What about it? The massive project to rebuild it didn't happen until AFTER Tommy left. Then it took on a life of its own because the state couldn't let go of the Federal funds they get from doing road work.
Personally, I'm far more ticked about how the roads in the Dells get rebuilt EVERY DAMN YEAR. When Tommy was in office, a law was passed to at least make sure that construction couldn't happen during the tourist season.
From some of the earliest work on ARPANet to many succcessful software firms.
ARPANet was cool. So is Raven software. But AmFam, Kraft, the State, and the five billion "consulting agencies" who support them are all fanatics about IBM. Practically no creative thinking, what-so-ever. And from the little I've seen of medical research, the same thinking is pervasive there as well. I mean, who the heck comes up with the idea of using DB2 on a 32 bit Windows NT machine with CORBA access to store voxel slices that are needed in real time?!? Hmm...
We know we're one of the most taxed populations in the union.
Actually, Dane County is one of the most taxed. The rest of the state isn't too bad.
We know our state government is corrupt and unethical.
Eh? Tommy Thompson did a damn good job of keeping things in order. The problem is that there has been no true sucessor step up, so the proceding governors have kept blundering along.
You wish. It's a state that's IBM dominated. Most of the big companies still run the old mainframes and will happily pay for and install whatever nonsense IBM throws their way. CICS Java bridge, Websphere, WSAD, etc? Install it all! We need it!
Not much creative thinking when it comes to computers. At least in Dane county, anyway. *sigh*
it shouldn't be surprising the population is ignorant about the nature of the Internet.
Nonsense. The rest of the state is quite well aware of the Internet. Dane county, OTOH, tends to have its head up its collective rear. Unfortunately, that's what happens when you have a very liberal University in the middle of an otherwise conservative state. The two kind of mix into this weird "we'll meet you halfway" type of arrangement.
Don't get me wrong. Wisconsin is my home state and I love it. But Dane county has serious issues.
Does anybody on this site actually know anything about space science?!
Yes. If your question is, does everyone here work with/at NASA and know all the facts, then no.
Does anybody have any idea what sort of science payload the Voyagers are carrying?
10 instruments supporting imaging, radio, magnetic, and spectral analysis. Some of the instruments have been deactivated to save power. Not great, but still the only thing we have that's 13 light hours out.
How long should we support these missions which have such diminished value? That money can do a lot of good in the space science community. I know the mission I'm working on (also a deep space bird) could use that money for some extra QA and the like.
If you can give me a probe that will overtake Voyager in 10 years, carry a more sophisticated science package, and be at least as durable and cost effective, then I say kill the Voyager program. If you are just hoping to get a bit more funding for a program that won't do anything near the same thing, then I say leave Voyager in operation.
It lets him claim to be interested in spaceflight while he kills off Voyager, the Shuttle, and Hubble. Bastard.
More nonsense. Did Bush call up O'Keefe and tell him to scrub the shuttle mission for Hubble? Nope. That was O'Keefe's call. Did the president call up O'Keefe and tell him to stop flying the shuttle? Nope, that was O'Keefe's call. The president actually asked what he could do to get manned flight back on track.
Now Voyager is facing cancellation from a desk jockey inside NASA and you think the president had something to do with this, how? The program is facing cancellation because some beaurocrats are worried about losing their jobs. The shuttle incident made things look very bad for NASA, and the inquery board's findings of "too much management" made them look worse. Managers inside NASA are trying to look like the "fiscally responsble" ones so that it's not their head on the chopping block.
Stop trying to make everything into a Democrat vs. Republican argument. It has no bearing on reality and only makes people here look stupid.
The public gets emotionally attached to something like Hubble, or Voyager... and that can prevent unbiased comparison to the alternatives.
I'm afraid that I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I don't think that emotional attachment is my issue. When I read the story, I weighed carefully the results of the data that Voyager is collecting against the cost of operating the probe. The results that I got back is that Voyager is a tremendously cost effective program for the science it is achieving. As a result, I think it should be preserved.
It's a similar case with Hubble. The telescope works, is in heavy use by the scientific community, NASA charges for its use (so they're not losing money on it), and I see little evidence that the scheduled repair mission would prove any more dangerous for the crew than when it was originally slated. Put two and two together and you come up with one inescapable conclusion: The repair mission was scrubbed as a publicity stunt. i.e. NASA feels that the public is worried about the saftey of the shuttles, so instead of trying to reverse that perception, they are bolstering it. Dumb thing to do? Yup. Fear can paralyze people that way.
Sadly, the current administration policy is to strip the entire space program of money to pay for the absurd Moon-Mars Initiative. Fortunately, the current administration has only 3 years, 10 months, and 10 days remaining. If we're lucky NASA will survive that period with no significant losses beyond Hubble (which is a doozy of a loss).
You people make no sense. The last president to do ANYTHING about improving the space program was Reagan. He spent money trying to undo the boneheaded space choices made by every president and congress after Kennedy. Once Reagan was gone, the status quo was again reasserted. I don't see ANY evidence that ANY valid choice in president would improve the space program.
If you want science done at NASA, it needs to be a re-election issue for congress critters. The president has some say, but at the end of the day it's congress who holds the keys to the purse. Making them see the light would be far more effective than complaining about the effectivness of the president's attempts to encourage the space program.
Folks, I need to make this very, very clear: Research science is no longer a priority at NASA. It's all going to the manned program.
What manned program? From where I'm sitting, I'm seeing NASA do less and less by the day. Even their programs to build new manned craft are still at the paper stage. So my thinking is that this is NASA's beaurocrats trying to save their own hides by appearing to be "fiscally responsible". After all, 4.2 mil is pocket change.
The 1st being the result of a republican-controlled congress.
Nonsense. Both Republicans and Democrats have been responsible for the various issues that NASA faces. In fact, the reason why we have the ISS instead of Space Station Freedom is because Clinton (and his Democrat controlled congress of the time) cut funding.
The issue is that congress critters are looking out for number 1, and that means shunting money wherever it will get them re-elected. Giving money to NASA doesn't get a representative re-elected unless NASA outsources to a large corporation in their constituancy. If we want space travel, we need an independent Space Agency, and we need the general public to make space travel a re-election issue.
The administration has been anti-science since the beginning and shows no signs of letting up.
That's why Bush was pushing for a Mars mission, right?
No, the problem is that he got very little enthusiasm out of the public when he presented the concept. As a result, he assembled a "team" to take care of it and went on to more pressing matters. If you want someone to blame, talk to:
1. Congress, who not only fails to fund NASA, but regularly cuts their bugdet while forcing them to outsource to ever-more-expensive contractors.
2. NASA's internal beauracracy that shifts managers around and kills programs without actually improving anything.
I don't know for certain, but I'm guessing that a large portion of the costs may involve the maintenance and renting of the necessary transciever equipment. There may even be costs associated with renting the Deep Space Network for relaying Voyager transmissions when the Earth is on the far side of the Sun.
I think there are very few intelligent people who would argue with collecting data from Voyager 1 and 2 as long as they are still in operation. After all, these craft have (boldly?) gone where no manmade object has ever gone before. Out into deep space. Considering that it took 30 years for the darn things to get out there, do we really want to blow this opportunity over a mesely few million bucks? I mean, 30 years is some people's entire professional career!
That being said, I think this is an area where scientists tend to underestimate the value of manned space travel. You'll notice that as long as manned space travel exists, it generates excitement in the general population. And as it advances, young people dream of one day visiting the stars themselves. Remove manned space travel, and the funding to ALL space ventures will be cut. Joe Smith really has no idea of the significance of the Voyager program. To him it's just a piece of junk that the Klingons will blast out of space in a few centuries. But give him dreams of visiting the moon, Mars, or other interesting places, and he'll happily support funding for all forms of space travel.
Some developers want to spin the suite out as a community project that the foundation has no responsibility for, and others want to create a Firefox Foundation to deal with the success of the standalone browser.
Or maybe... they could just leave it where it is? Is the Mozilla Foundation really all THAT bad? While I'm sure that everyone has reasons for their position, this smacks of a variation of "Not Invented Here Syndrome".
\No, "usr" stands for "user". In fact, the three letters came around because K&R couldn't stand to type "user", "source", "binaries", "shell", "list", "copy", "move", or a billion other little things. I submit to you, sir, that someone has royally yanked your chain.
What information? If she's a liar, how can you trust anything she writes?
Indeed. One of the things that originally made me suspect her story was her claims about all the people in the outlying areas that had died by the thousands when they failed to heed the warnings to move. That directly contradicts scientific information on Chernobyl which states that the number of deaths was actually small, but that there were a lot of cases of treatable Thyroid Cancer.
Unfortunately, I thought that she was merely uninformed and had bought into a lot of local tales. (Which was surprising for a "daughter of a nuclear scientist".) Guess I should have been more skeptical.
You pay for cable to get a set of channels. You can pay a premium for channels that guarantee not to interrupt the programming with commercials (e.g. HBO, Cinemax, etc.)
Similarly, people are paying a premium for TIVO services above and beyond regular TV service. One of the features they are paying for is to remove commercials from their programs. To forcefully add commercials back in is akin to HBO adding commercial breaks to their movies.
Big difference here. You paid for your magazine expecting ads. It's part of the package. Now if your magazine offered you a more expensive subscription that would give you a special edition without ads, how would you feel if they suddenly decided to place "a few" ads in your magazine?
You're missing the point. People already bought it for its ability to remove commercials. Now TIVO will change that, and a lot of TIVO customers will have no way of recovering the cost of that purchase.
The problem is that the TIVO is NOT free. You paid for that device, and you paid for that service. Getting ads you don't want is a betrayal of the customer.
Now if they wanted to provide a "free" version of the TIVO subscription that was advertiser supported, then I could see this working.
<deer-hunter>Love 'dem Packers. Gosh, I'd do anything for da' Packers. Remember Vince Lambardi in the glory days? Well I'm a deer hunter, how do you do, I got this dear hunting, rapping tale for you...</deer-hunter>
where taxes are high,
Only in Dane county.
property expensive,
Only in Dane county. (Although some of the outlying areas are starting to go up in price.)
salaries low,
As well as cost of living.
and few jobs to find.
Is it really that bad? Last time I was looking there, it was in the worst period of the economic downturn. Believe it or not, there were positions available, especially in Medial and Government work. The thing that pissed me off the most was that many of the consulting firms jerked you around and then ignored you until they needed to jerk you around again. (Exacta wasn't bad, though.)
The only thing that pissed me (and thousands of other people) off more than consulting companies, was AmFam. Could they even TRY interviewing a few candidates before they change the project requirements? I swear, they were just trying to keep their HR department busy. (Poor guys. They really were trying to staff the place.)
Gotta love it.
I love Wisconsin, but the Madison work culture is probably the most annoying part.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Highway 12 anyone?
What about it? The massive project to rebuild it didn't happen until AFTER Tommy left. Then it took on a life of its own because the state couldn't let go of the Federal funds they get from doing road work.
Personally, I'm far more ticked about how the roads in the Dells get rebuilt EVERY DAMN YEAR. When Tommy was in office, a law was passed to at least make sure that construction couldn't happen during the tourist season.
From some of the earliest work on ARPANet to many succcessful software firms.
ARPANet was cool. So is Raven software. But AmFam, Kraft, the State, and the five billion "consulting agencies" who support them are all fanatics about IBM. Practically no creative thinking, what-so-ever. And from the little I've seen of medical research, the same thinking is pervasive there as well. I mean, who the heck comes up with the idea of using DB2 on a 32 bit Windows NT machine with CORBA access to store voxel slices that are needed in real time?!? Hmm...
We know we're one of the most taxed populations in the union.
Actually, Dane County is one of the most taxed. The rest of the state isn't too bad.
We know our state government is corrupt and unethical.
Eh? Tommy Thompson did a damn good job of keeping things in order. The problem is that there has been no true sucessor step up, so the proceding governors have kept blundering along.
(see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Doyle)
In a state that is almost entirely M$ dominated
You wish. It's a state that's IBM dominated. Most of the big companies still run the old mainframes and will happily pay for and install whatever nonsense IBM throws their way. CICS Java bridge, Websphere, WSAD, etc? Install it all! We need it!
Not much creative thinking when it comes to computers. At least in Dane county, anyway. *sigh*
it shouldn't be surprising the population is ignorant about the nature of the Internet.
Nonsense. The rest of the state is quite well aware of the Internet. Dane county, OTOH, tends to have its head up its collective rear. Unfortunately, that's what happens when you have a very liberal University in the middle of an otherwise conservative state. The two kind of mix into this weird "we'll meet you halfway" type of arrangement.
Don't get me wrong. Wisconsin is my home state and I love it. But Dane county has serious issues.
Does anybody on this site actually know anything about space science?!
Yes. If your question is, does everyone here work with/at NASA and know all the facts, then no.
Does anybody have any idea what sort of science payload the Voyagers are carrying?
10 instruments supporting imaging, radio, magnetic, and spectral analysis. Some of the instruments have been deactivated to save power. Not great, but still the only thing we have that's 13 light hours out.
How long should we support these missions which have such diminished value? That money can do a lot of good in the space science community. I know the mission I'm working on (also a deep space bird) could use that money for some extra QA and the like.
If you can give me a probe that will overtake Voyager in 10 years, carry a more sophisticated science package, and be at least as durable and cost effective, then I say kill the Voyager program. If you are just hoping to get a bit more funding for a program that won't do anything near the same thing, then I say leave Voyager in operation.
It lets him claim to be interested in spaceflight while he kills off Voyager, the Shuttle, and Hubble. Bastard.
More nonsense. Did Bush call up O'Keefe and tell him to scrub the shuttle mission for Hubble? Nope. That was O'Keefe's call. Did the president call up O'Keefe and tell him to stop flying the shuttle? Nope, that was O'Keefe's call. The president actually asked what he could do to get manned flight back on track.
Now Voyager is facing cancellation from a desk jockey inside NASA and you think the president had something to do with this, how? The program is facing cancellation because some beaurocrats are worried about losing their jobs. The shuttle incident made things look very bad for NASA, and the inquery board's findings of "too much management" made them look worse. Managers inside NASA are trying to look like the "fiscally responsble" ones so that it's not their head on the chopping block.
Stop trying to make everything into a Democrat vs. Republican argument. It has no bearing on reality and only makes people here look stupid.
The public gets emotionally attached to something like Hubble, or Voyager... and that can prevent unbiased comparison to the alternatives.
I'm afraid that I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I don't think that emotional attachment is my issue. When I read the story, I weighed carefully the results of the data that Voyager is collecting against the cost of operating the probe. The results that I got back is that Voyager is a tremendously cost effective program for the science it is achieving. As a result, I think it should be preserved.
It's a similar case with Hubble. The telescope works, is in heavy use by the scientific community, NASA charges for its use (so they're not losing money on it), and I see little evidence that the scheduled repair mission would prove any more dangerous for the crew than when it was originally slated. Put two and two together and you come up with one inescapable conclusion: The repair mission was scrubbed as a publicity stunt. i.e. NASA feels that the public is worried about the saftey of the shuttles, so instead of trying to reverse that perception, they are bolstering it. Dumb thing to do? Yup. Fear can paralyze people that way.
Sadly, the current administration policy is to strip the entire space program of money to pay for the absurd Moon-Mars Initiative. Fortunately, the current administration has only 3 years, 10 months, and 10 days remaining. If we're lucky NASA will survive that period with no significant losses beyond Hubble (which is a doozy of a loss).
You people make no sense. The last president to do ANYTHING about improving the space program was Reagan. He spent money trying to undo the boneheaded space choices made by every president and congress after Kennedy. Once Reagan was gone, the status quo was again reasserted. I don't see ANY evidence that ANY valid choice in president would improve the space program.
If you want science done at NASA, it needs to be a re-election issue for congress critters. The president has some say, but at the end of the day it's congress who holds the keys to the purse. Making them see the light would be far more effective than complaining about the effectivness of the president's attempts to encourage the space program.
Folks, I need to make this very, very clear: Research science is no longer a priority at NASA. It's all going to the manned program.
What manned program? From where I'm sitting, I'm seeing NASA do less and less by the day. Even their programs to build new manned craft are still at the paper stage. So my thinking is that this is NASA's beaurocrats trying to save their own hides by appearing to be "fiscally responsible". After all, 4.2 mil is pocket change.
The 1st being the result of a republican-controlled congress.
Nonsense. Both Republicans and Democrats have been responsible for the various issues that NASA faces. In fact, the reason why we have the ISS instead of Space Station Freedom is because Clinton (and his Democrat controlled congress of the time) cut funding.
The issue is that congress critters are looking out for number 1, and that means shunting money wherever it will get them re-elected. Giving money to NASA doesn't get a representative re-elected unless NASA outsources to a large corporation in their constituancy. If we want space travel, we need an independent Space Agency, and we need the general public to make space travel a re-election issue.
The administration has been anti-science since the beginning and shows no signs of letting up.
That's why Bush was pushing for a Mars mission, right?
No, the problem is that he got very little enthusiasm out of the public when he presented the concept. As a result, he assembled a "team" to take care of it and went on to more pressing matters. If you want someone to blame, talk to:
1. Congress, who not only fails to fund NASA, but regularly cuts their bugdet while forcing them to outsource to ever-more-expensive contractors.
2. NASA's internal beauracracy that shifts managers around and kills programs without actually improving anything.
I don't know for certain, but I'm guessing that a large portion of the costs may involve the maintenance and renting of the necessary transciever equipment. There may even be costs associated with renting the Deep Space Network for relaying Voyager transmissions when the Earth is on the far side of the Sun.
I think there are very few intelligent people who would argue with collecting data from Voyager 1 and 2 as long as they are still in operation. After all, these craft have (boldly?) gone where no manmade object has ever gone before. Out into deep space. Considering that it took 30 years for the darn things to get out there, do we really want to blow this opportunity over a mesely few million bucks? I mean, 30 years is some people's entire professional career!
That being said, I think this is an area where scientists tend to underestimate the value of manned space travel. You'll notice that as long as manned space travel exists, it generates excitement in the general population. And as it advances, young people dream of one day visiting the stars themselves. Remove manned space travel, and the funding to ALL space ventures will be cut. Joe Smith really has no idea of the significance of the Voyager program. To him it's just a piece of junk that the Klingons will blast out of space in a few centuries. But give him dreams of visiting the moon, Mars, or other interesting places, and he'll happily support funding for all forms of space travel.
Some developers want to spin the suite out as a community project that the foundation has no responsibility for, and others want to create a Firefox Foundation to deal with the success of the standalone browser.
Or maybe... they could just leave it where it is? Is the Mozilla Foundation really all THAT bad? While I'm sure that everyone has reasons for their position, this smacks of a variation of "Not Invented Here Syndrome".
\No, "usr" stands for "user". In fact, the three letters came around because K&R couldn't stand to type "user", "source", "binaries", "shell", "list", "copy", "move", or a billion other little things. I submit to you, sir, that someone has royally yanked your chain.
What information? If she's a liar, how can you trust anything she writes?
Indeed. One of the things that originally made me suspect her story was her claims about all the people in the outlying areas that had died by the thousands when they failed to heed the warnings to move. That directly contradicts scientific information on Chernobyl which states that the number of deaths was actually small, but that there were a lot of cases of treatable Thyroid Cancer.
Unfortunately, I thought that she was merely uninformed and had bought into a lot of local tales. (Which was surprising for a "daughter of a nuclear scientist".) Guess I should have been more skeptical.
Why would you want to use something that's named "F***ed Up Beyond Repair 2000"?
in the past week or so they placed an ad on a pause screen for a special deal on additional units for existing ReplayTV customers.
So who shot first, Han or Greedo? The ReplayTV unit, you say? Err... nevermind...
Allow me to spell it out for you:
You pay for cable to get a set of channels. You can pay a premium for channels that guarantee not to interrupt the programming with commercials (e.g. HBO, Cinemax, etc.)
Similarly, people are paying a premium for TIVO services above and beyond regular TV service. One of the features they are paying for is to remove commercials from their programs. To forcefully add commercials back in is akin to HBO adding commercial breaks to their movies.
Comprenda?
How would you feel about commercials interrupting an HBO movie?
I rest my case.
Big difference here. You paid for your magazine expecting ads. It's part of the package. Now if your magazine offered you a more expensive subscription that would give you a special edition without ads, how would you feel if they suddenly decided to place "a few" ads in your magazine?
I know I'd be hopping mad.
You're missing the point. People already bought it for its ability to remove commercials. Now TIVO will change that, and a lot of TIVO customers will have no way of recovering the cost of that purchase.
The problem is that the TIVO is NOT free. You paid for that device, and you paid for that service. Getting ads you don't want is a betrayal of the customer.
Now if they wanted to provide a "free" version of the TIVO subscription that was advertiser supported, then I could see this working.
Q: Do you people go around trying to piss me off?
The author made a dumb comment and was refuted for it. Which has absolutely NOTHING to do with the relative benefits of Word vs. 'wc'.
Wisconsin,
:-)
<deer-hunter>Love 'dem Packers. Gosh, I'd do anything for da' Packers. Remember Vince Lambardi in the glory days? Well I'm a deer hunter, how do you do, I got this dear hunting, rapping tale for you...</deer-hunter>
where taxes are high,
Only in Dane county.
property expensive,
Only in Dane county. (Although some of the outlying areas are starting to go up in price.)
salaries low,
As well as cost of living.
and few jobs to find.
Is it really that bad? Last time I was looking there, it was in the worst period of the economic downturn. Believe it or not, there were positions available, especially in Medial and Government work. The thing that pissed me off the most was that many of the consulting firms jerked you around and then ignored you until they needed to jerk you around again. (Exacta wasn't bad, though.)
The only thing that pissed me (and thousands of other people) off more than consulting companies, was AmFam. Could they even TRY interviewing a few candidates before they change the project requirements? I swear, they were just trying to keep their HR department busy. (Poor guys. They really were trying to staff the place.)
Gotta love it.
I love Wisconsin, but the Madison work culture is probably the most annoying part.
You need to ask yourself one question:
Relative to what?
*AKAImBatman hits wviperw over the head with a copy of Einstein's "Special Theory of Relativity"
What about Spell Checking?
:-)
(Right click, "Spelling", "Check Spelling as you Type")
It's the only thing that keeps the spelling nazi's away from me.