even gold mining wouldn't be cost effective - it would cost far more than the gold was worth to collect it
Why is it expensive? Getting up there in the first place, yes. But once you're on the asteroid, it's not like you have to dig much for the metals; they're just sitting right there. To melt them you can focus a bunch of mirrors on it and let the sun do the work. And getting them back to earth? Dropping stuff down a gravity well is about ten thousand times easier and cheaper than getting stuff out of it.
And why isn't there a bloated government agency with delusions of adequacy (is there any other kind?) studying the ocean depths or the rain forests? Gee, tough question... For starters, operating costs are rather a lot less, so corporations and rich individuals can pay for it. And yes, space is sexy. Politically useful? As a scapegoat, maybe.
But you're missing the point. We don't want NASA to pioneer the conquest of space. If they did, it'd take them another thousand years to establish a lunar base. They are on record as saying they intend to use the shuttles for another 20 or 30 years. Can you imagine Intel being granted a government monopoly and then saying that the 8086 was a perfectly good chip and that they're not gonna bother making any new ones for another forty years?
Whoever said a PC couldn't also be a dumb terminal?
I had the opportunity to set up a number of thin client workstations with MS Terminal Server. I loved that thing. Ran 36 clients off of two servers. Never had to worry about the lusers formatting the things, attempting to use their 733t ski1z on them, or screwing them up any other way, which they did all the fscking time with standalone PC's. And the real beauty of it was when we put the client on a bunch of old Mac LC's and IBM 386's, and then basically ran NT4 on them. Saved a fortune in hardware costs and about two thirds of the maintenance time...
And any episode with the borg in Star Trek (hive minds)
The Death Star in Star Wars (small ships)
The droid armies of Episode 1 (central computer)
The Madness season, by C.S. Freidman (more hive minds)
The Man-Kzin Wars (don't fight well collectively, no FTL drive)
If you thought only Europe issues stupid patents, you should read the Patents section every Monday in the NYT.
I'm sorry, but where on earth did you get the idea that anyone considered the US Patent Office to be the pinnacle of intellectual achievement? This is, to my knowledge, one of the first/. articles covering stupid patents granted by a country other than the US.
Please refrain from complaining about hypocrisy when it does not actually exist.
Ocean conditions and prevailing currents prevent undersea cable from being layed in most areas of the ocean. You see, while daily tides don't seem too powerful to the average person, the stress imposed on a cable that is exposed to miles upon miles of oceanic currents will break even the strongest of cables
Oh well, that's easy then! We just stick a bunch of those tidal power plants on an otherwise perfectly good section of beach, and they'll suck up the excess tides. Then lay the cable as you please!
I imagine this would be best used in areas that aren't right next to the main power net, like islands. For instance, I bet Sea Haven would just love this. Depending on how much it costs, it might also be good as a quick-n-dirty power plant in 3rd world countries, where 400kW will get you pretty far.
Say Microsoft is releasing new versions of Office every two years, and the upgrade price is $150 each time. That works out to paying $75 each year. If the subscription is, say $50/year, and you get upgrades in that price, then customers are ahead $25/year
It also depends on how long you plan to use that version. More than a few people keep piece-of-shit systems running with 5 or 10 year old software. How is it in their favor to end up spending double or triple to keep this antiquated, but still perfectly usable, software running?
I will say again how pleasantly surprised I was when I went to get a patch for Quicken 98. Turns out Intuit just gives out their software for free once it gets to be a certain age.
Yes, I'm aware of that you can run IE (slow, buggy, weird) under Solaris, although I'm not familiar with licensing issues in that case.
A lot of people seem to think that IE, IS and other hideously-named MS products bundled with different MS Operating System are free.
Neither do I have to pay for IE for the Mac or Solaris. Win 3.1 does not come bundled with IE 5, yet I can still go and get it from them for free. Just how much _less_ should software cost for you to call it free?
You are saying that any software that requires an operating system I have to pay for is not free, no matter what I _didn't_ have to pay for it. There's no such thing as free/shareware for MS OS's? Could have fooled me...
Price/Performance: Mozilla
Funny, I don't recall ever having had to pay for IE. And there's an awful lot of posts here about how poorly NS6 is running.
See "The Boys From Brazil"
Great movie, and they actually got the Nature vs Nurture part right. Rather than just make 1 clone and hope he works out, they made dozens and tried to duplicate the major events in Hitler's life. I'm not sure how they were planning to duplicate his experiences in WW1, though.
If a site wants to make sure that whatever they peddle is available even after they're sued into oblivion, they should make available for download everything they keep on their site. Ideally something like an ftp server serving a few large file archives.
Obviously how well this works depends on how much stuff there is. DeCSS has gone far and wide because you can print it on a t-shirt if you need to. An entire encyclopedia/mathematics DB would be somewhat tougher, but I'm sure it's still doable.
Guinness owns guinesssucks.com. If I were trying to go to guinnesssucks.com, it's quite likely that I'd go to guinness-sucks.com by accident.
That's actually a pretty good argument for Guinness' side, except for the minor detail that while they own the domain, they don't actually use it. If the only guinnesssucks.com-ish domain names in use aren't owned by Guinness, how is it a copyright violation? That's like saying, 'I could write this book, but even though I'm not going to, you aren't allowed to give it the same title.'
Of course, it could be a conspiracy among the PC makers to make floppy drives less reliable to sell more floppies
That might work if there were no alternative to floppies. As it is, making 3 1/2's suck simply pushes customers into using networked storage or zip disks.
Err, exactly how many US astronauts have died in space? None.
How many Russians? Dunno, but as I recall, the Soviets literally had a crash course space program. They had something like 150 total deaths, whereas we had 10.
Insanely enough, this might actually be better for the space program. We Americans get the idea that space is a nice, happy, easy going place and if anything happens to shake that notion, lots of people try to shut it down (how long after Challenger for shuttle flights to resume?). Having high casualties throughout the program kind of hardens you so that one accident doesn't shut down the whole operation.
...because they don't make any money off of used textbook sales.
And how did you come to this conclusion?
Bookstore sells a new $100 book to me. After the semester, I sell it back to them for $50. They turn around and sell it again for $75. That's an extra $25 for nothing but shelf space for the used books. In fact, they're more likely to pay you $20 or $30 for the book, since they are cheap bastards, but you get the point.
Think of it this way:
You spend an hour of your time convincing your boss to give you a raise. More money for you, always a good thing!
Now some other management type, not even your boss or boss's boss or anything, decides to change it back. Why? Because you'll be making more than him, shame on you. How? Well, everyone on that level has access to the payroll information of everyone, not just their own subordinates. Now imagine that your boss is as responsive as NSI and try convincing him to change it back. Ugh.
Do I sound like an Apple apologist?
No, you sound like a public relations flack. "Jobs has synergy with his engineers"? Oh please...
Let's count the 'power words' here, shall we?
Synergy
Resurgence
Revitalize
Innovative
Creating an experience
Artists as well as engineers!
Change the world, again and again
Passion drives invention
I'm truly impressed, you should see if their marketing department has any job openings.
These guys need to realize just what the effects are of putting Christian Creationsim on the same level as evolution and natural selection. Students who spend 12 years in school being taught that it's possible the earth is only 6k years old (and all the associated ideas) are in for a rude awakening when they hit the Real World(TM), especially if they go to college for a degree in biology or archaeology or geology or anything involving the past. Fundamentalists need to understand that they are not doing students any favors by teaching outdated dogmas.
It remains true that religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability. Sidney Hook
Absolutely. NASA moves far too ponderously to get anywhere. For instance, what happened to the space program when the Challenger blew up? No launches for a looong time. We've had a total of 10 deaths in the space race which is regrettable, but not something to slow you down. Conversely, the Soviets had over 150 and the only reason they slowed down was because they were having a harder time coughing up the money for it. It's all about how much you want to have access to space and if this is any indicator, NASA doesn't want it all that bad. Learning by doing is expensive, but by god it gives results.
Slashdot Mirror
Why? Because of the space elevator bit? That idea is a tad older than SMAC, I assure you.
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Why is it expensive? Getting up there in the first place, yes. But once you're on the asteroid, it's not like you have to dig much for the metals; they're just sitting right there. To melt them you can focus a bunch of mirrors on it and let the sun do the work. And getting them back to earth? Dropping stuff down a gravity well is about ten thousand times easier and cheaper than getting stuff out of it.
And why isn't there a bloated government agency with delusions of adequacy (is there any other kind?) studying the ocean depths or the rain forests? Gee, tough question... For starters, operating costs are rather a lot less, so corporations and rich individuals can pay for it. And yes, space is sexy. Politically useful? As a scapegoat, maybe.
But you're missing the point. We don't want NASA to pioneer the conquest of space. If they did, it'd take them another thousand years to establish a lunar base. They are on record as saying they intend to use the shuttles for another 20 or 30 years. Can you imagine Intel being granted a government monopoly and then saying that the 8086 was a perfectly good chip and that they're not gonna bother making any new ones for another forty years?
--
I had the opportunity to set up a number of thin client workstations with MS Terminal Server. I loved that thing. Ran 36 clients off of two servers. Never had to worry about the lusers formatting the things, attempting to use their 733t ski1z on them, or screwing them up any other way, which they did all the fscking time with standalone PC's. And the real beauty of it was when we put the client on a bunch of old Mac LC's and IBM 386's, and then basically ran NT4 on them. Saved a fortune in hardware costs and about two thirds of the maintenance time...
--
Ok, sorry to have snapped at you.
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The Death Star in Star Wars (small ships)
The droid armies of Episode 1 (central computer)
The Madness season, by C.S. Freidman (more hive minds)
The Man-Kzin Wars (don't fight well collectively, no FTL drive)
The list goes on and on.
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I'm sorry, but where on earth did you get the idea that anyone considered the US Patent Office to be the pinnacle of intellectual achievement? This is, to my knowledge, one of the first /. articles covering stupid patents granted by a country other than the US.
Please refrain from complaining about hypocrisy when it does not actually exist.
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Oh well, that's easy then! We just stick a bunch of those tidal power plants on an otherwise perfectly good section of beach, and they'll suck up the excess tides. Then lay the cable as you please!
--
I imagine this would be best used in areas that aren't right next to the main power net, like islands. For instance, I bet Sea Haven would just love this. Depending on how much it costs, it might also be good as a quick-n-dirty power plant in 3rd world countries, where 400kW will get you pretty far.
--
It also depends on how long you plan to use that version. More than a few people keep piece-of-shit systems running with 5 or 10 year old software. How is it in their favor to end up spending double or triple to keep this antiquated, but still perfectly usable, software running?
I will say again how pleasantly surprised I was when I went to get a patch for Quicken 98. Turns out Intuit just gives out their software for free once it gets to be a certain age.
--
A lot of people seem to think that IE, IS and other hideously-named MS products bundled with different MS Operating System are free.
Neither do I have to pay for IE for the Mac or Solaris. Win 3.1 does not come bundled with IE 5, yet I can still go and get it from them for free. Just how much _less_ should software cost for you to call it free?
You are saying that any software that requires an operating system I have to pay for is not free, no matter what I _didn't_ have to pay for it. There's no such thing as free/shareware for MS OS's? Could have fooled me...
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Furthermore, you _can_ specify the editor to use in IE. I just finished setting mine to UltraEdit.
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Price/Performance: Mozilla
Funny, I don't recall ever having had to pay for IE. And there's an awful lot of posts here about how poorly NS6 is running.
--
See "The Boys From Brazil"
Great movie, and they actually got the Nature vs Nurture part right. Rather than just make 1 clone and hope he works out, they made dozens and tried to duplicate the major events in Hitler's life. I'm not sure how they were planning to duplicate his experiences in WW1, though.
--
Obviously how well this works depends on how much stuff there is. DeCSS has gone far and wide because you can print it on a t-shirt if you need to. An entire encyclopedia/mathematics DB would be somewhat tougher, but I'm sure it's still doable.
--
I agree. A better question would have been one regarding Asteroid and Missile Defenses, as well as plans for the space program in general.
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Guinness owns guinesssucks.com. If I were trying to go to guinnesssucks.com, it's quite likely that I'd go to guinness-sucks.com by accident.
That's actually a pretty good argument for Guinness' side, except for the minor detail that while they own the domain, they don't actually use it. If the only guinnesssucks.com-ish domain names in use aren't owned by Guinness, how is it a copyright violation? That's like saying, 'I could write this book, but even though I'm not going to, you aren't allowed to give it the same title.'
--
That might work if there were no alternative to floppies. As it is, making 3 1/2's suck simply pushes customers into using networked storage or zip disks.
--
I can just see Hippie Fundamentalists running around crucifying people because they don't own a bong.
I'm kidding, people.
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How many Russians? Dunno, but as I recall, the Soviets literally had a crash course space program. They had something like 150 total deaths, whereas we had 10.
Insanely enough, this might actually be better for the space program. We Americans get the idea that space is a nice, happy, easy going place and if anything happens to shake that notion, lots of people try to shut it down (how long after Challenger for shuttle flights to resume?). Having high casualties throughout the program kind of hardens you so that one accident doesn't shut down the whole operation.
--
I noticed that. I wish whoever posted the link to the article here would kindly place the full text of the article here as well.
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And how did you come to this conclusion?
Bookstore sells a new $100 book to me. After the semester, I sell it back to them for $50. They turn around and sell it again for $75. That's an extra $25 for nothing but shelf space for the used books. In fact, they're more likely to pay you $20 or $30 for the book, since they are cheap bastards, but you get the point.
--
You spend an hour of your time convincing your boss to give you a raise. More money for you, always a good thing!
Now some other management type, not even your boss or boss's boss or anything, decides to change it back. Why? Because you'll be making more than him, shame on you. How? Well, everyone on that level has access to the payroll information of everyone, not just their own subordinates. Now imagine that your boss is as responsive as NSI and try convincing him to change it back. Ugh.
--
No, you sound like a public relations flack. "Jobs has synergy with his engineers"? Oh please...
Let's count the 'power words' here, shall we?
Synergy
Resurgence
Revitalize
Innovative
Creating an experience
Artists as well as engineers!
Change the world, again and again
Passion drives invention
I'm truly impressed, you should see if their marketing department has any job openings.
--
It remains true that religious doctrines constitute a speculative hypothesis of an extremely low order of probability. Sidney Hook
--
Absolutely. NASA moves far too ponderously to get anywhere. For instance, what happened to the space program when the Challenger blew up? No launches for a looong time. We've had a total of 10 deaths in the space race which is regrettable, but not something to slow you down. Conversely, the Soviets had over 150 and the only reason they slowed down was because they were having a harder time coughing up the money for it. It's all about how much you want to have access to space and if this is any indicator, NASA doesn't want it all that bad. Learning by doing is expensive, but by god it gives results.
--