The Apollo programme didn't have to invent rocketry either. And the Apollo-era rockets aren't enough for the job they're proposing; Saturn V was designed to carry 3 men and a small suite of science experiments to the moon. That's a long way from what would be required for an inhabitable, permanent factory colony.
The original Sam is supposed to be half-crazy from loneliness by the time the second one turns up. The second one (who is basically sane) acts far more rationally.
That sort of film probably isn't to everyone's tastes, anyway. I really enjoyed it- but as a long time reader of Philip K. Dick novels, I'm probably more or less the ideal target market.
It's the height of cheekiness, really. Normal business practice is to get money through investment- which is to say, people "donate" money to you on the promise that, if the business ever makes a success of it, they can earn their money back (and then some).
They're just asking for donations for nothing (except vanity sponsorship). They want the investment, but if they ever get rich they don't want to give anything back. And they're not some scientific or charitable enterprise- they want to be some sort of private, commercial energy company. Would it kill them to make each donation a "bond" or "share purchase"? The only time they'd have to pay anything back is if they're profitable- in which case, it won't be a problem.
Well I can see a valid use for a "This software is provided as-is" clause.
If everyone were allowed to do that, there would be no concept of laws preventing fraudulent sales of goods, sales of damaged or nonfunctional goods, false advertising of goods, etc.
In EU (if nowhere else), it is the manufacturer's duty to ensure the thing they're selling you is good for 6 months minimum, and for a very long time thereafter (if the buyer can prove it was manufacturer's errors that have caused the item to go wrong). Trying to force the buyer to sign away this right is not allowed. Otherwise they would all do it.
The whole world would be much saner, happier and peaceful place without US.
under Nazi rule!
The world would most likely have been under Nazi rule without Stalin's Soviet Union too, but that doesn't mean that the world isn't happier, saner and more peaceful without it.
The United States, just including the 50 core states, is as big and powerful as most of the world's old colonial empires. The Chinese empire contained few people other than Chinese people, in geographical China. Ditto the Japanese empire.
Empire is an emotive word (and it's inaccurate, as the US is not ruled by an emperor), but his basic sentiment (that all of the world's most powerful nation states fell eventually) is more or less applicable to the US as much as anyone.
A lot of people have pointed out that some targets are bomb damaged, others have military jets parked in the middle, etc. Odds are they're using the sites to test their equipment in all sorts of novel set-ups, recreating "enemy bases", seeing how their equipment deals with random craters in the image, and so forth. Not the sort of thing it'd be easy to replicate just by taking pictures of existing sites.
A big chunk of the US war machine is GPS driven, and if you have a capability to operate without GPS and still hit your targets then you have an advantage.
That's a big "if". Much of the US military uses GPS, but is capable of falling back to more traditional methods. The Chinese military is likely to be just as reliant on GPS, and just as able to utilise fall backs.
The advantage of destroying GPS would probably be relatively minimal, but the disruption it'd cause to civilian operation (including in China) would be huge.
Don't all of those extremophiles (that we know of, on Earth), generally start out as more mundane organisms living in less extreme conditions? Then through process of evolution, some of them adapt to to the extreme conditions in which they eventually are thrust or spread to?
Perhaps, but not necessarily. When life first appeared on Earth, the planet was hotter, more volcanic, had more greenhouse gasses and no free oxygen. It would have been more or less completely toxic to almost all life that currently exists on Earth (except for a few of the extremophiles).
It's easy to think of modern day Earth as the "perfect" environment for life- but that's only because it's the environment we're evolved to thrive in. If we were built to thrive in another environment, our current environment might seem like hell. If you take one of those deep water volcanic organisms and try putting it in a temperate, freshwater lake, it'd be dead in no time.
I've posted similar a few times in the last month or so. XFCE has really come of age in the years since the last time I tried it, and feels like a worthy spiritual successor to GNOME 2 & KDE 3. Xubuntu is definitely my go-to Ubuntu flavour these days.
Although that said, I've not tried Mint, so I can't really pass judgement. There's an intriguing "Debian based" Mint version (as opposed to the conventional Ubuntu-based version) which I'm fascinated by, too.
Which, interestingly, may mean there's a Slashdot Effect involved after this article; plenty of readers might be curious to find out more about Mint, now it's being touted as an Ubuntu killer.
That effect might have been around for the last few months too, as disaffected Unity survivors start looking for promising Ubuntu forks (without necessarily actually following up on it and doing an install).
I've got 10 Mbit/s from Virgin, and it's ample to watch two high resolution video streams at once (the most pressure it is usually put under in our two person household). I've considered upgrading (50Mbps is available in my area)- but what's the point? It's never been a limiting factor for me, and the 50Mbps would up my monthly bill by more than 50%.
And not to put too fine a point on it, if you can't convince me (an iPlayer-watching, PC-gaming, large-file-downloading Slashdot reader) that it's worth the money, what hope of convincing a Joe Bloggs, my-computer-is-an-appliance, user?
The graphics processing on that is feeble compared to PS3 / XB360, and yet it outsold both of them for a while. Still sells relatively well now (albeit at 5-year-old-hardware prices).
We're never going to run out of oil, in the simple sense. It's just that some oil reserves are relatively easy to access (stick a big metal straw into the ground and start sucking), while others are hellishly difficult (such as tar sands, which take colossally more money and huge amounts more energy to extract). When you deplete all the easy sources, the cost of oil products will go up to match the new extraction methods, and the greenhouse gas problem gets worse (due to the more intense energy usage of your extraction methods).
The upshot is that the world becomes a much less pleasant place- but there will still always be petrol for your Ferrari for those who can afford it.
They call it "building the brand". The idea is that the name HTC is now in your head. When you decide to buy a new phone and you flick through the metaphorical catalogue, you'll think of HTC as an option, where before it might have been some anonymous entity you've never heard of.
It probably works; most big companies play the same game. The recent UK McDonald's adverts, where there's barely a morsel of food in sight, is similar. Same goes for all those car adverts where you just get a stream of vaguely suggestive visual metaphors.
I suppose that was my point- they're nice devices, and they do do everything that they promise to do. Like all products, they have a niche. The question is, how big is the niche?
I own a big desktop gaming computer, and a small screen laptop, and a durable, functional work laptop, and an Android smartphone. For me (and I'm just talking about me), is there a gap in that line-up that a tablet can fill? A tablet with the same size screen as my laptop (but different functionality), and the same functionality as my smartphone (but a bigger screen)? And is my need to fill that gap sufficiently strong that I'll spend an extra £500 on it? For me- no. For others the need to fill that gap might be stronger, and so yes.
I'm not convinced that this niche is ever going to be big enough to unseat full personal computers from their customary position at the top of the computing food chain. That's not to say that companies that make tablets (i.e. Apple) aren't going to continue to make them, continue to sell enough of them to make it worth their while, and continue to generate a healthy profit. Just that I don't see them as being a big "paradigm shift", where we're all going to change our behaviour and attitude and the current "paradigm" will become some quaint idea of the past.
Because they can't tell them to jump off a cliff. They have to tell the judge to tell them to jump off a cliff. And for that to happen, you have to persuade the judge that you're right. And the SCO lawyers are trying to persuade him that they're right instead. And the judge doesn't know the technicalities that well, and is forced to address every single point, one at a time, letting both sides have a fair crack at persuading him in intricate technical and legal detail for every one of 100s and 100s of points. And then even when he's made his mind up on any given batch of points, an appeal might be called and another judge will need to do the exact same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
The Apollo programme didn't have to invent rocketry either. And the Apollo-era rockets aren't enough for the job they're proposing; Saturn V was designed to carry 3 men and a small suite of science experiments to the moon. That's a long way from what would be required for an inhabitable, permanent factory colony.
Are you suggesting that, in terms of designing a Lunar launch and material recovery programme, there's an app for that?
I suppose you could try asking Siri...
At a glance, I read that as "Bill and Ted's stoned talk". Must be all the movie references in this thread...
The original Sam is supposed to be half-crazy from loneliness by the time the second one turns up. The second one (who is basically sane) acts far more rationally.
That sort of film probably isn't to everyone's tastes, anyway. I really enjoyed it- but as a long time reader of Philip K. Dick novels, I'm probably more or less the ideal target market.
It's the height of cheekiness, really. Normal business practice is to get money through investment- which is to say, people "donate" money to you on the promise that, if the business ever makes a success of it, they can earn their money back (and then some).
They're just asking for donations for nothing (except vanity sponsorship). They want the investment, but if they ever get rich they don't want to give anything back. And they're not some scientific or charitable enterprise- they want to be some sort of private, commercial energy company. Would it kill them to make each donation a "bond" or "share purchase"? The only time they'd have to pay anything back is if they're profitable- in which case, it won't be a problem.
Well I can see a valid use for a "This software is provided as-is" clause.
If everyone were allowed to do that, there would be no concept of laws preventing fraudulent sales of goods, sales of damaged or nonfunctional goods, false advertising of goods, etc.
In EU (if nowhere else), it is the manufacturer's duty to ensure the thing they're selling you is good for 6 months minimum, and for a very long time thereafter (if the buyer can prove it was manufacturer's errors that have caused the item to go wrong). Trying to force the buyer to sign away this right is not allowed. Otherwise they would all do it.
Presumably yes. But seeing as it's a gas-powered turbine, it'd probably make more sense to just not generate more power than is needed.
The whole world would be much saner, happier and peaceful place without US.
under Nazi rule!
The world would most likely have been under Nazi rule without Stalin's Soviet Union too, but that doesn't mean that the world isn't happier, saner and more peaceful without it.
The United States, just including the 50 core states, is as big and powerful as most of the world's old colonial empires. The Chinese empire contained few people other than Chinese people, in geographical China. Ditto the Japanese empire.
Empire is an emotive word (and it's inaccurate, as the US is not ruled by an emperor), but his basic sentiment (that all of the world's most powerful nation states fell eventually) is more or less applicable to the US as much as anyone.
A lot of people have pointed out that some targets are bomb damaged, others have military jets parked in the middle, etc. Odds are they're using the sites to test their equipment in all sorts of novel set-ups, recreating "enemy bases", seeing how their equipment deals with random craters in the image, and so forth. Not the sort of thing it'd be easy to replicate just by taking pictures of existing sites.
A big chunk of the US war machine is GPS driven, and if you have a capability to operate without GPS and still hit your targets then you have an advantage.
That's a big "if". Much of the US military uses GPS, but is capable of falling back to more traditional methods. The Chinese military is likely to be just as reliant on GPS, and just as able to utilise fall backs.
The advantage of destroying GPS would probably be relatively minimal, but the disruption it'd cause to civilian operation (including in China) would be huge.
Is this really /. material that needs to be on the front page?
Is the government purchase of millions of dollars of biotech for a weapons defence stockpile news for nerds?
I can't think who else it'd be news for...
Don't all of those extremophiles (that we know of, on Earth), generally start out as more mundane organisms living in less extreme conditions? Then through process of evolution, some of them adapt to to the extreme conditions in which they eventually are thrust or spread to?
Perhaps, but not necessarily. When life first appeared on Earth, the planet was hotter, more volcanic, had more greenhouse gasses and no free oxygen. It would have been more or less completely toxic to almost all life that currently exists on Earth (except for a few of the extremophiles).
It's easy to think of modern day Earth as the "perfect" environment for life- but that's only because it's the environment we're evolved to thrive in. If we were built to thrive in another environment, our current environment might seem like hell. If you take one of those deep water volcanic organisms and try putting it in a temperate, freshwater lake, it'd be dead in no time.
Assuming "1 out of 2" is synonymous with "incredibly rare".
I've posted similar a few times in the last month or so. XFCE has really come of age in the years since the last time I tried it, and feels like a worthy spiritual successor to GNOME 2 & KDE 3. Xubuntu is definitely my go-to Ubuntu flavour these days.
Although that said, I've not tried Mint, so I can't really pass judgement. There's an intriguing "Debian based" Mint version (as opposed to the conventional Ubuntu-based version) which I'm fascinated by, too.
Which, interestingly, may mean there's a Slashdot Effect involved after this article; plenty of readers might be curious to find out more about Mint, now it's being touted as an Ubuntu killer.
That effect might have been around for the last few months too, as disaffected Unity survivors start looking for promising Ubuntu forks (without necessarily actually following up on it and doing an install).
I've got 10 Mbit/s from Virgin, and it's ample to watch two high resolution video streams at once (the most pressure it is usually put under in our two person household). I've considered upgrading (50Mbps is available in my area)- but what's the point? It's never been a limiting factor for me, and the 50Mbps would up my monthly bill by more than 50%.
And not to put too fine a point on it, if you can't convince me (an iPlayer-watching, PC-gaming, large-file-downloading Slashdot reader) that it's worth the money, what hope of convincing a Joe Bloggs, my-computer-is-an-appliance, user?
I'm guessing he meant Modern Warfare 3.
But it's nice to know we're not alone!
Is it wrong that I went there first too?
Or- Wii.
The graphics processing on that is feeble compared to PS3 / XB360, and yet it outsold both of them for a while. Still sells relatively well now (albeit at 5-year-old-hardware prices).
I can't fathom why anyone's having kids. The kids we have already are truly screwed.
I mean, a few billion people would starve, but even if civilization completely collapsed we'd only be set back about twenty thousand years.
Oh good. Our kids will enjoy that.
We're never going to run out of oil, in the simple sense. It's just that some oil reserves are relatively easy to access (stick a big metal straw into the ground and start sucking), while others are hellishly difficult (such as tar sands, which take colossally more money and huge amounts more energy to extract). When you deplete all the easy sources, the cost of oil products will go up to match the new extraction methods, and the greenhouse gas problem gets worse (due to the more intense energy usage of your extraction methods).
The upshot is that the world becomes a much less pleasant place- but there will still always be petrol for your Ferrari for those who can afford it.
They call it "building the brand". The idea is that the name HTC is now in your head. When you decide to buy a new phone and you flick through the metaphorical catalogue, you'll think of HTC as an option, where before it might have been some anonymous entity you've never heard of.
It probably works; most big companies play the same game. The recent UK McDonald's adverts, where there's barely a morsel of food in sight, is similar. Same goes for all those car adverts where you just get a stream of vaguely suggestive visual metaphors.
I suppose that was my point- they're nice devices, and they do do everything that they promise to do. Like all products, they have a niche. The question is, how big is the niche?
I own a big desktop gaming computer, and a small screen laptop, and a durable, functional work laptop, and an Android smartphone. For me (and I'm just talking about me), is there a gap in that line-up that a tablet can fill? A tablet with the same size screen as my laptop (but different functionality), and the same functionality as my smartphone (but a bigger screen)? And is my need to fill that gap sufficiently strong that I'll spend an extra £500 on it? For me- no. For others the need to fill that gap might be stronger, and so yes.
I'm not convinced that this niche is ever going to be big enough to unseat full personal computers from their customary position at the top of the computing food chain. That's not to say that companies that make tablets (i.e. Apple) aren't going to continue to make them, continue to sell enough of them to make it worth their while, and continue to generate a healthy profit. Just that I don't see them as being a big "paradigm shift", where we're all going to change our behaviour and attitude and the current "paradigm" will become some quaint idea of the past.
Because they can't tell them to jump off a cliff. They have to tell the judge to tell them to jump off a cliff. And for that to happen, you have to persuade the judge that you're right. And the SCO lawyers are trying to persuade him that they're right instead. And the judge doesn't know the technicalities that well, and is forced to address every single point, one at a time, letting both sides have a fair crack at persuading him in intricate technical and legal detail for every one of 100s and 100s of points. And then even when he's made his mind up on any given batch of points, an appeal might be called and another judge will need to do the exact same thing.
That's what takes 10 torturous, expensive years.