No, I suspect that's an expectation, but if the materials are built right it'll have some rip-stop capability so it'll just make a hole. That will affect the solar sail, but not significantly until you get a lot of them.
The alternative is to make something that is heavier and less effective, which will still get punctured if a bit of debris goes through it.
After all, things in space are usually not moving very slowly in relation to each other, so anything that touches it is likely to go right through anyway, regardless of the material. I suppose with something like this, the less resistance the material puts up the less its course is going to be screwed up by a space rock.
It's also relatively unlikely (though certainly not impossible) for them to have a strike in the first place. Look at how cluttered Low Earth Orbit is with Mankind's crap, and how many active satellites have ever been knocked out of commission by our own cesspool of concentrated garbage in LEO? Two that I recall, and they hit each other. I know there have been occasional stories about impacts, but they aren't terribly common, and the chances of them dwindle off rapidly past LEO and Mankind's junkyard.
Plus, $16 million?!? for a deep space probe that requires no fuel? That's chicken feed in terms of space travel. The Japanese could probably mass-produce them for $12 million a pop or less given economies of scale, send 10 of them out in different directions, lose 8 of them to debris strikes and whatever, and STILL get better science longer than pretty much anything short of nuclear we could send up today.
So the net loss to the music industry because of piracy is about[...]
No, the net loss to the US economy is. RIAA still lost trillions in revenues, but other sectors of the economy generated trillions in revenues, so as far as the economy as a whole works out it's just about break-even.
[...]$132 then?
Or maybe it's a gain of $32.57, depending on whether Bob went out and bought that $164.57 in albums he's been talking about lately. I'll have to ask him later.
as exaggerated as the loss numbers claimed the RIAA.
I think that's rather the point. RIAA claims that piracy costs the US economy Dr. Evil Voice:One Million Billion Dollars, so people who depend on fair use provisions need to inflate their numbers by the same amount and claim that fair use allowances benefit the US by an equally inflated amount, so the argument balances.
As long as both groups are using equally-inflated numbers, the effect evens out.:)
Many people will trust the word of a paid celebrity endorsement from a golfer or football player over the advice of their practicing physician, or an actor even if the actor does not play Dr. House.
But, yeah, you could grep in "crystal healer", "energy medicine practitioner", or any one of a bunch of titles in place of either "doctor" or "celebrity".
This isn't anything new. I could have replaced "Dr. House" with "Quincy M.E." 20 years ago. 100 years before that, it would be some guy coming in with a few actors he mysteriously "heals" with his mystical elixir. 2000 years before that, it was enough to just claim to be the son of a mythical being.
Free fall makes a perfectly good microgravity environment. There may be gravitational forces present, but they are compensated for by the free fall, and therefore you are in a microgravity environment.
But, let's take your definition of "microgravity" which apparently means "no body close enough to have its gravitational field felt regardless of compensation" for the sake of argument. It's not what the term means, but let's assume it did.
Bear in mind that I never used any term containing the word "gravity" at all. I used the term "weight". In an environment where there is no effective gravitational force, there is no weight.
In the ISS, I would "weigh" very, very close to zero, despite my round tummy.
That weight is accurate in Metric AND Imperial, by the way. Just in case you needed that clarified.
Oh my God! Who do I make that check out to again? No, can't wait for it to clear, let me just give you my mattress and you can take how much it is, OK, I can't number very well.
OK, seriously...
Remember that many of the victims of scams like this don't know any better. These aren't random people showing up at their houses, they are ads showing up on websites. But many don't even know that.
They only know that their "computer person" has told them to make sure their AntiVirus is working correctly, and that the computer has just told them that their AntiVirus has stopped working correctly but the nice warning offered to fix it for them. Many of the newer ones look pretty legitimate, too, and have multiple URLs so when you Google them fake review sites come up and gush enthusiastically about how great the product is.
I have a co-worker who has been hit by this. I support 2 co-workers' home computers. They are otherwise intelligent people who use the preconfigured computers here at work every day. I give them lists of free antivirus packages they can load, and the one who had the problem came in and told me that her subscription to n0d ran out, but that the computer had warned her to replace it with "AntiVirus 2010" which had a free trial, but she noticed that once she installed it the computer slowed down.
She's not dumb, just on the low end of computer literacy. She knew that she needed to avoid popups and to run an Antivirus client, but this specific popup looked like a dialog box and she knew that her AV was running out, so she assumed it was like all the other warnings Windows Seven likes to send her about updates and such.
Same deal as the Russians taking tourists up, I suppose. Many of the support systems are common, but as I understand it each country has some allocated space. The science experiments would probably be subcontracted out to NASA and NASA would do them in its allocated space.
The first requirement of submitted proposals to NASA is to do so in English. We all know how well foreign languages (or measurement systems) work out. C'mon, this isn't rocket science!:)
It does lead me to one important question, however...
Polymer extrusion and blown film line test in low gravity for polymer chain linkage testing.
How do you spell "polymer", "extrusion", "gravity", and "linkage" correctly and use them in a coherent-sounding sentence, then get "airplane" wrong?;)
Penthouse apt for rent. Very cozy efficiency. Fully furnished. Magnificent view. Reserved parking for your vehicle. Onsite gymnasium. Great weight loss program (disclaimer: weight is not the same as mass). Exclusive community in a unique private out-of-the-way setting. Heat and utilities included. No pets. $40,000,000 a week.
As a co-worker of mine once said many years ago (paraphrased): "If I made the decisions around here, things would be very different. One of the major things that would be different is that I'd be writing the paychecks, not receiving one. I will advise management about things they are doing that I feel are wrong, and warn them about the implications of their decisions, because that's my job. Once they have reached a decision it's my job to implement it to the best of my ability, provided what they ask me to do is legal."
I just HOPE that in the future, development teams will fucking stick to standards!
Microsoft sold senior management on a series of rapid application development tools that allowed developers to write very effective applications very quickly. Rational companies use the most effective tool to solve a business problem, and in a lot of heavy-Microsoft shops those tools were FrontPage, SQL Server, Visual(insert language here), and the rest of the Microsoft development suite that was almost free once you drank the whole glass of kool-aid, Cherry Redmond flavor.
I don't think in all fairness that anyone could have predicted that Microsoft would not only break compatibility with other browsers, but also break compatibility with their own. The fact remains that a lot of software written with Microsoft toolkits from the IE6 era will only run on IE6. There is no IE6 compatibility mode in any meaningful sense of the term, and there is no "take the source code, shove it into this tool, recompile, now you're IE7+ compatible!" magic bullet, even when you have the original source code and the latest Microsoft tools. It requires recoding. Long, tedious, manual recoding.
As far as external vendor software goes, hell, "follows Web standards" isn't even on the RFP checklist at many companies now, and it certainly wasn't back then. The "standard" was Microsoft, because that's what everyone ran. If you could write your software more cheaply by using an ActiveX widget, so be it. That's what you did. And Microsoft will always support this stuff, because that's what they do, right?
The business shops around for the software that best solves the problem they have at the lowest price they can get away with. IT might get involved to make sure it works with the back-end systems, but very few people care too deeply about the desktop.
Tons and tons of companies used those tools to write applications for their internal use and also for sale to other companies. Then Microsoft came out with IE7 and basically told all of those developers that their applications would need to be almost completely rewritten.
Development teams will fucking stick to standards, but they are the standards of the company they work for, and last I checked IEEE doesn't run most companies unless I missed the global memo about the planetary business reorganization.
I'm just glad I never got into desktop application development. Writing useful programming is a whole lot easier on the midrange field, because my apps run on a single box, and I don't give a rat's ass what version of telnet you use to access my apps as long as it supports the 5250 function keys. I'm free to think about functionality, performance, security, and stability. I don't deal with desktop compatibility and what shade of cerulean the "Accept" button needs to be.
1. The software author was contributing to a project that he/she saw their own benefits from, and therefore were compensated by the resulting product. In a few smaller projects, a single person writes code entirely for their own benefit, then releases the code because someone else might want to use it, too. In this case, their time was "free" in terms of money, they compensated themselves with the results of their own work then offered out a copy of it for others to benefit from as well.
This, by the way, is why FOSS is often compared to "communism" (not the totalitarian kind as we've seen practiced, but the purer Marxian kind of "from each according to ability, to each according to need"). Everyone in a project like this is free to contribute whatever they can or want to, and everyone benefits from all of the contributions. Of course, where communism in the real world breaks down is in simple resource limitations - a lot of people want to take according to need, but not give according to ability. In the world of software development, you can have a very low number of givers and a very high number of takers and the model still works as long as you have some givers. And if the givers are benefiting themselves by creating what they themselves need, then they are building their own compensation.
2. The software was written under contract for a specific company to solve a specific problem and that company is not using the software for competitive advantage, so they release the code for others to use. It can also mean that software they use themselves can be improved by others at no cost to them, so symbiotic relationships can form.
3. The software was available in crude form and a company didn't want to reinvent the wheel, so they started with what was out there, improved it, and released the improved version as a way of "paying back" for the fact that the codebase saved them a crapload of development time. Or, in the case of a lot of projects, the company wants to sell you some hardware and they are OK with you doing other things with it once you've bought it (ie. what is now known as the Linksys WRT54GL series), so providing the source code moves more cheap generic-parts units off the shelf because the modding community wants to turn them into all sorts of crazy stuff.
In reality, most free software is the result of multiple of the above scenarios happening.
The fact is that while an author's time is not free, they can still give away the software under circumstances where enough people will give them small amounts of money (advertising on their download site, voluntary donations, or even kudos and appreciation to feed the ego for a spare-time project). They can also write software that benefits themselves and send it out, but if you want them to change it to suit your own needs you can offer them some money to make the changes, and the improved version can be released for all to enjoy.
I've seen projects where the original author makes the source code available, then uses "paypal voting" for new features. "Many people have asked me for feature 'x'. It's going to take me about 8 hours to write it, and I'm out of beer and nachos. If you want me to add feature 'x', send money and tell me it's for feature 'x' - when my donations for feature 'x' hit $400, I'll write it and release it for all to enjoy."
Close, but the real problem is the electoral college that pretty much ensures that any vote NOT for one of the two major-party candidates is a wasted vote.
We don't technically have a two-party system, we have an election system that is rigged such that only two of the parties count.
"GIVE THEIR GODDAMNED CREDIT CARD LOGIN INFORMATION OR THEIR GODDAMNED MERCHANT LOGIN INFORMATION."
I'll gladly hand you my credit card to buy something from you, but I will not write down the credentials to log in to my credit card company's website and administer my card. Yet, that's what Blippy asks people to do, and that's what they do.
1) Credit card companies only do this for "disposable" credit card numbers, which are usually only used for one transaction. No credit card company I've ever done business puts the full CC# of your master account on every line of your statement,
2) The REALLY good news is that such numbers only appear on your credit card statement,
So this information is relatively harmless, since most credit cards revealed this way would be invalid by the time they were revealed. Plus, of paramount importance here, the only way this information could possibly get out is if you gave your credit card account username and password to some strange website or something so they could see your credit card statement. And no one would be dumb enough to do that, right? I mean, that's insanity, giving out the username and password to your credit card accounts. Right? ummm, right?
Some people are just exhibitionists. "Oooh! Look at me! I just bought a new XYZ phone!" and having that information fed to a social media site automatically means they have more time to, you know, buy more crap.
As far as the credit card information, it all depends on who is feeding it. According to several articles on the subject, users give Blippy access to their credit card accounts (as in, access to log in to their credit card web site), and Blippy extracts the data it wants from your actual credit card transactions. If you use "temporary" credit card numbers like I do, then quite often the transaction will show up as (for example) "AMAZON.COM CARD#9999-9999-9999-9999". If Blippy is actually getting that data, then it's your credit card company that's revealing the data, not Blippy. If you signed up with Amazon, then you'll probably just get a list of items and it's unlikely a credit card will show through.
So, the actual credit cards revealed were probably "disposable" numbers that were likely useless by the time they were revealed. However, that does lead to a different point. Who in the hell is giving Blippy their logins for their credit card accounts, or their merchant accounts? I mean, c'mon, really, we're well into April, it's nowhere near the first. Is this some form of sick stupid joke?
Of course, if one were to, say, GIVE THEIR GODDAMNED CREDIT CARD OR MERCHANT LOGIN INFORMATION TO A GODDAMNED BUNCH OF STRANGERS, then their concept of "security" differs too greatly from mine for us to have a coherent conversation on the matter.
Well, duh! He's right there when I got the news! What in the hell would you expect me to do? Go out and find who actually did it and shoot THEM?
Geez, if I had that kind of patience I'd probably lose my American citizenship. Plus then I probably wouldn't be allowed to have a gun so I could shoot someone.
Except that you can hide your MAC address by simply turning off SSID broadcast, and your router is no longer screaming it.
TV content distributors use satellites to distribute content. If you use that, you must decrypt it. But you can sit and watch patterned static all day long, use the streamed signal to generate pseudorandom locations, and even point a focused receive-only antenna at the satellite and use the satellite as a point of reference if you want to.
The signals the device intentionally broadcasts in the clear are vastly different from signals that are sent as encrypted and you must decrypt. It's not the interception of the signal, that's perfectly legal. It's the circumvention of the encryption protocol.
You can call your SSID/MAC a "service", but in order to consider it a "protected service" you must encrypt it. Which means you'll have to invent your own 802.11x-ish spec that encrypts the MAC address and SSID as well as all data sent over the data channel. At that point, your analogy would hold. But you've got some serious development to do first.
Or you could simply uncheck the damned "broadcast SSID" checkbox on your router's configuration screen and be done with it. Google's not stupid enough to try and use AirSnort to ferret out hidden APs when there are plenty of broadcasting ones they could use for their Wifi-assisted-GPS service.
There is a gigantic yawning chasm full of nasty pointy teeth between "believe wholeheartedly" and "have proof of".
On one side of that chasm is religion, and on the other side of that chasm is science. Confusing one for the other is intellectually dangerous, and leads to piss-poor science or violent extremism in religion.
I care very much whether aliens exist, and I also believe wholeheartedly that they do exist in some form or other - I think it's statistically impossible given the size of the Universe that we are alone in it. But that's a belief, not a proven fact, and I accept it as such. I'm not going to argue with someone over it, because it's not something that CAN be argued over in any meaningful way. I can explain the underpinnings of the belief, and maybe some of those are based on bullshit information I've received and I need to revisit that belief, but that's pretty much it. It's a belief, not a fact. If you look at your own data and come to a different conclusion, OK then. We can each look at the other's belief and disagree, because in the end it's not going to change anything.
If credible proof were to be discovered either way, it would still change my view of the Universe quite profoundly. If someone had proof positive that alien life did not exist, I'd have to go get drunk and contemplate my navel for a while to accept my new lonely view of the Universe, and if alien life was proven then I would throw away the belief and start looking at the nature of the alien life we found. In either case, it would stop being a "belief" and would fundamentally change my view on the subject.
Right now, I'm convinced we're not alone in roughly the same way that someone who is religious is convinced that there is a God or Gods (deist). It's difficult for me to accept that there is NOT some other form of life out there. The data I see suggests I am correct, but there's precious little data that I'm basing my belief on. I don't know what form that life (or that God or those Gods) would take, so it's fun to speculate but any speculation is meaningless because there's no hard data to prove anything.
That's profoundly different from knowing, for certain, based on actual data, that other life forms (or God(s)) exist.
It's also profoundly different from convincing yourself that you know, for certain, based purely on strong enough belief, that other life forms (or God(s)) exist.
Having proof positive that aliens exist would not have a profound impact on our daily lives, true, but it would have a deeply profound impact on our outlook and perception of the universe around us. And, of course, who knows what information they may be broadcasting, if they do exist and we eventually find a signal?
Having said that, SETI has never been a very expensive project, so it's not like we're spending big money on SETI. Back when NASA funded SETI, it was less than one tenth of one percent of NASA's budget. Now that it's privately funded, it isn't really cutting too deeply into any other projects. Maybe you have a handful of scientists working on SETI instead of one of the other projects you mentioned, but then again most of our efforts in the world are wasted on things that are not only not in our best interests, but could arguably said to be acting against our best interests. SETI may not be optimal, but it's very small in the big picture and certainly doesn't appear detrimental.
I think their original hope was that those most interested in the SETI project would contribute their knowledge and expertise to a single project.
SETI@HOME proved that leveraging tons of processors to crunch algorithms developed by a relatively small number of good brains allowed them to expand their science. They've analyzed the everlovin' crap out of that signal for about 50 years now (or millions of years if you count SETI@HOME computer time) and nothing has surfaced yet, so maybe it's time to let others have a crack at it.
But there's good reason not to do that too soon.
The problem is that expanding the number of brains can be a good thing and a bad thing. Good in that more people will take novel approaches to analyzing the data, bad because there's going to be a lot of duplication, a lot of working at cross-purposes, and a lot of people so desperately wanting to be the one to discover the Greys that SETI will have to work up some method of validating claims.
And, of course, just debunking false claims from every 9-year-old who forgot to set the right floating point settings on his compiler and ended up with a filtration pattern, every nutjob who thinks that a pattern match of 2 bits against the latest copy of the "Music of the Spheres" constitutes a valid find, and every attention-seeker who just makes shit up in the hopes of getting their name in lights for a few seconds will now be a full-time job for a population of scientists much larger than the current SETI project supports today.
Right now, there are fewer brains working on the project, but they seem to have really good integrity. In radio terminology, there isn't much signal but the signal-to-noise ratio is quite good.
Make the data public, and you'll have a lot more theories on how to find a match, and some of them will even be good. A few will almost certainly be better than the original scientists had going on to start with. But the signal-to-noise ratio is going to be awful.
SETI already has credibility problems from those who do not believe that life could exist anywhere but God's Chosen Sphere, and those who believe that if life existed it would be a colossal coincidence indeed if it could emit patterns we'd recognize, and those who believe that such signals would never have had time to reach us yet. Add in a months' worth of multiple daily stories about some lunatic claiming to have found aliens based on pattern matching the raw SETI data against the screech marks on his underwear from the same day the data was collected, and they'll find it even harder to get funding.
But I suspect the SETI project, as it stands, is probably going to wither away at some point anyway. So releasing the data is a good way of making sure someone, somewhere, will preserve it in addition to expanding the uses of it.
OK, so they cannot be placed "subtly". I stand corrected on that point. But I don't know if these new cameras would need to be designated as "speed" cameras, and of course it really doesn't matter if they are in terms of their effectiveness.
The real point is that the location of the camera has little to do with where you are speeding. It's not using snapshots of your speed near brightly-painted cameras, it's using averages between those cameras. It doesn't matter if you know where the cameras are, because you either average your speed to be at or lower than the speed limit for the entire duration between the cameras or you get a ticket.
You can be a good "speed camera beater" for the current cameras and mash the brakes for these new cameras, but the cameras are probably not capturing your speed at the moment. They honestly do not care if you went by them at 5MPH or 150MPH. They only log that you were at such-and-such location at so-and-so time.
Then, when the next camera sees you, the database matches up your license plate and sees how fast you were going during the entire time between camera "A" and camera "B".
If you drive by the camera at the speed limit, floor the go pedal as soon as you're out of range and drive like a crazed speed demon, and slow down for the next camera, your average speed can still net you a ticket.
Slashdot Mirror
No, I suspect that's an expectation, but if the materials are built right it'll have some rip-stop capability so it'll just make a hole. That will affect the solar sail, but not significantly until you get a lot of them.
The alternative is to make something that is heavier and less effective, which will still get punctured if a bit of debris goes through it.
After all, things in space are usually not moving very slowly in relation to each other, so anything that touches it is likely to go right through anyway, regardless of the material. I suppose with something like this, the less resistance the material puts up the less its course is going to be screwed up by a space rock.
It's also relatively unlikely (though certainly not impossible) for them to have a strike in the first place. Look at how cluttered Low Earth Orbit is with Mankind's crap, and how many active satellites have ever been knocked out of commission by our own cesspool of concentrated garbage in LEO? Two that I recall, and they hit each other. I know there have been occasional stories about impacts, but they aren't terribly common, and the chances of them dwindle off rapidly past LEO and Mankind's junkyard.
Plus, $16 million?!? for a deep space probe that requires no fuel? That's chicken feed in terms of space travel. The Japanese could probably mass-produce them for $12 million a pop or less given economies of scale, send 10 of them out in different directions, lose 8 of them to debris strikes and whatever, and STILL get better science longer than pretty much anything short of nuclear we could send up today.
So the net loss to the music industry because of piracy is about[...]
No, the net loss to the US economy is. RIAA still lost trillions in revenues, but other sectors of the economy generated trillions in revenues, so as far as the economy as a whole works out it's just about break-even.
[...]$132 then?
Or maybe it's a gain of $32.57, depending on whether Bob went out and bought that $164.57 in albums he's been talking about lately. I'll have to ask him later.
as exaggerated as the loss numbers claimed the RIAA.
I think that's rather the point. RIAA claims that piracy costs the US economy Dr. Evil Voice:One Million Billion Dollars, so people who depend on fair use provisions need to inflate their numbers by the same amount and claim that fair use allowances benefit the US by an equally inflated amount, so the argument balances.
As long as both groups are using equally-inflated numbers, the effect evens out. :)
Many people will trust the word of a paid celebrity endorsement from a golfer or football player over the advice of their practicing physician, or an actor even if the actor does not play Dr. House.
But, yeah, you could grep in "crystal healer", "energy medicine practitioner", or any one of a bunch of titles in place of either "doctor" or "celebrity".
This isn't anything new. I could have replaced "Dr. House" with "Quincy M.E." 20 years ago. 100 years before that, it would be some guy coming in with a few actors he mysteriously "heals" with his mystical elixir. 2000 years before that, it was enough to just claim to be the son of a mythical being.
We don't change, we just update the lingo.
You're not really in microgravity
Free fall makes a perfectly good microgravity environment. There may be gravitational forces present, but they are compensated for by the free fall, and therefore you are in a microgravity environment.
But, let's take your definition of "microgravity" which apparently means "no body close enough to have its gravitational field felt regardless of compensation" for the sake of argument. It's not what the term means, but let's assume it did.
Bear in mind that I never used any term containing the word "gravity" at all. I used the term "weight". In an environment where there is no effective gravitational force, there is no weight.
In the ISS, I would "weigh" very, very close to zero, despite my round tummy.
That weight is accurate in Metric AND Imperial, by the way. Just in case you needed that clarified.
it's certified by these doctors.
grep/doctors/celebrities/
Oh my God! Who do I make that check out to again? No, can't wait for it to clear, let me just give you my mattress and you can take how much it is, OK, I can't number very well.
OK, seriously...
Remember that many of the victims of scams like this don't know any better. These aren't random people showing up at their houses, they are ads showing up on websites. But many don't even know that.
They only know that their "computer person" has told them to make sure their AntiVirus is working correctly, and that the computer has just told them that their AntiVirus has stopped working correctly but the nice warning offered to fix it for them. Many of the newer ones look pretty legitimate, too, and have multiple URLs so when you Google them fake review sites come up and gush enthusiastically about how great the product is.
I have a co-worker who has been hit by this. I support 2 co-workers' home computers. They are otherwise intelligent people who use the preconfigured computers here at work every day. I give them lists of free antivirus packages they can load, and the one who had the problem came in and told me that her subscription to n0d ran out, but that the computer had warned her to replace it with "AntiVirus 2010" which had a free trial, but she noticed that once she installed it the computer slowed down.
She's not dumb, just on the low end of computer literacy. She knew that she needed to avoid popups and to run an Antivirus client, but this specific popup looked like a dialog box and she knew that her AV was running out, so she assumed it was like all the other warnings Windows Seven likes to send her about updates and such.
Same deal as the Russians taking tourists up, I suppose. Many of the support systems are common, but as I understand it each country has some allocated space. The science experiments would probably be subcontracted out to NASA and NASA would do them in its allocated space.
Fully-laden? What do you mean, and African or European Shuttle?
centrifical
teather(ed)
oribital circumfurance
atmosphering re-entry
is more brittle or harded
paper airplain
infinitly divisible continum
The first requirement of submitted proposals to NASA is to do so in English. We all know how well foreign languages (or measurement systems) work out. C'mon, this isn't rocket science! :)
It does lead me to one important question, however...
Polymer extrusion and blown film line test in low gravity for polymer chain linkage testing.
How do you spell "polymer", "extrusion", "gravity", and "linkage" correctly and use them in a coherent-sounding sentence, then get "airplane" wrong? ;)
"Can it blend... in Zero G?"
Penthouse apt for rent. Very cozy efficiency. Fully furnished. Magnificent view. Reserved parking for your vehicle. Onsite gymnasium. Great weight loss program (disclaimer: weight is not the same as mass). Exclusive community in a unique private out-of-the-way setting. Heat and utilities included. No pets. $40,000,000 a week.
As a co-worker of mine once said many years ago (paraphrased): "If I made the decisions around here, things would be very different. One of the major things that would be different is that I'd be writing the paychecks, not receiving one. I will advise management about things they are doing that I feel are wrong, and warn them about the implications of their decisions, because that's my job. Once they have reached a decision it's my job to implement it to the best of my ability, provided what they ask me to do is legal."
I just HOPE that in the future, development teams will fucking stick to standards!
Microsoft sold senior management on a series of rapid application development tools that allowed developers to write very effective applications very quickly. Rational companies use the most effective tool to solve a business problem, and in a lot of heavy-Microsoft shops those tools were FrontPage, SQL Server, Visual(insert language here), and the rest of the Microsoft development suite that was almost free once you drank the whole glass of kool-aid, Cherry Redmond flavor.
I don't think in all fairness that anyone could have predicted that Microsoft would not only break compatibility with other browsers, but also break compatibility with their own. The fact remains that a lot of software written with Microsoft toolkits from the IE6 era will only run on IE6. There is no IE6 compatibility mode in any meaningful sense of the term, and there is no "take the source code, shove it into this tool, recompile, now you're IE7+ compatible!" magic bullet, even when you have the original source code and the latest Microsoft tools. It requires recoding. Long, tedious, manual recoding.
As far as external vendor software goes, hell, "follows Web standards" isn't even on the RFP checklist at many companies now, and it certainly wasn't back then. The "standard" was Microsoft, because that's what everyone ran. If you could write your software more cheaply by using an ActiveX widget, so be it. That's what you did. And Microsoft will always support this stuff, because that's what they do, right?
The business shops around for the software that best solves the problem they have at the lowest price they can get away with. IT might get involved to make sure it works with the back-end systems, but very few people care too deeply about the desktop.
Tons and tons of companies used those tools to write applications for their internal use and also for sale to other companies. Then Microsoft came out with IE7 and basically told all of those developers that their applications would need to be almost completely rewritten.
Development teams will fucking stick to standards, but they are the standards of the company they work for, and last I checked IEEE doesn't run most companies unless I missed the global memo about the planetary business reorganization.
I'm just glad I never got into desktop application development. Writing useful programming is a whole lot easier on the midrange field, because my apps run on a single box, and I don't give a rat's ass what version of telnet you use to access my apps as long as it supports the 5250 function keys. I'm free to think about functionality, performance, security, and stability. I don't deal with desktop compatibility and what shade of cerulean the "Accept" button needs to be.
Several possibilities.
1. The software author was contributing to a project that he/she saw their own benefits from, and therefore were compensated by the resulting product. In a few smaller projects, a single person writes code entirely for their own benefit, then releases the code because someone else might want to use it, too. In this case, their time was "free" in terms of money, they compensated themselves with the results of their own work then offered out a copy of it for others to benefit from as well.
This, by the way, is why FOSS is often compared to "communism" (not the totalitarian kind as we've seen practiced, but the purer Marxian kind of "from each according to ability, to each according to need"). Everyone in a project like this is free to contribute whatever they can or want to, and everyone benefits from all of the contributions. Of course, where communism in the real world breaks down is in simple resource limitations - a lot of people want to take according to need, but not give according to ability. In the world of software development, you can have a very low number of givers and a very high number of takers and the model still works as long as you have some givers. And if the givers are benefiting themselves by creating what they themselves need, then they are building their own compensation.
2. The software was written under contract for a specific company to solve a specific problem and that company is not using the software for competitive advantage, so they release the code for others to use. It can also mean that software they use themselves can be improved by others at no cost to them, so symbiotic relationships can form.
3. The software was available in crude form and a company didn't want to reinvent the wheel, so they started with what was out there, improved it, and released the improved version as a way of "paying back" for the fact that the codebase saved them a crapload of development time. Or, in the case of a lot of projects, the company wants to sell you some hardware and they are OK with you doing other things with it once you've bought it (ie. what is now known as the Linksys WRT54GL series), so providing the source code moves more cheap generic-parts units off the shelf because the modding community wants to turn them into all sorts of crazy stuff.
In reality, most free software is the result of multiple of the above scenarios happening.
The fact is that while an author's time is not free, they can still give away the software under circumstances where enough people will give them small amounts of money (advertising on their download site, voluntary donations, or even kudos and appreciation to feed the ego for a spare-time project). They can also write software that benefits themselves and send it out, but if you want them to change it to suit your own needs you can offer them some money to make the changes, and the improved version can be released for all to enjoy.
I've seen projects where the original author makes the source code available, then uses "paypal voting" for new features. "Many people have asked me for feature 'x'. It's going to take me about 8 hours to write it, and I'm out of beer and nachos. If you want me to add feature 'x', send money and tell me it's for feature 'x' - when my donations for feature 'x' hit $400, I'll write it and release it for all to enjoy."
Close, but the real problem is the electoral college that pretty much ensures that any vote NOT for one of the two major-party candidates is a wasted vote.
We don't technically have a two-party system, we have an election system that is rigged such that only two of the parties count.
Sorry, bad wording, allow me to clarify.
"GIVE THEIR GODDAMNED CREDIT CARD LOGIN INFORMATION OR THEIR GODDAMNED MERCHANT LOGIN INFORMATION."
I'll gladly hand you my credit card to buy something from you, but I will not write down the credentials to log in to my credit card company's website and administer my card. Yet, that's what Blippy asks people to do, and that's what they do.
There are two pieces of good news here.
1) Credit card companies only do this for "disposable" credit card numbers, which are usually only used for one transaction. No credit card company I've ever done business puts the full CC# of your master account on every line of your statement,
2) The REALLY good news is that such numbers only appear on your credit card statement,
So this information is relatively harmless, since most credit cards revealed this way would be invalid by the time they were revealed. Plus, of paramount importance here, the only way this information could possibly get out is if you gave your credit card account username and password to some strange website or something so they could see your credit card statement. And no one would be dumb enough to do that, right? I mean, that's insanity, giving out the username and password to your credit card accounts. Right? ummm, right?
Number of beta users: More than 5,000
Source: http://www.netbanker.com/2010/01/blippy_demonstrates_the_power_of_real-time_streaming_of_financial_transaction_data.html
Oh. Never mind. Some people are that stupid.
Some people are just exhibitionists. "Oooh! Look at me! I just bought a new XYZ phone!" and having that information fed to a social media site automatically means they have more time to, you know, buy more crap.
As far as the credit card information, it all depends on who is feeding it. According to several articles on the subject, users give Blippy access to their credit card accounts (as in, access to log in to their credit card web site), and Blippy extracts the data it wants from your actual credit card transactions. If you use "temporary" credit card numbers like I do, then quite often the transaction will show up as (for example) "AMAZON.COM CARD#9999-9999-9999-9999". If Blippy is actually getting that data, then it's your credit card company that's revealing the data, not Blippy. If you signed up with Amazon, then you'll probably just get a list of items and it's unlikely a credit card will show through.
So, the actual credit cards revealed were probably "disposable" numbers that were likely useless by the time they were revealed. However, that does lead to a different point. Who in the hell is giving Blippy their logins for their credit card accounts, or their merchant accounts? I mean, c'mon, really, we're well into April, it's nowhere near the first. Is this some form of sick stupid joke?
Of course, if one were to, say, GIVE THEIR GODDAMNED CREDIT CARD OR MERCHANT LOGIN INFORMATION TO A GODDAMNED BUNCH OF STRANGERS, then their concept of "security" differs too greatly from mine for us to have a coherent conversation on the matter.
Well, duh! He's right there when I got the news! What in the hell would you expect me to do? Go out and find who actually did it and shoot THEM?
Geez, if I had that kind of patience I'd probably lose my American citizenship. Plus then I probably wouldn't be allowed to have a gun so I could shoot someone.
Except that you can hide your MAC address by simply turning off SSID broadcast, and your router is no longer screaming it.
TV content distributors use satellites to distribute content. If you use that, you must decrypt it. But you can sit and watch patterned static all day long, use the streamed signal to generate pseudorandom locations, and even point a focused receive-only antenna at the satellite and use the satellite as a point of reference if you want to.
The signals the device intentionally broadcasts in the clear are vastly different from signals that are sent as encrypted and you must decrypt. It's not the interception of the signal, that's perfectly legal. It's the circumvention of the encryption protocol.
You can call your SSID/MAC a "service", but in order to consider it a "protected service" you must encrypt it. Which means you'll have to invent your own 802.11x-ish spec that encrypts the MAC address and SSID as well as all data sent over the data channel. At that point, your analogy would hold. But you've got some serious development to do first.
Or you could simply uncheck the damned "broadcast SSID" checkbox on your router's configuration screen and be done with it. Google's not stupid enough to try and use AirSnort to ferret out hidden APs when there are plenty of broadcasting ones they could use for their Wifi-assisted-GPS service.
There is a gigantic yawning chasm full of nasty pointy teeth between "believe wholeheartedly" and "have proof of".
On one side of that chasm is religion, and on the other side of that chasm is science. Confusing one for the other is intellectually dangerous, and leads to piss-poor science or violent extremism in religion.
I care very much whether aliens exist, and I also believe wholeheartedly that they do exist in some form or other - I think it's statistically impossible given the size of the Universe that we are alone in it. But that's a belief, not a proven fact, and I accept it as such. I'm not going to argue with someone over it, because it's not something that CAN be argued over in any meaningful way. I can explain the underpinnings of the belief, and maybe some of those are based on bullshit information I've received and I need to revisit that belief, but that's pretty much it. It's a belief, not a fact. If you look at your own data and come to a different conclusion, OK then. We can each look at the other's belief and disagree, because in the end it's not going to change anything.
If credible proof were to be discovered either way, it would still change my view of the Universe quite profoundly. If someone had proof positive that alien life did not exist, I'd have to go get drunk and contemplate my navel for a while to accept my new lonely view of the Universe, and if alien life was proven then I would throw away the belief and start looking at the nature of the alien life we found. In either case, it would stop being a "belief" and would fundamentally change my view on the subject.
Right now, I'm convinced we're not alone in roughly the same way that someone who is religious is convinced that there is a God or Gods (deist). It's difficult for me to accept that there is NOT some other form of life out there. The data I see suggests I am correct, but there's precious little data that I'm basing my belief on. I don't know what form that life (or that God or those Gods) would take, so it's fun to speculate but any speculation is meaningless because there's no hard data to prove anything.
That's profoundly different from knowing, for certain, based on actual data, that other life forms (or God(s)) exist.
It's also profoundly different from convincing yourself that you know, for certain, based purely on strong enough belief, that other life forms (or God(s)) exist.
Having proof positive that aliens exist would not have a profound impact on our daily lives, true, but it would have a deeply profound impact on our outlook and perception of the universe around us. And, of course, who knows what information they may be broadcasting, if they do exist and we eventually find a signal?
Having said that, SETI has never been a very expensive project, so it's not like we're spending big money on SETI. Back when NASA funded SETI, it was less than one tenth of one percent of NASA's budget. Now that it's privately funded, it isn't really cutting too deeply into any other projects. Maybe you have a handful of scientists working on SETI instead of one of the other projects you mentioned, but then again most of our efforts in the world are wasted on things that are not only not in our best interests, but could arguably said to be acting against our best interests. SETI may not be optimal, but it's very small in the big picture and certainly doesn't appear detrimental.
I think their original hope was that those most interested in the SETI project would contribute their knowledge and expertise to a single project.
SETI@HOME proved that leveraging tons of processors to crunch algorithms developed by a relatively small number of good brains allowed them to expand their science. They've analyzed the everlovin' crap out of that signal for about 50 years now (or millions of years if you count SETI@HOME computer time) and nothing has surfaced yet, so maybe it's time to let others have a crack at it.
But there's good reason not to do that too soon.
The problem is that expanding the number of brains can be a good thing and a bad thing. Good in that more people will take novel approaches to analyzing the data, bad because there's going to be a lot of duplication, a lot of working at cross-purposes, and a lot of people so desperately wanting to be the one to discover the Greys that SETI will have to work up some method of validating claims.
And, of course, just debunking false claims from every 9-year-old who forgot to set the right floating point settings on his compiler and ended up with a filtration pattern, every nutjob who thinks that a pattern match of 2 bits against the latest copy of the "Music of the Spheres" constitutes a valid find, and every attention-seeker who just makes shit up in the hopes of getting their name in lights for a few seconds will now be a full-time job for a population of scientists much larger than the current SETI project supports today.
Right now, there are fewer brains working on the project, but they seem to have really good integrity. In radio terminology, there isn't much signal but the signal-to-noise ratio is quite good.
Make the data public, and you'll have a lot more theories on how to find a match, and some of them will even be good. A few will almost certainly be better than the original scientists had going on to start with. But the signal-to-noise ratio is going to be awful.
SETI already has credibility problems from those who do not believe that life could exist anywhere but God's Chosen Sphere, and those who believe that if life existed it would be a colossal coincidence indeed if it could emit patterns we'd recognize, and those who believe that such signals would never have had time to reach us yet. Add in a months' worth of multiple daily stories about some lunatic claiming to have found aliens based on pattern matching the raw SETI data against the screech marks on his underwear from the same day the data was collected, and they'll find it even harder to get funding.
But I suspect the SETI project, as it stands, is probably going to wither away at some point anyway. So releasing the data is a good way of making sure someone, somewhere, will preserve it in addition to expanding the uses of it.
OK, so they cannot be placed "subtly". I stand corrected on that point. But I don't know if these new cameras would need to be designated as "speed" cameras, and of course it really doesn't matter if they are in terms of their effectiveness.
The real point is that the location of the camera has little to do with where you are speeding. It's not using snapshots of your speed near brightly-painted cameras, it's using averages between those cameras. It doesn't matter if you know where the cameras are, because you either average your speed to be at or lower than the speed limit for the entire duration between the cameras or you get a ticket.
You can be a good "speed camera beater" for the current cameras and mash the brakes for these new cameras, but the cameras are probably not capturing your speed at the moment. They honestly do not care if you went by them at 5MPH or 150MPH. They only log that you were at such-and-such location at so-and-so time.
Then, when the next camera sees you, the database matches up your license plate and sees how fast you were going during the entire time between camera "A" and camera "B".
If you drive by the camera at the speed limit, floor the go pedal as soon as you're out of range and drive like a crazed speed demon, and slow down for the next camera, your average speed can still net you a ticket.