Dear Slashdaughter,
Please avoid ad hominem attacks to comment writers in techno-political discussions. Please use documented scientific arguments for technical points and rationally argued points for political topics.
My points were not about my financial situation, nor the fate of earth, nor whether we are in a new great depression. My points were about the singular inappropriateness of a major engineering project oriented to manned space exploration at the present time.
I might point out that although the actual physical number on nuclear weapons has been decreased by the Americans and Soviet/Russians since the height of the cold war, the actual ability of the remaining nuclear bombs is enough to end human life on earth, the omnicide shoah, remains as present as hair-trigger and as likely now as it ever was then. Little real progress has been made in convincing the psychopaths who run the nuclear weapons programs to stand down for the long-term sake of human life.
Thank you for your interesting response. But you are missing the entire point of my post.
The point is that the global problems are unprecedented and very real. They can only be solved and dealt with by focused application of resources directly on the problems themselves. Exploration is a general approach to problem solving. Exploration itself doesn't solve problems. These 21st century problems that we face must be solved or humanity will either die or enter another period of dark age that will last hundreds of years.
The absolute last thing that we need to do to address 21st century problems is go to the moon.
Politicians are not equiped to solve engineering problems. They are good at directing public anger away from the institutions and corporations that fund their political campaigns. If the current problems continue to grow, and there is no reason to believe that they won't get worse, then the politicians will need an easy target to redirect public anger away from institutions and corporations. The moon/Mars exploration crowd is an easy target to direct public anger towards. The space engineers have no political consciousness. They are essentially naive fools when presented with situations outside of their technical specialities.
The fact that they continue to insist that space exploration is absolutely critical to mankind's survival only confirms this. Humans have lived on earth for 50,000 years without having the means to go into space: space travel is not essential to human survival. Don't present metaphorical horseshit in public as scientific fact: it doesn't reflect kindly on your reputation or profession.
The Chinese did not have aircraft carrier sized ships 1500 years ago. They had large treasure ships that explored the east African coast and traded with India 600 years ago. There is some evidence that they reached the Americas in 1421/1423 as presented in Garvin Mendes' books on pre-Columbian explorations. These ships were nowhere as large as a modern aircraft carrier. They explored lands that was basically the same as those that they came from. They didn't go into places that had no land, no water, no air, and no hope of finding any resources or trade that would justify the cost of their explorations. The Chinese empire was rich at that time. They were not trillions of dollars in debt and dependent upon foreign capital to support their government expenses. Their situation had nothing in common with our current situation.
Every time the NASA topic comes up on Slashdot, there are several hundred technical comments about the nature of the rockets and environment of space. And every time the subject appears it is necessary for someone to point out the reality of the situation.
The reality is that the USA is broke. Not only broke but trillions of dollars in debt. Not just trillions in debt but facing unprecedented challenges in energy resource depletion, over-population, financial collapse of the world banking institutions, climate change, permanent governmental grid-lock, and near-universal hostility from the other countries with growing economies.
Priorities are going to be set. The things that were important in the 1960s are not important any more. What this means is that there is going to be a lot of talk about man's destiny to travel to the moon and some superficial funding. But there is going to be no real effort made to return to the moon. The programs are going to be cut year after year.
The reason is obvious. There are real problems on the earth. They can't be ignored. There are no real solutions to these problems on the moon. Actually there is nothing on the moon. Going there is essentially a symbolic gesture:it's an act of engineering masturbation. Back when the USA was rich and powerful in the 1960s, these kind of symbolic projects could be supported and funded.
Those days are gone. We live in a different era. Accept it; because it's reality. And as engineers, reality is the most important consideration.
Man will return to the moon, it's true. But it won't happen in our lifetimes. It will happen in two or three hundred years from now. Learn to think long term.
The same thing applies to Mars exploration. You've seen the photos from the robot landers. It's a desert. No plants, no water, no nothing, just rocks and dust. Given the problems of the USA and Earth at the present time, there is no moral, physical, military, or political justification for spending hundreds of billions of dollars on space projects of this magnitude.
Please understand, it is in your best interest as technocrats and engineers to not support such projects of no social import such as manned interplanetary travel. If billions are spent on projects of this nature, and the economy continues to collapse, then you will be presented to the angry public as a scapegoat by the politicians. Lost your 401K, no health care for your children, living in your car because your underwater home foreclosed? The politicians will claim that it is all the fault of the engineers who pissed away billions of dollars for Mars/Moon landings.
Believe me, you don't want to be in the position where the massive social unrest of the 2020s is going to be blamed on the projects like moon landings that you publicly supported in 2009.
Please consider the political reality of this situation. Space engineers are being set up like fools to take the blame for situations that they had nothing to with creating.
Most Americans considered Canada to be merely another state that figured out a cute trick to avoid paying taxes to Washington, DC.
More or less true, until they go to Quebec and discover that everything is in French. And not the easy fun 'parlay-voo' French that they took in high school and spent two weeks learning to say "Ou est mes chauseurs blanches?" On you feet, fool.
No, they're in a francophone environment. Which is completely different from pretending to speak French at a party to impress that cute Iowa State Sociology major. This is like watching a French movie without subtitles, and not being able to leave because it is real life.
Most Americans spend about a day in Quebec and then discretely dive back to Vermont, New York, or Toronto. They tell their friends that they 'loved' Quebec and 'had no problems at all' with the language. But they are bullshitting (two 't's or one?) themselves. They freaked out.
Learning french (and learning english if you are from a francophone family) is really hard. And having all the supermarket boxes and government forms in both languages really doesn't help much. It's constantly going back and forth between books and magazines to get grammar and vocabulary and listening to radio and television to get listening comprehension (which is more difficult than reading). DVDs are a great resource because in North America every film has French subtitles available. And of course, french films have english subtitles. But french films rarely have french subtitles available. So you can't read the words and listen to the rapid dialog at the same time in order to get a feel about the different phonemic structures between french and english. Hollywood films in english always have the english titles available for the deaf people. They usually match the dialog closely.
Anyway, seriously study french before going to Quebec (including Montreal). It will be worth it because you won't feel extreme culture shock that comes from being illinguate (a word that I made up meaning to be unable to understand the local language).
Any you won't have any illusions about Canada being a distant part of the USA. Guam is distant part of the USA, Quebec isn't. And if Sarah Palin isn't sure if I'm correct, ignore her. Why is anyone still paying attention to anything she says? Shouldn't she have been a WalMart greeter instead of a Republican governor? Is there a difference?
Isn't it amazing how all of these advancements show up...
But they don't show up. Of all the hundreds of news stories of amazing technologies that have appeared on Slashdot over the past ten years, how many can you just go out and buy at Target or Home Depot?
None.
Maybe one or two. probably not.
Any announcement of an amazing technological breakthrough that appears on Slashdot generally stays that. A press release of an amazing technological breakthrough that's going to solve a major problem. How much of this amazing technology actually becomes purchasable product? Next to none, if not none.
Sad but true. Most of the stories that you read on Slashdot about amazing technological breakthroughs are just bullshit. Pipe dreams. Fantasies of techno-nerds hallucinating from watching too much Star Trek and fed to gullible but lovingly stupid media people.
Not to suggest the obvious, but the publishers seriously want to sell used games then they could take the games that aren't sold after a period of time and sell the at half the price of new games.
It's just software. And with software you have relatively high fixed costs for development and then you have practically no marginal costs for selling the product. Suppose for the first year, you sell X number of games of a title at $69,.3X at $69 the second year, and.1X units at $69 in the third year. Used games are selling.4X units at $30 in the third year. 0.4X times $30 brings more revenue than 0.1X times $69.
So just price the unsold new games of that title at slightly less than the used games of that title are selling for. Since you have no marginal costs on your sales product, you will be profitable. But no, you're a fucking marketing major and math is hard, so you want to pass a law to prohibit any 'advanced' business model that your little brain doesn't understand.
I'm surprised that with so many game companies in New England, no one seems to have adopted the sales model of Filene's basement.
Yes, salt. We not only have a serious petroleum problem, but also a big fresh, potable water problem. There's not enough to support the massively growing populations and the industries that consume hundreds of millions of gallons of it. Industries like integrated circuit manufacturing.
But the world is two-thirds water. However it is mixed with 23% salt: sodium chloride. We can separate the salt from the sea water, but it currently uses a lot of petroleum to do so. Today the areas that have the greatest need for fresh water derived from the sea tend to have a lot of petroleum nearby. That will change as the easy-to-reach oil is consumed and population grows in oil-poor lands.
We have also lots of sand. Sand can be melted into glass, which can be shaped into lenses that can focus the sunlight to evaporate the water from the salt. It's a big and complicated project, but we can do it.
But we end up with a lot of salt. Mountains of the stuff.
We have another great need. We've cut down many of the forests that has provided our basic housing building material. The alternatives such as brick and steel is expensive.
We need some way to transform the mountains of salt into cheap, workable, flexible, strong, and bio-degradable building materials to build housing, pipelines, aqueducts, and all the other things needed now for the massively growing population. We need chemists who can transform NaCl into new and presently-unknown materials. And to produce a new class of materials in a environmentally-friendly manner. And to do new material manufacturing in ways that will scale both up and down in order to supply millions of new jobs for all types of economies.
Any chemists need a serious challenge? Or, looking for a doctoral thesis topic?
This guy is crazy to submit to this test. Here is a (near) pseudo-science test being applied to him with a loaded question that can have only one possible correct and right answer. And the machine is not assured to give him that correct answer. And he does it in a nationally published magazine.
Suppose this machine 'proved' that he was more turned on by a professional sexpot movie star than his own wife. Do you think that she would...ever... let him live that down? If you say yes, then you don't know anything about women...go fuck your compiler.
Thirty years from now they have some silly disagreement. She says "..but you don't really love me..." He says " but, darling, honey, of course I do..." She says, "no, you really don't, and that machine proved it!".
There are some questions that have only one possible correct answer, regardless of what might be the 'truth'. The most important one is when your wife or girlfriend asks you " do you really love me?". Guys, listen to this, this is important, the only possible thing that you can ever say when this collection of sounds hits your ears is "YES". No hesitation, no..uh.., no ponderous meaningful silences, just 'yes'. Anything else that you could say or not say would be taken by her to mean 'no, I don't love you'. It just takes one 'no' and she will never believe you next 10 million times that you say "yes, I love you".
Another example of question that has only one possible answer is when someone who has the ability and the inclination to destroy your life asks you: "Have you ever used drugs?" Here the only possible answer is NO!, even if you're standing there with a joint dangling from your lips. Please don't forget this as it may come in useful some day.
A third example is when someone is pointing a gun at you and asks you, "Do you believe in...". Fellas, this is not an occasion for amicable discussion imbued with gentle irony. Chuck it up, smile, and shout 'YES!'. I believe in jumpin' Jehovah, the lizard king, the holy rock, the flying pizza monster, whatever, and add that you're overwhelming glad to find another true believer, and " could you...uh... maybe...uh... put down that gun?"
So you or anyone else in the world has nothing to gain by allowing yourselves to hooked up to some machine and be asked one of the questions that have only one possible answer, and gambling that the machine affirms that you actually and truly believe that you are giving the right answer. You have nothing to gain if the machine says 'yes, he's telling the truth' and everything to lose if the machine indicates otherwise.
Maybe it was just the French who were eating the Neanderthals. That would go a long way towards explaining that certain 'je ne sais quois' difference between them and all the rest of humanity.
The kids tripping on acid during the Summer of Love mostly turned into fear-freaks who relentlessly elected NeoCon Evangeliban to office.
This is a generational cliché. The 'Summer of Love' was 1967 and at that time there were no kids tripping. LSD didn't hit the American high schools throughout the country in a big way until the early 1970s. There is still a lot of debate about just how this managed to happen, but it did.
The number of people involved in the hippy counter-culture in the 1960s was actually very small, maybe 2-3% of the 18-25 year olds at the time 1967. They got a lot of press for being colorful and very noticeable, but there weren't a whole lot of them. The vast majority of American teens in 1967 were not much different from the teens of 1957 or 1997, they were just all normal people.
Much of what people think of as 60's behavior and mentality actually took place in the mid to late 1970s. This actually was a weird time with a lot of weed smoking and a lot of tripping. But most of the teenage tripping on LSD happened in the years 1971-1974 and then rapidly faded. Again no one is exactly sure why this social phenonemon happened at this time.
Here on the west coast we have a lot of the people still around who actually were the tripping hippies in the '67 Summer of Love. They, the ones that survived and didn't go mad (about 85% of them), are generally quietly prosperous, middle-class and politically liberal. There are a few radical hippies that turned conservative, such as the respected David Horowitz. But they were mostly radical new-left people from Berkeley and not San Francisco hippies.
I realize that all this now 'doesn't mean shit to a tree' (an expression of that time), and, with time, political enemies get grouped together by subsequent generations as artifacts of a past and irrelevant era. But still it is best to avoid the trap of generational clichés in public forums.
You think a few million will cover that? I think not.
Of course it will. Get the money, transfer it out of the USA to the Caymans or Luxembourg, and move to a nice beautiful discrete villa on the outskirts of some major city in or near a cocaine-producing country where the blow is cheap. Like say, Lima Peru.
Marry a beautiful young proper landed old-family upper-class girl who likes to have sex and who's family is experiencing a cash flow problem. Learn Spanish, meet your neighbors, learn the local customs, go to local cultural events, have your wife's family and friends teach you all that you need to say and do to be treated respectfully in your newly-adopted country. Go to Mass once or twice a year. Make some noticeable donations to local respected charities. Make a few unnoticeable donations to local police department's widows and orphans fund. Keep up appearances and indulge your appetites discretely. Know your limits but keep expanding them.
Do this and your millions will last a long, long time. Party Hardy, dude.
The economy is disintegrating, take the money now. You can always give it back later if you feel bad about it.
Let me repeat, the 20th century is over. The dot-com boom is long over. The bubble economy is over. Serious economists are predicting deflation. Sell out while you can. Take the money and let them deal with the problems that will happen if the economy does tank and the market for your currently-popular product goes away.
Let me sum it all up in one three letter word: AOL. Ten years ago, people thought that their stock price was going to continue to grow so big that it would eclipse the entire Time magazine: Warner Bros. studio conglomerate. Now they're just the lingering bad smell of a fart. Can you imagine how bad Steve Case would feel now if he didn't sell out for billions back then when he was more popular than Elvis? AOL is nothing now, but he still has...ALL...THOSE...BILLIONS...OF...DOLLARS.
Sell out now, fool. Why are you even asking us such a silly question? If you sell out and the business is good, you'll still be a company god and get even more money through your stock options and bonuses. If the start-up tanks, you'll still have all the money and you can walk away with none of the problems. Think of your kids. No kids yet? Well then sell out, find a beautiful wife or two and go make a dozen. and don't forget the pre-nup.
95% of the people who use computers are using Windows applications. (Don't mod me to -1 'cause you have a stat saying it's actually 93.7%, schmuck). The vast majority of the bazillions of people running computers are running Windows aps on Windows.
Why? Because they work. They do what needs to be done. And primarily because people know how to use them to do what they are using them for.
So if you want 'your' operating system (Mbuutuu, Umbongo,... whatever the fuck it is...Why did you give it such a bizarre name if you wanted it to be widely used and be taken seriously?) to be as used by all the bazillions of people who are using computers, then it better run Windows aps,... and run them well. Better than Windows, for that matter. Because nobody is going to shift to 'your' operating system unless Windows either stops working, or evolves into such a pain-in-the-ass to use (with endless pop-up windows and BSODs) that people are willing to risk switching away from Windows. And if Windows works, which it does...currently.. then why bother switching when you can't be sure that the alternative that you are being forced to switch to is actually going to work and you aren't having to go through some mutha-fugging 'learning experience' just to get back to the level of applications computer skills that you already have under Windows.
So, in the real world, 'your' operating system (Mbuutuu, Umbongo,... whatever the fuck it is...Why did you give it such a bizarre name if you wanted it to be widely used and be taken seriously?) isn't going to be used by the vast majority of people until you need to be a serious computer expert in order to tell 'your' operating system (Mbuutuu, Umbongo,... whatever the fuck it is...Why did you give it such a bizarre name if you wanted it to be widely used and be taken seriously?) from Windows.
What I'm saying is. You have to be indistinguishable from Windows AND better than Windows before millions are going to switch to 'your' operating system (Mbuutuu, Umbongo,... whatever the fuck it is...Why did you give it such a bizarre name if you wanted it to be widely used and be taken seriously?) from Windows.
Heresy, talking like this on Slashdot. But truth is always heresy. Get used to it. Move on. Fix the things that people hate about Windows with 'your' operating system (Mbuutuu, Umbongo,... whatever the fuck it is...Why did you give it such a bizarre name if you wanted it to be widely used and be taken seriously?) and everyone will switch.
But....
Our operating system is `~free~`. Well, la de da, everything is free if you don't pay for it. And who actually pays for Windows? It comes with computer that you buy. It comes with the computer that was issued to you at your work. It comes with every computer that you buy second-hand on CraigsList. For all realistic perspectives from the average computer user, Windows is -free-, too. If you're buying thousands of licenses for your corporate group, well of course it's not free. But you're not an average computer user.
Just put a few drops of hashish oil into their coffee each day. The amount is so small that they won't feel stoned, and it will accumulate in their bodies.
Then after a week or so, call them in for a 'random' urine test. The test will show (horror upon horror!) molecular traces of THC in their urine and you will have NO PROBLEM firing them, denying them unemployment, getting them thrown out of public housing, getting any professional license revoked, and just generally screwing up their All-American lifestyle forever.
Works every time. Done in the USA to hundreds of people daily for twenty years now.
Seriously, it's how we got rid of the asshole gung-ho Neidermeier officers back in the 1980's when I was in the US Navy. One positive test and they were gone: no appeal, no second-test review, no $2000 gas-spectraography review confirmation, no nothing. A few drops a day and the assholes disappear. Took the JAG years to realize that we were doing this, but we were out of 'service' by then.
It's like judo. You use your opponent's fanaticism against them.
But time has passed and wounds have healed. If you were booted out of the military for failing a drug test and you are the kind of person who never did or never would get high, then it probably happened to you. Think back about who you were seriously pissing off at the time. It was probably one of us.
We're not sorry. The military is better place because we did it. There was no permanent, endless war at the time and this was the easiest way to get rid of the psychos who would have gotten us all killed when the PEW finally arrived after 9/11.
I agree. No one who has sold 100000 toys for about $300 each is, has, or will ever go broke. Either they are lying, self-delusional (their sales department sleezos have invented sales to get undeserved commissions), or they have stolen the money and defrauded their investors, or they are completely incompetent in business. Or they have been paying fat and happy robotics engineers $120/hour for years to design toys that can move pieces of colored silicone into cute funny faces. Probably a combination of all of the above.
The idea that there would be an auction for intellectual property is absurd. Intellectual property is an oxymoron that only makes sense as a legal concept when it is kept as secret and as expensive as possible. No one would pay money at an auction for trade secrets that lose their financial value when the company that developed them goes bankrupt and their so-called intellectual property becomes non-secret during the process. If the company is based on so-called intellectual property that must remain trade secret to retain its value and the company goes bankrupt, then the company has no value and neither does its trade secrets.
These morons should have simply made their toys a little smaller, used smaller motors and die-chip-sized processors and sold their toys for $30. Then they wouldn't be bankrupt. Bankruptcy is what always happens when marketing majors get drunk with dim-witted venture capitalists. Smart engineers are always looking to put teams of these bozos together and then be standing in the right place when it starts raining money.
Every time that a space and lunar exploration story has run on Slashdot for the past three years, I have answered it with a reminder that space and lunar exploration is a fantasy because the USA is...well... stone dead broke.
And every time that I point this out, my message gets zapped to -1. And I always get replies that I am (1) a luddite, (2) a moron, (3) an asshole, (4) a fool who doesn't understand how absolutely important space and lunar exploration to human existence, and (5) a twit who doesn't realize that the space and lunar exploration programs are already blasting off because the money has been fully allocated for the next lunar and martian Apollo missions and vast teams of engineers are working on it right now as we speak.
Well, as it should have been obvious to anyone who is not collecting a fat pay check from NASA or isn't a total Tekkie buffoon, the USA actually is broke, politicians lie, budgets can be quietly revised, and whatever importance space and lunar exploration actually does have for human existence, it's going to have to wait for another hundred years or so. Get used to it because it is your reality.
You aren't going to see people walking on the moon or Mars in your lifetime. You will be lucky if in thirty or forty years from now if you can rent a tiny car once a year and drive to what once a shiny mall back in the glorious Lindsey_Lohan-cute_superstar era (before she converted to Islam and became president).
So, be a mensch, and stop modding me down to -1 for simply pointing out the plain honest truth to you'all. Be thankful that someone is willing to do it.
Come'on Slashdaughters, the 20th century is over. The boom times generated by cheap oil is passing. There will continue to be fantastic scientific discoveries, but they won't be implemented in the same way that they were in the era of your youth. With exploding populations, financial disintegration, and environmental collapse, we will be lucky if we are able to marshal all our scientific, engineering, and political skills to maintain a lifestyle for our special class of people that is equal to 1900, forget about returning to the era of 2000, which will only be available to the rumored ultra-rich 'cloud people'.
So get real, delicious Slashdaughters, and stop thinking about space and think about place. Your place in the real world. The cold dark world.
A weird weapon, it only works if you don't use it... shades of WarGames.
Nuclear weapons have solved the problem of national defense, but at a stiff price. In the past, there was always someone out there who thought that they could just come to your country or piece of ground, kick your ass, steal everything of value, rape your women, and turn your (and your women's) children into their slaves to buy, sell, fuck, or work to death as they please.
Hell, we even did it ourselves and got away with it for a long time. Your ancestors did also to your neighbors. And your neighbors did it to you. It's quite possible that you are thinking right now about doing it to someone.
It's not a bad idea, actually. You get all the benefits and you get to kill off all the assholes and bullies in your society that would make your life miserable if they weren't occupied by raging, raping, and pillaging someone else, somewhere else. Excuse me, I meant to say "turn all our brave boys into heroes or martyrs, proudly serving in our nation's defense..." Same thing.
However, there are some countries that no-one imagines or seriously plans to conquer and enslave. These countries have, at great expense, developed refrigerator-sized machines that convert hydrogen into helium in the most environmentally-insensitive way imaginable. When someone shows up at the border for a little bit of the old in-out, they get met with a few of these hydrogen-to-helium converters thrown their way, along with a few tossed through outer space to the folks back home.
What a mess. Basically the consequences of having to deal with having hydrogen-to-helium machines thrown your way far exceeds the joys and profits in ravishing and pillaging your neighbors. So you find something else to do. And we have world peace. Peace through machines. Not microprocessor-controlled dildos, or cool stereos playing groovy music, but through hydrogen bombs.
One small problem: If you have a few of these hydrogen-to-helium conversion machines, it's real easy to get your friends and neighbors to give you their stash and daughters. Without having to go through the trouble of violently taking it. Just go to their embassy with a list in one hand and picture of the H2H machine in the other. Don't say a word; they'll get the message.
So they want a few of the H2H machines themselves. And the more that there are around, the more likely that some one, somewhere, for some reason, under some God's direction, justified by some ancient holy book, is going to set them off. Which is bad for business.
So an elaborate game evolves. You pretend that you are going to use them if it were to happen that someone might assume that they could pretend to do something that would piss you off, if it were possible that it could ever happen.
And, success, you get world peace. Civilized people don't fuck with each other any more. Giant corporations can pretend that chickenshit things like trading MP3 files are a major issue, and other fantasies.
The only problem is when weirdos and fanatics get the H2H devices. And you don't know if they are going to be willing and able to play the 'pretend that we use them' game. So you can ignore them and hope for the best, as we do with nuclear powers like Israel and Japan ( please don't insult our intelligence by telling me that the Japanese don't have hydrogen-to-helium conversion machines), or you can threaten to kick their ass in advance if they cross a certain line that you and the other civilized nations have drawn in the sand (Pakistan and Korea). Or, if you're lucky, you can just buy them off and get them to surrender their H2H machines (and their U238 little brothers), like South Africa and the Ukraine.
Anyway, back to the point. You don't want to use the H2H converters for anyt
Is this really true? I grew up in Massachusetts and studied French there. Most people there don't realize that the country on the other side of the border is a French speaking one. I was amazed and surprised the first time that I hitchhiked to Quebec. No, seriously, I didn't know that not only was a Quebec a Francophone nation, it was a strictly francophone nation. English just...stops... about two meters from the border.
Having two years of high-school French helped offset the culture shock somewhat. But only now am I beginning to be able to understand anything that anyone says to me in French. People understand what I say to them: I just don't understand anything that is said to me. Being in a place (Oregon) that is 3000 kilometers from any French speaking people doesn't help. I can get Montreal radio stations in French through steaming FM audio, but I can only understand about one word in ten.
DVDs help. Due to the insistance of the Parti Quebecqois, French is an official language of the NAFTA alliance. Even though there are 350 million English speakers, 120 million Spanish speakers, and only 7 million French speakers in the NAFTA countries. All the DVDs of newer Hollywood movies are translated twice into French. Unfortunately, the audio translation and the subtitle translations NEVER match each other. You can't select French audio and French subtitles, focus on the spoken words and follow them with the subtitles the way that you can with the English subtitles (that are available for deaf people). It would be fantastic for language learning if this were possible, especially for vowel-rich languages like French and Spanish that are spoken about twice as fast as English.
By the way, I've never been able to hear any difference between Quebecqois French and Parisian French. People have told me that "people in Quebec don't speak French, they speak some French-like dialect". That is nonsense.
Just how different is Quebec French from Parisian French? Are vowel sounds elongated, as in the difference between North Carolina English and 'Omaha' (television standard) English? Is the rhthym and the vocabulary markedly different, like Jamica English and 'Omaha' English? Are they nearly mutually incomprehensible, like Spanish from Madrid vs that of Barcelona?
Any chance that I can get a few semi-serious replies instead of being mod'ed down to -1?
Prepare to be disappointed, all ye lunar colonist fans.
Your country is bankrupt. Your government is spending multi-TRILLION dollars to bail-out the rich from their stupidity. You have permanent endless expensive wars in distant and inconsequential lands. You depend on indifferent foreign governments to buy your government bonds that finance the huge debt that previous administrations have incurred.
It's not going to far in the future before the world pulls the plug on America.
When that happens the first thing that will be discarded will be the lunar colonization aspect of the space program.
Get used to it. Don't blame me for saying this. Don't mod me to down to -1 for bringing up an inconvenient truth.
Sure, the space program is cool. And important to the humanity's future. And the key to our (us techno-geeks that is) continued prosperity.
And it will happen.
But not in our lifetimes. It will happen two or three hundred years in the future. Not in 2020.
I KNOW a lot of people here are going to be pissed and feeling backstabbed when President Obama cancels the lunar-exploration projects sometime in the next three to five years. But it is an inevitability. So prepare yourself for it.
Thank you, A realistic and pragmatic person on Earth, home of all life.
This situation comes up whenever I get a new job in a company. I want to use MY software that has been configured by ME specifically to make ME more productive.
I've spent twenty years working in situations where one company uses WordBozo and another company uses BozoWord. In WordBozo the combination moves the cursor back one space and in BozoWord the same combination erases the hard disk. I've reached the point where I just assume that I am going to use the text editor that I know and trained my fingers to use the commands efficently regardless whatever the company uses for its 'official' word processor. I don't care. I'm not going to learn any new user interfaces for general-purpose software. Like text editors and graphics imaging/drawing programs.
So I discretely use MY software with MY user interface which makes ME productive. Which makes THEM money. And, to be quite frank and honest, at this point I don't give a F*** about what any software lawyer, BSA flack, or IT manager thinks about it. If they can't change the user interface of THEIR software to fit the commands that MY fingers have memorized, then that is their problem, not MINE.
If your software doesn't have a customizable user interface, then it's junk and you shouldn't be selling it. It's not professional by 21st century standards.
So I discretely bring MY productivity software to work, whereever I work, on flash drives. And I discretely use it. And I remain productive. Which is what really matters in the 21st century with its self-destructive economy.
All software lawyers are fools because they don't accept this situation. Any IT manager that doesn't accept this situation is a fool also.
It makes a little sense to stop secondhand resale of near luxury items for the original manufacturers. But only when the economy is growing and everyone has money to spend.
We are entering a new era. Most people are not going to have the money to spend on near-luxury goods at 20th century prices. But it will take a long time for the manufacturers to realize this.
If the manufacturers were smart they would get a list of all the people who attempted to buy and sell used their near-luxury goods from the watchdog groups that are forcing the sales off eBay. Then they would sell directly to these people themselves slightly flawed or returned goods. They would negotiate the price and terms themselves.
Sure it would take a lot of work. But there are a lot of people out of work. And they would control the market for their products.
But, again, it's going to take a long time before the manufacturers leave their 20th century mentality behind. Many manufacturers will never adapt to the new economic conditions and disappear. Whole industries like the recorded music industry are disappearing because as a group that is totally infected with lemming mentality, their executives can't adapt to the 21th century.
The one good thing about Creationism is that it forces teachers to present the scientific method to the students at a much earlier age. Often the nuts and volts of the skepticism that is the core process of science is skipped over in schools.
Children will say that my pastor showed me a picture of the dinosaurs and the cavemen living together. The teacher will explain that there is a difference between a painting and a photograph, and that with a certain skill, one can paint a picture of anything that looks reasonably like a near-photo.
Children will say that the earth was created in six days, 4000 years ago. Well we weren't there to witness this. But we can show records and artifacts (ones that weren't stolen from the Baghdad museum) that are over 4000 years old.
Creationism forces teachers to instill a spirit of skepticism in students. "I don't believe you, prove it" mentality that is more important that the facts themselves.
Atmel is SO much better than any PIC. Atmel AVR microcontrollers are individually cheaper. They run at least four times faster for the same clock speed (one instruction per clock cycle instead of one instruction per four clocks for the PIC). They have a vastly more versatile and flexible instruction set. The AVRs are designed to be used with high level languages like Open Source GCC, not kluged BASIC for high school kids that the PICs use in their absurdly overpriced 'training' packages. Most AVRs now have the same boot-loader capacities that this PICAXE package is offering.
I use AVRs for sound programmer/editors based on hardware MIDI synthesizers like the Yamaha TX81Z. It's nearly impossible to do any MIDI work in Windows. The MIDI APIs in Windows are difficult, incomprehensible, and nearly undocumented. It's a real mess and will never get any better. The hell with it. I do all my MIDI development now for $3 AVR processors and $5 graphic and character LCD screens. Developing for the AVR is like being back the 1980s writing assembler for the Commodore 64 and Turbo C for DOS. But everything is 1/10th to 1/100th of the cost that it was then. And there are no !@#$%^& ultra-violet EPROM erasers needed. Check out my open source hardware synth editors on the Yahoo! Yamaha DX group(s).
For the flash drives, fill them with your favorite MP3 songs, hundreds of them. Then trade them with other people who are doing the same. Trade a 512Mb drive for one the same size with someone in your office or class. If you are a student, try setting up an underground library where other students contribute flash drives filled with various genres of music, like alt-country or 19th-century German classical. Trade or 'check out' these flash drives from this underground library instead of doing file downloading. This way you can get hundreds of songs at one time without exposing yourself to the RIAA extortionists.
For SATA and IDE drives, get a USB-to-IDE/SATA interface for about $20. These drives can now be used as unplugged backup of things like movies, music libraries, and huge data banks. This is for things that you access several times a year and don't need to always be on your main PC/laptop hard drive.
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Dear Slashdaughter,
Please avoid ad hominem attacks to comment writers in techno-political discussions. Please use documented scientific arguments for technical points and rationally argued points for political topics.
My points were not about my financial situation, nor the fate of earth, nor whether we are in a new great depression. My points were about the singular inappropriateness of a major engineering project oriented to manned space exploration at the present time.
I might point out that although the actual physical number on nuclear weapons has been decreased by the Americans and Soviet/Russians since the height of the cold war, the actual ability of the remaining nuclear bombs is enough to end human life on earth, the omnicide shoah, remains as present as hair-trigger and as likely now as it ever was then. Little real progress has been made in convincing the psychopaths who run the nuclear weapons programs to stand down for the long-term sake of human life.
Thank you,
Thank you for your interesting response. But you are missing the entire point of my post.
The point is that the global problems are unprecedented and very real. They can only be solved and dealt with by focused application of resources directly on the problems themselves. Exploration is a general approach to problem solving. Exploration itself doesn't solve problems. These 21st century problems that we face must be solved or humanity will either die or enter another period of dark age that will last hundreds of years.
The absolute last thing that we need to do to address 21st century problems is go to the moon.
Politicians are not equiped to solve engineering problems. They are good at directing public anger away from the institutions and corporations that fund their political campaigns. If the current problems continue to grow, and there is no reason to believe that they won't get worse, then the politicians will need an easy target to redirect public anger away from institutions and corporations. The moon/Mars exploration crowd is an easy target to direct public anger towards. The space engineers have no political consciousness. They are essentially naive fools when presented with situations outside of their technical specialities.
The fact that they continue to insist that space exploration is absolutely critical to mankind's survival only confirms this. Humans have lived on earth for 50,000 years without having the means to go into space: space travel is not essential to human survival. Don't present metaphorical horseshit in public as scientific fact: it doesn't reflect kindly on your reputation or profession.
The Chinese did not have aircraft carrier sized ships 1500 years ago. They had large treasure ships that explored the east African coast and traded with India 600 years ago. There is some evidence that they reached the Americas in 1421/1423 as presented in Garvin Mendes' books on pre-Columbian explorations. These ships were nowhere as large as a modern aircraft carrier.
They explored lands that was basically the same as those that they came from. They didn't go into places that had no land, no water, no air, and no hope of finding any resources or trade that would justify the cost of their explorations. The Chinese empire was rich at that time. They were not trillions of dollars in debt and dependent upon foreign capital to support their government expenses. Their situation had nothing in common with our current situation.
Every time the NASA topic comes up on Slashdot, there are several hundred technical comments about the nature of the rockets and environment of space. And every time the subject appears it is necessary for someone to point out the reality of the situation.
The reality is that the USA is broke. Not only broke but trillions of dollars in debt. Not just trillions in debt but facing unprecedented challenges in energy resource depletion, over-population, financial collapse of the world banking institutions, climate change, permanent governmental grid-lock, and near-universal hostility from the other countries with growing economies.
Priorities are going to be set. The things that were important in the 1960s are not important any more. What this means is that there is going to be a lot of talk about man's destiny to travel to the moon and some superficial funding. But there is going to be no real effort made to return to the moon. The programs are going to be cut year after year.
The reason is obvious. There are real problems on the earth. They can't be ignored. There are no real solutions to these problems on the moon. Actually there is nothing on the moon. Going there is essentially a symbolic gesture:it's an act of engineering masturbation. Back when the USA was rich and powerful in the 1960s, these kind of symbolic projects could be supported and funded.
Those days are gone. We live in a different era. Accept it; because it's reality. And as engineers, reality is the most important consideration.
Man will return to the moon, it's true. But it won't happen in our lifetimes. It will happen in two or three hundred years from now. Learn to think long term.
The same thing applies to Mars exploration. You've seen the photos from the robot landers. It's a desert. No plants, no water, no nothing, just rocks and dust. Given the problems of the USA and Earth at the present time, there is no moral, physical, military, or political justification for spending hundreds of billions of dollars on space projects of this magnitude.
Please understand, it is in your best interest as technocrats and engineers to not support such projects of no social import such as manned interplanetary travel. If billions are spent on projects of this nature, and the economy continues to collapse, then you will be presented to the angry public as a scapegoat by the politicians. Lost your 401K, no health care for your children, living in your car because your underwater home foreclosed? The politicians will claim that it is all the fault of the engineers who pissed away billions of dollars for Mars/Moon landings.
Believe me, you don't want to be in the position where the massive social unrest of the 2020s is going to be blamed on the projects like moon landings that you publicly supported in 2009.
Please consider the political reality of this situation. Space engineers are being set up like fools to take the blame for situations that they had nothing to with creating.
Most Americans considered Canada to be merely another state that figured out a cute trick to avoid paying taxes to Washington, DC.
More or less true, until they go to Quebec and discover that everything is in French. And not the easy fun 'parlay-voo' French that they took in high school and spent two weeks learning to say "Ou est mes chauseurs blanches?" On you feet, fool.
No, they're in a francophone environment. Which is completely different from pretending to speak French at a party to impress that cute Iowa State Sociology major. This is like watching a French movie without subtitles, and not being able to leave because it is real life.
Most Americans spend about a day in Quebec and then discretely dive back to Vermont, New York, or Toronto. They tell their friends that they 'loved' Quebec and 'had no problems at all' with the language. But they are bullshitting (two 't's or one?) themselves. They freaked out.
Learning french (and learning english if you are from a francophone family) is really hard. And having all the supermarket boxes and government forms in both languages really doesn't help much. It's constantly going back and forth between books and magazines to get grammar and vocabulary and listening to radio and television to get listening comprehension (which is more difficult than reading). DVDs are a great resource because in North America every film has French subtitles available. And of course, french films have english subtitles. But french films rarely have french subtitles available. So you can't read the words and listen to the rapid dialog at the same time in order to get a feel about the different phonemic structures between french and english. Hollywood films in english always have the english titles available for the deaf people. They usually match the dialog closely.
Anyway, seriously study french before going to Quebec (including Montreal). It will be worth it because you won't feel extreme culture shock that comes from being illinguate (a word that I made up meaning to be unable to understand the local language).
Any you won't have any illusions about Canada being a distant part of the USA. Guam is distant part of the USA, Quebec isn't. And if Sarah Palin isn't sure if I'm correct, ignore her. Why is anyone still paying attention to anything she says? Shouldn't she have been a WalMart greeter instead of a Republican governor? Is there a difference?
Isn't it amazing how all of these advancements show up...
But they don't show up. Of all the hundreds of news stories of amazing technologies that have appeared on Slashdot over the past ten years, how many can you just go out and buy at Target or Home Depot?
None.
Maybe one or two. probably not.
Any announcement of an amazing technological breakthrough that appears on Slashdot generally stays that. A press release of an amazing technological breakthrough that's going to solve a major problem. How much of this amazing technology actually becomes purchasable product? Next to none, if not none.
Sad but true. Most of the stories that you read on Slashdot about amazing technological breakthroughs are just bullshit. Pipe dreams. Fantasies of techno-nerds hallucinating from watching too much Star Trek and fed to gullible but lovingly stupid media people.
Not to suggest the obvious, but the publishers seriously want to sell used games then they could take the games that aren't sold after a period of time and sell the at half the price of new games.
It's just software. And with software you have relatively high fixed costs for development and then you have practically no marginal costs for selling the product. Suppose for the first year, you sell X number of games of a title at $69, .3X at $69 the second year, and .1X units at $69 in the third year. Used games are selling .4X units at $30 in the third year. 0.4X times $30 brings more revenue than 0.1X times $69.
So just price the unsold new games of that title at slightly less than the used games of that title are selling for. Since you have no marginal costs on your sales product, you will be profitable. But no, you're a fucking marketing major and math is hard, so you want to pass a law to prohibit any 'advanced' business model that your little brain doesn't understand.
I'm surprised that with so many game companies in New England, no one seems to have adopted the sales model of Filene's basement.
Salt?!? WTF?
Yes, salt. We not only have a serious petroleum problem, but also a big fresh, potable water problem. There's not enough to support the massively growing populations and the industries that consume hundreds of millions of gallons of it. Industries like integrated circuit manufacturing.
But the world is two-thirds water. However it is mixed with 23% salt: sodium chloride. We can separate the salt from the sea water, but it currently uses a lot of petroleum to do so. Today the areas that have the greatest need for fresh water derived from the sea tend to have a lot of petroleum nearby. That will change as the easy-to-reach oil is consumed and population grows in oil-poor lands.
We have also lots of sand. Sand can be melted into glass, which can be shaped into lenses that can focus the sunlight to evaporate the water from the salt. It's a big and complicated project, but we can do it.
But we end up with a lot of salt. Mountains of the stuff.
We have another great need. We've cut down many of the forests that has provided our basic housing building material. The alternatives such as brick and steel is expensive.
We need some way to transform the mountains of salt into cheap, workable, flexible, strong, and bio-degradable building materials to build housing, pipelines, aqueducts, and all the other things needed now for the massively growing population. We need chemists who can transform NaCl into new and presently-unknown materials. And to produce a new class of materials in a environmentally-friendly manner. And to do new material manufacturing in ways that will scale both up and down in order to supply millions of new jobs for all types of economies.
Any chemists need a serious challenge? Or, looking for a doctoral thesis topic?
...some of the South Pacific islanders in Vanuatu have explained their motivation for cannibalism as "people are tasty",
Vanuatu, isn't that where Kazaa was incorporated? Do you think that this might be the real reason why they disappeared so suddenly?
Huh?
This guy is crazy to submit to this test. Here is a (near) pseudo-science test being applied to him with a loaded question that can have only one possible correct and right answer. And the machine is not assured to give him that correct answer. And he does it in a nationally published magazine.
Suppose this machine 'proved' that he was more turned on by a professional sexpot movie star than his own wife. Do you think that she would ...ever... let him live that down? If you say yes, then you don't know anything about women...go fuck your compiler.
Thirty years from now they have some silly disagreement. She says "..but you don't really love me..." He says " but, darling, honey, of course I do..." She says, "no, you really don't, and that machine proved it!".
There are some questions that have only one possible correct answer, regardless of what might be the 'truth'. The most important one is when your wife or girlfriend asks you " do you really love me?". Guys, listen to this, this is important, the only possible thing that you can ever say when this collection of sounds hits your ears is "YES". No hesitation, no ..uh.., no ponderous meaningful silences, just 'yes'. Anything else that you could say or not say would be taken by her to mean 'no, I don't love you'. It just takes one 'no' and she will never believe you next 10 million times that you say "yes, I love you".
Another example of question that has only one possible answer is when someone who has the ability and the inclination to destroy your life asks you: "Have you ever used drugs?" Here the only possible answer is NO!, even if you're standing there with a joint dangling from your lips. Please don't forget this as it may come in useful some day.
A third example is when someone is pointing a gun at you and asks you, "Do you believe in...". Fellas, this is not an occasion for amicable discussion imbued with gentle irony. Chuck it up, smile, and shout 'YES!'. I believe in jumpin' Jehovah, the lizard king, the holy rock, the flying pizza monster, whatever, and add that you're overwhelming glad to find another true believer, and " could you ...uh... maybe ...uh... put down that gun?"
So you or anyone else in the world has nothing to gain by allowing yourselves to hooked up to some machine and be asked one of the questions that have only one possible answer, and gambling that the machine affirms that you actually and truly believe that you are giving the right answer. You have nothing to gain if the machine says 'yes, he's telling the truth' and everything to lose if the machine indicates otherwise.
It's like playing Russian Roulette.
Maybe it was just the French who were eating the Neanderthals. That would go a long way towards explaining that certain 'je ne sais quois' difference between them and all the rest of humanity.
The kids tripping on acid during the Summer of Love mostly turned into fear-freaks who relentlessly elected NeoCon Evangeliban to office.
This is a generational cliché. The 'Summer of Love' was 1967 and at that time there were no kids tripping. LSD didn't hit the American high schools throughout the country in a big way until the early 1970s. There is still a lot of debate about just how this managed to happen, but it did.
The number of people involved in the hippy counter-culture in the 1960s was actually very small, maybe 2-3% of the 18-25 year olds at the time 1967. They got a lot of press for being colorful and very noticeable, but there weren't a whole lot of them. The vast majority of American teens in 1967 were not much different from the teens of 1957 or 1997, they were just all normal people.
Much of what people think of as 60's behavior and mentality actually took place in the mid to late 1970s. This actually was a weird time with a lot of weed smoking and a lot of tripping. But most of the teenage tripping on LSD happened in the years 1971-1974 and then rapidly faded. Again no one is exactly sure why this social phenonemon happened at this time.
Here on the west coast we have a lot of the people still around who actually were the tripping hippies in the '67 Summer of Love. They, the ones that survived and didn't go mad (about 85% of them), are generally quietly prosperous, middle-class and politically liberal.
There are a few radical hippies that turned conservative, such as the respected David Horowitz. But they were mostly radical new-left people from Berkeley and not San Francisco hippies.
I realize that all this now 'doesn't mean shit to a tree' (an expression of that time), and, with time, political enemies get grouped together by subsequent generations as artifacts of a past and irrelevant era. But still it is best to avoid the trap of generational clichés in public forums.
Thank you.
You think a few million will cover that? I think not.
Of course it will. Get the money, transfer it out of the USA to the Caymans or Luxembourg, and move to a nice beautiful discrete villa on the outskirts of some major city in or near a cocaine-producing country where the blow is cheap. Like say, Lima Peru.
Marry a beautiful young proper landed old-family upper-class girl who likes to have sex and who's family is experiencing a cash flow problem. Learn Spanish, meet your neighbors, learn the local customs, go to local cultural events, have your wife's family and friends teach you all that you need to say and do to be treated respectfully in your newly-adopted country. Go to Mass once or twice a year. Make some noticeable donations to local respected charities. Make a few unnoticeable donations to local police department's widows and orphans fund. Keep up appearances and indulge your appetites discretely. Know your limits but keep expanding them.
Do this and your millions will last a long, long time. Party Hardy, dude.
The economy is disintegrating, take the money now. You can always give it back later if you feel bad about it.
Let me repeat, the 20th century is over. The dot-com boom is long over. The bubble economy is over. Serious economists are predicting deflation. Sell out while you can. Take the money and let them deal with the problems that will happen if the economy does tank and the market for your currently-popular product goes away.
Let me sum it all up in one three letter word: AOL. Ten years ago, people thought that their stock price was going to continue to grow so big that it would eclipse the entire Time magazine: Warner Bros. studio conglomerate. Now they're just the lingering bad smell of a fart. Can you imagine how bad Steve Case would feel now if he didn't sell out for billions back then when he was more popular than Elvis? AOL is nothing now, but he still has...ALL...THOSE...BILLIONS...OF...DOLLARS.
Sell out now, fool. Why are you even asking us such a silly question? If you sell out and the business is good, you'll still be a company god and get even more money through your stock options and bonuses. If the start-up tanks, you'll still have all the money and you can walk away with none of the problems. Think of your kids. No kids yet? Well then sell out, find a beautiful wife or two and go make a dozen. and don't forget the pre-nup.
95% of the people who use computers are using Windows applications. (Don't mod me to -1 'cause you have a stat saying it's actually 93.7%, schmuck). The vast majority of the bazillions of people running computers are running Windows aps on Windows.
Why? Because they work. They do what needs to be done. And primarily because people know how to use them to do what they are using them for.
So if you want 'your' operating system (Mbuutuu, Umbongo,... whatever the fuck it is...Why did you give it such a bizarre name if you wanted it to be widely used and be taken seriously?) to be as used by all the bazillions of people who are using computers, then it better run Windows aps,... and run them well. Better than Windows, for that matter. Because nobody is going to shift to 'your' operating system unless Windows either stops working, or evolves into such a pain-in-the-ass to use (with endless pop-up windows and BSODs) that people are willing to risk switching away from Windows. And if Windows works, which it does...currently.. then why bother switching when you can't be sure that the alternative that you are being forced to switch to is actually going to work and you aren't having to go through some mutha-fugging 'learning experience' just to get back to the level of applications computer skills that you already have under Windows.
So, in the real world, 'your' operating system (Mbuutuu, Umbongo,... whatever the fuck it is...Why did you give it such a bizarre name if you wanted it to be widely used and be taken seriously?) isn't going to be used by the vast majority of people until you need to be a serious computer expert in order to tell 'your' operating system (Mbuutuu, Umbongo,... whatever the fuck it is...Why did you give it such a bizarre name if you wanted it to be widely used and be taken seriously?) from Windows.
What I'm saying is. You have to be indistinguishable from Windows AND better than Windows before millions are going to switch to 'your' operating system (Mbuutuu, Umbongo,... whatever the fuck it is...Why did you give it such a bizarre name if you wanted it to be widely used and be taken seriously?) from Windows.
Heresy, talking like this on Slashdot. But truth is always heresy. Get used to it. Move on. Fix the things that people hate about Windows with 'your' operating system (Mbuutuu, Umbongo,... whatever the fuck it is...Why did you give it such a bizarre name if you wanted it to be widely used and be taken seriously?) and everyone will switch.
But....
Our operating system is `~free~`. Well, la de da, everything is free if you don't pay for it. And who actually pays for Windows? It comes with computer that you buy. It comes with the computer that was issued to you at your work. It comes with every computer that you buy second-hand on CraigsList. For all realistic perspectives from the average computer user, Windows is -free-, too. If you're buying thousands of licenses for your corporate group, well of course it's not free. But you're not an average computer user.
Just put a few drops of hashish oil into their coffee each day. The amount is so small that they won't feel stoned, and it will accumulate in their bodies.
Then after a week or so, call them in for a 'random' urine test. The test will show (horror upon horror!) molecular traces of THC in their urine and you will have NO PROBLEM firing them, denying them unemployment, getting them thrown out of public housing, getting any professional license revoked, and just generally screwing up their All-American lifestyle forever.
Works every time. Done in the USA to hundreds of people daily for twenty years now.
Seriously, it's how we got rid of the asshole gung-ho Neidermeier officers back in the 1980's when I was in the US Navy. One positive test and they were gone: no appeal, no second-test review, no $2000 gas-spectraography review confirmation, no nothing. A few drops a day and the assholes disappear. Took the JAG years to realize that we were doing this, but we were out of 'service' by then.
It's like judo. You use your opponent's fanaticism against them.
But time has passed and wounds have healed. If you were booted out of the military for failing a drug test and you are the kind of person who never did or never would get high, then it probably happened to you. Think back about who you were seriously pissing off at the time. It was probably one of us.
We're not sorry. The military is better place because we did it. There was no permanent, endless war at the time and this was the easiest way to get rid of the psychos who would have gotten us all killed when the PEW finally arrived after 9/11.
I agree. No one who has sold 100000 toys for about $300 each is, has, or will ever go broke. Either they are lying, self-delusional (their sales department sleezos have invented sales to get undeserved commissions), or they have stolen the money and defrauded their investors, or they are completely incompetent in business. Or they have been paying fat and happy robotics engineers $120/hour for years to design toys that can move pieces of colored silicone into cute funny faces. Probably a combination of all of the above.
The idea that there would be an auction for intellectual property is absurd. Intellectual property is an oxymoron that only makes sense as a legal concept when it is kept as secret and as expensive as possible. No one would pay money at an auction for trade secrets that lose their financial value when the company that developed them goes bankrupt and their so-called intellectual property becomes non-secret during the process. If the company is based on so-called intellectual property that must remain trade secret to retain its value and the company goes bankrupt, then the company has no value and neither does its trade secrets.
These morons should have simply made their toys a little smaller, used smaller motors and die-chip-sized processors and sold their toys for $30. Then they wouldn't be bankrupt. Bankruptcy is what always happens when marketing majors get drunk with dim-witted venture capitalists. Smart engineers are always looking to put teams of these bozos together and then be standing in the right place when it starts raining money.
Every time that a space and lunar exploration story has run on Slashdot for the past three years, I have answered it with a reminder that space and lunar exploration is a fantasy because the USA is ...well... stone dead broke.
And every time that I point this out, my message gets zapped to -1. And I always get replies that I am (1) a luddite, (2) a moron, (3) an asshole, (4) a fool who doesn't understand how absolutely important space and lunar exploration to human existence, and (5) a twit who doesn't realize that the space and lunar exploration programs are already blasting off because the money has been fully allocated for the next lunar and martian Apollo missions and vast teams of engineers are working on it right now as we speak.
Well, as it should have been obvious to anyone who is not collecting a fat pay check from NASA or isn't a total Tekkie buffoon, the USA actually is broke, politicians lie, budgets can be quietly revised, and whatever importance space and lunar exploration actually does have for human existence, it's going to have to wait for another hundred years or so. Get used to it because it is your reality.
You aren't going to see people walking on the moon or Mars in your lifetime. You will be lucky if in thirty or forty years from now if you can rent a tiny car once a year and drive to what once a shiny mall back in the glorious Lindsey_Lohan-cute_superstar era (before she converted to Islam and became president).
So, be a mensch, and stop modding me down to -1 for simply pointing out the plain honest truth to you'all. Be thankful that someone is willing to do it.
Come'on Slashdaughters, the 20th century is over. The boom times generated by cheap oil is passing. There will continue to be fantastic scientific discoveries, but they won't be implemented in the same way that they were in the era of your youth. With exploding populations, financial disintegration, and environmental collapse, we will be lucky if we are able to marshal all our scientific, engineering, and political skills to maintain a lifestyle for our special class of people that is equal to 1900, forget about returning to the era of 2000, which will only be available to the rumored ultra-rich 'cloud people'.
So get real, delicious Slashdaughters, and stop thinking about space and think about place. Your place in the real world. The cold dark world.
A weird weapon, it only works if you don't use it... shades of WarGames.
Nuclear weapons have solved the problem of national defense, but at a stiff price. In the past, there was always someone out there who thought that they could just come to your country or piece of ground, kick your ass, steal everything of value, rape your women, and turn your (and your women's) children into their slaves to buy, sell, fuck, or work to death as they please.
Hell, we even did it ourselves and got away with it for a long time. Your ancestors did also to your neighbors. And your neighbors did it to you. It's quite possible that you are thinking right now about doing it to someone.
It's not a bad idea, actually. You get all the benefits and you get to kill off all the assholes and bullies in your society that would make your life miserable if they weren't occupied by raging, raping, and pillaging someone else, somewhere else. Excuse me, I meant to say "turn all our brave boys into heroes or martyrs, proudly serving in our nation's defense..." Same thing.
However, there are some countries that no-one imagines or seriously plans to conquer and enslave. These countries have, at great expense, developed refrigerator-sized machines that convert hydrogen into helium in the most environmentally-insensitive way imaginable. When someone shows up at the border for a little bit of the old in-out, they get met with a few of these hydrogen-to-helium converters thrown their way, along with a few tossed through outer space to the folks back home.
What a mess. Basically the consequences of having to deal with having hydrogen-to-helium machines thrown your way far exceeds the joys and profits in ravishing and pillaging your neighbors. So you find something else to do. And we have world peace. Peace through machines. Not microprocessor-controlled dildos, or cool stereos playing groovy music, but through hydrogen bombs.
One small problem: If you have a few of these hydrogen-to-helium conversion machines, it's real easy to get your friends and neighbors to give you their stash and daughters. Without having to go through the trouble of violently taking it. Just go to their embassy with a list in one hand and picture of the H2H machine in the other. Don't say a word; they'll get the message.
So they want a few of the H2H machines themselves. And the more that there are around, the more likely that some one, somewhere, for some reason, under some God's direction, justified by some ancient holy book, is going to set them off. Which is bad for business.
So an elaborate game evolves. You pretend that you are going to use them if it were to happen that someone might assume that they could pretend to do something that would piss you off, if it were possible that it could ever happen.
And, success, you get world peace. Civilized people don't fuck with each other any more. Giant corporations can pretend that chickenshit things like trading MP3 files are a major issue, and other fantasies.
The only problem is when weirdos and fanatics get the H2H devices. And you don't know if they are going to be willing and able to play the 'pretend that we use them' game. So you can ignore them and hope for the best, as we do with nuclear powers like Israel and Japan ( please don't insult our intelligence by telling me that the Japanese don't have hydrogen-to-helium conversion machines), or you can threaten to kick their ass in advance if they cross a certain line that you and the other civilized nations have drawn in the sand (Pakistan and Korea). Or, if you're lucky, you can just buy them off and get them to surrender their H2H machines (and their U238 little brothers), like South Africa and the Ukraine.
Anyway, back to the point. You don't want to use the H2H converters for anyt
Is this really true? I grew up in Massachusetts and studied French there. Most people there don't realize that the country on the other side of the border is a French speaking one. I was amazed and surprised the first time that I hitchhiked to Quebec. No, seriously, I didn't know that not only was a Quebec a Francophone nation, it was a strictly francophone nation. English just ...stops... about two meters from the border.
Having two years of high-school French helped offset the culture shock somewhat. But only now am I beginning to be able to understand anything that anyone says to me in French. People understand what I say to them: I just don't understand anything that is said to me. Being in a place (Oregon) that is 3000 kilometers from any French speaking people doesn't help. I can get Montreal radio stations in French through steaming FM audio, but I can only understand about one word in ten.
DVDs help. Due to the insistance of the Parti Quebecqois, French is an official language of the NAFTA alliance. Even though there are 350 million English speakers, 120 million Spanish speakers, and only 7 million French speakers in the NAFTA countries. All the DVDs of newer Hollywood movies are translated twice into French. Unfortunately, the audio translation and the subtitle translations NEVER match each other. You can't select French audio and French subtitles, focus on the spoken words and follow them with the subtitles the way that you can with the English subtitles (that are available for deaf people). It would be fantastic for language learning if this were possible, especially for vowel-rich languages like French and Spanish that are spoken about twice as fast as English.
By the way, I've never been able to hear any difference between Quebecqois French and Parisian French. People have told me that "people in Quebec don't speak French, they speak some French-like dialect". That is nonsense.
Just how different is Quebec French from Parisian French? Are vowel sounds elongated, as in the difference between North Carolina English and 'Omaha' (television standard) English? Is the rhthym and the vocabulary markedly different, like Jamica English and 'Omaha' English?
Are they nearly mutually incomprehensible, like Spanish from Madrid vs that of Barcelona?
Any chance that I can get a few semi-serious replies instead of being mod'ed down to -1?
Prepare to be disappointed, all ye lunar colonist fans.
Your country is bankrupt. Your government is spending multi-TRILLION dollars to bail-out the rich from their stupidity. You have permanent endless expensive wars in distant and inconsequential lands. You depend on indifferent foreign governments to buy your government bonds that finance the huge debt that previous administrations have incurred.
It's not going to far in the future before the world pulls the plug on America.
When that happens the first thing that will be discarded will be the lunar colonization aspect of the space program.
Get used to it. Don't blame me for saying this. Don't mod me to down to -1 for bringing up an inconvenient truth.
Sure, the space program is cool. And important to the humanity's future. And the key to our (us techno-geeks that is) continued prosperity.
And it will happen.
But not in our lifetimes. It will happen two or three hundred years in the future. Not in 2020.
I KNOW a lot of people here are going to be pissed and feeling backstabbed when President Obama cancels the lunar-exploration projects sometime in the next three to five years. But it is an inevitability. So prepare yourself for it.
Thank you,
A realistic and pragmatic person on Earth, home of all life.
This situation comes up whenever I get a new job in a company. I want to use MY software that has been configured by ME specifically to make ME more productive.
I've spent twenty years working in situations where one company uses WordBozo and another company uses BozoWord. In WordBozo the combination moves the cursor back one space and in BozoWord the same combination erases the hard disk. I've reached the point where I just assume that I am going to use the text editor that I know and trained my fingers to use the commands efficently regardless whatever the company uses for its 'official' word processor. I don't care. I'm not going to learn any new user interfaces for general-purpose software. Like text editors and graphics imaging/drawing programs.
So I discretely use MY software with MY user interface which makes ME productive. Which makes THEM money. And, to be quite frank and honest, at this point I don't give a F*** about what any software lawyer, BSA flack, or IT manager thinks about it. If they can't change the user interface of THEIR software to fit the commands that MY fingers have memorized, then that is their problem, not MINE.
If your software doesn't have a customizable user interface, then it's junk and you shouldn't be selling it. It's not professional by 21st century standards.
So I discretely bring MY productivity software to work, whereever I work, on flash drives. And I discretely use it. And I remain productive. Which is what really matters in the 21st century with its self-destructive economy.
All software lawyers are fools because they don't accept this situation. Any IT manager that doesn't accept this situation is a fool also.
And, why work for fools???
It makes a little sense to stop secondhand resale of near luxury items for the original manufacturers. But only when the economy is growing and everyone has money to spend.
We are entering a new era. Most people are not going to have the money to spend on near-luxury goods at 20th century prices. But it will take a long time for the manufacturers to realize this.
If the manufacturers were smart they would get a list of all the people who attempted to buy and sell used their near-luxury goods from the watchdog groups that are forcing the sales off eBay. Then they would sell directly to these people themselves slightly flawed or returned goods. They would negotiate the price and terms themselves.
Sure it would take a lot of work. But there are a lot of people out of work. And they would control the market for their products.
But, again, it's going to take a long time before the manufacturers leave their 20th century mentality behind. Many manufacturers will never adapt to the new economic conditions and disappear. Whole industries like the recorded music industry are disappearing because as a group that is totally infected with lemming mentality, their executives can't adapt to the 21th century.
The one good thing about Creationism is that it forces teachers to present the scientific method to the students at a much earlier age. Often the nuts and volts of the skepticism that is the core process of science is skipped over in schools.
Children will say that my pastor showed me a picture of the dinosaurs and the cavemen living together. The teacher will explain that there is a difference between a painting and a photograph, and that with a certain skill, one can paint a picture of anything that looks reasonably like a near-photo.
Children will say that the earth was created in six days, 4000 years ago. Well we weren't there to witness this. But we can show records and artifacts (ones that weren't stolen from the Baghdad museum) that are over 4000 years old.
Creationism forces teachers to instill a spirit of skepticism in students. "I don't believe you, prove it" mentality that is more important that the facts themselves.
Atmel is SO much better than any PIC. Atmel AVR microcontrollers are individually cheaper. They run at least four times faster for the same clock speed (one instruction per clock cycle instead of one instruction per four clocks for the PIC). They have a vastly more versatile and flexible instruction set. The AVRs are designed to be used with high level languages like Open Source GCC, not kluged BASIC for high school kids that the PICs use in their absurdly overpriced 'training' packages. Most AVRs now have the same boot-loader capacities that this PICAXE package is offering.
I use AVRs for sound programmer/editors based on hardware MIDI synthesizers like the Yamaha TX81Z. It's nearly impossible to do any MIDI work in Windows. The MIDI APIs in Windows are difficult, incomprehensible, and nearly undocumented. It's a real mess and will never get any better. The hell with it. I do all my MIDI development now for $3 AVR processors and $5 graphic and character LCD screens. Developing for the AVR is like being back the 1980s writing assembler for the Commodore 64 and Turbo C for DOS. But everything is 1/10th to 1/100th of the cost that it was then. And there are no !@#$%^& ultra-violet EPROM erasers needed. Check out my open source hardware synth editors on the Yahoo! Yamaha DX group(s).
For the flash drives, fill them with your favorite MP3 songs, hundreds of them. Then trade them with other people who are doing the same. Trade a 512Mb drive for one the same size with someone in your office or class. If you are a student, try setting up an underground library where other students contribute flash drives filled with various genres of music, like alt-country or 19th-century German classical. Trade or 'check out' these flash drives from this underground library instead of doing file downloading. This way you can get hundreds of songs at one time without exposing yourself to the RIAA extortionists.
For SATA and IDE drives, get a USB-to-IDE/SATA interface for about $20. These drives can now be used as unplugged backup of things like movies, music libraries, and huge data banks. This is for things that you access several times a year and don't need to always be on your main PC/laptop hard drive.