They have a reliable and well tested system, why doesn't NASA use that?
Because we really do need more than a crew of 3 for any real science or construction work. Not to mention that it'd be nice to have something we can leave up on the ISS for more than, what is it, 6 months at at time?
What psychological research has shown is that rats exposured to higher levels of stress in the experimental condition do mature faster than control rats. This "maturity" level in rats is measured by behavioral pattern exhibition. Of course, we are not sure if this general research can extend to humans -- it would be unethical to conduct experimental studies in humans.
Did you, by chance, RTFA? "Maturity" is implied to be a state of stunted expansion, and the "immature" ability to adapt to new situations is suggested to be caused by not by the civilized method of child-rearing, but by the higher fiscal reward given to those who can adapt to new situations.
Do I draw from "pop psychology and intuition" to make my point? Yes. That's the venue we're talking in. Psychology is still a young enough science that its terms of art are out of sync with standard language. There's nothing "immature", as the term is used in TFA, about liking fart jokes or not paying one's bills on time. In fact, an "immature" person would be better able to stop liking fart jokes and pay their bills on time than a "mature" person, once they are convinced that doing so is benefical to them.
Of course, we are not sure if this general research can extend to humans -- it would be unethical to conduct experimental studies in humans.
It would take no more than a simple statistical suvey to show the exact same correlation in Humans -- when we are introduced to stress, we start exhibiting more adult-like behaviors. The 11-year old who has to start earning money to feed his mother and siblings is going to stop wanting to go to McDonalds every day and is likey to stop worrying about his toys.
But that's not the measure of maturity, as the OP and common usage use the word. Thinking that it is make me think that you're, to use your word, "stupid."
If I see one more Microsoft fanboy say Vista is the "biggest change since Windows 3.1 to Windows 95," I'm going to scream, because you're just quoting goofy marketing brochures.
Nope. Win3.11 was a GUI that ran Win16 apps over DOS. Win95 was a fancier GUI that ran Win32 apps over DOS and introduced a new default layout to the file system.
WinXP is a GUI-native OS that runs Win32 apps. WinVista is a GUI-native OS that runs Win64 apps, Win32 apps, has a fancier GUI, and has significant changes to its security model, driver model, and file system layout.
If you think Vista is only as much a change as Win98 -- which was barely more than installing IE by default -- you don't know what you're talking about. Stop making the F/OS crowd look bad.
I think part of the problem might be that people are not forced to grow up and take responsibility at such a young age as they were before.
Nope, sorry.
The friends of mine who HAVE had to take responsibility at a young age, who HAVE gone to bed with hunger pains (and not out of choice) are far more immature and unable to take care of themselves than those of us who were children until the age of 18. Being introduced to hardship doesn't cause one to grow up faster -- it causes one to stop growing and start muddling through, even if they're not ready.
If you look at the rate of war, murder, and general chaos, you'll find that those regions of the world where children are not allowed to mature before being forced to act like adults are far worse off than places like the west. While I won't argue that western children are "spoiled" far more often than their african counterparts -- I think I'd rather my children be spoiled than broken.
It's windows XP + more CPU and RAM usage. Nothing special or useful
Unless you count the new start menu, the "sleep" mode (suspend to hibernate), the 3d-based Aero Glass, the "everybody's a user" security model, the sidebar, the new XPS print system, the bundle of included apps, the new WiFi networking model that can remember which security settings for which network, the new "Performance Statistcits" page on the computer management, and few hundred changes I haven't noticed yet. (Oh, and there's 64-bit support, to boot.)
Vista is easily the biggest change in Windows since the 3.11 / Win95 upgrade. To say that it's "just more CPU and RAM usage" is just FUD. (In fact, if you trim down Vista to match a trimmed down XP, I think Vista actually runs faster.)
Oh, and while you can probably say that most, if not all, of the new features are taken from OS X or Linux or what-have-you -- just because somebody else had it first doesn't mean that it's not an improvement.
Actually, it's the universe that doesn't change. Physics -- the body of science that explores how said Universe works -- changes all the time, relatively speaking.
Remember: the difference between the thing and our model of the thing is rather significant.
. No document is free if it's encoded in one of Microsoft's proprietry formats.
Right now, today, anyone who can't read a.doc file is either ignorant or obtuse. I think I might have one device that can read a text file and not a.doc format -- and most of them have at least two ways to read that format installed..doc is never going to get worse than it is today, because.docx and.docm (the new Office formats) are compressed XML, just like the old OOo format (albeit with a different schema.)
Are proprietary formats potentially very harmful? Yes. Is.doc a harmful format, because of its proprietary nature? No. (It's harmful because of it's word-processing nature, being really a WYSIWYM format that pretends to be WYSIWYG.)
Why isn't media created free/public domain unless its creator wants it protected?... ?
We tried that. Publishing companies (think of RIAA, but without the need for good PR) simply said that the author didn't delcare a copyright, and made millions without giving a dime to said author until they were taken to court.
It's trivial to make something public domain. CC makes it a bit more complicated, but they do have a theoretical way to authenticate what is and is not allowed, which nicely removes the only problem with public domain -- it can be hard to verify.
Require descriptions of what makes it offensive, describe what *exactly* it is that is being banned
They don't do this for two (well, three) reasons.
1: It makes laws unreadable. Don't believe me? Go poke around the NYS laws (www.senate.state.ny.us), and you'll see ample proof. (A few aren't bad, but keep reading if you think it's clear.)
2: If laws are stiff in what they mean, it's easy for someone to do exactly what the law is supposed to prevent, but avoid the law's consequences.
3: Laws are made by political committees. It's hard to get a large body to agree to the more complex of two choices.
At least they wouldn't be if the oil companies didn't havev their way.
Wow, I didn't think that people trolled journals.
Just in case you're missing the point, though -- there have been several points in the past century where, if it was possible just to achieve a two-fold increase in fuel economy without significant sacrafice (let alone the ten-fold of the magic carb.), it would have been done. One of those points is today.
people could eventually be arrested for anything at all
And this is why you MUST serve on jury duty. Because only with reasoned, concientious jurors does our system of laws really work.
When you get right down to it, the law isn't what Congress says, or the President, or the police, or even the judge. The law is what the people, through a jury, say.
...because we have forgotten the true purpose of a government...
Balderdash. The Romans thought the purpose of government was to bring glory to the people. The medieval christians thought the purpose of government was to spread the gospel. The chineese thought the purpose of government was to maintain the celestial order. Our own founding fathers may have had their own ideas about what they were forming our government for, but today that same structure is seen both as a way to make a profit, a way to protect unintelligent things, an avenue for power, and a thing to be avoided -- depending on who you talk to.
The purpose of a government is to do whatever those that give the government power want it to do. Anything more is just philisophical "should"-ing, and should always be dismissed until the points so made are affirmitvely proven.
For 200 users, with user-level security, you just need to find a tech willing to actually spend the time to make Access work. 2007 has plenty of additional gizmos, incluing a new "attachment" data type to, well, store those documetns you can't really store in Access.
(You can store Images in Access. You use the "image" file type.)
Now, if you just want to upgrade their database, the SINGLE CHEAPEST thing you can do is setup SQL Server 2005 Express. Access can upgrade itself to use the server (Use the "SQL Database Engine" if you're version-shy), and you gain all of those things that you don't have now.
They did get somewhat reasonable in Windows towards the end with the Radeon, but then they introduced that insane.net based control panel in Windows - WTF were they thinking?
that.net is a free-beer environment that the OS author is heavily pushing?
yeah, that'd be it..Net is not Passport. Not having.Net on your Windows box is like not having MSHTML or MSI. Sure, it'll work, but you'll keep running into software that presumes that you actually install this sort of thing.
If XPS is anything like Word in terms of layout it's equally useless. XPS has to be something a typesetter could use professionally before it's even remotely useful.
Odd, I'd have thought that "remotely useful" would be the first step, and "use professionally" be the goal. (Oh, and XPS *is* supposed to be much different. But I haven't looked at it--and neither have you, if you're judging a print-file format by the word-processing format that will most often lead to it.)
Knowing Microsofts lack of standards and interoperability compliance you can be assured the Vista software for it won't give you this.
MS is great for standards, but only so long as they're the ones who wrote them. In fact, if you take MS as an authority for all standards, they're fairly good about it, too. So, it's not that they don't want standards and interoperability. It's that they want THEIR standards and THEIR interopability.
What you should be questioning is why XPS exists at all.
Well, that's an easy answer. "Because Microsoft drank the XML xool-aid"
XPS is an XML-based page-layout format. Instead of the arcane postscript, MS has set their new printer-layer to use this XML format. Which means that, theoretically, anyone with enough time can both write to and read from an XPS file. And, like Adobe, they also have a viewer downloadable from their website: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/viewxps.mspx. (No, I have no idea what an mspx file is. But it looks like HTML to firefox, so I don't really care.)
Now, we can gripe that only Windows can view these, but then again nothing that writes XPS is even released for sale yet.
Considering the cost to transmit the ROM images are mere pennies, even in the worst case, the rest is practically straight profit on something that has cost you nothing else (unless the game failed to turn a profit when it was released in its original form).
You're forgetting overhead, quality support, and whatever expense they have from actually getting the original images from wherever they were archived into the new Virtual Console format.
Oh, and let's not forget the overhead for doing electronic transactions. It's not exactly "pennies". More like "dimes." Heck, I wouldnt' be surprised if their actual cost works out to over $1/ROM sale, before any theoretical customer support.
But there was no indecision by the Electoral College in 2000!
You're right. By the time it came for them to vote, Gore had already stepped down from the race.
What SHOULD have happened, once the ballots were found to be so close as to encourage a SCOTUS case, was to pass the decision either to Florida's legislature or Flordia's Congressional delegation. Bush would probably have still become President, but at least we wouldn't have those silly "he was selected, not elected" bumper stickers.
The lower population states, usually but not always Republican states, get most of the pork, earning far more Federal dollars than they pay in taxes, while the high population states almost always pay far more in taxes than they take in.
Where, exactly, is the room for a particle accellerator or artillery range in Rhode Island?
For no good reason, the Military tilts Republican. The military is the biggest government discretionary expense. Low-population states have the most extra room, which the military needs. Ergo, most big military projects are set up in low-population states, causing them to tilt Republican.
In fact, wasn't the President simply elected by the House of Represenatives at first?
Yes, but not in the way you think. The pre-Constitutional Colonial Congress (issued the Declaration of Independence, started the revolution, et al) elected its own President, which was the first time Washington got the job. And the Articles-of-Confederation Congress elected its own executve, who wasn't even called "President."
But the strong Article 2 executive we have as the President was never elected primarily by the House. Only in the event of an indecision by the Electoral College does something like that happen -- such as what should have happened in 2000.
FWIW, when you vote for president you vote for an elector in your state, and essentially all states have a "winner take all" implementation of the election law. Your state has the same number of electors as members of Congress -- at least 3, one for each senator and one for the House representative.
Oh, and there are states that want to have either a different voting system for their electors, or that want to split their electors. The biggest argument against this is that it would let national campaigns marginalize low-population areas. Which, somehow, is better than marginalizing citizens who live in high-population areas.
I have heard horror stories about trying to get Word to do any sort of TOC/referencing/cross referencing automatically. When I try it, nothing works for me, but I could be doing it all wrong. Most people say they just go through the final draft and number everything by hand (figures, equations, references, etc.) crazy.
They probably are. Word has fine features for TOC and referencing, but you need to (1) not use document map, (2) turn off automatic styles, and (3) remember to use the right field-code.
Word 2007 seems to have MUCH better citation and referencing tools. But as it's summer and I'm doing anything that requires such, I can't tell you how well they actually work.
Re-read his comment. He's not saying bookmarking isn't in PDF, he's saying you don't get a bookmarked PDF if you print to a file then use ps2pdf (which is true) or use OO (which, I think, isn't).
I'm saying that you can't get a tagged & bookmarked PDF that way.
You could download a macro for OOo 1 that would add bookmarks, and I think they folded that in for OOo 2. But neither one will give you a tagged PDF.
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They have a reliable and well tested system, why doesn't NASA use that?
Because we really do need more than a crew of 3 for any real science or construction work. Not to mention that it'd be nice to have something we can leave up on the ISS for more than, what is it, 6 months at at time?
What psychological research has shown is that rats exposured to higher levels of stress in the experimental condition do mature faster than control rats. This "maturity" level in rats is measured by behavioral pattern exhibition. Of course, we are not sure if this general research can extend to humans -- it would be unethical to conduct experimental studies in humans.
Did you, by chance, RTFA? "Maturity" is implied to be a state of stunted expansion, and the "immature" ability to adapt to new situations is suggested to be caused by not by the civilized method of child-rearing, but by the higher fiscal reward given to those who can adapt to new situations.
Do I draw from "pop psychology and intuition" to make my point? Yes. That's the venue we're talking in. Psychology is still a young enough science that its terms of art are out of sync with standard language. There's nothing "immature", as the term is used in TFA, about liking fart jokes or not paying one's bills on time. In fact, an "immature" person would be better able to stop liking fart jokes and pay their bills on time than a "mature" person, once they are convinced that doing so is benefical to them.
Of course, we are not sure if this general research can extend to humans -- it would be unethical to conduct experimental studies in humans.
It would take no more than a simple statistical suvey to show the exact same correlation in Humans -- when we are introduced to stress, we start exhibiting more adult-like behaviors. The 11-year old who has to start earning money to feed his mother and siblings is going to stop wanting to go to McDonalds every day and is likey to stop worrying about his toys.
But that's not the measure of maturity, as the OP and common usage use the word. Thinking that it is make me think that you're, to use your word, "stupid."
Maybe I'm making some insane assumptions, and forgive me if I am, but you shouldn't be even close to broke at those numbers.
By "no money" he meant "no savings."
It's easy enough to do in America.
If I see one more Microsoft fanboy say Vista is the "biggest change since Windows 3.1 to Windows 95," I'm going to scream, because you're just quoting goofy marketing brochures.
Nope. Win3.11 was a GUI that ran Win16 apps over DOS. Win95 was a fancier GUI that ran Win32 apps over DOS and introduced a new default layout to the file system.
WinXP is a GUI-native OS that runs Win32 apps. WinVista is a GUI-native OS that runs Win64 apps, Win32 apps, has a fancier GUI, and has significant changes to its security model, driver model, and file system layout.
If you think Vista is only as much a change as Win98 -- which was barely more than installing IE by default -- you don't know what you're talking about. Stop making the F/OS crowd look bad.
I think part of the problem might be that people are not forced to grow up and take responsibility at such a young age as they were before.
Nope, sorry.
The friends of mine who HAVE had to take responsibility at a young age, who HAVE gone to bed with hunger pains (and not out of choice) are far more immature and unable to take care of themselves than those of us who were children until the age of 18. Being introduced to hardship doesn't cause one to grow up faster -- it causes one to stop growing and start muddling through, even if they're not ready.
If you look at the rate of war, murder, and general chaos, you'll find that those regions of the world where children are not allowed to mature before being forced to act like adults are far worse off than places like the west. While I won't argue that western children are "spoiled" far more often than their african counterparts -- I think I'd rather my children be spoiled than broken.
It's windows XP + more CPU and RAM usage. Nothing special or useful
Unless you count the new start menu, the "sleep" mode (suspend to hibernate), the 3d-based Aero Glass, the "everybody's a user" security model, the sidebar, the new XPS print system, the bundle of included apps, the new WiFi networking model that can remember which security settings for which network, the new "Performance Statistcits" page on the computer management, and few hundred changes I haven't noticed yet. (Oh, and there's 64-bit support, to boot.)
Vista is easily the biggest change in Windows since the 3.11 / Win95 upgrade. To say that it's "just more CPU and RAM usage" is just FUD. (In fact, if you trim down Vista to match a trimmed down XP, I think Vista actually runs faster.)
Oh, and while you can probably say that most, if not all, of the new features are taken from OS X or Linux or what-have-you -- just because somebody else had it first doesn't mean that it's not an improvement.
Actually, it's the universe that doesn't change. Physics -- the body of science that explores how said Universe works -- changes all the time, relatively speaking.
Remember: the difference between the thing and our model of the thing is rather significant.
. No document is free if it's encoded in one of Microsoft's proprietry formats.
.doc file is either ignorant or obtuse. I think I might have one device that can read a text file and not a .doc format -- and most of them have at least two ways to read that format installed. .doc is never going to get worse than it is today, because .docx and .docm (the new Office formats) are compressed XML, just like the old OOo format (albeit with a different schema.)
.doc a harmful format, because of its proprietary nature? No. (It's harmful because of it's word-processing nature, being really a WYSIWYM format that pretends to be WYSIWYG.)
Right now, today, anyone who can't read a
Are proprietary formats potentially very harmful? Yes. Is
Why isn't media created free/public domain unless its creator wants it protected? ... ?
We tried that. Publishing companies (think of RIAA, but without the need for good PR) simply said that the author didn't delcare a copyright, and made millions without giving a dime to said author until they were taken to court.
It's trivial to make something public domain. CC makes it a bit more complicated, but they do have a theoretical way to authenticate what is and is not allowed, which nicely removes the only problem with public domain -- it can be hard to verify.
Require descriptions of what makes it offensive, describe what *exactly* it is that is being banned
They don't do this for two (well, three) reasons.
1: It makes laws unreadable. Don't believe me? Go poke around the NYS laws (www.senate.state.ny.us), and you'll see ample proof. (A few aren't bad, but keep reading if you think it's clear.)
2: If laws are stiff in what they mean, it's easy for someone to do exactly what the law is supposed to prevent, but avoid the law's consequences.
3: Laws are made by political committees. It's hard to get a large body to agree to the more complex of two choices.
At least they wouldn't be if the oil companies didn't havev their way.
Wow, I didn't think that people trolled journals.
Just in case you're missing the point, though -- there have been several points in the past century where, if it was possible just to achieve a two-fold increase in fuel economy without significant sacrafice (let alone the ten-fold of the magic carb.), it would have been done. One of those points is today.
people could eventually be arrested for anything at all
And this is why you MUST serve on jury duty. Because only with reasoned, concientious jurors does our system of laws really work.
When you get right down to it, the law isn't what Congress says, or the President, or the police, or even the judge. The law is what the people, through a jury, say.
...because we have forgotten the true purpose of a government...
Balderdash. The Romans thought the purpose of government was to bring glory to the people. The medieval christians thought the purpose of government was to spread the gospel. The chineese thought the purpose of government was to maintain the celestial order.
Our own founding fathers may have had their own ideas about what they were forming our government for, but today that same structure is seen both as a way to make a profit, a way to protect unintelligent things, an avenue for power, and a thing to be avoided -- depending on who you talk to.
The purpose of a government is to do whatever those that give the government power want it to do. Anything more is just philisophical "should"-ing, and should always be dismissed until the points so made are affirmitvely proven.
1: oddly enough, the ATI videocard/northbridge on my laptop SAYS it has that panel, but it doesn't show up.
2: I wonder of ATI's control panel appelet is anywhere as bloated as Nvidia's "NView" widget.
For 200 users, with user-level security, you just need to find a tech willing to actually spend the time to make Access work. 2007 has plenty of additional gizmos, incluing a new "attachment" data type to, well, store those documetns you can't really store in Access.
(You can store Images in Access. You use the "image" file type.)
Now, if you just want to upgrade their database, the SINGLE CHEAPEST thing you can do is setup SQL Server 2005 Express. Access can upgrade itself to use the server (Use the "SQL Database Engine" if you're version-shy), and you gain all of those things that you don't have now.
They did get somewhat reasonable in Windows towards the end with the Radeon, but then they introduced that insane .net based control panel in Windows - WTF were they thinking?
.net is a free-beer environment that the OS author is heavily pushing?
.Net is not Passport. Not having .Net on your Windows box is like not having MSHTML or MSI. Sure, it'll work, but you'll keep running into software that presumes that you actually install this sort of thing.
that
yeah, that'd be it.
If XPS is anything like Word in terms of layout it's equally useless. XPS has to be something a typesetter could use professionally before it's even remotely useful.
Odd, I'd have thought that "remotely useful" would be the first step, and "use professionally" be the goal. (Oh, and XPS *is* supposed to be much different. But I haven't looked at it--and neither have you, if you're judging a print-file format by the word-processing format that will most often lead to it.)
Knowing Microsofts lack of standards and interoperability compliance you can be assured the Vista software for it won't give you this.
MS is great for standards, but only so long as they're the ones who wrote them. In fact, if you take MS as an authority for all standards, they're fairly good about it, too. So, it's not that they don't want standards and interoperability. It's that they want THEIR standards and THEIR interopability.
Well, that's an easy answer. "Because Microsoft drank the XML xool-aid"
XPS is an XML-based page-layout format. Instead of the arcane postscript, MS has set their new printer-layer to use this XML format. Which means that, theoretically, anyone with enough time can both write to and read from an XPS file. And, like Adobe, they also have a viewer downloadable from their website: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/viewxps.mspx. (No, I have no idea what an mspx file is. But it looks like HTML to firefox, so I don't really care.)
Now, we can gripe that only Windows can view these, but then again nothing that writes XPS is even released for sale yet.
Considering the cost to transmit the ROM images are mere pennies, even in the worst case, the rest is practically straight profit on something that has cost you nothing else (unless the game failed to turn a profit when it was released in its original form).
You're forgetting overhead, quality support, and whatever expense they have from actually getting the original images from wherever they were archived into the new Virtual Console format.
Oh, and let's not forget the overhead for doing electronic transactions. It's not exactly "pennies". More like "dimes." Heck, I wouldnt' be surprised if their actual cost works out to over $1/ROM sale, before any theoretical customer support.
But there was no indecision by the Electoral College in 2000!
You're right. By the time it came for them to vote, Gore had already stepped down from the race.
What SHOULD have happened, once the ballots were found to be so close as to encourage a SCOTUS case, was to pass the decision either to Florida's legislature or Flordia's Congressional delegation. Bush would probably have still become President, but at least we wouldn't have those silly "he was selected, not elected" bumper stickers.
The lower population states, usually but not always Republican states, get most of the pork, earning far more Federal dollars than they pay in taxes, while the high population states almost always pay far more in taxes than they take in.
Where, exactly, is the room for a particle accellerator or artillery range in Rhode Island?
For no good reason, the Military tilts Republican. The military is the biggest government discretionary expense. Low-population states have the most extra room, which the military needs. Ergo, most big military projects are set up in low-population states, causing them to tilt Republican.
But with LaTeX...
You're using a system that's segregated from how essentially the entire rest of the world works.
Why oh why does someone ALWAYS bring up LaTeX every time MS Office is mentioned? It's not a comparable system.
In fact, wasn't the President simply elected by the House of Represenatives at first?
Yes, but not in the way you think. The pre-Constitutional Colonial Congress (issued the Declaration of Independence, started the revolution, et al) elected its own President, which was the first time Washington got the job. And the Articles-of-Confederation Congress elected its own executve, who wasn't even called "President."
But the strong Article 2 executive we have as the President was never elected primarily by the House. Only in the event of an indecision by the Electoral College does something like that happen -- such as what should have happened in 2000.
FWIW, when you vote for president you vote for an elector in your state, and essentially all states have a "winner take all" implementation of the election law. Your state has the same number of electors as members of Congress -- at least 3, one for each senator and one for the House representative.
Oh, and there are states that want to have either a different voting system for their electors, or that want to split their electors. The biggest argument against this is that it would let national campaigns marginalize low-population areas. Which, somehow, is better than marginalizing citizens who live in high-population areas.
I have heard horror stories about trying to get Word to do any sort of TOC/referencing/cross referencing automatically. When I try it, nothing works for me, but I could be doing it all wrong. Most people say they just go through the final draft and number everything by hand (figures, equations, references, etc.) crazy.
They probably are. Word has fine features for TOC and referencing, but you need to (1) not use document map, (2) turn off automatic styles, and (3) remember to use the right field-code.
Word 2007 seems to have MUCH better citation and referencing tools. But as it's summer and I'm doing anything that requires such, I can't tell you how well they actually work.
Re-read his comment. He's not saying bookmarking isn't in PDF, he's saying you don't get a bookmarked PDF if you print to a file then use ps2pdf (which is true) or use OO (which, I think, isn't).
I'm saying that you can't get a tagged & bookmarked PDF that way.
You could download a macro for OOo 1 that would add bookmarks, and I think they folded that in for OOo 2. But neither one will give you a tagged PDF.