1. User interface... and this may have changed for the better since I last played with the Gimp. It seems like every option or operation that is contextual to the picture is contained with an application level menu while every option that is global in scope like saving a file, etc... is accessed by a right-click context menu. It was confusing as hell the first several times I tried to save an image from the file menu without realizing that you had to right-click on an image to save it. While there is some quality code there, the developers could stand to spend some time on usability and flow. Even if they want to keep commands where they have them for personality or continuity's sake... they could replicate them where they 'belong'.
2. Paint controls. In many cases, the controls just don't have the fine level of manipulation that Photoshop allows. Paintbrush fall-off is a good example. Brush construction is another. Again, this may have changed in the last few months, but...
Limbaugh said he reviewed four different video games and found "no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures."
Four games. Four fucking games. Out of a entire fucking INDUSTRY, this asshole reviews four games. This is like reveiwing 'Ishtar', 'Waterworld', 'Howard the Duck', and 'Glitter' and then saying that all American movies suck.
I can list four games off the top of my *head* that have more speech and artistic values than all four of those movies I just mentioned put together.
'Black and White' - Morality play, pure and simple. What's the difference between right and wrong?
'Max Payne' - Dark Psychological Thriller with some gritty 3PS thrown in for taste.
'Starcraft' - Betrayal, Greed, and Cosmic justice carried out against a RTS background.
'Diablo II' - Relgion versus damnation. Hell, most RPG's have storylines. Some are better some are worse. What if the plotline of a RPG was that I was a judge trying to stamp out virtual kiddie porn?
If I switched totally over to Linux for workstation purposes today (I won't use anything else for server purposes), MPlayer'd be the first thing I'd install. Problem is that I understand that while it does subtitles better than most win32 DVD players, it doesn't do menus at all. (*Please* correct me if I'm wrong.)
Quicktime I can mostly live without since most of the video I watch is either DVD-based, MPEG or MPEG4/DivX (Anime fansubs are yummy!)
Who knows. With new revisions of Wine, Photoshop might even become more than just-barely usable. Oh, how I would love to trash my Winnt install....
I have a friend who refuses to go to Linux full time until he can get Photoshop
There are two things keeping me from Linux:
1. Crappy multimedia support in the form of DVD software, mpeg4/divx and other video codecs, sound drivers, etc.
and
2. The abscence of a no-problems Photoshop instance.
Games don't even count in my book, *but* I make all my $$$ with a copy of Photoshop open. Sorry, the Gimp is nice and all... played with it extensively in fact... but it just doesn't cut it upside Photoshop. Maybe it will in the near future. Wine is okay, but I've seen Photoshop run under Wine and it ain't pretty.
Since #1 is being worked on and in most cases workarounds like apps that will use the win32 codecs for various MPEG4 formats, a working Linux version of Photoshop would completely end my dependance on Microsoft.
This OS -- and its Darwin offspring -- extensively use what are called "daemons" (which is how Pagans write "demon" -- they are notoriously poor spellers: magick, vampyre, etc.) which is a program that hides in the background, doing things without the user's notice. If you are using a new Macintosh running OS X then you probably have these "daemons" on your computer, hardly something a good Christian would want! This clearly illustrates that not only is Macintosh based on Darwinism, but Darwinism is based on Satanism.
Lordy, Lordy, this is so thick that you need a shovel to get rid of that high holy smell.
When looking at *any* kind of text that may or may not be slanted towards or away from any given viewpoint, please keep a look out for the world 'Clearly'. It usually indicates that the author is expecting the reader to make a logic jump that might otherwise not be warranted.
Examples:
Some people who live in capitalist societies are homeless and hungry, therefore we can CLEARLY determine that capitalism is responsible for homelessness and hunger.
Some people who live in socialist societies are oppressed and have no rights. Therefore we can CLEARLY determine that socialism is equivalent to a dearth of human rights.
Religous types are especially bad about this. I am a Christian... a very liberal Christian... but for a long time I lost my faith because of a poorly produced anti-evolution video I was forced to watch in high school (in Texas). Typical contents of the video can be summarized as follows.
Because of [poorly documented and inadequately evidence] we can CLEARLY see that this discovery is a sham designed to discredit the world of our Lord...
'Clearly' gives away propoganda 9 out of 10 times.
When doing so make sure you put your address in your signature (and make sure its YOUR rep)! That ensures them that you are one of their constituents, not just a random person somewhere in america.
While many Reps and Senators feel that they can freely ignore the desires of citezens who are *not* their consituents, just as many recognize that they are responsible to the population of the United States as a whole, especially those who introduce bills that affect the entire nation or make decisions about bills in comittee.
Just because a rep is not in your district doesn't mean you can't mail or fax him!
I'm fairly sure I know exactly how GT's 'No Collaboration' rule came into effect. As with any college CS body, a few students took advantage of their ability to code and modify code to cheat or alternate doing homework assignments.
Rather than deal with the situation efficiently and responsibly, and probably also because of the stygian pro-intellectual property mantras that are chanted in most College CS departments, Georgia Tech introduced yet another ill-conceived Zero-Tolerance policy in order to take choice and discretion out of the hands of individuals and place it in the hands of administrators... who usually don't care or don't have time to investigate individual cases like individual teachers or professors would.
Mediocrity and inefficiency in administration is the direct result of Zero Tolerance policies in almost all circumstances. Any ZT policy will result in innocent people being punished for an imaginary wrong-doing. This is the case with schools who have zero-tolerance drug and weapons policies who expel students for having kitchen utensils or aspirin on their persons. This is the case with schools who expel students for even the most innocent public displays of affection.
Still, the lure of not having to have any personal responsibility for the wrong-doings of their students is too great a reward for the administrators of public and private schools to pass up. After all, how can the life of one student compare to the well-being of all the rest?
As long as people are able to have this mentality and not feel reprocussions from it, this kind of mass anti-social behavior will continue.
Not likely. A staggering number of AOL'ers are still using versions 3.0 and 4.0 of the AOL client, so I can only assume that similar percentages of compuserve users are doing the same thing. I don't think we can count on all of Compuserve, let alone 34 million AOL accounts, to suddenly be running on Gecko code any time in the near future.
Forcing an update download on customers is possible, however. Certain online games are now in the practice of forcing a patch on users on a weekly basis. This same model could work for the big ISP's to keep their customers updated with the latest technology.
It could also play into the hands of pushers of spyware and adware. What better way for LEO's to spy on someone suspected of a crime than to 'push' an update to his AOL or Compuserve account?
repairing Earth's atmosphere to pre-Industrial-Age levels!
While I beleive that there is a definite global warming problem and that most people don't understand what that really means... (More severe, chaotic weater, just not hotter weather)
I think that any radical change to the atmosphere should be taken with *EXTREME* caution so as to not make a bad situation worse.
Anyone read Niven's 'Fallen Angels'?
Before the turn of the century, it was not Global Warming that scientists were worried about, but Global Cooling. Several harsh and long winters, some due to violent volcano explosions, had decimated crops and reduced the world's food supply.
Let us not forget that an ice-age will trap valuable freshwater that could otherwise be raining down on crops in the form of glaciers.
Stopping the increase in and even reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses may be a very good thing, especially if it helps reduce the amount of incredibly severe weather caused by global warming.
Reducing it to a set level just because we 'ought to' is not a bright idea.
Sure the Yucatan blast wiped out the dinosaurs, but if we hadn't eliminated, adaptable Mammals and Birds probably wouldn't have been nearly so sucessful in the next 90 million years. Hell, birds may well be descendants of dinos who were adaptable enough to survive the fallout from First Impact.
That said, it's also true that Humans have to be pretty damn adaptable to manipulate celstial mechanics enough in order to avoid Second Impact.
As the difficult-to-remember renaming of the SSSCA worms its wicked way through congress, I'm seeing a *lot* more press about it. With the exception of the SF paper, most of the articles I've seen about it have focused on the opposition to the bill rather than the 'new age of Broadband' Disney would like us to think they're trying to usher in.
In fact, so many of those articles are getting so negatively slanted that it's becoming sensationalistic. Just like the lurid love affair the press had with O.J.'s (100% Not Guilty!) dirty deeds, the papers, newsrooms, and online news sites have picked up on something that's a 'winner' in terms of public outrage, tabloid sensationalism, and outright bribery.
Can we hope for Gary Condit-esque levels of mudslinging? Dare we aspire to John Wayne Bobbit levels of exposure and discomfort?
Fritz Hollings is getting his name dragged through the mud right now, and the press couldn't be happier than to have a new kicking dog in him and in the form of the CDBTPA or whatever the hell it's called.
For once, sensationalism works for geeks....
Tobor is Robot spelled backwards...
on
Hospital Robots
·
· Score: 2
I think the name Tobor was first used for a robot in the 50's-60's tv show 'Captain Video'. Captain video defeated Tobor and his master by giving Tobor contradictory commands.
While a highly realistic game is certainly great to look at, sometimes a company will concentrate so much on the appearance that gameplay will be sacraficed.
Or gameplay will be ignored in favor of a graphics engine. Take a look at EQ, arguably one of the biggest MMORPG's. Very popular, but now Verant is having problems because they had three features planned to 'update' the game. The first was a redesigned auction system. The second was a new, XML-based user interface. The third was an updated graphics engine.
The game was perfectly playable with the old graphics engine, but Verant decided to spend their time on that rather than the two in-game features that would make play more to users liking. Play sacrificed for eye-candy... *sigh*
What're these guys going to do, somehow magically eliminate all the 'clean' copies of codecs and encoding software in the wild?
While the occasional video post on Usenet is encoded with DivX 4 or 5, the majority of them are still encoded with the good-ol Microsoft-ripped DivX 3.11a!
Got LAME Source? You've got watermarkless MP3 for as long as you want. And, let's face it, DVD-audio maybe great for I-can-hear-the-difference-between-catgut-and-sheep gut-audiophiles, but it will be posted online in MP3 format... Just like the old dog tracks on the Fast and the Furious soundtrack were minutes after the disc was released.
Note some of the downright anti-social requirements, such as a level 60 avatar, and the 'right' class. Most damning of the lot is this, which is a direct quote from the page:
- We raid generally 6 days a week. Attendance to at LEAST 5 days is required. If you are busy with work or school or any other outside responsibility and do not feel you can make it 5 times a week, this is not the right guild for you. Raid times vary on the weekends, but generally our weekday schedule is from 4pm PST until 10pm PST.
There are people with too much time on their hands out there. There are also people like this, who have abandoned real life in favor of the alternative.
With a few exceptions, the public utility that most americans think least about... Our public road and highway infrastructure, is completely publicly owned. There's just no way to effectively manage an entire system of roads cost-effectively at a profit.
There exist a few turnpikes, toll-roads, and troll bridges out there... (*rimshot*) but for the most part Americans are used to paying for the right to use the system out of tax dollars.
Power is going the same way, as can be evidenced by the collapse of the California power grid. How long will the state pay for the power companies to stay solvent until the state becomes the primary power-provider? Phone will go too, IMHO.
Internet is going to be the next public utility, probably even before the phone system. Already communities all over the country are building 'municipal' internet services. Look for these to become tax-supported in the near future.
"...we recognize that [ORBZ.ORG] has done us a service."
It's about fucking time that someone pulled their heads out of their asses and realized that it wasn't necessary to start filing lawsuits and criminal charges to punish *smart* tech behavior!
Unfortuneately, it may already be too late for ORBZ. Here's hoping that ORBZ comes back up in light of this statement.
Hehe... that's the way it works. You *fight* for that first price decrease, knowing you can make it up in volume. Then you have more experience and capital necessary to make another price decrease... and another... and another.
This is the pattern that 'Moore's Law' is based on.
Could be why they didn't put up the first satelite into orbit or put the first man into space or have the longest continually manned space station.
When the USSR's manned spaceflight program began, several people died because the rockets they were on were too shakey, pulled too many G's, or some other factors.
If that's not 'rockey and dangerous', then I don't know what is.
Our good friends in the Eastern hemisphere have had a hell of a century from which they're still recovering. Lately, however, I'm hearing quite a bit of good things about Russia's space program. While it may have started out rocky and dangerous due to the influence of the communist party, this is the same space program that gave humanity both the longest-working manned space station in the form of MIR and the Progress supply frieghter rocket, which supplies the ISS right now. Say what you will about these two, but in terms of space programs, the Americans have always striven to become 'doers of deeds' while the Russians have been 'completers of tasks'. Think about which one of those pays off in the long run.
Recently, more and more of Russia's space program seems geared to provide access to space for both commercial and scientific work. Space Tourism in ISS, anyone? I would be willing to bet that if they become even a little more efficient at this, their costs will quickly drop because they will be the less expensive option when compared to the U.S. space program. Perhaps space could be a growth industry for Russia, the same way information technology has been for the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
1. User interface... and this may have changed for the better since I last played with the Gimp. It seems like every option or operation that is contextual to the picture is contained with an application level menu while every option that is global in scope like saving a file, etc... is accessed by a right-click context menu. It was confusing as hell the first several times I tried to save an image from the file menu without realizing that you had to right-click on an image to save it. While there is some quality code there, the developers could stand to spend some time on usability and flow. Even if they want to keep commands where they have them for personality or continuity's sake... they could replicate them where they 'belong'.
2. Paint controls. In many cases, the controls just don't have the fine level of manipulation that Photoshop allows. Paintbrush fall-off is a good example. Brush construction is another. Again, this may have changed in the last few months, but...
Sayeth the article:
Limbaugh said he reviewed four different video games and found "no conveyance of ideas, expression, or anything else that could possibly amount to speech. The court finds that video games have more in common with board games and sports than they do with motion pictures."
Four games. Four fucking games. Out of a entire fucking INDUSTRY, this asshole reviews four games. This is like reveiwing 'Ishtar', 'Waterworld', 'Howard the Duck', and 'Glitter' and then saying that all American movies suck.
I can list four games off the top of my *head* that have more speech and artistic values than all four of those movies I just mentioned put together.
'Black and White' - Morality play, pure and simple. What's the difference between right and wrong?
'Max Payne' - Dark Psychological Thriller with some gritty 3PS thrown in for taste.
'Starcraft' - Betrayal, Greed, and Cosmic justice carried out against a RTS background.
'Diablo II' - Relgion versus damnation. Hell, most RPG's have storylines. Some are better some are worse. What if the plotline of a RPG was that I was a judge trying to stamp out virtual kiddie porn?
Four fucking games. Gimme a break.
If I switched totally over to Linux for workstation purposes today (I won't use anything else for server purposes), MPlayer'd be the first thing I'd install. Problem is that I understand that while it does subtitles better than most win32 DVD players, it doesn't do menus at all. (*Please* correct me if I'm wrong.)
Quicktime I can mostly live without since most of the video I watch is either DVD-based, MPEG or MPEG4/DivX (Anime fansubs are yummy!)
Who knows. With new revisions of Wine, Photoshop might even become more than just-barely usable. Oh, how I would love to trash my Winnt install....
I have a friend who refuses to go to Linux full time until he can get Photoshop
There are two things keeping me from Linux:
1. Crappy multimedia support in the form of DVD software, mpeg4/divx and other video codecs, sound drivers, etc.
and
2. The abscence of a no-problems Photoshop instance.
Games don't even count in my book, *but* I make all my $$$ with a copy of Photoshop open. Sorry, the Gimp is nice and all... played with it extensively in fact... but it just doesn't cut it upside Photoshop. Maybe it will in the near future. Wine is okay, but I've seen Photoshop run under Wine and it ain't pretty.
Since #1 is being worked on and in most cases workarounds like apps that will use the win32 codecs for various MPEG4 formats, a working Linux version of Photoshop would completely end my dependance on Microsoft.
My dependance on evil Adobe is another matter....
This OS -- and its Darwin offspring -- extensively use what are called "daemons" (which is how Pagans write "demon" -- they are notoriously poor spellers: magick, vampyre, etc.) which is a program that hides in the background, doing things without the user's notice. If you are using a new Macintosh running OS X then you probably have these "daemons" on your computer, hardly something a good Christian would want! This clearly illustrates that not only is Macintosh based on Darwinism, but Darwinism is based on Satanism.
Lordy, Lordy, this is so thick that you need a shovel to get rid of that high holy smell.
When looking at *any* kind of text that may or may not be slanted towards or away from any given viewpoint, please keep a look out for the world 'Clearly'. It usually indicates that the author is expecting the reader to make a logic jump that might otherwise not be warranted.
Examples:
Some people who live in capitalist societies are homeless and hungry, therefore we can CLEARLY determine that capitalism is responsible for homelessness and hunger.
Some people who live in socialist societies are oppressed and have no rights. Therefore we can CLEARLY determine that socialism is equivalent to a dearth of human rights.
Religous types are especially bad about this. I am a Christian... a very liberal Christian... but for a long time I lost my faith because of a poorly produced anti-evolution video I was forced to watch in high school (in Texas). Typical contents of the video can be summarized as follows.
Because of [poorly documented and inadequately evidence] we can CLEARLY see that this discovery is a sham designed to discredit the world of our Lord...
'Clearly' gives away propoganda 9 out of 10 times.
When doing so make sure you put your address in your signature (and make sure its YOUR rep)! That ensures them that you are one of their constituents, not just a random person somewhere in america.
While many Reps and Senators feel that they can freely ignore the desires of citezens who are *not* their consituents, just as many recognize that they are responsible to the population of the United States as a whole, especially those who introduce bills that affect the entire nation or make decisions about bills in comittee.
Just because a rep is not in your district doesn't mean you can't mail or fax him!
I'm fairly sure I know exactly how GT's 'No Collaboration' rule came into effect. As with any college CS body, a few students took advantage of their ability to code and modify code to cheat or alternate doing homework assignments.
Rather than deal with the situation efficiently and responsibly, and probably also because of the stygian pro-intellectual property mantras that are chanted in most College CS departments, Georgia Tech introduced yet another ill-conceived Zero-Tolerance policy in order to take choice and discretion out of the hands of individuals and place it in the hands of administrators... who usually don't care or don't have time to investigate individual cases like individual teachers or professors would.
Mediocrity and inefficiency in administration is the direct result of Zero Tolerance policies in almost all circumstances. Any ZT policy will result in innocent people being punished for an imaginary wrong-doing. This is the case with schools who have zero-tolerance drug and weapons policies who expel students for having kitchen utensils or aspirin on their persons. This is the case with schools who expel students for even the most innocent public displays of affection.
Still, the lure of not having to have any personal responsibility for the wrong-doings of their students is too great a reward for the administrators of public and private schools to pass up. After all, how can the life of one student compare to the well-being of all the rest?
As long as people are able to have this mentality and not feel reprocussions from it, this kind of mass anti-social behavior will continue.
Not likely. A staggering number of AOL'ers are still using versions 3.0 and 4.0 of the AOL client, so I can only assume that similar percentages of compuserve users are doing the same thing. I don't think we can count on all of Compuserve, let alone 34 million AOL accounts, to suddenly be running on Gecko code any time in the near future.
Forcing an update download on customers is possible, however. Certain online games are now in the practice of forcing a patch on users on a weekly basis. This same model could work for the big ISP's to keep their customers updated with the latest technology.
It could also play into the hands of pushers of spyware and adware. What better way for LEO's to spy on someone suspected of a crime than to 'push' an update to his AOL or Compuserve account?
repairing Earth's atmosphere to pre-Industrial-Age levels!
While I beleive that there is a definite global warming problem and that most people don't understand what that really means... (More severe, chaotic weater, just not hotter weather)
I think that any radical change to the atmosphere should be taken with *EXTREME* caution so as to not make a bad situation worse.
Anyone read Niven's 'Fallen Angels'?
Before the turn of the century, it was not Global Warming that scientists were worried about, but Global Cooling. Several harsh and long winters, some due to violent volcano explosions, had decimated crops and reduced the world's food supply.
Let us not forget that an ice-age will trap valuable freshwater that could otherwise be raining down on crops in the form of glaciers.
Stopping the increase in and even reducing the amount of greenhouse gasses may be a very good thing, especially if it helps reduce the amount of incredibly severe weather caused by global warming.
Reducing it to a set level just because we 'ought to' is not a bright idea.
Sure the Yucatan blast wiped out the dinosaurs, but if we hadn't eliminated, adaptable Mammals and Birds probably wouldn't have been nearly so sucessful in the next 90 million years. Hell, birds may well be descendants of dinos who were adaptable enough to survive the fallout from First Impact.
That said, it's also true that Humans have to be pretty damn adaptable to manipulate celstial mechanics enough in order to avoid Second Impact.
I watched the commercial and took it at face value. For the first time in five years, I felt the urge to buy a pre-assembled computer.
The cow is now infinitely cooler in my book than the 'Dude' guy from dell.
As the difficult-to-remember renaming of the SSSCA worms its wicked way through congress, I'm seeing a *lot* more press about it. With the exception of the SF paper, most of the articles I've seen about it have focused on the opposition to the bill rather than the 'new age of Broadband' Disney would like us to think they're trying to usher in.
In fact, so many of those articles are getting so negatively slanted that it's becoming sensationalistic. Just like the lurid love affair the press had with O.J.'s (100% Not Guilty!) dirty deeds, the papers, newsrooms, and online news sites have picked up on something that's a 'winner' in terms of public outrage, tabloid sensationalism, and outright bribery.
Can we hope for Gary Condit-esque levels of mudslinging? Dare we aspire to John Wayne Bobbit levels of exposure and discomfort?
Fritz Hollings is getting his name dragged through the mud right now, and the press couldn't be happier than to have a new kicking dog in him and in the form of the CDBTPA or whatever the hell it's called.
For once, sensationalism works for geeks....
I think the name Tobor was first used for a robot in the 50's-60's tv show 'Captain Video'. Captain video defeated Tobor and his master by giving Tobor contradictory commands.
While a highly realistic game is certainly great to look at, sometimes a company will concentrate so much on the appearance that gameplay will be sacraficed.
Or gameplay will be ignored in favor of a graphics engine. Take a look at EQ, arguably one of the biggest MMORPG's. Very popular, but now Verant is having problems because they had three features planned to 'update' the game. The first was a redesigned auction system. The second was a new, XML-based user interface. The third was an updated graphics engine.
The game was perfectly playable with the old graphics engine, but Verant decided to spend their time on that rather than the two in-game features that would make play more to users liking. Play sacrificed for eye-candy... *sigh*
Karmawhoresystem2.1:
Judes Blast Filtering System
Mod parent up.
p gut-audiophiles, but it will be posted online in MP3 format... Just like the old dog tracks on the Fast and the Furious soundtrack were minutes after the disc was released.
What're these guys going to do, somehow magically eliminate all the 'clean' copies of codecs and encoding software in the wild?
While the occasional video post on Usenet is encoded with DivX 4 or 5, the majority of them are still encoded with the good-ol Microsoft-ripped DivX 3.11a!
Got LAME Source? You've got watermarkless MP3 for as long as you want. And, let's face it, DVD-audio maybe great for I-can-hear-the-difference-between-catgut-and-shee
Strangely, every time I get drunk enough to regret it the next morning, I wake up and find that I've done all the dishes.
I'm just a sick fuck, I guess.
~Every time you are near?
~Just like me, they long to be
~Close to you
~Why do stars fall down from the sky
~Every time you walk by?
Everybody sing along! Kareoke is wonderful, ever since I got my Taito PerfectPitch 9000!
~Just like me, they long to be
~Close to you.
I usually stop playing such a game when vision of said game appear in my sleep... that's just too freaky for me.
Unfortuneately, many people don't. Check out this application for one of the 'Uber' EQ guilds.
http://www.fohguild.org/html/recruit.php
Note some of the downright anti-social requirements, such as a level 60 avatar, and the 'right' class. Most damning of the lot is this, which is a direct quote from the page:
- We raid generally 6 days a week. Attendance to at LEAST 5 days is required. If you are busy with work or school or any other outside responsibility and do not feel you can make it 5 times a week, this is not the right guild for you. Raid times vary on the weekends, but generally our weekday schedule is from 4pm PST until 10pm PST.
There are people with too much time on their hands out there. There are also people like this, who have abandoned real life in favor of the alternative.
Mmmmm.... MacOS for Pentium4... I would *so* buy a copy. Too bad this is an april fool's joke.
With a few exceptions, the public utility that most americans think least about... Our public road and highway infrastructure, is completely publicly owned. There's just no way to effectively manage an entire system of roads cost-effectively at a profit.
There exist a few turnpikes, toll-roads, and troll bridges out there... (*rimshot*) but for the most part Americans are used to paying for the right to use the system out of tax dollars.
Power is going the same way, as can be evidenced by the collapse of the California power grid. How long will the state pay for the power companies to stay solvent until the state becomes the primary power-provider? Phone will go too, IMHO.
Internet is going to be the next public utility, probably even before the phone system. Already communities all over the country are building 'municipal' internet services. Look for these to become tax-supported in the near future.
"...we recognize that [ORBZ.ORG] has done us a service."
It's about fucking time that someone pulled their heads out of their asses and realized that it wasn't necessary to start filing lawsuits and criminal charges to punish *smart* tech behavior!
Unfortuneately, it may already be too late for ORBZ. Here's hoping that ORBZ comes back up in light of this statement.
Hehe... that's the way it works. You *fight* for that first price decrease, knowing you can make it up in volume. Then you have more experience and capital necessary to make another price decrease... and another... and another.
This is the pattern that 'Moore's Law' is based on.
Could be why they didn't put up the first satelite into orbit or put the first man into space or have the longest continually manned space station.
When the USSR's manned spaceflight program began, several people died because the rockets they were on were too shakey, pulled too many G's, or some other factors.
If that's not 'rockey and dangerous', then I don't know what is.
Our good friends in the Eastern hemisphere have had a hell of a century from which they're still recovering. Lately, however, I'm hearing quite a bit of good things about Russia's space program. While it may have started out rocky and dangerous due to the influence of the communist party, this is the same space program that gave humanity both the longest-working manned space station in the form of MIR and the Progress supply frieghter rocket, which supplies the ISS right now. Say what you will about these two, but in terms of space programs, the Americans have always striven to become 'doers of deeds' while the Russians have been 'completers of tasks'. Think about which one of those pays off in the long run.
Recently, more and more of Russia's space program seems geared to provide access to space for both commercial and scientific work. Space Tourism in ISS, anyone? I would be willing to bet that if they become even a little more efficient at this, their costs will quickly drop because they will be the less expensive option when compared to the U.S. space program. Perhaps space could be a growth industry for Russia, the same way information technology has been for the United States.
Anyone agree, disagree with me?