Homer: [answering the door] Who is it?
Voice: Goons.
Homer: Who?
Voice: Hired goons.
Homer: Hired goons? [opens the door]
Goons: [take Homer roughly away]
-- ``Last Exit to Springfield''
If they aren't taking responsibility for having safety-first policies that put profits second, then yes, they are indeed responsible for a failure of management that should land them in jail. Setting a direction is their job. Choosing to go for short term profits at the expense of safety is a direction that they determine. Send them to jail for life. The next guy in the job will be much more likely not to take those chances.
Yeah, noncompete was an unfortunate choice of words... I actually meant an exclusivity contract, which is entirely enforceable since it doesn't incur the wrath of any of the right-to-work laws.
Now the cruise missile part... that would be interesting. I suppose the immediate consequence would be the death of just about everyone in North America... I don't know how many continents have large numbers of squirrels, but it really could lead to quite the apocalypse.;-)
So now we're in a price-is-right bidding war, trying to find the largest sum that Gordonjcp can afford to pay to have his company taken over, without going over (after all, if he can't pay up, it'd really be wrong of him not to reject your bid). -$50,000.00!
Yeah, to really kill open source, you have to buy up the key developers and put them on non-compete contracts. It would probably even be a cheaper strategy. 10 billion could pay 60 thousand salaries for a year... if they actually have 70 billion they could make a pretty significant dent in open source, particularly if they target only people developing stuff that competes with them in any way.
We have (roughly) another 2000 years in my model, just to make it to a star system 4 light years away.
That's a lot of time for our technology to develop. Even very conservative estimates would have us doing atmospheric analysis on the planets orbiting nearby stars by then.
Ion rockets will get us there plenty fast. The technology is proven, and just needs scaling up.
We're in a sparsely populated arm of the milky way. The average should be lower, not higher.
We don't need an earth-like star, we need a bunch of resources that are likely to be available at nearly every star, at its Oort cloud equivalent.
And finally, if we travel further before settling, that actually improves the numbers for me, not you. Traveling a short distance is the worst case for me, since I stop for 10,000 years of development at each stop in my model.
Our civilization is almost ready to colonize the next star system (4 light years away) at around 8000 years old. Assuming it takes on average 10,000 years to cross each 4 light year distance (and I hope you would agree that seems an unlikely slow pace after the first success), the time to cross (and presumably fill) the galaxy (about 100,000 light year across) is no worse than 353,553,390 years, and that would certainly allow a lot of time for the colonists to make their situation very comfortable. That's only 353 million years! The galaxy has been around for at least 13 billion years, planets capable of supporting life seem likely to have existed for 9+ billion years.
This is why people suspect there is a non-obvious filter happening to prevent this scenario. Perhaps it takes a million years to cross each four light years for some reason, but there's no obvious reason that it should, the methods for moving along faster than that seem pretty obviously within reach of our current technology.
That idea bothers the statisticians. There's no particular reason to believe we would be first, and in fact, there are many reasons to think that should not be the case (as one example, earth is orbiting a relatively young star... why didn't any of the tens of billions of older stars in this galaxy get lucky?)
Does anyone who has ever rubbed their eyes still doubt that we are living in a simulation? I mean, why else would you wind up with an input error grid?
Yes, and the difficulty is that: a) there's no 'separation of church and state' in the constitution and b) the laws that are interpreted to define 'separation of church and state' are based on complex legal cases rather than the constitution itself.
By all means, read the constitution, and see if you can spot for yourself why a state (rather than the federal government) should feel restricted by a notion of separation of church and state.
I've seen his site before... I don't see where he indicates that it's a joke, though I suppose it is somewhat preposterous to imagine that everyone overreacts to him in reality.
Slashdot Mirror
The cameras in my area snap a picture of your car and the red light, from behind. Showing you, in the intersection, with the light red.
Are there really cameras out there that don't do this?
Mandatory:
Homer: [answering the door] Who is it?
Voice: Goons.
Homer: Who?
Voice: Hired goons.
Homer: Hired goons? [opens the door]
Goons: [take Homer roughly away]
-- ``Last Exit to Springfield''
If they aren't taking responsibility for having safety-first policies that put profits second, then yes, they are indeed responsible for a failure of management that should land them in jail. Setting a direction is their job. Choosing to go for short term profits at the expense of safety is a direction that they determine. Send them to jail for life. The next guy in the job will be much more likely not to take those chances.
Yeah, I made my estimate based on a fairly generous bump above the going rate.
You're supposed to perforate your own pedophile for this purpose, and help out with the grand pedophile perforation project.
Too late. FAPP FAPP FAPP ... it's all over the internet FAPP FAPP FAPP.
You really want 240hz for the combination of fluidity and 3d at the same time, particularly for games.
Yeah, noncompete was an unfortunate choice of words ... I actually meant an exclusivity contract, which is entirely enforceable since it doesn't incur the wrath of any of the right-to-work laws.
Grounded in the sense that squirrels in fact do have wings, and Oracle does have a lot of money?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_squirrel
Now the cruise missile part ... that would be interesting. I suppose the immediate consequence would be the death of just about everyone in North America ... I don't know how many continents have large numbers of squirrels, but it really could lead to quite the apocalypse. ;-)
So now we're in a price-is-right bidding war, trying to find the largest sum that Gordonjcp can afford to pay to have his company taken over, without going over (after all, if he can't pay up, it'd really be wrong of him not to reject your bid). -$50,000.00!
Buy enough developers, slow your OS competitors to a crawl.
Yeah, to really kill open source, you have to buy up the key developers and put them on non-compete contracts. It would probably even be a cheaper strategy. 10 billion could pay 60 thousand salaries for a year ... if they actually have 70 billion they could make a pretty significant dent in open source, particularly if they target only people developing stuff that competes with them in any way.
We have (roughly) another 2000 years in my model, just to make it to a star system 4 light years away.
That's a lot of time for our technology to develop. Even very conservative estimates would have us doing atmospheric analysis on the planets orbiting nearby stars by then.
Ion rockets will get us there plenty fast. The technology is proven, and just needs scaling up.
Moments after I posted that, I wondered who would be first with your response. Well done.
We're in a sparsely populated arm of the milky way. The average should be lower, not higher.
We don't need an earth-like star, we need a bunch of resources that are likely to be available at nearly every star, at its Oort cloud equivalent.
And finally, if we travel further before settling, that actually improves the numbers for me, not you. Traveling a short distance is the worst case for me, since I stop for 10,000 years of development at each stop in my model.
What do you see if you close your eyes and rub hard?
Wrong kind of got lucky too ... have you SEEN Calista Flockhart?
Our civilization is almost ready to colonize the next star system (4 light years away) at around 8000 years old. Assuming it takes on average 10,000 years to cross each 4 light year distance (and I hope you would agree that seems an unlikely slow pace after the first success), the time to cross (and presumably fill) the galaxy (about 100,000 light year across) is no worse than 353,553,390 years, and that would certainly allow a lot of time for the colonists to make their situation very comfortable. That's only 353 million years! The galaxy has been around for at least 13 billion years, planets capable of supporting life seem likely to have existed for 9+ billion years.
This is why people suspect there is a non-obvious filter happening to prevent this scenario. Perhaps it takes a million years to cross each four light years for some reason, but there's no obvious reason that it should, the methods for moving along faster than that seem pretty obviously within reach of our current technology.
That idea bothers the statisticians. There's no particular reason to believe we would be first, and in fact, there are many reasons to think that should not be the case (as one example, earth is orbiting a relatively young star ... why didn't any of the tens of billions of older stars in this galaxy get lucky?)
Does anyone who has ever rubbed their eyes still doubt that we are living in a simulation? I mean, why else would you wind up with an input error grid?
Yes, and the difficulty is that:
a) there's no 'separation of church and state' in the constitution
and
b) the laws that are interpreted to define 'separation of church and state' are based on complex legal cases rather than the constitution itself.
By all means, read the constitution, and see if you can spot for yourself why a state (rather than the federal government) should feel restricted by a notion of separation of church and state.
I've seen his site before ... I don't see where he indicates that it's a joke, though I suppose it is somewhat preposterous to imagine that everyone overreacts to him in reality.
Yeah, definite asshat of the year nominee. Here's how a human being responds:
Option 1:
I'm sorry, I don't have time today, there is a client presentation due. I hope you find your cat.
Option 2:
Creates appropriate poster to help fellow human being.
Asshat response:
Spends time more than sufficient to help fellow human being instead acting like an asshat.
You should really get on top of the people over at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
All they need to do is stop taking federal funds.