I think the GP is implying that whoever seized control of the ship would be free to take it into port without the tugs and intentionally ram something.
The super-rich are not the only potential market, people of modest means engage in tourism as well. All the super-rich are doing is helping to pay for the necessary r&d and initial infrastructure. Costs will come down with improved technology and greater experience. Even **IF** tourism was the only potential space industry there would still be a potential market of millions of travelers. Its just a matter of time as costs work their way down the willingness-to-pay curve.
That said, I do not believe the commercial utility of space is limited to tourism. And whether we are dealing with tourism, scientific research or industrial application there will be a point where getting the resources locally will make more economic sense than lifting the resources from earth. That will open up even more commercialization of space.
I see the A-10 as an aircraft with which the Air Force "serves" the other branches - not control of the sky, but exploitation of that control.
That is why I would like to see an updated carrier based version, strengthened landing gear, foldable wings and a tail hook. That would allow the Marines to fly it. The Marines have the correct perspective of airpower, it exists to protect and support the guys on the ground. A Marine pilot starts his career by becoming an infantry officer, only then can he go on to become a naval aviator.
So how do you explain the growing list of perfectly legal vendors that are accepting payments in BTC? Just a marketing gimmick?
To a small degree, yes, bit coins enthusiasts give them some publicity and referrals. However the main motivation is to pocket the swipe fee that credit card vendors would normally charge. This swipe fee is built into the price of goods and services. Vendors typically immediately convert the bit coins back to dollars, euros, etc. They don't hold bit coins.
For small-scale transactions in time and value - e.g. turning $7 into BTC to immediately buy a CD - a relatively unstable currency is fine.
Stability of currency is absolutely needed for a vendor. If you had to change your pricing every 10 minutes how would you ever advertise anything? Would restaurants have dynamic menus with pricing that changes throughout the meal?
The las vegas casino that accepts bit coins prices everything in dollars. When a customer wants to use bitcoins they convert the dollar amount to bitcoins at the time the bill is printed, accept payment in bitcoins and then immediately convert the bitcoins back to dollars.
I'm guessing that since FB requires an existing E-mail address to sign up, having @facebook.com would be redundant... not to mention the lack of a really decent E-mail client.
Who doesn't need an extra email address? Facebook email could be incredibly useful as a spam bucket. Give facebook to the companies and organizations that you do not want to hear from but require an email for some reason.
That sounds like time for a modernization effort...
And strengthen the landing gear, make the wings fold and add a tail hook so it can be used by the Marines. Their aircraft are required to be carrier capable. Being a land based bird is what prevented them from getting the A-10 in the past.
Actually the A-10 fleet all got new wings and engines as part of the A-10C upgrade.
Were they newly manufactured or were they reworked wings off of retired birds in long term storage? My understanding is that upgrades were done with used wings that were in good shape and had some modifications to strengthen them.
The Air Force pilots flying the A-10 love it. Many Air Force pilots flying other aircraft think the A-10 is an incredible and valuable aircraft, a perfect complement to the high performance fighters.
Its really only the Air Force leadership that hates the A-10.
The US Navy and Marine Corp are "merged" in some ways, command, procurement, etc. Together they represent the Naval Services commanded by the Department of the Navy.
For example look at Marine Corp Aviation. Marine pilots are trained at the same schools along side Navy pilots and the Navy and Marines essentially fly the same aircraft. Marine squadrons are often deployed on aircraft carriers. There is one notable difference with respect to Marine pilots. They must first become infantry officers before starting aviation training.
The Coast Guard also falls under the Department of the Navy when directed to do so by the President. This happened during WW1 and WW2. Normally the Coast Guard is performing missions that the military is prohibited from doing, law enforcement for example.
The Air Force brass *never* wanted the A-10, the A-10 was virtually forced upon them. There has never been a moment in time since the A-10 first flew that they were not trying to be rid of it.
My understanding is that A-10s undergo a lot more mechanical stress during training and combat than B-52s and that the A-10 fleet is seeing a lot of micro-fractures in key structural areas. They have been cannibalizing old planes in storage but that source is just about dried up. They are at the point where they will need to manufacture new components, major components like wings. This is letting the brass finally get their way.
A THOUSAND warheads are needed as a deterrent? I would think a few dozen at most in case China gets a bit bold.
Its not about the number of missiles that you start the day with, its about the number of missiles that are left after you have been hit in a first strike.
The reason for such a large number of warheads is survivability. No weapon is 100% effective. However lets assume a hypothetical weapon that destroys its target 99% of the time. If this weapon is used to attack 1,000 warheads then 10 warheads will survive and be available for a counterattack. This is the mathematics of MAD. No matter how badly you are hit you are still unthinkably dangerous.
Regarding taxable/nontaxable items, that can be handled in an app by a "no tax" button. Just the way sales clerks rang things up as taxable or not on cash registers for many decades.
There are subscription services that provide state, county and city rates on demand. Their sum would constitute a pretty good default value if the user has not manually configured a rate. Again, the point of this discussion is to show why a calculator app might legitimately use localization data.
Answering in a separate post since this is going off on a tangent...
I'm located in NJ, for example, and I'm buying a coat at a clothing store. Quick, what's my sales tax? Answer: 0. Clothing is tax-free here.
Since the calculator app keeps track of individual items it just needs an indication that a particular item is tax free.
Ok, I just moved to TN, and I'm buying a car; what's my tax? IIRC, it's some percentage (7 or 9%) on the first $1500 or 2500, and the rest is tax-free.
No problem. If the car is at or under the limit enter the amount as in a "normal" bill. If it is over then it is essentially a flat fee. Calculate that "fee" and enter it as the dollar amount of tax. The app lets you set a percentage and calculates the dollar amount, or you can optionally just enter the dollar amount.
There's almost 10,000 sales tax jurisdictions in the US, and the rules are constantly changing (what the tax is, what items are tax-free, etc.). How do you hope to keep up with all that?
There are subscriber based services that provide such information. Various online retailers use them.
You don't need sales tax information to calculate a tip.
The bill / tip functionality goes way beyond merely calculating a tip. It can be used for such a simple task, simply enter your total as an item and a tip will be calculated using your default tip rate. However it can also be used for more complicated tasks. Optionally specifying the percentage of an individual item that you are responsible for provides functionality that simply splitting the total does not. You may calculate the actual portion of a bill that you are responsible for. For example if you shared an appetizer with three friends, had an entree and two drinks simply enter the full price of the appetizer and your percentage of 25, the price of your entree and then the price of your drink and a quantity of 2.
There's no way your little calculator app can properly calculate sales tax.
Untrue. If the cash register can do it then an app can do it. It is however terribly complicated in some cases. Yet in many cases it is not.
Thanks for your discussion. It suggests a new feature, identifying a bill item as non-taxable.
That said, the larger point is that a calculator app could legitimately use location information to initialize the default tax rate to be used in its calculations. Use of location is not inherently an indicator of an abusive app.
Why does a calculator app need to access my contact list or location data?
I have written a calculator app and I did consider using location data. In addition to scientific, statistics, business and hex functionality it also offers bill / tip functionality. The later could use location data to estimate sales tax if you had not defined it in settings. That said, I have not implemented such behavior.
I suppose I could also use locality to automatically choose whether I am converting US fluid ounce or Imperial fluid ounces to ml, rather than rely on a definition in settings. Again, I have not implemented such behavior.
Now I do use internet access which is not something that a calculator obviously needs. However I allow users to import statistical data from the web.
I understand that some apps are abusive. I am just trying to point out that advanced behavior is not necessarily an indicator of an abusive app. We now have quite sophisticated handheld computers and we are not limited to the legacy functionality that legacy devices offered.
The Phonix bios clean-room implementation was necessary because - d'oh! - Phonix couldn't legaly use the IBM bios implementation.
Its useful to point out to readers that IBM published the source code to their PC BIOS. If you programmed for DOS and used BIOS calls it was common to look at this source code to get details about parameters to be passed in. This would make you ineligible for the clean room rewrite.
However, Microsoft can use the Android implementation. It's open source for FSM's sake.
Not all of it. The summary is clearly referring to the non-open proprietary components of Android.
We're in the pre-industrial era of software development, and even the best of us aren't very good at it
Its more that we are in the post Hammurabi era of building and those early builders learned to build their walls very very well, they got the tools and process right.:-)
From the Code of Hammurabi: "If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death."
That's fantastic, truly. I wonder how Monseigneur Georges Lemaitre would feel if he found out that in 2014 that religious groups were actively seeking to have sound science removed from educational materials in favor of religion.
The Catholics and many Protestant denominations don't see a disagreement between scientific discoveries and religion. They believe science and religion answer different questions, how vs why, so one is not a substitute for the other. They teach science in their science class and religion in their religion class.
Some religious schools teach science, catholics and many protestant denominations. They seem to teach science in their science class and religion in their religion class. This includes teaching evolution and cosmology.
... I do think that there are certain fields that a strong believer wouldn't find any reason to study. An extreme view of that would even include something like biology or astronomy.
The Big Bang Theory and the dating of the universe at approximately 14 billion years old was proposed by a Catholic priest, Monseigneur Georges Lemaitre.
The way one instructor pilot explained it to me is that it is lawsuits not regulations that are killing off manufacturing for the private pilot audience. He had numerous examples of pilot error, cited in the FAA accident report, that still led to juries awarding big settlements to families for various bogus reasons. Leading to a trend towards kit aircraft these days. These aircraft get a big "experimental" sticker on the fuselage and apparently this protects the designers sufficiently.
Meanwhile the guy coding up his own game engine nights and weekends burns himself out, arrives with a fried brain, and your project suffers.
I am not referring to people who spend all their evenings and weekends on some personal project. I am referring to people who had used some of their spare time, when they had some, to read something development related or to do some coding.
Sometimes this was done precisely because their day to day work was insufficiently challenging. One guy I knew was working on a legacy project that was pure C. For fun he spent a little time learning smalltalk. He was also someone I occasionally went scuba diving with. We met at his house early one morning for a dive, double checked our gear and loaded it into his truck. Before driving to the beach we called a dive shop as soon as they opened. We learned that the conditions sucked. We unloaded our gear from his truck and I spent a couple of hours geeking out as he showed me some smalltalk. Different hobbies for different days and different moods.
When I refer to some after hours coding I am not referring to any great or grand projects. Just a little indulgence in curiosity or amusement.
I also think that the more challenging home project helped preserve this guy's morale at work. Made the less challenging day job more tolerable, his itch was getting scratched elsewhere.
Not saying that a healthy interest in programming techniques and after hours involvement in coding projects are bad. Just that they aren't actually necessary for a long and successful career
I'm not saying a complete lack of ever having had an after hours coding project is a career killer. I am just noting a correlation between the better programmers and those who on occasion when circumstances permitted had indulged an inherent interest in programming.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the GP is implying that whoever seized control of the ship would be free to take it into port without the tugs and intentionally ram something.
The super-rich are not the only potential market, people of modest means engage in tourism as well. All the super-rich are doing is helping to pay for the necessary r&d and initial infrastructure. Costs will come down with improved technology and greater experience. Even **IF** tourism was the only potential space industry there would still be a potential market of millions of travelers. Its just a matter of time as costs work their way down the willingness-to-pay curve.
That said, I do not believe the commercial utility of space is limited to tourism. And whether we are dealing with tourism, scientific research or industrial application there will be a point where getting the resources locally will make more economic sense than lifting the resources from earth. That will open up even more commercialization of space.
I see the A-10 as an aircraft with which the Air Force "serves" the other branches - not control of the sky, but exploitation of that control.
That is why I would like to see an updated carrier based version, strengthened landing gear, foldable wings and a tail hook. That would allow the Marines to fly it. The Marines have the correct perspective of airpower, it exists to protect and support the guys on the ground. A Marine pilot starts his career by becoming an infantry officer, only then can he go on to become a naval aviator.
So how do you explain the growing list of perfectly legal vendors that are accepting payments in BTC? Just a marketing gimmick?
To a small degree, yes, bit coins enthusiasts give them some publicity and referrals. However the main motivation is to pocket the swipe fee that credit card vendors would normally charge. This swipe fee is built into the price of goods and services. Vendors typically immediately convert the bit coins back to dollars, euros, etc. They don't hold bit coins.
For small-scale transactions in time and value - e.g. turning $7 into BTC to immediately buy a CD - a relatively unstable currency is fine.
Stability of currency is absolutely needed for a vendor. If you had to change your pricing every 10 minutes how would you ever advertise anything? Would restaurants have dynamic menus with pricing that changes throughout the meal?
The las vegas casino that accepts bit coins prices everything in dollars. When a customer wants to use bitcoins they convert the dollar amount to bitcoins at the time the bill is printed, accept payment in bitcoins and then immediately convert the bitcoins back to dollars.
I'm guessing that since FB requires an existing E-mail address to sign up, having @facebook.com would be redundant... not to mention the lack of a really decent E-mail client.
Who doesn't need an extra email address? Facebook email could be incredibly useful as a spam bucket. Give facebook to the companies and organizations that you do not want to hear from but require an email for some reason.
That sounds like time for a modernization effort ...
And strengthen the landing gear, make the wings fold and add a tail hook so it can be used by the Marines. Their aircraft are required to be carrier capable. Being a land based bird is what prevented them from getting the A-10 in the past.
Actually the A-10 fleet all got new wings and engines as part of the A-10C upgrade.
Were they newly manufactured or were they reworked wings off of retired birds in long term storage? My understanding is that upgrades were done with used wings that were in good shape and had some modifications to strengthen them.
The Air Force pilots flying the A-10 love it. Many Air Force pilots flying other aircraft think the A-10 is an incredible and valuable aircraft, a perfect complement to the high performance fighters.
Its really only the Air Force leadership that hates the A-10.
The US Navy and Marine Corp are "merged" in some ways, command, procurement, etc. Together they represent the Naval Services commanded by the Department of the Navy.
For example look at Marine Corp Aviation. Marine pilots are trained at the same schools along side Navy pilots and the Navy and Marines essentially fly the same aircraft. Marine squadrons are often deployed on aircraft carriers. There is one notable difference with respect to Marine pilots. They must first become infantry officers before starting aviation training.
The Coast Guard also falls under the Department of the Navy when directed to do so by the President. This happened during WW1 and WW2. Normally the Coast Guard is performing missions that the military is prohibited from doing, law enforcement for example.
The Air Force brass *never* wanted the A-10, the A-10 was virtually forced upon them. There has never been a moment in time since the A-10 first flew that they were not trying to be rid of it.
My understanding is that A-10s undergo a lot more mechanical stress during training and combat than B-52s and that the A-10 fleet is seeing a lot of micro-fractures in key structural areas. They have been cannibalizing old planes in storage but that source is just about dried up. They are at the point where they will need to manufacture new components, major components like wings. This is letting the brass finally get their way.
As they would probably have to reprocess it to use in a weapon again anyhow.
The Pentagon's logic is probably that reprocessing would be less expensive that creating new material should they desire new warheads.
A THOUSAND warheads are needed as a deterrent? I would think a few dozen at most in case China gets a bit bold.
Its not about the number of missiles that you start the day with, its about the number of missiles that are left after you have been hit in a first strike.
The reason for such a large number of warheads is survivability. No weapon is 100% effective. However lets assume a hypothetical weapon that destroys its target 99% of the time. If this weapon is used to attack 1,000 warheads then 10 warheads will survive and be available for a counterattack. This is the mathematics of MAD. No matter how badly you are hit you are still unthinkably dangerous.
Regarding taxable/nontaxable items, that can be handled in an app by a "no tax" button. Just the way sales clerks rang things up as taxable or not on cash registers for many decades.
There are subscription services that provide state, county and city rates on demand. Their sum would constitute a pretty good default value if the user has not manually configured a rate. Again, the point of this discussion is to show why a calculator app might legitimately use localization data.
I'm located in NJ, for example, and I'm buying a coat at a clothing store. Quick, what's my sales tax? Answer: 0. Clothing is tax-free here.
Since the calculator app keeps track of individual items it just needs an indication that a particular item is tax free.
Ok, I just moved to TN, and I'm buying a car; what's my tax? IIRC, it's some percentage (7 or 9%) on the first $1500 or 2500, and the rest is tax-free.
No problem. If the car is at or under the limit enter the amount as in a "normal" bill. If it is over then it is essentially a flat fee. Calculate that "fee" and enter it as the dollar amount of tax. The app lets you set a percentage and calculates the dollar amount, or you can optionally just enter the dollar amount.
There's almost 10,000 sales tax jurisdictions in the US, and the rules are constantly changing (what the tax is, what items are tax-free, etc.). How do you hope to keep up with all that?
There are subscriber based services that provide such information. Various online retailers use them.
You don't need sales tax information to calculate a tip.
The bill / tip functionality goes way beyond merely calculating a tip. It can be used for such a simple task, simply enter your total as an item and a tip will be calculated using your default tip rate. However it can also be used for more complicated tasks. Optionally specifying the percentage of an individual item that you are responsible for provides functionality that simply splitting the total does not. You may calculate the actual portion of a bill that you are responsible for. For example if you shared an appetizer with three friends, had an entree and two drinks simply enter the full price of the appetizer and your percentage of 25, the price of your entree and then the price of your drink and a quantity of 2.
There's no way your little calculator app can properly calculate sales tax.
Untrue. If the cash register can do it then an app can do it. It is however terribly complicated in some cases. Yet in many cases it is not.
Thanks for your discussion. It suggests a new feature, identifying a bill item as non-taxable.
That said, the larger point is that a calculator app could legitimately use location information to initialize the default tax rate to be used in its calculations. Use of location is not inherently an indicator of an abusive app.
Why does a calculator app need to access my contact list or location data?
I have written a calculator app and I did consider using location data. In addition to scientific, statistics, business and hex functionality it also offers bill / tip functionality. The later could use location data to estimate sales tax if you had not defined it in settings. That said, I have not implemented such behavior.
I suppose I could also use locality to automatically choose whether I am converting US fluid ounce or Imperial fluid ounces to ml, rather than rely on a definition in settings. Again, I have not implemented such behavior.
Now I do use internet access which is not something that a calculator obviously needs. However I allow users to import statistical data from the web.
I understand that some apps are abusive. I am just trying to point out that advanced behavior is not necessarily an indicator of an abusive app. We now have quite sophisticated handheld computers and we are not limited to the legacy functionality that legacy devices offered.
Amazon has an app store, they could have the ability to sell Blackberry, IOS, Android apps ...
An iOS app has to be digitally signed by Apple, if not a device running iOS will decline to run the app.
The Phonix bios clean-room implementation was necessary because - d'oh! - Phonix couldn't legaly use the IBM bios implementation.
Its useful to point out to readers that IBM published the source code to their PC BIOS. If you programmed for DOS and used BIOS calls it was common to look at this source code to get details about parameters to be passed in. This would make you ineligible for the clean room rewrite.
However, Microsoft can use the Android implementation. It's open source for FSM's sake.
Not all of it. The summary is clearly referring to the non-open proprietary components of Android.
We're in the pre-industrial era of software development, and even the best of us aren't very good at it
Its more that we are in the post Hammurabi era of building and those early builders learned to build their walls very very well, they got the tools and process right. :-)
From the Code of Hammurabi: "If a builder build a house for some one, and does not construct it properly, and the house which he built fall in and kill its owner, then that builder shall be put to death."
That's fantastic, truly. I wonder how Monseigneur Georges Lemaitre would feel if he found out that in 2014 that religious groups were actively seeking to have sound science removed from educational materials in favor of religion.
The Catholics and many Protestant denominations don't see a disagreement between scientific discoveries and religion. They believe science and religion answer different questions, how vs why, so one is not a substitute for the other. They teach science in their science class and religion in their religion class.
Some religious schools teach science, catholics and many protestant denominations. They seem to teach science in their science class and religion in their religion class. This includes teaching evolution and cosmology.
... I do think that there are certain fields that a strong believer wouldn't find any reason to study. An extreme view of that would even include something like biology or astronomy.
The Big Bang Theory and the dating of the universe at approximately 14 billion years old was proposed by a Catholic priest, Monseigneur Georges Lemaitre.
The way one instructor pilot explained it to me is that it is lawsuits not regulations that are killing off manufacturing for the private pilot audience. He had numerous examples of pilot error, cited in the FAA accident report, that still led to juries awarding big settlements to families for various bogus reasons. Leading to a trend towards kit aircraft these days. These aircraft get a big "experimental" sticker on the fuselage and apparently this protects the designers sufficiently.
Meanwhile the guy coding up his own game engine nights and weekends burns himself out, arrives with a fried brain, and your project suffers.
I am not referring to people who spend all their evenings and weekends on some personal project. I am referring to people who had used some of their spare time, when they had some, to read something development related or to do some coding.
Sometimes this was done precisely because their day to day work was insufficiently challenging. One guy I knew was working on a legacy project that was pure C. For fun he spent a little time learning smalltalk. He was also someone I occasionally went scuba diving with. We met at his house early one morning for a dive, double checked our gear and loaded it into his truck. Before driving to the beach we called a dive shop as soon as they opened. We learned that the conditions sucked. We unloaded our gear from his truck and I spent a couple of hours geeking out as he showed me some smalltalk. Different hobbies for different days and different moods.
When I refer to some after hours coding I am not referring to any great or grand projects. Just a little indulgence in curiosity or amusement.
I also think that the more challenging home project helped preserve this guy's morale at work. Made the less challenging day job more tolerable, his itch was getting scratched elsewhere.
Not saying that a healthy interest in programming techniques and after hours involvement in coding projects are bad. Just that they aren't actually necessary for a long and successful career
I'm not saying a complete lack of ever having had an after hours coding project is a career killer. I am just noting a correlation between the better programmers and those who on occasion when circumstances permitted had indulged an inherent interest in programming.