There was a lot of difference between 1980, and 1974 or 75. When Wozniac started, the 6502 chip was brand new, there was very little documentation, and there were no support chips for it.
While modern chips operate at much higher clock speeds, the technology is much better and faster today. I agree that PC board layout is much more critical now than it was then; wires haven't gotten any faster since 75. However, PC board layout is much easier and faster now, than it was then.
Remember, in 1975 PC boards were laid out by hand using black tape on mylar - doing a complex board would literally take months.
Also please remember that it is one thing to take a VLSI subsection like a modern multifunction chip and glue it to a processor, and something entirely different to have to create those functions in TTL like Wozniac did with his GCR circuitry for the floppy drive on the Apple II.
By the way, your friend also had unusual talent, the proof of that would have been to walk around on the streets trying to find anyone else who could do what he could do. We tend to think that just because we knew someone who can do 'A' that everyone knows someone who can do 'A'. If Rembrandt were alive today, and you knew him - you wouldn't find it unusual; "Oh yeah, I know this guy who can paint real well"
Anyone who today thinks that they are a hot shot digital designer is invited to try duplicating what Woz did back in the seventies.
What makes his work exceptional is that there were no simulators available for modeling computer behavior; he and the other designers of the era had to SIMULATE THE ENTIRE COMPUTER IN THEIR HEADS. That is a very rare talent.
While there are many people today who can do digital designs, the available tools are much better than they were just 25 years ago. To find out how good Woz was you would have to use the same tools he had - with the same low level TTL chips, a 'hock your calculator' R & D budget to work with, and do your work in a garage.
I have noticed a lot of posts on Slashdot where the posters are counting on the legal system to straighten out questions. I think we need to consider something about the legal system before we count on it to do anything useful.
The legal system consists of 100's of millions of lines of cruft, NOT ONE LINE OF WHICH HAS EVER BEEN TESTED TO SEE IF IT WORKS!!!
Imagine for a second that we wrote 100 million lines of code to control a nuclear reactor, and that nobody ever checked any of it. We just put the code into the computers and took over control of an actual working reactor without testing. I think that everyone who knows anything about programming would agree that would be a horrendously irresponsible thing to do. Yet, nobody seems to have any problem with putting completely unchecked legal code into the much more dangerous human control system of the law; THIS IS ABSOLUTELY INSANE.
How can the legal system be tested? A preliminary step would be to take 1000 innocent defendants around the country, trump up charges against them, run them through the criminal justice system and see how many of them are convicted. That would give us an idea of the false positive error rate of the legal system.
The question I have is this: "How could anyone, who is not monumentally evil, object to testing the legal system; what would you be afraid of - spending a little time and money to see if we know what we are doing?"
The accidental testing of the legal system which was done by DNA work on death row inmates in Illinois is appalling; about half of the death row inmates were shown to be innocent by the testing. Surely capital cases are the ones where we have to be the most sure, and yet the legal system produced a 50% error rate when it was checked. It was so bad that the governor of Illinois was forced to suspend executions in the state! A 50% error rate means that you could do just as well by flipping a coin!
It is high time that we checked to see if the people in the legal system have so much as a clue. I suspect that when we do, we will find the results of testing ghastly. My prediction, based on my own analysis of how the legal system works, is that about 90% of the innocent defendants run through it will be convicted. When dealing with the lives and freedom of people I suspect that no one but a psychopath can find a 90% error rate acceptable.
Might I suggest to Marvel a new X-man based on John Katz: PONTIFICATOR .
Equipped with intelligence and great sensitivity toward things which cause him to feel rejected Pontificator literally fights with words. His huge speech balloons are so large as to hurl all the other characters, friend and foe alike, out of the frame when he starts a rant.
Until he learns to control his outbursts Professor Xavier is forced to keep him in a 'Silence of the Lambs' style muzzle to keep him from hammering the rest of the world into oblivion. Of course, this only makes things worse as Pontificator now feels even more rejected.
Seriously John, I suspect that many - if not most of us on this forum have felt rejection ever since we realized we were different.
Let me suggest, that you learn to protect, and turn down, your sensitivity toward rejection. The problem with great sensitivity is that it is hard to see the differences between the major issues and the minor ones; when everything hurts it is hard to tell the big issues from the small ones - pain is pain.
It is also important to understand how much of our own rejection we create ourselves. To those who are very strong at creating rejection and relatively insensitive to its effects, the people who ARE sensitive to rejection look like whining simps. The strong rejecters have no idea how much pain their rejections cause. Think about it for a second, would you want to be around anyone who complains as much as you do? Neither do the people who reject you. It really helps to learn to package your observations better; people are more likely to learn from them then.
People who are strong at anything blame the weak; after all the weak can't fight back, so they have to take the blame. If it were true that weakness and stupidity were responsible for mankind's problems then we could all blame all of our problems on rocks; can you think of anything with less intelligence or less muscle power?
What I am saying is that fewer words with a better focus an the major issues will go a lot farther than trying to hammer people into submission with pontification. For the most part the people rejecting you have no idea how much damage they are causing - the job of the sensitive is to educate the strong; trying to hammer them with your strengths won't get the job done.
What makes this movie good, in my opinion, is that it displays evil as it actually is in the real world. What makes the Magneto character evil is not his views or his stated goals; it is his actions which reveal his character.
Real evil does not show its true nature until it believes it has won; caution is the watch word of evil. As long as there are forces opposing it evil clouds itself in doubt; Lenin's true nature didn't show up until the Soviet Union was consolidated. Hitler - had he not started WW - II doubtless would have been considered a great German leader.
Magneto's real nature was outlined by one of the X - men toward the end of the movie when he said "You're so full of shit, if you really cared about mutants it would be YOU in that machine instead of Rogue" (Or words to that effect - sorry only saw the film once on Friday.)
There are many people who have views similar to yours, you could be right.
History will determine which of our perspectives are accurate.
I have one more observation: I have noticed that gun control advocates do not have the courage of their convictions. If they did they would have a sign on their home announcing "GUN FREE HOUSE". The fact that they don't means that they are dependent upon the implied threat that they might have a gun to keep criminals out of their home, while seeking to avoid the responsibilities of gun ownership.
Perhaps you could argue that I wouldn't have a sign on my house which said "I'M NOT HOME" and that is true. The difference is that I believe in protecting my property - so I get to use the implied threat that I'm at home; there is no hypocrisy in that. A gun control advocate DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GUNS TO PROTECT HIS HOUSE, so he has absolutely no moral right to use the hypocritical implied threat that he DOES have a gun to keep his family safe.
Anonymous Coward, and Veteran, those names really are descriptive aren't they?
I don't blame everything on gun control, I was just making an observation.
Here is another observation: I have noticed that bullies are less likely to pick on professional boxers than nerds in glasses.
There are trade offs for every design decision. The trade off you make for the increased safety of getting rid of your guns is an increased probability of tyranny. You've made your choice, you get to live with the consequences of that choice.
Has anyone else noticed how much more the Australian government has been pushing their citizens around since they seized all of the guns in the country?
Evidently, governments are more likely to push around an unarmed population than an armed one. Who would have guessed?
F-15 engines have a thrust of 50,000 lbs each. 200 would have a thrust of 10,000,000 lbs which is more than the 7,500,000 of an actual Saturn V first stage. One hundred would be closer to the mark - remember the first stage would be much lighter than the first stage of an actual Saturn V. One hundred engines is a 10 x 10 array - not so ridiculous if you look at it that way. A combo like I described could put about 60 tons into orbit.
Thanks for the comments. I was not suggesting trying to squeeze everything possible out of air breathers, just replacing the first stage of something like a Saturn V - using stages II and III to get a payload into orbit.
The thrust of an F-15's engines are more than the weight of the air craft, and it can go supersonic straight up. In fact, an F-15 can get to 40,000 feet faster than a Saturn V Moon rocket could. Thus, we do have an engine, off the shelf, which can handle a range of 0 to 1400 miles an hour and altitudes of sea level to 40 or 50 thousand feet without design changes.
I think that if you will do some back of the envelope calculations on such a design you will find that it puts a pretty large payload into orbit - pretty inexpensively compared to doing the whole job with rockets.
Fact: In an Apollo moon launch 70% of the fuel used is burned in getting the missile from 0 to the speed of sound.
Fact: Most of the weight of the first stage is in the oxidizer. (liquid oxygen).
Question: Why are we carrying oxygen around in the atmosphere?
It seems to me that jet engines do a good job of handling the 0 to the speed of sound part of the speed range. Using jets in the first stage has a number of advantages:
Jets are much safer than Rockets.
Jet engines are available off the shelf.
Jet engines have a much higher specific impulse than rockets (Isp = pounds of thrust / pounds of fuel burned per sec)
Jet engines are reusable.
A Beowulf cluster of Jet engines (sorry, I couldn't resist the Joke) would generate large amounts of thrust.
A launch with hybrid Jet engine first stage would be much less expensive than a pure rocket launch.
I suspect that the first stage of boosters use rockets because "That's the way we've always done it".
Comments from veterans at NASA or other space agencies would be appreciated.
Young men spend a lot of time chasing illusions of power, young women typically chase the illusion of control. Script kiddies do destructive things because it gives them an illusion that they are powerful. It is the same illusion that a vandal gets by throwing paint onto an existing masterpiece: 'See, I'm a painter also'. It is almost always easier to destroy than to create; it is a very difficult job to write a program which works well and is useful. It is easy to crash such a program; just pull the power cord. People who crack into systems, and virus writers, both get the same illusion of power; "see how mighty I am, look at this chaos I caused".
The truth is that real power feels like nothing. You do something, things happen, and you get no feel that you did anything; all of the force of your effort goes into the target. The less you feel, the more the target responds. This is disappointing to men who want 'the feeling of power'.
Eventually most script kiddies outgrow the sort of adolescent thinking that causes them to do destructive things. Young people everywhere have a 'golden glow' about their existence. It is obvious to them that the old people like me don't get it. However, that is not what is going on; we get it, we just know that 'special glow' is an illusion. Real maturity arrives when you can see the illusions of youth for what they are.
Does this mean that I want 13 year olds to behave like 50 year olds? NO, making mistakes is the only way to learn anything; if you don't make any mistakes you haven't learned anything - you already knew how to do what ever it was that you were doing. Youthful indiscretions are an essential part of growing up - if you are lucky, they don't get you killed or sent to prison for a long time - eventually you do something that scares you enough to cause you to learn something.
Young people expect the same reasonableness from government authority figures that they have experienced from the authority figures in their life while they grow up; but that is a false expectation. Government, and the criminal justice system are giant, impersonal machines. When you get caught up in the gears of that machinery you will be ground into hamburger meat by it. All of your dreams, fears, and hopes are meaningless to the impersonal machinery of government; it grinds the good as finely as it does the evil.
Of course there is a secondary reason for trouble making; some people are searching for attention, and to them even punishment if better than being ignored.
The real question is this: if Linux had tested better would PC Magazine have published the article? In my opinion it would not. Please be aware that Ziff Davis and Microsoft are essentially married. If you wish to see what the outcome of a test will be simply look at the advertising budget for the two 'competitors' with ZD, and you will be able to predict the results.
Linux will ALWAYS have a disadvantage in these sorts of tests: Microsoft is able to scan the Linux code base looking for cases where Linux is weak and they are not. Once they find a case they call their friends in the press to run a benchmark on exactly the conditions under which Linux will stumble. The Linux community can't do this since 1.) We don't have access to Microsoft's code base. 2). We don't have an 'objective' press in our pocket.
By ZD's tests each version of Windows since 3.1 has been faster than the previous version. That this is a croc is obvious: run Win 3.1 on a simple Pentium 133 with 16 Mb and it flies, run Win 2K on 300 Mhz modern processor with 4 times as much memory and it is sluggish. The trick is that when Microsoft makes a slower OS there is always something in it which is faster. They point out the part that is faster, and that is what 'their' magazines test. The result: the Newer OS is 'faster'. Most people who read the ZD class of magazines can't see through this kind of trickery.
Are the results of the Zdnet bench accurate? Probably; Microsoft set up the test so that it would produce those results, so it is repeatable - just as the Mindcraft test was. Are the tests fair? Of course not, but it doesn't do any good to complain. All that is possible is to fix the problem. When that happens ZD won't re-test: they have achieved their goal of making Microsoft look good to the average person.
This is just another example of Microsoft's dirty tricks department.
Imagine for a moment a scale model of an oil drilling rig. This scale model can be made fully functional; cranes can lift pipes, motors can spin drill bits. Looking at the model in operation, one can get a full understanding of how a drilling rig works.
However, what one lacks from the godlike perspective of viewing a model is an understanding of just how dangerous a full size drilling rig is. A small nine volt motor on the model becomes a 750 volt 800 hp motor on the full size rig; the model's motor can't hurt anyone, the full size motor can easily kill.
This danger occurs simply because of scale: when you go from a model to a full size rig, YOU don't change in size. If a thread lifting a pipe on the model breaks it is no big deal. If the wire rope lifting a thousand pound length of drilling pipe breaks people can die.
When you look at laws, what you are looking at is the written plans and operating specs for a government. When you think about those laws in operation you are applying those operating specifications to your mental model of a government. However, the actual government is a gigantic, powerful, and - simply because of its sheer size - extremely dangerous, machine.
An actual oil drilling rig has a maximum speed at which the drill bit can spin. If we pull an idiotic Tim Taylor Tool Time stunt on the rig , add MORE POWER, and spin the drill pipe faster very bad things can happen. A pipe might sheer due to the increased stress of higher speed operation. Bearings which might work at 300 rpm fly apart at 10,000. The new more powerful motor can fling a broken piece of drill pipe around like a flail smashing the rig and killing lots of people.
In a similar fashion the gigantic, extremely dangerous, machinery of government has a maximum speed at which it can cycle; part of the reason that the US system of Government has lasted as long as it has is that the process of creating legislation is a ponderous one; it is difficult to get new laws into effect. This helps to keep the government from flailing around out of controll.
Remember that the enforcement arm of governments - the police - are utterly uncritical of the laws they enforce; neither the Nazi's nor the Communists ever had to replace the police when they took over a country. This means that the police are just as happy to bash in YOUR skull as the skull of car thief; you look just like any other 'suspect' to them.
Faster - more powerful - more efficient is not always the best thing. When it comes to the legislative process - ponderous is the proper speed - anything faster is a foolhardy experiment to undertake.
From a strategic standpoint it is probably a better idea to go after a weak company than a strong one. Most lawyers will admit that in a court of law money is power; in unarmed one on one combat an elephant is a lot harder to beat than a cockroach.
Insurance companies and banks have more or less perfected this strategy: go after someone who can't possibly win so that you establish legal precedent. Judges are hesitant to overturn an existing precedent. It is this strategy which has established the lopsided world in which we live, in which the effect of the law is slanted toward those who have money. While the law is meant to be fair; the reality of "money equals power" means that most of the time the law rules in favor of the wealthy.
An example can illustrate how lopsided things are: when was the last time that you heard of an employee writing an employment contract and getting a company to sign it? If both employees and employers were in equal bargaining positions half of all employment contracts would be written by the employees. But in fact, all of the employment contracts of which I am aware are dictated by the employers and are non negotiable; "Sign this or don't work". Such lopsided conditions exist because being in the right in a court of law hardly matters; what counts is who wins and who loses - why they lose doesn't matter.
Lawyers are people who simply don't understand right and wrong: that is why everything has to be written down for them.
If we are out to establish a legal precedent for the GPL the best strategy is crush a cockroach, not punch an elephant.
Despite corporate propaganda, almost all inventions are the result of the work of one or a very small number of individuals at a company. The widely held myth is that companies spend "Billions of dollars" to develop inventions, but that is simply not true. The size of an R&D budget is inversely proportional to how much the people involved know what they are doing. If you know what you are doing you don't have to spend ANY money on R&D. If you don't have a clue about what you are doing you can spend a lot of money trying to do something.
Of course there are exceptions: a project like the Apollo moon landing is inherently expensive despite how much you know about it - but for the most part that inverse ratio holds true. Most claims of high development costs are just plausible lies; Microsoft's main expenses in developing Win 2K was salaries to the programmers involved, but they claim to have spent "Billions" in creating it. What BS, it is like the claim that 50,000 children every year in the US are being kidnapped (The actual number is around 800); somebody claims it and almost nobody stops to think about it.
Do the math: Win 2k has about 35,000,000 lines of code in it. If every one of those lines was written from scratch (they weren't, most are held over from NT) in order for Win 2K to have cost even one billion dollars to develop MS was spending over $28 per line of code. Even using the number of 15 lines of code per day per programmer that means MS is paying $428 per day in salaries and over head per programmer, that is $2140 per week - over $107000 a year. As the programmers become more productive than 15 lines per day the numbers get even worse. Conclusion: there is NO WAY Win 2k cost even one Billion dollars to produce. Don't be impressed by corporate propaganda - it is mostly lies.
Rambus is symptomatic of a much larger problem which is coming in industry; the problem of intellectual parasites. In the past patents have not played that large a part in shaping how industries produce goods; most patent disputes were handled by cross licensing. If producer 'A' had a patent it tried to enforce against producer 'B', usually 'B' had patents it could enforce against 'A'. The results were cross licensing agreements which allowed both companies to continue in production.
Of course sometimes companies had no Patent portfolio to cross license, and were forced to pay royalties. However, being producers themselves, the patent holders couldn't charge too much; corporate 'karma' prevented it - after all if they charged predatory royalties - somebody could do the same things to them.
Rambus on the other hand produces NOTHING; they exist only as a shell firm with a PR department, a legal department, a portfolio of patents, and little else. Because they produce nothing, companies like Rambus are not subject to cross licensing, and corporate 'karma' has no effect on them. The result is that a Rambus style firm is free to gouge on their royalty demands. The only thing which limits them is the threat of a counter suits by deep pocketed memory producers with the object of invalidating the Patents.
In effect companies like Rambus have the moral stature of email spam; both are a parasitic drain on a system which tends to hamper the productive.
I think that we are only seeing the tip of the Rambus future. Because Rambus makes nothing, their 'cost of goods sold' is zero; at least Microsoft has to pay for the blank CD's that they press. Thus, minus their expenses, everything that Rambus takes in is gravy. One of the things that I expect them to do in the future is use their money to acquire additional patents to suck even more blood out of the economy.
It is no accident that both spam and productionless, patent holding companies were dreamed up by lawyers. Neither is an approach that productive people would think of.
Is there a solution to parasitic patent behavior? I think that there is. In the United States patents can only be granted to individuals, NO COMPANY HAS EVER BEEN GRANTED A PATENT ON ANYTHING. Companies obtain patents by having them assigned to them. This is typically done by means of employment contracts which force inventors to assign their patent rights to the corporation. This puts into effect the first layer of parasitic behavior. Most abuse of the patent system occurs because of the assignment process; if the law were changed so that only an INDIVIDUAL could own a patent - as well as be granted one - most of the parasitic and bad consequences of the patent system would disappear.
Code can never be more trusted than its authors. How could anyone trust source code that can't be seen? How does anyone know that it meets the specs to which it is designed? Closed source code is based on "Trust us - we know what we are doing".
What is to keep someone from writing an open RFC style formal spec and then allow the open source community program to the spec? Open source is all about programming to standards.
The code can be tested by the writer of the RFC as part of the creation standard. In effect that RFC writer becomes the lead programmer on the project.
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While modern chips operate at much higher clock speeds, the technology is much better and faster today. I agree that PC board layout is much more critical now than it was then; wires haven't gotten any faster since 75. However, PC board layout is much easier and faster now, than it was then.
Remember, in 1975 PC boards were laid out by hand using black tape on mylar - doing a complex board would literally take months.
Also please remember that it is one thing to take a VLSI subsection like a modern multifunction chip and glue it to a processor, and something entirely different to have to create those functions in TTL like Wozniac did with his GCR circuitry for the floppy drive on the Apple II.
By the way, your friend also had unusual talent, the proof of that would have been to walk around on the streets trying to find anyone else who could do what he could do. We tend to think that just because we knew someone who can do 'A' that everyone knows someone who can do 'A'. If Rembrandt were alive today, and you knew him - you wouldn't find it unusual; "Oh yeah, I know this guy who can paint real well"
What makes his work exceptional is that there were no simulators available for modeling computer behavior; he and the other designers of the era had to SIMULATE THE ENTIRE COMPUTER IN THEIR HEADS. That is a very rare talent.
While there are many people today who can do digital designs, the available tools are much better than they were just 25 years ago. To find out how good Woz was you would have to use the same tools he had - with the same low level TTL chips, a 'hock your calculator' R & D budget to work with, and do your work in a garage.
Great work Steve, thanks.
The legal system consists of 100's of millions of lines of cruft, NOT ONE LINE OF WHICH HAS EVER BEEN TESTED TO SEE IF IT WORKS!!!
Imagine for a second that we wrote 100 million lines of code to control a nuclear reactor, and that nobody ever checked any of it. We just put the code into the computers and took over control of an actual working reactor without testing. I think that everyone who knows anything about programming would agree that would be a horrendously irresponsible thing to do. Yet, nobody seems to have any problem with putting completely unchecked legal code into the much more dangerous human control system of the law; THIS IS ABSOLUTELY INSANE.
How can the legal system be tested? A preliminary step would be to take 1000 innocent defendants around the country, trump up charges against them, run them through the criminal justice system and see how many of them are convicted. That would give us an idea of the false positive error rate of the legal system.
The question I have is this: "How could anyone, who is not monumentally evil, object to testing the legal system; what would you be afraid of - spending a little time and money to see if we know what we are doing?"
The accidental testing of the legal system which was done by DNA work on death row inmates in Illinois is appalling; about half of the death row inmates were shown to be innocent by the testing. Surely capital cases are the ones where we have to be the most sure, and yet the legal system produced a 50% error rate when it was checked. It was so bad that the governor of Illinois was forced to suspend executions in the state! A 50% error rate means that you could do just as well by flipping a coin!
It is high time that we checked to see if the people in the legal system have so much as a clue. I suspect that when we do, we will find the results of testing ghastly. My prediction, based on my own analysis of how the legal system works, is that about 90% of the innocent defendants run through it will be convicted. When dealing with the lives and freedom of people I suspect that no one but a psychopath can find a 90% error rate acceptable.
Equipped with intelligence and great sensitivity toward things which cause him to feel rejected Pontificator literally fights with words. His huge speech balloons are so large as to hurl all the other characters, friend and foe alike, out of the frame when he starts a rant.
Until he learns to control his outbursts Professor Xavier is forced to keep him in a 'Silence of the Lambs' style muzzle to keep him from hammering the rest of the world into oblivion. Of course, this only makes things worse as Pontificator now feels even more rejected.
Seriously John, I suspect that many - if not most of us on this forum have felt rejection ever since we realized we were different.
Let me suggest, that you learn to protect, and turn down, your sensitivity toward rejection. The problem with great sensitivity is that it is hard to see the differences between the major issues and the minor ones; when everything hurts it is hard to tell the big issues from the small ones - pain is pain.
It is also important to understand how much of our own rejection we create ourselves. To those who are very strong at creating rejection and relatively insensitive to its effects, the people who ARE sensitive to rejection look like whining simps. The strong rejecters have no idea how much pain their rejections cause. Think about it for a second, would you want to be around anyone who complains as much as you do? Neither do the people who reject you. It really helps to learn to package your observations better; people are more likely to learn from them then.
People who are strong at anything blame the weak; after all the weak can't fight back, so they have to take the blame. If it were true that weakness and stupidity were responsible for mankind's problems then we could all blame all of our problems on rocks; can you think of anything with less intelligence or less muscle power?
What I am saying is that fewer words with a better focus an the major issues will go a lot farther than trying to hammer people into submission with pontification. For the most part the people rejecting you have no idea how much damage they are causing - the job of the sensitive is to educate the strong; trying to hammer them with your strengths won't get the job done.
Real evil does not show its true nature until it believes it has won; caution is the watch word of evil. As long as there are forces opposing it evil clouds itself in doubt; Lenin's true nature didn't show up until the Soviet Union was consolidated. Hitler - had he not started WW - II doubtless would have been considered a great German leader.
Magneto's real nature was outlined by one of the X - men toward the end of the movie when he said "You're so full of shit, if you really cared about mutants it would be YOU in that machine instead of Rogue" (Or words to that effect - sorry only saw the film once on Friday.)
History will determine which of our perspectives are accurate.
I have one more observation: I have noticed that gun control advocates do not have the courage of their convictions. If they did they would have a sign on their home announcing "GUN FREE HOUSE". The fact that they don't means that they are dependent upon the implied threat that they might have a gun to keep criminals out of their home, while seeking to avoid the responsibilities of gun ownership.
Perhaps you could argue that I wouldn't have a sign on my house which said "I'M NOT HOME" and that is true. The difference is that I believe in protecting my property - so I get to use the implied threat that I'm at home; there is no hypocrisy in that. A gun control advocate DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GUNS TO PROTECT HIS HOUSE, so he has absolutely no moral right to use the hypocritical implied threat that he DOES have a gun to keep his family safe.
Anonymous Coward, and Veteran, those names really are descriptive aren't they?
Here is another observation: I have noticed that bullies are less likely to pick on professional boxers than nerds in glasses.
There are trade offs for every design decision. The trade off you make for the increased safety of getting rid of your guns is an increased probability of tyranny. You've made your choice, you get to live with the consequences of that choice.
Evidently, governments are more likely to push around an unarmed population than an armed one. Who would have guessed?
F-15 engines have a thrust of 50,000 lbs each. 200 would have a thrust of 10,000,000 lbs which is more than the 7,500,000 of an actual Saturn V first stage. One hundred would be closer to the mark - remember the first stage would be much lighter than the first stage of an actual Saturn V. One hundred engines is a 10 x 10 array - not so ridiculous if you look at it that way. A combo like I described could put about 60 tons into orbit.
The thrust of an F-15's engines are more than the weight of the air craft, and it can go supersonic straight up. In fact, an F-15 can get to 40,000 feet faster than a Saturn V Moon rocket could. Thus, we do have an engine, off the shelf, which can handle a range of 0 to 1400 miles an hour and altitudes of sea level to 40 or 50 thousand feet without design changes.
I think that if you will do some back of the envelope calculations on such a design you will find that it puts a pretty large payload into orbit - pretty inexpensively compared to doing the whole job with rockets.
Fact: Most of the weight of the first stage is in the oxidizer. (liquid oxygen).
Question: Why are we carrying oxygen around in the atmosphere?
It seems to me that jet engines do a good job of handling the 0 to the speed of sound part of the speed range. Using jets in the first stage has a number of advantages:
Jets are much safer than Rockets.
Jet engines are available off the shelf.
Jet engines have a much higher specific impulse than rockets (Isp = pounds of thrust / pounds of fuel burned per sec)
Jet engines are reusable.
A Beowulf cluster of Jet engines (sorry, I couldn't resist the Joke) would generate large amounts of thrust.
A launch with hybrid Jet engine first stage would be much less expensive than a pure rocket launch.
I suspect that the first stage of boosters use rockets because "That's the way we've always done it".
Comments from veterans at NASA or other space agencies would be appreciated.
Young men spend a lot of time chasing illusions of power, young women typically chase the illusion of control. Script kiddies do destructive things because it gives them an illusion that they are powerful. It is the same illusion that a vandal gets by throwing paint onto an existing masterpiece: 'See, I'm a painter also'. It is almost always easier to destroy than to create; it is a very difficult job to write a program which works well and is useful. It is easy to crash such a program; just pull the power cord. People who crack into systems, and virus writers, both get the same illusion of power; "see how mighty I am, look at this chaos I caused".
The truth is that real power feels like nothing. You do something, things happen, and you get no feel that you did anything; all of the force of your effort goes into the target. The less you feel, the more the target responds. This is disappointing to men who want 'the feeling of power'.
Eventually most script kiddies outgrow the sort of adolescent thinking that causes them to do destructive things. Young people everywhere have a 'golden glow' about their existence. It is obvious to them that the old people like me don't get it. However, that is not what is going on; we get it, we just know that 'special glow' is an illusion. Real maturity arrives when you can see the illusions of youth for what they are.
Does this mean that I want 13 year olds to behave like 50 year olds? NO, making mistakes is the only way to learn anything; if you don't make any mistakes you haven't learned anything - you already knew how to do what ever it was that you were doing. Youthful indiscretions are an essential part of growing up - if you are lucky, they don't get you killed or sent to prison for a long time - eventually you do something that scares you enough to cause you to learn something.
Young people expect the same reasonableness from government authority figures that they have experienced from the authority figures in their life while they grow up; but that is a false expectation. Government, and the criminal justice system are giant, impersonal machines. When you get caught up in the gears of that machinery you will be ground into hamburger meat by it. All of your dreams, fears, and hopes are meaningless to the impersonal machinery of government; it grinds the good as finely as it does the evil.
Of course there is a secondary reason for trouble making; some people are searching for attention, and to them even punishment if better than being ignored.
The real question is this: if Linux had tested better would PC Magazine have published the article? In my opinion it would not. Please be aware that Ziff Davis and Microsoft are essentially married. If you wish to see what the outcome of a test will be simply look at the advertising budget for the two 'competitors' with ZD, and you will be able to predict the results.
Linux will ALWAYS have a disadvantage in these sorts of tests: Microsoft is able to scan the Linux code base looking for cases where Linux is weak and they are not. Once they find a case they call their friends in the press to run a benchmark on exactly the conditions under which Linux will stumble. The Linux community can't do this since 1.) We don't have access to Microsoft's code base. 2). We don't have an 'objective' press in our pocket.
By ZD's tests each version of Windows since 3.1 has been faster than the previous version. That this is a croc is obvious: run Win 3.1 on a simple Pentium 133 with 16 Mb and it flies, run Win 2K on 300 Mhz modern processor with 4 times as much memory and it is sluggish. The trick is that when Microsoft makes a slower OS there is always something in it which is faster. They point out the part that is faster, and that is what 'their' magazines test. The result: the Newer OS is 'faster'. Most people who read the ZD class of magazines can't see through this kind of trickery.
Are the results of the Zdnet bench accurate? Probably; Microsoft set up the test so that it would produce those results, so it is repeatable - just as the Mindcraft test was. Are the tests fair? Of course not, but it doesn't do any good to complain. All that is possible is to fix the problem. When that happens ZD won't re-test: they have achieved their goal of making Microsoft look good to the average person.
This is just another example of Microsoft's dirty tricks department.
However, what one lacks from the godlike perspective of viewing a model is an understanding of just how dangerous a full size drilling rig is. A small nine volt motor on the model becomes a 750 volt 800 hp motor on the full size rig; the model's motor can't hurt anyone, the full size motor can easily kill.
This danger occurs simply because of scale: when you go from a model to a full size rig, YOU don't change in size. If a thread lifting a pipe on the model breaks it is no big deal. If the wire rope lifting a thousand pound length of drilling pipe breaks people can die.
When you look at laws, what you are looking at is the written plans and operating specs for a government. When you think about those laws in operation you are applying those operating specifications to your mental model of a government. However, the actual government is a gigantic, powerful, and - simply because of its sheer size - extremely dangerous, machine.
An actual oil drilling rig has a maximum speed at which the drill bit can spin. If we pull an idiotic Tim Taylor Tool Time stunt on the rig , add MORE POWER, and spin the drill pipe faster very bad things can happen. A pipe might sheer due to the increased stress of higher speed operation. Bearings which might work at 300 rpm fly apart at 10,000. The new more powerful motor can fling a broken piece of drill pipe around like a flail smashing the rig and killing lots of people.
In a similar fashion the gigantic, extremely dangerous, machinery of government has a maximum speed at which it can cycle; part of the reason that the US system of Government has lasted as long as it has is that the process of creating legislation is a ponderous one; it is difficult to get new laws into effect. This helps to keep the government from flailing around out of controll.
Remember that the enforcement arm of governments - the police - are utterly uncritical of the laws they enforce; neither the Nazi's nor the Communists ever had to replace the police when they took over a country. This means that the police are just as happy to bash in YOUR skull as the skull of car thief; you look just like any other 'suspect' to them.
Faster - more powerful - more efficient is not always the best thing. When it comes to the legislative process - ponderous is the proper speed - anything faster is a foolhardy experiment to undertake.
Insurance companies and banks have more or less perfected this strategy: go after someone who can't possibly win so that you establish legal precedent. Judges are hesitant to overturn an existing precedent. It is this strategy which has established the lopsided world in which we live, in which the effect of the law is slanted toward those who have money. While the law is meant to be fair; the reality of "money equals power" means that most of the time the law rules in favor of the wealthy.
An example can illustrate how lopsided things are: when was the last time that you heard of an employee writing an employment contract and getting a company to sign it? If both employees and employers were in equal bargaining positions half of all employment contracts would be written by the employees. But in fact, all of the employment contracts of which I am aware are dictated by the employers and are non negotiable; "Sign this or don't work". Such lopsided conditions exist because being in the right in a court of law hardly matters; what counts is who wins and who loses - why they lose doesn't matter.
Lawyers are people who simply don't understand right and wrong: that is why everything has to be written down for them.
If we are out to establish a legal precedent for the GPL the best strategy is crush a cockroach, not punch an elephant.
Of course there are exceptions: a project like the Apollo moon landing is inherently expensive despite how much you know about it - but for the most part that inverse ratio holds true. Most claims of high development costs are just plausible lies; Microsoft's main expenses in developing Win 2K was salaries to the programmers involved, but they claim to have spent "Billions" in creating it. What BS, it is like the claim that 50,000 children every year in the US are being kidnapped (The actual number is around 800); somebody claims it and almost nobody stops to think about it.
Do the math: Win 2k has about 35,000,000 lines of code in it. If every one of those lines was written from scratch (they weren't, most are held over from NT) in order for Win 2K to have cost even one billion dollars to develop MS was spending over $28 per line of code. Even using the number of 15 lines of code per day per programmer that means MS is paying $428 per day in salaries and over head per programmer, that is $2140 per week - over $107000 a year. As the programmers become more productive than 15 lines per day the numbers get even worse. Conclusion: there is NO WAY Win 2k cost even one Billion dollars to produce. Don't be impressed by corporate propaganda - it is mostly lies.
Of course sometimes companies had no Patent portfolio to cross license, and were forced to pay royalties. However, being producers themselves, the patent holders couldn't charge too much; corporate 'karma' prevented it - after all if they charged predatory royalties - somebody could do the same things to them.
Rambus on the other hand produces NOTHING; they exist only as a shell firm with a PR department, a legal department, a portfolio of patents, and little else. Because they produce nothing, companies like Rambus are not subject to cross licensing, and corporate 'karma' has no effect on them. The result is that a Rambus style firm is free to gouge on their royalty demands. The only thing which limits them is the threat of a counter suits by deep pocketed memory producers with the object of invalidating the Patents.
In effect companies like Rambus have the moral stature of email spam; both are a parasitic drain on a system which tends to hamper the productive.
I think that we are only seeing the tip of the Rambus future. Because Rambus makes nothing, their 'cost of goods sold' is zero; at least Microsoft has to pay for the blank CD's that they press. Thus, minus their expenses, everything that Rambus takes in is gravy. One of the things that I expect them to do in the future is use their money to acquire additional patents to suck even more blood out of the economy.
It is no accident that both spam and productionless, patent holding companies were dreamed up by lawyers. Neither is an approach that productive people would think of.
Is there a solution to parasitic patent behavior? I think that there is. In the United States patents can only be granted to individuals, NO COMPANY HAS EVER BEEN GRANTED A PATENT ON ANYTHING. Companies obtain patents by having them assigned to them. This is typically done by means of employment contracts which force inventors to assign their patent rights to the corporation. This puts into effect the first layer of parasitic behavior. Most abuse of the patent system occurs because of the assignment process; if the law were changed so that only an INDIVIDUAL could own a patent - as well as be granted one - most of the parasitic and bad consequences of the patent system would disappear.
What is to keep someone from writing an open RFC style formal spec and then allow the open source community program to the spec? Open source is all about programming to standards.
The code can be tested by the writer of the RFC as part of the creation standard. In effect that RFC writer becomes the lead programmer on the project.