As any non-profit can tell you, NEVER admit you have enough donations. The instant you do, all donations stop until you come crying in a panic again. And the second time around, it's even harder to get anything.
OK, Mandrake isn't a non-profit, but most everyone who was considering joining will just continue leeching for free since the impression is now that Mandrake doesn't need subscriptions anymore.
From the article : "should help the company stave off attempts by state and federal officials to regulate its business"
This seems *amazingly* short sighted. Sure there is some regulation and the requisite overhead and hassle. However, if I were in charge of Paypal I'd be screaming for getting legitimized as a real bank. How many people who do not use Paypal already due to security concerns would if it carried the legitimacy of being labeled an official bank. Also, how many current users would use it with more money on deposit? Since Paypal already has an established customer base of people who are accustomed to dealing with online money, why NOT pull out all the stops and offer real banking services? Paypal checking accounts, Paypal brokerage services, Paypal mortgage, Paypal etc, etc, etc. There is serious money to be made in these endeavors!
What we all need to do is fake open mail relays. Just report "Yeah Mr. Spammer, those 50,000 mails were sent" while not doing a thing. The spammer will think the mail has been sent, we won't get the mails; everyone will be happy!
Actually, it isn't. His illustration is correct. This is a phenomenon known as the 'money multiplier'. In the example of the $20,000 this is a multiplier of 100%, and the bank is completely uncovered. The FDIC would be on this bank like a bad smell. It should have been more like: The bank loans out $18,600. This would have the bank at the FDIC recommended 7% coverage level.
Money cannot be created by any body other than the central national bank
Actually, *legal tender* is what can only be created by the central bank. Wealth, on the other hand, becomes greater by moving through banks in the manner described.
"If it were that tall, anybody at the top would be squished"
No, make it long enough that the anchor station's centripital force outward equals one gravity (or a little less). But it can't be nothing, duh: If that were true, one person on the ground could give a small tug on the cable and the thing would fall on them.
How do you think the thing can stay up on a *cable*? It's not a rigid tower. And it can't be in a geosynchronous orbit because that's where the forces would be equal and tugging on it would bring it down. A tethered space elevator is something for a low (think space shuttle) level orbit.
The moon revolves much too slowly. The far end of the thing is pulling up due to centripital forces. In orbit around earth, unless it were cut up high, any saboteurs who cut it down low will just send the cable and orbiting anchor station slingshotting away into deep space/sun/anywhere but back to earth.
Great for emergencies: dial 911 and point the phone camera at the robber/rapist/misc-sociopath. Might not help you right at the moment, but the cops would know who to look for.
20 minutes to completely fill the thing. But I don't think the target market isn't supposed to max the capacity each time it's used. Meanwhile, it looks a little sturdier and scratch-resistant compared to a CD-R... That's a little slow but we may be spoiled: consider that it's twice the speed of an RLL hard drive. Wait a year or two and that speed will double. Meanwhile early adopters can buy this current model and fund the company until faster technology becomes available for the rest of us.
"'Like an Anglo-Saxon cousin to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' Xan Brooks applauds the brave first instalment"
This reviewer makes a completely off-base comparision. In Middle Earth mythology, Sauron has imbued the One Ring with his evil energies. The ring is itself an artifact of active evil. As Frodo wears it more and more he becomes corrupted by it as we find out in the closing sequence in Mount Doom. And Frodo's experience is nothing compared to Gollum's.
In CTHD, the exact opposite is true. The Green Destiny is absolutely neutral. It is simply a very well crafted tool. In the hands of the good people, it does good. In the hands of the bad people, it does mischief/evil. That was, IMHO, a much better movie for geeks of all colors because it depicted technology as being what you make of it.
Most 'western' tradition movies and stories have this theme of actively evil technology. The Hollywood Luddite Assoc. has been churning out films lately where technology is inherently evil. Even the ring in LotR, as simple of a 'device' as it is, is still an inanimate (thing created by a human) object with an evil agenda on its own. Not only is technology rarely neutral in films, but it is also hard to think of a list of technological devices depicted in a positive light in movies... The kid in "AI", Johnny 5, C3PO (mainly a comic relief tool). But a long list of 'evil' technology in movies comes to mind easily: Andriods (The Terminator, Bishop, etc), The One Ring, The Death Star, The Matrix, HAL9000, cloning, etc, etc.
Well, I digress, but this reviewer has missed the whole "technology is good/evil neutral" theme that made CTHD such a refreshingly different movie.
The problem with super-soldiers is how to get them to take orders they don't happen to like. Are you SURE the brainwashing/programming is 100% effective? Even if it is, what if the 'normal human' leader of the batallion of super-soldiers decides he wants to be king? If you think the FBI is being nasty with the 'antiterrorism' law, wait til they become GM super-sneaky FBI guys.
As nasty as this sounds, it isn't without precedent. In the late 70's, I forget the year, an engine fell off of a Lockheed L1011 at 30,000 feet. Killed everyone... most heinous crash. The maintenance guy who put in the bolts installed them in the wrong order after the engine was removed for an overhaul.
Gotta love high tech bubble economics... Develop and deploy wireless network for $1 billion, sell for $8 million. This is almost as good a deal as Iridium!
We don't want to discourage people from submitting licenses, knowing that their license might be held up for public notice.
This depends on the attitude with which it is presented, doesn't it? Compare: "These proprietary wannabes tried to muscle in with the following restrictions" with "We felt the OSI model and the requirements imposed by these business plans were incompatible in the following points"
Sure, there's *always* trolls who take offense at business plans on some misguided principle, but anyone who counts will take it as it's meant: a simple lesson in OSI compatibility.
The most annoying thing about Civ, Civ2, and SMAC (and probably Civ3) is that the game devolves to total war. Despite being titled and nominally about "civilization", it's really war. While you supposedly can win by the flight to Alpha Centauri (or the Ascent to Transendence), these are usually victories by side effect. You've had to militarity conquer or at least beat down, all opponents by the time you win by these other methods. What if it were more of a civilization simulator; think SimCity on a larger scale. It would be nice if there were a setting for the AI to be less fanatical war machines and more into peaceful competition.
"I don't know what you will be using your portable for and why you're asking about video chipsets"
Whups, I was prompted to ask the question as a result of my research into a laptop. I had already ordered a Toshiba with a GeForce2go before even submitting the question. This is an attempt to stir debate of the merits of the various chips available rather than simply getting personal advice.
It may be impossible to find a perfect mobile video chip, which would be one that:
1. Uses as little battery as possible when with a light workload, and:
2. Near desktop performance while taking a work break to play games.
I went for the GeForce2go purely on the reputation for performance of its desktop big brothers. But discussion generated may help others make up their minds if their needs/wants are different.
The original poster to whom I was responding wanted to know a single social benefit to a NASA program. My point made no mention of free markets, income disparity, or corporate welfare. The single largest potential boost to the general economy is government spending.
No private sector undertaking can come close or even make up a noticable fraction of the spending (and thus economicaly stimulating) power of the federal government. Notice an hour before the stock market opened on Sep 17 the Federal Reserve dumped notes valued at more than IBM's annual income in a single move. A small example of the spending power of the federal government.
So, when this person asked about benefit to the public about a high-budget goverment agency, I pointed out that the economic value of the act of that spending was often very worthwhile. Despite your arguments, I hope you can acknowledge that Contractor X employs a lot of people from the *general populace* (not the top super-rich) to work in its factory making NASA widgets and this is a benefit. If they didn't work there, the next-best job would be lower paying otherwise (all other things equal) they would have quit Contractor X to go work at a higher paying job. These members of the general public (and there are a lot of them) are benefitting quite a bit. Then the places where they shop benefit, etc, etc.
I think the debate of whether or not its fair that shareholders of Contractor X also benefit is another argument. So are the causes, effects, and solutions to income disparity. This would be an interesting discussion since you seem to have some grasp of the problem, but outside the scope of this thread as we've probably already departed far enough from the retirement of the NASA director.
"If I don't live to see men on Mars in my lifetime, I'm going to be pissed."
If you wait that long, it will be too late. Then you'll just die a bitter, pissed off, old individual and all will be for naught. Better to be pissed off now since that might motivate you to pester your Congress critter for better NASA funding, etc.
Then you can happily die as a merely bitter and old individual.
What do you mean by justifies the cost? NASA programs employ a LOT of people; not just at NASA just at hundreds if not thousands (during Apollo) of contractors. Money spent on something like the Mars Global Surveyor wasn't thrown into space because if you melted the thing down to its component parts for scrap the value would be a pittance. The benefit was that many, many people had steady jobs putting the thing together. They in turn spread the wealth to their communities and thus back into the general economy.
The same could be said about $1 million cruise missiles being shot at empty terrorist camps. The missile itself isn't $1M. They're just aluminum, explosives, and a couple of microprocessors. But a thousand people in Ratheon's southern California factory have steady jobs assembling them.
I think you're expecting something like a NASA-made machine to go to the moon, mine, and bring back enough gold to pay for itself, but that's not the point. Western civilization has valued knowledge for its own sake since the ancient Greeks came up with the idea of "philosophy". The effort of this pursuit is valuable in itself, for knowledge is added to humanity's stockpile even in failure.
If you still really want to picture a NASA project as a closed economic system unto itself (which it isn't), then consider the Mars Pathfinder mission. Enough merchanising tie-ins were sold that the project paid for itself.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, Mandrake isn't a non-profit, but most everyone who was considering joining will just continue leeching for free since the impression is now that Mandrake doesn't need subscriptions anymore.
And just a few days ago, Red Hat's stock took a severe one-day beating. From almost $8 to just over $5. Hopefully this helps it recover.
This seems *amazingly* short sighted. Sure there is some regulation and the requisite overhead and hassle. However, if I were in charge of Paypal I'd be screaming for getting legitimized as a real bank. How many people who do not use Paypal already due to security concerns would if it carried the legitimacy of being labeled an official bank. Also, how many current users would use it with more money on deposit? Since Paypal already has an established customer base of people who are accustomed to dealing with online money, why NOT pull out all the stops and offer real banking services? Paypal checking accounts, Paypal brokerage services, Paypal mortgage, Paypal etc, etc, etc. There is serious money to be made in these endeavors!
What we all need to do is fake open mail relays. Just report "Yeah Mr. Spammer, those 50,000 mails were sent" while not doing a thing. The spammer will think the mail has been sent, we won't get the mails; everyone will be happy!
Actually, it isn't. His illustration is correct. This is a phenomenon known as the 'money multiplier'. In the example of the $20,000 this is a multiplier of 100%, and the bank is completely uncovered. The FDIC would be on this bank like a bad smell. It should have been more like: The bank loans out $18,600. This would have the bank at the FDIC recommended 7% coverage level.
Money cannot be created by any body other than the central national bank
Actually, *legal tender* is what can only be created by the central bank. Wealth, on the other hand, becomes greater by moving through banks in the manner described.
Is George trying to regain karma for having precipitated the collapse of the baht?
No, make it long enough that the anchor station's centripital force outward equals one gravity (or a little less). But it can't be nothing, duh: If that were true, one person on the ground could give a small tug on the cable and the thing would fall on them.
How do you think the thing can stay up on a *cable*? It's not a rigid tower. And it can't be in a geosynchronous orbit because that's where the forces would be equal and tugging on it would bring it down. A tethered space elevator is something for a low (think space shuttle) level orbit.
The moon revolves much too slowly. The far end of the thing is pulling up due to centripital forces. In orbit around earth, unless it were cut up high, any saboteurs who cut it down low will just send the cable and orbiting anchor station slingshotting away into deep space/sun/anywhere but back to earth.
Just be sure when you head back to civilization with the IT bus that the guerilla fighters don't follow you.
Well duh, they need to have a Mac to get music into their new iPods.
Great for emergencies: dial 911 and point the phone camera at the robber/rapist/misc-sociopath. Might not help you right at the moment, but the cops would know who to look for.
20 minutes to completely fill the thing. But I don't think the target market isn't supposed to max the capacity each time it's used. Meanwhile, it looks a little sturdier and scratch-resistant compared to a CD-R... That's a little slow but we may be spoiled: consider that it's twice the speed of an RLL hard drive. Wait a year or two and that speed will double. Meanwhile early adopters can buy this current model and fund the company until faster technology becomes available for the rest of us.
"'Like an Anglo-Saxon cousin to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon' Xan Brooks applauds the brave first instalment"
This reviewer makes a completely off-base comparision. In Middle Earth mythology, Sauron has imbued the One Ring with his evil energies. The ring is itself an artifact of active evil. As Frodo wears it more and more he becomes corrupted by it as we find out in the closing sequence in Mount Doom. And Frodo's experience is nothing compared to Gollum's.
In CTHD, the exact opposite is true. The Green Destiny is absolutely neutral. It is simply a very well crafted tool. In the hands of the good people, it does good. In the hands of the bad people, it does mischief/evil. That was, IMHO, a much better movie for geeks of all colors because it depicted technology as being what you make of it.
Most 'western' tradition movies and stories have this theme of actively evil technology. The Hollywood Luddite Assoc. has been churning out films lately where technology is inherently evil. Even the ring in LotR, as simple of a 'device' as it is, is still an inanimate (thing created by a human) object with an evil agenda on its own. Not only is technology rarely neutral in films, but it is also hard to think of a list of technological devices depicted in a positive light in movies... The kid in "AI", Johnny 5, C3PO (mainly a comic relief tool). But a long list of 'evil' technology in movies comes to mind easily: Andriods (The Terminator, Bishop, etc), The One Ring, The Death Star, The Matrix, HAL9000, cloning, etc, etc.
Well, I digress, but this reviewer has missed the whole "technology is good/evil neutral" theme that made CTHD such a refreshingly different movie.
The problem with super-soldiers is how to get them to take orders they don't happen to like. Are you SURE the brainwashing/programming is 100% effective? Even if it is, what if the 'normal human' leader of the batallion of super-soldiers decides he wants to be king? If you think the FBI is being nasty with the 'antiterrorism' law, wait til they become GM super-sneaky FBI guys.
As nasty as this sounds, it isn't without precedent. In the late 70's, I forget the year, an engine fell off of a Lockheed L1011 at 30,000 feet. Killed everyone... most heinous crash. The maintenance guy who put in the bolts installed them in the wrong order after the engine was removed for an overhaul.
Gotta love high tech bubble economics... Develop and deploy wireless network for $1 billion, sell for $8 million. This is almost as good a deal as Iridium!
This depends on the attitude with which it is presented, doesn't it? Compare: "These proprietary wannabes tried to muscle in with the following restrictions" with "We felt the OSI model and the requirements imposed by these business plans were incompatible in the following points"
Sure, there's *always* trolls who take offense at business plans on some misguided principle, but anyone who counts will take it as it's meant: a simple lesson in OSI compatibility.
"however HP should impose their standards on Compaq."
You forget that one of the purposes of big mergers is to cut costs... >sigh
The most annoying thing about Civ, Civ2, and SMAC (and probably Civ3) is that the game devolves to total war. Despite being titled and nominally about "civilization", it's really war. While you supposedly can win by the flight to Alpha Centauri (or the Ascent to Transendence), these are usually victories by side effect. You've had to militarity conquer or at least beat down, all opponents by the time you win by these other methods. What if it were more of a civilization simulator; think SimCity on a larger scale. It would be nice if there were a setting for the AI to be less fanatical war machines and more into peaceful competition.
Whups, I was prompted to ask the question as a result of my research into a laptop. I had already ordered a Toshiba with a GeForce2go before even submitting the question. This is an attempt to stir debate of the merits of the various chips available rather than simply getting personal advice.
It may be impossible to find a perfect mobile video chip, which would be one that:
1. Uses as little battery as possible when with a light workload, and:
2. Near desktop performance while taking a work break to play games.
I went for the GeForce2go purely on the reputation for performance of its desktop big brothers. But discussion generated may help others make up their minds if their needs/wants are different.
No private sector undertaking can come close or even make up a noticable fraction of the spending (and thus economicaly stimulating) power of the federal government. Notice an hour before the stock market opened on Sep 17 the Federal Reserve dumped notes valued at more than IBM's annual income in a single move. A small example of the spending power of the federal government.
So, when this person asked about benefit to the public about a high-budget goverment agency, I pointed out that the economic value of the act of that spending was often very worthwhile. Despite your arguments, I hope you can acknowledge that Contractor X employs a lot of people from the *general populace* (not the top super-rich) to work in its factory making NASA widgets and this is a benefit. If they didn't work there, the next-best job would be lower paying otherwise (all other things equal) they would have quit Contractor X to go work at a higher paying job. These members of the general public (and there are a lot of them) are benefitting quite a bit. Then the places where they shop benefit, etc, etc.
I think the debate of whether or not its fair that shareholders of Contractor X also benefit is another argument. So are the causes, effects, and solutions to income disparity. This would be an interesting discussion since you seem to have some grasp of the problem, but outside the scope of this thread as we've probably already departed far enough from the retirement of the NASA director.
You're kidding, right? Spending on breakthrough, high-risk stuff took NASA to the moon. Disinterested political leadership killed the X-33.
If you wait that long, it will be too late. Then you'll just die a bitter, pissed off, old individual and all will be for naught. Better to be pissed off now since that might motivate you to pester your Congress critter for better NASA funding, etc.
Then you can happily die as a merely bitter and old individual.
Better to make sure we don't nuke/shoot/infect/choke everyone in the first place, eh?
The same could be said about $1 million cruise missiles being shot at empty terrorist camps. The missile itself isn't $1M. They're just aluminum, explosives, and a couple of microprocessors. But a thousand people in Ratheon's southern California factory have steady jobs assembling them.
I think you're expecting something like a NASA-made machine to go to the moon, mine, and bring back enough gold to pay for itself, but that's not the point. Western civilization has valued knowledge for its own sake since the ancient Greeks came up with the idea of "philosophy". The effort of this pursuit is valuable in itself, for knowledge is added to humanity's stockpile even in failure.
If you still really want to picture a NASA project as a closed economic system unto itself (which it isn't), then consider the Mars Pathfinder mission. Enough merchanising tie-ins were sold that the project paid for itself.