Apollo started as cool hitech unproven crap. That sure didn't work, did it?
Venture Star and X-34 were probably too forward thinking, but they were excellent technology demonstrators (especially X-34, which was pretty damn cheap). I for one don't believe that single stage to orbit and/or reusable space vehicles are going to be cost effective until we get a radically better way to propel them. (IE not chemical rockets)
But hell, I'm just an aerospace undergrad...what the hell do I know?
No, not really. There is a substantive difference to me between me killing somebody and somebody killing me. The former is sometimes undesireable. The latter is ALWAYS undesireable. Why is this confusing?
Assuming that The Man is going to use whatever weapons are available to subjugate the people, is it not better that these weapons are non-lethal ones? Certainly, it'd be better if The Man would stop subjugating people, but I don't see that happening, really.
There is a DIFFERENCE between causing somebody pain to make them stop threatening people and killing them. If your ethical spectrum does not recognize this distinction, I submit to you that it is fundamentally flawed.
By your argument, defending yourself with judo is tantamount to shooting somebody in the back of the head.
OK. I'll let corporations run amok through the economy if they give up their incorporation and government-granted monopolies (that's patents and copyrights).
If they want laissez-faire, they'll get laissez-faire, but they don't get to cherry-pick the government interventions that help their bottom lines.
(yeah, right...like they'll ever do what I think is right regardless...)
The government is BY DEFINITION involved in the market. The government awards corporate charters to corporations, awarding them preferential tax and liability considerations not available to private citizens, and corporations spend tremendous sums of money "educating" politicians...an activity again far too expensive for private citizens to engage in.
Capitalism may reward innovation (usually only when said innovation is accompanied by huge amounts of political wheel-greasing and marketing blitzes) but the government ALWAYS rewards the people who pay it. (hint...it's not you and me.)
So no, the government should not simply "laissez-faire", because the corporations spend money and effort to bias the government towards their interests (which is almost away from our own interests).
Look, bottom line is this: The rate of profit growth of the record companies is INCREASING in the face of this, it's most desperate hour. They have the GALL to say "These bad people are taking food from the mouths of our babies!" and still raise prices on their cartel-controlled product, while engineering a major propaganda campaign to hide behind. Their behavior is contemptible, and using their own tools against them is TOTALLY JUSTIFIED.
I live in the northern part of the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex. Liquor laws in my county and in many others near me are very similar to the ones there in Utah (you have to be a member of a private club to buy a drink, and you may not buy liquor by the bottle within the county lines). North Dallas has had zero difficulty attracting and maintaining high-tech industry. (Nortel, Samsung, used to be 3DFX, etc.) Therefore, while I agree with the Iomega CEO's thesis, I don't necessarily agree with his conclusion.
Caveat: I expect the fact that these are county laws, and patchy ones at that, reduces their effect on attracting businesses. So maybe I'm talking out of me arse.
Fun fact: The Unicard Club (the one anybody with a brain who wants to drink around here belongs to, which consists of practically every restaurant in the region) charges establishments several tens of thousands of dollars per year for them to be permitted to enroll people in the Unicard Club (which is attractive, because I don't then have to have a Bennigan's Club card, and a Humperdink's club card, and a Snuffer's club card, ad nauseam). The enrollment is usually free to the drinker. The profits, however, are enjoyed by the very Southern Baptists who lobbied for the passage and maintenance of the law. I love it when people can successfully con the State (or the county in this case) into acting as their financial heavy. I just wish I could figure out a way to do it myself.
(Yes, I'm just joking. But it's more profitable than the damn lotto...)
I don't think anybody's actually CLAIMING that Napster helped the RIAA. It reads to me like a rhetorical ploy, and it's an effective one. Kinda like a reductio ad absurdum...nobody is actually claiming that case R is true, but it is the logical extension of case T. Is it explicitly stated that way? No, it's not, but since nobody around here takes RIAA's statistical analyses seriously (because they're CRACKED) nobody's going to take Slashdot's seriouslye either, except as satire.
So they give you their code, free of charge, and you feel somehow slighted when they ask you to give yours back to them in return? Seems pretty damn selfish to me. How does it hurt you to give them your code? If it hurts you to give them your code, how do you justify hurting them by accepting their code?
Nope. Won't work. 1) To get to orbit, you have to go through a band (commonly called "space") where there's no oxygen around to combust. If you ain't got any with you, your motor turns off and you turn into a very expensive lawn dart. 2) Nobody's figured out how to get the same hunk of metal (the "engine") to operate both as a ramjet and as a rocket, so you need more hunks of metal inside your spacecraft to get through "space". 3) Scramjets have a very high cross-sectional area relative to their thrust potential compared to rockets. That is, they produce far more drag (up to an order of magnitude more) than a similarly powerful rocket.
High speed air breathing flight is STUPENDOUSLY difficult. It's only been in the last five to eight years that the computers are fast enough to even BEGIN to model the supersonic flows through a scramjet, and the problem is very far from being solved. Rockets are ugly and pedestrian, but they do the job better than any technology on the drawing boards.
Uh, Enterprise was never slated for space flight. It was retrofitted for space flight after Challenger was lost. Never for a moment did anybody think that the 747 was going to be the first stage of a launch vehicle, since the Shuttle carries about zero fuel for its main engines onboard. The Shuttle was designed from the outset to ride up on the external fuel tank and its SRBs. The 747 was used for glide testing with the Enterprise, and also to transport the operational shuttles back to Kennedy when they land at Edwards AFB.
Why don't you quit your bitching and write such a game? Nobody else is responsible for realizing YOUR visions. Of course, nobody's really interested in them either, so you might have trouble selling your wares...
Ah! Now we get down to it! YOU are the arbitrator of all that is Just and Right in the universe. So if we, the poor unwashed masses, are indulging in distasteful stuff, You in Your Wisdom will ban it from us, only for our own betterment and edification. And then take away the things we purchased with our money and give them to causes that You deem Worthy.
Dear sweet Jesus on a popsicle stick, I hope you're trolling, because if you're not...you're a dolt.
If those projects need CPU horsepower, they can go buy a bloody 1600mHz overclocked Athlon. They certainly don't have any right to use MY computer that I paid for.
Your ideas of "worthiness" smack of some very very broken ideas about socioeconomics. (Specifically, somebody with a "worthy" cause has the right to use something that I purchased, since I'm using it for "unworthy" purposes)
"Oooh! The new iMacs have faster processors and more VRAM!"
Oh, you mean computers get better specs over time? Woo. Big news. *tries to contain excitement* *succeeds*
So yes, the new styles for the external case ARE the most important part of the new product release. Just because YOU aren't interested in aesthetics, or don't agree with Apple's aesthetic, does not mean that other people aren't or don't.
Let me pick up on one of your minor points. The Bible doesn't need to have a foundation in historical fact in order to fulfill its purpose (I'm assuming for the sake of argument that the Bible is a divinely inspired work designed to show people how to live well and be righteous in the eyes of their Creator).
Galileo said "The Bible is not a book about how the heavens go, it is a book about how to go to heaven." The Bible's validity and utility in the lives of humans is in its message (loosely translated: Love thy God, love thy neighbor, love thyself), not in its historicity. Take the whole thing as a giant allegorical fable, and you detract not a whit from its impact and effectiveness at its stated purpose.
I don't believe God gave us these amazingly powerful minds so that we could get all our answers from something written down on pulped plant matter 2000 years ago. I think (S)He gave us these minds in order to take the lessons recorded for us by our forebears and Make The World Better. Backbiting and infighting about the mechanism of Creation between people of good conscience is as destructive to this goal as Nietzche's "God is dead" philosophy.
I'm not challenging your definition of "fact" (although saying "That's just a given" and therefore excluding it from the conversation is EXACTLY the sort of games the Creationists play re: the existence of God), I'm challenging your assertion "It's not a troll. It's a fact. That's the problem with Creationists. They can't tell the difference between fact and fiction."
You say it's a fact that Creationists can't tell the difference between fact and fiction. The Creationists say it's a fact that God exists and he created the universe 6000 years ago with the species more or less in their current state. I'm trying to figure out how your "fact" is so much more reliable than their "fact". (Note that I don't agree with EITHER assertion.)
Lemme play Devil's Advocate. (Considering the subject matter, that's pretty ironic.)
You could just as easily say that this God elevated a band of desert nomads to power, and engineered the Roman power plays to His (and His peoples') advantage.
When you presuppose an omnipotent being, ANYTHING is possible.
Slashdot Mirror
I see the point (s)he was trying to make...it was just a foolish one. Killing me bad. Killing other people not always bad. QED.
I wasn't having trouble with his thesis, just his reasoning. : )
Apollo started as cool hitech unproven crap. That sure didn't work, did it?
Venture Star and X-34 were probably too forward thinking, but they were excellent technology demonstrators (especially X-34, which was pretty damn cheap). I for one don't believe that single stage to orbit and/or reusable space vehicles are going to be cost effective until we get a radically better way to propel them. (IE not chemical rockets)
But hell, I'm just an aerospace undergrad...what the hell do I know?
No, not really. There is a substantive difference to me between me killing somebody and somebody killing me. The former is sometimes undesireable. The latter is ALWAYS undesireable. Why is this confusing?
Replace "MBA's" with "black people" or "political dissidents" and maybe you'll begin to appreciate the irony.
Assuming that The Man is going to use whatever weapons are available to subjugate the people, is it not better that these weapons are non-lethal ones? Certainly, it'd be better if The Man would stop subjugating people, but I don't see that happening, really.
There is a DIFFERENCE between causing somebody pain to make them stop threatening people and killing them. If your ethical spectrum does not recognize this distinction, I submit to you that it is fundamentally flawed.
By your argument, defending yourself with judo is tantamount to shooting somebody in the back of the head.
OK. I'll let corporations run amok through the economy if they give up their incorporation and government-granted monopolies (that's patents and copyrights).
If they want laissez-faire, they'll get laissez-faire, but they don't get to cherry-pick the government interventions that help their bottom lines.
(yeah, right...like they'll ever do what I think is right regardless...)
Sure was. You know how much it cost? Hint: the number has lots of zeroes after it.
The government is BY DEFINITION involved in the market. The government awards corporate charters to corporations, awarding them preferential tax and liability considerations not available to private citizens, and corporations spend tremendous sums of money "educating" politicians...an activity again far too expensive for private citizens to engage in.
Capitalism may reward innovation (usually only when said innovation is accompanied by huge amounts of political wheel-greasing and marketing blitzes) but the government ALWAYS rewards the people who pay it. (hint...it's not you and me.)
So no, the government should not simply "laissez-faire", because the corporations spend money and effort to bias the government towards their interests (which is almost away from our own interests).
I can't believe I used it's as a possessive. Shoot me in the head please, and pretend it said its.
I hate it when I trip on my own pet peeves.
Look, bottom line is this: The rate of profit growth of the record companies is INCREASING in the face of this, it's most desperate hour. They have the GALL to say "These bad people are taking food from the mouths of our babies!" and still raise prices on their cartel-controlled product, while engineering a major propaganda campaign to hide behind. Their behavior is contemptible, and using their own tools against them is TOTALLY JUSTIFIED.
I live in the northern part of the Dallas/Ft. Worth metroplex. Liquor laws in my county and in many others near me are very similar to the ones there in Utah (you have to be a member of a private club to buy a drink, and you may not buy liquor by the bottle within the county lines). North Dallas has had zero difficulty attracting and maintaining high-tech industry. (Nortel, Samsung, used to be 3DFX, etc.) Therefore, while I agree with the Iomega CEO's thesis, I don't necessarily agree with his conclusion.
Caveat: I expect the fact that these are county laws, and patchy ones at that, reduces their effect on attracting businesses. So maybe I'm talking out of me arse.
Fun fact: The Unicard Club (the one anybody with a brain who wants to drink around here belongs to, which consists of practically every restaurant in the region) charges establishments several tens of thousands of dollars per year for them to be permitted to enroll people in the Unicard Club (which is attractive, because I don't then have to have a Bennigan's Club card, and a Humperdink's club card, and a Snuffer's club card, ad nauseam). The enrollment is usually free to the drinker. The profits, however, are enjoyed by the very Southern Baptists who lobbied for the passage and maintenance of the law. I love it when people can successfully con the State (or the county in this case) into acting as their financial heavy. I just wish I could figure out a way to do it myself.
(Yes, I'm just joking. But it's more profitable than the damn lotto...)
I don't think anybody's actually CLAIMING that Napster helped the RIAA. It reads to me like a rhetorical ploy, and it's an effective one. Kinda like a reductio ad absurdum...nobody is actually claiming that case R is true, but it is the logical extension of case T. Is it explicitly stated that way? No, it's not, but since nobody around here takes RIAA's statistical analyses seriously (because they're CRACKED) nobody's going to take Slashdot's seriouslye either, except as satire.
So they give you their code, free of charge, and you feel somehow slighted when they ask you to give yours back to them in return? Seems pretty damn selfish to me. How does it hurt you to give them your code? If it hurts you to give them your code, how do you justify hurting them by accepting their code?
Nope. Won't work. 1) To get to orbit, you have to go through a band (commonly called "space") where there's no oxygen around to combust. If you ain't got any with you, your motor turns off and you turn into a very expensive lawn dart. 2) Nobody's figured out how to get the same hunk of metal (the "engine") to operate both as a ramjet and as a rocket, so you need more hunks of metal inside your spacecraft to get through "space". 3) Scramjets have a very high cross-sectional area relative to their thrust potential compared to rockets. That is, they produce far more drag (up to an order of magnitude more) than a similarly powerful rocket.
High speed air breathing flight is STUPENDOUSLY difficult. It's only been in the last five to eight years that the computers are fast enough to even BEGIN to model the supersonic flows through a scramjet, and the problem is very far from being solved. Rockets are ugly and pedestrian, but they do the job better than any technology on the drawing boards.
Uh, Enterprise was never slated for space flight. It was retrofitted for space flight after Challenger was lost. Never for a moment did anybody think that the 747 was going to be the first stage of a launch vehicle, since the Shuttle carries about zero fuel for its main engines onboard. The Shuttle was designed from the outset to ride up on the external fuel tank and its SRBs. The 747 was used for glide testing with the Enterprise, and also to transport the operational shuttles back to Kennedy when they land at Edwards AFB.
Competitive CLOCK speeds...the performance of the chips (And the new G4, which you conveniently overlook) is stupendous.
Why don't you quit your bitching and write such a game? Nobody else is responsible for realizing YOUR visions. Of course, nobody's really interested in them either, so you might have trouble selling your wares...
Ah! Now we get down to it! YOU are the arbitrator of all that is Just and Right in the universe. So if we, the poor unwashed masses, are indulging in distasteful stuff, You in Your Wisdom will ban it from us, only for our own betterment and edification. And then take away the things we purchased with our money and give them to causes that You deem Worthy.
Dear sweet Jesus on a popsicle stick, I hope you're trolling, because if you're not...you're a dolt.
If those projects need CPU horsepower, they can go buy a bloody 1600mHz overclocked Athlon. They certainly don't have any right to use MY computer that I paid for.
Your ideas of "worthiness" smack of some very very broken ideas about socioeconomics. (Specifically, somebody with a "worthy" cause has the right to use something that I purchased, since I'm using it for "unworthy" purposes)
What's there too talk about?
"Oooh! The new iMacs have faster processors and more VRAM!"
Oh, you mean computers get better specs over time? Woo. Big news. *tries to contain excitement* *succeeds*
So yes, the new styles for the external case ARE the most important part of the new product release. Just because YOU aren't interested in aesthetics, or don't agree with Apple's aesthetic, does not mean that other people aren't or don't.
Let me pick up on one of your minor points. The Bible doesn't need to have a foundation in historical fact in order to fulfill its purpose (I'm assuming for the sake of argument that the Bible is a divinely inspired work designed to show people how to live well and be righteous in the eyes of their Creator).
Galileo said "The Bible is not a book about how the heavens go, it is a book about how to go to heaven." The Bible's validity and utility in the lives of humans is in its message (loosely translated: Love thy God, love thy neighbor, love thyself), not in its historicity. Take the whole thing as a giant allegorical fable, and you detract not a whit from its impact and effectiveness at its stated purpose.
I don't believe God gave us these amazingly powerful minds so that we could get all our answers from something written down on pulped plant matter 2000 years ago. I think (S)He gave us these minds in order to take the lessons recorded for us by our forebears and Make The World Better. Backbiting and infighting about the mechanism of Creation between people of good conscience is as destructive to this goal as Nietzche's "God is dead" philosophy.
I'm not challenging your definition of "fact" (although saying "That's just a given" and therefore excluding it from the conversation is EXACTLY the sort of games the Creationists play re: the existence of God), I'm challenging your assertion "It's not a troll. It's a fact. That's the problem with Creationists. They can't tell the difference between fact and fiction."
You say it's a fact that Creationists can't tell the difference between fact and fiction. The Creationists say it's a fact that God exists and he created the universe 6000 years ago with the species more or less in their current state. I'm trying to figure out how your "fact" is so much more reliable than their "fact". (Note that I don't agree with EITHER assertion.)
Lemme play Devil's Advocate. (Considering the subject matter, that's pretty ironic.)
You could just as easily say that this God elevated a band of desert nomads to power, and engineered the Roman power plays to His (and His peoples') advantage.
When you presuppose an omnipotent being, ANYTHING is possible.
Explain to me how your assertion of "fact" is any more valid than the creationists assertions of "fact".