You are correct. A $50 book which is accpetable is a poor value compared to an excellent book (which mirrors your teaching methods/style) for $100. With undergrad courses easily costing in excess of $1000, an extra $50 on a excpetional text vs an average one is small change.
My problem with the ebooks is the implicit expiration. That might not be a big deal if the books were far less than their physical counterparts (say, 15-30%), but to charge nearly the cost of a used book is a bit outrageous. I have many books from my undergrad years which I still reference on at least a monthly basis. Some were bought used, and some are not in the best of shape, but all are good references. I suppose I'm lucky that the basics of structural engineering has not changed much in the last 50 years.
I applaud your efforts to provide good resources to your students, even if it requires trading close to the line of fair use. It requires effort (time) to do so, even if actual money doesn't change hands. I tend to do the same for my clients, somewhat liberally reprinting sections of various codes which apply to them. Asking someone to buy $500-$1000+ in code references for a single project is a bit much.
Because then you have to print the book. This is infiniely cheaper to the publisher, and the dumber-than-bricks college student thinks its cool to have their texts on the computer.
I don't really get it, though. You can buy a book new for 100% of the cover price, used (if they have them) for 75%, and then usually sell them back to the bookstore at the end of term for 40-50% of purchase.
100% - 40% = 60% and you get the physical object, or 66% and it magically disappers after the term. Not to mention all the books that you should keep anyway. The best feeling I ever had was selling my deformable solids book back after I buteed heads with the professor for an entire term. The worst feeling was realizing that I needed the book six months later and had to re-buy it. Bought used for 75%, sold back for 50%, rebought for 75%. I was out for a full price. Imagine if I'd gotten an ebook - it would have cost me 166% of the cost of the book, as I now have it as a standard resource in my bookshelf.
Actually, textbook writing isn't particularly profitable in the hard sciences. This is based purely on anecdotal evidence, however. I do know of some authors of college texts, and most of them get less than a dollar per book sold. If you can imagine that the market for such books is particularly small for anything other than freshman level weed-out courses (thousands of copies, may be a couple tens of thousands for all but the major standards), there is little to gain for writing a text except the ability to be published and the desire to use your own materials for teaching. $20,000 may seem like lot of money for writing a text, but considering the number of hours required to do such a project, the return is pretty poor.
Sounds like you bought her a toy. Not really a requirement for school. Not that organization isn't a good skill (music collection), but she's not really using the computer to forward her education.
You do bring up a good point, however. If a kid is going to lug around a computer to classes, it's probably best to get the lightest possible. Its bad enough to carry all the textbooks, much less a 7lb behemouth (or, worse yet, one of those 11lb Dells) as well.
Well, he probably doesn't need to drop $20,000 on a consultant to tell him his list is a little thin, and he should be spending more. Sorry, but I think he has already received many valuable answers. Generally, I suspect managers hire you because they think their IT guy doesn't know what hes doing. If my IT guy suggested a high priced consultant, I would assume he didn't know what he was doing, and either get him in-house budgeting help (if he was really good at the geek stuff) or find someone better.
If you read his question, he's not trying to come up with a budget - he already has one. Reading between the lines, he's worried that its too much. Cost per employee or percentage of gross revenue is a yardstick against which the budget will be measured by non-techincal types, and compared with "industry averages" to see if spending is in line with competitors. If he's really concerned that his budgets are high, he needs to grab the president/CEO and have a one-on-one before budgets get presented.
By the way, running IT as a profit center tends to piss off your clients. I happen to run a small engineering firm (architecture-related), and have worked in both government and commerce in several firms, and have a wife who has been business operations manager in two industries. People HATE being nickel and dimed for little shit. In a field like architecture, where there are as many small firms in a city as there are ants in your back yard, you have to make people love you to get clients. Annoying a single client with a bunch of little line item charges can mean the loss of a dozen or more potential clients/jobs. BTW - in most (medium) architectural firms, everybody is a cost center, even the architects. Fees tend to be negotiated based on a percentage of estimated construction, not hourly rates or printing charges, and are usually fixed - or nearly so.
Want fair taxes? Opt for a gross receipts tax. My rough numbers put it at 2.5% to 5%. No deductions, no exemptions, no credits. Buy and Sell stock daily? You're going to pay a percentage of each transaction to Uncle Sam. He protects the system which allows you to trade, you pay for that protection. Own a corporation? Pay tax twice - once when your corporation gets paid, once when you pay your salary/take profit. The US Governement provides special legal protections for Corporations...there's your fee for that protection. Want to avoid the double tax? go Sole Proprietor and put your ass out there for liability like everyone else. Flip your house or car every three years to keep up with the Jonses? You got it...pay the man on each transaction.
Okay, there's one deduction: Each United States Taxpayer Identification Number (SSN for residents, TIN for legal aliens) over 16 years of age gets an annual deduction equal to 2087x(federal minimum wage). Thats right, you make at or less that the full time minimum wage, and we'll give you a pass. Want to lower taxes? Raise the minimum wage. And no, if you have a dozen kids you don't get to deduct them. You chose to have them (remember screaming "Oh God, YES!"? that was the decision moment). However, if your spouse chooses not to work, the two of you (filing jointly) get your "full" deduction.
Disclaimer: I trade stocks & mutual funds for investment, I own an S Corp, My wife and I both work, I have a child. I'm not looking for a free ride, I want something that is relatively fair and very hard to skirt.
..."don't bother." A lot shorter and more concise than the 6kB mini-review Timothy gave it. I suppose it makes him look like he reads bad books too, and isn't just writing advertisement copy.
No, this is like Quayle spelling potato with an "e" on the end. It so mind numbingly stupid, we can't believe it has happened. And so we're going to talk about how much stupidity there is in congress.
We already know the bill was chock full of backscrathcing for energy producers and miscellaneous pork, and a lack of interest in the environment. Thats a given. The fact that something so ridiculous actually made it through along with the slash and burn politics is news.
8:30 is a fine time for the sun to set. It sets by six in the winter (Virginia) and there doens't seem to be outcry.
7am and the sun is "high overhead"? I'm still trying to figure out why that would be a problem. I work a relatively normal 8-5 day, and I have a sunrise simulator that I use - even in the summer - to get up at 6 so I have time to have breakfast and get my kid out of bed / dressed / fed / off to school. If it were light out at 5am, that'd be great.
Of course, I have TiVo, so I don't have to worry about all that "but I can't watch Jay Leno and get up at 5am" shit. (No, I don't watch late night tv anyway). I don't play evening (insert sport here), where light is a problem. I can't get in 18 holes of golf after work regardless of the sunset time, so evening play is a moot point.
Now that I come to think about it, if it got cooler an hour earlier in the evening, it would probably be much nicer. Young kids could spend more evenings chasing fireflys insead of having to go to bed while its still light out. The fireworks on the 4th could start at a reasonable time.
Tell you what...I'm still looking for a down side. Even my wife would have one less day to be in a bitchy mood 'cause she lost an hour of sleep each spring. (Yes, she seems to treat the extra hour of sleep the fall change offers as a holiday akin to Christmas)
Let me fill in 2 for you: CDs & DVDs. The nicest way to label them, cost effectively, is with inkjet on printable discs. No worries about peeling lables or ungly sharpie-labelling. Epson's got one for under $100 retail. Sure, Epsons are crap - clogging if you don't use them for a week (hint: cron a 1"x8" image with the entire spectrum to the printer every day or two...just make sure you've got cheap paper loaded)
And then there's #3 - large format prints. As expensive as they are, 24"-60" wide printers are still much cheaper than the electrostsic versions. The 24" 6-color HP I have set me back $1200, which is a bargain in the large format world. I'm sure that's not the intent of the article, but it is another area where inkjets still rule.
Re:I can't see any reason to complain about the pr
on
Xbox 360 for $300
·
· Score: 1
I'm guessing the target audience is the same kids whos parents are buying them $35,000 SUVs to take to college when they're freshmen. Not that I'm jealous...
Funny, I haven't noticed this. I do get emails which randomly appear in the wrong accounts - an email sent to my business account will show up both there and in my personal inbox *shrug*. Its free (beer)...hard to complain too much.
I take it the "Copies & Folders" section isn't sending your sent items to the desired folders, or bcc'ing the right folks?
Well, I press my nose up against the screen (use a d/view stand) so it's not that bad. Also, I do mostly cad work, so the extra pixels means more real estate and better accuracy in the drawing area. I usually use a larger zoom for text editing...10 pt in Word at 100% is a bit small.
I'll admit that some things don't run as fast as they should, but for the most part, the laptop is every bit as fast as the 2.8G desktop it replaced, and I can take everything with me.
Previous house: new, custom design, prewired 9 ways to Sunday.
Current House: 1960s ranch. Server is in the unfinished part of the basement. I snaked wire from the server area, across the unfinshed ceiling to an A/C duct that was put in a couple of years before I moved in. that goes all the way to the attic. AFter that I just found the room I wanted and the location on the wall and matching top plate (look under the insulation in the attic). For ease of fishing, drill a 1/2" hole the top plate and an inch hole in the drywall (put a low voltage old-work, open backed box in if you'll cover it up with a plate later). Low-tech fish method: Drop one end of a beaded chain down into the wall and tape the top part of the chain to your cable. Beaded chain is the stuff you'll see on old pull-chain ceiling lights - looks like a lot o little (1/8") metal beads. Take a magnet - the kind on a telescoping rod work well - and stick it in the hole you drilled in the wall and wave it around 'til you hit the beaded chain. Pull the chain out, and the cable will follow (if you taped it securely).
No, really, he was concerned that 540Mb wireless would leave wired behind. I was pointing out he had nothing to fear.
If I'd wanted to boast, I'd tell you that my laptop is a Presicion M70 with a PM-1.86Ghz processor, 2GB of DDR2 ram, an intel 1Gb enet card, an nVidia QuadraFX go 1400 with 256MB ram, a 100GB HD, and a 1920x1200 screen. The non-raided discs in the FW tower (a cheapie FW400 tower box I bought for $300 and populated with IDE HDs) are the bottleneck, or possibly the FW bus itself, depending on the content.
The server is a Dell SC400 with a few extra sticks of RAM, an ATI 9600 and an ATI HDTV wonder. Nothing there to brag about.
As for the fellow concerned that wire length is a factor, my main link is about 40', home crimped at both ends. Since I've gotten sustained transfers of large (1GB files) at 28MB/s, I'm guessing that the FW bus is saturated. I haven't tried a ramdisk to ramdisk memory transfer, so I can't be sure.
Yeah, no simple "right click on the file". It'll have to be move your cursor over the file name and press firmly, somewhere on the right side of the mouse.
Get yourself a gigbit e-net switch and cards. Buy.com has an 8-port for about $60 after rebate right now (SMC, just set mine up). Runs 1000Mb/s over cat5(e). I can't even saturate my Gb net at home with an 8-drive FW tower (limited by drive speed and/or FW bandwidth of 400Mb/s/channel) between my server and my laptop.
However, it would be nice not to have to be plugged into the cables when I want to edit video on the server. Right now, the connection (54Mb) is dicey enough and slow enough (10-15Mb max real throughput, down hill, with the wind behind me) that its impractical.
All I can say is that if I don't see a dupe on/., I'm going to start running for the hills. The hair is already starting to stand up on the back of my neck, it's so creepy.
You see, that whole "360 degree movement" think is a trckball. If you have a mechanical moune, there's one on the bottom of it. AutoCAD uses a much better way of accessing this type of pan function: you click-hold the middle button (or scroll wheel) and move your mouse. Far more accurate than track balls. Want to zoom, too? That what the scroll wheel is for.
I happen to have seven buttons on my Logitech MX900 mouse (okay, the right and left "buttons" are just pressure sensitive areas on the mouse top, with nice tactile feedback sensors below. I use the r/l buttons and the scroll wheel. I never touch the others, and have had to teach muself to be careful not to move my hand for fear of inadvertent clicks. I don't feel a desire for r/l movement of the wheel, as it tends to interfere with my click-only accuracy of the scroll wheel (I've tried it).
Apple - you've made a beautiful, minimalist piece of hardware. Sadly, it would have been better implemented in sofware with a standard 3 button mouse. But then, it wouldn't have been "innovative", would it?
Lets face it, you must first follow the money. Sure, it sounds like a good idea to reuse the currect parts of the shuttle to leverage existing parts and technology. But we are looking at a 35 year old design. We can't come up with anything better? Maybe it's not cost savings...
It turns out that (ATTFA) Dr. Horowitz, one of the leading proponents for the resue of old technology, turns out to be the head of "ATK Thiokol, where he now leads the company's effort to develop the new family of rockets". Hmmm, I know, if we just modify the ones we've got in stock, we can sell them all over again to NASA. That'll keep out costs down and minimize the possibility of competition. Sounds like a great solution Dr. Horowitz...for your bank account.
Like most of the other posters have stated, social engineering works only when you've got a sufficiently lax attitude in employees and a large enough population to offer general anonymity. Having worked at a facility with a secure area, I can say that nobodu was getting into the secure area to any thing useful without proper ID. (I decided that getting out with data, should you be an insider, wasn't very hard though, as they put the receptionsist in the wrong place)
Um, actually, your off by three orders of magnitude. Shuttle orbits are 200-250 miles. Unfortunately for your astronaut spamers, they'll only have seconds to send the message, as the shuttle has a ground speed of over 250mi/min (don't quote that last one, I'm basing it off 25k mi/90min orbit).
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct. A $50 book which is accpetable is a poor value compared to an excellent book (which mirrors your teaching methods/style) for $100. With undergrad courses easily costing in excess of $1000, an extra $50 on a excpetional text vs an average one is small change.
My problem with the ebooks is the implicit expiration. That might not be a big deal if the books were far less than their physical counterparts (say, 15-30%), but to charge nearly the cost of a used book is a bit outrageous. I have many books from my undergrad years which I still reference on at least a monthly basis. Some were bought used, and some are not in the best of shape, but all are good references. I suppose I'm lucky that the basics of structural engineering has not changed much in the last 50 years.
I applaud your efforts to provide good resources to your students, even if it requires trading close to the line of fair use. It requires effort (time) to do so, even if actual money doesn't change hands. I tend to do the same for my clients, somewhat liberally reprinting sections of various codes which apply to them. Asking someone to buy $500-$1000+ in code references for a single project is a bit much.
...is there a plugin that will make it play nice with a pocketPC?
Because then you have to print the book. This is infiniely cheaper to the publisher, and the dumber-than-bricks college student thinks its cool to have their texts on the computer.
I don't really get it, though. You can buy a book new for 100% of the cover price, used (if they have them) for 75%, and then usually sell them back to the bookstore at the end of term for 40-50% of purchase.
100% - 40% = 60% and you get the physical object, or 66% and it magically disappers after the term. Not to mention all the books that you should keep anyway. The best feeling I ever had was selling my deformable solids book back after I buteed heads with the professor for an entire term. The worst feeling was realizing that I needed the book six months later and had to re-buy it. Bought used for 75%, sold back for 50%, rebought for 75%. I was out for a full price. Imagine if I'd gotten an ebook - it would have cost me 166% of the cost of the book, as I now have it as a standard resource in my bookshelf.
This doesn't look like a bargain in any way.
Actually, textbook writing isn't particularly profitable in the hard sciences. This is based purely on anecdotal evidence, however. I do know of some authors of college texts, and most of them get less than a dollar per book sold. If you can imagine that the market for such books is particularly small for anything other than freshman level weed-out courses (thousands of copies, may be a couple tens of thousands for all but the major standards), there is little to gain for writing a text except the ability to be published and the desire to use your own materials for teaching. $20,000 may seem like lot of money for writing a text, but considering the number of hours required to do such a project, the return is pretty poor.
Sounds like you bought her a toy. Not really a requirement for school. Not that organization isn't a good skill (music collection), but she's not really using the computer to forward her education.
You do bring up a good point, however. If a kid is going to lug around a computer to classes, it's probably best to get the lightest possible. Its bad enough to carry all the textbooks, much less a 7lb behemouth (or, worse yet, one of those 11lb Dells) as well.
Well, he probably doesn't need to drop $20,000 on a consultant to tell him his list is a little thin, and he should be spending more. Sorry, but I think he has already received many valuable answers. Generally, I suspect managers hire you because they think their IT guy doesn't know what hes doing. If my IT guy suggested a high priced consultant, I would assume he didn't know what he was doing, and either get him in-house budgeting help (if he was really good at the geek stuff) or find someone better.
If you read his question, he's not trying to come up with a budget - he already has one. Reading between the lines, he's worried that its too much. Cost per employee or percentage of gross revenue is a yardstick against which the budget will be measured by non-techincal types, and compared with "industry averages" to see if spending is in line with competitors. If he's really concerned that his budgets are high, he needs to grab the president/CEO and have a one-on-one before budgets get presented.
By the way, running IT as a profit center tends to piss off your clients. I happen to run a small engineering firm (architecture-related), and have worked in both government and commerce in several firms, and have a wife who has been business operations manager in two industries. People HATE being nickel and dimed for little shit. In a field like architecture, where there are as many small firms in a city as there are ants in your back yard, you have to make people love you to get clients. Annoying a single client with a bunch of little line item charges can mean the loss of a dozen or more potential clients/jobs. BTW - in most (medium) architectural firms, everybody is a cost center, even the architects. Fees tend to be negotiated based on a percentage of estimated construction, not hourly rates or printing charges, and are usually fixed - or nearly so.
Want fair taxes? Opt for a gross receipts tax. My rough numbers put it at 2.5% to 5%. No deductions, no exemptions, no credits. Buy and Sell stock daily? You're going to pay a percentage of each transaction to Uncle Sam. He protects the system which allows you to trade, you pay for that protection. Own a corporation? Pay tax twice - once when your corporation gets paid, once when you pay your salary/take profit. The US Governement provides special legal protections for Corporations...there's your fee for that protection. Want to avoid the double tax? go Sole Proprietor and put your ass out there for liability like everyone else. Flip your house or car every three years to keep up with the Jonses? You got it...pay the man on each transaction.
Okay, there's one deduction: Each United States Taxpayer Identification Number (SSN for residents, TIN for legal aliens) over 16 years of age gets an annual deduction equal to 2087x(federal minimum wage). Thats right, you make at or less that the full time minimum wage, and we'll give you a pass. Want to lower taxes? Raise the minimum wage. And no, if you have a dozen kids you don't get to deduct them. You chose to have them (remember screaming "Oh God, YES!"? that was the decision moment). However, if your spouse chooses not to work, the two of you (filing jointly) get your "full" deduction.
Disclaimer: I trade stocks & mutual funds for investment, I own an S Corp, My wife and I both work, I have a child. I'm not looking for a free ride, I want something that is relatively fair and very hard to skirt.
..."don't bother." A lot shorter and more concise than the 6kB mini-review Timothy gave it. I suppose it makes him look like he reads bad books too, and isn't just writing advertisement copy.
No, this is like Quayle spelling potato with an "e" on the end. It so mind numbingly stupid, we can't believe it has happened. And so we're going to talk about how much stupidity there is in congress.
We already know the bill was chock full of backscrathcing for energy producers and miscellaneous pork, and a lack of interest in the environment. Thats a given. The fact that something so ridiculous actually made it through along with the slash and burn politics is news.
Which seems to be the problem?
8:30 is a fine time for the sun to set. It sets by six in the winter (Virginia) and there doens't seem to be outcry.
7am and the sun is "high overhead"? I'm still trying to figure out why that would be a problem. I work a relatively normal 8-5 day, and I have a sunrise simulator that I use - even in the summer - to get up at 6 so I have time to have breakfast and get my kid out of bed / dressed / fed / off to school. If it were light out at 5am, that'd be great.
Of course, I have TiVo, so I don't have to worry about all that "but I can't watch Jay Leno and get up at 5am" shit. (No, I don't watch late night tv anyway). I don't play evening (insert sport here), where light is a problem. I can't get in 18 holes of golf after work regardless of the sunset time, so evening play is a moot point.
Now that I come to think about it, if it got cooler an hour earlier in the evening, it would probably be much nicer. Young kids could spend more evenings chasing fireflys insead of having to go to bed while its still light out. The fireworks on the 4th could start at a reasonable time.
Tell you what...I'm still looking for a down side. Even my wife would have one less day to be in a bitchy mood 'cause she lost an hour of sleep each spring. (Yes, she seems to treat the extra hour of sleep the fall change offers as a holiday akin to Christmas)
Let me fill in 2 for you: CDs & DVDs. The nicest way to label them, cost effectively, is with inkjet on printable discs. No worries about peeling lables or ungly sharpie-labelling. Epson's got one for under $100 retail. Sure, Epsons are crap - clogging if you don't use them for a week (hint: cron a 1"x8" image with the entire spectrum to the printer every day or two...just make sure you've got cheap paper loaded)
And then there's #3 - large format prints. As expensive as they are, 24"-60" wide printers are still much cheaper than the electrostsic versions. The 24" 6-color HP I have set me back $1200, which is a bargain in the large format world. I'm sure that's not the intent of the article, but it is another area where inkjets still rule.
I'm guessing the target audience is the same kids whos parents are buying them $35,000 SUVs to take to college when they're freshmen. Not that I'm jealous...
Funny, I haven't noticed this. I do get emails which randomly appear in the wrong accounts - an email sent to my business account will show up both there and in my personal inbox *shrug*. Its free (beer)...hard to complain too much.
I take it the "Copies & Folders" section isn't sending your sent items to the desired folders, or bcc'ing the right folks?
Well, I press my nose up against the screen (use a d/view stand) so it's not that bad. Also, I do mostly cad work, so the extra pixels means more real estate and better accuracy in the drawing area. I usually use a larger zoom for text editing...10 pt in Word at 100% is a bit small.
I'll admit that some things don't run as fast as they should, but for the most part, the laptop is every bit as fast as the 2.8G desktop it replaced, and I can take everything with me.
Once the discussion is archived, nobody can post anything useful to the poll, and then there won't be any trace of who is copying DVDs.
Oh, sorry, I thought this was some freedom of speech thing.
Nevermind.
Previous house: new, custom design, prewired 9 ways to Sunday.
Current House: 1960s ranch. Server is in the unfinished part of the basement. I snaked wire from the server area, across the unfinshed ceiling to an A/C duct that was put in a couple of years before I moved in. that goes all the way to the attic. AFter that I just found the room I wanted and the location on the wall and matching top plate (look under the insulation in the attic). For ease of fishing, drill a 1/2" hole the top plate and an inch hole in the drywall (put a low voltage old-work, open backed box in if you'll cover it up with a plate later). Low-tech fish method: Drop one end of a beaded chain down into the wall and tape the top part of the chain to your cable. Beaded chain is the stuff you'll see on old pull-chain ceiling lights - looks like a lot o little (1/8") metal beads. Take a magnet - the kind on a telescoping rod work well - and stick it in the hole you drilled in the wall and wave it around 'til you hit the beaded chain. Pull the chain out, and the cable will follow (if you taped it securely).
No, really, he was concerned that 540Mb wireless would leave wired behind. I was pointing out he had nothing to fear.
If I'd wanted to boast, I'd tell you that my laptop is a Presicion M70 with a PM-1.86Ghz processor, 2GB of DDR2 ram, an intel 1Gb enet card, an nVidia QuadraFX go 1400 with 256MB ram, a 100GB HD, and a 1920x1200 screen. The non-raided discs in the FW tower (a cheapie FW400 tower box I bought for $300 and populated with IDE HDs) are the bottleneck, or possibly the FW bus itself, depending on the content.
The server is a Dell SC400 with a few extra sticks of RAM, an ATI 9600 and an ATI HDTV wonder. Nothing there to brag about.
As for the fellow concerned that wire length is a factor, my main link is about 40', home crimped at both ends. Since I've gotten sustained transfers of large (1GB files) at 28MB/s, I'm guessing that the FW bus is saturated. I haven't tried a ramdisk to ramdisk memory transfer, so I can't be sure.
Hmmm, It hough you were a troll or an OT, but you're kinda right. You have to turn it upside down, and imagine its sorta saggy, though.
For the nubile version, you have to wait for the round puck version (like the old iMacs), and hope they add a scroll disc, like the iPods.
Yeah, no simple "right click on the file". It'll have to be move your cursor over the file name and press firmly, somewhere on the right side of the mouse.
Get yourself a gigbit e-net switch and cards. Buy.com has an 8-port for about $60 after rebate right now (SMC, just set mine up). Runs 1000Mb/s over cat5(e). I can't even saturate my Gb net at home with an 8-drive FW tower (limited by drive speed and/or FW bandwidth of 400Mb/s/channel) between my server and my laptop.
However, it would be nice not to have to be plugged into the cables when I want to edit video on the server. Right now, the connection (54Mb) is dicey enough and slow enough (10-15Mb max real throughput, down hill, with the wind behind me) that its impractical.
All I can say is that if I don't see a dupe on /., I'm going to start running for the hills. The hair is already starting to stand up on the back of my neck, it's so creepy.
..but then everyone could have it, I guess.
You see, that whole "360 degree movement" think is a trckball. If you have a mechanical moune, there's one on the bottom of it. AutoCAD uses a much better way of accessing this type of pan function: you click-hold the middle button (or scroll wheel) and move your mouse. Far more accurate than track balls. Want to zoom, too? That what the scroll wheel is for.
I happen to have seven buttons on my Logitech MX900 mouse (okay, the right and left "buttons" are just pressure sensitive areas on the mouse top, with nice tactile feedback sensors below. I use the r/l buttons and the scroll wheel. I never touch the others, and have had to teach muself to be careful not to move my hand for fear of inadvertent clicks. I don't feel a desire for r/l movement of the wheel, as it tends to interfere with my click-only accuracy of the scroll wheel (I've tried it).
Apple - you've made a beautiful, minimalist piece of hardware. Sadly, it would have been better implemented in sofware with a standard 3 button mouse. But then, it wouldn't have been "innovative", would it?
Lets face it, you must first follow the money. Sure, it sounds like a good idea to reuse the currect parts of the shuttle to leverage existing parts and technology. But we are looking at a 35 year old design. We can't come up with anything better? Maybe it's not cost savings...
It turns out that (ATTFA) Dr. Horowitz, one of the leading proponents for the resue of old technology, turns out to be the head of "ATK Thiokol, where he now leads the company's effort to develop the new family of rockets". Hmmm, I know, if we just modify the ones we've got in stock, we can sell them all over again to NASA. That'll keep out costs down and minimize the possibility of competition. Sounds like a great solution Dr. Horowitz...for your bank account.
Like most of the other posters have stated, social engineering works only when you've got a sufficiently lax attitude in employees and a large enough population to offer general anonymity. Having worked at a facility with a secure area, I can say that nobodu was getting into the secure area to any thing useful without proper ID. (I decided that getting out with data, should you be an insider, wasn't very hard though, as they put the receptionsist in the wrong place)
Um, actually, your off by three orders of magnitude. Shuttle orbits are 200-250 miles. Unfortunately for your astronaut spamers, they'll only have seconds to send the message, as the shuttle has a ground speed of over 250mi/min (don't quote that last one, I'm basing it off 25k mi/90min orbit).