Check out my uid. I've been here a while. What's frustrating is that Slashdot used to be good. After they went public, the quality of the articles have gone downhill dramatically.
Eh, I've been around awhile myself, and I have to say that this sort of thing went on before. They've never spellchecked, and they've always run some crap-o-rama articles. Hey, at least Jon Katz is gone.:) Everyone complained about quality back then, too.
I think one of the things that makes Slashdot good is the fact that they do have human editors. Human editors mean human mistakes. Granted, sometimes you have to shake your head at the level of stupid mistake, but on the whole, Slashdot is where it is because of CmdrTaco, not despite him. I think replacing the editors would turn Slashdot into just another ranting blog.
...but the chances of the healthcare industry letting this fly if it is real are slim to none. Think about it. Chemotherapy is a multi-BILLION dollar a year buisness. WHy do you think there have been no major cures in the past...what, 30-40 years?
Sheesh. You know, even mean, nasty, conspiratorial CEOs with giant handlebar mustaches get cancer, too.
Rocket science is not easy. You cannot cut corners on development and testing and there is no substitute for the decades of experience these companies have.
To quote John Carmack, "Rocket science is not as easy as amateurs think it is, but it's not as hard as the professionals think it is."
NASA is only part of the problem. The other problem are the Lockheed's, etc, who think nothing can be done for less than a billion dollars. They have zero incentive to reduce the cost of space -- why should they? They make billions of dollars off it. Do you think they would ever try the "cheap clusters of modular rocket systems to orbit" as Armadillo is going to do? Hell no. That would bring mass production into it -- and we can't have that.
Do you know why the insurance company was willing to put up the money for the X-Prize? Because they asked the old guard, and the old guard told them it was impossible to do for less than a billion dollars.
Only the competition from new blood is going to break the stranglehold (and the arrogance, as you demonstrate) of the old guard.
Ah, neither on the snippet you provided nor on the actual page of the link you provided appears either "highway" or "road".
What the platform said was, "ALL public lands and resources, as well as claims thereto, except as explicitly allowed by the Constitution..." The one thing you can say about Libertarians is that they like applying their beliefs in a psychopathically consistent way. The only mention of public roads in the constitution is for postal roads. If they say "all public lands", they mean ALL public lands. They want to sell off the national parks! You think mere neighborhood roads are somehow off-limits?
It's the same with private nukes. Nowhere will you find in the party platform mention of private ownership of nukes, but you'll find plenty about private weapon ownership, and nothing about limits. They don't believe in limits -- that's the whole Libertarian philosophy. Either something is allowed in unlimited amounts, or it's not.
All public lands and resources, as well as claims thereto, except as explicitly allowed by the Constitution, shall be returned to private ownership, with the proceeds of sale going to retire public liabilities. Resource rights shall be defined as property rights, including riparian rights. All publicly owned infrastructures including dams and parks shall be returned to private ownership and all taxing authority for such public improvements shall sunset. Property related services shall be supplied by private markets and paid for by user fees, and regulation of property shall be limited to that which secures the rights of individuals.
Ah, you have to love those crazy Libertarians.:) There's all sorts of great nuggets in the platform. I also like the fact that this also says your neighborhood park will be turned into condos. I have a theory that only about 5% of people who style themselves Libertarian actually know what the party believes.
I can understand vertical take off but why do a veritcal landing?
Vertical landing versus horizontal landing is one of those big debates. The argument for vertical landing, as I understand it, can be summed up as "airplanes are bad spaceships, and spaceships are bad airplanes." In other words, trying to make a ship do both means it's poor at both. Look at all the problems the Space Shuttle has with protecting the wings from damage, for example.
Actually, I read an amusing quote from Bob Truax that said (paraphrase), "Insisting that spaceships land like airplanes makes as much sense as insisting a hundred years ago that airplanes should land on railroad tracks."
Well this is now off-topic but there are private highways near where I live and they are better-maintained and if you added up how much of your income/state/sales/fuel taxes go to roads and such you might be shocked at your return on investment.
Private highways work well in certain cases. The problem is that they want every road in every neighborhood to be privatized. As in, you need to pay a toll to go from your house to the grocery store. A toll back. Basically, since everything would be private property, you have would have no right to travel unless you could afford to pay.
This actually neatly summarizes the problems with Libertarians in a nutshell. They simplistically assume what's a good idea in one case is applicable to every case (e.g., self-defense is good, therefore, personal nukes must also be good. Low taxes is good, therefore, no taxes must also be good. Etc.)
I'm not saying there aren't bad bosses, but there are a LOT more bad employees than bad bosses, just because of the raw numbers. Given the bosses are just employees (duh, I hope), the rate of bad employees ought the be the same as the rate of bad bosses. If we assume that the average boss has an average of ten grunts, then we have ten bad employees for every bad boss.
So how many of these employees are bad-mouthing their boss because they're lazy idiots who expect a paycheck for as little work as possible and skewing the statistics? This study doesn't seem too interested in this question.
Lucus must want money. He certainly wouldn't make another IJ movie because it would be interesting.
No, I think Lucas wants another movie because he wants to do something that the fans don't hate, even if it makes a lot of money. Billionaires don't generally want more money, they want more respect.
We have the Iraq war because so many U.S. citizens are excited, not disgusted, by violence, any violence.
Maybe you get excited by the violence (I've noticed that pacifists usually displace on everyone else their own personality disorders), but I personally get excited about the potential birth of freedom in a formerly murderous dictorship. TJ said it best: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -- Thomas Jefferson
Not everyone has the financial means to choose the non-free version. [...] Or maybe you mean even the poor have the choice to pirate a copy of Windows.
The "poor" do not have the means to choose at all. The poor go to the library. Only relatively wealthy people have computers of their own.
Banning trans-fats in New York, banning smoking in Seattle.
Smoking, at the very least, is a public nuisance. There is no law against public smoking that isn't justified. People should not be allowed to smoke within 500 yards of any other person.
I was with you about Trans-Fats, until I read this article about the issue on The Straight Dope. I figured it was more idiocy from the Health Nazis who want to ban anything that tastes good, but this is really about a cheaper substitute that has a big effect on health. This is the sort of thing that government ought to care about, in the same category as clean restaurants.
That's the theory. In practice, they weren't really sure how exact the cloning process duplicated the original genetics. That's the issue -- there may have been some DNA damage in the process that caused some weird interactions.
We apparently got the expected result, but it's definitely not something that should be taken for granted.
Steve Jobs was quoted today as saying, "I am proud to say that I have been exonerated by myself twice as fast as any previous corruption probe."
That Steve! Always the innovator, even when it comes to stealing from the shareholder. I'm feeling a strange sensation right now -- I think it's from the corruption-distortion field.
So, what are the exclusive broadcast rights worth for the Mars landing?
Not enough (i.e., billions of dollars). And even if it was enough, the problem isn't doing a one-time stunt, the problem is having an ongoing revenue stream to keep things going. We went to the moon -- but what was enticing about keeping us there?
Past that, what is the current going rate for a chunk of guaranteed authentic Mars Rock?
Again, you might make money with the first X thousand chunks, but eventually you run out of people willing to pay a significant amount of money for it, and it's not scarce anymore.
The only almost sure-fire ongoing revenue stream is tourism, and the big question is whether that can even cover the costs of an orbital hotel, much less a trip to mars (which probably would NOT cover those costs, at least at this point in our space-fairing civilization).
I don't completely disagree with your point, but Columbus had it easy for other reasons. Sailing across the ocean is a LOT easier than going to space, even adjusting for different eras. It was a much lower risk and MUCH lower cost expedition. Resources were literally just lying around, and trading partners were already established. Just getting into space is very difficult, and trying to mine things is dauntingly difficult, and worse, a totally unproven risk.
I think we'll get there eventually, but it really isn't the government's fault that private industry is only taking baby steps. If there were mountains of money out there for the easy pickin', we would have done so in the 1960s and 70s. Just pray that space tourism can support the industry, because that's all there is right now that's going to make short-term money.
Dude, I've learned my lesson. I'm not even gonna bother with you.
No problem, I'll just take that to mean, "You are absolutely right, Reality Master. I bow to your inexorable logic and brilliant insight." I get that a lot.
Yet, if we send people to Mars, we get a whole new planet to live on and explore, forever.
It'll never happen, even if living there was practical (which is very much in doubt). As soon as anyone even gets close to trying to set up a colony, it'll "temporarily" (read: forever) get shut down over environmental contamination concerns. Mars is a completely unique environment, and scientists won't want it messed up so it can studied.
The future of space is large habitats.
(And yes, Earth *can* shut it down. A Mars colony would need Earth support for decades, if not centuries, if not millenia before it could be self-sufficient).
Where would we be now if Columbus was told not to go on an expedition, because the European youth were apathetic to exploration?
It's worth pointing out that Columbus went on his voyage not for the "love of exploration" as everyone seems to think, but because he was trying to open up a new route to the Indies -- In other words, for profit. "Exploration apathy" wouldn't have affected things in the least.
Space will be explored when the explorers have the same motivation as Columbus. "Because it's there" is not going to take us very far.
Are you trying to say that when companies market a product they only choose to advertise facts that put their product in a positive light? I'm shocked!
No, I'm saying I actually can't think of a company that tells lies as bald-faced as Apple.
Do you remember the old Intel ads where they claimed that thier new chips made browsing the Internet faster when almost everyone was using dialup?
Except that was actually true. It didn't make the connection go faster, it made the browsing experience faster. I don't know if you remember how horribly slow the HTML renderer of Netscape 4 was, but a faster processer definitely helped. Pages did pop up faster. Of course, a faster processor helped with other web technologies as well, such as Java and Javascript.
Compare that to the "twice as fast" lie. Apple told people a Mac was twice fast as a PC in huge block letters, and then in tiny print at the bottom, it mentioned that it was based on a single, utterly useless artificial benchmark. And when you compared real applications, a Mac was slower in almost every case. That's not advertising "facts" to put themselves in the best light, that's a flat-out, pedal-to-the-metal lie. It would be like Ford advertising that they get "twice the gas mileage" over Chevy, if both are driven one mile per hour, but gets worse gas mileage at any other speed. If Ford did that, would you give them the same pass you do Apple? I highly doubt it.
what in jobs' history did he do before that manufactured a crisis for publicity?
He has shown a distinct willingness to be less than truthful when marketing his products. The most notorious case that comes to mind was the "twice as fast" debacle, which was a complete lie. But there's a long history of things like that.
This is a good thing? In my world, when a web site crashes because of holiday traffic, I call them incompetent.
On the other hand, knowing Jobs' history, I wouldn't be surprised if he took half the servers offline to manufacture a "crisis" just for the publicity.
That's like a lawyer walking into a courtroom and saying, "Yes, you have video of my client robbing the bank, but how do you know that someone else didn't create a mask that looks exactly like my client?"
That's why the standard is "guilty without a reasonable doubt" and not "guilty without any doubt". There are an infinite number of "well, what if..." scenerios.
Apple enjoys something like 30% margins on hardware sales.
Apple (and Microsoft) enjoy something like 98% margins on software sales.
Why in the world would they be crazy enough to cannibalize their own hardware sales so people can buy a $300 PC and run Mac OS on it instead?
Have you seen how much money Microsoft makes on software?
Have you any idea what it would require to write unix kernel extensions to make the 30,000,000 pieces of hardware out there to work properly with the mac os from scratch?
You don't write a "kernel extension" for every piece of hardware. That's what drivers are for. And oh yeah, third party companies write the drivers, not Apple.
the persistent rumor that Apple will release Mac OS X for PC -- described as 'so counter-productive and financially damaging for Apple that we doubt the company has ever seriously considered it.'
Yeah, because it sure hurt Microsoft so release an operating system for the PC, and not come out with their own hardware [sarcasm]. Where does this dumb idea come from? Very, very, very VERY few people buy Apple primarily because they like the hardware. People buy Apple because they like the software. When it comes to computers, APPLE IS A SOFTWARE COMPANY. They are NOT a hardware company!
Within a year, Apple could potentially be the world dominant software supplier if they would just get a clue.
Would it be harder to support a lot of different hardware? Of course! So what? They need to stop being cowards and take the plunge.
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Why do you need to drag a 4 seat 3000+ pound car around at 25mpg, when you can use a 1 (or 2) seat 600 pound motorcycle at 50mpg?
Because motorcycles are utterly impractical for anything other than joy riding in nice weather?
Check out my uid. I've been here a while. What's frustrating is that Slashdot used to be good. After they went public, the quality of the articles have gone downhill dramatically.
Eh, I've been around awhile myself, and I have to say that this sort of thing went on before. They've never spellchecked, and they've always run some crap-o-rama articles. Hey, at least Jon Katz is gone. :) Everyone complained about quality back then, too.
I think one of the things that makes Slashdot good is the fact that they do have human editors. Human editors mean human mistakes. Granted, sometimes you have to shake your head at the level of stupid mistake, but on the whole, Slashdot is where it is because of CmdrTaco, not despite him. I think replacing the editors would turn Slashdot into just another ranting blog.
Sheesh. You know, even mean, nasty, conspiratorial CEOs with giant handlebar mustaches get cancer, too.
Rocket science is not easy. You cannot cut corners on development and testing and there is no substitute for the decades of experience these companies have.
To quote John Carmack, "Rocket science is not as easy as amateurs think it is, but it's not as hard as the professionals think it is."
NASA is only part of the problem. The other problem are the Lockheed's, etc, who think nothing can be done for less than a billion dollars. They have zero incentive to reduce the cost of space -- why should they? They make billions of dollars off it. Do you think they would ever try the "cheap clusters of modular rocket systems to orbit" as Armadillo is going to do? Hell no. That would bring mass production into it -- and we can't have that.
Do you know why the insurance company was willing to put up the money for the X-Prize? Because they asked the old guard, and the old guard told them it was impossible to do for less than a billion dollars.
Only the competition from new blood is going to break the stranglehold (and the arrogance, as you demonstrate) of the old guard.
Ah, neither on the snippet you provided nor on the actual page of the link you provided appears either "highway" or "road".
What the platform said was, "ALL public lands and resources, as well as claims thereto, except as explicitly allowed by the Constitution..." The one thing you can say about Libertarians is that they like applying their beliefs in a psychopathically consistent way. The only mention of public roads in the constitution is for postal roads. If they say "all public lands", they mean ALL public lands. They want to sell off the national parks! You think mere neighborhood roads are somehow off-limits?
It's the same with private nukes. Nowhere will you find in the party platform mention of private ownership of nukes, but you'll find plenty about private weapon ownership, and nothing about limits. They don't believe in limits -- that's the whole Libertarian philosophy. Either something is allowed in unlimited amounts, or it's not.
I don't know where this comes from, I have never heard a Libertarian say all roads should privatized. Can you provide a link, or is this smoke?
Right from the Party Platform:
Ah, you have to love those crazy Libertarians. :) There's all sorts of great nuggets in the platform. I also like the fact that this also says your neighborhood park will be turned into condos. I have a theory that only about 5% of people who style themselves Libertarian actually know what the party believes.
I can understand vertical take off but why do a veritcal landing?
Vertical landing versus horizontal landing is one of those big debates. The argument for vertical landing, as I understand it, can be summed up as "airplanes are bad spaceships, and spaceships are bad airplanes." In other words, trying to make a ship do both means it's poor at both. Look at all the problems the Space Shuttle has with protecting the wings from damage, for example.
Actually, I read an amusing quote from Bob Truax that said (paraphrase), "Insisting that spaceships land like airplanes makes as much sense as insisting a hundred years ago that airplanes should land on railroad tracks."
Well this is now off-topic but there are private highways near where I live and they are better-maintained and if you added up how much of your income/state/sales/fuel taxes go to roads and such you might be shocked at your return on investment.
Private highways work well in certain cases. The problem is that they want every road in every neighborhood to be privatized. As in, you need to pay a toll to go from your house to the grocery store. A toll back. Basically, since everything would be private property, you have would have no right to travel unless you could afford to pay.
This actually neatly summarizes the problems with Libertarians in a nutshell. They simplistically assume what's a good idea in one case is applicable to every case (e.g., self-defense is good, therefore, personal nukes must also be good. Low taxes is good, therefore, no taxes must also be good. Etc.)
I'm not saying there aren't bad bosses, but there are a LOT more bad employees than bad bosses, just because of the raw numbers. Given the bosses are just employees (duh, I hope), the rate of bad employees ought the be the same as the rate of bad bosses. If we assume that the average boss has an average of ten grunts, then we have ten bad employees for every bad boss.
So how many of these employees are bad-mouthing their boss because they're lazy idiots who expect a paycheck for as little work as possible and skewing the statistics? This study doesn't seem too interested in this question.
Lucus must want money. He certainly wouldn't make another IJ movie because it would be interesting.
No, I think Lucas wants another movie because he wants to do something that the fans don't hate, even if it makes a lot of money. Billionaires don't generally want more money, they want more respect.
We have the Iraq war because so many U.S. citizens are excited, not disgusted, by violence, any violence.
Maybe you get excited by the violence (I've noticed that pacifists usually displace on everyone else their own personality disorders), but I personally get excited about the potential birth of freedom in a formerly murderous dictorship. TJ said it best: "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." -- Thomas Jefferson
Not everyone has the financial means to choose the non-free version. [...] Or maybe you mean even the poor have the choice to pirate a copy of Windows.
The "poor" do not have the means to choose at all. The poor go to the library. Only relatively wealthy people have computers of their own.
Banning trans-fats in New York, banning smoking in Seattle.
Smoking, at the very least, is a public nuisance. There is no law against public smoking that isn't justified. People should not be allowed to smoke within 500 yards of any other person.
I was with you about Trans-Fats, until I read this article about the issue on The Straight Dope. I figured it was more idiocy from the Health Nazis who want to ban anything that tastes good, but this is really about a cheaper substitute that has a big effect on health. This is the sort of thing that government ought to care about, in the same category as clean restaurants.
A clone is an identical twin.
That's the theory. In practice, they weren't really sure how exact the cloning process duplicated the original genetics. That's the issue -- there may have been some DNA damage in the process that caused some weird interactions.
We apparently got the expected result, but it's definitely not something that should be taken for granted.
Steve Jobs was quoted today as saying, "I am proud to say that I have been exonerated by myself twice as fast as any previous corruption probe."
That Steve! Always the innovator, even when it comes to stealing from the shareholder. I'm feeling a strange sensation right now -- I think it's from the corruption-distortion field.
So, what are the exclusive broadcast rights worth for the Mars landing?
Not enough (i.e., billions of dollars). And even if it was enough, the problem isn't doing a one-time stunt, the problem is having an ongoing revenue stream to keep things going. We went to the moon -- but what was enticing about keeping us there?
Past that, what is the current going rate for a chunk of guaranteed authentic Mars Rock?
Again, you might make money with the first X thousand chunks, but eventually you run out of people willing to pay a significant amount of money for it, and it's not scarce anymore.
The only almost sure-fire ongoing revenue stream is tourism, and the big question is whether that can even cover the costs of an orbital hotel, much less a trip to mars (which probably would NOT cover those costs, at least at this point in our space-fairing civilization).
Compared to us, Columbus had it easy.
I don't completely disagree with your point, but Columbus had it easy for other reasons. Sailing across the ocean is a LOT easier than going to space, even adjusting for different eras. It was a much lower risk and MUCH lower cost expedition. Resources were literally just lying around, and trading partners were already established. Just getting into space is very difficult, and trying to mine things is dauntingly difficult, and worse, a totally unproven risk.
I think we'll get there eventually, but it really isn't the government's fault that private industry is only taking baby steps. If there were mountains of money out there for the easy pickin', we would have done so in the 1960s and 70s. Just pray that space tourism can support the industry, because that's all there is right now that's going to make short-term money.
Dude, I've learned my lesson. I'm not even gonna bother with you.
No problem, I'll just take that to mean, "You are absolutely right, Reality Master. I bow to your inexorable logic and brilliant insight." I get that a lot.
Yet, if we send people to Mars, we get a whole new planet to live on and explore, forever.
It'll never happen, even if living there was practical (which is very much in doubt). As soon as anyone even gets close to trying to set up a colony, it'll "temporarily" (read: forever) get shut down over environmental contamination concerns. Mars is a completely unique environment, and scientists won't want it messed up so it can studied.
The future of space is large habitats.
(And yes, Earth *can* shut it down. A Mars colony would need Earth support for decades, if not centuries, if not millenia before it could be self-sufficient).
Where would we be now if Columbus was told not to go on an expedition, because the European youth were apathetic to exploration?
It's worth pointing out that Columbus went on his voyage not for the "love of exploration" as everyone seems to think, but because he was trying to open up a new route to the Indies -- In other words, for profit. "Exploration apathy" wouldn't have affected things in the least.
Space will be explored when the explorers have the same motivation as Columbus. "Because it's there" is not going to take us very far.
Are you trying to say that when companies market a product they only choose to advertise facts that put their product in a positive light? I'm shocked!
No, I'm saying I actually can't think of a company that tells lies as bald-faced as Apple.
Do you remember the old Intel ads where they claimed that thier new chips made browsing the Internet faster when almost everyone was using dialup?
Except that was actually true. It didn't make the connection go faster, it made the browsing experience faster. I don't know if you remember how horribly slow the HTML renderer of Netscape 4 was, but a faster processer definitely helped. Pages did pop up faster. Of course, a faster processor helped with other web technologies as well, such as Java and Javascript.
Compare that to the "twice as fast" lie. Apple told people a Mac was twice fast as a PC in huge block letters, and then in tiny print at the bottom, it mentioned that it was based on a single, utterly useless artificial benchmark. And when you compared real applications, a Mac was slower in almost every case. That's not advertising "facts" to put themselves in the best light, that's a flat-out, pedal-to-the-metal lie. It would be like Ford advertising that they get "twice the gas mileage" over Chevy, if both are driven one mile per hour, but gets worse gas mileage at any other speed. If Ford did that, would you give them the same pass you do Apple? I highly doubt it.
what in jobs' history did he do before that manufactured a crisis for publicity?
He has shown a distinct willingness to be less than truthful when marketing his products. The most notorious case that comes to mind was the "twice as fast" debacle, which was a complete lie. But there's a long history of things like that.
This is a good thing? In my world, when a web site crashes because of holiday traffic, I call them incompetent.
On the other hand, knowing Jobs' history, I wouldn't be surprised if he took half the servers offline to manufacture a "crisis" just for the publicity.
That's like a lawyer walking into a courtroom and saying, "Yes, you have video of my client robbing the bank, but how do you know that someone else didn't create a mask that looks exactly like my client?"
That's why the standard is "guilty without a reasonable doubt" and not "guilty without any doubt". There are an infinite number of "well, what if..." scenerios.
Apple enjoys something like 30% margins on hardware sales.
Apple (and Microsoft) enjoy something like 98% margins on software sales.
Why in the world would they be crazy enough to cannibalize their own hardware sales so people can buy a $300 PC and run Mac OS on it instead?
Have you seen how much money Microsoft makes on software?
Have you any idea what it would require to write unix kernel extensions to make the 30,000,000 pieces of hardware out there to work properly with the mac os from scratch?
You don't write a "kernel extension" for every piece of hardware. That's what drivers are for. And oh yeah, third party companies write the drivers, not Apple.
the persistent rumor that Apple will release Mac OS X for PC -- described as 'so counter-productive and financially damaging for Apple that we doubt the company has ever seriously considered it.'
Yeah, because it sure hurt Microsoft so release an operating system for the PC, and not come out with their own hardware [sarcasm]. Where does this dumb idea come from? Very, very, very VERY few people buy Apple primarily because they like the hardware. People buy Apple because they like the software. When it comes to computers, APPLE IS A SOFTWARE COMPANY. They are NOT a hardware company!
Within a year, Apple could potentially be the world dominant software supplier if they would just get a clue.
Would it be harder to support a lot of different hardware? Of course! So what? They need to stop being cowards and take the plunge.