Look, I'll fire up a few smokes and toss back a cold one and sort out this whole P=NP problem for you.... I'm sure that I can come up with it right away... how hard can it really be? Tongue firmly in cheek!
The NASA that was in the Apollo era wouldn't have allowed a design like they deployed for the shuttle's solid fuel boosters to have been fielded in the first place. The NASA of that era wouldn't have allowed the launch in the case that it'd been deployed based off of concerns at the time instead of making the Challenger disaster
What are you talking about? NASA was all set to go with Block I Apollo until a Pad on the Fire. The Atlas Booster that lofted John Glenn into orbit blew up on the pad more often than not. NASA back in those days took enormous risks and got lucky. They got lucky that Apollo 11 didn't crater, got lucky that the LEM engine actually could restart in a vaccum, they got lucky in a lot of ways because they had a lot of super engineers that had been building rockets and aircraft since they were teenagers, and had a ready pool of astronauts to take giant risks with their lives because many were combat veterans from the Korean War.
NASA's problem is that it is too risk averse because it has this backstory of the shuttle program was to make space routine. It's not. We simply do not have the technology to make space routine for people yet. IT's a giant chemical bomb sitting on a pad that blows up to launch people five times faster than most bullets can fly and into an environment where everything needed to sustain life must be man made. These are huge problems and they really just fly with a lot of redundancy and overbuild everything to try and manage risk, simply because they don't know what they are doing, and neither does anyone else.
At issue is not the redistribution of income, it is whether or not the jobs create wealth. If the gov't pays someone 100K a year, and they produce 120k a year of genuine goods and services, that's a 20% ROI and you can create those jobs indefinitely.
There are two reasons to avoid government investing is that:
First, it is a sort of a theft in some people's eyes, when the gov't competes against people it can use the power of tax law and its printing press to secure capital for projects, and thus be at an advantage against those who must use their own resources or turn to capital markets. If the government continually does private sector work, then, this competition will actually cause capital markets to dry up because no one will want to accept the risk that any profitable enterprise might be created by the government.
This leads to the second problem, and that is, when the government takes on the role of investor, it also must take on the risk. If the government is not investing, all it has to do is profit via taxation on those who were successful, and leave the ruin and failure of the vast majority of businesses to others. If it does invest, though, bad investment choices by the government will invariably lead to its collapse or at least some social turmoil. Indeed, if we view the Iraq War as an investment by the government, many people would view that as a sort of a mistake. But what if the government blew that kind of money all the time and on things that people did not want or technologies that did not work.
Ultimately, we could look at a failure of the Soviet government to invest in the research needed for communications technologies such as computers and fax and copiers as a significant reason for their downfall. To some extent, they were so caught up in the 1960s style era from which they had their greatest successes that they didn't even notice NATO nations pulling away in the 1970s and 1980s through the application of computers to every aspect of the production and management of goods until it was far too late.
Conversely, western governments didn't have to do anything, but cherry pick taxes from economic winners. It's not that socialism or capitalism is morally superior, it is that capitalism is physically superior for the longevity of governments simply because it requires governments to do less and absorb less risk.
I think most educated citizens are hip to the idea of a bunch of super smart people basically getting paid to do nothing but making cool stuff to do in air and space. To put things in perspective, NASA's entire budget consumes maybe one day worth of everyone in the USA working and I think its reasonable to get people to give up a day for something that adds to the entire national identity and experience.
So why don't we do a 5% tax on imports, and use that for NASA. Against an import spectrum of about 1T per year, would be, what, 50B for NASA, and that should be plenty of money to fund both manned and unmanned science missions.
But fascism, as a political philosophy, upholds the rule of law, and that was the point I was trying to make
Fascism as a political practice upholds obedience to the State, and that is most certainly not the same as the rule of law. That's my point. Laws bind the state as well as the people, and that can't happen philosophically when people are merely charged with obedience.
It appeals to people who want to believe obedience is rule of law, I'll give you that, but that speaks to larger problem in civic education, not fascisms genuine thrust.
Auschwitz, terrible though it was, was not. Fascism actually highly values the rule of law
Fascism doesn't value the rule of law at all. The first thing any good Fascist regime does, and the NAZIs were no exception, is to sweep aside the vestiges of Democracy with an enabling act that grants the leader the sole power to make laws and mete out punishment. The whole point of the rule of law is consistency, and once you've got it all locked out the window. To wit, under German law, everything was "legal" in the sense of the word, because Hitler was the supreme legal authority per the Enabling Act and other subsequent legislation. But even before then the NAZIs used every illegal trick in the book to try and get power. First they tried and out and out coup, and that failed. Then they had roving private armies beating the shit out of everyone that stood in their path, and got away with it because everyone was either too afraid to stand up or too divided to be effective, or really looking to do the same thing itself.
Obedience to orders is not a substitute for law, and inside any supposedly running fascist dictatorship there is rot and corruption. Even during the peak of NAZI power, fraud and deceipt and disobedience of Hitler was really quite rampant. Hitler's generals ignored his orders as much as they could, and sometimes, Speer ignored his orders, Himmler openly plotted against Hitler, Goering got high all the time, they all did. Hitler basically kept himself in power by keeping everyone playing against each other, but the whole illusion of absolute authority was just that, an illusion. In even a dictatorship, government is by the consent of the governed, and as long as Hitler had the illusion of power, he kept his people in check.
Look, it doesn't matter who or where you are. The government has guns, you do not. If they want something, they will get it. What separates, or is supposed to separate, this process in places like the USA, from places like China, is that there is supposed to be accountability for the government that gets that information. This is at the ballot box and also due to separation of branches.
That Bush argued that the executive was allowed to unilaterally search due to a commander in chief doctrine was what really got him in trouble with the left, and, I think on that score the lefties were correct. What's interesting, though, is that the present administration seems to be adopting the same doctrine, but is making the "personality" argument, and really, once you start using personality arguments, rather than supportive of a legal process, you've shredded civil rights. To wit, just because Obama might be a nicer dictator for some people doesn't mean that he is still not a dictator. If it is bad for a President to do something when you voted against him, it is bad for a President to do it when you vote against, and vice versa.
Has anyone wonder why we need to scrap liberties in the name of security that we seemed to do fine with even during World War II or the Cold War? I mean, once upon a time, we actually had to worry about British spies (for the 19th century), German spies (two world wars), Soviet Spies (the Cold War), and yet we kept to open borders. Why now, is it, that a penny anny bunch of backwards people have us ripping up the Constitution? It's just not worth it.
Everyone that looks upon humanity and calls it broken is a dictator wanting to be born. They want to meddle in people's lives, arrange them like so many dominos, and then proclaim the carnage they have created as fixed. I wish these madmen and madwomen for once would have the self honesty to admit that they are the ones that are broken, because they hate a free people.
It was... the income taxes sucking the life out of our industries..
Well, that didn't help, but when you have foolish free trade deals with companies that have essentially no labor costs, the tax rate doesn't matter all that much.
I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
Dell said that about Apple, and when Apple passed Dell in market cap, Steve Jobs very famously sent out an email to the entire Apple team saying "Hah hah, we beat you Dell. Should Dell be shut down and given back to the shareholders..."
Although the Dems were able to muster votes to get their health care stuff through despite bitter republican opposition, they will ultimately, on lesser issues, talk turkey. Florida and Alabama will get to keep flying the Shuttle with some contracts for extending it, in exchange for support on any of the things Obama wants but needs the center-right in both parties on. For example, Obama might want an emissions deal, and, while, you would think Republicans would oppose it, Republicans are also heavy in the states that could benefit from some sort of missions for the shuttle to save the earth as part of the package that would also benefit GOP states. Sessions, for example, could be bought on some deal for NASA in exchange for a deal to spin off GM so he can protect the Toyota plants in his state. Florida could be bought off for any number of things.
It was also that medicare exploded during the early 1970s. Entitlements exploded, and the cost of the war exploded, and the price of oil exploded when the USA devalued its currency and dropped the gold standard.
Really, I think the whole sturm and drang of the doom of the internet is so much a red herring. This would hurt content aggregators, of course. They would ultimately have to pony up for links to interesting sites, rather than the benefit of a no-follow link. But, between google bombing, link farms and all the other useless link content on the internet, I would not mind a sweeping away of sites that really offer no value at all. Far from being this rich and beautiful thing, most of today's internet is just an over-advertised waste of time.
whilst the Pope sits in a palace that dwarfs any king's palace. Now that's morals for you.
How about the morals of big hollywood making billions of dollars throwing poor people in jail for copying a movie or a song, about feeding the poor? The Vatican doesn't even have as much money as minor movie studio, just a lot of old stuff that frankly isn't worth very much.
The difference is in volunteering. I wonder when the left will finally admit that the renaissance wasn't some "enlightening" where the people became free of the evil church, but rather, a bunch of minor warlords and bankers that decided to take power away from the church, keep it for themselves, and then some.
The Pope's palace is a pile of rocks. The head of the liberal movement in the United States has an airborne palace that flies around at 600+ mph and multiple bases throughout the world. The pope has a few guys dressed up in 16th century uniforms. The head of the liberals has two million men and women under arms, countless scores of agents, police, and interrogation powers. Unlike the Pope, he and his political party send their dark agents throughout the empire to confiscate the savings of any that would oppose their government.
Indeed, if the amount of compulsion and confiscation is a measure of tyranny, than even the 10% church tithe is a lot less onerous than the litany of agencies and forms the government makes one attend.
The terrible thing about this decision is that it just screws the middle class. Yes, the middle class might occur some mythical savings of $3000 in fuel for an estimated (likely low) increased manufacturing costs, but what this will really do is force the middle class to take on more debt to get that extra $1000. So, right away, that $1000 in increased costs is going to come at a price approaching $2000 in interest, and further reduce the opportunity cost of the middle class to do things most effectively possible with its money.
Capital costs are killer for lower income brackets, and the left simply doesn't care, and this in my mind is proof that they are just trying to make cars less available, like so many other things, less available for the average guy and to make him poorer over all.
People that dismiss Oracle's database software are foolish. The transaction management, up time, and all the other robustness features of an Oracle database server gave me plenty of time to go look for hot girls when I was single. Meanwhile, those SQL Server guys hung in the lab.
They had to send it because they couldn't know a priori that you were not doing a search. If they had a separate box,
Again, this is not a problem. Forget about Google's implementation. You can try various combinations of nslookup locally and offer autocomplete that. If you don't get a hit, then send the search request. Since most users tend to visit the same sites over and over again, you can even cache those. You can have a super box.
This is some rather lame marketing by Microsoft because Chrome's user experience with one magic box for address and search is so spot on and IE's dual boxes seems so lame and dated. Particularly in Windows, it is just as easy to get at keystroke messages for all windows as it is to get them in one, you can go in your main message loop:
while (GetMessage(msg)) {
if( msg.something == WM_KEYDOWN)
log(msg); }
I think would work for just about everything.
So yes, Microsoft might have a point about Chrome invading your privacy, but, at the same time, trying to bundle it in with a critique of chrome's single window is just marketese and really undermines the rest of their own point. It's such a stretch of reality, that you have to wonder how much the rest of their message is true.
Hmmm...like drunk drivers? Yea let's make alcohol illegal. How did that go again? Do you get it yet? How hard is it to see that prohibition doesn't fucking work?
If we really wanted to ban drugs, we could do what islamic countries do and just whip the tar out of you the moment you get caught with a joint. That would pretty much end the war on drugs. So yes, there is a point at which you bring some tyranny and win it.
So in that sense, drugs are in fact legal right now, because the penalties for most people and risk of getting caught are so low.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, I'll fire up a few smokes and toss back a cold one and sort out this whole P=NP problem for you.... I'm sure that I can come up with it right away... how hard can it really be? Tongue firmly in cheek!
The NASA that was in the Apollo era wouldn't have allowed a design like they deployed for the shuttle's solid fuel boosters to have been fielded in the first place. The NASA of that era wouldn't have allowed the launch in the case that it'd been deployed based off of concerns at the time instead of making the Challenger disaster
What are you talking about? NASA was all set to go with Block I Apollo until a Pad on the Fire. The Atlas Booster that lofted John Glenn into orbit blew up on the pad more often than not. NASA back in those days took enormous risks and got lucky. They got lucky that Apollo 11 didn't crater, got lucky that the LEM engine actually could restart in a vaccum, they got lucky in a lot of ways because they had a lot of super engineers that had been building rockets and aircraft since they were teenagers, and had a ready pool of astronauts to take giant risks with their lives because many were combat veterans from the Korean War.
NASA's problem is that it is too risk averse because it has this backstory of the shuttle program was to make space routine. It's not. We simply do not have the technology to make space routine for people yet. IT's a giant chemical bomb sitting on a pad that blows up to launch people five times faster than most bullets can fly and into an environment where everything needed to sustain life must be man made. These are huge problems and they really just fly with a lot of redundancy and overbuild everything to try and manage risk, simply because they don't know what they are doing, and neither does anyone else.
At issue is not the redistribution of income, it is whether or not the jobs create wealth. If the gov't pays someone 100K a year, and they produce 120k a year of genuine goods and services, that's a 20% ROI and you can create those jobs indefinitely.
There are two reasons to avoid government investing is that:
First, it is a sort of a theft in some people's eyes, when the gov't competes against people it can use the power of tax law and its printing press to secure capital for projects, and thus be at an advantage against those who must use their own resources or turn to capital markets. If the government continually does private sector work, then, this competition will actually cause capital markets to dry up because no one will want to accept the risk that any profitable enterprise might be created by the government.
This leads to the second problem, and that is, when the government takes on the role of investor, it also must take on the risk. If the government is not investing, all it has to do is profit via taxation on those who were successful, and leave the ruin and failure of the vast majority of businesses to others. If it does invest, though, bad investment choices by the government will invariably lead to its collapse or at least some social turmoil. Indeed, if we view the Iraq War as an investment by the government, many people would view that as a sort of a mistake. But what if the government blew that kind of money all the time and on things that people did not want or technologies that did not work.
Ultimately, we could look at a failure of the Soviet government to invest in the research needed for communications technologies such as computers and fax and copiers as a significant reason for their downfall. To some extent, they were so caught up in the 1960s style era from which they had their greatest successes that they didn't even notice NATO nations pulling away in the 1970s and 1980s through the application of computers to every aspect of the production and management of goods until it was far too late.
Conversely, western governments didn't have to do anything, but cherry pick taxes from economic winners. It's not that socialism or capitalism is morally superior, it is that capitalism is physically superior for the longevity of governments simply because it requires governments to do less and absorb less risk.
I think most educated citizens are hip to the idea of a bunch of super smart people basically getting paid to do nothing but making cool stuff to do in air and space. To put things in perspective, NASA's entire budget consumes maybe one day worth of everyone in the USA working and I think its reasonable to get people to give up a day for something that adds to the entire national identity and experience.
So why don't we do a 5% tax on imports, and use that for NASA. Against an import spectrum of about 1T per year, would be, what, 50B for NASA, and that should be plenty of money to fund both manned and unmanned science missions.
But fascism, as a political philosophy, upholds the rule of law, and that was the point I was trying to make
Fascism as a political practice upholds obedience to the State, and that is most certainly not the same as the rule of law. That's my point. Laws bind the state as well as the people, and that can't happen philosophically when people are merely charged with obedience.
It appeals to people who want to believe obedience is rule of law, I'll give you that, but that speaks to larger problem in civic education, not fascisms genuine thrust.
Auschwitz, terrible though it was, was not. Fascism actually highly values the rule of law
Fascism doesn't value the rule of law at all. The first thing any good Fascist regime does, and the NAZIs were no exception, is to sweep aside the vestiges of Democracy with an enabling act that grants the leader the sole power to make laws and mete out punishment. The whole point of the rule of law is consistency, and once you've got it all locked out the window. To wit, under German law, everything was "legal" in the sense of the word, because Hitler was the supreme legal authority per the Enabling Act and other subsequent legislation. But even before then the NAZIs used every illegal trick in the book to try and get power. First they tried and out and out coup, and that failed. Then they had roving private armies beating the shit out of everyone that stood in their path, and got away with it because everyone was either too afraid to stand up or too divided to be effective, or really looking to do the same thing itself.
Obedience to orders is not a substitute for law, and inside any supposedly running fascist dictatorship there is rot and corruption. Even during the peak of NAZI power, fraud and deceipt and disobedience of Hitler was really quite rampant. Hitler's generals ignored his orders as much as they could, and sometimes, Speer ignored his orders, Himmler openly plotted against Hitler, Goering got high all the time, they all did. Hitler basically kept himself in power by keeping everyone playing against each other, but the whole illusion of absolute authority was just that, an illusion. In even a dictatorship, government is by the consent of the governed, and as long as Hitler had the illusion of power, he kept his people in check.
Look, it doesn't matter who or where you are. The government has guns, you do not. If they want something, they will get it. What separates, or is supposed to separate, this process in places like the USA, from places like China, is that there is supposed to be accountability for the government that gets that information. This is at the ballot box and also due to separation of branches.
That Bush argued that the executive was allowed to unilaterally search due to a commander in chief doctrine was what really got him in trouble with the left, and, I think on that score the lefties were correct. What's interesting, though, is that the present administration seems to be adopting the same doctrine, but is making the "personality" argument, and really, once you start using personality arguments, rather than supportive of a legal process, you've shredded civil rights. To wit, just because Obama might be a nicer dictator for some people doesn't mean that he is still not a dictator. If it is bad for a President to do something when you voted against him, it is bad for a President to do it when you vote against, and vice versa.
Has anyone wonder why we need to scrap liberties in the name of security that we seemed to do fine with even during World War II or the Cold War? I mean, once upon a time, we actually had to worry about British spies (for the 19th century), German spies (two world wars), Soviet Spies (the Cold War), and yet we kept to open borders. Why now, is it, that a penny anny bunch of backwards people have us ripping up the Constitution? It's just not worth it.
Everyone that looks upon humanity and calls it broken is a dictator wanting to be born. They want to meddle in people's lives, arrange them like so many dominos, and then proclaim the carnage they have created as fixed. I wish these madmen and madwomen for once would have the self honesty to admit that they are the ones that are broken, because they hate a free people.
It was... the income taxes sucking the life out of our industries..
Well, that didn't help, but when you have foolish free trade deals with companies that have essentially no labor costs, the tax rate doesn't matter all that much.
hey can vote as much as they like, extension in any sensible use of the word is impossible.
The key word is sensible. Regardless of political party, rest assured that our government is anything but.
I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
Dell said that about Apple, and when Apple passed Dell in market cap, Steve Jobs very famously sent out an email to the entire Apple team saying "Hah hah, we beat you Dell. Should Dell be shut down and given back to the shareholders..."
Although the Dems were able to muster votes to get their health care stuff through despite bitter republican opposition, they will ultimately, on lesser issues, talk turkey. Florida and Alabama will get to keep flying the Shuttle with some contracts for extending it, in exchange for support on any of the things Obama wants but needs the center-right in both parties on. For example, Obama might want an emissions deal, and, while, you would think Republicans would oppose it, Republicans are also heavy in the states that could benefit from some sort of missions for the shuttle to save the earth as part of the package that would also benefit GOP states. Sessions, for example, could be bought on some deal for NASA in exchange for a deal to spin off GM so he can protect the Toyota plants in his state. Florida could be bought off for any number of things.
It was also that medicare exploded during the early 1970s. Entitlements exploded, and the cost of the war exploded, and the price of oil exploded when the USA devalued its currency and dropped the gold standard.
Ironic considering your sig. I giggled, but throw in some advertising and your site may fall into the latter category.
You've got a point. Perhaps I should make my site's motto - "An underadvertised waste of time."
Really, I think the whole sturm and drang of the doom of the internet is so much a red herring. This would hurt content aggregators, of course. They would ultimately have to pony up for links to interesting sites, rather than the benefit of a no-follow link. But, between google bombing, link farms and all the other useless link content on the internet, I would not mind a sweeping away of sites that really offer no value at all. Far from being this rich and beautiful thing, most of today's internet is just an over-advertised waste of time.
That's what they claim to be
No, they don't. And they do ooze rubbish about benevolence.
If god is so good, then why do his peoples
It's a strawman argument. God isn't good. God is God.
whilst the Pope sits in a palace that dwarfs any king's palace. Now that's morals for you.
How about the morals of big hollywood making billions of dollars throwing poor people in jail for copying a movie or a song, about feeding the poor? The Vatican doesn't even have as much money as minor movie studio, just a lot of old stuff that frankly isn't worth very much.
. Now that's morals for you.
The difference is in volunteering. I wonder when the left will finally admit that the renaissance wasn't some "enlightening" where the people became free of the evil church, but rather, a bunch of minor warlords and bankers that decided to take power away from the church, keep it for themselves, and then some.
The Pope's palace is a pile of rocks. The head of the liberal movement in the United States has an airborne palace that flies around at 600+ mph and multiple bases throughout the world. The pope has a few guys dressed up in 16th century uniforms. The head of the liberals has two million men and women under arms, countless scores of agents, police, and interrogation powers. Unlike the Pope, he and his political party send their dark agents throughout the empire to confiscate the savings of any that would oppose their government.
Indeed, if the amount of compulsion and confiscation is a measure of tyranny, than even the 10% church tithe is a lot less onerous than the litany of agencies and forms the government makes one attend.
The terrible thing about this decision is that it just screws the middle class. Yes, the middle class might occur some mythical savings of $3000 in fuel for an estimated (likely low) increased manufacturing costs, but what this will really do is force the middle class to take on more debt to get that extra $1000. So, right away, that $1000 in increased costs is going to come at a price approaching $2000 in interest, and further reduce the opportunity cost of the middle class to do things most effectively possible with its money.
Capital costs are killer for lower income brackets, and the left simply doesn't care, and this in my mind is proof that they are just trying to make cars less available, like so many other things, less available for the average guy and to make him poorer over all.
People that dismiss Oracle's database software are foolish. The transaction management, up time, and all the other robustness features of an Oracle database server gave me plenty of time to go look for hot girls when I was single. Meanwhile, those SQL Server guys hung in the lab.
They had to send it because they couldn't know a priori that you were not doing a search. If they had a separate box,
Again, this is not a problem. Forget about Google's implementation. You can try various combinations of nslookup locally and offer autocomplete that. If you don't get a hit, then send the search request. Since most users tend to visit the same sites over and over again, you can even cache those. You can have a super box.
Your code will not get keyboard input for any application other than the one it runs in
For a web browser, that's all you need, and that's the issue under discussion.
This is some rather lame marketing by Microsoft because Chrome's user experience with one magic box for address and search is so spot on and IE's dual boxes seems so lame and dated. Particularly in Windows, it is just as easy to get at keystroke messages for all windows as it is to get them in one, you can go in your main message loop:
while (GetMessage(msg)) {
if( msg.something == WM_KEYDOWN)
log(msg);
}
I think would work for just about everything.
So yes, Microsoft might have a point about Chrome invading your privacy, but, at the same time, trying to bundle it in with a critique of chrome's single window is just marketese and really undermines the rest of their own point. It's such a stretch of reality, that you have to wonder how much the rest of their message is true.
Hmmm...like drunk drivers? Yea let's make alcohol illegal. How did that go again? Do you get it yet? How hard is it to see that prohibition doesn't fucking work?
If we really wanted to ban drugs, we could do what islamic countries do and just whip the tar out of you the moment you get caught with a joint. That would pretty much end the war on drugs. So yes, there is a point at which you bring some tyranny and win it.
So in that sense, drugs are in fact legal right now, because the penalties for most people and risk of getting caught are so low.