The future was a marketing ploy to make us all buy into the "brave new future" that industry was bringing us, as long as we kept investing and stopped unionizing.
I took a look at a Brand New Honda Accord 4-banger last week.
33 mpg Highway.
This morning, I drove my 30 year old aircooled Volkswagen to work, getting 36 mpg Highway. (the engine is actually based on a 50 year old design, which was based on a 90 year-old design made originally for small airplanes - ironically, this engine is the same as the Rotax 912 (as in Porsche 912), used to power our Predator unmanned surveilance planes).
So American auto manufacturers don't have a monopoly on crappy tech.
bah. wake me up when you (or anybody else for that matter) can come up with a way to define and or measure sentience.
Until then you're still fishing around in the dark.
Either humans have a sacred, divine spark, and therefore should not be murdered, or humans are no more sacred than fungus. Pick one or the other.
Cultural taboo? Now your really stretching it. Not all cultures have a taboo against murder. Just the ones that survived. In which case, the only reason to not kill people is where that person's life benefits society as a whole. And where it does not? Ever see Logan's Run? Solyent Green?
The economy is in the crapper for one reason and one reason only.
In 1999 Hugo Chavez said that he wanted a piece of the American Pie, and cut the supply of oil so prices would go up.
Essentially, high energy prices act as a Tax - and there's no service that is returned, and there's no loophole, so companies pass on the added expense to consumers, which curtail their spending in response, which creates a death-spiral that the economy's been in ever since.
Exactly. Instead of debugging like this, why don't you put some decent error-handling and logging functions into the code, or *gasp* use a debugger - oh yeah, that's right, in order to install a debugger onto a customer system in the Microsoft world, you need a Visual Studio license, and you risk upsetting the delicate balance of libraries on the system in question which totally changes the conditions and likely makes debugging impossible. Thanks a lot Microsoft. Too bad NT doesn't have a built in debugger like NetWare.
My first thought is; Toshiro Mifune as Goemon. (maybe 15 years ago. . .:(...
My impression from watching several episodes on Cartoon Network is that Lupin isn't really a thief, per-se, rather, he tends to prefer foiling other criminals' plans by either stealing from them, or pre-emptively stealing something that the other criminal was going to steal - and later the valuable object or money ends up getting returned or destroyed anyway. (seems the insurance companies are the big losers here).
One other observation - Castle Cagliostro was an awesome movie - and Steven Speilberg is quoted back in the 80's as claiming it to be the greatest action-adventure movie of all-time. I don't think he's too far off.
" OS X is a borderline flop -- it's only got 10% of the userbase, and has pretty much been rejected as "not ready" by most of the professional community,"
eh? where have you been. Linux people have been adopting OS X like crazy for the past two years.
At A Previous Employer Who Shall Remain Nameless: (product is still on the market)
We had a product which did (we'll call it "X") and tracked all it's information in a "database" we built in-house. The primary architect, of course, was a pretty sharp guy. He had written a whitepaper for the company stating why he thought "unix was dead" and why we should not waste our time, as a company, developing "portable" products, and that we should take full advantage of Microsoft's technologies on Windows.
As far as ACID test goes, NONE of those elements existed in this "database" we used. Nor were there any verification, export, import, or repair tools initially available.
As soon as this product scaled to a reasonable level, (the field was always one step ahead of our test lab, as far as scaling the application goes), we started seeing weird crashes and corruption that we just could not reproduce or isolate in the lab. When the term "database corruption" was used, the architect would throw a fit, and blame some other component, denying that database corruption was even possible.
The absence of tools meant that we could not troubleshoot in the field. Developing tools was the equvalent of admitting that there was a problem. As we scaled our lab, in response, we started to uncover these problems. This was when our architect resigned. His job had suddenly changed from "Technical Primadonna" to "beleaguered fixer of uncounted bugs".
That's when we REALLY started to get into trouble.
At some point, there was serious talk about ripping the whole database out and going to a "real" commercial database solution. Some third party thing. That was shortly before I left that job. But in the end - there was much suffering and pain, and the product lost a great deal of ground to it's competitors all due to a lack of Respect For Those Who Have Gone Before.
Generally, when a company's marketing budget exceeds it's R&D budget by mulitiples, you can tell that there's something other than merit selling the product.
I'd buy the sob story their very well-paid accountants came up with if it weren't for that fact.
That's the thing though - there's no guarantee that a patentholder is going to SELL his product responsibly.
They may charge YOU $80 a pill for an antibiotic, but they're charging Farmer John $80 for a 40lb bag of feed laced with the stuff. He makes a huge profit off of his 1st tier customer, you, but he also makes a profit off of Farmer John by selling in bulk, and there's no danger of you eating the animal feed so he doesn't cannibalize his own market. Farmer John's cows grow faster, sure. And his pasture patties become a breeding ground for the resistant strain. So there's no danger of market contamination, but if you're mountain-biking across a stream that just happens to run across Farmer John's land, you could very well catch that bacteria. And there's really nobody to sue over it. Hey, bad things happen. That's tough for you, guy.
Ultimately, it's no skin off the drug company's nose, because they now have a brand new market to expand into, drugs for resistant-strains of bacteria.
Yes - the current economic downturn was spawned from Hugo Chavez' 1999 plan to "take a piece of the action" of America's booming economy. Oil prices spiked, Clinton tapped the strategic reserve, Enron fucked with the California power system causing rolling blackouts, which helped to cripple the main engine of the nation's economy by pushing SV dotcoms over the brink just as they were running out of venture capital. Microsoft didn't suffer from the blackouts, but they suffered from the DOJ case, which was backed out before any real actual damage was done to the company - only it's stock price was deflated, and of course, other tech companies suffered alongside.
Now, California, formerly the 6th largest economy in the world, is bankrupt, socked with oppressive energy contracts it was forced into during Enron and Dynergy's scamming. Millions of people who used to be worth millions of dollars are now being forced to liquidate all their posessions and property at fire sale prices, just to buy groceries.
" Nine out of 10 NCEs turn out to be duds by Phase III trials. Do the math on how much money the tenth one has to make"
This is the same argument the music industry uses, by the way. Creative accounting can appear to justify all kinds of bizzare stuff which turns out to be nothing more than a scam to line some CEO's pockets.
Most big pharma companies have a marketing budget that's 3 times the size of their R&D budget. So there's some math for you to put in your pipe and smoke.
Finally, as I said before, trials should NOT be funded by the company that stands to benefit from them. It's BASIC ETHICS.
Drug companies should NOT be testing their own drugs for safety, or even funding the tests. The tests should be funded by taxes on drugs, and performed by independent private labs, scrupulously examined to eliminate conflicts of interest.
When a given drug's tax has fully funded the safety testing (which, after all, was imposed by the government for the benefit of the public at large) - then the tax can expire.
Drug companies funding their own studies is like a programmer doing his own testing.
It is all about the oil. But a war and "grabbing" the oil isn't the goal.
The goal is to terrorize the markets for an extended period of time under the threat of war - so that oil remains above $40-60/bbl. This will have the effect of draining the remaining financial resources of the middle-class dry, to be absorbed by the upper-class. It keeps our economy in check, and funnels profits to the oil companies and traders. It also has the side effect of imposing legislation by over-spending to the point where the government has no choice but to cease operations because it's out of money. This has happened before, but this time, the government will be so far in debt that all those juicy public programs will cease, utterly, with no option to ever come back. This includes welfare, and social security. Furthermore, the government will not be able to afford the necessary resources to create or enforce laws against corporate fraud. It's an anarchist's dream.
And of course, the arabs won't embargo the oil, they're just going along with this all because they want to see higher prices. Higher prices= more profits for them. Demand won't drop like it did in the 70's because now, everybody has a giant SUV, and everybody's funds are drained, so they won't be able to go buy econoboxes.
Even so, the chances of the generator vaporizing over a city are zero.
1. Launch vehicles are destroyed by remote control if they stray outside of a mathematically-defined "cone" around their planned flight-path. This is always going to be at least several hundred miles away from any sizable population.
2. There's no launch vehicle destruction scenario that is anywhere near violent enough to damage an RTG casing enough to release radioactivity. Possibly striking the ground at thousands of miles per hour would do it - but no launch vehicle travels at that speed at any altitude anywhere near the ground. They get up pretty high before they accellerate to that speed, and if they turn around and point the wrong direction (down) for any reason, they're destroyed - no rocket=no thrust, no thrust=no high velocity impact. The casings for these things are tested in impact tests with rocket sleds slamming into concrete walls at hundreds, even thousands of miles per hour, and they survive intact.
Well, Bush is rich and successful, which PROVES he knows what he's doing. All rich and successful people are rich and successful for a reason, and therefore should be worshipped like gods and handed all control of the economy. These boozhwah Nobel Laureates and academics don't know jack squat about running the government like a business.
Naw, best ass-shot was in "Cruel Intentions" (I know, cheezy remake of another movie altogether), where she tells her step brother that if he wins the bet, he can have her and "anywhere you want", (as she's laying back on a bed, fully clothed) then she swings one leg up and over, showing him her ass - implying that she's up for anal.
THAT was the best ass shot without showing any flesh. Of all time.
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The future was a marketing ploy to make us all buy into the "brave new future" that industry was bringing us, as long as we kept investing and stopped unionizing.
I'm sure there are millions of Minnesota citizens who would buy any car designed in Canada.
Crappy American Tech?
I took a look at a Brand New Honda Accord 4-banger last week.
33 mpg Highway.
This morning, I drove my 30 year old aircooled Volkswagen to work, getting 36 mpg Highway. (the engine is actually based on a 50 year old design, which was based on a 90 year-old design made originally for small airplanes - ironically, this engine is the same as the Rotax 912 (as in Porsche 912), used to power our Predator unmanned surveilance planes).
So American auto manufacturers don't have a monopoly on crappy tech.
bah. wake me up when you (or anybody else for that matter) can come up with a way to define and or measure sentience.
Until then you're still fishing around in the dark.
Either humans have a sacred, divine spark, and therefore should not be murdered, or humans are no more sacred than fungus. Pick one or the other.
Cultural taboo? Now your really stretching it. Not all cultures have a taboo against murder. Just the ones that survived. In which case, the only reason to not kill people is where that person's life benefits society as a whole. And where it does not? Ever see Logan's Run? Solyent Green?
The economy is in the crapper for one reason and one reason only.
In 1999 Hugo Chavez said that he wanted a piece of the American Pie, and cut the supply of oil so prices would go up.
Essentially, high energy prices act as a Tax - and there's no service that is returned, and there's no loophole, so companies pass on the added expense to consumers, which curtail their spending in response, which creates a death-spiral that the economy's been in ever since.
Exactly.
Instead of debugging like this, why don't you put some decent error-handling and logging functions into the code, or *gasp* use a debugger - oh yeah, that's right, in order to install a debugger onto a customer system in the Microsoft world, you need a Visual Studio license, and you risk upsetting the delicate balance of libraries on the system in question which totally changes the conditions and likely makes debugging impossible. Thanks a lot Microsoft. Too bad NT doesn't have a built in debugger like NetWare.
My first thought is; :(...
Toshiro Mifune as Goemon.
(maybe 15 years ago. . .
My impression from watching several episodes on Cartoon Network is that Lupin isn't really a thief, per-se, rather, he tends to prefer foiling other criminals' plans by either stealing from them, or pre-emptively stealing something that the other criminal was going to steal - and later the valuable object or money ends up getting returned or destroyed anyway.
(seems the insurance companies are the big losers here).
One other observation -
Castle Cagliostro was an awesome movie - and Steven Speilberg is quoted back in the 80's as claiming it to be the greatest action-adventure movie of all-time. I don't think he's too far off.
" OS X is a borderline flop -- it's only got 10% of the userbase, and has pretty much been rejected as "not ready" by most of the professional community,"
eh? where have you been. Linux people have been adopting OS X like crazy for the past two years.
That's nothing.
Through the BSD layer, you can run software on OS X that was written much earlier than 1984. . .
At A Previous Employer Who Shall Remain Nameless:
(product is still on the market)
We had a product which did (we'll call it "X") and tracked all it's information in a "database" we built in-house. The primary architect, of course, was a pretty sharp guy. He had written a whitepaper for the company stating why he thought "unix was dead" and why we should not waste our time, as a company, developing "portable" products, and that we should take full advantage of Microsoft's technologies on Windows.
As far as ACID test goes, NONE of those elements existed in this "database" we used. Nor were there any verification, export, import, or repair tools initially available.
As soon as this product scaled to a reasonable level, (the field was always one step ahead of our test lab, as far as scaling the application goes), we started seeing weird crashes and corruption that we just could not reproduce or isolate in the lab. When the term "database corruption" was used, the architect would throw a fit, and blame some other component, denying that database corruption was even possible.
The absence of tools meant that we could not troubleshoot in the field. Developing tools was the equvalent of admitting that there was a problem. As we scaled our lab, in response, we started to uncover these problems. This was when our architect resigned. His job had suddenly changed from "Technical Primadonna" to "beleaguered fixer of uncounted bugs".
That's when we REALLY started to get into trouble.
At some point, there was serious talk about ripping the whole database out and going to a "real" commercial database solution. Some third party thing. That was shortly before I left that job. But in the end - there was much suffering and pain, and the product lost a great deal of ground to it's competitors all due to a lack of Respect For Those Who Have Gone Before.
Windows is Just Fine for me, it does everything I need it to do.
As soon as I finish installing Cygwin.
Generally, when a company's marketing budget exceeds it's R&D budget by mulitiples, you can tell that there's something other than merit selling the product.
I'd buy the sob story their very well-paid accountants came up with if it weren't for that fact.
That's the thing though - there's no guarantee that a patentholder is going to SELL his product responsibly.
They may charge YOU $80 a pill for an antibiotic, but they're charging Farmer John $80 for a 40lb bag of feed laced with the stuff. He makes a huge profit off of his 1st tier customer, you, but he also makes a profit off of Farmer John by selling in bulk, and there's no danger of you eating the animal feed so he doesn't cannibalize his own market. Farmer John's cows grow faster, sure. And his pasture patties become a breeding ground for the resistant strain. So there's no danger of market contamination, but if you're mountain-biking across a stream that just happens to run across Farmer John's land, you could very well catch that bacteria. And there's really nobody to sue over it. Hey, bad things happen. That's tough for you, guy.
Ultimately, it's no skin off the drug company's nose, because they now have a brand new market to expand into, drugs for resistant-strains of bacteria.
well, when resistent strains emerge, you isolate them, contain them, do not allow them to reproduce and spread.
Kinda sucks for the individual hosts, but good for humanity as a whole, dontcha think?
Gee, I put a G4 in my G3 Mac without upgrading the motherboard. Sure, bus bandwidth was kinda tight, but hey, it's a G4 now!
Oh, sorry, I guess you can't really do that on the intel side, can you? too bad. so sad.
Yes - the current economic downturn was spawned from Hugo Chavez' 1999 plan to "take a piece of the action" of America's booming economy. Oil prices spiked, Clinton tapped the strategic reserve, Enron fucked with the California power system causing rolling blackouts, which helped to cripple the main engine of the nation's economy by pushing SV dotcoms over the brink just as they were running out of venture capital. Microsoft didn't suffer from the blackouts, but they suffered from the DOJ case, which was backed out before any real actual damage was done to the company - only it's stock price was deflated, and of course, other tech companies suffered alongside.
Now, California, formerly the 6th largest economy in the world, is bankrupt, socked with oppressive energy contracts it was forced into during Enron and Dynergy's scamming. Millions of people who used to be worth millions of dollars are now being forced to liquidate all their posessions and property at fire sale prices, just to buy groceries.
Who benefits?
Careful, such ideas sound dangerous.
We might end up with a cure instead of an ongoing treatment. . .
" Nine out of 10 NCEs turn out to be duds by Phase III trials. Do the math on how much money the tenth one has to make"
This is the same argument the music industry uses, by the way.
Creative accounting can appear to justify all kinds of bizzare stuff which turns out to be nothing more than a scam to line some CEO's pockets.
Most big pharma companies have a marketing budget that's 3 times the size of their R&D budget. So there's some math for you to put in your pipe and smoke.
Finally, as I said before, trials should NOT be funded by the company that stands to benefit from them. It's BASIC ETHICS.
Drug companies should NOT be testing their own drugs for safety, or even funding the tests. The tests should be funded by taxes on drugs, and performed by independent private labs, scrupulously examined to eliminate conflicts of interest.
When a given drug's tax has fully funded the safety testing (which, after all, was imposed by the government for the benefit of the public at large) - then the tax can expire.
Drug companies funding their own studies is like a programmer doing his own testing.
It is all about the oil.
But a war and "grabbing" the oil isn't the goal.
The goal is to terrorize the markets for an extended period of time under the threat of war - so that oil remains above $40-60/bbl. This will have the effect of draining the remaining financial resources of the middle-class dry, to be absorbed by the upper-class. It keeps our economy in check, and funnels profits to the oil companies and traders.
It also has the side effect of imposing legislation by over-spending to the point where the government has no choice but to cease operations because it's out of money. This has happened before, but this time, the government will be so far in debt that all those juicy public programs will cease, utterly, with no option to ever come back. This includes welfare, and social security. Furthermore, the government will not be able to afford the necessary resources to create or enforce laws against corporate fraud. It's an anarchist's dream.
And of course, the arabs won't embargo the oil, they're just going along with this all because they want to see higher prices. Higher prices= more profits for them. Demand won't drop like it did in the 70's because now, everybody has a giant SUV, and everybody's funds are drained, so they won't be able to go buy econoboxes.
If you want to get off even lighter, become a CEO and defraud investors out of millions, and cripple the US economy for decades.
You'll probably walk.
Even so, the chances of the generator vaporizing over a city are zero.
1. Launch vehicles are destroyed by remote control if they stray outside of a mathematically-defined "cone" around their planned flight-path. This is always going to be at least several hundred miles away from any sizable population.
2. There's no launch vehicle destruction scenario that is anywhere near violent enough to damage an RTG casing enough to release radioactivity. Possibly striking the ground at thousands of miles per hour would do it - but no launch vehicle travels at that speed at any altitude anywhere near the ground. They get up pretty high before they accellerate to that speed, and if they turn around and point the wrong direction (down) for any reason, they're destroyed - no rocket=no thrust, no thrust=no high velocity impact. The casings for these things are tested in impact tests with rocket sleds slamming into concrete walls at hundreds, even thousands of miles per hour, and they survive intact.
Well, Bush is rich and successful, which PROVES he knows what he's doing. All rich and successful people are rich and successful for a reason, and therefore should be worshipped like gods and handed all control of the economy. These boozhwah Nobel Laureates and academics don't know jack squat about running the government like a business.
Well, anything that can be digitized is closely related to Math. . .
Naw, best ass-shot was in "Cruel Intentions" (I know, cheezy remake of another movie altogether), where she tells her step brother that if he wins the bet, he can have her and "anywhere you want", (as she's laying back on a bed, fully clothed) then she swings one leg up and over, showing him her ass - implying that she's up for anal.
THAT was the best ass shot without showing any flesh. Of all time.