Aren't the newer missions more specifically focused than the old missions? Ie, they have a small, highly defined endpoint they have to get to and the designs are built to do that one mission.
Seems that the older missions ("Fly that way until your battery runs out") were purposefully vague and required a spacecraft with a higher amount of durability due to the squishiness of the mission.
It's like comparing dispisable watches to a Rolex.
I have a Timex Marathon 100 digital watch I bought in 1986 for $35. I have worn it daily since then and have only changed the battery 4 times and it works fine.
Someone I know who has a Rolex paid over $2000 for it and they are "supposed" to send it in for cleaning every 3-5 years (which runs about $500).
What was that about disposable watches and Rolexes?
Duh, Richard Thompson is one of the 20 most talented guitar players in the world, who has been around since the 60's. He is in that less than 1%. How much does the the most talented laywer, doctor, programmer, or used car salesman for that matter make?
If he's so talented, why is he so cheap? For $10k we could hire him for our neighborhood block party. I think he represents the "workman" side of the music business, not the megabucks pinnacle. A small but loyal fan base.
The bands that play nightly at the Bottom of the hill for 200 people is the professional equivilent of a doctor that's just out of medical school practicing two days a week. Is it any surprise they make no money?
Re:Ownership as the basis of political rights
on
Triangle Boy Lives
·
· Score: 2
Control of properity that you own is a political right.
But that's what the Soviets said. The theorists behind democracy reasoned that political rights *came* from ownership of private property; rights over something you own are absolute, they aren't given to you by someone else. If the people as a whole own all the land and means of production they are less subject to the tyranny of government.
Yep, it proteted people in that bastion of civil rights, the Soviet Union.
There was no private property in the Soviet Union, which is why there was no freedom.
There is no "right" to control other people's properity.
Which is why private property is the basis for freedom, according to classical Liberal political thought.
It gets scary when most of the private property is controlled by a small group of people who use the rhetoric of liberty and property to advance an agenda that denies rights like freedom of speech to non-property holders.
Doesn't it depend on the performer and what they bring with them?
I saw Richard Thompson play last winter and the rumor I had heard was that he was getting $10k per concert. It was a solo accoustic show, and he traveled with maybe his manager and a single sound guy.
If you played 20 shows in 3 months (one every 5 days), you'd have $200k, even less taxes and expenses you'd have close to $100k free and clear.
A band comprised of 5 guys, a manager and a roadie/sound guy is going to need more money, less stuff and more touring to make money EVEN AT $10k per show -- you just can feed, house and pay 7 people very well on that kind of money.
The sweet spot for most performers is when they get to the point when they can fill a 1,000-2,000 seat venue @ $30 per seat consistently and can net out $15-20K per show. By playing smaller venues they presumably pay less money in rental, haul less gear around with them, require fewer roadies, and generally overal lower operating expenses.
You're not getting rich doing this, but if you can make $2-300K per year free and clear doing it, what's wrong with that? It sure sounds like a better lifestyle than 98% of the population lives, and 99.9999 percent of the world lives.
Ownership as the basis of political rights
on
Triangle Boy Lives
·
· Score: 2
I guess the biggest objection some people will have is that when you make political rights dependent on ownership of property, a lot of people who don't own property lose their rights.
A lot of people say that mass ownership of property guarantees political rights, since the control of ownership limits the power base of the government or other property owners.
I think our world is turning in a scary world of property being concentrated into the hands of a few who tout the rights granted by their property ownership, which is really is an end run around the implied political rights of others.
Administrators aren't sure what anybody needs that kind of bandwidth for yet, but they are curious to see how it gets used.
At a wildly conservative estimate of $75 per run, that's over $1 million being spent "to see what happens." I'm all in favor of the experimental nature of the University and I'm strongly in favor of trying to buy ahead of the curve where possible.
But...couldn't an experiment to see what everyone might do with 1 Gbps fiber be scaled to a quarter of that size or even a tenth of that size and the rest of the money spent on other equipment or infrastructure needs?
It might future-proof them, but AFAIK Gbit ethernet is running just fine on four pair Cat 5, which they probably already have installed. The annoying nature of fiber optics has IMHO kept it from being "the next step" in end-user distributive network technology -- it's fragile, complex to fix and the interfaces are more expensive and non-standard on most equipment that 16k people would use.
Given the budget crunches that most states are feeling, it seems strangely inappropriate to blow at least $1 million to see what happens (yes, CWRU gets money from Ohio).
At least on a bunch of the HP Netserver models we've used - LX Pro, LH3, LH4, etc. They seemed to have dropped it on the smaller 2U and 1U models like the 1000 and 2000 due to lack of space or something.
It's too bad there's not a standardized motherboard resource (built-in PCI device, etc)for LCD displays like this; OS and app vendors would then be able to utilize it out of the box.
The idiotic thing is the displays on our LH3s and LH4s didn't show much and were useless, even with the "interactive" buttons that let you cruise around like on a printer. If they could display system load, temperature, yadda yadda they would be be much more useful.
Of course we know the logical conclusion to LCD displays on the front of computers -- someobody will have to have a full-blown 6" color LCD display on the front of the machine...
Sounds like it will muss up a clean running IP network like IPX did. If so, no thanks.
But nothing IPX can do is worse than someone with a lot of bandwidth and a duplicate IP address can do.
IPX without SAP/RIP spoofing was murder on really, really low-bandwidth WAN links or cheesy imitations thereof that used long-haul bridges.
But IPX (and Appletalk) had a lot of *good* things about them, too that take much more work and much more complexity to achieve in IP. Automatic client node addressing -- it just works in IPX, in IP it takes a whole infrastructure (DHCP server, integration with DNS, etc).
Service location -- it just worked with IPX SAP. SLP (at least the little exposure I had with it and Netware 5) was mind-numbingly complicated and often relied on multicast.
No shortage of addresses, either - IPX gave you 32 bits of network addressing and 48 bits of node addressing.
I'd love in-game live audio chat, especially for FPS that have objective maps. They would greatly benefit from users being able to actually attempt a real strategy rather than the chaos that reigns now.
It would have been interesting to have a 4-way system running code-morphing chips that could target multiple CPUs and a meta-OS that would allow you to run multiple OSs (Mac OS, Windows, BSD, Sun, etc) on the same machine at the same time.
I'm not sure who would want one other than cross-platform developers, but it would have been interesting.
A big benefit of air conditioning is a huge boon to museums. Works of art and historical items are much more easily preserved in temperature/humidity controlled environments that air conditioning systems provide.
We went to the MFA in Boston 2-3 years ago in the summer and I was kind of appalled at the lack of A/C in vast stretches of the museum, including the furniture and decorative arts wings. I'm sure paintings benefit greatly from stable environments, but the wood furniture REALLY benefits from not constantly warping the summer and contracting in the winter.
Although one could reason that most of the furniture made prior to the invention of A/C had been naturally subject to that and the woodworkers of the era built a lot of floating joints that could tolerate it, but its got to be hard on the laminates and inlays.
It certainly seems inefficient to retrofit it into existing homes and homesites -- digging, plumbing, etc etc.
But what about *new* construction of subdivisions? This crossed my mind the last time I went to suburbia -- the development I was in had for every group of houses a pond/wetland pretty much in the center around them. What if you made this water feature a part of the geothermal cooling process when you built everything?
The return water from the houses could be pumped into a fountain (gaining evaporative cooling) and the supply water could be taken from the cooler water at the bottom; presumably a non-trivial amount of cooling would be done on the buried portions running to/from the houses.
This would in effect be not much different from the huge evaporative cooling towers that supply chilled water to the downtown buildings around me. It would add a "pretty" water feature to the homes around it and it wouldn't be astronomical to build since there'd already be tons of digging going on.
The downside would be that it wouldn't do anything for heat in the winter and the water would presumably require some serious filtration to keep the water systems functioning. I'm not terribly clear on the amount of water it would take to keep such a system for 10, 2500 sq ft houses cool in 90+ degree weather. It'd be a drag if the pond was too small and the water got too warm; perhaps burying a large loop beneath the pond for the supply side would add some cooling to it.
There has to be prior art. I remember looking at JPEGs in at least 1992/3 and I remember somebody selling a proprietary board for Macs that did hardware JPEG compression at about the same time.
1) Qwest doesn't want any more bad press or anymore state regulators breathing down their neck about their business practices and hence doesn't pursue further sales of marketing data. This is desired outcome, I think.
2) Qwest is so desperate for cash they will sell anything, and they decide to start selling customer info to anyone. This is a likely outcome, money and corporations being what they are.
Unix admins also invest a lot of ego into what they do, which probably accounts for some of the skill/dedication/competance.
It also makes a lot of them know-it-all, pain-in-the-asses to work with. The NT people I've worked with are usually a lot less wrapped up in being NT people (understandably) and are a little bit more flexible.
I often wonder if non-technical management picks up on this as well -- soft skills like that are often highly regarded, and even if it doesn't involve a deliberate conspiracy it may be something they're subconciously aware of.
I hate caddies, but I do like something other than bare optical storage. I understand that the original CD spec included the box/caddy as part of the medium (ala Minidisc or DVD-RAM carts).
They'd be bulkier, but ultimately simpler to use/store.
Any it does not cost money to survey, drill, extract, store, transport, store again, refine, store again, transport again, store again, and then dispense petroleum distallates (crude -> gasoline)? Just because half of that labor is done at far lower cost than farm workers (who have a strong lobby with bought politicians) by workers of oil companies who have their own competing political pawns?
Turning crude oil in the ground on the Arabian peninsula into gasoline in my midwestern car tank takes both money and energy, you're absolutely right.
But if Ethanol *consumes* more energy than it takes to make it, where is the benfit? We need to come up with an agrifuel that allows us to make a net gain in energy, not just balance the equation.
1) Umm, giving away free money to motivate people only motivates them to take free money. You can't fix the overproduction of corn by subsidizing its further overproduction.
2) "Several types of insect resistant hybrids" -- WOW, we've solved the pest and fertilization problems ALL IN ONE FELL SWOOP.
3) Made up numbers, but made up for a point -- how much energy does it take to make ethanol vs. how much you get out of it? If we're burning 10 barrels of oil to make anything less than 15 barrels of ethanol we're clearly just rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic.
4) With the engines in my cars. How spec'd out are there for high ethanol? I've only seen a VERY short list of Fords and maybe a Chevy or two that can run high/all ethanol. I don't drive one.
I'm not opposed to fuels created from plants grown in the ground.
The bad things with Ethanol are:
1) Its a false economy. Subsidized by lots of taxpayer dollars (direct, and indirect via forcing it into mixtures with gas). Its really just a crutch for farmers who can't quit the corn habit and ADM, which can't quit the free-government-money habit.
2) It mostly (exclusively?) uses corn as its source, and I'm not convinced that corn is the best crop to provide a fuel source. What about hemp or some other crop that might require less insecticide, fertilizer, etc etc.
3) It's kind of fuel-intensive to make. Planting, harvesting, fertilizing, insecticiding, AND DISTILLING all take machines that use fuel. If you get 20 gallons per acre (totally made-up) and you use 20 gallons per acre (again, totally made up) to make it, how "fuel efficient" is it?
4) There have been complaints about ethanol wreaking havoc with engines. I'm pretty sure I've seen warnings in owners manuals not to use too high of an ethanol concentration.
I'm sure there's a plant-to-fuel combination thats a winner -- low mechnical input to growth and harvesting, low energy input to distillation. Unfortunately I don't think ethanol is it -- its a way to get more money to corn farms in the midwest with some marginal pollution and oil dependency benefits.
Walking is key, especially if you can walk with some vigor. Not eating fast food is really important, although "no matter what" is a bit extreme. I indulge sometimes, but its always when its that or not eating at all, usually once per month.
You want to stop eating *when you're not hungry*, not when you're full. Being full is a sign of having eaten too much.
As for who it would and wouldn't work for, I'd imagine it would work for just about everyone. Look at a lot of European countries where walking and non-fast-food diets are the norm -- how many fat people do you see?
Slashdot Mirror
Do they make phones that can actually take a real sample for ringtone, or is it just a bunch of MIDI-style notes programming?
If you could get a sample, you could actually put in a sample of a real Bell telephone ringing, which might be pretty amusing.
Aren't the newer missions more specifically focused than the old missions? Ie, they have a small, highly defined endpoint they have to get to and the designs are built to do that one mission.
Seems that the older missions ("Fly that way until your battery runs out") were purposefully vague and required a spacecraft with a higher amount of durability due to the squishiness of the mission.
It's like comparing dispisable watches to a Rolex.
I have a Timex Marathon 100 digital watch I bought in 1986 for $35. I have worn it daily since then and have only changed the battery 4 times and it works fine.
Someone I know who has a Rolex paid over $2000 for it and they are "supposed" to send it in for cleaning every 3-5 years (which runs about $500).
What was that about disposable watches and Rolexes?
Duh, Richard Thompson is one of the 20 most talented guitar players in the world, who has been around since the 60's. He is in that less than 1%. How much does the the most talented laywer, doctor, programmer, or used car salesman for that matter make?
If he's so talented, why is he so cheap? For $10k we could hire him for our neighborhood block party. I think he represents the "workman" side of the music business, not the megabucks pinnacle. A small but loyal fan base.
The bands that play nightly at the Bottom of the hill for 200 people is the professional equivilent of a doctor that's just out of medical school practicing two days a week. Is it any surprise they make no money?
Control of properity that you own is a political right.
But that's what the Soviets said. The theorists behind democracy reasoned that political rights *came* from ownership of private property; rights over something you own are absolute, they aren't given to you by someone else. If the people as a whole own all the land and means of production they are less subject to the tyranny of government.
Yep, it proteted people in that bastion of civil rights, the Soviet Union.
There was no private property in the Soviet Union, which is why there was no freedom.
There is no "right" to control other people's properity.
Which is why private property is the basis for freedom, according to classical Liberal political thought.
It gets scary when most of the private property is controlled by a small group of people who use the rhetoric of liberty and property to advance an agenda that denies rights like freedom of speech to non-property holders.
Doesn't it depend on the performer and what they bring with them?
I saw Richard Thompson play last winter and the rumor I had heard was that he was getting $10k per concert. It was a solo accoustic show, and he traveled with maybe his manager and a single sound guy.
If you played 20 shows in 3 months (one every 5 days), you'd have $200k, even less taxes and expenses you'd have close to $100k free and clear.
A band comprised of 5 guys, a manager and a roadie/sound guy is going to need more money, less stuff and more touring to make money EVEN AT $10k per show -- you just can feed, house and pay 7 people very well on that kind of money.
The sweet spot for most performers is when they get to the point when they can fill a 1,000-2,000 seat venue @ $30 per seat consistently and can net out $15-20K per show. By playing smaller venues they presumably pay less money in rental, haul less gear around with them, require fewer roadies, and generally overal lower operating expenses.
You're not getting rich doing this, but if you can make $2-300K per year free and clear doing it, what's wrong with that? It sure sounds like a better lifestyle than 98% of the population lives, and 99.9999 percent of the world lives.
I guess the biggest objection some people will have is that when you make political rights dependent on ownership of property, a lot of people who don't own property lose their rights.
A lot of people say that mass ownership of property guarantees political rights, since the control of ownership limits the power base of the government or other property owners.
I think our world is turning in a scary world of property being concentrated into the hands of a few who tout the rights granted by their property ownership, which is really is an end run around the implied political rights of others.
Administrators aren't sure what anybody needs that kind of bandwidth for yet, but they are curious to see how it gets used.
At a wildly conservative estimate of $75 per run, that's over $1 million being spent "to see what happens." I'm all in favor of the experimental nature of the University and I'm strongly in favor of trying to buy ahead of the curve where possible.
But...couldn't an experiment to see what everyone might do with 1 Gbps fiber be scaled to a quarter of that size or even a tenth of that size and the rest of the money spent on other equipment or infrastructure needs?
It might future-proof them, but AFAIK Gbit ethernet is running just fine on four pair Cat 5, which they probably already have installed. The annoying nature of fiber optics has IMHO kept it from being "the next step" in end-user distributive network technology -- it's fragile, complex to fix and the interfaces are more expensive and non-standard on most equipment that 16k people would use.
Given the budget crunches that most states are feeling, it seems strangely inappropriate to blow at least $1 million to see what happens (yes, CWRU gets money from Ohio).
At least on a bunch of the HP Netserver models we've used - LX Pro, LH3, LH4, etc. They seemed to have dropped it on the smaller 2U and 1U models like the 1000 and 2000 due to lack of space or something.
It's too bad there's not a standardized motherboard resource (built-in PCI device, etc)for LCD displays like this; OS and app vendors would then be able to utilize it out of the box.
The idiotic thing is the displays on our LH3s and LH4s didn't show much and were useless, even with the "interactive" buttons that let you cruise around like on a printer. If they could display system load, temperature, yadda yadda they would be be much more useful.
Of course we know the logical conclusion to LCD displays on the front of computers -- someobody will have to have a full-blown 6" color LCD display on the front of the machine...
Qwest may have to sell off some businesses, but they own too much local loop to dry up and blow away.
I just don't see the former US West infrastructure being junked.
Can it be made any more efficiently than corn-based ethanol? Hempseed or other oil-bearing plants?
Sounds like it will muss up a clean running IP network like IPX did. If so, no thanks.
But nothing IPX can do is worse than someone with a lot of bandwidth and a duplicate IP address can do.
IPX without SAP/RIP spoofing was murder on really, really low-bandwidth WAN links or cheesy imitations thereof that used long-haul bridges.
But IPX (and Appletalk) had a lot of *good* things about them, too that take much more work and much more complexity to achieve in IP. Automatic client node addressing -- it just works in IPX, in IP it takes a whole infrastructure (DHCP server, integration with DNS, etc).
Service location -- it just worked with IPX SAP. SLP (at least the little exposure I had with it and Netware 5) was mind-numbingly complicated and often relied on multicast.
No shortage of addresses, either - IPX gave you 32 bits of network addressing and 48 bits of node addressing.
I'd love in-game live audio chat, especially for FPS that have objective maps. They would greatly benefit from users being able to actually attempt a real strategy rather than the chaos that reigns now.
It would have been interesting to have a 4-way system running code-morphing chips that could target multiple CPUs and a meta-OS that would allow you to run multiple OSs (Mac OS, Windows, BSD, Sun, etc) on the same machine at the same time.
I'm not sure who would want one other than cross-platform developers, but it would have been interesting.
A big benefit of air conditioning is a huge boon to museums. Works of art and historical items are much more easily preserved in temperature/humidity controlled environments that air conditioning systems provide.
We went to the MFA in Boston 2-3 years ago in the summer and I was kind of appalled at the lack of A/C in vast stretches of the museum, including the furniture and decorative arts wings. I'm sure paintings benefit greatly from stable environments, but the wood furniture REALLY benefits from not constantly warping the summer and contracting in the winter.
Although one could reason that most of the furniture made prior to the invention of A/C had been naturally subject to that and the woodworkers of the era built a lot of floating joints that could tolerate it, but its got to be hard on the laminates and inlays.
It certainly seems inefficient to retrofit it into existing homes and homesites -- digging, plumbing, etc etc.
But what about *new* construction of subdivisions? This crossed my mind the last time I went to suburbia -- the development I was in had for every group of houses a pond/wetland pretty much in the center around them. What if you made this water feature a part of the geothermal cooling process when you built everything?
The return water from the houses could be pumped into a fountain (gaining evaporative cooling) and the supply water could be taken from the cooler water at the bottom; presumably a non-trivial amount of cooling would be done on the buried portions running to/from the houses.
This would in effect be not much different from the huge evaporative cooling towers that supply chilled water to the downtown buildings around me. It would add a "pretty" water feature to the homes around it and it wouldn't be astronomical to build since there'd already be tons of digging going on.
The downside would be that it wouldn't do anything for heat in the winter and the water would presumably require some serious filtration to keep the water systems functioning. I'm not terribly clear on the amount of water it would take to keep such a system for 10, 2500 sq ft houses cool in 90+ degree weather. It'd be a drag if the pond was too small and the water got too warm; perhaps burying a large loop beneath the pond for the supply side would add some cooling to it.
There has to be prior art. I remember looking at JPEGs in at least 1992/3 and I remember somebody selling a proprietary board for Macs that did hardware JPEG compression at about the same time.
You can look at it two ways:
1) Qwest doesn't want any more bad press or anymore state regulators breathing down their neck about their business practices and hence doesn't pursue further sales of marketing data. This is desired outcome, I think.
2) Qwest is so desperate for cash they will sell anything, and they decide to start selling customer info to anyone. This is a likely outcome, money and corporations being what they are.
I guess it's true - you do get what you pay for.
Unix admins also invest a lot of ego into what they do, which probably accounts for some of the skill/dedication/competance.
It also makes a lot of them know-it-all, pain-in-the-asses to work with. The NT people I've worked with are usually a lot less wrapped up in being NT people (understandably) and are a little bit more flexible.
I often wonder if non-technical management picks up on this as well -- soft skills like that are often highly regarded, and even if it doesn't involve a deliberate conspiracy it may be something they're subconciously aware of.
I hate caddies, but I do like something other than bare optical storage. I understand that the original CD spec included the box/caddy as part of the medium (ala Minidisc or DVD-RAM carts).
They'd be bulkier, but ultimately simpler to use/store.
But won't they get pissed when they find out what the royalty payments are?
Any it does not cost money to survey, drill, extract, store, transport, store again, refine, store again, transport again, store again, and then dispense petroleum distallates (crude -> gasoline)? Just because half of that labor is done at far lower cost than farm workers (who have a strong lobby with bought politicians) by workers of oil companies who have their own competing political pawns?
Turning crude oil in the ground on the Arabian peninsula into gasoline in my midwestern car tank takes both money and energy, you're absolutely right.
But if Ethanol *consumes* more energy than it takes to make it, where is the benfit? We need to come up with an agrifuel that allows us to make a net gain in energy, not just balance the equation.
1) Umm, giving away free money to motivate people only motivates them to take free money. You can't fix the overproduction of corn by subsidizing its further overproduction.
2) "Several types of insect resistant hybrids" -- WOW, we've solved the pest and fertilization problems ALL IN ONE FELL SWOOP.
3) Made up numbers, but made up for a point -- how much energy does it take to make ethanol vs. how much you get out of it? If we're burning 10 barrels of oil to make anything less than 15 barrels of ethanol we're clearly just rearranging deck chairs on the Titantic.
4) With the engines in my cars. How spec'd out are there for high ethanol? I've only seen a VERY short list of Fords and maybe a Chevy or two that can run high/all ethanol. I don't drive one.
I'm not opposed to fuels created from plants grown in the ground.
The bad things with Ethanol are:
1) Its a false economy. Subsidized by lots of taxpayer dollars (direct, and indirect via forcing it into mixtures with gas). Its really just a crutch for farmers who can't quit the corn habit and ADM, which can't quit the free-government-money habit.
2) It mostly (exclusively?) uses corn as its source, and I'm not convinced that corn is the best crop to provide a fuel source. What about hemp or some other crop that might require less insecticide, fertilizer, etc etc.
3) It's kind of fuel-intensive to make. Planting, harvesting, fertilizing, insecticiding, AND DISTILLING all take machines that use fuel. If you get 20 gallons per acre (totally made-up) and you use 20 gallons per acre (again, totally made up) to make it, how "fuel efficient" is it?
4) There have been complaints about ethanol wreaking havoc with engines. I'm pretty sure I've seen warnings in owners manuals not to use too high of an ethanol concentration.
I'm sure there's a plant-to-fuel combination thats a winner -- low mechnical input to growth and harvesting, low energy input to distillation. Unfortunately I don't think ethanol is it -- its a way to get more money to corn farms in the midwest with some marginal pollution and oil dependency benefits.
It's amazing how simple it can be.
Walking is key, especially if you can walk with some vigor. Not eating fast food is really important, although "no matter what" is a bit extreme. I indulge sometimes, but its always when its that or not eating at all, usually once per month.
You want to stop eating *when you're not hungry*, not when you're full. Being full is a sign of having eaten too much.
As for who it would and wouldn't work for, I'd imagine it would work for just about everyone. Look at a lot of European countries where walking and non-fast-food diets are the norm -- how many fat people do you see?