Unions cater to the least skilled individuals who are least capable of adding value.
So, all the Boeing engineers with BS or MS degrees fall into this category?
I said that "Unions cater to the least skilled individuals", and that's just as true of the SPEEA as any other union. However, since unions are often effectively or actually compulsory, clearly not all of a union's members qualify as "least skilled". But it's the least skilled who are most protected by unions.
Boeing is an unusual case because it is also a kind of monopoly in the US. (What is it about Seattle?) Workers in that industry may not have as much choice, if they want to stay within the industry and at the same geographic location, as people working in other fields. Unions try to negotiate a better deal for their employees. If you're a truly skilled worker, the best way to negotiate a better deal is to have companies compete for your skills, which may means switching jobs. If I personally were in aerospace and found my ability to sell my skills elsewhere was being limited, I would consider switching fields before I would join a union, and I would advise anyone else to do the same.
I have a friend who worked at Boeing for many years (in IT), and when he left, his pay increased substantially at his next job. These artificial markets that get created by semi-monopolies and unions are never a good thing.
I guess, for larger projects, I'd rather spend my time helping a non-profit like World Concern with their Information Systems then I would helping a bunch of for-profit companies increase their margin and get nothing in return.
Right, but now you're talking about charity. Most open source is not about charity at all.
In some senses I see how MS makes this sound "unamerican".
MS has been one of the biggest contributing factors to the open source explosion. Their practices have prevented strong commercial competition, and exploited customers beyond what many are willing to accept. Open source is certainly "un-Microsoft", but it's not even remotely un-American. As I've pointed out, a big part of open source is about competition, and that's very American.
I'm still not convinced that this isn't going to eventually cut into "our" bottom line as programmers.... It's a good thing that I didn't get into programming for the money!
You have a concern that's currently theoretical, with no current evidence of it actually happening, but are implying that it might affect your economic prospects today or in the near future? Programmers get paid very well right now, and the fact that traditional operating systems and office suites are not where the future money is has no impact on that.
Most industries have unions to ensure reasonable compensation for their work
That's not true at all. It's primarily jobs with low added-value, which can be done by any slightly warm-bodied person, which have unions. Programming is not that kind of job, and open source doesn't make it any less skilled a job.
You're right that one of the purposes of unions is to reduce competition between individuals. If you're looking for something un-American, that's it. Unions cater to the least skilled individuals who are least capable of adding value. We'd be better off with more explicit social programs to help these individuals, since unions often have a negative effect on overall economic health.
Your argument might make sense if the market for software was a zero-sum game, where the availability of a free product reduced the overall dollars spent on software. But the free products simply form a base on which the next generation of more sophisticated products are built - if anything, open source contributes to the health and vibrancy of the market for software. The Internet itself, as well as for example Java and XML, are direct examples of that - open technologies which are driving major spending.
If the market for new kinds of software has any limits, its hard to detect what they are. You can't compare software development to what, say, Teamsters members do. It's certainly likely that if you're a low level "code monkey", that your pay will come under pressure in future, but that'll be from offshore developers and other people who are willing to work for less money, and has nothing to do with open source.
If you can add value, you'll do so out of choice, and one of the factors in your choice will be whether you feel you need to be paid directly for the work you're doing.
Your philosophy assumes that comptent programmers won't keep giving things away.
Not at all. People are always giving things away, as well as doing things to earn a living - usually both at once, one way or another.
They will based on the open source model, which will continually erode the value of software.
You're missing part of what I was getting at, which is that it's the economics of competition that erodes the value of software, just as it erodes the value of every other product out there, over time.
I think you may have some preconceptions about the value of software - thinking of it as comparable to a physical product which requires significant resources to copy. This is a mistake. It's the Bill Gates model of what software is, and one of the the things open source represents is a rational economic response to this distortion.
But when it's targeted towards a mass market and a multimillion dollar market I get concerned for all of us, not just myself.
Give me an example of a product where this applies. I don't believe there are any. As I mentioned, operating systems, basic web servers, and office suites have all reached such a level of commoditization that the "multimillion dollar market" for them is fast becoming an aberration.
The problem is that there are a lot of people who want to be lazy and get paid for selling more or less the same thing that they did 20 years ago, over and over again, without adding any significant value. Luckily, competition has a tendency to keep them from being that lazy. Instead, most are forced to think up new ideas, and develop new useful products, to earn a living.
It'd be like John Carmack open sourcing Doom3. It'd be stupid, and he won't do it for 3 - 4 years, which is after he's made a sizeable (and deserving) profit off of it.
Right, so as you suggest, he won't do it until he's earned what he feels he needs to from it. Where's the problem? He's creating real value which isn't easily duplicated "for free", so he gets to earn money from it.
Since I work in Information Systems everything I do is proprietary anyway.
That doesn't have to be the case. I'm a consultant who works on internal IS systems, but since I keep copyright to much of the work that I do, I'm in a position to open source some of it, as well as to contribute to open source projects that I work on. So for at least some of the work I do, I bill a customer for it, and upload it to Sourceforge the same day, with the customer's knowledge and consent.
One thing I get out of it is access to "products" that I and the customer otherwise might not have had access to, for reasons which include budget, as well as the desire to have source code, both for reasons of continuity as well as control.
Continuity, because vendors going out of business, dropping products, or changing strategies is a real issue. Control, because vendors often do things against the interests of their customers (competition again) - see Microsoft. Having access to source code prevents this.
There are many other reasons for choosing open source, and most of them are equally rational.
I just wonder why we are trying to lower the value of our skills and hard work.
A big reason is competition. You're incorrectly focusing on open source as the driving factor here. In the business world, the choice of open source is very often (usually?) made for competitive reasons. This is often the case for individuals too. In many cases - probably more than some authors care to admit - work on open source is done to "make a name" for the author. Perhaps an author wants to work on a certain type of system but doesn't work for a company which sells such systems. So now, whether the author likes to think of it this way or not, he competes with the programmers at those companies by working on an open source package in that market. If you talk to an open source author, I think you'll find they're usually aware of that, and unapologetic about it. One of the effects of competition is to drive down prices.
Of course, there's the side of open source that's "sold" as being altruistic, working towards a common good, etc. I'm not saying that doesn't apply. Again, both companies and individuals indulge in this behavior also. However, usually, when you examine them, choices are essentially selfish, even if in an "enlightened self-interest" kind of way. With free software, Richard Stallman presumably thinks that the world would be a better place if people followed his rules, and he would prefer to live in such a world. He's competing with all the people who have a different world view, and driving the value of their software down because he believes that value is too high. He represents an extreme in this respect, but even he doesn't suggest that people should work for nothing. He simply doesn't seem to believe that it's a requirement that people be paid repeatedly and handsomely for a single piece of work.
People are happy to claim OpenOffice as a successful Open Source project, but how many remember that the bulk of code in Open Office was produced as a closed source propritary program?
In my experience, some of the best open source products are those that started off as closed source. IBM's Eclipse IDE is another example. I don't see any reason to discriminate against a good, open product because it once was closed. What's the logic in that?
You're taking an extremely narrow view based on a single scenario. For example, many companies contribute to open source, because it helps them with things that aren't central to their own business, but that they still need anyway. Read the article about Joel's piece posted the other day, about complementarities.
I'm honestly afraid that the ubiquity of OS's and productivity applications will threaten my ability to make a reasonably comfortable income.
It *does* threaten your ability to make a comfortable income if you plan to compete with open source products. But the software market is unfathomably huge and diverse, and by no means everything is open sourced. In fact, the most commonly open sourced items are those that are well understood, even commoditized. Linux, Apache, and OpenOffice represent the commoditization of OSes, web servers, and office suites respectively.
This happens to all products eventually. To make a comfortable income, you have to *add value*, not just repeat what everyone already knows how to do. Making a comfortable income is up to you - your true skills and abilities aren't affected by what other people do. If you feel threatened that you won't be able to earn a living, it means that you don't feel confident that you have any useful skill to offer. Perhaps you don't, but that's not the fault of open source software.
Probably because a Microsoft drone got mod points. Every now and then, I see evidence of that. They can't resist reading/., but they've been brainwashed into thinking what a neat company MS is and how misunderstood it is.
they are ready and willing to do whatever it takes to fight...
Actually, no, they're not. What it's going to take is for Microsoft to stop behaving like an exploitative monopoly that has been able to use its illegal position to continually reap excess profit from its market. But if its profit reduces significantly and permanently, the stock will tank, and that's going to hurt the stockholders, big time.
No-one at Microsoft is ready or willing to step forward and say "yup, I guess our glory days are over, let's start competing fairly now." Instead, they're going to go down kicking and screaming.
There is at least one person at Microsoft who knows what the deal is, though: why do you think Bill Gates stepped down as President? He got out (back into R&D) at a point a bit past the top of his game. The government lawsuit forced him to realize that there was nowhere to go but down.
But at the center of the earth gravity is a much weaker force.
True, but the pressure of the material above the center, which is attracted towards the core, is very strong. That's what causes the earth's core to be dense - gravity creates pressure.
Is there a point just outside the center of the earth where gravity would actually pull you *UP*, since the bulk of the earth's mass lays above you?
No. The Earth is roughly spheroid, remember? The "center" of the Earth for the purposes of this discussion is the center of gravity, which is the net gravitational effect of all of Earth's atoms at any point. At the center of gravity, those forces cancel out. But anywhere other than that, the net force is towards the center of gravity.
Waggling Ever Upwards was much better!
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General IT Books?
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· Score: 2, Funny
Look, there's no question. Sure, if you're new to his work, Waggling Onwards seems profound, but it just doesn't compare to the subtlety and sheer intellectual discipline of Waggling Ever Upwards.
Why, it even inspired poetry: "waggling, wibble wobbling, spiraling ever upwards", from Blue Clear Silence, by Claiborne Schley Walsh. (Warning: link may be considered literary equivalent of goatse, by some...)
Congratulations! Hollywood wants to hire you...
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Physics in the Movies
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· Score: 2
...since you seem to have as bad an understanding of physics as any Hollywood script consultant, but will probably work for less money.
I'm not sure I quite understand Chardish physics yet, but I think one of the basics may be that space is permeated by an ether, so that when you step outside a spaceship travelling at some speed relative to the ether, the ether wind immediately blows you away.
The part I haven't quite figured out yet is why, when we send a spaceship out of the Earth's atmosphere, it isn't blown away by the ether wind caused by the Earth's motion through space around the sun, and by the sun's rotation around the galactic core, etc.
Or is it that there's a strange inertia effect in which you retain the inertia from the next-to-last environment you were in?
Parallel invention or reinvention is very common, often occurring around the same time in different parts of the world. One reason for it is that ideas usually build on existing knowledge, so people working at the same time with access to similar knowledge are likely to come up with the similar ideas.
The first patent in the US for a maglev train design was filed in 1969. The interesting question would be whether 5 year olds before that time might have come up with the same idea, or whether something that you were exposed to might have seeded the idea, whether toy trains or watching the Jetsons on TV.
Building and maintaining track, especially expensive hi-tech maglev track, isn't going to be able to compete with airlines economically, especially not for long-haul routes.
I don't usually reply to ACs, but since I wrote a provocative message without explaining myself, I'll explain here.
Even ignoring the fact that they deprived blacks of any kind of civil rights, South Africa's white government knowingly deprived the black people of SA of a decent education. That was one of the root causes of the Soweto riots in '76. (The Afrikaans-teaching requirement was simply the final straw). I was attending high school in Johannesburg at the time - I remember it quite well.
Given that via oppression and withholding of education, the government created an enormous almost completely uneducated populace, it's no surprise that when turning the country over to that populace for democratic rule, there have been problems.
That's why I said "talk about reaping what you sow". The only problem with that is of course that the ones mostly doing the reaping are the children or grandchildren of those who helped create or support the apartheid nightmare. Judging from some of the responses in this thread, many of those people have become apologists for their parents' sins, which is not too surprising. Still, it's rather sad that humans never seem able to take responsibility for either their own or often even their ancestor's actions - the fault always has to lie elsewhere, preferably with people of a different skin color.
As for the comparison of South Africa to other countries with racist policies or practices - no question, America for example can be as racist as anywhere, because as I've just alluded to, humans in general have a tendency towards racism. The problem with South Africa was how long it continued a governmentally-imposed apartheid policy and attempted to control its people with military force.
Basically, South Africa began entering the twentieth century as a democratic country, only in 1994. It has a century of catching up to do, at least, and the only people who were in a position to change that, were the people who supported and ran the apartheid government up until 1994. De Klerk finally did something, but it was hardly out of choice - it was more like the employee who, on learning he's been fired, says "you can't fire me, I quit".
The standard SA racist talk, that we've seen in these threads, is simply a comforting way for ignorant whites to blame a problem of their own creation on the very people that they oppressed for so long.
I assume you must be referring to the white racist monkeys who came up with the plan to deprive tens of millions of blacks of an education. Talk about reaping what you sow.
Lots of people seem to think that for some reason.
They think it because it's true. For example, see the emission spectrum of a standard white LED. This spectrum has two very distinct peaks, and poorer coverage in other areas of the spectrum. This still produces something approximating "pure" white light, but it's done by combining two relatively narrow-spectrum sources, and that's what makes it seem unnatural.
The Sun produces a much more constant intensity over the entire visible spectrum, as can be seen on this page. The Sun's spectrum is far from "poorer and narrower", as you described it - it would more accurately be described as "richer and wider". It does have somewhat lower intensity at the blue end, but that's nothing compared to the gaps in a white LED's spectrum.
The above link also lets you see the spectrum of a fluorescent bulb, which despite some peaks, is still more constant across the spectrum than the LED is.
The issue here is not purely one of human preference, either - in a room illuminated with white LEDs with a spectrum as shown in the first link, reds will be poorly illuminated, and objects with some colors will appear brighter than others. So, I stand by my statement that current LED technology has "a much narrower spectrum of light than any commonly used bulb technology - sort of the opposite of the 'natural light' bulbs that some companies sell."
In future, it's quite possible and likely that LEDs will be used to produce lamps with a wider and more even spectrum, but that certainly isn't the case today.
I could imagine that 4 striped standard ATA drives could do well over 130-150 MB/s
A standard 33MHz PCI bus would limit the top end to about 132MB/s, which is the point the other poster was making - that current buses will make it difficult for a single machine to saturate 10Gbit Ethernet. Not that that's a serious problem, exactly...
It's harder for him to retract his claim about prime numbers:
"The obvious mathematical breakthrough would be development of an easy way to factor large prime numbers." -- Bill Gates, "The Road Ahead", Viking Penguin (1995)
(come to think of it, this implies that physical size is a fundamental limiting factor on the speed of computers - it does no good to have an infinitely fast CPU if its parts can't communicate rapidly due to speed-of-light delays...)
Researchers have realized this for decades. Before enormous silicon chip densities became ordinary, engineers at IBM (IIRC) used to say that the future of computers was "hairy smoking golfballs". This captured a number of important characteristics of very fast computers:
Hairy because of all the wiring that would be involved (like the rubber strings in the core of old golfballs)
Smoking because of all the heat that would be generated
Golfball-sized because of latency issues, as you said
Golfball-shaped because a sphere is the most efficient use of space for components that need to be interconnected.
Since those days, Intel and its competitors have fulfilled all of these predictions except for the spherical shape, which is much more difficult and not as important as the other characteristics.
A Pentium 4 is hairy - those 55 million transistors have a lot of connections; and smoking, as anyone whose CPU fan has broken can attest. It's smaller than a golfball in cross-sectional area. That size isn't just to make them more convenient! If a physically bigger CPU would be faster, you can bet someone would be building them.
You wouldn't want your house to be lit by current LED technology. They have a much narrower spectrum of light than any commonly used bulb technology - sort of the opposite of the "natural light" bulbs that some companies sell.
I agree it's a special case, and it also points out why Amtrak fails everywhere else. When something is profitable, it's fairly easy to do it right, because profit rewards "correct" behavior, so ideally, you get a virtuous cycle.
When there's no hope of profits, there's no measure of what's important to the customers and what's not, so you get pathological behavior like money wasted on massive vanity projects while important infrastructure issues are left undealt with.
But I don't buy the conclusion from the article you referenced, "The loss of the ability to choose to traverse this incredible continent from the safety and comfort of a glass topped Domeliner, sipping a Martini while taking in our fruited plains, spacious skies and purple mountains majesty instead of being crammed into a smelly overcrowded airliner would be a great loss for us all." That's not a very convincing argument for spending trillions of future tax dollars on a national rail infrastructure.
Instead, they need to figure out what the purpose of tax-funded rail transit is - if there is one - and come up with clear guidelines for minimum standards that such a service has to provide, and perhaps more importantly, what it should not try to provide. They then need to fund it to an acceptable level. Underfunding something like Amtrak simply sets it up for failure, which is then used as proof that it isn't viable. Lack of sufficiently clear and specific goals guarantees that money won't be well spent.
I happen to think there probably really is little or no place for long-distance passenger rail in the current USA, outside of dense corridors like the Northeast.
You don't know much about Amtrak, I take it. Aside from the derailment record which I see another poster has documented, Amtrak has been perpetually on the edge of bankruptcy for decades. This has an effect on their level of service, and in fact the poor derailment record (albeit better than Vietnam, Thailand and Bangladesh) is a direct consequence of that.
Ignoring airlines and the odd exceptional subway/metrorail system, America just doesn't do mass transit well, for all sorts of reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Boeing is an unusual case because it is also a kind of monopoly in the US. (What is it about Seattle?) Workers in that industry may not have as much choice, if they want to stay within the industry and at the same geographic location, as people working in other fields. Unions try to negotiate a better deal for their employees. If you're a truly skilled worker, the best way to negotiate a better deal is to have companies compete for your skills, which may means switching jobs. If I personally were in aerospace and found my ability to sell my skills elsewhere was being limited, I would consider switching fields before I would join a union, and I would advise anyone else to do the same.
I have a friend who worked at Boeing for many years (in IT), and when he left, his pay increased substantially at his next job. These artificial markets that get created by semi-monopolies and unions are never a good thing.
Right, but now you're talking about charity. Most open source is not about charity at all.
In some senses I see how MS makes this sound "unamerican".
MS has been one of the biggest contributing factors to the open source explosion. Their practices have prevented strong commercial competition, and exploited customers beyond what many are willing to accept. Open source is certainly "un-Microsoft", but it's not even remotely un-American. As I've pointed out, a big part of open source is about competition, and that's very American.
I'm still not convinced that this isn't going to eventually cut into "our" bottom line as programmers. ... It's a good thing that I didn't get into programming for the money!
You have a concern that's currently theoretical, with no current evidence of it actually happening, but are implying that it might affect your economic prospects today or in the near future? Programmers get paid very well right now, and the fact that traditional operating systems and office suites are not where the future money is has no impact on that.
Most industries have unions to ensure reasonable compensation for their work
That's not true at all. It's primarily jobs with low added-value, which can be done by any slightly warm-bodied person, which have unions. Programming is not that kind of job, and open source doesn't make it any less skilled a job.
You're right that one of the purposes of unions is to reduce competition between individuals. If you're looking for something un-American, that's it. Unions cater to the least skilled individuals who are least capable of adding value. We'd be better off with more explicit social programs to help these individuals, since unions often have a negative effect on overall economic health.
Your argument might make sense if the market for software was a zero-sum game, where the availability of a free product reduced the overall dollars spent on software. But the free products simply form a base on which the next generation of more sophisticated products are built - if anything, open source contributes to the health and vibrancy of the market for software. The Internet itself, as well as for example Java and XML, are direct examples of that - open technologies which are driving major spending.
If the market for new kinds of software has any limits, its hard to detect what they are. You can't compare software development to what, say, Teamsters members do. It's certainly likely that if you're a low level "code monkey", that your pay will come under pressure in future, but that'll be from offshore developers and other people who are willing to work for less money, and has nothing to do with open source.
If you can add value, you'll do so out of choice, and one of the factors in your choice will be whether you feel you need to be paid directly for the work you're doing.
Your philosophy assumes that comptent programmers won't keep giving things away.
Not at all. People are always giving things away, as well as doing things to earn a living - usually both at once, one way or another.
They will based on the open source model, which will continually erode the value of software.
You're missing part of what I was getting at, which is that it's the economics of competition that erodes the value of software, just as it erodes the value of every other product out there, over time.
I think you may have some preconceptions about the value of software - thinking of it as comparable to a physical product which requires significant resources to copy. This is a mistake. It's the Bill Gates model of what software is, and one of the the things open source represents is a rational economic response to this distortion.
But when it's targeted towards a mass market and a multimillion dollar market I get concerned for all of us, not just myself.
Give me an example of a product where this applies. I don't believe there are any. As I mentioned, operating systems, basic web servers, and office suites have all reached such a level of commoditization that the "multimillion dollar market" for them is fast becoming an aberration.
The problem is that there are a lot of people who want to be lazy and get paid for selling more or less the same thing that they did 20 years ago, over and over again, without adding any significant value. Luckily, competition has a tendency to keep them from being that lazy. Instead, most are forced to think up new ideas, and develop new useful products, to earn a living.
It'd be like John Carmack open sourcing Doom3. It'd be stupid, and he won't do it for 3 - 4 years, which is after he's made a sizeable (and deserving) profit off of it.
Right, so as you suggest, he won't do it until he's earned what he feels he needs to from it. Where's the problem? He's creating real value which isn't easily duplicated "for free", so he gets to earn money from it.
Since I work in Information Systems everything I do is proprietary anyway.
That doesn't have to be the case. I'm a consultant who works on internal IS systems, but since I keep copyright to much of the work that I do, I'm in a position to open source some of it, as well as to contribute to open source projects that I work on. So for at least some of the work I do, I bill a customer for it, and upload it to Sourceforge the same day, with the customer's knowledge and consent.
One thing I get out of it is access to "products" that I and the customer otherwise might not have had access to, for reasons which include budget, as well as the desire to have source code, both for reasons of continuity as well as control. Continuity, because vendors going out of business, dropping products, or changing strategies is a real issue. Control, because vendors often do things against the interests of their customers (competition again) - see Microsoft. Having access to source code prevents this.
There are many other reasons for choosing open source, and most of them are equally rational.
I just wonder why we are trying to lower the value of our skills and hard work.
A big reason is competition. You're incorrectly focusing on open source as the driving factor here. In the business world, the choice of open source is very often (usually?) made for competitive reasons. This is often the case for individuals too. In many cases - probably more than some authors care to admit - work on open source is done to "make a name" for the author. Perhaps an author wants to work on a certain type of system but doesn't work for a company which sells such systems. So now, whether the author likes to think of it this way or not, he competes with the programmers at those companies by working on an open source package in that market. If you talk to an open source author, I think you'll find they're usually aware of that, and unapologetic about it. One of the effects of competition is to drive down prices.
Of course, there's the side of open source that's "sold" as being altruistic, working towards a common good, etc. I'm not saying that doesn't apply. Again, both companies and individuals indulge in this behavior also. However, usually, when you examine them, choices are essentially selfish, even if in an "enlightened self-interest" kind of way. With free software, Richard Stallman presumably thinks that the world would be a better place if people followed his rules, and he would prefer to live in such a world. He's competing with all the people who have a different world view, and driving the value of their software down because he believes that value is too high. He represents an extreme in this respect, but even he doesn't suggest that people should work for nothing. He simply doesn't seem to believe that it's a requirement that people be paid repeatedly and handsomely for a single piece of work.
In my experience, some of the best open source products are those that started off as closed source. IBM's Eclipse IDE is another example. I don't see any reason to discriminate against a good, open product because it once was closed. What's the logic in that?
I'm honestly afraid that the ubiquity of OS's and productivity applications will threaten my ability to make a reasonably comfortable income.
It *does* threaten your ability to make a comfortable income if you plan to compete with open source products. But the software market is unfathomably huge and diverse, and by no means everything is open sourced. In fact, the most commonly open sourced items are those that are well understood, even commoditized. Linux, Apache, and OpenOffice represent the commoditization of OSes, web servers, and office suites respectively.
This happens to all products eventually. To make a comfortable income, you have to *add value*, not just repeat what everyone already knows how to do. Making a comfortable income is up to you - your true skills and abilities aren't affected by what other people do. If you feel threatened that you won't be able to earn a living, it means that you don't feel confident that you have any useful skill to offer. Perhaps you don't, but that's not the fault of open source software.
Actually, no, they're not. What it's going to take is for Microsoft to stop behaving like an exploitative monopoly that has been able to use its illegal position to continually reap excess profit from its market. But if its profit reduces significantly and permanently, the stock will tank, and that's going to hurt the stockholders, big time.
No-one at Microsoft is ready or willing to step forward and say "yup, I guess our glory days are over, let's start competing fairly now." Instead, they're going to go down kicking and screaming.
There is at least one person at Microsoft who knows what the deal is, though: why do you think Bill Gates stepped down as President? He got out (back into R&D) at a point a bit past the top of his game. The government lawsuit forced him to realize that there was nowhere to go but down.
True, but the pressure of the material above the center, which is attracted towards the core, is very strong. That's what causes the earth's core to be dense - gravity creates pressure.
Is there a point just outside the center of the earth where gravity would actually pull you *UP*, since the bulk of the earth's mass lays above you?
No. The Earth is roughly spheroid, remember? The "center" of the Earth for the purposes of this discussion is the center of gravity, which is the net gravitational effect of all of Earth's atoms at any point. At the center of gravity, those forces cancel out. But anywhere other than that, the net force is towards the center of gravity.
Debian.
Why, it even inspired poetry: "waggling, wibble wobbling, spiraling ever upwards", from Blue Clear Silence, by Claiborne Schley Walsh. (Warning: link may be considered literary equivalent of goatse, by some...)
I'm not sure I quite understand Chardish physics yet, but I think one of the basics may be that space is permeated by an ether, so that when you step outside a spaceship travelling at some speed relative to the ether, the ether wind immediately blows you away.
The part I haven't quite figured out yet is why, when we send a spaceship out of the Earth's atmosphere, it isn't blown away by the ether wind caused by the Earth's motion through space around the sun, and by the sun's rotation around the galactic core, etc.
Or is it that there's a strange inertia effect in which you retain the inertia from the next-to-last environment you were in?
Except 300mph maglevs already exist...
The first patent in the US for a maglev train design was filed in 1969. The interesting question would be whether 5 year olds before that time might have come up with the same idea, or whether something that you were exposed to might have seeded the idea, whether toy trains or watching the Jetsons on TV.
...will be back here six times a day to read about them.
Even ignoring the fact that they deprived blacks of any kind of civil rights, South Africa's white government knowingly deprived the black people of SA of a decent education. That was one of the root causes of the Soweto riots in '76. (The Afrikaans-teaching requirement was simply the final straw). I was attending high school in Johannesburg at the time - I remember it quite well.
Given that via oppression and withholding of education, the government created an enormous almost completely uneducated populace, it's no surprise that when turning the country over to that populace for democratic rule, there have been problems.
That's why I said "talk about reaping what you sow". The only problem with that is of course that the ones mostly doing the reaping are the children or grandchildren of those who helped create or support the apartheid nightmare. Judging from some of the responses in this thread, many of those people have become apologists for their parents' sins, which is not too surprising. Still, it's rather sad that humans never seem able to take responsibility for either their own or often even their ancestor's actions - the fault always has to lie elsewhere, preferably with people of a different skin color.
As for the comparison of South Africa to other countries with racist policies or practices - no question, America for example can be as racist as anywhere, because as I've just alluded to, humans in general have a tendency towards racism. The problem with South Africa was how long it continued a governmentally-imposed apartheid policy and attempted to control its people with military force.
Basically, South Africa began entering the twentieth century as a democratic country, only in 1994. It has a century of catching up to do, at least, and the only people who were in a position to change that, were the people who supported and ran the apartheid government up until 1994. De Klerk finally did something, but it was hardly out of choice - it was more like the employee who, on learning he's been fired, says "you can't fire me, I quit".
The standard SA racist talk, that we've seen in these threads, is simply a comforting way for ignorant whites to blame a problem of their own creation on the very people that they oppressed for so long.
I assume you must be referring to the white racist monkeys who came up with the plan to deprive tens of millions of blacks of an education. Talk about reaping what you sow.
They think it because it's true. For example, see the emission spectrum of a standard white LED. This spectrum has two very distinct peaks, and poorer coverage in other areas of the spectrum. This still produces something approximating "pure" white light, but it's done by combining two relatively narrow-spectrum sources, and that's what makes it seem unnatural.
The Sun produces a much more constant intensity over the entire visible spectrum, as can be seen on this page. The Sun's spectrum is far from "poorer and narrower", as you described it - it would more accurately be described as "richer and wider". It does have somewhat lower intensity at the blue end, but that's nothing compared to the gaps in a white LED's spectrum.
The above link also lets you see the spectrum of a fluorescent bulb, which despite some peaks, is still more constant across the spectrum than the LED is.
The issue here is not purely one of human preference, either - in a room illuminated with white LEDs with a spectrum as shown in the first link, reds will be poorly illuminated, and objects with some colors will appear brighter than others. So, I stand by my statement that current LED technology has "a much narrower spectrum of light than any commonly used bulb technology - sort of the opposite of the 'natural light' bulbs that some companies sell."
In future, it's quite possible and likely that LEDs will be used to produce lamps with a wider and more even spectrum, but that certainly isn't the case today.
A standard 33MHz PCI bus would limit the top end to about 132MB/s, which is the point the other poster was making - that current buses will make it difficult for a single machine to saturate 10Gbit Ethernet. Not that that's a serious problem, exactly...
Researchers have realized this for decades. Before enormous silicon chip densities became ordinary, engineers at IBM (IIRC) used to say that the future of computers was "hairy smoking golfballs". This captured a number of important characteristics of very fast computers:
Since those days, Intel and its competitors have fulfilled all of these predictions except for the spherical shape, which is much more difficult and not as important as the other characteristics.
A Pentium 4 is hairy - those 55 million transistors have a lot of connections; and smoking, as anyone whose CPU fan has broken can attest. It's smaller than a golfball in cross-sectional area. That size isn't just to make them more convenient! If a physically bigger CPU would be faster, you can bet someone would be building them.
When there's no hope of profits, there's no measure of what's important to the customers and what's not, so you get pathological behavior like money wasted on massive vanity projects while important infrastructure issues are left undealt with.
But I don't buy the conclusion from the article you referenced, "The loss of the ability to choose to traverse this incredible continent from the safety and comfort of a glass topped Domeliner, sipping a Martini while taking in our fruited plains, spacious skies and purple mountains majesty instead of being crammed into a smelly overcrowded airliner would be a great loss for us all." That's not a very convincing argument for spending trillions of future tax dollars on a national rail infrastructure.
Instead, they need to figure out what the purpose of tax-funded rail transit is - if there is one - and come up with clear guidelines for minimum standards that such a service has to provide, and perhaps more importantly, what it should not try to provide. They then need to fund it to an acceptable level. Underfunding something like Amtrak simply sets it up for failure, which is then used as proof that it isn't viable. Lack of sufficiently clear and specific goals guarantees that money won't be well spent.
I happen to think there probably really is little or no place for long-distance passenger rail in the current USA, outside of dense corridors like the Northeast.
This article implies that 452 kph is the top speed the train reaches in these test runs.
Ignoring airlines and the odd exceptional subway/metrorail system, America just doesn't do mass transit well, for all sorts of reasons.