Q: If it's such a bullshit comparison, then why didn't NASA squirrel away $20-30M and do this first, piggy-backing on their own efforts?
A: Because they can't.
Call it bureaucracy, call it inefficiencies, call it an aversion to risk after losing many astronauts. They had the money, they had the technology, they failed to move ahead. NASA is dead.
I would encourage all of you who are democrats to also vote for Badnarik. After all:
a. he's pro-choice b. he's against the invasion of Iraq c. he'll reduce the deficit to $0 d. he'll cut the debt rather aggressively e. he'll cut corporate welfare f. he's not George W. Bush.
Pick any reason you like, he's got all the appeal of the DNC positions and certainly has more integrity than Kerry.
It takes me a good 15 - 20 minutes to properly preflight my plane before I take off. This is to make damn sure that it is in perfect running condition. If anything is not right I don't go.
So... you don't want people to take the risk on flying cars because it's dangerous? Technological transitions are always full of risk. But if we don't get started, then we'll never learn how to cope with those risks.
I suspect flying cars will be banned a few times before they become commonplace. But I also suspect the people who can afford the first cars will be a bit more careful in the air than they are on the road. Yes, we'll have tragedies anyway, but the make-up-applying, cellphone-weilding masses won't really become commonplace until the cars are flying themselves or have clearly defined lanes to follow like we do now.
For those of us who would like to live waaaay out in the boonies which might require a 3+ hour commute by land, two 15 minute pre-flights per day might be totally worth the trouble if it meant we could fly home at 300mph.
However, I'm certain that the freeways in the sky will be sold as a way to reduce congestion by opening up more lanes -- all speed limited at 60mph to conserve energy... even though studies will prove that's a very inefficient speed to maintain flight.
The problem is that NASA management ran the program as if it were "mission critical" or less whereas the engineers, public, and probably astronauts assumed it was "life critical."
That philisophical difference led to repeated launches in cold weather, despite warnings that the o-rings were not spec'd at those temps.
That philisophical difference led to repeated launches without a means to inspect or repair heat tiles, despite the fact that shuttles always came back with tiles damaged or missing.
Many and various problems were well understood, known to occur, and ignored. Risks were taken conciously and then hands went up with an "oh my" when the numbers came up unfavorable.
This difference between public and goverment assumptions are why the government will fail in space. At this point in our history, it is too expensive to mount a 100% reliable space program. Five 9s might be possible, but probably still too expensive. But a private space industry, with massive competition and cheap craft will be more understood when it loses humans and cargo. A government train wreck is a tragedy, but 43,000 vehicular deaths per year is merely the price of freedom of movement.
Had Mike Melvill died in his pursuit of the x-prize, the contest would continue. Whereas NASA gets a massive inquiry and shutdown until they come back with a 200% budget requirement and get killed on the congress floor.
Privatization isn't merely something we want, it's the only way things will move forward. Let the government be the first to fund giant new projects like an interstellar colonial ship. But leave the already-done projects to business.
It's also important to grow up. Mature your process. I won't work 60-80 hour weeks (at the office) because it's typically less productive than 40 well planned hours.
Most "startups" burn people out because they don't plan, don't design, don't document their requirements and basically do everything they can in a reactive way that back-loads their schedules down to the last emergency feature request the night before a major release. These places are rarely, if ever, successful.
You'll find more enjoyment in 7-8 well planned hours at work, especially when they allow you to go home before your children go to bed. Those experiences are worth their weight in gold.
If you feel that you're selfishly using up too much of the planet's resources, or that God doesn't want you to live past a certain age, or the ennui of your endless existence is too much to bear (oh, the angst!), fine -- please kill yourself now.
The problem isn't that they don't want to live more than their natural 77.3 years. It's that they don't want you to live more than your 77.3 years. They'll reject the therapy and die off after having their natural 2.3 children (or 8.6 for some cultists), but during their prime 40 years of life they'll busily hunt down and exterminate all of you unnatural aberations from [God's] plan.
The problems with society are always in the ways others want to impose their choices on my life.
I wasn't going to say this since the story starts in London, but the above is from the University of Oregon so I gotta add:
7. Buy a nice handgun and get the proper permit. Do the world a favor and kill the next mugger you meet.
This entire story is just ridiculous. How to avoid being targetted as a victim... fine, don't make it obvious you have things of value... but c'mon people, fight back! A mugger becomes very apologetic looking down the barrel of a gun.
I didn't either, but there were three things that happened in my life that changed that.
1. I became a manager and had to worry how I was going to explain to employees like yourself that they're fired... or laid-off... or whatever. I don't like hearing that news myself, but let me tell you giving it isn't a picnic either. You want to avoid it, you want to train, help, negotiate... but the fact is the job has to get done or the cutbacks have to happen.
2. Get married. Now it's not just you. And that little voice in your head that you used to tell to shut-up? Well, it's got company that won't shut-up. And more importantly it acts unpredictably, you might not be worried about some issue (pick: income, housing, health, children, future, news, etc.), but your spouse will be.
3. Children. Now it's really not just you. No divorce lawyer in the world can make your children disappear. They're fantastic, you'll love them... but imagine getting laid off or just worrying about your employment future when you have all those mouths to feed.
So you had better figure out how to deal with the stress you think you are facing because it only gets worse from here.
Personally, I don't let it get to me. Fake it until you make it. That's my motto.;)
The problem with better defensive measures is that they force the opposition to improve their offensive measures. IIRC, the.223 round was selected over the.30-06 because it tended to wound or maim rather than kill. Studies showed that a wounded opponent would occupy up to four enemy soldiers vs. a dead opponent which only occupied the dead one.
So as we get better defenses, we can expect our opponents to step up their firepower. Superior technology isn't keeping Americans from getting killed in our current wars... and it won't in any other.
But this certainly is cool and I'd rather have it in a fire fight than not. Remind's me of Niven's leather impact armor; I always wanted a suit of that.
No interview or degree can filter out the good from the bad worker.
I'm not talking about "can they do it" but "will they." There are many highly qualified, techinically skilled individuals who just... fall apart after college. For people without references vouching for their dedication, work ethic, ability to pitch-in until the job is done, low pay is a way for companies to cut their losses.
After 1-3 years, employers can tell whether you are a superstar or a waste of their time and the salary potential rapidly increases. This is why you have to shop carefully for opportunity, technology, funding and such. Choose your company wisely because if you get laid off in six to twelve months, you'll be starting over to some degree.
But don't sweat the low pay, think of it as getting paid for your continuing education. You will be learning for the next few years (hopefully more) or else you won't be seeing six figure salaries any time soon.
Gates is wrong. Hardware prices don't depend as much on technology but on what people are willing to pay.
You are both incorrect and correct: Free hardware occurs when you have a pay-for-use service to offset the cost of manufacturing. It works for cellular phones, cable and satellite tv, and it's even starting to occur in energy with kickbacks for more efficient appliances.
The companies don't have to be the same, just have tight relationships.
So what Bill is hinting at is that Windows OS is going to become a subscription service for everyone (already is for Enterprise customers) and that the subscription fees are going to be high enough to justify kicking back a significant amount to Intel, Dell, Taiwan or whomever is building the XBox^H^H^H^H platform that the customer chooses for their home PC.
If cable tv or telephony is the leading indicator (and they stand to be replaced by WMP and IM in the common household) then we can expect MSFT to consider a subscription price (which includes a home PC) of $50-100 per month to be tolerable by end users. At $600-$1200 per year with a new $300 free desktop upgrade every three years, that seems like a workable model.
There have ALREADY been cases where people died because cell phones did not have 911 location services.
Yes, we should protect all those highly educated geeks and the morons who follow in their footsteps from cutting off their 911 enabled land-line because they're so enamoured with VoIP... only to die in a fire because the truck cannot find their computer... 192.168.1.2? WTF are you? At home? Great, and where is that? Your house?
Please, this is nothing more than a BS excuse to keep regulated services regulated and support big business. Trust me, the self-identification you have to provide isn't going to cut it for 911, they'll need a trusted and confirmed physical address which means your ISP will have to get involved and auto-transmit your registration (billing address, no, physical!) to the phone company so they can pass it along to the 911 service desk. Good-bye anonimity.
People lived (and died) before 911 came about and will continue to do both with or without 911 on VoIP. If you are really worried about 911 finding you in an emergency, don't cut your land line.
When it comes to science questions, such as whether or not global warming is happening and whether or not we are contributing to it and whether or not the icecaps are melting into the ocean at an alarming rate, well, the scientists are correct, and the administration is wrong.
Human carbon dioxide emissions raise the overall temperature. It's proven, and it doesn't need more study.
Wait, I've heard this argument before, but back in my day it was black holes do not exist... or was it the speed of sound is impossible to exceed! Yes, that was it... then of course there were all the nobel-equivalent scientists proving that the Earth was flat. And today we have the speed of light as a proven speed limit and global warming as a proven effect of cow farts.
Sorry, I've seen the best liberal science that the National Geographic Society has to offer: Not only can they not get their math correct, but they cannot conclusively form the argument that humans are causing the warming. Yea, we give off CO2, yea the oceans and trees absorb it. Uh, but not all of it, in fact, not half. But the amount we find in the atmosphere doesn't rise anywhere near the expected missing-half amount... so while we cannot form a theory, science has proven that humans are responsible for this warming?
Sorry, I don't buy it. Not only because we've had non-industrial warming in the past, but because life is so adaptable to exploiting sudden increases in the level of resources.
Give it a few decades and we'll all be proven wrong.
Oh and regarding a bunch of scientists NOT being politically motivated? Puh-leeeeze, they aren't exactly self-employed you know. Everything is political.
Maybe there's something that I'm misunderstanding here. You're suggesting that he's just a messenger -- nothing more? I completely disagree. This person posted an exploit. I'm not sure how it is where you're from, but from where I sit, posting an exploit is on an entirely different level from simply telling someone that their software is full of holes (including how and where).
Where I'm from, many bugs reported by the test group are ignored if you cannot rub the reviewer's nose in the pile of stink that the bug could create. The passing sentiment that results in a WONTFIX or a POSTPONE to later releases tends to be coupled with a healthy misunderstanding of the risk and impact that such bugs can cause.
Filing such an exploit demonstrating how easily a customer might encounter such a bug and what sort of damage it might cause is the ONLY way to guarantee a bug gets fixed.
So yea, don't blame the messenger, unless they actually wrote a self-propagating virus and called that the message. Posting an exploit is no different that mentioning that guns allow one to exploit bank security and steal cash. There is a huge difference between informative and criminal.
Much spam now originates from thousands of infected Windows machines. The CPU cost per email won't deter Distributed spam networks one bit. They have the CPU cycles and bandwidth to spare. When will MSFT address the innate vulnerability in their OS? Granted, automatic and unattended Windows update is a huge step in the right direction, but like a bilge pump, it does nothing to address the leaks in the hull.
The alternative cash (or credit?) cost per email sent requires some sort of central banking authority to track the payments and authorize each sender or piece of email sent. Suddenly email is no longer a loose network of peer servers, it's a MSFT controlled central authority... I'm sure they'd be happy to provide that service for "free" along with your $50 annual Windows license renewal.
Your Windows "client" will undoubtably offer you the option to "Refuse uncertified email?" as an anti-spam solution. Corporations running sendmail or other *nix alternatives will gladly pay the $2500+ annual contract to be able to authenticate with and send email through the MSFT email servers. But small-time non-Windows operations will be forced to abandon *nix based systems for their email gateways or give up using email to communicate with their friends and customers with Windows OS.
This is not a solution and certainly not a smart one, it's MSFT holding their userbase hostage. I for one do not welcome our new OS overlords.
The consequences of space exploration being government run are intentional, not incidental. As recent history has taught us, when you allow explorers to travel to and colonize new lands, you end up with a civil war and a new super power. Or at the very least, erosion of the tax base.
Unless someone brews up a simple back-yard UFO recipe, we can expect all future space travel to be tightly controlled by the government. They have no interest in losing control of the serfs.
Why not just roll off the alternate ramp and start exploring? I guess I just don't understand why the front ramp is so special.
Because that's what they tested it with. This is not robot wars where if the rover trips on an antenna and tips over some guy can walk into the ring and set it upright again. The alternate ramp has to be conceived, modeled, tested and proved, then re-proved, before the management should sign off on the plan.
Otherwise we can kiss $400M and several years goodbye.
Oh yea, the JPL dudes are for figuring out what I listed above, not for making it quicker.
...if project managers went on strike for a week, they would come back to find the entire project had been completely redesigned from scratch, it would be amazingly efficient and well structured and it would work perfectly and within budget, whats more it would have 100 new useful features.
Some observations from my experience with cowboy development (developers without adequate management):
within some imaginary budget dreamed up in the same week.
on target for "code complete" within the next year, but the stability of the previous managed release will never be obtained as Developers migrate from one cool new feature to the next without pausing to fix the bugs.
with 100 new features useful to the developers, but not many customers.
redesigned and re-coded from scratch in the uber-language of the day... each year.
complete with all the orginal bugs the team spent the last few years identifying and removing.
undoubtably with completely new and undocumented APIs (to save time!) that break all test tools and third party customer Apps.
Requirements and Specifications? Bwahahahaha! We're saving TIME by skipping that crap!
However, Test/QA will still be held accountable for the quality of the release.
No doubt a few (if you're lucky) features that the developers thought were stupid marketing gimmicks (read as: customer deal-breakers) have been removed or made incompatible through redesign.
Profit!
So you might understand my hesitation to believe that no program management == some sort of coder utopia. You'd be out of work in short order.
Re:Definitely
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Come on, who uses passwords like '%33#Gt(;' nowadays..
I do.:-)
Me too.
I also use a three... make that four tiered system.
a. simple (slashdot, new york times, etc.) b. medium (unpriviledged accounts, e-commerce) c. banking (banks only) d. secure (longer and root only)
I only have one simple password. I have two medium passwords, one banking password and one secure password. Other than the simple one, they are all 8+ characters long and random.
I generate them by banging on the keyboard, holding shift and banging some more, releasing shift and banging some more. Then I click-select-drag-drop-repeat a few times and then start deleting characters at random.
I then write the newly christened password down on a small piece of paper and carry it in my wallet for a few days until my fingers have memorized the sequence. I then eat it.
As for changing passwords, what's the point in that? If you have a strong password and you (or your systems admin) are at all alert to long-running brute force attacks on your account, then a hacker has the same chance of guessing your brand new password in X hours as they do of guessing your old password in X hours.
Strong passwords are good security. Rotation discourages strong passwords. QED.
BTW, if one noticed a brute force attack underway in the logs, would one change the password? Or change the account name?
Of course, if/when this is finally accepted, it means that oil/gas exits the non-renewable resource club and joins nuclear as a semi-renewable resource.
I doubt this will cause any of the eco-freaks or greenies to start buying SUVs. I don't think it will actually change much of anything at all. Instead they'll start prognosticating that the Earth has been pushing out these resources for 4.5B years and cannot possibly go on much longer before the coal, oil, gas, uranium runs out. That Solar/Wind/Geothermal/Hydro (wait, that last one's bad for fish) are the only renewable resources and we should all spend 10X as much as we currently do to use these morally pure fuels.
Of course, 100 years from now when run away consumption of NG/Oil outpaces the Earth's production rate (like we're doing for fresh water today), then their argument will make a bit more sense.
Now flash forward 4B years when the Sun's output is trailing off. What have they got to say about "renewable" energy now? Huh? Huh? Thought so.
There is no renewable energy source. It's all entropy. I'd like the cheapest I can get please.
I imagine the acceleration and deceleration are limited by the gyroscope's mass and reactiveness.
As a regular motorcyclist, I'd like to think that high-delta-v isn't required for commuting because 99% of the time I don't use it. But I would never give up the potential of a solid braking system with a large cantilevered countermass. There have been moments when it was the difference between life and pain.
Even so, this would be a super cool toy. I hear Bombardier is quite good at making those.
They were obviously a people possessed with greater intellect than we commonly see here on Earth. The result, no doubt, of centuries of Darwinian attrition.
I'm sure a people with sufficient sense to know better than to fall off high places would want to keep things that way.
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Q: If it's such a bullshit comparison, then why didn't NASA squirrel away $20-30M and do this first, piggy-backing on their own efforts?
A: Because they can't.
Call it bureaucracy, call it inefficiencies, call it an aversion to risk after losing many astronauts. They had the money, they had the technology, they failed to move ahead. NASA is dead.
I would encourage all of you who are democrats to also vote for Badnarik. After all:
a. he's pro-choice
b. he's against the invasion of Iraq
c. he'll reduce the deficit to $0
d. he'll cut the debt rather aggressively
e. he'll cut corporate welfare
f. he's not George W. Bush.
Pick any reason you like, he's got all the appeal of the DNC positions and certainly has more integrity than Kerry.
So... you don't want people to take the risk on flying cars because it's dangerous? Technological transitions are always full of risk. But if we don't get started, then we'll never learn how to cope with those risks.
I suspect flying cars will be banned a few times before they become commonplace. But I also suspect the people who can afford the first cars will be a bit more careful in the air than they are on the road. Yes, we'll have tragedies anyway, but the make-up-applying, cellphone-weilding masses won't really become commonplace until the cars are flying themselves or have clearly defined lanes to follow like we do now.
For those of us who would like to live waaaay out in the boonies which might require a 3+ hour commute by land, two 15 minute pre-flights per day might be totally worth the trouble if it meant we could fly home at 300mph.
However, I'm certain that the freeways in the sky will be sold as a way to reduce congestion by opening up more lanes -- all speed limited at 60mph to conserve energy... even though studies will prove that's a very inefficient speed to maintain flight.
It was only a matter of time.
The problem is that NASA management ran the program as if it were "mission critical" or less whereas the engineers, public, and probably astronauts assumed it was "life critical."
That philisophical difference led to repeated launches in cold weather, despite warnings that the o-rings were not spec'd at those temps.
That philisophical difference led to repeated launches without a means to inspect or repair heat tiles, despite the fact that shuttles always came back with tiles damaged or missing.
Many and various problems were well understood, known to occur, and ignored. Risks were taken conciously and then hands went up with an "oh my" when the numbers came up unfavorable.
This difference between public and goverment assumptions are why the government will fail in space. At this point in our history, it is too expensive to mount a 100% reliable space program. Five 9s might be possible, but probably still too expensive. But a private space industry, with massive competition and cheap craft will be more understood when it loses humans and cargo. A government train wreck is a tragedy, but 43,000 vehicular deaths per year is merely the price of freedom of movement.
Had Mike Melvill died in his pursuit of the x-prize, the contest would continue. Whereas NASA gets a massive inquiry and shutdown until they come back with a 200% budget requirement and get killed on the congress floor.
Privatization isn't merely something we want, it's the only way things will move forward. Let the government be the first to fund giant new projects like an interstellar colonial ship. But leave the already-done projects to business.
... than software I don't.
It's also important to grow up. Mature your process. I won't work 60-80 hour weeks (at the office) because it's typically less productive than 40 well planned hours.
Most "startups" burn people out because they don't plan, don't design, don't document their requirements and basically do everything they can in a reactive way that back-loads their schedules down to the last emergency feature request the night before a major release. These places are rarely, if ever, successful.
You'll find more enjoyment in 7-8 well planned hours at work, especially when they allow you to go home before your children go to bed. Those experiences are worth their weight in gold.
If you feel that you're selfishly using up too much of the planet's resources, or that God doesn't want you to live past a certain age, or the ennui of your endless existence is too much to bear (oh, the angst!), fine -- please kill yourself now.
The problem isn't that they don't want to live more than their natural 77.3 years. It's that they don't want you to live more than your 77.3 years. They'll reject the therapy and die off after having their natural 2.3 children (or 8.6 for some cultists), but during their prime 40 years of life they'll busily hunt down and exterminate all of you unnatural aberations from [God's] plan.
The problems with society are always in the ways others want to impose their choices on my life.
I wasn't going to say this since the story starts in London, but the above is from the University of Oregon so I gotta add:
7. Buy a nice handgun and get the proper permit. Do the world a favor and kill the next mugger you meet.
This entire story is just ridiculous. How to avoid being targetted as a victim... fine, don't make it obvious you have things of value... but c'mon people, fight back! A mugger becomes very apologetic looking down the barrel of a gun.
I didn't either, but there were three things that happened in my life that changed that.
;)
1. I became a manager and had to worry how I was going to explain to employees like yourself that they're fired... or laid-off... or whatever. I don't like hearing that news myself, but let me tell you giving it isn't a picnic either. You want to avoid it, you want to train, help, negotiate... but the fact is the job has to get done or the cutbacks have to happen.
2. Get married. Now it's not just you. And that little voice in your head that you used to tell to shut-up? Well, it's got company that won't shut-up. And more importantly it acts unpredictably, you might not be worried about some issue (pick: income, housing, health, children, future, news, etc.), but your spouse will be.
3. Children. Now it's really not just you. No divorce lawyer in the world can make your children disappear. They're fantastic, you'll love them... but imagine getting laid off or just worrying about your employment future when you have all those mouths to feed.
So you had better figure out how to deal with the stress you think you are facing because it only gets worse from here.
Personally, I don't let it get to me. Fake it until you make it. That's my motto.
The problem with better defensive measures is that they force the opposition to improve their offensive measures. IIRC, the .223 round was selected over the .30-06 because it tended to wound or maim rather than kill. Studies showed that a wounded opponent would occupy up to four enemy soldiers vs. a dead opponent which only occupied the dead one.
So as we get better defenses, we can expect our opponents to step up their firepower. Superior technology isn't keeping Americans from getting killed in our current wars... and it won't in any other.
But this certainly is cool and I'd rather have it in a fire fight than not. Remind's me of Niven's leather impact armor; I always wanted a suit of that.
I'm not talking about "can they do it" but "will they." There are many highly qualified, techinically skilled individuals who just
After 1-3 years, employers can tell whether you are a superstar or a waste of their time and the salary potential rapidly increases. This is why you have to shop carefully for opportunity, technology, funding and such. Choose your company wisely because if you get laid off in six to twelve months, you'll be starting over to some degree.
But don't sweat the low pay, think of it as getting paid for your continuing education. You will be learning for the next few years (hopefully more) or else you won't be seeing six figure salaries any time soon.
Gates is wrong. Hardware prices don't depend as much on technology but on what people are willing to pay.
You are both incorrect and correct: Free hardware occurs when you have a pay-for-use service to offset the cost of manufacturing. It works for cellular phones, cable and satellite tv, and it's even starting to occur in energy with kickbacks for more efficient appliances.
The companies don't have to be the same, just have tight relationships.
So what Bill is hinting at is that Windows OS is going to become a subscription service for everyone (already is for Enterprise customers) and that the subscription fees are going to be high enough to justify kicking back a significant amount to Intel, Dell, Taiwan or whomever is building the XBox^H^H^H^H platform that the customer chooses for their home PC.
If cable tv or telephony is the leading indicator (and they stand to be replaced by WMP and IM in the common household) then we can expect MSFT to consider a subscription price (which includes a home PC) of $50-100 per month to be tolerable by end users. At $600-$1200 per year with a new $300 free desktop upgrade every three years, that seems like a workable model.
where's my multi-terebyte disk array
Shameless self-serving plug: Here.
There have ALREADY been cases where people died because cell phones did not have 911 location services.
Yes, we should protect all those highly educated geeks and the morons who follow in their footsteps from cutting off their 911 enabled land-line because they're so enamoured with VoIP... only to die in a fire because the truck cannot find their computer... 192.168.1.2? WTF are you? At home? Great, and where is that? Your house?
Please, this is nothing more than a BS excuse to keep regulated services regulated and support big business. Trust me, the self-identification you have to provide isn't going to cut it for 911, they'll need a trusted and confirmed physical address which means your ISP will have to get involved and auto-transmit your registration (billing address, no, physical!) to the phone company so they can pass it along to the 911 service desk. Good-bye anonimity.
People lived (and died) before 911 came about and will continue to do both with or without 911 on VoIP. If you are really worried about 911 finding you in an emergency, don't cut your land line.
When it comes to science questions, such as whether or not global warming is happening and whether or not we are contributing to it and whether or not the icecaps are melting into the ocean at an alarming rate, well, the scientists are correct, and the administration is wrong.
Human carbon dioxide emissions raise the overall temperature. It's proven, and it doesn't need more study.
Wait, I've heard this argument before, but back in my day it was black holes do not exist... or was it the speed of sound is impossible to exceed! Yes, that was it... then of course there were all the nobel-equivalent scientists proving that the Earth was flat. And today we have the speed of light as a proven speed limit and global warming as a proven effect of cow farts.
Sorry, I've seen the best liberal science that the National Geographic Society has to offer: Not only can they not get their math correct, but they cannot conclusively form the argument that humans are causing the warming. Yea, we give off CO2, yea the oceans and trees absorb it. Uh, but not all of it, in fact, not half. But the amount we find in the atmosphere doesn't rise anywhere near the expected missing-half amount... so while we cannot form a theory, science has proven that humans are responsible for this warming?
Sorry, I don't buy it. Not only because we've had non-industrial warming in the past, but because life is so adaptable to exploiting sudden increases in the level of resources.
Give it a few decades and we'll all be proven wrong.
Oh and regarding a bunch of scientists NOT being politically motivated? Puh-leeeeze, they aren't exactly self-employed you know. Everything is political.
Where I'm from, many bugs reported by the test group are ignored if you cannot rub the reviewer's nose in the pile of stink that the bug could create. The passing sentiment that results in a WONTFIX or a POSTPONE to later releases tends to be coupled with a healthy misunderstanding of the risk and impact that such bugs can cause.
Filing such an exploit demonstrating how easily a customer might encounter such a bug and what sort of damage it might cause is the ONLY way to guarantee a bug gets fixed.
So yea, don't blame the messenger, unless they actually wrote a self-propagating virus and called that the message. Posting an exploit is no different that mentioning that guns allow one to exploit bank security and steal cash. There is a huge difference between informative and criminal.
Much spam now originates from thousands of infected Windows machines. The CPU cost per email won't deter Distributed spam networks one bit. They have the CPU cycles and bandwidth to spare. When will MSFT address the innate vulnerability in their OS? Granted, automatic and unattended Windows update is a huge step in the right direction, but like a bilge pump, it does nothing to address the leaks in the hull.
The alternative cash (or credit?) cost per email sent requires some sort of central banking authority to track the payments and authorize each sender or piece of email sent. Suddenly email is no longer a loose network of peer servers, it's a MSFT controlled central authority... I'm sure they'd be happy to provide that service for "free" along with your $50 annual Windows license renewal.
Your Windows "client" will undoubtably offer you the option to "Refuse uncertified email?" as an anti-spam solution. Corporations running sendmail or other *nix alternatives will gladly pay the $2500+ annual contract to be able to authenticate with and send email through the MSFT email servers. But small-time non-Windows operations will be forced to abandon *nix based systems for their email gateways or give up using email to communicate with their friends and customers with Windows OS.
This is not a solution and certainly not a smart one, it's MSFT holding their userbase hostage. I for one do not welcome our new OS overlords.
The consequences of space exploration being government run are intentional, not incidental. As recent history has taught us, when you allow explorers to travel to and colonize new lands, you end up with a civil war and a new super power. Or at the very least, erosion of the tax base.
Unless someone brews up a simple back-yard UFO recipe, we can expect all future space travel to be tightly controlled by the government. They have no interest in losing control of the serfs.
Why not just roll off the alternate ramp and start exploring? I guess I just don't understand why the front ramp is so special.
Because that's what they tested it with. This is not robot wars where if the rover trips on an antenna and tips over some guy can walk into the ring and set it upright again. The alternate ramp has to be conceived, modeled, tested and proved, then re-proved, before the management should sign off on the plan.
Otherwise we can kiss $400M and several years goodbye.
Oh yea, the JPL dudes are for figuring out what I listed above, not for making it quicker.
Some observations from my experience with cowboy development (developers without adequate management):
So you might understand my hesitation to believe that no program management == some sort of coder utopia. You'd be out of work in short order.
Me too.
I also use a three... make that four tiered system.
a. simple (slashdot, new york times, etc.)
b. medium (unpriviledged accounts, e-commerce)
c. banking (banks only)
d. secure (longer and root only)
I only have one simple password. I have two medium passwords, one banking password and one secure password. Other than the simple one, they are all 8+ characters long and random.
I generate them by banging on the keyboard, holding shift and banging some more, releasing shift and banging some more. Then I click-select-drag-drop-repeat a few times and then start deleting characters at random.
I then write the newly christened password down on a small piece of paper and carry it in my wallet for a few days until my fingers have memorized the sequence. I then eat it.
As for changing passwords, what's the point in that? If you have a strong password and you (or your systems admin) are at all alert to long-running brute force attacks on your account, then a hacker has the same chance of guessing your brand new password in X hours as they do of guessing your old password in X hours.
Strong passwords are good security. Rotation discourages strong passwords. QED.
BTW, if one noticed a brute force attack underway in the logs, would one change the password? Or change the account name?
Of course, if/when this is finally accepted, it means that oil/gas exits the non-renewable resource club and joins nuclear as a semi-renewable resource.
I doubt this will cause any of the eco-freaks or greenies to start buying SUVs. I don't think it will actually change much of anything at all. Instead they'll start prognosticating that the Earth has been pushing out these resources for 4.5B years and cannot possibly go on much longer before the coal, oil, gas, uranium runs out. That Solar/Wind/Geothermal/Hydro (wait, that last one's bad for fish) are the only renewable resources and we should all spend 10X as much as we currently do to use these morally pure fuels.
Of course, 100 years from now when run away consumption of NG/Oil outpaces the Earth's production rate (like we're doing for fresh water today), then their argument will make a bit more sense.
Now flash forward 4B years when the Sun's output is trailing off. What have they got to say about "renewable" energy now? Huh? Huh? Thought so.
There is no renewable energy source. It's all entropy. I'd like the cheapest I can get please.
Fair enough, then the prosecution can merely "prove" that your phone was at the crime scene.
I imagine the acceleration and deceleration are limited by the gyroscope's mass and reactiveness.
As a regular motorcyclist, I'd like to think that high-delta-v isn't required for commuting because 99% of the time I don't use it. But I would never give up the potential of a solid braking system with a large cantilevered countermass. There have been moments when it was the difference between life and pain.
Even so, this would be a super cool toy. I hear Bombardier is quite good at making those.
why didn't the Empire have guard rails anywhere?
They were obviously a people possessed with greater intellect than we commonly see here on Earth. The result, no doubt, of centuries of Darwinian attrition.
I'm sure a people with sufficient sense to know better than to fall off high places would want to keep things that way.