On all other points we are mostly in agreement, except that I would hijack some of Zubrin's ideas and lay some groundwork by launching fuel-generating plants in advance of anybody actually going to Mars.
The short, glib answer is: because Mars rockets don't grow on the moon.
The cost and effort to build a moon base which can support humans long-term is already pretty high. Then you have to build facilities for building and launching Mars missions. Unless you want the additional cost of lifting raw materials to the moon for manufacture (or even just basic parts for lunar assembly), you also have to come up with equipment and processing infrastructure to use the raw materials up there -- and even then, probably only a fraction of necessary materials are realistically accessible.
So before you've even launched your first Mars mission from the moon, you're already mired in this enormous project just to make the moon useful for that task.
By a HUGE margin, it would be easier to just use existing Earthside resources, manufacturing infrastructure, and launch facilities to go straight to Mars.
I also believe there are good reasons from the orbital mechanics perspective to go straight from Earth, but I forget the details.
Read Robert Zubrin's book "The Case for Mars" for a great detailed discussion of this exact subject.
There are a whole hell of a lot more than "several" wealthy CEO's. Being the president of a company is no small task, but it also rarely warrants tens of millions in compensation and benefits when that same CEO whacks a few hundred or a few thousand of his less fortunate employees -- you know, those same poor bastards who bust their ass each day to keep the CEO in limos and jets.
Heh, one of the more prolific semi-pro trolls on/. uses a Culture ship name. I think it's "Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The".
By far Bank's novels are one of the best series of books I've ever read. I own most of them, but dammit, they're now out of print and I can't get my hands on a couple that various "friends" ran off with...
The advantage of a ringworld over a Dyson shell is that it is actually conceivable to build one, given extremely, but not impossibly, strong materials,...and ready access to approximately 335 Earths-worth of raw materials (Earth mass is 5.9742*10^27 and according to some fansite I found, Ringworld is supposed to be 2*10^30).
The fact is, your rant was based on an assumption, and I took issue with that -- nothing more. I said nothing about what was or wasn't an acceptable percentage to exclude from support.
Yes, a *significant* number are using outdated browsers, but every shred of evidence I can find indicates this is not the *majority* case (and at least part of my job is to stay on top of these numbers). Unfortunately the statistics we collect on our own sites are not publicly accessible (and I'm not at the office so I can't even cut and paste) -- but I'm a senior architect in a Fortune 50 financial company with roughly 1.5 million online users doing about one half billion in transactions annually via our biggest sites, and we find that IE6 accounts for about 70% of our traffic (yes, we support any SSL-capable client). And I repeat, that percentage is borne by every single statistic, both internal and external, that we can lay our hands on.
Yeah, there is skew in our internal numbers -- for one thing, many of our clients tend to be wealthy, so right there we're not seeing a representative sample -- but 1,500,000 individual users (and that ignores transiet hits -- I'm counting only account-holders who log in) is still a pretty good sampling, and I'd gladly put those numbers up against whatever user population you're using as a reference.
Your responses whipsawed across all sorts of things -- what is and isn't an acceptable exclusion rate, good statistical models versus bad, the HTTP spec and IE bugs, but have mostly ignored that I was trying to make ONE point: in general, people are *not* stuck on IE5.
That's it.
Hell, find me a few equally unreliable (but current) sites whose statistics prove me wrong, and I'll at least agree to a draw. But I bet you can't, because ANYBODY who is collecting from a usefully large sample is going to reach the same conclusion -- IE6 has mostly replaced IE5 in the general public.
Ah. And your daily activities range so far & wide that your Actual Observation is a better judge of how many people run IE5 than statistics generated by a series of popular websites?
IE5 problems and the qualifications of your comp-sci friends are all totally irrelevant. I work with 400 programmers, and about 100 of us have more than 20 years experience with computers. Most of them use IE6. Big deal. That tells us nothing useful about global usage.
We know that MOST people, for better or for worse, are using IE5 *or* IE6, so all I've done is attempt to provide some information demonstrating which is more commonly used. Suggesting that people run "out of the box Windows" is the closest you've come to supporting your argument, and there are even better statistics to show that WinXP SP1 is the most common OS on the Web today -- and that's IE6, too.
Show me some numbers, or don't bother replying. My AC patience has run out.
The Osprey (which is not really a helicopter) was designed 20 years ago. That comparison is like referring to an original IBM PC when somebody asks whether their quad-processor BSD server configuration can survive a slashdotting.:)
Also, the crash you refer to had two causes. A software failure contributed to the wreck, but there was already a hydraulic failure extant.
I don't think the Chinese are rational thinkers when it comes to Tiawan, and if they decide to take the island by military means (I think they will manage it using dirty island politics) I don't for an instant think they would hesitate to blind and damage the US military with a satellite strike.
I wouldn't put an outright attack on Taiwan past them. In fact, they've almost come right out and told everyone they're planning one. In the past few years, their annual reports which outline their military posture to the party have openly identified the United States in the section reserved for "enemies" (this began in the last few years of the 90's, roughly when their jet ran into that P3). Previously the US was identified with more neutral language. Recently they have made fairly ominous statements about their plans for Taiwan including blunt predictions of warfare in the region in 2005 or 2006 (I forget which). Simultaneously, there have been massive buildups in the regions of China near Taiwan. The little bit reported by the mainstream press makes it sound like nothing more than typical political bickering, but this is all a matter of public record (search sites like FAS.org for things like "Chinese defense posture" for some really interesting reading on the subject).
That said, I would not expect them to risk taking out American satellites mainly because we have so many other forms of effective espionage available to us -- particularly extremely high altitude fly-overs which they are unable to counter should we choose to use them (and we would). Killing our satellites would be annoying to us, but by no means would it be a crippling blow to our ability to monitor their activities.
What would be more troubling is somebody with actual power, such as France (the French Navy is wargaming with the Chinese Navy this week), siding with them. The French WOULD have the ability to interfere with our second-string recon options, and we'd be a lot more hesitant to treat them to a smackdown. They wouldn't have to side with the Chinese outright, they'd just have to run interference, like announce that they're trying to "contain the situation" and declare an exclusion zone. Granted, probably the French wouldn't risk pissing off the US that way, particularly if the Chinese did make a move against us, but who knows -- the French always seem to go off on a tangent when you least expect it.
(No offense intended to anybody from France or China, I love the place and all the people I've met. Like people are fond of saying about the US, it's the governments I have a problem with.)
That would be true if modern carriers didn't run around in "carrier groups", which provide a rather staggering array of defenses for the carrier itself. It is still extremely important to be able to deliver airpower by sea. Being 500 miles offshore is irrelevant given the range of modern combat aircraft (and the fact that we go for air superiority fast and early, which allows aerial refueling).
A SCUD would be irrelevant for this purpose -- a carrier group would never come into range (and I've read that SCUDs would suck as nuke platforms anyway, although I can't remember the reasoning behind it). It might be possible to use a ballistic missile to deliver a nuke into a CVG, although the group could probably take one of those out fairly easily, not to mention putting significant distance between themselves and the target point with the kind of warning you get with a large ballistic missile (they move surprisingly fast), and an air-launched nuke would probably only work with the combination of surprise and high quality stealth. In a known or suspected hostile environment, early warning systems such as AWACS would prevent anything from getting anywhere near launch range.
You're right about the Soviets, but remember they had to worry about being attacked by western technology which is far superior to anything they had in any quantity.
The web grew out of a BBS-like need. The Internet is just a larger-scale implementation of the machine-to-machine networking that was already in place. Normally I wouldn't bother making the distinction, but in the context of what you're saying, it matters.
I also don't see the connection between using Citrix and using mainframes. In fact, most (probably all) Fortune 500 companies aren't going back to mainframes -- they never left in the first place. Are you perhaps trying to relate terminal usage and other forms of remote usage to mainframe interfaces? In that case, I'd say that's a trivial characteristic of mainframes (throughput is their defining characteristic).
There are a large number of people who will be required in support position. Probably doing things that we can't imagine right now. I'm sure that a policy like that of western europe or even Canada, will provide a basic standard of living to all Americans. Imagine the amount of money spent on defense - $400 billion a year = $1000 per capita.
People won't be "doing things we can't imagine" because the problem exists NOW. We aren't talking about a problem somewhere in the dim future. If I understand the last sentence correctly, you seem to be suggesting that $1000 can provide a basic standard of living in America. I have no idea where you live, but you clearly don't know anything about the cost of living over here. In some of the most backwater, rural areas I've ever been to, basic subsistence -- barely enough food, and the most basic shelter -- would probably run you about ten times that much annually. And then you'd be living the life of abject poverty. And bear in mind, that's in the distant corners -- run down one-traffic-light towns in West Texas, and things of that nature. Sounds fantastic, doesn't it?
The whole world needs to transform from a subsistence culture to a knowledge culture.
And nothing about offshoring American jobs promotes that. Instead, American knowledge workers -- the American middle class -- are being forced into subsistence roles locally, while the relocation of their jobs contributes no real change in the "other" culture because any possible beneficial effect of the offshored jobs are so heavily diluted by the massive populations you describe.
And those companies are the same ones who are doing the heaviest outsourcing. So basically they're double-dipping on the outsourcing trend -- all while they whack American jobs. I'm not sure what part of that I'm supposed to get excited about.
I dunno what qualifies as "near downtown Ft. Worth", but $1000/month will let you pick up a mortgage of about $140K-$170K depending on the rate you can score. Right now a basic search on Realtor.com lists over 1,500 3-bedroom homes in Ft. Worth TX in the $100K-$150K price range.
Right now, I'm at an income level that makes insurance take food out of my kids' mouths.... Fact is, I'd rather put insurance money in the bank, and what-if I hit somebody, I pay out of my own pocket.
First, if you do get into an accident, the lawsuits that may result will take a hell of a lot more food out of your kids' mouths than any insurance payments will. Fact is, I've had to sue assholes twice who caused accidents and were uninsured. In one case, he got away with it, but not without building a pretty hefty record for himself in the process (missed court dates, contempt of court judgements, etc.). In the other case, she paid FAR more on repair bills, court costs, and attorney fees than she ever would have in total insurance payments on the crappy Datsun B210 she was driving when she caused the accident: she shelled out over $9000, not including whatever she spent to replace or repair her old B210. I imagine basic coverage on a B210 can't be more than $50/month or so, which means she burned up more than fifteen years of insurance payments in a single wreck.
Second, I don't know about where you live, but in all the states I've lived in, you have to hold in escrow about $100K per vehicle before you can exempt yourself from carrying insurance -- and then ALL that money is a big juicy target in ANY accident, whether you're at fault or not. Given the cost of parking that much money (you can't invest it), it's just stupid to not pay insurance. Therefore, if you're having trouble feeding your kids, being able to sock away a hundred grand is just a pipe dream, not a "plan".
Third, if you can't afford insurance, PARK YOUR FUCKING CAR AND WALK. I don't like the current system at all, particularly states like mine with insane "no fault" rules. But people like you just make it harder for people like me. That first guy I sued left me high and dry without a way to get to work. So, fuck him. I don't care whether he could feed his kids. If things were that tight, he should have been riding a bus. Or maybe he shouldn't have had kids. Regardless, his irresponsible, selfish attitude resulted in his problem becoming MY problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed, it's a great book: The Case for Mars
"gotta-beat-the-Ruskies"
:)
The correct spelling is "C-H-I-N-E-S-E".
On all other points we are mostly in agreement, except that I would hijack some of Zubrin's ideas and lay some groundwork by launching fuel-generating plants in advance of anybody actually going to Mars.
The short, glib answer is: because Mars rockets don't grow on the moon.
The cost and effort to build a moon base which can support humans long-term is already pretty high. Then you have to build facilities for building and launching Mars missions. Unless you want the additional cost of lifting raw materials to the moon for manufacture (or even just basic parts for lunar assembly), you also have to come up with equipment and processing infrastructure to use the raw materials up there -- and even then, probably only a fraction of necessary materials are realistically accessible.
So before you've even launched your first Mars mission from the moon, you're already mired in this enormous project just to make the moon useful for that task.
By a HUGE margin, it would be easier to just use existing Earthside resources, manufacturing infrastructure, and launch facilities to go straight to Mars.
I also believe there are good reasons from the orbital mechanics perspective to go straight from Earth, but I forget the details.
Read Robert Zubrin's book "The Case for Mars" for a great detailed discussion of this exact subject.
There are a whole hell of a lot more than "several" wealthy CEO's. Being the president of a company is no small task, but it also rarely warrants tens of millions in compensation and benefits when that same CEO whacks a few hundred or a few thousand of his less fortunate employees -- you know, those same poor bastards who bust their ass each day to keep the CEO in limos and jets.
Wouldn't that qualify as signing a contract under duress?
(Golf clap.)
Heh, one of the more prolific semi-pro trolls on /. uses a Culture ship name. I think it's "Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The".
By far Bank's novels are one of the best series of books I've ever read. I own most of them, but dammit, they're now out of print and I can't get my hands on a couple that various "friends" ran off with...
The advantage of a ringworld over a Dyson shell is that it is actually conceivable to build one, given extremely, but not impossibly, strong materials, ...and ready access to approximately 335 Earths-worth of raw materials (Earth mass is 5.9742*10^27 and according to some fansite I found, Ringworld is supposed to be 2*10^30).
:)
Hey, it's a slow morning in the office.
I never said otherwise.
You implied otherwise.
I am done here.
The fact is, your rant was based on an assumption, and I took issue with that -- nothing more. I said nothing about what was or wasn't an acceptable percentage to exclude from support.
Yes, a *significant* number are using outdated browsers, but every shred of evidence I can find indicates this is not the *majority* case (and at least part of my job is to stay on top of these numbers). Unfortunately the statistics we collect on our own sites are not publicly accessible (and I'm not at the office so I can't even cut and paste) -- but I'm a senior architect in a Fortune 50 financial company with roughly 1.5 million online users doing about one half billion in transactions annually via our biggest sites, and we find that IE6 accounts for about 70% of our traffic (yes, we support any SSL-capable client). And I repeat, that percentage is borne by every single statistic, both internal and external, that we can lay our hands on.
Yeah, there is skew in our internal numbers -- for one thing, many of our clients tend to be wealthy, so right there we're not seeing a representative sample -- but 1,500,000 individual users (and that ignores transiet hits -- I'm counting only account-holders who log in) is still a pretty good sampling, and I'd gladly put those numbers up against whatever user population you're using as a reference.
Your responses whipsawed across all sorts of things -- what is and isn't an acceptable exclusion rate, good statistical models versus bad, the HTTP spec and IE bugs, but have mostly ignored that I was trying to make ONE point: in general, people are *not* stuck on IE5.
That's it.
Hell, find me a few equally unreliable (but current) sites whose statistics prove me wrong, and I'll at least agree to a draw. But I bet you can't, because ANYBODY who is collecting from a usefully large sample is going to reach the same conclusion -- IE6 has mostly replaced IE5 in the general public.
Ah. And your daily activities range so far & wide that your Actual Observation is a better judge of how many people run IE5 than statistics generated by a series of popular websites?
IE5 problems and the qualifications of your comp-sci friends are all totally irrelevant. I work with 400 programmers, and about 100 of us have more than 20 years experience with computers. Most of them use IE6. Big deal. That tells us nothing useful about global usage.
We know that MOST people, for better or for worse, are using IE5 *or* IE6, so all I've done is attempt to provide some information demonstrating which is more commonly used. Suggesting that people run "out of the box Windows" is the closest you've come to supporting your argument, and there are even better statistics to show that WinXP SP1 is the most common OS on the Web today -- and that's IE6, too.
Show me some numbers, or don't bother replying. My AC patience has run out.
So you're basing your comment "Loads of people are still on IE5" on what... Anecodtal evidence? Gut feeling? Dionne Warwick's Psychic Friends Network?
The Osprey (which is not really a helicopter) was designed 20 years ago. That comparison is like referring to an original IBM PC when somebody asks whether their quad-processor BSD server configuration can survive a slashdotting. :)
Also, the crash you refer to had two causes. A software failure contributed to the wreck, but there was already a hydraulic failure extant.
I don't think the Chinese are rational thinkers when it comes to Tiawan, and if they decide to take the island by military means (I think they will manage it using dirty island politics) I don't for an instant think they would hesitate to blind and damage the US military with a satellite strike.
I wouldn't put an outright attack on Taiwan past them. In fact, they've almost come right out and told everyone they're planning one. In the past few years, their annual reports which outline their military posture to the party have openly identified the United States in the section reserved for "enemies" (this began in the last few years of the 90's, roughly when their jet ran into that P3). Previously the US was identified with more neutral language. Recently they have made fairly ominous statements about their plans for Taiwan including blunt predictions of warfare in the region in 2005 or 2006 (I forget which). Simultaneously, there have been massive buildups in the regions of China near Taiwan. The little bit reported by the mainstream press makes it sound like nothing more than typical political bickering, but this is all a matter of public record (search sites like FAS.org for things like "Chinese defense posture" for some really interesting reading on the subject).
That said, I would not expect them to risk taking out American satellites mainly because we have so many other forms of effective espionage available to us -- particularly extremely high altitude fly-overs which they are unable to counter should we choose to use them (and we would). Killing our satellites would be annoying to us, but by no means would it be a crippling blow to our ability to monitor their activities.
What would be more troubling is somebody with actual power, such as France (the French Navy is wargaming with the Chinese Navy this week), siding with them. The French WOULD have the ability to interfere with our second-string recon options, and we'd be a lot more hesitant to treat them to a smackdown. They wouldn't have to side with the Chinese outright, they'd just have to run interference, like announce that they're trying to "contain the situation" and declare an exclusion zone. Granted, probably the French wouldn't risk pissing off the US that way, particularly if the Chinese did make a move against us, but who knows -- the French always seem to go off on a tangent when you least expect it.
(No offense intended to anybody from France or China, I love the place and all the people I've met. Like people are fond of saying about the US, it's the governments I have a problem with.)
You can lay money on the fact that the Chinese are watching how the psychological war against America regarding Iraq is currently being waged.
That is one of the most insightful things I've read on slashdot in months, and well-phrased at that -- and I blew the last of my mod points yesterday.
That would be true if modern carriers didn't run around in "carrier groups", which provide a rather staggering array of defenses for the carrier itself. It is still extremely important to be able to deliver airpower by sea. Being 500 miles offshore is irrelevant given the range of modern combat aircraft (and the fact that we go for air superiority fast and early, which allows aerial refueling).
:)
A SCUD would be irrelevant for this purpose -- a carrier group would never come into range (and I've read that SCUDs would suck as nuke platforms anyway, although I can't remember the reasoning behind it). It might be possible to use a ballistic missile to deliver a nuke into a CVG, although the group could probably take one of those out fairly easily, not to mention putting significant distance between themselves and the target point with the kind of warning you get with a large ballistic missile (they move surprisingly fast), and an air-launched nuke would probably only work with the combination of surprise and high quality stealth. In a known or suspected hostile environment, early warning systems such as AWACS would prevent anything from getting anywhere near launch range.
You're right about the Soviets, but remember they had to worry about being attacked by western technology which is far superior to anything they had in any quantity.
Don't write off carriers just yet.
The web grew out of a BBS-like need. The Internet is just a larger-scale implementation of the machine-to-machine networking that was already in place. Normally I wouldn't bother making the distinction, but in the context of what you're saying, it matters.
I also don't see the connection between using Citrix and using mainframes. In fact, most (probably all) Fortune 500 companies aren't going back to mainframes -- they never left in the first place. Are you perhaps trying to relate terminal usage and other forms of remote usage to mainframe interfaces? In that case, I'd say that's a trivial characteristic of mainframes (throughput is their defining characteristic).
Loads of people are still on Internet Explorer 5 today, that was released over five years ago
s er.php a sp
Actually, most sites that track this sort of thing show about 75% of all users on IE6, but only around 10% on IE5.
Some examples:
http://www.thecounter.com/stats/2004/January/brow
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat.htm
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.
http://www.cen.uiuc.edu/bstats/latest.html
http://www.webreference.com/stats/browser.html
You should quote sources for your numbers.
No problem. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2000.
And it's worth noting that numbers collected for 2000 were before things got REALLY bad...
Was there any benefit when Nokia, Nortel, Sony, Toshiba, etc., decided to off-shore their development to the US?
Talk about a bad example. Today Nokia announced they're laying off people in Texas to move R&D in the UK and India.
There are a large number of people who will be required in support position. Probably doing things that we can't imagine right now. I'm sure that a policy like that of western europe or even Canada, will provide a basic standard of living to all Americans. Imagine the amount of money spent on defense - $400 billion a year = $1000 per capita.
People won't be "doing things we can't imagine" because the problem exists NOW. We aren't talking about a problem somewhere in the dim future. If I understand the last sentence correctly, you seem to be suggesting that $1000 can provide a basic standard of living in America. I have no idea where you live, but you clearly don't know anything about the cost of living over here. In some of the most backwater, rural areas I've ever been to, basic subsistence -- barely enough food, and the most basic shelter -- would probably run you about ten times that much annually. And then you'd be living the life of abject poverty. And bear in mind, that's in the distant corners -- run down one-traffic-light towns in West Texas, and things of that nature. Sounds fantastic, doesn't it?
The whole world needs to transform from a subsistence culture to a knowledge culture.
And nothing about offshoring American jobs promotes that. Instead, American knowledge workers -- the American middle class -- are being forced into subsistence roles locally, while the relocation of their jobs contributes no real change in the "other" culture because any possible beneficial effect of the offshored jobs are so heavily diluted by the massive populations you describe.
They sure as hell aren't sucking down $20M-$60M annually.
($60M/year comes to about $30K/hour, incidentally.)
And those companies are the same ones who are doing the heaviest outsourcing. So basically they're double-dipping on the outsourcing trend -- all while they whack American jobs. I'm not sure what part of that I'm supposed to get excited about.
I dunno what qualifies as "near downtown Ft. Worth", but $1000/month will let you pick up a mortgage of about $140K-$170K depending on the rate you can score. Right now a basic search on Realtor.com lists over 1,500 3-bedroom homes in Ft. Worth TX in the $100K-$150K price range.
Right now, I'm at an income level that makes insurance take food out of my kids' mouths. ... Fact is, I'd rather put insurance money in the bank, and what-if I hit somebody, I pay out of my own pocket.
First, if you do get into an accident, the lawsuits that may result will take a hell of a lot more food out of your kids' mouths than any insurance payments will. Fact is, I've had to sue assholes twice who caused accidents and were uninsured. In one case, he got away with it, but not without building a pretty hefty record for himself in the process (missed court dates, contempt of court judgements, etc.). In the other case, she paid FAR more on repair bills, court costs, and attorney fees than she ever would have in total insurance payments on the crappy Datsun B210 she was driving when she caused the accident: she shelled out over $9000, not including whatever she spent to replace or repair her old B210. I imagine basic coverage on a B210 can't be more than $50/month or so, which means she burned up more than fifteen years of insurance payments in a single wreck.
Second, I don't know about where you live, but in all the states I've lived in, you have to hold in escrow about $100K per vehicle before you can exempt yourself from carrying insurance -- and then ALL that money is a big juicy target in ANY accident, whether you're at fault or not. Given the cost of parking that much money (you can't invest it), it's just stupid to not pay insurance. Therefore, if you're having trouble feeding your kids, being able to sock away a hundred grand is just a pipe dream, not a "plan".
Third, if you can't afford insurance, PARK YOUR FUCKING CAR AND WALK. I don't like the current system at all, particularly states like mine with insane "no fault" rules. But people like you just make it harder for people like me. That first guy I sued left me high and dry without a way to get to work. So, fuck him. I don't care whether he could feed his kids. If things were that tight, he should have been riding a bus. Or maybe he shouldn't have had kids. Regardless, his irresponsible, selfish attitude resulted in his problem becoming MY problem.