Yah right. Bill Walker at Motorola ditched all of their desktop PPC-powered machines in favor of Dells. If they won't even eat their own dogfood, you can be sure they're not working hard to make it taste good.
I seriously doubt that a culture on the moon would be the hallmark of individual freedom.
Anywhere where a man's circumstances force him to rely on others for survival - that dependency will necessarily cause subjugation. Either political or economic. Those in control of the needed resources (in this case, probably air), will be tempted, and ultimately yeild to the temptation, to use that resource for their individual gain.
Now, on a larger scale, until such a colony becomes self reliant, the same will play out for the colony as a whole. Once the colony gains independence, the individual members sure as hell won't, or their masters can simply shut off the air.
On Earth, a rebel can always go "on the lam" hide in the woods, applying survival skills, living off the land. For a while, evading authorities, and therefore, being free. Not at all possible in space.
"On the other hand, interceptor missiles are pretty useless against the types of projectiles in this scenario, at the very least it's a MUCH harder job"
Sure, but can you hit any targets accurately from 200000 miles away? Without risking unacceptable collateral damage.
Long before this becomes a threat, the REAL threat to military world domination will be: Posession of large numbers of nuclear warheads, along with a wide range of delivery methods from cruise missiles to ICBMs to artillary shells, to SLBMs to TBMs, to deployment from LEO - combined with an array of defensive technologies like PAC-3, THAAD, and NMD.
Striking with impunity is what it's all about.
This will happen within the next 5-10 years. Projectiles from the moon will not happen in that time-frame. Therefore, any attempt to achieve that capability will necessarily be blocked.
The REAL fight you should concern yourself with is the USs stated goal of no longer allowing other nations to launch spy or GPS-type satellites, and the US developing the capability to eliminate such satellites. The high frontier is where the next war (actually the last several - but they were one-sided) will be fought, if the combatants are serious about winning. There's a LOT of high-frontier territory to conquer between here and the moon.
A mass-driver installation under construction could easily be targeted from space before coming operational. The US already has the technology to develop this capability. Whether it's from a high-altitude airborne laser pointing UP (no atmospheric interference on either end) or from a nuclear warhead - the Chinese lobbing rocks at us from the moon just ain't never gonna happen. That's pure fantasy.
There's a big, big difference between getting TO the moon, and establishing a base there. And another order of magnatude difference between a permanent base, and one from which one could launch an attack.
For the next 100 years AT LEAST, the main threat will be from LEO-based weapons.
Controlling the high-ground is fine and dandy (and absolutely necessary today), and yes, doing The Moon is a good way to develop the necessary technologies to get there. But we're going to be fighting over LEO first. And for a very long time. Long before 0wnz0ring the moon becomes an issue of concern.
There are PLENTY of Microsoft enthusiasts out there who would kill or die for a chance to peek at the source code, to attempt to address, or at least understand observed buggy behavior.
That's the whole POINT of Open Source.
Last year, I spent 4 weeks working with Microsoft Developer support trying to figure out why Win2k was behaving the way it was. And if I or any of my co workers could just have looked at the source code, we would have at least had a shot at fixing it. In the end, Microsoft admitted that they could not find a developer who understood how this particular component worked (WFP), nor could they commit the resources to look at the code to figure it out. Bottom line was - we were given free reign to define the Official Documented Microsoft Behavior as, what we observed. As opposed to what Microsoft had Documented.
Simply outspending your competition does not win any wars.
About a zillion f*cked companies have proven that while spending a lot of money makes you look like you're growing, and fools people into buying your stock - - but only for a while.
The WAY that America spends it's defense dollar is simply insane. Allowing defense contractors to consolidate until there are one or two left, and simply alternating big contracts to make sure that two competitors remain in the feild does NOT guarantee that competition exists, or that you'll enjoy it's fruits.
We may be outspending our competition, but we're not out-competing them. The environment of favoritism and corporate welfare that has become so pervasive for the past 30 years is going to be our undoing.
Fine - but exactly what level of extraordinary evidence is required for a claim of a given extraordinariness? Is it a linear relationship, or exponential? Is this relationship quantifyable? Or does it depend on how skeptical is the person you're trying to convince?
In that case - to each his own. You've thrown empiricism out the window again.
That's why I believe it's turtles. Turtles, all the way down, man!
It's one thing to hold an opinion, even one that sounds probably correct.
It's quite another to *know* based on hard data.
And right now - there's no hard data, except for what we've got from Viking. . . and perhaps what we know about organic chemistry in space dust from meteorites. . .
And repubs wonder why people are so terrified of nuclear power. I guess these Russians were lucky they lived in a Communist country. Could you imagine what would've happened to the property values? If that had happened in the US, it would annihilate the economy based on that bit alone. As it is, nobody with property on the Columbia R. in Washington can sell for 1/10th what it was worth in the 1960's. . .
Plutonium and Tritium for Soviet nuclear weapons is produced at three closely guarded locations, each of which includes a "closed" city of workers. These cities do not appear on maps, and until recently, travel to and from them was all but prohibited. Even now, foreign visitors have been allowed to see only two of the sites. Each of the sites has an official name, often including a number that indicates a post office address, but each was known by another name or names abroad as well as in the Soviet Union. The complex officially known as Chelyabinsk-40 is located in Chelyabinsk province, about 15 kilometers east of the city of Kyshtym on the east side of the southern Urals. It is situated in the area around Lake Kyzyltash, in the upper Techa River drainage basin among numerous other interconnected lakes. Between Lake Kyzyltash and Lake Irtyash is Chelyabinsk-65, the military-industrial city once called Beria, but today inhabitants call it Sorokovka("forties town").
Another Mayak laboratory, the All-Union Institute of Technical Physics, is located just east of the Urals, 20 kilometers north of Kasli. It is better known by its post office box, Chelyabinsk-70. It was opened in 1955, shortly after the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory opened in the United States.
Chelyabinsk-65, was reported to have 83,000 inhabitants and "almost 100,000 people." Chelyabinsk-40, the reactor complex, covers some 90 square kilometers, according to a recent ministry report, and is run by the production association Mayak("beacon" or "lighthouse"). All the reactors are located near the southeast shore of Lake Kyzyltash and relied on open-cycle cooling: water from the lake was pumped directly through the core.
Probably fashioned after the U.S. Hanford Reservation in the state of Washington, Chelyabinsk-40 was the first Soviet plutonium production complex. Construction was started on the first buildings of the new city in November 1945. Some 70,000 inmates from 12 labor camps were reportedly used to build the complex. It is here that the physicist Igor Kurchatov, working under Stalin's deputy Lavrenti Beria, built the first plutonium production reactor, called "Anotchka" or A Reactor, in just 18 months.
The people of the Chelyabinsk Region have suffered no less than three nuclear disasters: For over six years, the Mayak complex systematically dumped radioactive waste into the Techa River, the only source of water for the 24 villages which lined its banks. The four largest of those villages were never evacuated, and only recently have the authorities revealed to the population why they strung barbed wire along the banks of the river some 35 years ago. Today, as a result of Kyshtym-57's (a local environmental group lead by Louisa Korzhova) fight for radiation victims, a new law was introduced which allows residents of Muslyumovo to resettle themselves elsewhere. Unfortunately, the new law is limited only to one village.
In 1957, the area suffered its next calamity when the cooling system of a radioactive waste containment unit malfunctioned and exploded. About two million curies spread throughout the region, exposing to radiation over a quarter million people. Less than half of one percent of these people were evacuated, and some of those only after years had passed.
The third disaster came ten years later. The Mayak complex had been using Lake Karachay as a dumping basin for its radioactive waste since 1951. In 1967, a drought reduced the water level of the lake, and gale-force winds spread the radioactive dust throughout twenty-five thousand square kilometers, further irradiating half a million people with five million curies.
Chelyabinsk-40, or the Kyshtym complex is best known to the outside world as the site of a disastrous explosion in 1957, only recently acknowledged by Soviet officialdom. The tanks were entirely immersed in, and cooled by, water. But the monitoring system was defective.
look at Bush's sorry environmental record in Texas, and guess again.
Hint: allowing logging companies to harvest trees off of public lands (ie. Land that belongs to Taxpayers like you and I) does not reduce forest fires, and does not benefit the environment.
Lawyer1: hey dude, nice Prosh man, what are you doing this week? Lawyer2: Oh, I talked some sucker failing software company into a frivolous IP lawsuit binge. L1: Righteous!
Fortunately, this did not happen in the Professional Killer industry. We're still in high-demand, have not been outsourced, and there's no glut in sight for the good, highly skilled, discreet, assassin.
But the problem is - that skillset doesn't seem to be in demand at the HR/hiring level. If you're lucky enough to get the attention of a manager or team lead who likes what you do, great, you're IN. But if you send a resume to a company, and you're neither a programmer, nor a phone monkey, nor a network admin (which seems to consist entirely of being an Exchange guru these days) they just don't seem to know what to do with you.
What do you do? I fix stuff. What? I solve problems that programmers don't seem to grasp - you know, OS, hardware configuration, dependencies, security issues. .. You're a network Admin? No. I can reset passwords, or run an Exchange server, or any of the normal run of the mill tasks, but I do something that's more valuable than that - I fix stuff. I solve problems. But (blinders on) we don't have those kind of problems. . .
Without mentioning any names, There are actually a TON of solutions out there. And about 1999 lbs. of Garbage. The problem is, many of the systems require a TON of customization work, which when you figure out the costs, in reality, you end up spending about as much as rolling your own would cost. (which is a VERY strong argument for an Open Source solution).
Just don't get stuck with a bad one. m'kay?
Do your homework - because every time someone spends money on a bad solution, a bad company stays in business that much longer - you're doing a gross disservice to the rest of the market. (I currently have experience with two document management systems which are BOTH COMPLETE CRAP).
Damn, I thought he said "you hack a bride together"
Usually, you hack a bride apart - unless your last name is Frankenstein, where I suppose you would hack one together, but would it almost certainly fail?
Slashdot Mirror
actually, more oil on the road refreshes the asphalt, makes it more supple.
You mean, if you buy less gas and drive more miles, you'll pay higher taxes? This is a tax on cars with good milage. That sucks.
Yah right. Bill Walker at Motorola ditched all of their desktop PPC-powered machines in favor of Dells. If they won't even eat their own dogfood, you can be sure they're not working hard to make it taste good.
I seriously doubt that a culture on the moon would be the hallmark of individual freedom.
Anywhere where a man's circumstances force him to rely on others for survival - that dependency will necessarily cause subjugation. Either political or economic. Those in control of the needed resources (in this case, probably air), will be tempted, and ultimately yeild to the temptation, to use that resource for their individual gain.
Now, on a larger scale, until such a colony becomes self reliant, the same will play out for the colony as a whole. Once the colony gains independence, the individual members sure as hell won't, or their masters can simply shut off the air.
On Earth, a rebel can always go "on the lam" hide in the woods, applying survival skills, living off the land. For a while, evading authorities, and therefore, being free. Not at all possible in space.
"On the other hand, interceptor missiles are pretty useless against the types of projectiles in this scenario, at the very least it's a MUCH harder job"
Sure, but can you hit any targets accurately from 200000 miles away? Without risking unacceptable collateral damage.
Long before this becomes a threat, the REAL threat to military world domination will be:
Posession of large numbers of nuclear warheads, along with a wide range of delivery methods from cruise missiles to ICBMs to artillary shells, to SLBMs to TBMs, to deployment from LEO - combined with an array of defensive technologies like PAC-3, THAAD, and NMD.
Striking with impunity is what it's all about.
This will happen within the next 5-10 years. Projectiles from the moon will not happen in that time-frame. Therefore, any attempt to achieve that capability will necessarily be blocked.
The REAL fight you should concern yourself with is the USs stated goal of no longer allowing other nations to launch spy or GPS-type satellites, and the US developing the capability to eliminate such satellites. The high frontier is where the next war (actually the last several - but they were one-sided) will be fought, if the combatants are serious about winning. There's a LOT of high-frontier territory to conquer between here and the moon.
A mass-driver installation under construction could easily be targeted from space before coming operational. The US already has the technology to develop this capability. Whether it's from a high-altitude airborne laser pointing UP (no atmospheric interference on either end) or from a nuclear warhead - the Chinese lobbing rocks at us from the moon just ain't never gonna happen. That's pure fantasy.
There's a big, big difference between getting TO the moon, and establishing a base there. And another order of magnatude difference between a permanent base, and one from which one could launch an attack.
For the next 100 years AT LEAST, the main threat will be from LEO-based weapons.
Controlling the high-ground is fine and dandy (and absolutely necessary today), and yes, doing The Moon is a good way to develop the necessary technologies to get there. But we're going to be fighting over LEO first. And for a very long time. Long before 0wnz0ring the moon becomes an issue of concern.
business process? You mean like this?
http://www.sei.cmu.edu/cmm/cmm.html
There's a right way, and a wrong way to do this stuff. If it's done incorrectly, the next version of Windows we'll see will be Windows 2020.
Apparently, the guys who invented CMM weren't privy to the awful realities of running an actual Software Development business.
There are PLENTY of Microsoft enthusiasts out there who would kill or die for a chance to peek at the source code, to attempt to address, or at least understand observed buggy behavior.
That's the whole POINT of Open Source.
Last year, I spent 4 weeks working with Microsoft Developer support trying to figure out why Win2k was behaving the way it was. And if I or any of my co workers could just have looked at the source code, we would have at least had a shot at fixing it. In the end, Microsoft admitted that they could not find a developer who understood how this particular component worked (WFP), nor could they commit the resources to look at the code to figure it out. Bottom line was - we were given free reign to define the Official Documented Microsoft Behavior as, what we observed. As opposed to what Microsoft had Documented.
In other words, BAH!
As a Lockheed-Martin employee, recently laid off from a busted dotcom, I'd tend to agree. . .
Simply outspending your competition does not win any wars.
About a zillion f*cked companies have proven that while spending a lot of money makes you look like you're growing, and fools people into buying your stock - - but only for a while.
The WAY that America spends it's defense dollar is simply insane. Allowing defense contractors to consolidate until there are one or two left, and simply alternating big contracts to make sure that two competitors remain in the feild does NOT guarantee that competition exists, or that you'll enjoy it's fruits.
We may be outspending our competition, but we're not out-competing them. The environment of favoritism and corporate welfare that has become so pervasive for the past 30 years is going to be our undoing.
Fine - but exactly what level of extraordinary evidence is required for a claim of a given extraordinariness? Is it a linear relationship, or exponential? Is this relationship quantifyable? Or does it depend on how skeptical is the person you're trying to convince?
In that case - to each his own. You've thrown empiricism out the window again.
That's why I believe it's turtles. Turtles, all the way down, man!
It's one thing to hold an opinion, even one that sounds probably correct.
It's quite another to *know* based on hard data.
And right now - there's no hard data, except for what we've got from Viking. . . and perhaps what we know about organic chemistry in space dust from meteorites. . .
We are in the middle.
. . . of OUR frame of reference.
. . . if we're not alone, that's scary for THEM.
. . . and they kept this SECRET for decades.
And repubs wonder why people are so terrified of nuclear power. I guess these Russians were lucky they lived in a Communist country. Could you imagine what would've happened to the property values? If that had happened in the US, it would annihilate the economy based on that bit alone. As it is, nobody with property on the Columbia R. in Washington can sell for 1/10th what it was worth in the 1960's. . .
The Most Contaminated
Spot on the Planet
Chelyabinsk Nuclear Disasters
Plutonium and Tritium for Soviet nuclear weapons is produced at three closely guarded locations, each of which includes a "closed" city of workers. These cities do not appear on maps, and until recently, travel to and from them was all but prohibited. Even now, foreign visitors have been allowed to see only two of the sites. Each of the sites has an official name, often including a number that indicates a post office address, but each was known by another name or names abroad as well as in the Soviet Union.
The complex officially known as Chelyabinsk-40 is located in Chelyabinsk province, about 15 kilometers east of the city of Kyshtym on the east side of the southern Urals. It is situated in the area around Lake Kyzyltash, in the upper Techa River drainage basin among numerous other interconnected lakes. Between Lake Kyzyltash and Lake Irtyash is Chelyabinsk-65, the military-industrial city once called Beria, but today inhabitants call it Sorokovka("forties town").
Another Mayak laboratory, the All-Union Institute of Technical Physics, is located just east of the Urals, 20 kilometers north of Kasli. It is better known by its post office box, Chelyabinsk-70. It was opened in 1955, shortly after the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory opened in the United States.
Chelyabinsk-65, was reported to have 83,000 inhabitants and "almost 100,000 people." Chelyabinsk-40, the reactor complex, covers some 90 square kilometers, according to a recent ministry report, and is run by the production association Mayak("beacon" or "lighthouse"). All the reactors are located near the southeast shore of Lake Kyzyltash and relied on open-cycle cooling: water from the lake was pumped directly through the core.
Probably fashioned after the U.S. Hanford Reservation in the state of Washington, Chelyabinsk-40 was the first Soviet plutonium production complex. Construction was started on the first buildings of the new city in November 1945. Some 70,000 inmates from 12 labor camps were reportedly used to build the complex. It is here that the physicist Igor Kurchatov, working under Stalin's deputy Lavrenti Beria, built the first plutonium production reactor, called "Anotchka" or A Reactor, in just 18 months.
The people of the Chelyabinsk Region have suffered no less than three nuclear disasters:
For over six years, the Mayak complex systematically dumped radioactive waste into the Techa River, the only source of water for the 24 villages which lined its banks. The four largest of those villages were never evacuated, and only recently have the authorities revealed to the population why they strung barbed wire along the banks of the river some 35 years ago. Today, as a result of Kyshtym-57's (a local environmental group lead by Louisa Korzhova) fight for radiation victims, a new law was introduced which allows residents of Muslyumovo to resettle themselves elsewhere. Unfortunately, the new law is limited only to one village.
In 1957, the area suffered its next calamity when the cooling system of a radioactive waste containment unit malfunctioned and exploded. About two million curies spread throughout the region, exposing to radiation over a quarter million people. Less than half of one percent of these people were evacuated, and some of those only after years had passed.
The third disaster came ten years later. The Mayak complex had been using Lake Karachay as a dumping basin for its radioactive waste since 1951. In 1967, a drought reduced the water level of the lake, and gale-force winds spread the radioactive dust throughout twenty-five thousand square kilometers, further irradiating half a million people with five million curies.
Chelyabinsk-40, or the Kyshtym complex is best known to the outside world as the site of a disastrous explosion in 1957, only recently acknowledged by Soviet officialdom. The tanks were entirely immersed in, and cooled by, water. But the monitoring system was defective.
actually, you DON'T want all that waste too close together in one place.
t tp://www.logtv.com/chelya/kyshtym.html
http://www.cdi.org/russia/johnson/7018-8.cfm
h
Too many fast neutrons + too much unstable material = Criticality
yes, because we all believe that these reactors will be built in someone else's neighborhood. Not ours.
look at Bush's sorry environmental record in Texas, and guess again.
Hint:
allowing logging companies to harvest trees off of public lands (ie. Land that belongs to Taxpayers like you and I) does not reduce forest fires, and does not benefit the environment.
Into the lawyer's pockets!
Lawyer1: hey dude, nice Prosh man, what are you doing this week?
Lawyer2: Oh, I talked some sucker failing software company into a frivolous IP lawsuit binge.
L1: Righteous!
Fortunately, this did not happen in the Professional Killer industry. We're still in high-demand, have not been outsourced, and there's no glut in sight for the good, highly skilled, discreet, assassin.
But the problem is - that skillset doesn't seem to be in demand at the HR/hiring level. If you're lucky enough to get the attention of a manager or team lead who likes what you do, great, you're IN. But if you send a resume to a company, and you're neither a programmer, nor a phone monkey, nor a network admin (which seems to consist entirely of being an Exchange guru these days) they just don't seem to know what to do with you.
.
What do you do?
I fix stuff.
What?
I solve problems that programmers don't seem to grasp - you know, OS, hardware configuration, dependencies, security issues. .
You're a network Admin?
No. I can reset passwords, or run an Exchange server, or any of the normal run of the mill tasks, but I do something that's more valuable than that - I fix stuff. I solve problems.
But (blinders on) we don't have those kind of problems. . .
Without mentioning any names, There are actually a TON of solutions out there. And about 1999 lbs. of Garbage. The problem is, many of the systems require a TON of customization work, which when you figure out the costs, in reality, you end up spending about as much as rolling your own would cost. (which is a VERY strong argument for an Open Source solution).
Just don't get stuck with a bad one. m'kay?
Do your homework - because every time someone spends money on a bad solution, a bad company stays in business that much longer - you're doing a gross disservice to the rest of the market. (I currently have experience with two document management systems which are BOTH COMPLETE CRAP).
Damn, I thought he said "you hack a bride together"
Usually, you hack a bride apart - unless your last name is Frankenstein, where I suppose you would hack one together, but would it almost certainly fail?