Time for what? Installing Linux? Configuring Linux? Let me ask you, did you install Windows on your current machine (and did it take some measure of time), or did you buy that machine with Windows already installed (which you can also do with Linux)?
> Is your bandwidth free?
Did you download MS Office XP off the web, or do you not realize that you can order StarOffice on CD from several companies for very few dollars? Also, if you're referring to Linux fixes, does Microsoft send you patches by mail, or do you get them from the update site? Did that bandwidth cost not count?
> And are you fine waiting for fixes for features that don't exactly work?
Are we talking about Linux patches here, or MS Service Packs?
> And since IE is just a wrapper around that and the networking
> code, then how is that wrong?
It's not wrong to tie IE's components into the OS for use elsewhere, but that's not where the problem lies. The problem lies with the fact that in integrating the components of IE into the OS, they also made it prohibitively difficult to use them elsewhere. In this example, you state that IE is just a wrapper for the HTML viewer and networking code, which it now is (in simplitic terms). However, that means that a different wrapper for HTML viewer and network access (Netscape) can't be used in its place for most functions, because those components are not easily commandable from an external program. The only reason MS could do this is because they control the OS, which gives them the unfair ability to wall out competitors, and that's what's wrong.
Let me take the example of a simple application: the calculator. Microsoft includes a calculator application with Windows for free. On the surface, this seems to be the same as the Internet Explorer, but answer these questions.
1.) Does the calculator program destroy all other calculator applications when it installs?
2.) Does the calculator program use internal programming in the OS that other calculator programs can't access?
3.) Does uninstalling the calculator program cause Windows not to boot properly?
I think it becomes easy to see the difference when you look at it that way. The simple answer is that it would have been easy to embed the HTML rendering engine in IE and in Windows, or, more correctly, to make the HTML rendering engine a distinct component that can be (1) worked around by another program's engine, or (2) modular so other programs could hook into it and use it. Microsoft chose instead to make it as difficult as possible for anyone else to replace IE by knitting it into the OS. That's where they crossed the line, and if you think they did it just because of bad planning, you need to read up on what happened when they integrated Kerberos security. Or Java.
> The best, most powerful, candidate survives. If office or windows
> did not serve the needs of the business community - it would fail.
> If it suits the needs of the business community, it thrives and pushes
> its competitors out of the market. Have you thought, just for a microsecond,
> that instead of always bullying people out of
business, microsoft actually
> makes, what the majority of corporate users consider, a superior product?
> Wether or not you consider it a superior product is irrelevant. The business
> end-user community has practically standardized. There is nothing better
> out there for the generic, end-user market right now.
Very well said, but I disagree with your point, and didn't even need a microsecond to think about it. First, you consider "best" and "most powerful" to be synonymous, and in this case, they weren't. In virtually every case (excepting Windows 3.1, which beat out its competitors right off), Microsoft put out a weaker product and then leveraged its advantages over competitors to force them out (recall the now-infamous "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" t-shirts). It's true that the Microsoft products overtook their competitors, but hills of documentation were presented in the trial that this could not have happened if MS hadn't actively submarined its competitors' products by manipulating the OS underneath it, and the market. The reason WordPerfect stopped getting better is because MS made it so that WordPerfect Corp. and then Corel had to spend so much energy dealing with the undocumented additions to the OS that it became unprofitable to continue innovating the product. In brief, you're right that there's nothing better out there for the end-user any more, but you're wrong to assume that would be the case if MS hadn't been able to control the OS, and that's why we're bashing Microsoft about their new initiatives today.
> Just in case your wondering, I admit MS has some pretty nasty tricks
> up its sleeve when it comes to business practices. But nobody ever
> said the world was a nice place to live.
We're way beyond "nice" by this point, which is again why we're so anti-MS. When the company presented a forged videotape of performance issues within Windows, someone should have gone to jail for perjury, and someone working for a company with less money and influence would have done so. More recently, Steve Ballmer himself, whom I've heard is a rather intelligent man, can't seem to understand that Linux and the GPL aren't the same thing, since he uses them interchangeably in discussions, but I suspect it's more likely he knows full well and says the things he does to add to the open source confusion. Like I said, we're way past "nice" by now.
> Hey, I don't have a problem with using MS Office.
> They were the first to do it and they do it well.
I can only assume that you mean that MS was the first to do MS Office, because if you meant that they were the first to do an integrated office suite, you'd be wrong. Of course, they squashed Lotus out of existence (and AmiPro sucked anyway), but I don't really count that.
It sounds out of hand, but the programmer's market in Japan is quite lunatic in reality, and it's been known to happen that a company will find out what a programmer looks like, then have people (attractive, if they think it'll make a difference) waiting outside that company's offices to bump into the person "accidentally" when he/she (but mostly he) comes out.
So, in a way, the craziness you propose is not so crazy after all.
>...Either the Open Source movement will be dead, or you propellerheads
> will be treating this book like the Bible and Torvalds like a prophet.
In a thousand years, I would hope that the concept of operating systems will be as out-of-date as your interpretation of our liking for Linus.
> Ditch the hero worship. It's unbecoming in serious folk and makes
> you all look like kids.
Your implication that hero-worship is childish is wrong on two counts. First, hero-worship does not have to be childish. In fact, most of us just refer to it as "respect". Second, Linus is in fact a hero, and not because he's a god, but because he is a prophet, although I admit to having a very loose definition of "prophet". He's the best demonstration we've had in the last decade that an everyman can change the world.
> Add to that the fact that most of you would still be working
> on PDPs if it weren't for Microsoft and IBM making babies.
Don't be daft. If IBM and Microsoft didn't exist, someone else would have done it instead. And, as a side note, IBM sold off the OS project for PCs to Microsoft because they thought of PCs as unworthy of their own developers. Microsoft themselves thought so highly of the project that they too decided to buy MS-DOS from another company and rebadge it rather then waste their time building it. So, don't be such a hero-worshipper of IBM and Microsoft yourself. They are neither irreplacable in the history of OSes nor were they particularly visionary.
> You zealots are all alike: witless, ungrateful, patricidal loons.
Oh, get off it. You overgeneralize by far too much for me to take this seriously.
> Remember your roots, and realize that Torvalds is not the
> figurative loins from which the OS movement sprang. There were many
> ancestors, some of whom you revile today without knowing that their
> contributions make it possible for you to hang out on a hobby site and
> bitch about people who are richer than you because they work for a living.
Good heavens, you're serious, aren't you? You're right that the open source movement didn't start with Linus Torvalds, but by that argument the PC movement didn't start with IBM (Texas Instruments and Tandy and Apple were making PCs long before IBM ever tried), and Windows didn't start with Microsoft (Bill swiped it from Apple, who in their turn swiped it from Xerox PARC), and so on. The point is that Linux is what pushed the OSS movement into the public eye, and Linus created Linux, so he gets the credit. And, most people (myself included) revile Microsoft (or IBM, for that matter) because of their business practices, not their product.
Perhaps you need to do a little reading, and a little growing up yourself, before you toss around such blatant and inaccurate information.
I'd mod you up if I had points to use. I agree that the FSF isn't exactly the group I want fighting Redmond, since they too are rather extreme in their views. Both groups seem to forget the middle ground.
I'm astonished that this came up, because I can indeed refute your theory (damn, what one learns in college!). In 1991 while I was in college, we passed a large number of foods under a Geiger counter to monitor natural radiation (we were bored and had lunch and a Geiger counter at hand). None other than chicken nuggets from Mickey D's was in the group, and they didn't show any noticeable increase in radioactive material from the background. Sorry.
Nuclear detonations don't happen by accident. Ever (and don't include accidental activation of an H-bomb here. That's not an accidental reaction, that's accidentally starting a device intended to create a reaction). The reason most nations don't store all of their plutonium in one place has nothing to do with putting it all in close proximity, it has to do with the cost and danger involved in moving it from where it's made (usually by power plants) to where it would be stored. Any accident would have to involve supercompression of the stored plutonium, and since storage is usually both mixing the material with filler and separating units of material with shielding the odds that any accident will cause such supercompression is vanishingly small.
See my post above. Lifting the garbage into orbit costs too much energy to be worth it. And, "as long as nothing goes wrong" has to be pretty exacting when you're dealing with plutonium.
> Encase it in glass first so that it won't leak before it gets subducted.
Swing and a miss, Ace. Would you tell me what good encasing it in glass would do, considering that glass melts at a much lower temperature than rock? I hope you didn't lose any sleep thinking this up.
> So, what you do, is you encase it in glass. Simple. You could
> use it instead of a hot water bottle. Never need refilling.;-)
Two things: first, with no seriousness at all, it really makes dropping your Thermos a bad thing. "Oops! Oh, no! (crack) BOOM!". Second, and seriously, glass is a liquid, and it's fragile. Since exposing plutonium to the environment is a bad thing, putting it in such a fragile container is asking for trouble. Besides, if you could buy your plutonium bottle at Wal-Mart, you could buy enough of them to get together a noticeable amount of fissile material. I'll warrant that building a bomb with it would be difficult, but crushing the elements and blowing the dust into an air exchange system would make for a useful terrorist tactic as well.
Actually, plutonium isn't nearly that deadly. The original article even mentions some doctoral nitwit who inhaled plutonium dust to make a point. I think he's nuts, but he's still alive, so I guess he wins the bet. The issue has been and continues to be the cost associated with success, and with failure. Lifting something out of Earth's gravity well costs a lot of energy (remember, we're not just talking space shuttle stuff here, since the shuttle never leaves orbit). On all of the moon shots, 99.99 percent of the material that left the launch pad, weight-wise, was fuel. Thus, lifting tons of plutonium out of orbit would require tens of thousands of tons of fuel to do the job (that's hundreds of Saturn-V rockets worth). Not only does this represent an awesome cost, but it's also an awesome risk, since if a single one of these space shots malfunctions it'll dump a big cloud of unpleasantness into the atmosphere. Since the removal of the material from our gravity well is the stopping point, nobody has ever bothered to address where it should go once it's up there.
The simple idea behind critical mass is that it's not so much critical mass as critical density. You can store more than the critical mass of a radioisotope as long as you include something to reduce the density. You can (A) mix it with non-reactive filler, which cuts the mass per unit area down to non-chaining levels, or you can (B) store subcritical masses that are separated from each other by shielding (the golf-balls-in-a-box idea). In most cases, both are used in tandem. And so, there's no boom.
> What are they learning from the hunt-and-kill games?
Why, they're learning how to hunt-and-kill effectively. Where reason separates from Sen. Harp is that knowing how to hunt-and-kill effectively does not induce hunting and killing. In other words, being good at it isn't going to make a kid think that it's okay to do it.
You've got a real inconsistency here, then. You stated in another post that if you heard that your kids were involved in a violent movie/game, they'd be punished just as if they'd done it at home, but now you're saying you told your son that a movie had violence, and he left the room, which implies that you'd have let him stay if he chose. What happened to the above-mentioned "If I over hear that either of them were involved in some form of violent movie / game elsewhere they will be punished as if he had done it at home" statement? Do you punish them for "being involved in" a violent movie or not? From this, I'd say you need to do some more thinking on my original statement, since inconsistency isn't good parenting.
Sorry, but your argument doesn't pan out. The X-rated movie thing is a throwback to more Puritanical times, and the dangers of smoking and giving firearms to kids has been well documented. There is no such proof that shoot-em-ups have any deleterious effect, and even researchers that want to prove there's danger in video games have been unable to demonstrate any causality. To wit, it does take a scientist to see the effects. If you want to speak about how youth violence is on the rise, I present the evidence that in the last twenty years, youth violence (in the U.S.) has been declining, and this data from none other than the FBI, whose job it is to track youth violence (among other things). Sorry, but your personal observations about the "state of things today" doesn't cut it next to that. Prove to me that video games cause violence, and perhaps I'll agree that the government has any place in regulating it.
> The solution then is for women to quit their jobs and stay
> home with the kids, is it? Brilliant.
Caution. Your assumption of sexism on the poster's part reveals sexism on your part. I suspect the point was to stop trying to get the money for the big SUV, TV and computer and spend the time instead with your kids. That's my answer, at least. I'd be careful, were I you, not to assume that having a single income family necessarily means that the female partner (assuming M/F relationship to begin with) is the one staying home. I'd stay home while my wife went to work in a heartbeat if we could afford it, but she hated her job when we started having kids so she decided it would be better to quit than deal with keeping it, so she stays home.
> And you know what, they have NO INTEREST in any sort of violence
> what so ever.. But yet they have more videogames than most kids can count.
You may wish to consider that they exhibit no interest in violence in your presence because they get punished if they do. Whether this is teaching them not to like violence or simply teaching them to cover up their interest remains to be seen.
I think that's his point. It's your responsibility to keep tabs on your kids. It's not your government's responsibility, or a video arcade owner's job to keep anyone's kids (save their own) from playing shoot-em-ups. This bill just pushes responsibility on to people who don't deserve it because there are parents who don't step up to the plate. I'd be inclined to say that it's worth the effort to protect kids whose parents don't, but there's not a shred of real evidence that it causes any harm, and so it becomes a simple issue of legislators thinking (incorrectly) that they are better parents than parents, and that's what's really not right here.
Virg
Re:Repeat (this subj. line was too good to change)
on
Killing Video Games
·
· Score: 2
> Didn't you already post something like this already Katz?
Where's the "-1, redundant" when you really need one?
> Women dont have a problem with sex, you dolt, they have a problem with PORN.
Many women don't have a problem with pornography, you dolt, and many men do have a problem with pornography, you bigot.
> People who watch porn have a fucking problem - they dont fuck,
> they dont experience sex, they watch porn.
Please don't push you difficulties off on me. I am happily married to a woman who enjoys pornography as much as I do, and it doesn't seem to interfere with our ability to have real-life relations at all. You speak as though you had a problem with a human being and are trying to dump what appears to be his problem on all of the rest of us because you're unable to conceive that we could think differently than you. Solve your own hang-ups before you try working on mine, and don't tell me that you speak for all women when you so obviously do not.
> Porn is only as useful as it keeps useless men as far away
> from women as usefully possible. As a woman, I wish you fucking
> losers would emblazon a remote on your clothing so that we can keep
> as far as fuck away from you as possible.
I wouldn't need to wear a marking for that. I'd only need to talk to you for a few moments and I can assure you you'd have no problem keeping me as far from you as possible.
> Bad for what buisness? Maybe Mundie doesnt realize it,
> but the other 2.5 billion people working on this
planet arent
> working in the software buisness. And in the IT industry, even
> there I'd guess maybe about 5 percent are working in companies whose
> buisness the GPL would be bad for.
Well, the GPL is a software license, and the GPL is a bad business decision for most commercial software developers, so the point of relevance is that the GPL is most likely a bad business model for the sector of the industry that needs it in the first place.
> So maybe Mundie should try explaining exactly why the other
> 6 billion people somehow affected by software should care about
> his desires to control any and all of their software and make
> them pay through the nose at every turn.
Well, I'll guess it's because his company makes software that some of these people want to use, and it's not very realistic to expect them to give away the software when they had to pay programmers to write it. Nice try at the straw man, though.
> Free software is about and for USERS of software.
You're quite right. So what's your point?
> The important thing isnt wether Microsoft can survive or not
> (because who cares if they whine all the way to irrelevancy)...
It is the important thing to Microsoft stockholders and Microsoft officials.
>...it's wether the freedom and value provided
by free software
> can make it a Good Buisness Choice for everyone else.
Okay, I'll bite. Which software company that currently charges for software can give it all away for free and expect to stay in business? Nice try, but Utopianism doesn't work as a software model.
I'm definitely one of Micro$oft's big detractors, but the issue I have with Mundie's speech has little to do with Microsoft's business model. It has to do with the way he's constantly stating that the GPL is bad, because any company that touches it immediately pisses away any and all IP rights, which is just bull. Having a GPL OS doesn't preclude any company from writing a closed-source program for it. So, if Microsoft wanted to publish Word for Linux, they would not be required under the GPL to publish anything unless they incorporated GPL'ed code directly into the program. That's where the FUD comes in, and that's the place where we should be calling them to task. Saying that Microsoft should embrace the GPL because it's better for anyone other than Microsoft will just make us look like fools.
> Money saved is no good to the economy, but money spending is
> what makes for a vibrant and thriving economy.
Not true. Money saved makes more money available for borrowing (yes, I know there are many factors, but this is one of those factors) which drives down interest rates. Falling interest rates makes investment more attractive, which boosts the economy. Besides, if the $175B isn't being spent on software, why do you assume it's all going in the bank?
Slashdot Mirror
> Is your time free?
Time for what? Installing Linux? Configuring Linux? Let me ask you, did you install Windows on your current machine (and did it take some measure of time), or did you buy that machine with Windows already installed (which you can also do with Linux)?
> Is your bandwidth free?
Did you download MS Office XP off the web, or do you not realize that you can order StarOffice on CD from several companies for very few dollars? Also, if you're referring to Linux fixes, does Microsoft send you patches by mail, or do you get them from the update site? Did that bandwidth cost not count?
> And are you fine waiting for fixes for features that don't exactly work?
Are we talking about Linux patches here, or MS Service Packs?
Virg
> And since IE is just a wrapper around that and the networking
> code, then how is that wrong?
It's not wrong to tie IE's components into the OS for use elsewhere, but that's not where the problem lies. The problem lies with the fact that in integrating the components of IE into the OS, they also made it prohibitively difficult to use them elsewhere. In this example, you state that IE is just a wrapper for the HTML viewer and networking code, which it now is (in simplitic terms). However, that means that a different wrapper for HTML viewer and network access (Netscape) can't be used in its place for most functions, because those components are not easily commandable from an external program. The only reason MS could do this is because they control the OS, which gives them the unfair ability to wall out competitors, and that's what's wrong.
Let me take the example of a simple application: the calculator. Microsoft includes a calculator application with Windows for free. On the surface, this seems to be the same as the Internet Explorer, but answer these questions.
1.) Does the calculator program destroy all other calculator applications when it installs?
2.) Does the calculator program use internal programming in the OS that other calculator programs can't access?
3.) Does uninstalling the calculator program cause Windows not to boot properly?
I think it becomes easy to see the difference when you look at it that way. The simple answer is that it would have been easy to embed the HTML rendering engine in IE and in Windows, or, more correctly, to make the HTML rendering engine a distinct component that can be (1) worked around by another program's engine, or (2) modular so other programs could hook into it and use it. Microsoft chose instead to make it as difficult as possible for anyone else to replace IE by knitting it into the OS. That's where they crossed the line, and if you think they did it just because of bad planning, you need to read up on what happened when they integrated Kerberos security. Or Java.
Virg
> The best, most powerful, candidate survives. If office or windows
> did not serve the needs of the business community - it would fail.
> If it suits the needs of the business community, it thrives and pushes
> its competitors out of the market. Have you thought, just for a microsecond,
> that instead of always bullying people out of business, microsoft actually
> makes, what the majority of corporate users consider, a superior product?
> Wether or not you consider it a superior product is irrelevant. The business
> end-user community has practically standardized. There is nothing better
> out there for the generic, end-user market right now.
Very well said, but I disagree with your point, and didn't even need a microsecond to think about it. First, you consider "best" and "most powerful" to be synonymous, and in this case, they weren't. In virtually every case (excepting Windows 3.1, which beat out its competitors right off), Microsoft put out a weaker product and then leveraged its advantages over competitors to force them out (recall the now-infamous "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" t-shirts). It's true that the Microsoft products overtook their competitors, but hills of documentation were presented in the trial that this could not have happened if MS hadn't actively submarined its competitors' products by manipulating the OS underneath it, and the market. The reason WordPerfect stopped getting better is because MS made it so that WordPerfect Corp. and then Corel had to spend so much energy dealing with the undocumented additions to the OS that it became unprofitable to continue innovating the product. In brief, you're right that there's nothing better out there for the end-user any more, but you're wrong to assume that would be the case if MS hadn't been able to control the OS, and that's why we're bashing Microsoft about their new initiatives today.
> Just in case your wondering, I admit MS has some pretty nasty tricks
> up its sleeve when it comes to business practices. But nobody ever
> said the world was a nice place to live.
We're way beyond "nice" by this point, which is again why we're so anti-MS. When the company presented a forged videotape of performance issues within Windows, someone should have gone to jail for perjury, and someone working for a company with less money and influence would have done so. More recently, Steve Ballmer himself, whom I've heard is a rather intelligent man, can't seem to understand that Linux and the GPL aren't the same thing, since he uses them interchangeably in discussions, but I suspect it's more likely he knows full well and says the things he does to add to the open source confusion. Like I said, we're way past "nice" by now.
Virg
> Hey, I don't have a problem with using MS Office.
> They were the first to do it and they do it well.
I can only assume that you mean that MS was the first to do MS Office, because if you meant that they were the first to do an integrated office suite, you'd be wrong. Of course, they squashed Lotus out of existence (and AmiPro sucked anyway), but I don't really count that.
Virg
It sounds out of hand, but the programmer's market in Japan is quite lunatic in reality, and it's been known to happen that a company will find out what a programmer looks like, then have people (attractive, if they think it'll make a difference) waiting outside that company's offices to bump into the person "accidentally" when he/she (but mostly he) comes out.
So, in a way, the craziness you propose is not so crazy after all.
Virg
> ...Either the Open Source movement will be dead, or you propellerheads
> will be treating this book like the Bible and Torvalds like a prophet.
In a thousand years, I would hope that the concept of operating systems will be as out-of-date as your interpretation of our liking for Linus.
> Ditch the hero worship. It's unbecoming in serious folk and makes
> you all look like kids.
Your implication that hero-worship is childish is wrong on two counts. First, hero-worship does not have to be childish. In fact, most of us just refer to it as "respect". Second, Linus is in fact a hero, and not because he's a god, but because he is a prophet, although I admit to having a very loose definition of "prophet". He's the best demonstration we've had in the last decade that an everyman can change the world.
> Add to that the fact that most of you would still be working
> on PDPs if it weren't for Microsoft and IBM making babies.
Don't be daft. If IBM and Microsoft didn't exist, someone else would have done it instead. And, as a side note, IBM sold off the OS project for PCs to Microsoft because they thought of PCs as unworthy of their own developers. Microsoft themselves thought so highly of the project that they too decided to buy MS-DOS from another company and rebadge it rather then waste their time building it. So, don't be such a hero-worshipper of IBM and Microsoft yourself. They are neither irreplacable in the history of OSes nor were they particularly visionary.
> You zealots are all alike: witless, ungrateful, patricidal loons.
Oh, get off it. You overgeneralize by far too much for me to take this seriously.
> Remember your roots, and realize that Torvalds is not the
> figurative loins from which the OS movement sprang. There were many
> ancestors, some of whom you revile today without knowing that their
> contributions make it possible for you to hang out on a hobby site and
> bitch about people who are richer than you because they work for a living.
Good heavens, you're serious, aren't you? You're right that the open source movement didn't start with Linus Torvalds, but by that argument the PC movement didn't start with IBM (Texas Instruments and Tandy and Apple were making PCs long before IBM ever tried), and Windows didn't start with Microsoft (Bill swiped it from Apple, who in their turn swiped it from Xerox PARC), and so on. The point is that Linux is what pushed the OSS movement into the public eye, and Linus created Linux, so he gets the credit. And, most people (myself included) revile Microsoft (or IBM, for that matter) because of their business practices, not their product.
Perhaps you need to do a little reading, and a little growing up yourself, before you toss around such blatant and inaccurate information.
Virg
I'd mod you up if I had points to use. I agree that the FSF isn't exactly the group I want fighting Redmond, since they too are rather extreme in their views. Both groups seem to forget the middle ground.
Virg
I'm astonished that this came up, because I can indeed refute your theory (damn, what one learns in college!). In 1991 while I was in college, we passed a large number of foods under a Geiger counter to monitor natural radiation (we were bored and had lunch and a Geiger counter at hand). None other than chicken nuggets from Mickey D's was in the group, and they didn't show any noticeable increase in radioactive material from the background. Sorry.
Virg
Nuclear detonations don't happen by accident. Ever (and don't include accidental activation of an H-bomb here. That's not an accidental reaction, that's accidentally starting a device intended to create a reaction). The reason most nations don't store all of their plutonium in one place has nothing to do with putting it all in close proximity, it has to do with the cost and danger involved in moving it from where it's made (usually by power plants) to where it would be stored. Any accident would have to involve supercompression of the stored plutonium, and since storage is usually both mixing the material with filler and separating units of material with shielding the odds that any accident will cause such supercompression is vanishingly small.
Virg
> why's it a bad idea?
See my post above. Lifting the garbage into orbit costs too much energy to be worth it. And, "as long as nothing goes wrong" has to be pretty exacting when you're dealing with plutonium.
Virg
> Encase it in glass first so that it won't leak before it gets subducted.
Swing and a miss, Ace. Would you tell me what good encasing it in glass would do, considering that glass melts at a much lower temperature than rock? I hope you didn't lose any sleep thinking this up.
Virg
> So, what you do, is you encase it in glass. Simple. You could ;-)
> use it instead of a hot water bottle. Never need refilling.
Two things: first, with no seriousness at all, it really makes dropping your Thermos a bad thing. "Oops! Oh, no! (crack) BOOM!". Second, and seriously, glass is a liquid, and it's fragile. Since exposing plutonium to the environment is a bad thing, putting it in such a fragile container is asking for trouble. Besides, if you could buy your plutonium bottle at Wal-Mart, you could buy enough of them to get together a noticeable amount of fissile material. I'll warrant that building a bomb with it would be difficult, but crushing the elements and blowing the dust into an air exchange system would make for a useful terrorist tactic as well.
Virg
Actually, plutonium isn't nearly that deadly. The original article even mentions some doctoral nitwit who inhaled plutonium dust to make a point. I think he's nuts, but he's still alive, so I guess he wins the bet. The issue has been and continues to be the cost associated with success, and with failure. Lifting something out of Earth's gravity well costs a lot of energy (remember, we're not just talking space shuttle stuff here, since the shuttle never leaves orbit). On all of the moon shots, 99.99 percent of the material that left the launch pad, weight-wise, was fuel. Thus, lifting tons of plutonium out of orbit would require tens of thousands of tons of fuel to do the job (that's hundreds of Saturn-V rockets worth). Not only does this represent an awesome cost, but it's also an awesome risk, since if a single one of these space shots malfunctions it'll dump a big cloud of unpleasantness into the atmosphere. Since the removal of the material from our gravity well is the stopping point, nobody has ever bothered to address where it should go once it's up there.
Virg
The simple idea behind critical mass is that it's not so much critical mass as critical density. You can store more than the critical mass of a radioisotope as long as you include something to reduce the density. You can (A) mix it with non-reactive filler, which cuts the mass per unit area down to non-chaining levels, or you can (B) store subcritical masses that are separated from each other by shielding (the golf-balls-in-a-box idea). In most cases, both are used in tandem. And so, there's no boom.
Virg
> "A society that will trade a little liberty for a little order
> will lose both, and deserve neither."
According to Bartletts, Ben Franklin said this, not Jefferson.
Virg
> What are they learning from the hunt-and-kill games?
Why, they're learning how to hunt-and-kill effectively. Where reason separates from Sen. Harp is that knowing how to hunt-and-kill effectively does not induce hunting and killing. In other words, being good at it isn't going to make a kid think that it's okay to do it.
Virg
You've got a real inconsistency here, then. You stated in another post that if you heard that your kids were involved in a violent movie/game, they'd be punished just as if they'd done it at home, but now you're saying you told your son that a movie had violence, and he left the room, which implies that you'd have let him stay if he chose. What happened to the above-mentioned "If I over hear that either of them were involved in some form of violent movie / game elsewhere they will be punished as if he had done it at home" statement? Do you punish them for "being involved in" a violent movie or not? From this, I'd say you need to do some more thinking on my original statement, since inconsistency isn't good parenting.
Virg
Sorry, but your argument doesn't pan out. The X-rated movie thing is a throwback to more Puritanical times, and the dangers of smoking and giving firearms to kids has been well documented. There is no such proof that shoot-em-ups have any deleterious effect, and even researchers that want to prove there's danger in video games have been unable to demonstrate any causality. To wit, it does take a scientist to see the effects. If you want to speak about how youth violence is on the rise, I present the evidence that in the last twenty years, youth violence (in the U.S.) has been declining, and this data from none other than the FBI, whose job it is to track youth violence (among other things). Sorry, but your personal observations about the "state of things today" doesn't cut it next to that. Prove to me that video games cause violence, and perhaps I'll agree that the government has any place in regulating it.
Virg
> The solution then is for women to quit their jobs and stay
> home with the kids, is it? Brilliant.
Caution. Your assumption of sexism on the poster's part reveals sexism on your part. I suspect the point was to stop trying to get the money for the big SUV, TV and computer and spend the time instead with your kids. That's my answer, at least. I'd be careful, were I you, not to assume that having a single income family necessarily means that the female partner (assuming M/F relationship to begin with) is the one staying home. I'd stay home while my wife went to work in a heartbeat if we could afford it, but she hated her job when we started having kids so she decided it would be better to quit than deal with keeping it, so she stays home.
Virg
> And you know what, they have NO INTEREST in any sort of violence
> what so ever.. But yet they have more videogames than most kids can count.
You may wish to consider that they exhibit no interest in violence in your presence because they get punished if they do. Whether this is teaching them not to like violence or simply teaching them to cover up their interest remains to be seen.
Virg
I think that's his point. It's your responsibility to keep tabs on your kids. It's not your government's responsibility, or a video arcade owner's job to keep anyone's kids (save their own) from playing shoot-em-ups. This bill just pushes responsibility on to people who don't deserve it because there are parents who don't step up to the plate. I'd be inclined to say that it's worth the effort to protect kids whose parents don't, but there's not a shred of real evidence that it causes any harm, and so it becomes a simple issue of legislators thinking (incorrectly) that they are better parents than parents, and that's what's really not right here.
Virg
> Didn't you already post something like this already Katz?
Where's the "-1, redundant" when you really need one?
Virg
> Women dont have a problem with sex, you dolt, they have a problem with PORN.
Many women don't have a problem with pornography, you dolt, and many men do have a problem with pornography, you bigot.
> People who watch porn have a fucking problem - they dont fuck,
> they dont experience sex, they watch porn.
Please don't push you difficulties off on me. I am happily married to a woman who enjoys pornography as much as I do, and it doesn't seem to interfere with our ability to have real-life relations at all. You speak as though you had a problem with a human being and are trying to dump what appears to be his problem on all of the rest of us because you're unable to conceive that we could think differently than you. Solve your own hang-ups before you try working on mine, and don't tell me that you speak for all women when you so obviously do not.
> Porn is only as useful as it keeps useless men as far away
> from women as usefully possible. As a woman, I wish you fucking
> losers would emblazon a remote on your clothing so that we can keep
> as far as fuck away from you as possible.
I wouldn't need to wear a marking for that. I'd only need to talk to you for a few moments and I can assure you you'd have no problem keeping me as far from you as possible.
Virg
> Bad for what buisness? Maybe Mundie doesnt realize it,
...it's wether the freedom and value provided
by free software
> but the other 2.5 billion people working on this planet arent
> working in the software buisness. And in the IT industry, even
> there I'd guess maybe about 5 percent are working in companies whose
> buisness the GPL would be bad for.
Well, the GPL is a software license, and the GPL is a bad business decision for most commercial software developers, so the point of relevance is that the GPL is most likely a bad business model for the sector of the industry that needs it in the first place.
> So maybe Mundie should try explaining exactly why the other
> 6 billion people somehow affected by software should care about
> his desires to control any and all of their software and make
> them pay through the nose at every turn.
Well, I'll guess it's because his company makes software that some of these people want to use, and it's not very realistic to expect them to give away the software when they had to pay programmers to write it. Nice try at the straw man, though.
> Free software is about and for USERS of software.
You're quite right. So what's your point?
> The important thing isnt wether Microsoft can survive or not
> (because who cares if they whine all the way to irrelevancy)...
It is the important thing to Microsoft stockholders and Microsoft officials.
>
> can make it a Good Buisness Choice for everyone else.
Okay, I'll bite. Which software company that currently charges for software can give it all away for free and expect to stay in business? Nice try, but Utopianism doesn't work as a software model.
I'm definitely one of Micro$oft's big detractors, but the issue I have with Mundie's speech has little to do with Microsoft's business model. It has to do with the way he's constantly stating that the GPL is bad, because any company that touches it immediately pisses away any and all IP rights, which is just bull. Having a GPL OS doesn't preclude any company from writing a closed-source program for it. So, if Microsoft wanted to publish Word for Linux, they would not be required under the GPL to publish anything unless they incorporated GPL'ed code directly into the program. That's where the FUD comes in, and that's the place where we should be calling them to task. Saying that Microsoft should embrace the GPL because it's better for anyone other than Microsoft will just make us look like fools.
Virg
> Money saved is no good to the economy, but money spending is
> what makes for a vibrant and thriving economy.
Not true. Money saved makes more money available for borrowing (yes, I know there are many factors, but this is one of those factors) which drives down interest rates. Falling interest rates makes investment more attractive, which boosts the economy. Besides, if the $175B isn't being spent on software, why do you assume it's all going in the bank?
Virg