In an era when people are becoming more and more concerned with manned space flight, I think projects and contests like this are the only way possible to get humanity into the heavens. Governments will always be under pressure to reduce spending; it will only be with enthusiasts that we make it to our proper place in space.
Government is not under any real pressure to reduce spending, they are under internal pressures to maintain control. Enthusiasts are possibly the only ones that will ever find a way for humanity to get into space. Governments are only funding space projects to appease the curiosity of the masses and maintain control of the technology.
Look around the world today at the way government is actively acquiring a monopoly on force. Do you think anyone in government looks forward to an easy way for terrorists with rocks to obtain Earth orbit?
Re:try not to share the wealth.
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
Slave driving, or the perceived need to work long hours and weekends are signs of reactive organizations with poor planning skills. There is always one more emergency that deserves the old college try. Let's get everyone together and make it happen! Show that team spirit! Make the company a success!
Problem is, many of these so called problems could have been avoided.
If you find your company heading down the same path they were on last year, then you can bet you've got more long hours and weekends ahead. Turning these companies around and building practices and habits that allow them to meet the demands of Sales and Marketing on a predictable schedule, WITHOUT screwing the team for evenings and weekends... that takes hard work, committment, skill, negotiations, analysis and planning. Lots of planning.
But it works. I don't work weekends anymore. I ship products on time. I ship higher quality products because we manage the quality from the beginning and keep a tight control on changes and cowboy development.
It required me to get out of the trenches and into management, but it's working and I enjoy my job now.
I love all the "I hate the X&!#@ Cops!!" trolls that inhabit this place; youthful rage directed at "the man"... with no concept of what it would be like to live without them.
If our rights to defend ourselves hadn't been systematically taken away by those who wish to have more control over us, we wouldn't need the police.
Life without police would mean getting to and from work in a prompt manner. People would stay right except to pass, because a few encounters with road-ragers would encourage them to stay out of the fast lane. It would mean you could shoot the next guy who tries to rob you, and not worry about going to jail for possession of a deadly weapon. It would mean you could grow plants of all sorts in your house and not worry about losing your freedom, family and equity in your home. It would mean that when some asshole rapes your daughter, you could go drag his ass out on the lawn and negotiate with his parents for his life... or lynch him if no one vouches for his character.
Yes, life would be a bit violent while we adapted to the new rules and self-government. Innocent people would have to buy guns the same way they buy DVD players and Cellphones. Family fueds might come back in fashion, but eventually cooler heads would rule and calm things down to a civil level.
On the other hand, serious crimes would drop drastically as people began enforcing the laws themselves. Victims would transform into Vigilantes. Criminals would have more to worry about since more people would be armed and empowered to protect each other. Today's enforcement by slow-proxy is ridiculous: You can commit murder knowing the odds are 50% that you'll get away with it. After all, the victim won't offer much of a fight and people in the vicinity will just ignore you or call a cop leaving plenty of time to flee the scene. Assuming those they catch are mostly drug crazed or enraged, any careful planner probably has better than a 75% of getting away with a serious crime.
Centralization of law enforcement has done wonders to increase the random violence against innocents in today's society. Police do little to nothing FOR law abiding citizens, but they sure have gotten into the habit of getting in the way of our daily lives.
So please constrain your FUD unless you can back it up. We are a society of the unarmed, preyed upon by both the criminal and "the man."
For crying out loud, if someone is speeding and causes an accident, they deserve to get stiffed by the law because they are a dangerous, arrogant, son-of-a-bitch. These people kill.
Unlike the inattentive driver doing the speed limit that mows down my child.
It's not the speed, it's the level of awareness. The black box will help convict the speeder because he's a ba-aa-aa-d ma-aa-aa-n, but create sympathy for the inattentive, but compliant driver because that could be any one of us.
Speed doesn't kill people. There is no magic limit under which driving becomes safe. Stop attacking the easy target (speeders stand out) and try fixing the root of the problem:
The POINT of space exploration, research, design and public funding of such is to REMOVE THE RISK and make it available to the common human.
We all seem to agree that space exploration yeilds tremendous scientific discovery and knowledge... well, do we want to subscribe to the NASA drinking fountain or open up the field to every amateur spaceologist that wants to go prospecting?
NASA needs to lead the way in making it safe. That's why this shuttle disaster is horrifying. Such an obvious problem and they never bothered to solve the what-if.
Your flaw here is that you assume God is a created being. However, in order to be an all powerful god, God must have always existed.
Your flaw here is assuming that this proof can work for God(s) but cannot work for the Universe.
If the Universe required a causal event to begin, then perhaps the Big Bang or God created it... but what was the causal event for those? And if either of those require no causal event, then why does the Universe?
The problem I have, even if I accept that the present universe will fold into itself and spawn another or many other universes, ad infinatum, is that my humanity craves for a beginning to this process... and if there is no beginning, if this roiling sea of universes simply IS, then what else is there, out there, somewhere?
It is a multi-license key usually given to system builders and the like. I think Microsoft is correct in stating that this will lead to more piracy since the key can be used on an "unlimited" amount of machines.
But it will only be good until SP1 which will probably be released next Monday.
Please buy guns, food and water with your excess cash before you decide to go camp out on the roof. That way those of us who choose to carry on the species will be able to pilfer through your things and live to fight another day.
No, I want my house to be on some other sparsely populated planet or asteroid with a nice view.
Flying cars (even higher speed limits) would do wonders for urban sprawl and return mankind to the "neighborhood" or village community of our ancestors. Living stack like cord wood in cites is doing wonders for de-humanizing the planet.
If computer programming were like drug discovery, then we could spend our days throwing different objects at our keyboards until an e-commerce engine popped out.
Nobody is going to pay $18 bucks a month to download and burn 10 songs. You need to offer 100 or 1000 (or unlimited downloads) for $18 a month. "But!", you say, "That's not profitable! We won't make any money!"
Read the article. The $18 price includes unlimited downloads as well as 10 burns per month. If you just want the unlimited downloads, it's only $9 per month. So the burn price is $0.90 per track.
This means the AOL subscriber can listen to everything, indefinitely, on their home computer and only buy the stuff they truly like. It's the ultimate try before you buy program. Heard the new ________ album? Go get it! Listen to it... decide it sucks, go download another! And then you can burn a compilation CD of your favorites.
I do the same thing with my X-Box Magazine subscription (~$2 per month, but includes those damn pop-up ads:). Get the magazine, get the demo disc, play the demos, figure out which game to buy this month.
Yea, there's still Kazaa, but I turned off sharing with other users a long time ago because I don't want to become an RIAA case study.
What's the point? Why not make a more efficient mechanical generator to convert directly to electricity instead? By spreading the whole process out over several steps they are just wasting more energy than they really need to.
Because maybe this is just their interpretation of the three laws of robotics. For whatever reason, they cannot merely KILL the humans, but they can control their lives in the interest of security and safety. Like the government, trust us, my name is Agent... Smith.
How about this: A gun license should be as hard to get as a driver's license.
This would mean a written exam on safty, a practical exam on basic marksmanship, maintanience, and safety.
Right. Then after handing over our civil liberties (a right delayed is a right denied) to The State, we'd be able to rest assured that we'd never get mugged by an unlicensed, gun-toting, homicidal maniac.
i saw once, was to show that it is indeed impossible to save the entire human population. basically, the amount of people we can take off the planet every day is nowhere near the level of population growth.
Impossible given the approach governments take wherein it is the government's responsibility to herd all the people to designated places, process and screen them, reject the unapproved, board them onto a suitible transport devices and hurl them off into the sun...
But when fusion is contained in a handy car battery sized package and personal space craft are available down the street for $30K 2002 USD... then humanity should have no trouble saving itself.
In our preliminary tests of a unit Intel donated, we were able to run four instances of a single threaded process on a dual-proc HT machine. The performance was somewhat greater than two instances on the same box.
Admittedly, not conclusive results and we've yet to run more controlled tests, but our initial take is that you might achieve higher rack density of processes and throughput using this architecture.
Sorry I don't have specific data, we're still studying HT.
As for your ogg comment, please. You'd be ripping it to ogg from what? A CD . And what do you make using this service? A CD . Duh. Burn the freakin' CD and then rip it to ogg.
Well, for one thing, the download you burn to CD will likely be encoded in some lossy codec. So your suggestion would be equivalent to buying the CD, ripping it to MP3 at 128kbps, then burning it back to CD.
But it's still a step in the right direction and most consumers will never know the difference. After all, they don't miss vinyl.
Re:I was making $33,000 a year when I was 19
on
Generation Wrecked
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· Score: 1
The days of reading an HTML/Java book and going to a $65,000/year job with a startup are behind us.
That's funny, I'm trying to fill a $65,000/year position at a startup. The applicant needs to know Java and probably read a book on it to get started. Of course, I'm looking for someone with experience which they very likely got during the boom...
The fatalistic outlook I see common in this discussion is only good for placating your 12-month unemployment record. Why not get the skills and experience that set you apart from the average? Buy the $50 book, use that computer you bought during the boom or ask your parents for one, practice, make a project out of it. Have something to show off over the Internet at your interviews--or at least something to talk about.
"I made this" and some pride go a long way these days vs. a resume full of inflated titles and no real good stories because you hid until the funding dried up.
I started in IT back in 1995 making about $30K, which was a pay cut from my previous non-IT career. But I knew I had topped out and needed to switch to IT for a taller ladder.
After stalling out for a year or two, I grabbed some books, took some chances and rode the boom wave from position to higher skilled position. I paid attention. I collected my stories and my "I made this" portfolios.
Post boom, I'm making yet more money than during the boom. Some salaried positions have contracted. Yes, you now need more skills/experience for the same pay that less might have earned you during the boom, but you should HAVE more skills/experience because it's been two years! Any hard worker should be making the same now as then. I read a salary survey that indicated salaries have actually climbed 4% in the last year!
What I've found is that there are a lot more applicants for each position, but the positions are still open. People are still hiring, and they are often willing to pay 10-20% more for TALENT vs. the average resume.
So if you actually HAVE talent, whether it's some arcane language skill or just being damn good at getting the problems solved on time, please keep your price high and explain to your prospective new employer's why they should hire you and WHY you are worth the money you want to make.
You know you're doing it right when they turn you down because of your price rather than your skills. After that, it's either negotiable or merely a matter of time before you find an employer that got burned sticking within their budget for an Average applicant that isn't cutting it.
What's really funny is the bit of info that any call center manager can tell you: Each point of contact with a human costs $$$. So to collect that $2 or $4 or whatever VAT on incoming import purchases, the government needs to turn around and spend something like $10 between the paper for the notification of the pending tax, the time to prepare the notification, time to deliver, tracking expenses, inventory of the parcel, meet and greet the inbound VAT payer, find parcel, process cash/funds, tracking parcel paid for and delivered, and all the overhead on those actions/persons that doesn't fall under salary and supplies.
Again, we're with the Government, we're here to help.
The big question that has to be asked/proven in court is whether or not the EULA was ever agreed to.
Since I am not liable for my father or child's debts, let alone my brother's or neighbor's, how can a business be held liable for its employee's EULA violation? Or vice-versa?
And if I'm not in compliance with my licenses, ie. if I have a piece of unlicensed software, then can it be shown that I actually agreed to a EULA in all cases? It IS possible to install software without agreeing to a EULA. What then? What am I in violation of?
I don't think that the locking is intended to stop the child removing the beacon; rather, I think the idea is to ensure that any abductor would not be able to remove it.
Um, the child may not be able to remove it, but as a kidnaper deterrant, this is likely to be as ineffective as "the club" is for cars.
Slashdot Mirror
In an era when people are becoming more and more concerned with manned space flight, I think projects and contests like this are the only way possible to get humanity into the heavens. Governments will always be under pressure to reduce spending; it will only be with enthusiasts that we make it to our proper place in space.
Government is not under any real pressure to reduce spending, they are under internal pressures to maintain control. Enthusiasts are possibly the only ones that will ever find a way for humanity to get into space. Governments are only funding space projects to appease the curiosity of the masses and maintain control of the technology.
Look around the world today at the way government is actively acquiring a monopoly on force. Do you think anyone in government looks forward to an easy way for terrorists with rocks to obtain Earth orbit?
Slave driving, or the perceived need to work long hours and weekends are signs of reactive organizations with poor planning skills. There is always one more emergency that deserves the old college try. Let's get everyone together and make it happen! Show that team spirit! Make the company a success!
Problem is, many of these so called problems could have been avoided.
If you find your company heading down the same path they were on last year, then you can bet you've got more long hours and weekends ahead. Turning these companies around and building practices and habits that allow them to meet the demands of Sales and Marketing on a predictable schedule, WITHOUT screwing the team for evenings and weekends... that takes hard work, committment, skill, negotiations, analysis and planning. Lots of planning.
But it works. I don't work weekends anymore. I ship products on time. I ship higher quality products because we manage the quality from the beginning and keep a tight control on changes and cowboy development.
It required me to get out of the trenches and into management, but it's working and I enjoy my job now.
I love all the "I hate the X&!#@ Cops!!" trolls that inhabit this place; youthful rage directed at "the man"... with no concept of what it would be like to live without them.
If our rights to defend ourselves hadn't been systematically taken away by those who wish to have more control over us, we wouldn't need the police.
Life without police would mean getting to and from work in a prompt manner. People would stay right except to pass, because a few encounters with road-ragers would encourage them to stay out of the fast lane. It would mean you could shoot the next guy who tries to rob you, and not worry about going to jail for possession of a deadly weapon. It would mean you could grow plants of all sorts in your house and not worry about losing your freedom, family and equity in your home. It would mean that when some asshole rapes your daughter, you could go drag his ass out on the lawn and negotiate with his parents for his life... or lynch him if no one vouches for his character.
Yes, life would be a bit violent while we adapted to the new rules and self-government. Innocent people would have to buy guns the same way they buy DVD players and Cellphones. Family fueds might come back in fashion, but eventually cooler heads would rule and calm things down to a civil level.
On the other hand, serious crimes would drop drastically as people began enforcing the laws themselves. Victims would transform into Vigilantes. Criminals would have more to worry about since more people would be armed and empowered to protect each other. Today's enforcement by slow-proxy is ridiculous: You can commit murder knowing the odds are 50% that you'll get away with it. After all, the victim won't offer much of a fight and people in the vicinity will just ignore you or call a cop leaving plenty of time to flee the scene. Assuming those they catch are mostly drug crazed or enraged, any careful planner probably has better than a 75% of getting away with a serious crime.
Centralization of law enforcement has done wonders to increase the random violence against innocents in today's society. Police do little to nothing FOR law abiding citizens, but they sure have gotten into the habit of getting in the way of our daily lives.
So please constrain your FUD unless you can back it up. We are a society of the unarmed, preyed upon by both the criminal and "the man."
For crying out loud, if someone is speeding and causes an accident, they deserve to get stiffed by the law because they are a dangerous, arrogant, son-of-a-bitch. These people kill.
Unlike the inattentive driver doing the speed limit that mows down my child.
It's not the speed, it's the level of awareness. The black box will help convict the speeder because he's a ba-aa-aa-d ma-aa-aa-n, but create sympathy for the inattentive, but compliant driver because that could be any one of us.
Speed doesn't kill people. There is no magic limit under which driving becomes safe. Stop attacking the easy target (speeders stand out) and try fixing the root of the problem:
Inattentive driving kills.
The POINT of space exploration, research, design and public funding of such is to REMOVE THE RISK and make it available to the common human.
We all seem to agree that space exploration yeilds tremendous scientific discovery and knowledge... well, do we want to subscribe to the NASA drinking fountain or open up the field to every amateur spaceologist that wants to go prospecting?
NASA needs to lead the way in making it safe. That's why this shuttle disaster is horrifying. Such an obvious problem and they never bothered to solve the what-if.
Your flaw here is that you assume God is a created being. However, in order to be an all powerful god, God must have always existed.
Your flaw here is assuming that this proof can work for God(s) but cannot work for the Universe.
If the Universe required a causal event to begin, then perhaps the Big Bang or God created it... but what was the causal event for those? And if either of those require no causal event, then why does the Universe?
The problem I have, even if I accept that the present universe will fold into itself and spawn another or many other universes, ad infinatum, is that my humanity craves for a beginning to this process... and if there is no beginning, if this roiling sea of universes simply IS, then what else is there, out there, somewhere?
It is a multi-license key usually given to system builders and the like. I think Microsoft is correct in stating that this will lead to more piracy since the key can be used on an "unlimited" amount of machines.
But it will only be good until SP1 which will probably be released next Monday.
Please buy guns, food and water with your excess cash before you decide to go camp out on the roof. That way those of us who choose to carry on the species will be able to pilfer through your things and live to fight another day.
Thanks.
Seriously.
You wanna keep them on the ground now don't you?
No, I want my house to be on some other sparsely populated planet or asteroid with a nice view.
Flying cars (even higher speed limits) would do wonders for urban sprawl and return mankind to the "neighborhood" or village community of our ancestors. Living stack like cord wood in cites is doing wonders for de-humanizing the planet.
If computer programming were like drug discovery, then we could spend our days throwing different objects at our keyboards until an e-commerce engine popped out.
Nobody is going to pay $18 bucks a month to download and burn 10 songs. You need to offer 100 or 1000 (or unlimited downloads) for $18 a month. "But!", you say, "That's not profitable! We won't make any money!"
:). Get the magazine, get the demo disc, play the demos, figure out which game to buy this month.
Read the article. The $18 price includes unlimited downloads as well as 10 burns per month. If you just want the unlimited downloads, it's only $9 per month. So the burn price is $0.90 per track.
This means the AOL subscriber can listen to everything, indefinitely, on their home computer and only buy the stuff they truly like. It's the ultimate try before you buy program. Heard the new ________ album? Go get it! Listen to it... decide it sucks, go download another! And then you can burn a compilation CD of your favorites.
I do the same thing with my X-Box Magazine subscription (~$2 per month, but includes those damn pop-up ads
Yea, there's still Kazaa, but I turned off sharing with other users a long time ago because I don't want to become an RIAA case study.
What's the point? Why not make a more efficient mechanical generator to convert directly to electricity instead? By spreading the whole process out over several steps they are just wasting more energy than they really need to.
... Smith.
Because maybe this is just their interpretation of the three laws of robotics. For whatever reason, they cannot merely KILL the humans, but they can control their lives in the interest of security and safety. Like the government, trust us, my name is Agent
How about this: A gun license should be as hard to get as a driver's license.
This would mean a written exam on safty, a practical exam on basic marksmanship, maintanience, and safety.
Right. Then after handing over our civil liberties (a right delayed is a right denied) to The State, we'd be able to rest assured that we'd never get mugged by an unlicensed, gun-toting, homicidal maniac.
i saw once, was to show that it is indeed impossible to save the entire human population. basically, the amount of people we can take off the planet every day is nowhere near the level of population growth.
Impossible given the approach governments take wherein it is the government's responsibility to herd all the people to designated places, process and screen them, reject the unapproved, board them onto a suitible transport devices and hurl them off into the sun...
But when fusion is contained in a handy car battery sized package and personal space craft are available down the street for $30K 2002 USD... then humanity should have no trouble saving itself.
In our preliminary tests of a unit Intel donated, we were able to run four instances of a single threaded process on a dual-proc HT machine. The performance was somewhat greater than two instances on the same box.
Admittedly, not conclusive results and we've yet to run more controlled tests, but our initial take is that you might achieve higher rack density of processes and throughput using this architecture.
Sorry I don't have specific data, we're still studying HT.
Seriously though, Congress wouldn't be so iffy about giving NASA money if they actually stayed within their budget.
Can you think of any project, department or plan the U.S. Congress funds that doesn't end up costing more than anticipated?
As for your ogg comment, please. You'd be ripping it to ogg from what? A CD . And what do you make using this service? A CD . Duh. Burn the freakin' CD and then rip it to ogg.
Well, for one thing, the download you burn to CD will likely be encoded in some lossy codec. So your suggestion would be equivalent to buying the CD, ripping it to MP3 at 128kbps, then burning it back to CD.
But it's still a step in the right direction and most consumers will never know the difference. After all, they don't miss vinyl.
The days of reading an HTML/Java book and going to a $65,000/year job with a startup are behind us.
That's funny, I'm trying to fill a $65,000/year position at a startup. The applicant needs to know Java and probably read a book on it to get started. Of course, I'm looking for someone with experience which they very likely got during the boom...
The fatalistic outlook I see common in this discussion is only good for placating your 12-month unemployment record. Why not get the skills and experience that set you apart from the average? Buy the $50 book, use that computer you bought during the boom or ask your parents for one, practice, make a project out of it. Have something to show off over the Internet at your interviews--or at least something to talk about.
"I made this" and some pride go a long way these days vs. a resume full of inflated titles and no real good stories because you hid until the funding dried up.
I started in IT back in 1995 making about $30K, which was a pay cut from my previous non-IT career. But I knew I had topped out and needed to switch to IT for a taller ladder.
After stalling out for a year or two, I grabbed some books, took some chances and rode the boom wave from position to higher skilled position. I paid attention. I collected my stories and my "I made this" portfolios.
Post boom, I'm making yet more money than during the boom. Some salaried positions have contracted. Yes, you now need more skills/experience for the same pay that less might have earned you during the boom, but you should HAVE more skills/experience because it's been two years! Any hard worker should be making the same now as then. I read a salary survey that indicated salaries have actually climbed 4% in the last year!
What I've found is that there are a lot more applicants for each position, but the positions are still open. People are still hiring, and they are often willing to pay 10-20% more for TALENT vs. the average resume.
So if you actually HAVE talent, whether it's some arcane language skill or just being damn good at getting the problems solved on time, please keep your price high and explain to your prospective new employer's why they should hire you and WHY you are worth the money you want to make.
You know you're doing it right when they turn you down because of your price rather than your skills. After that, it's either negotiable or merely a matter of time before you find an employer that got burned sticking within their budget for an Average applicant that isn't cutting it.
This may sound a little simplistic, but Billy G. would give a billion away to charity.
And without proper management and leadership, most of that money will be pissed away.
Some, if not most, of us "IT Workers" acquired particular skills specifically to reap such benefits. This is not luck, nor is it coincidence.
What's really funny is the bit of info that any call center manager can tell you: Each point of contact with a human costs $$$. So to collect that $2 or $4 or whatever VAT on incoming import purchases, the government needs to turn around and spend something like $10 between the paper for the notification of the pending tax, the time to prepare the notification, time to deliver, tracking expenses, inventory of the parcel, meet and greet the inbound VAT payer, find parcel, process cash/funds, tracking parcel paid for and delivered, and all the overhead on those actions/persons that doesn't fall under salary and supplies.
Again, we're with the Government, we're here to help.
The big question that has to be asked/proven in court is whether or not the EULA was ever agreed to.
Since I am not liable for my father or child's debts, let alone my brother's or neighbor's, how can a business be held liable for its employee's EULA violation? Or vice-versa?
And if I'm not in compliance with my licenses, ie. if I have a piece of unlicensed software, then can it be shown that I actually agreed to a EULA in all cases? It IS possible to install software without agreeing to a EULA. What then? What am I in violation of?
I don't think that the locking is intended to stop the child removing the beacon; rather, I think the idea is to ensure that any abductor would not be able to remove it.
Um, the child may not be able to remove it, but as a kidnaper deterrant, this is likely to be as ineffective as "the club" is for cars.
Paper is about the most reliable form of interoffice communication there is. You can take it with you anywhere, you can read it anytime you want.
At night? Without Power? Under a new Moon?
How does scoring more points on your gameboy increase your reproductive fitness?
Duh, every gamer knows that only the best gamers get laid.