"I mean money sitting in a bank or invested in the stock market does not body any good except the few rich big wigs of the company or bank."
Moron.
Money that "sits in the bank" or that's invested in stocks does not just rest in someone's desk drawer. It's the financial fuel that provides your new factory equipment, new coding team, and the expanded new office.
If you've ever worked a day in your life, you have been the beneficiary of such money. The computer you used to vomit this nonsense onto/. is a direct result of investments of the sort that you ignorantly dismiss.
I realize how glamorous it may seen to be traveling between the planets and the stars, but really, what's worth more, that dream or a single human life?
Duh. The dream. People died in the process of getting to the moon -- did they shutter the project after the Apollo 1 fire? No -- they learned from the mistakes and kept on going.
Attitudes like this are what stopped us dead following the death of Challenger... absurd.
All of this just goes to underscore a critical point:
Space is too important to leave it to the gov't!
The current crop of thumb-fingered dolts will mess it up at every opportunity -- the Apollo team, and the spirit that drove them, is dead at NASA. Close down that relic, and get the hell out of the way!
Actually, I reported a spam routed through his new services last year... Sent a long note to his ISP, explaining that I thought providing him bandwidth was foolhardy.
Got a message back from the "Great Man" himself, with his claims of being anti-spam, &c., &c., blah, blah, blah. Truth be told, I never heard from that spammer again -- nor any other that I could trace through Wallace, since then. (This is in the context of 300+ confirmed kills for 1999, and over 200 so far this year.)
Kinda cool, though, putting a tick-mark on my SPAM can to represent that kill.:-)
While open DTDs should make data translation easier, there will still be competing data standards, issued by competing organizations, with competing priorities.
Although it seems to have foundered in execution, Microsoft's BizTalk framework, with an emphasis on putting the DTDs out there for collaborative use, seems to be a step in the right direction.
As to the original question, though... again, it's not likely that XML will resolve the difficulties -- everyone who takes a pass at a file format for a given type of data will have their own little spin on what should be in there...
I for one would far rather live in the 13th century. (As for the 14th, I'd have to think about it.)
Guess what, nitwit? You can't go back to the 13th century, but you can get a pretty good simulation:
1. Step away from your computer. Computers did not exist. 2. Go turn off your electric power main. Ditto water, gas, sewer, cable, telephone, cell, etc., etc.. None existed. 3. Leave your house. If you have a dirt-floored shed, that's an accurate alternative. 4. Get rid of your clothes and make your own. No pre-made cloth -- get your own fiber. 5. Ditto shoes. Kill your own leather. 6. Forget about the grocery store or Domino's. Get your own food. (Make the tools & fire yourself, too.) 7. Want to talk to a friend? Have a nice hike! 8. Got a sniffle? Good luck -- hope you survive! God help you if you actually get injured. 13th c. medicine was not known for either effectiveness or pleasantness.
Let us know how it turns out! (Oh, wait, you won't be able to -- do you know smoke signals?)
Actually, simply going to Africa yourself would provide a decent simulation. Perhaps that's the problem, eh?
Re:This is incredibly bad for everyone...
on
Microsoft Loses
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Nice ad hominem, but can you refute any of my points?
How do you breathe while performing a colon examination upon yourself that way? I don't think that's what Ms. Couric meant...
So, to review, you're taking the position that capitalism somehow embodies justification for outright theft, and that if the Supreme Court is asleep at the switch, that makes it all okay? Hello? McFly?
Never mind that you're talking about then taking my pilfered money and handing it over to a gov't whose track record is, to put it mildy, abyssmal, and instructing them to use it to ensure the survival of the species.
Looking at history, they'd take that as a mandate to continue the welfare program practices of paying people who are unable to hold down productive jobs to have more children, who'll in all too short a time, join their mothers in the same cycle. Hey! It's increasing the species, right?
Or, the money could be applied towards procuring more big-hair bimbos for our Lech in Chief, thus increasing the species another way.
I actually don't assume that you don't want to tax me -- to the contrary, I proceed from the assumption that you and your spiritual brethren are all about. This is why I lock my car... and why I vote.
As for this project, ask me nicely, you can have 10 times that $10 -- but try to pickpocket me, and I'll rip your liver out.
Even better, why not a gas tax for space exploration.
Errr... how is this not picking my pocket?
To review: taxation (for purposes outside of the stated Constitutional responsibilities of protecting the citizenry from the application of force or fraud) is theft. Full stop.
This is incredibly bad for everyone...
on
Microsoft Loses
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· Score: 1
...even you -- yes, you!
A lot of/.ers have a deep, abiding hatred of Microsoft. Fine. So don't buy their products. Run your Linux systems with your Corel Office, etc., etc.. You keep saying that it's every bit as good as Microsoft's stuff -- fine, then don't give Mr. Bill any of your business. The market really does work, if only you give it a chance.
Fast-forward a few years, to that shining day that so many of you seem to be forecasting, when Microsoft joins IBM as a burning hulk alongside the road of progress, and Linux is the dominant force... what's to stop the Injustice Department from going after Red Hat? As someone once observed, "any gov't big enough to give you anything you want is big enough to take away everything you have."
Has Microsoft competed hard? You betcha. Have they harmed any consumers? Show me one. The fact of the matter is that they have successfully unified a previously fractured OS market, so that developers like myself can build a solution and be reasonably sure that there's a large body of customers who will have the environment that I'm writing for.
I'll point out that Linux did not spring into existence until there was a large installed base of Intel boxes out there -- which would not have been likely without the Microsoft success in building a consistent platform for Intel to sell into.
I think that everyone here would agree that this is a Good Thing.
Does Microsoft sometimes ship stuff that should have baked a little longer? Sure thing -- but when was the last time that you installed any software from any source that was utterly bug-free? That's what I thought...
To reiterate -- if you hate Microsoft, more power to you. But don't take away my option to do business with them, as they exist today.
But we would rather spend the money on fueling up our SUVs and creating military forces to get fuel for those SUVs. For only $10 a year per capita, we could (the US or the EU) easily create enough detection equipment and the scientists to analyze it.
You're committing the common error of assuming that what's mine is ours. If everyone who had a project that required just $10 of every citizen's income got what they wanted, we'd have... Oh wait; we're already there.
As for this project, ask me nicely, you can have 10 times that $10 -- but try to pickpocket me, and I'll rip your liver out.
Besides all of that -- what's more wasteful: a private citizen spending his own hard-earned money to gas up a fuel hog, or a gov't that spends my money to pay farmers not to farm, addicts to use, and lawyers to slice away more of our freedoms daily?
where will we run to? what will we do? why is it so important that we survive?
So don't. In Oregon, and elsewhere in the world, you can even get a nice prescription for personal extinction. And there are always the old standbys -- leaping off a bridge, stepping in front of a dump truck, or just turning your head to the wall and stopping.
Oh? You didn't mean yourself, personally? Then shut up and take your pseudo-nihilistic posturing back under your rock with you.
Survival of the species is the "prime directive" -- and if you don't feel that urge, then don't.
Your arguments are specious, circular, and otherwise fatally flawed. "Corporation bad. Gov't good. Thag say so."
Remember, it's a failure of a government space program that we're talking about here. The ISS is a lovely illustration of exactly why space is too important to trust to gov't. Instead of being driven by some semblance of rationality (profit, either short or long term), priorities and expenditures are shaped by the political winds (and the biggest campaign donors).
As for the original issue, global inequalities still don't make the case for restraining private space exploration efforts. Inequality is a constant -- in past centuries, it was measured in galleons and doubloons; today it is measured in microprocessors and dollars.
To think of this another way, look back at history: many of the greatest voyages of discovery around our own planet were undertaken by private organizations. That model would remain a viable one, absent the pernicious effects of gov't interference.
Gov't has had its chance to take on space. It has clearly demonstrated that it's not up to the challenges. Get out of the way, and let the competent, properly motivated, private explorers show you how it's done.
Slashdot Mirror
Moron.
Money that "sits in the bank" or that's invested in stocks does not just rest in someone's desk drawer. It's the financial fuel that provides your new factory equipment, new coding team, and the expanded new office.
If you've ever worked a day in your life, you have been the beneficiary of such money. The computer you used to vomit this nonsense onto /. is a direct result of investments of the sort that you ignorantly dismiss.
I repeat: Moron.
Duh. The dream. People died in the process of getting to the moon -- did they shutter the project after the Apollo 1 fire? No -- they learned from the mistakes and kept on going.
Attitudes like this are what stopped us dead following the death of Challenger... absurd.
All of this just goes to underscore a critical point:
Space is too important to leave it to the gov't!
The current crop of thumb-fingered dolts will mess it up at every opportunity -- the Apollo team, and the spirit that drove them, is dead at NASA. Close down that relic, and get the hell out of the way!
Got a message back from the "Great Man" himself, with his claims of being anti-spam, &c., &c., blah, blah, blah. Truth be told, I never heard from that spammer again -- nor any other that I could trace through Wallace, since then. (This is in the context of 300+ confirmed kills for 1999, and over 200 so far this year.)
Kinda cool, though, putting a tick-mark on my SPAM can to represent that kill. :-)
But why not use a really hot cup of tea, and Brownian motion? I suppose that the hardware's a little more difficult...
Although it seems to have foundered in execution, Microsoft's BizTalk framework, with an emphasis on putting the DTDs out there for collaborative use, seems to be a step in the right direction.
As to the original question, though... again, it's not likely that XML will resolve the difficulties -- everyone who takes a pass at a file format for a given type of data will have their own little spin on what should be in there...
FREE BILL GATES!!
Too, in the price of a new car, $600 is a drop in the bucket. I'd love one of these in my next car!
1. Step away from your computer. Computers did not exist.
2. Go turn off your electric power main. Ditto water, gas, sewer, cable, telephone, cell, etc., etc.. None existed.
3. Leave your house. If you have a dirt-floored shed, that's an accurate alternative.
4. Get rid of your clothes and make your own. No pre-made cloth -- get your own fiber.
5. Ditto shoes. Kill your own leather.
6. Forget about the grocery store or Domino's. Get your own food. (Make the tools & fire yourself, too.)
7. Want to talk to a friend? Have a nice hike!
8. Got a sniffle? Good luck -- hope you survive! God help you if you actually get injured. 13th c. medicine was not known for either effectiveness or pleasantness.
Let us know how it turns out! (Oh, wait, you won't be able to -- do you know smoke signals?)
Actually, simply going to Africa yourself would provide a decent simulation. Perhaps that's the problem, eh?
Didn't think so.
So, to review, you're taking the position that capitalism somehow embodies justification for outright theft, and that if the Supreme Court is asleep at the switch, that makes it all okay? Hello? McFly?
Never mind that you're talking about then taking my pilfered money and handing it over to a gov't whose track record is, to put it mildy, abyssmal, and instructing them to use it to ensure the survival of the species.
Looking at history, they'd take that as a mandate to continue the welfare program practices of paying people who are unable to hold down productive jobs to have more children, who'll in all too short a time, join their mothers in the same cycle. Hey! It's increasing the species, right?
Or, the money could be applied towards procuring more big-hair bimbos for our Lech in Chief, thus increasing the species another way.
I actually don't assume that you don't want to tax me -- to the contrary, I proceed from the assumption that you and your spiritual brethren are all about. This is why I lock my car... and why I vote.
Errr... how is this not picking my pocket?
To review: taxation (for purposes outside of the stated Constitutional responsibilities of protecting the citizenry from the application of force or fraud) is theft. Full stop.
A lot of /.ers have a deep, abiding hatred of Microsoft. Fine. So don't buy their products. Run your Linux systems with your Corel Office, etc., etc.. You keep saying that it's every bit as good as Microsoft's stuff -- fine, then don't give Mr. Bill any of your business. The market really does work, if only you give it a chance.
Fast-forward a few years, to that shining day that so many of you seem to be forecasting, when Microsoft joins IBM as a burning hulk alongside the road of progress, and Linux is the dominant force... what's to stop the Injustice Department from going after Red Hat? As someone once observed, "any gov't big enough to give you anything you want is big enough to take away everything you have."
Has Microsoft competed hard? You betcha. Have they harmed any consumers? Show me one. The fact of the matter is that they have successfully unified a previously fractured OS market, so that developers like myself can build a solution and be reasonably sure that there's a large body of customers who will have the environment that I'm writing for.
I'll point out that Linux did not spring into existence until there was a large installed base of Intel boxes out there -- which would not have been likely without the Microsoft success in building a consistent platform for Intel to sell into.
I think that everyone here would agree that this is a Good Thing.
Does Microsoft sometimes ship stuff that should have baked a little longer? Sure thing -- but when was the last time that you installed any software from any source that was utterly bug-free? That's what I thought...
To reiterate -- if you hate Microsoft, more power to you. But don't take away my option to do business with them, as they exist today.
As for this project, ask me nicely, you can have 10 times that $10 -- but try to pickpocket me, and I'll rip your liver out.
Besides all of that -- what's more wasteful: a private citizen spending his own hard-earned money to gas up a fuel hog, or a gov't that spends my money to pay farmers not to farm, addicts to use, and lawyers to slice away more of our freedoms daily?
Oh? You didn't mean yourself, personally? Then shut up and take your pseudo-nihilistic posturing back under your rock with you.
Survival of the species is the "prime directive" -- and if you don't feel that urge, then don't.
Remember, it's a failure of a government space program that we're talking about here. The ISS is a lovely illustration of exactly why space is too important to trust to gov't. Instead of being driven by some semblance of rationality (profit, either short or long term), priorities and expenditures are shaped by the political winds (and the biggest campaign donors).
As for the original issue, global inequalities still don't make the case for restraining private space exploration efforts. Inequality is a constant -- in past centuries, it was measured in galleons and doubloons; today it is measured in microprocessors and dollars.
To think of this another way, look back at history: many of the greatest voyages of discovery around our own planet were undertaken by private organizations. That model would remain a viable one, absent the pernicious effects of gov't interference.
Gov't has had its chance to take on space. It has clearly demonstrated that it's not up to the challenges. Get out of the way, and let the competent, properly motivated, private explorers show you how it's done.