Nice. America's Cup has long had, and had a reputation for, arcane rules. Just as for the Formula cars, Indy, etc., the rules are meant to offer two things, a level playing field, and yet room for engineering and technical innovation and the manner in which the vehicle is driven within the rules that give that level field. A similar approach is done for smaller class boats but the rules are much simpler.
It's all supposed to boil down to how well one can design and build a boat (that's matched evenly with others) and then how well can one sail it.
America's Cup is indeed a playground for the rich. Yet one may readily and enjoyably participate in small class boat races at a local sailing club, often for no more money than just showing up and offering to crew. For more serious stuff it's generally expected that you have proper clothing, an approved harness and flotation jacket along with proper devices (lamp, flares, horn.) If you get up into Mackinac Race territory, then it starts getting serious, but even twenty, thirty years ago it was fairly casual. It's fine if one just wants to day-sail; but the small class boats offer an entry point to people with boats and practical small boat handling while dancing on the edge.
I'm not sure about the "supposed to" so much; so far people and I just do what seems natural to us, but I think I know what you mean.
If one could know that the Kinect is locked down then I'm all for it just 'cuz it's a nifty toy at the least. What these folks have done with it is way cool whether one wishes to use it or no.
My laptop cam has a light also but I'm not sophisticated enough to rest totally assured that the software I use reports correctly as to whether it and the microphone are on or off - offhand, I don't even recall if the light is wired directly in circuit with the cam so it can't be spoofed. Drat, like I really needed something more to look into right now.
"Not to mention that stopping hunger/poverty/etc often requires the recipients to change their behavior."
Or, you know, jobs to earn the money to buy the food. Seen the planet's population unemployment rates lately?
ON the topic at hand, bringing in all the old arguments gets old. NASA's portion of the budget is absurdly small for any such arguments to hold up. The last time the NASA budget was more than 1% of the federal budget was '91-'93. In relation to GNP (or whatever they use now) it's nigh invisible. What was the old statistic? At the height of the Apollo program outlays, people in the U.S. spent more on pizza than the portion of their taxes that went to NASA.
Didn't say I had a problem with it, only that it was a bit of getting used to. Camera is in bezel of laptop's 17" screen; sometimes I'll be leaning back in my office chair, other times leaning forward to type some thing, once with my nose to the screen, "What are you doing?" "Seeing if you got more wrinkles that I do." At a comfortable viewing distance there's still around 5 degrees of separation eyes-to-camera, so that's the "getting used to." Also, with several people, we'll each look directly at the camera from time to time, for emphasis, solidarity, whatever. I guess it's a human thing and we're all a bit different in how we do things.
Unless the Kinect is phoning home, that part wouldn't bother me. Using Skype? Now that bothers me, so I use alternatives.
Thanks for mentioning "The Marching Morons" - it's been on the tip of my mind for months but couldn't recall title or author, due ravages of bad memory. Too much these days falls right in line; I see fewer and fewer people who seem to know how to do anything if they can't "Google" it. Their parents didn't teach them, their schools are afraid to, and they shun Scouts.
I paid my respects at el Reg; suffice that Mr. Pohl introduced me to more, taught me more, than few other writers came close to.
I haven't video called much and it took a little bit of getting used to but then was OK. At appropriate times I'll look directly into the camera and the other person sees that. And vice versa. Works, and only a little awkward. This new software is nifty but unsettling in its own way. Until I use it I'll reserve judgement.
Sounds a sweet system, what with the CPU, scads of RAM, and the screens. Video editing is one of those things that "I want to learn how but don't have time/energy/focus for right now"
I like where AMD is going with their arch and HSA from the tiny bit I can follow of such things; it looks to offer a logical, streamlined approach to future workloads. There's part of the prob- often ahead of time, AMD offered full 64-bit, then cores, now the [bundled/hybrid?] cores, etc., while waiting for programmers to catch up with applications that would make better use of them. (If I get my settings right, I like having my system use more than one core for booting and some of my apps and games spread their load over the full CPU (or however many cores I give them - VirtualBox, for example.))
For foreseeable future I'm budget-stuck with what I have - scrambling to save for a new power supply and video card upgrade, and the eight-core. Speaking of which, what are you using to drive all your screens?
Oh, yes, please do let me know when you upgrade your 27" displays - I'm in lust. [grin] When I built present sys I got a deal on two LG 20.5 displays, gave one to my sister. Got hooked on wide screen and now want moar. Being able to have two documents or photos side by side, read and reply to email, is not only nice but necessary. Starting with my first 16-bit - and first GUI - I've wanted my display to emulate and expand upon what one could do on a full-sized desk or layout table, and was talking with engineers at Atari in '91 about this but the tech at the time just wasn't up to the task (unless maybe with kind of funding found in some research labs.)
Was that the same woman who bought a full container of hot coffee at the drive-in window, placed it between her legs and drove off, such that the movement of her ample thighs distorted the cup and popped off the top so she got splashed with hot coffee?
Bad burn, yes, and worse thinking. But that's just it: she wasn't thinking. Her lawyer was, and McDonalds caved. If I remember from the story, McD had already offered to pay her full medical bills and then some, but that wasn't good enough.
I may have missed other suits around the same time, but in my mind it's this one incident that really tore things open, reversing the line between responsible use and rewarding stupidity.
I'm a nutcase, then. I put together the current box in summer of '09, and I'm on the third CPU,an AMD 1090T. If there's no successor to Piledriver, then I'm still gonna save up for what will be a significant upgrade to my system. Am I lucky enough to get affordable housing, I'd even be able to build a new system with the eight-core.
I _like_ having extra cores - they make easy having different things running, playing with virtual machines, crunching for WCG. The hit I take on heat and electric are offset by the power and versatility on tap.
For the general market at the least I agree with you, tho.
I see this every time mention is made of guaranteed minimum income (how ever it may be phrased), the assumption that all of a sudden there would be a huge number of people who don't want to work. I think it's unwarranted and down to as much projection as prejudice.
Generally, people have the need to feel useful, wanted, and productive. They might want to do work other than they're now doing, they might want to do less of it, or with a more flexible schedule; they might even want to work for themselves, i.e. start a business.
Regardless, something will have to be done. By mid century at the latest, easily a third of the entire workforce will have no work at all. We can house them in concentration camps, kill them, or fund them. The latter seems like it'd be an interesting experiment and in the scheme of things, if intelligently funded, could even pay its own way over time. Dig around a little, some good economic modeling has gone into the idea of guaranteed income.
This is an issue way beyond the pettiness of partisan politics, it's a coming reality.
It was obvious to me you'd put some thought into stuff, borne out of more than casual reading and perhaps experience, was my surmise. I gotcher 'FTR', I hadn't mistaken the balance. It might be nice to have things all one or the other, as so many find it easy to see, but maybe they just do that for sake of argument.
I would really like it if more things in life were a tad simpler. Answering "do we need to do this" and keeping a weather eye for unintended consequences might help. For that matter, paying attention to the area specialists (the guys what learn the languages, spent often years in mufti in-country learning what's what) would have been handy for the U.S's last two bits of adventuring. We've done too many things without clear objectives and relying too much on what amounts to wishful thinking, expressed in vague terms (comes from many flawed assumptions, I think.) That, and as Ike warned, the corps don't just have a finger in the pie, they're in with both feet.
Cheers, mate. Oh, and you're right, I think, AF and Navy both have under-used expertise and capability for a range of un-war uses.
Indeed, Heinlein did a good job on his homework, and often wove it so seamlessly into the story that one barely noticed on first reading. He was a sharp mind who delved into myriad questions. One of my favorite anecdotes about him comes from when he was asked about his philosophy that was in his writing, lessons to learn, all that, and he just said, "....I write to make money, so I don't have to get an honest job." Beauty.
Oh, and on those Google patents? They're bullshit. Now, thanks to the bright lights at the patent office, patented bullshit, just like so many of the others that are obvious, prior art, or "because computer|Internet|cloud".
The fact that email is sent _en clair_ over the wires is not an argument for it being open. The reason is simple: unlike a postcard where one need only look at it, to read someone's email somebody has to find it and open it up with a text viewer, which is a physical act - and this act is analogous to opening an envelope. Until it's opened all that's seen is a filename or header, which is akin to the address on the outside of an envelope.
Why this is so hard for so many to see is beyond me, unless it's because rather than having to stop and think it's easier to repeat "what everyone knows to be so."
In 1963 almost any city with 25,000 people had at least one television station. (I just spent an hour looking via my weak search fu, couldn't find figures, so I'm going by my recollection living in the East, West, and Midwest during the Sixties.)
So that makes hundreds of stations. Generally, local stations started early in the morning, 6 to 7am. There'd be a sign-on, sometimes a short homily by a local pastor, then on to a local farm and weather report. Many would carry network feeds for shows such as The Today Show.
Most would sign off around 10pm. In larger markets there'd be the Jack Paar show followed by old movies until the wee hours.
If you're just speaking of public educational TV, that's something else entirely, and I don't recall any until getting cable in early 70's.
@geekoid
I didn't know the government gave TV stations money. What I do know is that for a long time each broadcast station - radio and TV - had to set aside a certain amount of time per day (or as a percentage of their broadcast day, I fergit) for programming in the public interest. This usually was taken to mean news. Later, TV in particular turned their news departments into "profit centers".
Yup, I remember Edward Murrow, Eric Sevareid, Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinckly. And the serious drama shows such as Playhouse 90. It wasn't quite yet the wasteland characterized and predicted by Newton Minow, but we could see it heading that way.
Intelligent use of lighting would be great; most cities I've lived in or near suck at it and absolutely don't care.
Another thing I noticed decades back, moving from outside a small town to a Modern American Megapolis: city folks don't see the stars at night; they have no sense of awe, or humility.
Ah, thank you. I will try to find the documentary - I'd not been aware of it, or missed it. Given the situation between Finland and Russia then, it would have been interesting had they been, so to say, outbid. At any rate, I think it a sad thing they had to abandon their continuing research, as in the case of Mir they were on to an interesting line, it seems.
Yes, and when what he proposes has the finely turned phrase "likely to or capable of facilitating terrorism" which on a good or weird day depending on where you stand is sufficiently ambiguous to cover just about whatever one wants it to mean, it's game over for any poor sod who sneezes in his Wheaties and is on someone's shit list.
Vandenberg is not better for a trip to the Moon unless you've got a fuckton extra delta-v in your pocket. It's used for polar launches; the boost phase is all or mostly all over water. Launching equatorial missions over land is a no-no. Doesn't have a fucking thing to do with military or a VA senator. It's mechanics, fuel, and liability (and that's part of not wanting to unnecessarily endanger people under the boost portion of flight path.)
No, you've gone to it and beyond it, which by most common usage would qualify for going to the Moon. Crashing, landing, orbiting, and fly-by all qualify.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice. America's Cup has long had, and had a reputation for, arcane rules. Just as for the Formula cars, Indy, etc., the rules are meant to offer two things, a level playing field, and yet room for engineering and technical innovation and the manner in which the vehicle is driven within the rules that give that level field. A similar approach is done for smaller class boats but the rules are much simpler.
It's all supposed to boil down to how well one can design and build a boat (that's matched evenly with others) and then how well can one sail it.
America's Cup is indeed a playground for the rich. Yet one may readily and enjoyably participate in small class boat races at a local sailing club, often for no more money than just showing up and offering to crew. For more serious stuff it's generally expected that you have proper clothing, an approved harness and flotation jacket along with proper devices (lamp, flares, horn.) If you get up into Mackinac Race territory, then it starts getting serious, but even twenty, thirty years ago it was fairly casual. It's fine if one just wants to day-sail; but the small class boats offer an entry point to people with boats and practical small boat handling while dancing on the edge.
I'm not sure about the "supposed to" so much; so far people and I just do what seems natural to us, but I think I know what you mean.
If one could know that the Kinect is locked down then I'm all for it just 'cuz it's a nifty toy at the least. What these folks have done with it is way cool whether one wishes to use it or no.
My laptop cam has a light also but I'm not sophisticated enough to rest totally assured that the software I use reports correctly as to whether it and the microphone are on or off - offhand, I don't even recall if the light is wired directly in circuit with the cam so it can't be spoofed. Drat, like I really needed something more to look into right now.
In the valley of the blind the one-eyed man is the first one killed. Or down-modded.
"Not to mention that stopping hunger/poverty/etc often requires the recipients to change their behavior."
Or, you know, jobs to earn the money to buy the food. Seen the planet's population unemployment rates lately?
ON the topic at hand, bringing in all the old arguments gets old. NASA's portion of the budget is absurdly small for any such arguments to hold up. The last time the NASA budget was more than 1% of the federal budget was '91-'93. In relation to GNP (or whatever they use now) it's nigh invisible. What was the old statistic? At the height of the Apollo program outlays, people in the U.S. spent more on pizza than the portion of their taxes that went to NASA.
Didn't say I had a problem with it, only that it was a bit of getting used to. Camera is in bezel of laptop's 17" screen; sometimes I'll be leaning back in my office chair, other times leaning forward to type some thing, once with my nose to the screen, "What are you doing?" "Seeing if you got more wrinkles that I do." At a comfortable viewing distance there's still around 5 degrees of separation eyes-to-camera, so that's the "getting used to." Also, with several people, we'll each look directly at the camera from time to time, for emphasis, solidarity, whatever. I guess it's a human thing and we're all a bit different in how we do things.
Unless the Kinect is phoning home, that part wouldn't bother me. Using Skype? Now that bothers me, so I use alternatives.
Thanks for mentioning "The Marching Morons" - it's been on the tip of my mind for months but couldn't recall title or author, due ravages of bad memory. Too much these days falls right in line; I see fewer and fewer people who seem to know how to do anything if they can't "Google" it. Their parents didn't teach them, their schools are afraid to, and they shun Scouts.
I paid my respects at el Reg; suffice that Mr. Pohl introduced me to more, taught me more, than few other writers came close to.
I haven't video called much and it took a little bit of getting used to but then was OK. At appropriate times I'll look directly into the camera and the other person sees that. And vice versa. Works, and only a little awkward. This new software is nifty but unsettling in its own way. Until I use it I'll reserve judgement.
Sounds a sweet system, what with the CPU, scads of RAM, and the screens. Video editing is one of those things that "I want to learn how but don't have time/energy/focus for right now"
I like where AMD is going with their arch and HSA from the tiny bit I can follow of such things; it looks to offer a logical, streamlined approach to future workloads. There's part of the prob- often ahead of time, AMD offered full 64-bit, then cores, now the [bundled/hybrid?] cores, etc., while waiting for programmers to catch up with applications that would make better use of them. (If I get my settings right, I like having my system use more than one core for booting and some of my apps and games spread their load over the full CPU (or however many cores I give them - VirtualBox, for example.))
For foreseeable future I'm budget-stuck with what I have - scrambling to save for a new power supply and video card upgrade, and the eight-core. Speaking of which, what are you using to drive all your screens?
Oh, yes, please do let me know when you upgrade your 27" displays - I'm in lust. [grin] When I built present sys I got a deal on two LG 20.5 displays, gave one to my sister. Got hooked on wide screen and now want moar. Being able to have two documents or photos side by side, read and reply to email, is not only nice but necessary. Starting with my first 16-bit - and first GUI - I've wanted my display to emulate and expand upon what one could do on a full-sized desk or layout table, and was talking with engineers at Atari in '91 about this but the tech at the time just wasn't up to the task (unless maybe with kind of funding found in some research labs.)
Was that the same woman who bought a full container of hot coffee at the drive-in window, placed it between her legs and drove off, such that the movement of her ample thighs distorted the cup and popped off the top so she got splashed with hot coffee?
Bad burn, yes, and worse thinking. But that's just it: she wasn't thinking. Her lawyer was, and McDonalds caved. If I remember from the story, McD had already offered to pay her full medical bills and then some, but that wasn't good enough.
I may have missed other suits around the same time, but in my mind it's this one incident that really tore things open, reversing the line between responsible use and rewarding stupidity.
Lemme guess, native English-speaker on ibogaine with too much crank and Jack on the side? Awesome, man. First belly laugh of the day.
I'm a nutcase, then. I put together the current box in summer of '09, and I'm on the third CPU,an AMD 1090T. If there's no successor to Piledriver, then I'm still gonna save up for what will be a significant upgrade to my system. Am I lucky enough to get affordable housing, I'd even be able to build a new system with the eight-core.
I _like_ having extra cores - they make easy having different things running, playing with virtual machines, crunching for WCG. The hit I take on heat and electric are offset by the power and versatility on tap.
For the general market at the least I agree with you, tho.
I see this every time mention is made of guaranteed minimum income (how ever it may be phrased), the assumption that all of a sudden there would be a huge number of people who don't want to work. I think it's unwarranted and down to as much projection as prejudice.
Generally, people have the need to feel useful, wanted, and productive. They might want to do work other than they're now doing, they might want to do less of it, or with a more flexible schedule; they might even want to work for themselves, i.e. start a business.
Regardless, something will have to be done. By mid century at the latest, easily a third of the entire workforce will have no work at all. We can house them in concentration camps, kill them, or fund them. The latter seems like it'd be an interesting experiment and in the scheme of things, if intelligently funded, could even pay its own way over time. Dig around a little, some good economic modeling has gone into the idea of guaranteed income.
This is an issue way beyond the pettiness of partisan politics, it's a coming reality.
It was obvious to me you'd put some thought into stuff, borne out of more than casual reading and perhaps experience, was my surmise. I gotcher 'FTR', I hadn't mistaken the balance. It might be nice to have things all one or the other, as so many find it easy to see, but maybe they just do that for sake of argument.
I would really like it if more things in life were a tad simpler. Answering "do we need to do this" and keeping a weather eye for unintended consequences might help. For that matter, paying attention to the area specialists (the guys what learn the languages, spent often years in mufti in-country learning what's what) would have been handy for the U.S's last two bits of adventuring. We've done too many things without clear objectives and relying too much on what amounts to wishful thinking, expressed in vague terms (comes from many flawed assumptions, I think.) That, and as Ike warned, the corps don't just have a finger in the pie, they're in with both feet.
Cheers, mate. Oh, and you're right, I think, AF and Navy both have under-used expertise and capability for a range of un-war uses.
Boss to driver: We just found out - one of your packages is a bomb.
Less drastic: Before you make your drop, stop at Ernie's, pick up package.
Superfluous but important: Congrats - it's a girl!
Laws without context are Procrustean; judges without discretion aren't judges.
Indeed, Heinlein did a good job on his homework, and often wove it so seamlessly into the story that one barely noticed on first reading. He was a sharp mind who delved into myriad questions. One of my favorite anecdotes about him comes from when he was asked about his philosophy that was in his writing, lessons to learn, all that, and he just said, "....I write to make money, so I don't have to get an honest job." Beauty.
Oh, and on those Google patents? They're bullshit. Now, thanks to the bright lights at the patent office, patented bullshit, just like so many of the others that are obvious, prior art, or "because computer|Internet|cloud".
No.
The fact that email is sent _en clair_ over the wires is not an argument for it being open. The reason is simple: unlike a postcard where one need only look at it, to read someone's email somebody has to find it and open it up with a text viewer, which is a physical act - and this act is analogous to opening an envelope. Until it's opened all that's seen is a filename or header, which is akin to the address on the outside of an envelope.
Why this is so hard for so many to see is beyond me, unless it's because rather than having to stop and think it's easier to repeat "what everyone knows to be so."
@Hognoxious
In 1963 almost any city with 25,000 people had at least one television station. (I just spent an hour looking via my weak search fu, couldn't find figures, so I'm going by my recollection living in the East, West, and Midwest during the Sixties.)
So that makes hundreds of stations. Generally, local stations started early in the morning, 6 to 7am. There'd be a sign-on, sometimes a short homily by a local pastor, then on to a local farm and weather report. Many would carry network feeds for shows such as The Today Show.
Most would sign off around 10pm. In larger markets there'd be the Jack Paar show followed by old movies until the wee hours.
If you're just speaking of public educational TV, that's something else entirely, and I don't recall any until getting cable in early 70's.
@geekoid
I didn't know the government gave TV stations money. What I do know is that for a long time each broadcast station - radio and TV - had to set aside a certain amount of time per day (or as a percentage of their broadcast day, I fergit) for programming in the public interest. This usually was taken to mean news. Later, TV in particular turned their news departments into "profit centers".
Yup, I remember Edward Murrow, Eric Sevareid, Walter Cronkite, Huntley and Brinckly. And the serious drama shows such as Playhouse 90. It wasn't quite yet the wasteland characterized and predicted by Newton Minow, but we could see it heading that way.
Intelligent use of lighting would be great; most cities I've lived in or near suck at it and absolutely don't care.
Another thing I noticed decades back, moving from outside a small town to a Modern American Megapolis: city folks don't see the stars at night; they have no sense of awe, or humility.
So if you got a ride along on a Moon orbit trip, you wouldn't tell people that you'd been to the Moon. That's cool.
Ah, thank you. I will try to find the documentary - I'd not been aware of it, or missed it. Given the situation between Finland and Russia then, it would have been interesting had they been, so to say, outbid. At any rate, I think it a sad thing they had to abandon their continuing research, as in the case of Mir they were on to an interesting line, it seems.
"It's his job..."
Yes, and when what he proposes has the finely turned phrase "likely to or capable of facilitating terrorism" which on a good or weird day depending on where you stand is sufficiently ambiguous to cover just about whatever one wants it to mean, it's game over for any poor sod who sneezes in his Wheaties and is on someone's shit list.
Your last para is for shit and too cute by half.
Vandenberg is not better for a trip to the Moon unless you've got a fuckton extra delta-v in your pocket. It's used for polar launches; the boost phase is all or mostly all over water. Launching equatorial missions over land is a no-no. Doesn't have a fucking thing to do with military or a VA senator. It's mechanics, fuel, and liability (and that's part of not wanting to unnecessarily endanger people under the boost portion of flight path.)
No, you've gone to it and beyond it, which by most common usage would qualify for going to the Moon. Crashing, landing, orbiting, and fly-by all qualify.
It's also a move in Euchre where one players attempts all the tricks.