is just rewards for previous stellar performance. Plus, they sell seats in the stadium.
2. Consumerism is excellent. In a perfect world, we compete to see who builds the best, not destroys the most. There's no middle ground. The best judge of who built the best is, tada, the consumer.
3. Throwing a ball a precisely as an NFL Quarterback does is extremely hard. If, football were as mindless of a game as you say, you would have no problem receiving a play, analyzing various defenses, deciding which receiver is most likely to be open, all while trying to avoid nearly 2000 lbs of humans intent on your injury. If you could do all of that, in under 2 seconds, then yes, you would be worth 20 million a year and you would not be underpaid.
4. Most NFL players have college degrees, and, many have degrees in hard engineering fields.
Bottom line. NFL Players are smart, and good at what they do. If you ever talked to a pro player, and I have, you would probably find their analysis of a particular play is remarkably in depth.
I have this big red mark on my belly.
It used to be a nice tight belly but now it is more of a big rolling gut, bolstered by 10 years of beer and hostess apple pies.
I think the big red mark is a bite of some kind, probably a blue tooth... oh my god, there's a hair leg crawling out of it....
it's a monster, a monster, with blue teeth....and it's eating its way out of me........
[img src = bloodsplat]
I mean really, everyone keeps talking about Homeland Security as if solely a Bush ill but keep in mind that the Democrats voted for it too. And, the Democrats on the campaign trail are saying that we need to have MORE.
July 2004 is closing in fast. Should be quite a time.
says: "Doh, Stupid comet!"
20 years from now, against all odds, the comet bashed ever so slightly by our irresponsibly launched space probe slams into Yellowstone super volcano.
That little probe has to be stopped before it bumps into something! Send someone out to get it before it's too late!
You know, a lot of environmentalists decry American consumption on one hand and then vote to sustain a non-market ideology that lets people continue to believe they can do exactly what the environmentalists say they should not.
The classic case in point is electricity. In the USA, there is this notion that electricity is a fundamental right and it should essentially cost for nothing. It doesn't. The price of electricity varies wildly based on the fuel supply and the amount of demand. It's pretty academic: the cost of power rises every day as everyone turns on the air conditioners and drops as night falls. Most consumers are shielded from these price fluctuations by their "democrat" friends. If people actually paid market prices for their power, they would probably be so horrified that that noontime A/C cost them an extra $50 a month, they wouldn't use it. Instead, you have utilities scrambling to build more power plants, to burn --all the time---, just to satisfy people running their air conditionrs at noon. It's insane.
And, another thing, why shouldn't utilities be allowed to brown people out. You want to avoid new plant construction? Fine, at peak days, just shut off areas of the city.
The same issues go for every other natural resource. Christ, the dems bitch about the price of gas and blame it on bush, but, right now, any real enviornmentalists would tell you that if Bush raised the price of gas to $5 a gallon to really soak the poor, it would be a dream come true for conservation.
You can't have your cake of cheap energy for the poor and energy conservation at the same time. If you want people to conserve energy, it has to be valuable.
>Which is better? A 4000-pound passenger car that >gets 18 mpg on the highway, or a 3200-pound car
The 4000 pound car has a beautiful sounding engine while the 3200 pound car sounds like a buzzsaw. Come on man, big v8 vs little 4 cylinder. It's gotta be v8. It just sounds and feels so much better.
>Which is better, a light source that draws 60 >watts or a light source with the same light
Flourescent lights give me headaches, thank you. I'll take good old incandescent any day. And I'll add that water saving shower heads are aweful.
>Which is better? Duck hunters poisoning their >future game with lead shot, or a prohibition on
I'm glad they banned lead shot.
> Which is better? Dumping resultant chemicals from manufacturing into natural waterways
I don't like dumping into rivers or lakes either and I support the Chesapeake Bay cleanup effort.
> More efficient home furnaces, better insulating materials that don't cause cancer with repeated exposure
That's good, but I like to keep the windows open as I have a severe distrust of "safe" materials. Indoor air pollution is a drag.
What I'm getting at it is that our drive to replace some of our more wasteful practices with "more efficient" exotic chemicals have placed humans into a chemical soup whose long term health effects are just beginning to be understood. What's up with all the plastic everywhere and the possible links to raised environmental estrogen levels?
Many environmentalists are not the wealthy type because they are closet slackers. They decry everyone else's prosperity and want to shut the people that work down out of jealously. Their beef with the United States is the culture of consumption, the notion of of consumer capitalism. Even if it were environmentally 0 impact, they would have issues with it. Environmentalists want to impose their severe religion on everyone and so their science must be taken with as much a grain of salt as would science from RJ Reynolds. Environmentalists just hate people too much for people to trust their advice.
The Eastern Front in World War II is without a doubt the most savage fight in human history and in that fight Stalingrad was one of the monster battles. It might not be a stretch to say that more Germans and Russians were killed at Stalingrad than at all of America's wars combined. It was a continous block to block urban fight that lasted for several months through the fall and into the freezing dead of winter.
It was a gigantic disaster for the German Army and while Germany would be able to build the tanks, guns, and uniforms to go again at Kursk the following year, the loss of trained men in both the ground units and the Luftwaffe was not ever really made up.
I don't think there is a German or Russian around that does not have some relative killed in the Eastern front.
Oh, there are so many reasons for the German failure on the Eastern Front that you and I could probably fill up this board discussing them. My original remarks were based on Speer's figures of keeping at 50% prewar armaments production through the end of the war.
Yes, Germany ultimately did fail in production, but that was after nearly a year of having essentially no air protection while wave after wave of allied bombers and allied fighters strafed her, and, had lost thousands of men on the initial invasion, the assaults on Stalingrad and Kursk, in Africa, and being slowly drained in Italy.
Even then, by December 1944, the Germans were still able to put together a credible counterattack on Allied forces. Had they more pilots and fuel? who knows?
Some biotech companies have been known to lie about drug pipelines and even to trial patients in order to boost their stock prices.
Does the name Ethyol ring a bell?
Hah, here I was thinking I'd have to quit. Now, I'll just get a shot and knock the tumor right out.
Honestly, our computers where I work at are so frigging old that I wish Al Qaeda would EMP us! People, you have to think this through. If a terrorist attacked the company that I worked at with a local EMP bomb, we would have to buy 100 new computers and we'd be back in business in a few days. Thus, it would be an inconvenience, but, not really that damaging.
If a terrorist attacked the United States with an nuclear power emp bomb, then, Bush would probably nuke the rest of the middle east just for spite. Bush would launch everything at any place that flies the Crescent flag, and probably France too just to be on the safe side.
So, even though we'd be back in the stone age until we got our new computers from Dell / HP / Whoever (which would take a year perhaps), the rest of the world would be a giant crater.
Hitting economic infrastructure is less and less likely to work in any war because we can produce so much stuff so quickly that the disruption would hardly be noticable.
Even in World War II the Allies were oft astonished at the recuperative power of the German Army -- they always had plenty of bullets and planes, and in the end, it was an actual lack of fighting age men that did them in.
Today the recovery capabilities of any modern economy are too awesome to admit. Office buildings can be thrown up overnight. Network cabling can be run quickly. The United States and other modern economies are almost Borg like in their ability to recover from local terrorist attacks. The WTC was a terrible loss, yes, but because of the 3000 people that were killed - not the buildings and physical stuff. To turn the country into a police state for threats that don't really mean that much seems stupid.
In Amiga every window had its own RastPort and its own underlying bitmap. Back in the day it was thought that graphics hardware would eventually be extended to do all the windows as sort of super sprites, but that never happened.
I think the "pledge" system, from an end user perspective, is nearly the same as the pay for the license approach of shareware. In both:
a) the user downloads the program
b) if the user uses the program, and likes it, they are encouraged to "register" it to support its continued development.
Perhaps the most reasonable mechanism is to change the licensing model somewhat to differentiate from end users and developers. We could say that open source systems -can- charge money for end users. That way, the dough filters back to the developers and good projects don't die for lack of funding. Developers using open source would pay a tax of some sort to keep the open source system moving.
To differentiate developers from end users, we might require a C/S degree plus some form of certification to actually participate in the open source pool. This would serve as the basis for professionally licensing computer programmers - a long overdue move anyway. The minimum requirement would be a C/S degree + a certification. Not sure if it's right to say any engineering degree will do because C/S is a discipline in its own right and there's theoretical stuff a C/S grad will have that an EE switching over will miss.
Thoughts?