In Universal City Studios Inc. v. Reimerdes, a 2000 case out of the Southern District of New York, the question was whether a Web site distributing the code to crack DVD protection was in violation of the DMCA. Specifically, the defendants posted and linked to code that would strip the encryption from DVDs. The site's sister print publication had also run articles on (to quote U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan) "such topics as how to steal an Internet domain name, access other people's e-mail, intercept cellular phone calls, and break into the computer systems at Costco stores and Federal Express." That said, the defendants' postings were, after all, speech -- they communicated information to others. Further, others could have used the code for purely fair use ends.
Judge Kaplan nodded his head to fair use. Then he wrote, "The fact that Congress elected to leave technologically unsophisticated persons who wish to make fair use of encrypted copyrighted works without the technical means of doing so is a matter for Congress unless Congress' decision contravenes the Constitution." (The judge decided that it didn't.)
The judge is implying that the DMCA lets you hack protected technology for fair use purposes. But you have to do the hacking, and you have to conjure up, all by your lonesome, the code that lets you do it. Only computer geniuses need apply.
If you believe that the decision carries some weight in interpretation of the law, and with the columnists assertion of the implication, then you most certain can circumvent...you just have to do it yourself.
It will never come to pass, unless you equate instant on with standby, which we already have.
I have 2GB of RAM in my PC. It takes close to 4 minutes to go from cold to functional. Now, I have a slow hard drive - maybe 300Mb/s - but that still means that I should be able to load the memory completely full in less than 60 seconds. I can when I come out of hibernation, but somehow the disc will run continuously for 240+ seconds on boot? It has nothing to do with the memory, and more to do with the fact that all the things which run at startup (in XP) take so many resources.
FWIW, I could probably run my laptop stable using only standby and hibernation as it is pretty stable long-term, but to dock and undock causes all sorts of driver issues which render the machine almost useless for my necessary tasks. I'm forced to endure shutdown and startup, despite all of the laptop manuf.'s claims to "simple" dock/undock capabilities.
The DMCA does not restrict fair use, per se. You are welcome to decode anything you purchase. You may not help someone else do it, nor may anyone else help you. You're welcome to buy any tool you need to do the decoding. But no one may sell it to you.
That's why having Slysoft off shore is so helpful.
"Better, faster, cheaper" was tried. They also tried the "take more risks, do more science". The problem with the first was that cheaper was the immutable part of that closed equation. The problem with the second was that risk taking was valued but failure was punished.
Neither produced any forward motion.
This, too, will fail. Simple reason: space research and exploration is a custom, one-of-a-kind endeavor at this stage. You can't make a "standard" bus because as soon as you do, somebody will need more [power,data,real estate,angular momentum,precision,jitter compensation] that the standard bus can provide. And then you're back into the business of custom modifications for each scientific payload. It has been tried so many times, it's funny (sad, not ha ha). There have been minor successes, but in the end, the savings are relatively marginal, considering there is a raft of designs out there which can be used as starting points for custom hardware.
I'm sorry. I'm not usually one to complain about these types of things, but this is so ugly it'll probably get you beat up - even if you aren't still in high school.
Quite honestly, I'm underwhelmed. Maybe it's going to do a lot more than I think it will, but I'd really prefer something with a sizable reading page, and the absolute minimum bezel around the screen. I don't like to admit it, but Steve "I can't stand buttons" Jobs is on to something. Textual input and interaction is such a small part of the reading experience I really would rather have a less-useful touch screen than a device which is twice as big as it needs to be for it's primary function (i.e. reading).
I mean, hey, wouldn't you love to see the thing with an internal segmented case and the components on a flexible substrate which allowed the book to be flexible about the long axis (say, up to 20 degrees of arc)and rigid about the short axis. Then you could curl it a bit and it would slip into your pocket, just like a real paperback.
No, this is just another device which is trying to do too much, and the compromises made will doom it to eventual failure. Hell, at least make the keyboard a slide-out affair like the HTC phones to save some space. Besides, did I mention is was ugly? Two bagger, coyote ugly?
I don't mind that MS has a new operating system. I mind that MS has decided to change how and where everything used to manage the system has been changed. I mind that their "paradigm shift" to tasks rather than actions prevents me from getting to the parts of the OS I need to manage the system. I run a small company and we're all XP (and a 2k3 SBE). I do the IT because I can't really justify 5-10% of my annual operating budget to an IT consultant. I know where things are, and have a good idea of how to keep things running. Every time I run into a default Vista install, I spend tens of minutes looking for "the old way" of doing things. Now, I wouldn't need to if I were trained in such things - but isn't the point of modern OSes to minimize the amount of technical resources necessary? I still can't set the wireless card to do internet searches and have the wired card only do lookups for ips in the 192.168.0.x space, just like I can't with XP, but now it takes me three times as long to fool the system into doing just that.
Personally, when I hit a key, I want whatever I've just initiated to be done. Now. With several billion operations per second, and only 2 million pixels on the screen, I shouldn't even notice anything has happened, and yet amazingly I find a 1-4 second delay for most operations under vista. I hate to get all old-man on modern IT, but DOS was faster under a 33MHz processor for executing simple operations. Transparency is not particularly valuable if the computer can't keep up with my inputs.
I'm thinking of asking Dick Cheney to be on my ticket. It will get my the nutcase right wing folks, and then I'll lock him in his safe until the term is over.
Glad to hear there are still people who care on the inside. I spent about 9 years at Goddard, and it really was great.
I suppose we shouldn't let on that when we went down to the cape for payload integration we usually rented oceanfront condos for the week or three we were there. I even had my sister come down one weekend and stay, since I ended up with a 3 bedroom unit on the beach. Of course, no one in the press would check to find out that the condo rate for those long stays was 65% of the government rate for the hotel next door, which we could have stayed at and been within the room allowance (and for room, you don't keep the difference - it's just a savings to the agency for the trip).
It's kind of funny, really. I'd forgotten that there is no overtime in the gov't, and the monetary thank-yous were usually a $300 ($200 after taxes) award check you might get once every few years.
If you believe what you wrote, you're too young to understand. Go back further, grasshopper, and you will see that NASA used to actually build and fly things themselves. Sure, contractors existed, but they were not the lion's share of the workforce, as they are now. Heck, you only need to go back past Ronald "Contract out the Government" Reagan to see the shift in full light.
Why is NASA a management body? Because the government decided it should be "more efficient", thinking that if you had contractors, they would do their jobs and then get fired. You could scale up and down as needed, with no pesky employee problems. Thing is, there are few truly qualified contractors, and so there is little to no competition. Further, the contractors are so entwined in the system that they are essentially employees, just with much higher overhead. I worked at a major center, and I can tell you that you made sure there was something for everyone at the contractor's office to work on so you didn't lose anybody - either due to friendships or for corporate knowledge reasons. There is no real efficiency, and any you think you've gained has most likely been lost to the overhead associated with having a double layer of contract administration (gov't and contractor) in between the people who decide and the people who do the work.
Hell, if we listen to you, we may as well just skip the whole NASA part and have Congress draw up the requirements and farm the contracts out directly. With so few in-house experts trained to be engineers and scientists by NASA, congressional aides could easily come up with all the necessary paperwork themselves.
Having a space agency is about exploration and focusing our efforts to show what is possible. It's not about ten thousand government workers tasked to write proposals and manage outside contracts.
I'd love to see NASA actually hire (not contract) the best and brightest to create the next generation flight vehicle. Build it all in house, and contract out nothing. If we could just declare a war on moon terrorists and get hold of $100-$150B in funding over the next 6 years, I'm pretty certain we could do a pretty damned good job.
What's worse is that if they didn't spend that money, they would have had their budget reduced the next year. If they happened to have been otherwise efficient, they would be penalized the next year for that efficiency. You can't win, really.
I'm not saying I'm for it, I'm making an observation and saying that there's discontinuity between the workplace which will exist and the workforce which is available. Personally, I think humans would be better off with between 1% and 10% of their numbers...above that it's simply unsustainable. And, since you'll probably ask - yes, my family has fewer children than adults.
Stupid. Written off. Underprivileged. Poorly motivated. Call them whatever you like. There is a large segment of the population who - for whatever reason - have very poor problem solving and independent thinking skills. I have worked in enough jobs with really smart people to know that I'm no genius. I know lots of people smarter than I am. But, wow, you get out of some of those high end fields and you'd be amazed at what passes for average.
My daughter just entered school, and I've met a lot of her friends, and seen a lot of what these kids do. I am absolutely appalled at how little their parents seem to value their education. Here's an example - every day the kids take home a worksheet that shows what they've done, and what they are planning to do. There's one kid in the class who, after a month, had 20 of these papers in her backpack. She's a pretty smart kid, and seem to be interested in learning. I asked her why she still had the papers in her backpack, and she told me it was because her parents never took them out. So, after a month of school, these parents have no idea what she's been doing, and apparently don't care. Lest you think they didn't know, the class had two orientations with the parents - one group session, and one in person with the teacher - in both sessions they were explicit in the need for the parent to look at the progress sheets each night, both for information on what was happening in school and to help encourage the work their children were doing.
I've decided that more than half the parents just don't care, and I live in a pretty "care oriented" area, with many people being professionals and university professors. School is more than just daycare - it's an absolution of all responsibility to the technical education of their children.
So don't get me wrong - I'm not out to eliminate some theoretical lower class, but there is - without question - a growing disparity between what we need to continue our "progress" and "efficiency" and the workforce that expects us to pay wages which feed, clothe, and house them. Hell, I think there is a traditional belief that people are just there to produce labor - like having a dozen children so you can work the farm. As a society, we seem to have intellectually moved beyond human muscle as a machine, but we haven't really moved away from the child-rearing and teaching methods that is geared towards producing mindless machines. Television and movies have exacerbated the problem because those who "learned" to be mindless machines now see how the elite live (or, rather, how someone fictitiously portrays how the elite would live if they never had to work) and expect that that lifestyle is owed to them for the mindless work they do.
I would be happy if everyone who didn't plan on focusing their energies on raising independent, critical thinking children would just not have them, and those who do would do so with a single child, 2 if they felt they had the resources (not just money - resources like time, patience, capacity for love and encouragement, etc.) to do do so. Having more than two (intentionally) is, imho, simply selfish. Just keeping to those teachings would get the population back to something manageable and sustainable in 150 years or so. No - don't even bring up China. I'm not talking about some "one child" rule, I'm talking about the population - every individual person - deciding that the best thing for everyone is to do this of their own accord. To come to the realization that having children does not make you an adult; that God will not love you more for all the new children you have; that children cost a lot of money to raise properly ($300k
There is an awards banquet for flight safety held, apparently, at each launch, which occurs about three times a year. The awards cover 750 of what is likely tens of thousands of employees working for NASA and the contractors in the shuttle program. We're talking about a 1.5M awards banquet for an $8B/yr operation, or somewhere in the 0.01% range. Now I'm not saying that it's not a waste, though I'm curious where the seating costs of $20,000 for the shuttle launch come from, but the costs are not all that outlandish. Remember that one shuttle launch can really mean 4-16 different payloads, so there are a lot of people involved.
Go figure out what a similar party costs just about anywhere. Flying someone in coach is going to run about $300-500, minimum, if you book in advance and choose non-refundable. 4 nights hotel (we assume you are travelling on day 1 and day 5, day 2 is the banquet, day 3 is the launch, day four is a cape tour and the show), $120/night is bare minimum in a metro area unless you like sleeping with roaches. You get a night banquet at a banquet hall - nice dinner, dessert, a little entertainment. Hell, my high school reunion was $80 a head, and it was pretty basic. $150 is probably more reasonable for the service. One night you get a free show. Wow. Somebody call the fun police. Cirque tickets are $200; a broadway production in an off town is $80. Transportation to/from/between - you aren't going to walk to the cape from Orlando - would you have preferred we rented them a car for $300?
Where am I?...$300 plane + $480 hotel + $150 banquet and awards + nice show $120 + $300/2 for the car (we'll make them share) = $1200. Now, they came up with 400k-500k per banquet with 750 people...that's only $675 a person. I'd say they got a pretty good deal. $675 for 5 days and 4 nights plus a shuttle launch, dinner, and show? That's a freakin' bargain if you ask me.
Anyway...you go find out what the budget is for the awards banquet of any 10,000 person company. Go find out what just the CEO and his/her spouse spend. This really will look like chump change.
..exclusive contracts between cable providers and municipalities?
If they really want to make it a level playing field, prohibit the ownership of both physical infrastructure and programming by the same entity. You can have one or the other, but not both. Once you own both, or a significant proportion of both (say, more than 3-5%), there is an inherent conflict of interest when the infrastructure side sets carrying rates for the programming side. If you own both, you can set the rates high enough that the programming side always loses money, and the infrastructure side makes enough money to keep the system afloat. That way, you can sell your programming costs below wholesale, knowing that at the end of the year the combined operation will make money. Outside players offering programming and paying the same infrastructure rate cannot compete, and you're back to a monopoly status.
This is what's lost on these discussions. We're eliminating jobs for those in the manual labor sector. What? Train them for something else? I suggest looking at my sig. There are a lot of people out there who are simply untrainable. The gap between the top 20% of the population and the bottom 20% of the population in the ability to excel at modern, efficient methods an techniques is just astounding. In an agrarian world, being dumb may hold you back a bit, but you can still make a living and be productive. We're eliminating that class. The result is that, with a compressed intellectual range of "valuable" occupations, the disparity in cognitive ability has widened relative to the scale by which we measure. That was terribly worded...um...if the job market in the early 20th century had lots of positions for people who's cognitive skill set ranged from a "3" to a "10" on a scale of 1-10, the job market today has the majority in the range of "5" to "10", and we're moving towards the "7" to "10" range. The further we go, the more people will not be competent to do the jobs available. Now that's okay, because with efficiencies and replacement of lower skilled jobs by machines means we need fewer people at that level. At the same time that's a problem because you just can't go and kill all those folks who are no longer needed. Ideally we could get rid of those in society as we replaced them with machines. Otherwise they become unemployable wards of the state, or turn to illegal means to support themselves.
Because I feel I'm near the top of the cognitive scale*, robots don't bother me. They mean that I get things faster, more accurately, and probably cheaper. But there are a lot of people who are going to be idled by this type of technology. And the world population is still growing, so there will be even more at the lower end of the scale (in numbers - it's simple statistics), and fewer jobs for them. It's a bit odd, but there has recently been a big backlash over the eugenics movement that occurred in the mid 20th century in the US, mostly because it's politically incorrect to talk of such things. We are getting so efficient that we can more easily support those at the bottom. The question is...do we want to?
*Please don't give me shit about that comment - practically everyone on/. is near the top.
See, the idea of using robots to do repetitive tasks is to free up the population for other tasks, and to increase productivity. For those who bemoan that we appear to be working more even though we're getting more efficient, I might point out that we are working during our prime to support a life of complete leisure at a later stage in our life. 100 years ago, nearly all people worked until they were either physcally unable to, or they died - which often occurred in rapid succession. We really are working less, it just doesn't feel like it to those who are currently working. We get a second bonus that our lifestyle is significantly more comfortable that it was 100 years ago. The ability for me to keep my environment at a constant 70F, sleep on an amazingly soft but supportive bed, eat all manner of foods that would have been completely unavailable, and travel to remote destinations faster than it used to take many just to get to a city seems like a pretty magnificent feat of efficiency.
I'll be honest - I could probably work about 10 hours a week and still live better than my great-grandfather. Of course, living in a modern world on $25,000 a year would certainly preclude a lot of the comforts of modern society, but it would still be better than 100 years ago.
Actually, it has a lot to do with where people live vs. where they work. In many super-urban centers the public transport is good (subway in NY, metro in DC, etc.) and they are heavily used. Unfortunately, public transport can only get you so far out into the sub-urban areas, which is where many americans prefer to live. Often, the choice is a 15 minute car ride to public transport, a 10 minute wait for the train, 40 minutes on the train, and then a 10 minute walk to work. For the same commute, it may only take 45-50 minutes by car, and you park 2-3 minutes walk from the office. That's an extra 50 minutes a day commuting. If you figure that most urban professionals in the US are putting in 9-10 hour days, plus an hour for lunch, that 50 minutes is pretty precious self-time (or family time).
Now there are two issues here that are somewhat self-imposed - the long workday, and desire to live remote from where you work. In many cases, it's not quite that simple. Many people actually work where they can find a job, and the hours help you to keep that job. Often, that job is not sufficient to pay for the cost of (safe, comfortable) housing near where they work. The only place they can afford is on the outskirts where property values are lower.
Damn, if I hadn't already posted you'd get an insightful. This time around, both formats have more than ample space to put a 1080p feature length movie, with room for bonus material to spare. Blu-ray actually has the disadvantage of being (a) kind of a 60s-esque stupid name and (b) no mention of HD in the format. HD-DVD, while pedestrian and unimaginative, is unusually descriptive to the masses. I mean, if you're buying an HD-TV, you may as well pick up that $100 HD-DVD player to go with it. Sure beats getting one of those $500 blu-ray things, right?
Seriously. DVDs hold 8.5GB of storage (give or take a bit). Of the 350 or so DVDs I own, I think only two of them have more than 8GB of data on them, and I'd estimate no more than 10% have more than 6.5GB. About a third are single layer. What I'm getting at is that even in a clearly inferior codec format, the studios are wasting 20-40% of the available disc space. Did I hear you say Superbit? Good call...how many moviews have been released in superbit recently. Right.
Oh, sure, there's the argument that you could put a lower compression version on the disc, or that you could put more data on a single disc, but where's the value in that? Lower compression at that level is probably not going to be discernible to most of the population, even if they did go out at get 1080p projectors for their theaters with 100+ inch screens. Multi disc sets? Hey - that's a feature. Look at the prices - are you going to pay extra for 10 seasons of Seinfeld on a single disc, or would you pony up for a deluxe 2 disc set? Of course you and I would see through the charade, but there are a lot of stupid people out there that equate number of discs with value. A 2 disc set will always sell for an extra 40-60%, even if there is no real additional material.
No, not only is the extra capacity worthless, with the cost of HDs dropping so quickly, even the writable formats are going to be poor choices for backups. When was the last time you backed up you 500GB drive onto DVD? How about DVD-DL - yeah, that's economical. By the time these drives hit $50, the you're still going to be looking at a cakebox to back up your nTB drive.
Actually, I was 16, and had far less muscle then than I do now. Most men don't stop adding muscle until they are in their early 20s. According to the BMI, "normal" would be between 140 and 180 for me. At 140, my doctor would probably refer me for treatment for an unknown eating disorder. FWIW, I come in about 15.5-16.5% body fat - the low end of the range if you believe the American Dietetic Assn. I'm not an athlete, and Oddly enough, my wife, who is 5'-0 and 125lbs has a body fat close to 30%, but she's in the normal range for BMI. Go figure.
I'm not saying that I couldn't lose 10-15lbs - 185-190 would be a better weight for me, and I'd probably have to go down to 12-14% body fat to do it - but even there, I'd still be considered overweight by BMI.
Slashdot Mirror
...the more content that slips through your fingers.
(apologies to Lucas, et. al.)
Sounds like a junior hacking project...just don't forget to tip the media off after you turn the congressman over to the IntelliCops.
Iirc, any circumvention for fair-use purposes are allowed. From http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1052440872261
In Universal City Studios Inc. v. Reimerdes, a 2000 case out of the Southern District of New York, the question was whether a Web site distributing the code to crack DVD protection was in violation of the DMCA. Specifically, the defendants posted and linked to code that would strip the encryption from DVDs. The site's sister print publication had also run articles on (to quote U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan) "such topics as how to steal an Internet domain name, access other people's e-mail, intercept cellular phone calls, and break into the computer systems at Costco stores and Federal Express." That said, the defendants' postings were, after all, speech -- they communicated information to others. Further, others could have used the code for purely fair use ends.
Judge Kaplan nodded his head to fair use. Then he wrote, "The fact that Congress elected to leave technologically unsophisticated persons who wish to make fair use of encrypted copyrighted works without the technical means of doing so is a matter for Congress unless Congress' decision contravenes the Constitution." (The judge decided that it didn't.)
The judge is implying that the DMCA lets you hack protected technology for fair use purposes. But you have to do the hacking, and you have to conjure up, all by your lonesome, the code that lets you do it. Only computer geniuses need apply.
If you believe that the decision carries some weight in interpretation of the law, and with the columnists assertion of the implication, then you most certain can circumvent...you just have to do it yourself.
It will never come to pass, unless you equate instant on with standby, which we already have.
I have 2GB of RAM in my PC. It takes close to 4 minutes to go from cold to functional. Now, I have a slow hard drive - maybe 300Mb/s - but that still means that I should be able to load the memory completely full in less than 60 seconds. I can when I come out of hibernation, but somehow the disc will run continuously for 240+ seconds on boot? It has nothing to do with the memory, and more to do with the fact that all the things which run at startup (in XP) take so many resources.
FWIW, I could probably run my laptop stable using only standby and hibernation as it is pretty stable long-term, but to dock and undock causes all sorts of driver issues which render the machine almost useless for my necessary tasks. I'm forced to endure shutdown and startup, despite all of the laptop manuf.'s claims to "simple" dock/undock capabilities.
The DMCA does not restrict fair use, per se. You are welcome to decode anything you purchase. You may not help someone else do it, nor may anyone else help you. You're welcome to buy any tool you need to do the decoding. But no one may sell it to you.
That's why having Slysoft off shore is so helpful.
"Better, faster, cheaper" was tried. They also tried the "take more risks, do more science". The problem with the first was that cheaper was the immutable part of that closed equation. The problem with the second was that risk taking was valued but failure was punished.
Neither produced any forward motion.
This, too, will fail. Simple reason: space research and exploration is a custom, one-of-a-kind endeavor at this stage. You can't make a "standard" bus because as soon as you do, somebody will need more [power,data,real estate,angular momentum,precision,jitter compensation] that the standard bus can provide. And then you're back into the business of custom modifications for each scientific payload. It has been tried so many times, it's funny (sad, not ha ha). There have been minor successes, but in the end, the savings are relatively marginal, considering there is a raft of designs out there which can be used as starting points for custom hardware.
I'm sorry. I'm not usually one to complain about these types of things, but this is so ugly it'll probably get you beat up - even if you aren't still in high school.
Quite honestly, I'm underwhelmed. Maybe it's going to do a lot more than I think it will, but I'd really prefer something with a sizable reading page, and the absolute minimum bezel around the screen. I don't like to admit it, but Steve "I can't stand buttons" Jobs is on to something. Textual input and interaction is such a small part of the reading experience I really would rather have a less-useful touch screen than a device which is twice as big as it needs to be for it's primary function (i.e. reading).
I mean, hey, wouldn't you love to see the thing with an internal segmented case and the components on a flexible substrate which allowed the book to be flexible about the long axis (say, up to 20 degrees of arc)and rigid about the short axis. Then you could curl it a bit and it would slip into your pocket, just like a real paperback.
No, this is just another device which is trying to do too much, and the compromises made will doom it to eventual failure. Hell, at least make the keyboard a slide-out affair like the HTC phones to save some space. Besides, did I mention is was ugly? Two bagger, coyote ugly?
I don't mind that MS has a new operating system. I mind that MS has decided to change how and where everything used to manage the system has been changed. I mind that their "paradigm shift" to tasks rather than actions prevents me from getting to the parts of the OS I need to manage the system. I run a small company and we're all XP (and a 2k3 SBE). I do the IT because I can't really justify 5-10% of my annual operating budget to an IT consultant. I know where things are, and have a good idea of how to keep things running. Every time I run into a default Vista install, I spend tens of minutes looking for "the old way" of doing things. Now, I wouldn't need to if I were trained in such things - but isn't the point of modern OSes to minimize the amount of technical resources necessary? I still can't set the wireless card to do internet searches and have the wired card only do lookups for ips in the 192.168.0.x space, just like I can't with XP, but now it takes me three times as long to fool the system into doing just that.
Personally, when I hit a key, I want whatever I've just initiated to be done. Now. With several billion operations per second, and only 2 million pixels on the screen, I shouldn't even notice anything has happened, and yet amazingly I find a 1-4 second delay for most operations under vista. I hate to get all old-man on modern IT, but DOS was faster under a 33MHz processor for executing simple operations. Transparency is not particularly valuable if the computer can't keep up with my inputs.
I'm thinking of asking Dick Cheney to be on my ticket. It will get my the nutcase right wing folks, and then I'll lock him in his safe until the term is over.
Glad to hear there are still people who care on the inside. I spent about 9 years at Goddard, and it really was great.
I suppose we shouldn't let on that when we went down to the cape for payload integration we usually rented oceanfront condos for the week or three we were there. I even had my sister come down one weekend and stay, since I ended up with a 3 bedroom unit on the beach. Of course, no one in the press would check to find out that the condo rate for those long stays was 65% of the government rate for the hotel next door, which we could have stayed at and been within the room allowance (and for room, you don't keep the difference - it's just a savings to the agency for the trip).
It's kind of funny, really. I'd forgotten that there is no overtime in the gov't, and the monetary thank-yous were usually a $300 ($200 after taxes) award check you might get once every few years.
If you believe what you wrote, you're too young to understand. Go back further, grasshopper, and you will see that NASA used to actually build and fly things themselves. Sure, contractors existed, but they were not the lion's share of the workforce, as they are now. Heck, you only need to go back past Ronald "Contract out the Government" Reagan to see the shift in full light.
Why is NASA a management body? Because the government decided it should be "more efficient", thinking that if you had contractors, they would do their jobs and then get fired. You could scale up and down as needed, with no pesky employee problems. Thing is, there are few truly qualified contractors, and so there is little to no competition. Further, the contractors are so entwined in the system that they are essentially employees, just with much higher overhead. I worked at a major center, and I can tell you that you made sure there was something for everyone at the contractor's office to work on so you didn't lose anybody - either due to friendships or for corporate knowledge reasons. There is no real efficiency, and any you think you've gained has most likely been lost to the overhead associated with having a double layer of contract administration (gov't and contractor) in between the people who decide and the people who do the work.
Hell, if we listen to you, we may as well just skip the whole NASA part and have Congress draw up the requirements and farm the contracts out directly. With so few in-house experts trained to be engineers and scientists by NASA, congressional aides could easily come up with all the necessary paperwork themselves.
Having a space agency is about exploration and focusing our efforts to show what is possible. It's not about ten thousand government workers tasked to write proposals and manage outside contracts.
I'd love to see NASA actually hire (not contract) the best and brightest to create the next generation flight vehicle. Build it all in house, and contract out nothing. If we could just declare a war on moon terrorists and get hold of $100-$150B in funding over the next 6 years, I'm pretty certain we could do a pretty damned good job.
What's worse is that if they didn't spend that money, they would have had their budget reduced the next year. If they happened to have been otherwise efficient, they would be penalized the next year for that efficiency. You can't win, really.
I'm not saying I'm for it, I'm making an observation and saying that there's discontinuity between the workplace which will exist and the workforce which is available. Personally, I think humans would be better off with between 1% and 10% of their numbers...above that it's simply unsustainable. And, since you'll probably ask - yes, my family has fewer children than adults.
Stupid. Written off. Underprivileged. Poorly motivated. Call them whatever you like. There is a large segment of the population who - for whatever reason - have very poor problem solving and independent thinking skills. I have worked in enough jobs with really smart people to know that I'm no genius. I know lots of people smarter than I am. But, wow, you get out of some of those high end fields and you'd be amazed at what passes for average.
My daughter just entered school, and I've met a lot of her friends, and seen a lot of what these kids do. I am absolutely appalled at how little their parents seem to value their education. Here's an example - every day the kids take home a worksheet that shows what they've done, and what they are planning to do. There's one kid in the class who, after a month, had 20 of these papers in her backpack. She's a pretty smart kid, and seem to be interested in learning. I asked her why she still had the papers in her backpack, and she told me it was because her parents never took them out. So, after a month of school, these parents have no idea what she's been doing, and apparently don't care. Lest you think they didn't know, the class had two orientations with the parents - one group session, and one in person with the teacher - in both sessions they were explicit in the need for the parent to look at the progress sheets each night, both for information on what was happening in school and to help encourage the work their children were doing.
I've decided that more than half the parents just don't care, and I live in a pretty "care oriented" area, with many people being professionals and university professors. School is more than just daycare - it's an absolution of all responsibility to the technical education of their children.
So don't get me wrong - I'm not out to eliminate some theoretical lower class, but there is - without question - a growing disparity between what we need to continue our "progress" and "efficiency" and the workforce that expects us to pay wages which feed, clothe, and house them. Hell, I think there is a traditional belief that people are just there to produce labor - like having a dozen children so you can work the farm. As a society, we seem to have intellectually moved beyond human muscle as a machine, but we haven't really moved away from the child-rearing and teaching methods that is geared towards producing mindless machines. Television and movies have exacerbated the problem because those who "learned" to be mindless machines now see how the elite live (or, rather, how someone fictitiously portrays how the elite would live if they never had to work) and expect that that lifestyle is owed to them for the mindless work they do.
I would be happy if everyone who didn't plan on focusing their energies on raising independent, critical thinking children would just not have them, and those who do would do so with a single child, 2 if they felt they had the resources (not just money - resources like time, patience, capacity for love and encouragement, etc.) to do do so. Having more than two (intentionally) is, imho, simply selfish. Just keeping to those teachings would get the population back to something manageable and sustainable in 150 years or so. No - don't even bring up China. I'm not talking about some "one child" rule, I'm talking about the population - every individual person - deciding that the best thing for everyone is to do this of their own accord. To come to the realization that having children does not make you an adult; that God will not love you more for all the new children you have; that children cost a lot of money to raise properly ($300k
Okay, I just RTFA, and here's the real scoop:
There is an awards banquet for flight safety held, apparently, at each launch, which occurs about three times a year. The awards cover 750 of what is likely tens of thousands of employees working for NASA and the contractors in the shuttle program. We're talking about a 1.5M awards banquet for an $8B/yr operation, or somewhere in the 0.01% range. Now I'm not saying that it's not a waste, though I'm curious where the seating costs of $20,000 for the shuttle launch come from, but the costs are not all that outlandish. Remember that one shuttle launch can really mean 4-16 different payloads, so there are a lot of people involved.
Go figure out what a similar party costs just about anywhere. Flying someone in coach is going to run about $300-500, minimum, if you book in advance and choose non-refundable. 4 nights hotel (we assume you are travelling on day 1 and day 5, day 2 is the banquet, day 3 is the launch, day four is a cape tour and the show), $120/night is bare minimum in a metro area unless you like sleeping with roaches. You get a night banquet at a banquet hall - nice dinner, dessert, a little entertainment. Hell, my high school reunion was $80 a head, and it was pretty basic. $150 is probably more reasonable for the service. One night you get a free show. Wow. Somebody call the fun police. Cirque tickets are $200; a broadway production in an off town is $80. Transportation to/from/between - you aren't going to walk to the cape from Orlando - would you have preferred we rented them a car for $300?
Where am I?...$300 plane + $480 hotel + $150 banquet and awards + nice show $120 + $300/2 for the car (we'll make them share) = $1200. Now, they came up with 400k-500k per banquet with 750 people...that's only $675 a person. I'd say they got a pretty good deal. $675 for 5 days and 4 nights plus a shuttle launch, dinner, and show? That's a freakin' bargain if you ask me.
Anyway...you go find out what the budget is for the awards banquet of any 10,000 person company. Go find out what just the CEO and his/her spouse spend. This really will look like chump change.
..exclusive contracts between cable providers and municipalities?
If they really want to make it a level playing field, prohibit the ownership of both physical infrastructure and programming by the same entity. You can have one or the other, but not both. Once you own both, or a significant proportion of both (say, more than 3-5%), there is an inherent conflict of interest when the infrastructure side sets carrying rates for the programming side. If you own both, you can set the rates high enough that the programming side always loses money, and the infrastructure side makes enough money to keep the system afloat. That way, you can sell your programming costs below wholesale, knowing that at the end of the year the combined operation will make money. Outside players offering programming and paying the same infrastructure rate cannot compete, and you're back to a monopoly status.
This is what's lost on these discussions. We're eliminating jobs for those in the manual labor sector. What? Train them for something else? I suggest looking at my sig. There are a lot of people out there who are simply untrainable. The gap between the top 20% of the population and the bottom 20% of the population in the ability to excel at modern, efficient methods an techniques is just astounding. In an agrarian world, being dumb may hold you back a bit, but you can still make a living and be productive. We're eliminating that class. The result is that, with a compressed intellectual range of "valuable" occupations, the disparity in cognitive ability has widened relative to the scale by which we measure. That was terribly worded...um...if the job market in the early 20th century had lots of positions for people who's cognitive skill set ranged from a "3" to a "10" on a scale of 1-10, the job market today has the majority in the range of "5" to "10", and we're moving towards the "7" to "10" range. The further we go, the more people will not be competent to do the jobs available. Now that's okay, because with efficiencies and replacement of lower skilled jobs by machines means we need fewer people at that level. At the same time that's a problem because you just can't go and kill all those folks who are no longer needed. Ideally we could get rid of those in society as we replaced them with machines. Otherwise they become unemployable wards of the state, or turn to illegal means to support themselves.
/. is near the top.
Because I feel I'm near the top of the cognitive scale*, robots don't bother me. They mean that I get things faster, more accurately, and probably cheaper. But there are a lot of people who are going to be idled by this type of technology. And the world population is still growing, so there will be even more at the lower end of the scale (in numbers - it's simple statistics), and fewer jobs for them. It's a bit odd, but there has recently been a big backlash over the eugenics movement that occurred in the mid 20th century in the US, mostly because it's politically incorrect to talk of such things. We are getting so efficient that we can more easily support those at the bottom. The question is...do we want to?
*Please don't give me shit about that comment - practically everyone on
See, the idea of using robots to do repetitive tasks is to free up the population for other tasks, and to increase productivity. For those who bemoan that we appear to be working more even though we're getting more efficient, I might point out that we are working during our prime to support a life of complete leisure at a later stage in our life. 100 years ago, nearly all people worked until they were either physcally unable to, or they died - which often occurred in rapid succession. We really are working less, it just doesn't feel like it to those who are currently working. We get a second bonus that our lifestyle is significantly more comfortable that it was 100 years ago. The ability for me to keep my environment at a constant 70F, sleep on an amazingly soft but supportive bed, eat all manner of foods that would have been completely unavailable, and travel to remote destinations faster than it used to take many just to get to a city seems like a pretty magnificent feat of efficiency.
I'll be honest - I could probably work about 10 hours a week and still live better than my great-grandfather. Of course, living in a modern world on $25,000 a year would certainly preclude a lot of the comforts of modern society, but it would still be better than 100 years ago.
That's only true if _everyone's_ devices stopped working. If you accidentally lose your cell phone, it puts you at a quite a bit of a disadvantage.
Actually, it has a lot to do with where people live vs. where they work. In many super-urban centers the public transport is good (subway in NY, metro in DC, etc.) and they are heavily used. Unfortunately, public transport can only get you so far out into the sub-urban areas, which is where many americans prefer to live. Often, the choice is a 15 minute car ride to public transport, a 10 minute wait for the train, 40 minutes on the train, and then a 10 minute walk to work. For the same commute, it may only take 45-50 minutes by car, and you park 2-3 minutes walk from the office. That's an extra 50 minutes a day commuting. If you figure that most urban professionals in the US are putting in 9-10 hour days, plus an hour for lunch, that 50 minutes is pretty precious self-time (or family time).
Now there are two issues here that are somewhat self-imposed - the long workday, and desire to live remote from where you work. In many cases, it's not quite that simple. Many people actually work where they can find a job, and the hours help you to keep that job. Often, that job is not sufficient to pay for the cost of (safe, comfortable) housing near where they work. The only place they can afford is on the outskirts where property values are lower.
..but with extra "bad" and no "joke".
Damn, if I hadn't already posted you'd get an insightful. This time around, both formats have more than ample space to put a 1080p feature length movie, with room for bonus material to spare. Blu-ray actually has the disadvantage of being (a) kind of a 60s-esque stupid name and (b) no mention of HD in the format. HD-DVD, while pedestrian and unimaginative, is unusually descriptive to the masses. I mean, if you're buying an HD-TV, you may as well pick up that $100 HD-DVD player to go with it. Sure beats getting one of those $500 blu-ray things, right?
Seriously. DVDs hold 8.5GB of storage (give or take a bit). Of the 350 or so DVDs I own, I think only two of them have more than 8GB of data on them, and I'd estimate no more than 10% have more than 6.5GB. About a third are single layer. What I'm getting at is that even in a clearly inferior codec format, the studios are wasting 20-40% of the available disc space. Did I hear you say Superbit? Good call...how many moviews have been released in superbit recently. Right.
Oh, sure, there's the argument that you could put a lower compression version on the disc, or that you could put more data on a single disc, but where's the value in that? Lower compression at that level is probably not going to be discernible to most of the population, even if they did go out at get 1080p projectors for their theaters with 100+ inch screens. Multi disc sets? Hey - that's a feature. Look at the prices - are you going to pay extra for 10 seasons of Seinfeld on a single disc, or would you pony up for a deluxe 2 disc set? Of course you and I would see through the charade, but there are a lot of stupid people out there that equate number of discs with value. A 2 disc set will always sell for an extra 40-60%, even if there is no real additional material.
No, not only is the extra capacity worthless, with the cost of HDs dropping so quickly, even the writable formats are going to be poor choices for backups. When was the last time you backed up you 500GB drive onto DVD? How about DVD-DL - yeah, that's economical. By the time these drives hit $50, the you're still going to be looking at a cakebox to back up your nTB drive.
According to another poster here, it's a 8x speed.
Actually, I was 16, and had far less muscle then than I do now. Most men don't stop adding muscle until they are in their early 20s. According to the BMI, "normal" would be between 140 and 180 for me. At 140, my doctor would probably refer me for treatment for an unknown eating disorder. FWIW, I come in about 15.5-16.5% body fat - the low end of the range if you believe the American Dietetic Assn. I'm not an athlete, and Oddly enough, my wife, who is 5'-0 and 125lbs has a body fat close to 30%, but she's in the normal range for BMI. Go figure.
I'm not saying that I couldn't lose 10-15lbs - 185-190 would be a better weight for me, and I'd probably have to go down to 12-14% body fat to do it - but even there, I'd still be considered overweight by BMI.