I'm aware of Hanlon's Razor, but just like Occam's Razor, it has it's limits. If you have to keep compounding simple explanations in order to account for more and more evidence, then Occam's Razor starts to fail and breaks down. Similarly, if you have to keep calling Hanlon's Razor over and over again to account for the epic-levels of abuse our politicians take practice in, it begins to break down and fails. I would accept that our politicians are simply incompetent and not malicious if they managed to learn from past efforts. However, we rarely see them do that. Every single time Congress advocates some kind of increased surveillance/profiling/security theater legislation there is some kind of public outcry (whether it be from the ACLU, the EFF, hand-written letters, or whatever). Despite this, however, Congress simply brushes the unpopular legislation under the rug and then rolls it back out again as some kind of addendum to another bill, or as another bill entirely a few months later. At best, they make meaningless, loophole ridden compromises to appease the protesters and end up ignoring most of those compromises later anyways.
So sure, claim that the politicos are just completely ignorant and incompetent. Assume that 435 men and women that make a career out of speaking to the public about highly technical and complicated issues are naive and ignorant. I used to do the same thing. But after watching the same patterns repeat themselves time and again I came to the conclusion that the Hanlon's Razor mantra, when applied to the U.S. political system, is just another thought-terminating fallacy that is extremely efficient at excusing citizens from duty. I, for one, am not buying it anymore.
These days, I can't buy ammunition for my antique rifle collection without getting fingerprinted. I can't sign up for most utility services without giving out my social security number. I am asked to let a snooper look through my bags every time I leave Wal Mart and Frye's electronics. I have to show my ID five times to various illiterate mooks before I board an airplane. I have to keep my passport stored in a specially designed sleeve to keep my personal data from being broadcast to the world. I get photographed in nearly every store I go into a store. I get photographed by every ATM I use. The data I send and receive from the internet is snooped upon by the NSA. I have to pay $300+ if I go 10 mph over the speed limit (yes, fines are that high in SB county, California), so I have to spend nearly as much energy watching my speedometer as I do watching the road for obstacles. My license plate gets photographed if I make a yellow light to avoid getting rear-ended by the guy behind me (and yes, that has happened to me 6 times at a red light, and no, I never once was slamming on or locking up my brakes). And, hell I have to present my ID to buy baby formula from a grocery store because I might be using it to cook meth.
So I am sorry, but Hanlon's razor doesn't cut it anymore. We citizens of the United States are being treated like criminals every time we go out in public (and sometimes when we are in our own homes, God forbid someone walking around in their boxers accidentally stumble in front of an open window). This is not only due to Congress, but also due to local Sheriffs, judges overstepping their authority, HOA's that dig their nails so deep into your life that it's like you're being watched all day, corporate retailers that think they can get away from abusing all of their customers, and on and on and on. This problem stems not just from one source, but from a mental illness that has completely permeated our society: fear. We are giving up our liberties at every level because there are some pantywastes in this society that can't cope with the fact that bad shit happens sometimes and its better to deal with it than to try to control every little thing. So I, for one, am sick of it. I don't attribute this to incompetence or naivete. I attribute it, mostly, to fucking assholes who have learned that they
A gun, on the other hand, can kill people right out of the store.
So can a car, most cleaners that you use in your household, various drugs you buy at the pharmacy (over the counter), a baseball bat, a golf club, a nail gun, a car battery, anti-freeze, a kitchen knife set, and so on and so on and so on. Just because something can be used to kill a person doesn't mean it will be used to kill a person. Just sayin'
Of course it would take a piece of legislation that completely tramples anonymous communication to convince two congressmen from two very different states to put aside partisan politics and play ball together. Why is it that the politicos can only team up on things that screw the citizens, but not the ones that help the citizens? Fucking assholes.
Well you seem to be practicing on Slashdot just fine. Maybe you can try making threats on here because people take online threats SO seriously...just like they do anonymous threats over the phone..../end sarcasm
The tests will be flown by four unmanned X-51 "Waverider" vehicles developed by a team including the U.S. Air Force, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA, Boeing Phantom Works and Pratt & Whitney.
So where I think the OP was asking if there are any other designs/previous models with which to compare this flight against, the three vehicles being tested in the fall would not qualify. The three vehicles being tested in the fall are the same vehicle, but just different serial numbers.
With regards to question 3, they have developed some pretty tricky ways to help cool the engines and the body of the vehicle. For instance, they cool the engines by circulating the JP-7 fuel through the body to absorb some of the heat to help bring it to the combustion point. This is very similar to how rocket nozzles are currently cooled to slow melting/failure:
The scramjet will circulate the fuel behind engine walls to cool the structures. Without such active cooling, the temperatures in a scramjet could reach 5,000 deg. Fahrenheit, high enough to melt virtually any metal on Earth. Solving the cooling challenge is a major AFRL/Pratt & Whitney achievement.
My wager is that the entire vehicle took thermal control into its design considerations and it uses a combination of geometry, aerodynamics, and fuel management to help sink heat at an appropriately high rate to prevent too much for a build up. However, since I don't have the design specs, and I doubt anyone outside of the military will, for awhile at least, I can only speculate. You also have to understand that at those speeds, your gas dynamics become a problem of rarified gasses and heat management becomes a very tricky problem indeed, one that can't be approached by traditional cooling means. So in summation I would guess yes, they have probably found some very cool new ways to sink heat at hypersonic speeds.
So far as I understand, those three vehicles are the exact same model, but will simply undergo some slightly different tests. So, no, I don't think there are any other vehicles than the X-51 model being flown right now.
Yup, because when I said, "disciplined about script formatting and variable names," what I was referring to was the practice of keeping all variables anonymous, not indenting anything, not using proper line breaks, not commenting my code, and loading functions with anonymous inputs that are anonymous outputs from preceding functions.
Yup, all those practices are, most certainly, what I mean when I say disciplined formatting and variable naming practices. You hit the nail on the head AC!
/endsarcasm
(And please don't woosh me, yes I know it was a joke).
Oh don't get me wrong, I understand the reasons for the bloat in the large companies. I've worked at two of them now and have been told, numerous times, precisely why things are set up the way they are set up. That doesn't mean that such methods/practices are the best/most efficient/only way to do things though. I mean, hell, look at the Russians. They may blow up one in every ten of their launches, but since they turn out twenty rockets for every one American rocket, it displaces the loss (for clarification, those numbers are entirely made up to relate the general design theory followed by Russia in aerospace systems, they are not, in any way, linked to actual success/failure statistics of Russian designed systems).
I do that as well. However, I find it to be very convenient when I can open the source, look at it for five minutes, and figure out exactly how the program is set up. If I've worked on something sufficiently complex, I'll break out the documentation that I wrote and go from there. However, self-documenting code is an extremely useful habit to work with in my experience.
You know, in all of these life on other planet stories, I've seen Jupiter touted as this savior planet because it prevents so many asteroid impacts here on Earth. That's all well and good for us, but who is to say that frequent asteroid impacts couldn't be an evolutionary pressure in and of themselves? I mean, perhaps a system that got bombarded by asteroids constantly would breed a lifeform that could go into some kind os suspended animation/hibernation period during the resulting sun blackout/dust cloud. Perhaps frequent asteroid impacts would breed a lifeform that thrives in the high heat environment immediately following such an impact, but that immediately goes into some kind of slow metabolism period to survive the following winter. Hell, maybe it would breed some other completely crazy kind of lifeform that used the impact event to eject itself into the upper atmosphere where it then coasted in orbit for years, gaining energy from it's stars radiation, before slowly deorbiting back to the surface to await another impact event.
I mean, sure, humans aren't particularly evolved to handle an asteroid impact. That doesn't mean that some other form of complex life isn't.
We know that Venus and Mars, if they had life at one point, don't have much now,
I have to say that is an assertion rather than a fact. We have not discovered much life on Venus or Mars yet, but consider that we have only sent a small handful of probes and rovers to either. We may have mapped the surface of Mars from orbit, but that doesn't mean we would have discovered whatever potential life may be there. Consider the fact that many of the Earth imaging satellite systems have a very hard time resolving pictures of humans on the surface (really, even getting 30 meter resolution of visible data is extremely difficult). That said, having a couple of imaging satellites over Mars is hardly enough to rule out some kind of more complex life. Add to that the fact that Mars is pocked with numerous craters and canyons and such (both at the poles and the equator) and it becomes apparent that we still don't know that much about Mars. Hell, for an exercise, just try searching for images of Mars developed in the 1990's and then images developed in the 2000's. You will see a huge difference in the way the planet is depicted precisely because there was so much new information to be learned in that small span of time. Making the claim, therefore, that Mars doesn't have much life on it now is a very bold statement considering that our high resolution data of Mars is still very small at best. Frankly, we just haven't explored that planet enough to know whether or not there still is some kind of life on or below the surface.
Now, if we take a look at Venus, the data is even more limited. We hardly have any surface data of that planet. We hardly have any probes that have penetrated the atmosphere and beamed back detailed information. We don't have any rovers poking around there. To claim that there is not much life on Venus is simply a bold statement brought on by over-confidence in our scientific progression in the last fifty years or so. We still don't have much of a clue regarding the minute details of the Venusian surface so to claim that there isn't some form of complex life there is simply unfounded.
AFAIK, all the private space companies are looking at tourism, not rendesvous with the ISS, Hubble, or science missions.
Well that's not really true, no. Both the SpaceX Dragon capsule and the Orbital Sciences capsule proposals encompass a docking interface with the ISS. As for Hubble maintenance, you're probably right, neither of those craft will be able to dock with the Hubble. But last I heard, Hubble wasn't going to be fixed again anytime soon. I thought the last maintenance mission was the final one. And as for science missions, I am not sure what science missions you are talking about. So far as I know, the shuttle no longer does any science on its own. It has become a simple ferry to the ISS where larger, more controlled, longer experiments can be set up in space.
Regarding the lack of a domestic replacement craft for the shuttle, I suggest you write to your congresscritters and give them hell for turning an engineering problem into a political boondoggle. I suggest you write to Lockheed Martin and give them hell for dragging their feet on the Orion design. I suggest you write to ATK and give them hell for lobbying to get a heavy launch vehicle design approved based on nonexistent components (Ares V and the fabled 5 stage solid rocket boosters). And, in general, I suggest you direct your ire at incompetent, over bloated national defense contractors and subcontractors that have been promising results for cheap and delivering compromises for twice the damn price. Frankly, the large players in the aerospace industry these days, are some of the most wasteful companies in existence in my opinion. Then again, I was raised with the idea that it shouldn't take three works of paperwork to change a damn screw on a piece of hardware (and yes, that last part was a personal anecdote).
Oh, I should caveat one thing. In order to develop perl scripts into a distributable, platform independent, one click executable, I've been using the PAR packager module for perl. Sometimes it produces slightly bloated.exe's (since it has to bring in all of the relevant code from any external modules and dependencies), but it seems to produce very stable executables on win32 systems.
I'll second this one. The place that I work runs almost all of its commands via bat jobs that run from simple to complex. When I started here, I installed Strawberry Perl on my win32 system. I have, since, replaced every functionality that the bat jobs used to do with perl scripts (primarily for my own purposes, but most of my coworkers don't mind them either). The primary reason I did this was readability. I can set up my perl scripts in such a manner that I can look at them a year later and know exactly what I did and how I did it. All I had to do was be a little disciplined about script formatting and variable names (it's really not that hard).
So far, I've gotten Strawberry perl to print to all of the printers on my network, run some old fortran programs successfully, update an in-house wiki automatically, automate e-mails to my co workers, and crash our entire network (that last one wasn't so much a feature, but hey, it shows just how powerful perl is). That said, I think with a bit of time and research you could probably get Strawberry perl to do exactly what you needed pretty easily. But I will warn you, when it comes to perl, I find that user experiences vary greatly.
Meh, even if all of the money towards bank bailouts and healthcare went towards NASA, I'd still like to see the shuttles retired. We can make more progress in space exploration using more modern launch systems (Falcon 9, Atlas V) and on-orbit rendezvous than we can flying the Space Shuttle. Don't get me wrong, the shuttles have provided very necessary lessons in manned-space exploration and LEO operations, but the program is almost 30 years old and has been a politicized boondoggle from the beginning. If the shuttles had actually become the quick-cycle space planes they were sold as, then maybe I would say continue the program. However, as it stands now, the shuttle program had its time. Now its time for our nation (and species) to evolve in terms of space exploration. This, of course, is just my humble opinion.
For the record, I'd like to thank the shuttle crews for their years of service as well.
I personally like the idea of ultra-light, ultra-thing displays being stitched into the skin to create modifiable tattoo platforms. Of course, the day someone learns how to hack it and writes, "Insert Penis Here!" on your new, super cool video tattoo will suck. Then again, it will be funny when you learn how to do that to someone else.
Well yeah, I could have, but I was more interested in making a joke than actually learning about the man you mentioned. I have no doubt in my mind that he was a very intelligent/capable man. However, giving myself something to laugh about had more bearing on my life than learning about him did at the time I made the joke. I figured someone else might get a snicker at my terrible attempts at humor too. Then again, maybe not./shrug
Something that could help usher that in is a word count or document length limit to new laws. I mean, I know we live in a complex society, but having a 2000+ page law for anything is simply absurd. The reason the Constitution is such a powerful symbol for folk in America is because it is simple and accessible by the public. A layman can pick up the Constitution, read it in an hour, and have a pretty good idea of the goals that the document were supposed to be accomplished. If it were illegal to pass a law that had pages upon pages of jargon, legal-speak, and utter unrelated bullshit then voters wouldn't need media outlets and politicians to 'translate' what a proposed bill says.
When it comes down to it, any bill that is more than a couple dozen pages is trying to micromanage whatever issue it is addressing and will, thus, cause more confusion, inconsistencies, loopholes, and, ultimately, harm than good.
Thanks for the info. For those of you interested in a bit of activism, the pdf's linked to above are written in business letter format and contain the address that Congress used to contact Genachowski. Writing Genachowski directly could show him that the people really do care about net neutrality. He's not an elected representative, but it probably would do him and his organization well to hear the support of the American people.
Ah hell, I'll just post the address in this post for those 'dotters that are too lazy to click the link even:
The Honorable Julius Genachowski
Chairman
Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street, SW
Washington, D.C. 20554
So I did some Googling (nonencrypted so maybe it can't be trusted), and found this page that tells you how to set up the SSL search as the default search in FF, Chrome, and IE. There was no mention of Opera, but then, I never really bothered with Opera so I am sure someone else can figure that one out. Also, apparently the "KB SSL Enforce extension" for Chrome sets up an automatic redirect for google.com to link to https://www.google.com./ I haven't tried this, however, since I don't use Chrome at work.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm aware of Hanlon's Razor, but just like Occam's Razor, it has it's limits. If you have to keep compounding simple explanations in order to account for more and more evidence, then Occam's Razor starts to fail and breaks down. Similarly, if you have to keep calling Hanlon's Razor over and over again to account for the epic-levels of abuse our politicians take practice in, it begins to break down and fails. I would accept that our politicians are simply incompetent and not malicious if they managed to learn from past efforts. However, we rarely see them do that. Every single time Congress advocates some kind of increased surveillance/profiling/security theater legislation there is some kind of public outcry (whether it be from the ACLU, the EFF, hand-written letters, or whatever). Despite this, however, Congress simply brushes the unpopular legislation under the rug and then rolls it back out again as some kind of addendum to another bill, or as another bill entirely a few months later. At best, they make meaningless, loophole ridden compromises to appease the protesters and end up ignoring most of those compromises later anyways.
So sure, claim that the politicos are just completely ignorant and incompetent. Assume that 435 men and women that make a career out of speaking to the public about highly technical and complicated issues are naive and ignorant. I used to do the same thing. But after watching the same patterns repeat themselves time and again I came to the conclusion that the Hanlon's Razor mantra, when applied to the U.S. political system, is just another thought-terminating fallacy that is extremely efficient at excusing citizens from duty. I, for one, am not buying it anymore.
These days, I can't buy ammunition for my antique rifle collection without getting fingerprinted. I can't sign up for most utility services without giving out my social security number. I am asked to let a snooper look through my bags every time I leave Wal Mart and Frye's electronics. I have to show my ID five times to various illiterate mooks before I board an airplane. I have to keep my passport stored in a specially designed sleeve to keep my personal data from being broadcast to the world. I get photographed in nearly every store I go into a store. I get photographed by every ATM I use. The data I send and receive from the internet is snooped upon by the NSA. I have to pay $300+ if I go 10 mph over the speed limit (yes, fines are that high in SB county, California), so I have to spend nearly as much energy watching my speedometer as I do watching the road for obstacles. My license plate gets photographed if I make a yellow light to avoid getting rear-ended by the guy behind me (and yes, that has happened to me 6 times at a red light, and no, I never once was slamming on or locking up my brakes). And, hell I have to present my ID to buy baby formula from a grocery store because I might be using it to cook meth.
So I am sorry, but Hanlon's razor doesn't cut it anymore. We citizens of the United States are being treated like criminals every time we go out in public (and sometimes when we are in our own homes, God forbid someone walking around in their boxers accidentally stumble in front of an open window). This is not only due to Congress, but also due to local Sheriffs, judges overstepping their authority, HOA's that dig their nails so deep into your life that it's like you're being watched all day, corporate retailers that think they can get away from abusing all of their customers, and on and on and on. This problem stems not just from one source, but from a mental illness that has completely permeated our society: fear. We are giving up our liberties at every level because there are some pantywastes in this society that can't cope with the fact that bad shit happens sometimes and its better to deal with it than to try to control every little thing. So I, for one, am sick of it. I don't attribute this to incompetence or naivete. I attribute it, mostly, to fucking assholes who have learned that they
This project was inspired by the inevitable comments about flash longevity on every Slashdot SSD story.
Take that every 'dotter that says bitching on this website doesn't get anything done!
/removestonguefromcheek
A gun, on the other hand, can kill people right out of the store.
So can a car, most cleaners that you use in your household, various drugs you buy at the pharmacy (over the counter), a baseball bat, a golf club, a nail gun, a car battery, anti-freeze, a kitchen knife set, and so on and so on and so on. Just because something can be used to kill a person doesn't mean it will be used to kill a person. Just sayin'
Of course it would take a piece of legislation that completely tramples anonymous communication to convince two congressmen from two very different states to put aside partisan politics and play ball together. Why is it that the politicos can only team up on things that screw the citizens, but not the ones that help the citizens? Fucking assholes.
Well you seem to be practicing on Slashdot just fine. Maybe you can try making threats on here because people take online threats SO seriously...just like they do anonymous threats over the phone.... /end sarcasm
The tests will be flown by four unmanned X-51 "Waverider" vehicles developed by a team including the U.S. Air Force, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, NASA, Boeing Phantom Works and Pratt & Whitney.
So where I think the OP was asking if there are any other designs/previous models with which to compare this flight against, the three vehicles being tested in the fall would not qualify. The three vehicles being tested in the fall are the same vehicle, but just different serial numbers.
The scramjet will circulate the fuel behind engine walls to cool the structures. Without such active cooling, the temperatures in a scramjet could reach 5,000 deg. Fahrenheit, high enough to melt virtually any metal on Earth. Solving the cooling challenge is a major AFRL/Pratt & Whitney achievement.
Source
My wager is that the entire vehicle took thermal control into its design considerations and it uses a combination of geometry, aerodynamics, and fuel management to help sink heat at an appropriately high rate to prevent too much for a build up. However, since I don't have the design specs, and I doubt anyone outside of the military will, for awhile at least, I can only speculate. You also have to understand that at those speeds, your gas dynamics become a problem of rarified gasses and heat management becomes a very tricky problem indeed, one that can't be approached by traditional cooling means. So in summation I would guess yes, they have probably found some very cool new ways to sink heat at hypersonic speeds.
So far as I understand, those three vehicles are the exact same model, but will simply undergo some slightly different tests. So, no, I don't think there are any other vehicles than the X-51 model being flown right now.
Yup, because when I said, "disciplined about script formatting and variable names," what I was referring to was the practice of keeping all variables anonymous, not indenting anything, not using proper line breaks, not commenting my code, and loading functions with anonymous inputs that are anonymous outputs from preceding functions.
/endsarcasm
Yup, all those practices are, most certainly, what I mean when I say disciplined formatting and variable naming practices. You hit the nail on the head AC!
(And please don't woosh me, yes I know it was a joke).
Oh don't get me wrong, I understand the reasons for the bloat in the large companies. I've worked at two of them now and have been told, numerous times, precisely why things are set up the way they are set up. That doesn't mean that such methods/practices are the best/most efficient/only way to do things though. I mean, hell, look at the Russians. They may blow up one in every ten of their launches, but since they turn out twenty rockets for every one American rocket, it displaces the loss (for clarification, those numbers are entirely made up to relate the general design theory followed by Russia in aerospace systems, they are not, in any way, linked to actual success/failure statistics of Russian designed systems).
I do that as well. However, I find it to be very convenient when I can open the source, look at it for five minutes, and figure out exactly how the program is set up. If I've worked on something sufficiently complex, I'll break out the documentation that I wrote and go from there. However, self-documenting code is an extremely useful habit to work with in my experience.
You know, in all of these life on other planet stories, I've seen Jupiter touted as this savior planet because it prevents so many asteroid impacts here on Earth. That's all well and good for us, but who is to say that frequent asteroid impacts couldn't be an evolutionary pressure in and of themselves? I mean, perhaps a system that got bombarded by asteroids constantly would breed a lifeform that could go into some kind os suspended animation/hibernation period during the resulting sun blackout/dust cloud. Perhaps frequent asteroid impacts would breed a lifeform that thrives in the high heat environment immediately following such an impact, but that immediately goes into some kind of slow metabolism period to survive the following winter. Hell, maybe it would breed some other completely crazy kind of lifeform that used the impact event to eject itself into the upper atmosphere where it then coasted in orbit for years, gaining energy from it's stars radiation, before slowly deorbiting back to the surface to await another impact event.
I mean, sure, humans aren't particularly evolved to handle an asteroid impact. That doesn't mean that some other form of complex life isn't.
We know that Venus and Mars, if they had life at one point, don't have much now,
I have to say that is an assertion rather than a fact. We have not discovered much life on Venus or Mars yet, but consider that we have only sent a small handful of probes and rovers to either. We may have mapped the surface of Mars from orbit, but that doesn't mean we would have discovered whatever potential life may be there. Consider the fact that many of the Earth imaging satellite systems have a very hard time resolving pictures of humans on the surface (really, even getting 30 meter resolution of visible data is extremely difficult). That said, having a couple of imaging satellites over Mars is hardly enough to rule out some kind of more complex life. Add to that the fact that Mars is pocked with numerous craters and canyons and such (both at the poles and the equator) and it becomes apparent that we still don't know that much about Mars. Hell, for an exercise, just try searching for images of Mars developed in the 1990's and then images developed in the 2000's. You will see a huge difference in the way the planet is depicted precisely because there was so much new information to be learned in that small span of time. Making the claim, therefore, that Mars doesn't have much life on it now is a very bold statement considering that our high resolution data of Mars is still very small at best. Frankly, we just haven't explored that planet enough to know whether or not there still is some kind of life on or below the surface.
Now, if we take a look at Venus, the data is even more limited. We hardly have any surface data of that planet. We hardly have any probes that have penetrated the atmosphere and beamed back detailed information. We don't have any rovers poking around there. To claim that there is not much life on Venus is simply a bold statement brought on by over-confidence in our scientific progression in the last fifty years or so. We still don't have much of a clue regarding the minute details of the Venusian surface so to claim that there isn't some form of complex life there is simply unfounded.
AFAIK, all the private space companies are looking at tourism, not rendesvous with the ISS, Hubble, or science missions.
Well that's not really true, no. Both the SpaceX Dragon capsule and the Orbital Sciences capsule proposals encompass a docking interface with the ISS. As for Hubble maintenance, you're probably right, neither of those craft will be able to dock with the Hubble. But last I heard, Hubble wasn't going to be fixed again anytime soon. I thought the last maintenance mission was the final one. And as for science missions, I am not sure what science missions you are talking about. So far as I know, the shuttle no longer does any science on its own. It has become a simple ferry to the ISS where larger, more controlled, longer experiments can be set up in space.
Regarding the lack of a domestic replacement craft for the shuttle, I suggest you write to your congresscritters and give them hell for turning an engineering problem into a political boondoggle. I suggest you write to Lockheed Martin and give them hell for dragging their feet on the Orion design. I suggest you write to ATK and give them hell for lobbying to get a heavy launch vehicle design approved based on nonexistent components (Ares V and the fabled 5 stage solid rocket boosters). And, in general, I suggest you direct your ire at incompetent, over bloated national defense contractors and subcontractors that have been promising results for cheap and delivering compromises for twice the damn price. Frankly, the large players in the aerospace industry these days, are some of the most wasteful companies in existence in my opinion. Then again, I was raised with the idea that it shouldn't take three works of paperwork to change a damn screw on a piece of hardware (and yes, that last part was a personal anecdote).
Oh, I should caveat one thing. In order to develop perl scripts into a distributable, platform independent, one click executable, I've been using the PAR packager module for perl. Sometimes it produces slightly bloated .exe's (since it has to bring in all of the relevant code from any external modules and dependencies), but it seems to produce very stable executables on win32 systems.
I'll second this one. The place that I work runs almost all of its commands via bat jobs that run from simple to complex. When I started here, I installed Strawberry Perl on my win32 system. I have, since, replaced every functionality that the bat jobs used to do with perl scripts (primarily for my own purposes, but most of my coworkers don't mind them either). The primary reason I did this was readability. I can set up my perl scripts in such a manner that I can look at them a year later and know exactly what I did and how I did it. All I had to do was be a little disciplined about script formatting and variable names (it's really not that hard).
So far, I've gotten Strawberry perl to print to all of the printers on my network, run some old fortran programs successfully, update an in-house wiki automatically, automate e-mails to my co workers, and crash our entire network (that last one wasn't so much a feature, but hey, it shows just how powerful perl is). That said, I think with a bit of time and research you could probably get Strawberry perl to do exactly what you needed pretty easily. But I will warn you, when it comes to perl, I find that user experiences vary greatly.
Does that mean the future Linux is Lynx? =P
Why bother? Once they open the tarball they'll just pipe the output fulfill their dependencies. ;)
Meh, even if all of the money towards bank bailouts and healthcare went towards NASA, I'd still like to see the shuttles retired. We can make more progress in space exploration using more modern launch systems (Falcon 9, Atlas V) and on-orbit rendezvous than we can flying the Space Shuttle. Don't get me wrong, the shuttles have provided very necessary lessons in manned-space exploration and LEO operations, but the program is almost 30 years old and has been a politicized boondoggle from the beginning. If the shuttles had actually become the quick-cycle space planes they were sold as, then maybe I would say continue the program. However, as it stands now, the shuttle program had its time. Now its time for our nation (and species) to evolve in terms of space exploration. This, of course, is just my humble opinion.
For the record, I'd like to thank the shuttle crews for their years of service as well.
I personally like the idea of ultra-light, ultra-thing displays being stitched into the skin to create modifiable tattoo platforms. Of course, the day someone learns how to hack it and writes, "Insert Penis Here!" on your new, super cool video tattoo will suck. Then again, it will be funny when you learn how to do that to someone else.
Well yeah, I could have, but I was more interested in making a joke than actually learning about the man you mentioned. I have no doubt in my mind that he was a very intelligent/capable man. However, giving myself something to laugh about had more bearing on my life than learning about him did at the time I made the joke. I figured someone else might get a snicker at my terrible attempts at humor too. Then again, maybe not. /shrug
Something that could help usher that in is a word count or document length limit to new laws. I mean, I know we live in a complex society, but having a 2000+ page law for anything is simply absurd. The reason the Constitution is such a powerful symbol for folk in America is because it is simple and accessible by the public. A layman can pick up the Constitution, read it in an hour, and have a pretty good idea of the goals that the document were supposed to be accomplished. If it were illegal to pass a law that had pages upon pages of jargon, legal-speak, and utter unrelated bullshit then voters wouldn't need media outlets and politicians to 'translate' what a proposed bill says.
When it comes down to it, any bill that is more than a couple dozen pages is trying to micromanage whatever issue it is addressing and will, thus, cause more confusion, inconsistencies, loopholes, and, ultimately, harm than good.
Thanks for the info. For those of you interested in a bit of activism, the pdf's linked to above are written in business letter format and contain the address that Congress used to contact Genachowski. Writing Genachowski directly could show him that the people really do care about net neutrality. He's not an elected representative, but it probably would do him and his organization well to hear the support of the American people.
Ah hell, I'll just post the address in this post for those 'dotters that are too lazy to click the link even:
The Honorable Julius Genachowski
Chairman
Federal Communications Commission
445 12th Street, SW
Washington, D.C. 20554
Have fun guys.
Awesome! We make a good team. Let's go fix the economy now....or something...
So I did some Googling (nonencrypted so maybe it can't be trusted), and found this page that tells you how to set up the SSL search as the default search in FF, Chrome, and IE. There was no mention of Opera, but then, I never really bothered with Opera so I am sure someone else can figure that one out. Also, apparently the "KB SSL Enforce extension" for Chrome sets up an automatic redirect for google.com to link to https://www.google.com./ I haven't tried this, however, since I don't use Chrome at work.
Have fun guys.