According to TFA, he had a heart attack two days earlier and didn't know it. This restricted his circulation to the point that he ended up passing out at the wheel. There doesn't seem to be anything he could have done, except maybe go to the hospital every day just to make sure he hadn't had a heart attack recently.
We have a major problem with a general lack of interest in science, math, and engineering in this country. If a story like this can prominently feature the fact that this guy is an engineer and used principles of physics (regardless of how basic) to solve a serious problem, maybe that will inspire one or two people to get into the field. Every little bit helps.
You need to look up what ethics means. Ethics means responsibility to all *stakeholders*, not just the shareholders. Stakeholders in a company include the shareholders, employees, and the society in which they operate. A company that does whatever it can to maximize shareholder value without regard to any of the other stakeholders is not ethical.
It may be legally fine, but it's ethically wrong. Google has built its vast wealth largely on the backs of American infrastructure paid for by American tax dollars. Ethically, they should be paying their fair share for that infrastructure, not exploiting loopholes to avoid it.
I'm sure anti-tax zealots will disagree with me, but in my view exploiting these kinds of loopholes is just another example of how laughable Google's "don't be evil" slogan has become.
The proprietors of Sealand continue to live in fantasy land. All it is is an abandoned platform out in the ocean under British rule. Sure, they say it's independent, but the only reason they're allowed to carry on thinking that is because they aren't doing anything illegal enough for the Brits to make the effort to enforce their rule. If something like the Pirate Bay moved in, they would find the British reasserting themselves over that hunk of concrete pretty quick. Hell, the Brits traveled 8,000 miles to go to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, and the only thing worth anything there is a bunch of sheep. They'll have no problems sending a ship (or a cruise missile) a few miles out to sea to take out a platform.
The only reason anyone would buy that pile of crap for a billion dollars is because they wanted to do some heavily illegal shit on it, otherwise they'd go buy some tropical private island for 1% of the cost. Since Britain would never allow that sort of thing to go down within their territorial waters, any potential buyer is essentially spending a metric assload of money for a fairy tale.
Launching a satellite into space costs tens of millions of dollars. Are they saying buying a platform out in the ocean was actually MORE expensive than that? Sounds like Sealand may be a little overpriced for what you get. You can buy a number of private islands for less than that. Hell, they could buy a fairly decent paramilitary force and take over Sealand that way for less than it would take to launch a satellite into any kind of stable orbit.
Re:Seriously?
on
Drupal 7
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's a tool people who don't want to bother with programming their own website can use to build their own website. I've been a programmer for years, and I have done web development, but I really don't want to deal with the aggravation of programming my own site (the cobbler's children have no shoes and all that). So, I use Drupal to do it for me. Sure, there's still some effort in getting things to work right, and it's never going to win any awards for innovative design, but it's about a hundred times less irritating than doing everything from scratch.
I do have to question the wisdom of the submitter when he suggests the perfect way to get new people into using Drupal is to have them help test Drupal 7. That seems like exactly the wrong way to do it. If someone who has never seen Drupal before is first exposed to it via a buggy development release they're going to throw it out in frustration and try something else. Betas are for people already interested in and/or using your product, not for people you're trying to convert.
At what point do you draw the line between "slowing" and "stopping"? They could easily slow down a particular site to the point where it's practically unusable (limit it to, say, 50 bytes/second). That seems like it would clearly curtail free speech, because nobody is going to wait around for that thing to load. It wouldn't actually "block" the site, though.
There's way too much gray area and too many opportunities for abuse if you say slowing something down is okay but stopping it isn't. The only practical way to assure free speech on the Internet in an enforceable way is total net neutrality.
Let's be honest here: Put in the context of the bailout, or even of the military budget or social programs like Social Security or Medicare, everything we could possible do in space looks like a bargain. The issue has always been political will.
Absent an imminent threat, real or perceived, the average voter doesn't want to fund anything, especially in today's political climate. It's easy to campaign for increasing military spending because of the evil terrorists. It's easy to campaign for keeping Social Security because nobody wants to see grandmothers starving on the streets. In contrast, it's very difficult to win elections running on platform of increasing our efforts in space. Most voters don't understand why we're even up there and wouldn't care if they did because it doesn't impact their day to day lives or their perceived sense of security.
So, when we decide we want to cut money from the budget, NASA and other programs like it are the first on the chopping block. We cut a billion here and a billion there from various programs, but won't touch the programs that take the largest bite out of the federal budget: the military, social security, and medicare. We could fully fund a mission to Mars right now just by cutting out a small portion of the money the military wastes on various projects it doesn't need or even particularly want, but that's never going to happen because to the average voter failing to fund whatever Congress thinks the military wants is anti-American and will cause the terrorists to win.
Our government has consistently shown that the way to win elections is to increase military spending and cut education and science research, including space exploration. This should tell you where our priorities are as a society, and why we're unlikely to make it to Mars or anywhere else in our lifetime.
The end is nearing. Better either consider getting in good with your maker, since He'll be coming soon, or usher in an armageddon to wipe out much of the population. Oh, wait...
Part of the reason we're in this situation in the first place is because a not insignificant portion of the people in power (and the people who vote for them) actually do believe the second coming of Christ (or the first coming of the Messiah for the extremist Zionist wing of the Jewish people) is imminent, and are acting accordingly. It makes little sense to plan for long term stewardship of the Earth if you're convinced the end times are near anyway.
If people were more pragmatic and less concerned with fulfilling vague prophecies in their holy books, we'd be a lot better off now.
I was thinking something very much along these lines. I can't believe that AOL is doing something more I/O intensive than everyone else in the world. If you're looking at buying something this expensive, you really need to go through your database design and application code with a fine-toothed comb and look for inefficiencies first.
Of course, in the real world, this sort of thing (maybe not to this scale) happens all the time. We just had a customer that was having major performance problems. They demanded we put them on a massive $750,000 whiz-bang SAN device right away to alleviate their problems. So we did, and then their DBAs finally get off their asses and look at the code and make some changes that cut their I/O demand in half. Basically, they ended up burning $750,000 on something they didn't even need. I have a feeling AOL just spend $1,000,000 on something they didn't really need as well.
What needs to happen is someone in Washington needs to grow a spine and raise taxes to pay for what we need to pay for, and start trimming the fat going forward. The military is a great place to start
Good luck with that. The military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about is far bigger and more powerful than even he could have predicted, and it's basically unstoppable at this point. Defense contractors lobby Congress to fund giant defense projects of questionable value, Congress people get those giant defense projects built in their districts, and the jobs that get created turn into votes to get them re-elected and more money for the contractors to expand their lobbying efforts. It's a cycle that's good for everyone involved except the taxpayer (other than the ones in the Congress person's district, of course).
Hell, the Secretary of Defense himself got raked over the coals for even daring to suggest the military didn't actually need all of the money they get every year, and wouldn't it be great if they could stop buying all this crap they have no use for. If the guy in charge of the military can't cut the military budget, then who the hell can? Congress sure isn't going to do it, nobody ever gets elected by being "soft on defense", especially in our post-9/11 fear-based system.
Probably because they asked the artist to draw a computer with blinky lights (to signify something high tech) and that was the only computer he had ever seen. After all, it's not like your average person encountered 50 different computers a day back then like we do now.
In my opinion we were defeated the minute we decided to go to Iraq and starve the Afghan war of resources. If we were able to marginalize the Taliban and start large-scale rebuilding projects quickly we might have had a chance. 9 years in, it seems unlikely we'll be able to get the people back on our side.
I did specifically say "the first two" at the very beginning of the post in order to allow for my crack at Buzz later on. Nothing personal against Buzz, he seems like a nice enough guy, but his last book was, in my view, not very good at all.
The first two men on the moon are world famous, but very few people can name who the third or fourth are, or indeed any of the others. Clearly, being first is hugely important. If you're first, you get bragging rights and endless book deals even if you're not a very good writer (I'm looking at you, Buzz). If you're not first, all you get to do is go around telling everyone you hit golf balls on the moon in hopes of getting invited to speak at an elementary school assembly.
With this in mind, deciding who will be the first on Mars is hugely important. When the time comes, everyone is going to be fighting to be the first person to set foot on Mars, and since the mission will likely be international in nature, global politics also will come into play in making the decision. Therefore, the perfect solution was devised: Let everyone be first! So, we're going to tie a huge solar sail to the Earth and bring the entire planet to Mars at once. This way there's no arguing, and everyone will be happy.
Sure, and then the Taliban gets to convert the entire country to their side by making sure everyone knows the infidels essentially detonated a nuclear bomb on Afghan soil. When winning the hearts and minds of the populace is essential to winning the war, irradiating the countryside is generally considered a bad move.
It used be that having people build data centers in your community meant lots of good jobs. These days, though, with advances in lights out management, you can build a huge data center and only need a few low-pay button pushers and forklift drivers on site. All of the high paid engineer and admin positions can be staffed anywhere, and usually end up being primarily existing staff who remain wherever they're already living.
Sure having some jobs coming in is better than no jobs coming in, but data centers alone are not going to transform a community into a high tech mecca any more than building a bunch of warehouses will.
If they have vastly superior firepower, they won't need stealth. If first contact was established, for example, by way of some planet-destroying weapon that instantly blew us all to atoms, stealth probably wouldn't come into play.
Honestly, though, I find speculation about this sort of thing to be highly amusing but ultimately pointless. We know essentially nothing about what alien life might look or act like, so you could literally speculate almost anything and have just as much chance of being right as the next guy. For all we know a visiting alien race might not even view us as being sentient enough to bother with and would either completely ignore us or treat us like we treat chimps. Sure, we like to study them and see if we can teach them any cool tricks, but we're not likely to try to set up high-level diplomatic relations with them. Our own sense of superiority compels us to imagine aliens would at least be interested in talking with us, or at least trying to exterminate us. We never really consider the idea that aliens might not care about us enough to do either of those things.
Of course, that's all pointless speculation based on no real data as well, so who knows.
As soon as they figure out that this recording was made without the express written consent of Major League Baseball, Crosby's estate is going to be totally hosed.
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According to TFA, he had a heart attack two days earlier and didn't know it. This restricted his circulation to the point that he ended up passing out at the wheel. There doesn't seem to be anything he could have done, except maybe go to the hospital every day just to make sure he hadn't had a heart attack recently.
We have a major problem with a general lack of interest in science, math, and engineering in this country. If a story like this can prominently feature the fact that this guy is an engineer and used principles of physics (regardless of how basic) to solve a serious problem, maybe that will inspire one or two people to get into the field. Every little bit helps.
You need to look up what ethics means. Ethics means responsibility to all *stakeholders*, not just the shareholders. Stakeholders in a company include the shareholders, employees, and the society in which they operate. A company that does whatever it can to maximize shareholder value without regard to any of the other stakeholders is not ethical.
It may be legally fine, but it's ethically wrong. Google has built its vast wealth largely on the backs of American infrastructure paid for by American tax dollars. Ethically, they should be paying their fair share for that infrastructure, not exploiting loopholes to avoid it.
I'm sure anti-tax zealots will disagree with me, but in my view exploiting these kinds of loopholes is just another example of how laughable Google's "don't be evil" slogan has become.
The proprietors of Sealand continue to live in fantasy land. All it is is an abandoned platform out in the ocean under British rule. Sure, they say it's independent, but the only reason they're allowed to carry on thinking that is because they aren't doing anything illegal enough for the Brits to make the effort to enforce their rule. If something like the Pirate Bay moved in, they would find the British reasserting themselves over that hunk of concrete pretty quick. Hell, the Brits traveled 8,000 miles to go to war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, and the only thing worth anything there is a bunch of sheep. They'll have no problems sending a ship (or a cruise missile) a few miles out to sea to take out a platform.
The only reason anyone would buy that pile of crap for a billion dollars is because they wanted to do some heavily illegal shit on it, otherwise they'd go buy some tropical private island for 1% of the cost. Since Britain would never allow that sort of thing to go down within their territorial waters, any potential buyer is essentially spending a metric assload of money for a fairy tale.
Launching a satellite into space costs tens of millions of dollars. Are they saying buying a platform out in the ocean was actually MORE expensive than that? Sounds like Sealand may be a little overpriced for what you get. You can buy a number of private islands for less than that. Hell, they could buy a fairly decent paramilitary force and take over Sealand that way for less than it would take to launch a satellite into any kind of stable orbit.
It's a tool people who don't want to bother with programming their own website can use to build their own website. I've been a programmer for years, and I have done web development, but I really don't want to deal with the aggravation of programming my own site (the cobbler's children have no shoes and all that). So, I use Drupal to do it for me. Sure, there's still some effort in getting things to work right, and it's never going to win any awards for innovative design, but it's about a hundred times less irritating than doing everything from scratch.
I do have to question the wisdom of the submitter when he suggests the perfect way to get new people into using Drupal is to have them help test Drupal 7. That seems like exactly the wrong way to do it. If someone who has never seen Drupal before is first exposed to it via a buggy development release they're going to throw it out in frustration and try something else. Betas are for people already interested in and/or using your product, not for people you're trying to convert.
After that? Lego C&C Music Factory!
The trick is getting the legos to perform those killer dance moves.
At what point do you draw the line between "slowing" and "stopping"? They could easily slow down a particular site to the point where it's practically unusable (limit it to, say, 50 bytes/second). That seems like it would clearly curtail free speech, because nobody is going to wait around for that thing to load. It wouldn't actually "block" the site, though.
There's way too much gray area and too many opportunities for abuse if you say slowing something down is okay but stopping it isn't. The only practical way to assure free speech on the Internet in an enforceable way is total net neutrality.
Let's be honest here: Put in the context of the bailout, or even of the military budget or social programs like Social Security or Medicare, everything we could possible do in space looks like a bargain. The issue has always been political will.
Absent an imminent threat, real or perceived, the average voter doesn't want to fund anything, especially in today's political climate. It's easy to campaign for increasing military spending because of the evil terrorists. It's easy to campaign for keeping Social Security because nobody wants to see grandmothers starving on the streets. In contrast, it's very difficult to win elections running on platform of increasing our efforts in space. Most voters don't understand why we're even up there and wouldn't care if they did because it doesn't impact their day to day lives or their perceived sense of security.
So, when we decide we want to cut money from the budget, NASA and other programs like it are the first on the chopping block. We cut a billion here and a billion there from various programs, but won't touch the programs that take the largest bite out of the federal budget: the military, social security, and medicare. We could fully fund a mission to Mars right now just by cutting out a small portion of the money the military wastes on various projects it doesn't need or even particularly want, but that's never going to happen because to the average voter failing to fund whatever Congress thinks the military wants is anti-American and will cause the terrorists to win.
Our government has consistently shown that the way to win elections is to increase military spending and cut education and science research, including space exploration. This should tell you where our priorities are as a society, and why we're unlikely to make it to Mars or anywhere else in our lifetime.
You might want to consider parking your car in a different location.
The end is nearing. Better either consider getting in good with your maker, since He'll be coming soon, or usher in an armageddon to wipe out much of the population. Oh, wait...
Part of the reason we're in this situation in the first place is because a not insignificant portion of the people in power (and the people who vote for them) actually do believe the second coming of Christ (or the first coming of the Messiah for the extremist Zionist wing of the Jewish people) is imminent, and are acting accordingly. It makes little sense to plan for long term stewardship of the Earth if you're convinced the end times are near anyway.
If people were more pragmatic and less concerned with fulfilling vague prophecies in their holy books, we'd be a lot better off now.
I was thinking something very much along these lines. I can't believe that AOL is doing something more I/O intensive than everyone else in the world. If you're looking at buying something this expensive, you really need to go through your database design and application code with a fine-toothed comb and look for inefficiencies first.
Of course, in the real world, this sort of thing (maybe not to this scale) happens all the time. We just had a customer that was having major performance problems. They demanded we put them on a massive $750,000 whiz-bang SAN device right away to alleviate their problems. So we did, and then their DBAs finally get off their asses and look at the code and make some changes that cut their I/O demand in half. Basically, they ended up burning $750,000 on something they didn't even need. I have a feeling AOL just spend $1,000,000 on something they didn't really need as well.
What needs to happen is someone in Washington needs to grow a spine and raise taxes to pay for what we need to pay for, and start trimming the fat going forward. The military is a great place to start
Good luck with that. The military-industrial complex Eisenhower warned about is far bigger and more powerful than even he could have predicted, and it's basically unstoppable at this point. Defense contractors lobby Congress to fund giant defense projects of questionable value, Congress people get those giant defense projects built in their districts, and the jobs that get created turn into votes to get them re-elected and more money for the contractors to expand their lobbying efforts. It's a cycle that's good for everyone involved except the taxpayer (other than the ones in the Congress person's district, of course).
Hell, the Secretary of Defense himself got raked over the coals for even daring to suggest the military didn't actually need all of the money they get every year, and wouldn't it be great if they could stop buying all this crap they have no use for. If the guy in charge of the military can't cut the military budget, then who the hell can? Congress sure isn't going to do it, nobody ever gets elected by being "soft on defense", especially in our post-9/11 fear-based system.
Exactly: Babies are stupid.
Probably because they asked the artist to draw a computer with blinky lights (to signify something high tech) and that was the only computer he had ever seen. After all, it's not like your average person encountered 50 different computers a day back then like we do now.
Jesus probably wouldn't have used those long metal poles to hold up the banner during a thunderstorm.
In my opinion we were defeated the minute we decided to go to Iraq and starve the Afghan war of resources. If we were able to marginalize the Taliban and start large-scale rebuilding projects quickly we might have had a chance. 9 years in, it seems unlikely we'll be able to get the people back on our side.
I did specifically say "the first two" at the very beginning of the post in order to allow for my crack at Buzz later on. Nothing personal against Buzz, he seems like a nice enough guy, but his last book was, in my view, not very good at all.
The first two men on the moon are world famous, but very few people can name who the third or fourth are, or indeed any of the others. Clearly, being first is hugely important. If you're first, you get bragging rights and endless book deals even if you're not a very good writer (I'm looking at you, Buzz). If you're not first, all you get to do is go around telling everyone you hit golf balls on the moon in hopes of getting invited to speak at an elementary school assembly.
With this in mind, deciding who will be the first on Mars is hugely important. When the time comes, everyone is going to be fighting to be the first person to set foot on Mars, and since the mission will likely be international in nature, global politics also will come into play in making the decision. Therefore, the perfect solution was devised: Let everyone be first! So, we're going to tie a huge solar sail to the Earth and bring the entire planet to Mars at once. This way there's no arguing, and everyone will be happy.
Sure, and then the Taliban gets to convert the entire country to their side by making sure everyone knows the infidels essentially detonated a nuclear bomb on Afghan soil. When winning the hearts and minds of the populace is essential to winning the war, irradiating the countryside is generally considered a bad move.
It used be that having people build data centers in your community meant lots of good jobs. These days, though, with advances in lights out management, you can build a huge data center and only need a few low-pay button pushers and forklift drivers on site. All of the high paid engineer and admin positions can be staffed anywhere, and usually end up being primarily existing staff who remain wherever they're already living.
Sure having some jobs coming in is better than no jobs coming in, but data centers alone are not going to transform a community into a high tech mecca any more than building a bunch of warehouses will.
It's not like we have better things to do than make sure every child receives a rounded ruler!
Why would anyone want a ruler that was only 10 inches long?
If they have vastly superior firepower, they won't need stealth. If first contact was established, for example, by way of some planet-destroying weapon that instantly blew us all to atoms, stealth probably wouldn't come into play.
Honestly, though, I find speculation about this sort of thing to be highly amusing but ultimately pointless. We know essentially nothing about what alien life might look or act like, so you could literally speculate almost anything and have just as much chance of being right as the next guy. For all we know a visiting alien race might not even view us as being sentient enough to bother with and would either completely ignore us or treat us like we treat chimps. Sure, we like to study them and see if we can teach them any cool tricks, but we're not likely to try to set up high-level diplomatic relations with them. Our own sense of superiority compels us to imagine aliens would at least be interested in talking with us, or at least trying to exterminate us. We never really consider the idea that aliens might not care about us enough to do either of those things.
Of course, that's all pointless speculation based on no real data as well, so who knows.
As soon as they figure out that this recording was made without the express written consent of Major League Baseball, Crosby's estate is going to be totally hosed.