The writer Tom Junod engages in what Hunter Thompson once called "a failed but essentially noble experiment in pure gonzo journalism."
In HT's case, that usually meant doing a lot of drugs and then babbling like an idiot. Junod appears to have skipped the drugs part, which may explain his total lack of actual useful insights.
In point of fact, there were no probably no individual digital computer owners (analog computers are another matter) before the cost of a computer fell below, say, an average person's annual income. Probably the first computer to have a lot of user-owners was the Sol 20, which went for $1K in kit form — about $3800 in today's money.
Also, sneering at the lack of hacking expertise of somebody like Dijkstra ignores the difference between computer science and computer engineering. Sort of like sneering at a chemist who doesn't know how to brew beer.
As for Turing: I think too many people contributed to the birth of computing for any one of them to claim parenthood. You could make a case for AT being the father of software, since he was the first computer scientist to really consider programming to be more than a minor adjunct to the hardware. Indeed, if you consider Turing Machine code to be software, Turing was doing software long before there were any computers to do it on!
I don't think it's PC to think about projecting American power by means more complicated than just killing bad guys. Even the military knows better than that.
SSTO vehicles are not practical with our current level of material science and engine technology.
What, and the Orion kludge is? If you'd paid closer attention to that post you dismissed so glibly, you wouldn't think so.
You keep making this into false either-ors. There are tons of different designs besides a simple SSTO. I don't know enough aeronautics to talk about the practicality of any of them. I do know that any launch system that involves splashing billions (with a B!) of dollars worth of hardware into the Atlantic is ever going to get political traction.
Back in the early sixties, we made a really bad call, putting getting to the moon before the Soviets ahead of building proper space infrastructure. And the core of that infrastructure has to be a fully-reusable launch vehicle that's capable of achieving geosynchronous orbit.
After Apollo ran out of support (because of those $3 billion dollar launches) we had a chance to do it with the Shuttle program. But they tried to do it on the cheap, and the result was an evil kludge that kills astronauts and ends up costing a ton in after-the-mistake kludgy fixes. Another kludge that alleges to be cheaper because of theoretical "economies of scale" and "proven" (meaning "disposable") technology is not the answer.
The only serious solution is to forget about all the stupid trophy projects and start all over. Unfortunately, we've never had the political leadership capable of doing that.
Well, assuming that his bank takes his side (probably will, but you never know) he's still minus a laptop. Kind of a big privation for a soldier in an overseas war zone — such people are always voracious for contact with home, and nowadays that means internet access. He really needs for Dell to provide actual customer service, something they seem to have trouble doing even in the lower 48, never mind The Stan.
(The context-sensitive ad at the top of the page as I type this is for that new Tom Cruise movie about the guy who tried to overthrow Hitler. Somebody trying to tell us something?)
Fine, you can recycle the capsule. That should save a million or two. What about the billion-dollar throwaway vehicle you need to launch the thing?!
Expressed in 2008 dollars, the cost of assembling and launching the Saturn V vehicle used in the Apollo and Skylab flights was $3 billion a mission. This is just the cost of the launch vehicle, without the cost of the mission vehicle. It will take a lot more than economies of scale to bring this down to something sane.
Assuming that manufacturing lots of small rockets instead of one big one is actually a cost saver. Compare, for example, the retail cost of a semi rig versus an equivalent number of pickup trucks.
The whole Orion program is just more Bush flim flam. The contorted arguments that we can return to the moon on the cheap are typical of an administration that conflates "expert" with "on our side."
Don't get so full of yourself, the Russians and Chinese seem to be doing fine with capsule designs.
Excuse me? Where does TPP say the capsule concept is the wrong one? Though now that you mention it: how are we ever going to have a permanent (which means economically self-sustained) manned presence in space if we keep building gazillion-dollar vehicles that can only be used once?
The Russian and Chinese projects are not "doing fine", not if your goal is real progress in building space infrastructure. What we have instead is a lot of projects whose purpose is national prestige, period. Orion just takes this mistake to its most logical extreme.
All the Easter Eggs in the Apple Newton really used to bug me. I didn't mind all the little jokes, but I did mind that more effort seemed to go into dreaming up those jokes then went into swatting bugs. When a product doesn't know that punctuation isn't part of a word's spelling, but does know where Elvis was last seen, you wonder where the developer's priorities are.
I'd accuse you of not being a lawyer. But that's not necessary. No lawyer would predict the outcome of litigation, at least not with such certainty. Only self-appointed legal "experts" think they have that ability.
Let's not play with semantics. There a shortage of energy that works with our current energy infrastructure. Obviously we need to upgrade the infrastructure to work with new kinds of energy. But that's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, the most efficient way to use our fossil fuels remains an issue.
Yes, backups are a good idea. But people do forget or procrastinate, and sermons about how much You'll Regret It don't change that.
It makes a big difference if the effort to perform the backup is minimal. The USBKey/Fireproof safe route doesn't require too much effort. But my route requires no effort beyond what I already do to backup my computer hard disk. (The Roboform archive is automatically caught in my weekly backup.) Better yet, RoboForm saves me the effort of making up, recording, and typing in passwords.
"Keep it updated" is the hard part. Who's going to remember to pull out that USB drive and sync it on anything like a regular basis?
All my account names and passwords are automatically entered into my RoboForm database, which is encrypted, and which only I know how to unencrypt. I originally did this to make my life easier (I could never memorize that many passwords) and my online accounts more secure (strong passwords only, generated by Roboform). But it also presents a solution to leaving all this information to my heirs: put a piece of paper with my Roboform password in that fireproof safe.
Except I'd never do that. I don't want my heirs knowing all that stuff about my online browsing habits, including (but not limited to) my taste in porn. The only online information they would really need access to is my financial accounts, and that they can get access to the old-fashioned way.
"You're just substituting one energy source for another. You're not doing anything about the energy shortage."
Yes you are. It's a lot more efficient to have convert all your chemical energy into electricity at one central spot than to have millions of engines that the vehicles have to carry around with them. I believe the efficiency factor is something like 60%. Besides, there are non-chemical ways to generate electricity.
I figured it'd be more interesting to get a distro NOT designed for the PS3 to run properly...
You get two hacker points, one for running Linux on a game console instead of a PC, and one for running a distro that's not designed for said game console.
Warning: you are three hacker points away from being disqualified for n00b status!
Now, I CAN do that with my toaster & my microwave.
That's kind of beside the point. You make 1 or 2 sandwiches a day. McDonald's makes millions. (Yours are much better, I'm sure, in fact almost any sandwich is, but that's another issue.) If they design a fancy process that shaves a few seconds off the process of making a sandwich, we're talking big savings in manufacturing, er, preparation costs. Quite a valuable patent really.
Anyway, this story makes it official: This whole patent troll trolling business has jumped the shark. I don't believe in imaginary property probably didn't even bother to read the story all the way through. If he had, he would have realized that nobody is trying to patent the actual act of making a sandwich, just a particular process for doing so.
Dumpster diving would still be possible. The thief doesn't have to steal one of those credit card offers, just some mail with personal info in it.
But you're probably right. Hard to imagine a thief bothering to go to all that trouble, and then not actually steal anything. First USA does indeed sound like a very rancid company, even compared to other companies in a very rancid industry.
You're correct, but you're kind of looking at the wrong issue. If a nation extends its territorial waters to include the sea around another nation's territory, that doesn't mean the other nation automatically gives up sovereignty over that territory. That's the logic that's being applied by "Prince Michael".
But you'll notice that I put all references to the "sovereign ruler" of Sealand in quotes. That's because I find the idea that you can claim to be a sovereign nation just because you're squatting on an abandoned radar platform is just plain dumb. The fact that the UK's lawyers have found it inexpedient to challenge that claim doesn't change this silliness. I think you'll find that the first time "Prince Michael" actually does something that the Brits can't live with, they'll send out a bunch of bobbies on a helicopter, politely but firmly remove the Bates family from their "domain" which they will then blow up.
Of course it will never come to that, because then the Bates family would have to go back to being just another bunch of con artists. So they'll won't ever exercise their "sovereignty" for fear of losing it.
People need to get over this, just like they need to get over irradiated food.
What a stupid comparison. Purifying water is just a matter of removing the stuff that you don't want in it. Irradiating food means bombarding it with radiation that undoubtedly causes physical changes. Whether these changes are dangerous is a matter of controversy, and I won't pretend to know enough to have an opinion.
What I do know is that I'm tired of people dismissing whole ranges of opinions because they're too lazy to distinguish serious arguments form the half-baked notions of a few idiots. By that logic, nobody should ever vote Republican ever again because all Republicans are too stupid to distinguish between somebody who's a Islamofascist Terrorist and somebody whose middle name happens to be Hussein.
But of course Republicans aren't like that. They have smart people with legitimate concerns and they have a cadre of total idiots, just like every political or advocacy group. Dismissing the whole group because you can point out the stupidity of a few individuals in that group is itself extremely stupid.
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Dude, cockroaches don't come from factories. Do I have to explain the birds, bees, and blattaria to you?
The writer Tom Junod engages in what Hunter Thompson once called "a failed but essentially noble experiment in pure gonzo journalism."
In HT's case, that usually meant doing a lot of drugs and then babbling like an idiot. Junod appears to have skipped the drugs part, which may explain his total lack of actual useful insights.
I think I speak for all readers when I say: Huh?
In point of fact, there were no probably no individual digital computer owners (analog computers are another matter) before the cost of a computer fell below, say, an average person's annual income. Probably the first computer to have a lot of user-owners was the Sol 20, which went for $1K in kit form — about $3800 in today's money.
Also, sneering at the lack of hacking expertise of somebody like Dijkstra ignores the difference between computer science and computer engineering. Sort of like sneering at a chemist who doesn't know how to brew beer.
As for Turing: I think too many people contributed to the birth of computing for any one of them to claim parenthood. You could make a case for AT being the father of software, since he was the first computer scientist to really consider programming to be more than a minor adjunct to the hardware. Indeed, if you consider Turing Machine code to be software, Turing was doing software long before there were any computers to do it on!
I don't think it's PC to think about projecting American power by means more complicated than just killing bad guys. Even the military knows better than that.
How on earth did you get through the first phase of the game? Arabian horse breeding is not for the timid!
SSTO vehicles are not practical with our current level of material science and engine technology.
What, and the Orion kludge is? If you'd paid closer attention to that post you dismissed so glibly, you wouldn't think so.
You keep making this into false either-ors. There are tons of different designs besides a simple SSTO. I don't know enough aeronautics to talk about the practicality of any of them. I do know that any launch system that involves splashing billions (with a B!) of dollars worth of hardware into the Atlantic is ever going to get political traction.
Back in the early sixties, we made a really bad call, putting getting to the moon before the Soviets ahead of building proper space infrastructure. And the core of that infrastructure has to be a fully-reusable launch vehicle that's capable of achieving geosynchronous orbit.
After Apollo ran out of support (because of those $3 billion dollar launches) we had a chance to do it with the Shuttle program. But they tried to do it on the cheap, and the result was an evil kludge that kills astronauts and ends up costing a ton in after-the-mistake kludgy fixes. Another kludge that alleges to be cheaper because of theoretical "economies of scale" and "proven" (meaning "disposable") technology is not the answer.
The only serious solution is to forget about all the stupid trophy projects and start all over. Unfortunately, we've never had the political leadership capable of doing that.
Is your son offering to fly an attack on Dell HQ? If not, the JAG attorney probably has more potential for resolving this problem.
Well, assuming that his bank takes his side (probably will, but you never know) he's still minus a laptop. Kind of a big privation for a soldier in an overseas war zone — such people are always voracious for contact with home, and nowadays that means internet access. He really needs for Dell to provide actual customer service, something they seem to have trouble doing even in the lower 48, never mind The Stan.
(The context-sensitive ad at the top of the page as I type this is for that new Tom Cruise movie about the guy who tried to overthrow Hitler. Somebody trying to tell us something?)
Fine, you can recycle the capsule. That should save a million or two. What about the billion-dollar throwaway vehicle you need to launch the thing?!
Expressed in 2008 dollars, the cost of assembling and launching the Saturn V vehicle used in the Apollo and Skylab flights was $3 billion a mission. This is just the cost of the launch vehicle, without the cost of the mission vehicle. It will take a lot more than economies of scale to bring this down to something sane.
Assuming that manufacturing lots of small rockets instead of one big one is actually a cost saver. Compare, for example, the retail cost of a semi rig versus an equivalent number of pickup trucks.
The whole Orion program is just more Bush flim flam. The contorted arguments that we can return to the moon on the cheap are typical of an administration that conflates "expert" with "on our side."
Don't get so full of yourself, the Russians and Chinese seem to be doing fine with capsule designs.
Excuse me? Where does TPP say the capsule concept is the wrong one? Though now that you mention it: how are we ever going to have a permanent (which means economically self-sustained) manned presence in space if we keep building gazillion-dollar vehicles that can only be used once?
The Russian and Chinese projects are not "doing fine", not if your goal is real progress in building space infrastructure. What we have instead is a lot of projects whose purpose is national prestige, period. Orion just takes this mistake to its most logical extreme.
All the Easter Eggs in the Apple Newton really used to bug me. I didn't mind all the little jokes, but I did mind that more effort seemed to go into dreaming up those jokes then went into swatting bugs. When a product doesn't know that punctuation isn't part of a word's spelling, but does know where Elvis was last seen, you wonder where the developer's priorities are.
your manager comes to you and says "zomg! piratez! they r eatin ma soupz!"
My manager hardly even talks like that. On the other hand, my cat. . .
The can absolutely sue you, but they'll lose.
I'd accuse you of not being a lawyer. But that's not necessary. No lawyer would predict the outcome of litigation, at least not with such certainty. Only self-appointed legal "experts" think they have that ability.
Let's not play with semantics. There a shortage of energy that works with our current energy infrastructure. Obviously we need to upgrade the infrastructure to work with new kinds of energy. But that's not going to happen overnight. In the meantime, the most efficient way to use our fossil fuels remains an issue.
Yes, backups are a good idea. But people do forget or procrastinate, and sermons about how much You'll Regret It don't change that.
It makes a big difference if the effort to perform the backup is minimal. The USBKey/Fireproof safe route doesn't require too much effort. But my route requires no effort beyond what I already do to backup my computer hard disk. (The Roboform archive is automatically caught in my weekly backup.) Better yet, RoboForm saves me the effort of making up, recording, and typing in passwords.
"Keep it updated" is the hard part. Who's going to remember to pull out that USB drive and sync it on anything like a regular basis?
All my account names and passwords are automatically entered into my RoboForm database, which is encrypted, and which only I know how to unencrypt. I originally did this to make my life easier (I could never memorize that many passwords) and my online accounts more secure (strong passwords only, generated by Roboform). But it also presents a solution to leaving all this information to my heirs: put a piece of paper with my Roboform password in that fireproof safe.
Except I'd never do that. I don't want my heirs knowing all that stuff about my online browsing habits, including (but not limited to) my taste in porn. The only online information they would really need access to is my financial accounts, and that they can get access to the old-fashioned way.
"You're just substituting one energy source for another. You're not doing anything about the energy shortage."
Yes you are. It's a lot more efficient to have convert all your chemical energy into electricity at one central spot than to have millions of engines that the vehicles have to carry around with them. I believe the efficiency factor is something like 60%. Besides, there are non-chemical ways to generate electricity.
I figured it'd be more interesting to get a distro NOT designed for the PS3 to run properly...
You get two hacker points, one for running Linux on a game console instead of a PC, and one for running a distro that's not designed for said game console.
Warning: you are three hacker points away from being disqualified for n00b status!
Plus an extra hack point for overclocking a low power CPU!
Now, I CAN do that with my toaster & my microwave.
That's kind of beside the point. You make 1 or 2 sandwiches a day. McDonald's makes millions. (Yours are much better, I'm sure, in fact almost any sandwich is, but that's another issue.) If they design a fancy process that shaves a few seconds off the process of making a sandwich, we're talking big savings in manufacturing, er, preparation costs. Quite a valuable patent really.
Anyway, this story makes it official: This whole patent troll trolling business has jumped the shark. I don't believe in imaginary property probably didn't even bother to read the story all the way through. If he had, he would have realized that nobody is trying to patent the actual act of making a sandwich, just a particular process for doing so.
If he's into sex and drugs, his kidney is probably not very valuable. If only he had stuck with rock-and-roll...
Dumpster diving would still be possible. The thief doesn't have to steal one of those credit card offers, just some mail with personal info in it.
But you're probably right. Hard to imagine a thief bothering to go to all that trouble, and then not actually steal anything. First USA does indeed sound like a very rancid company, even compared to other companies in a very rancid industry.
You're correct, but you're kind of looking at the wrong issue. If a nation extends its territorial waters to include the sea around another nation's territory, that doesn't mean the other nation automatically gives up sovereignty over that territory. That's the logic that's being applied by "Prince Michael".
But you'll notice that I put all references to the "sovereign ruler" of Sealand in quotes. That's because I find the idea that you can claim to be a sovereign nation just because you're squatting on an abandoned radar platform is just plain dumb. The fact that the UK's lawyers have found it inexpedient to challenge that claim doesn't change this silliness. I think you'll find that the first time "Prince Michael" actually does something that the Brits can't live with, they'll send out a bunch of bobbies on a helicopter, politely but firmly remove the Bates family from their "domain" which they will then blow up.
Of course it will never come to that, because then the Bates family would have to go back to being just another bunch of con artists. So they'll won't ever exercise their "sovereignty" for fear of losing it.
People need to get over this, just like they need to get over irradiated food.
What a stupid comparison. Purifying water is just a matter of removing the stuff that you don't want in it. Irradiating food means bombarding it with radiation that undoubtedly causes physical changes. Whether these changes are dangerous is a matter of controversy, and I won't pretend to know enough to have an opinion.
What I do know is that I'm tired of people dismissing whole ranges of opinions because they're too lazy to distinguish serious arguments form the half-baked notions of a few idiots. By that logic, nobody should ever vote Republican ever again because all Republicans are too stupid to distinguish between somebody who's a Islamofascist Terrorist and somebody whose middle name happens to be Hussein.
But of course Republicans aren't like that. They have smart people with legitimate concerns and they have a cadre of total idiots, just like every political or advocacy group. Dismissing the whole group because you can point out the stupidity of a few individuals in that group is itself extremely stupid.