That's a good question. The inside of the rear cabin is vented shortly after lift-off, so it's not as if they expected to find none, they just found more than they expected. This indicates a leak or an instrumentation issue (one of the leak detection bottles failed to function at all), but keep in mind the SSME's have a pretty decent history of leaking from all sorts of places to the point of early engine shutdown (STS-93).
It sounds to me like NASA is trying to kill off the shuttle... even the most esoteric engineering problems make headlines these days.
Aside from conspiracy theories, the difference here is that stuff made in China is half the price of the other thing on the shelf, and Joe Walmart doesn't give a damn about his buddy's job if he can save that kind of money on his new Popeil Chicken Roaster. This isn't about a 10% savings for inferior goods.
At the end of the day, making the same old computer here in the US shouldn't be interesting to us. There's not much money in it, even if your company does it exceptionally well. Literally anyone can do it, and doing it outside of the US means little or no environmental compliance.
Now, as the US loses its ability to come up with the new stuff that can be made first here during the most profitable portion of a product's life, that's scary. Eventually, this means that the products will be invented in China, and the only stuff we'll be making is the low profit old-news products of yester-year because anyone can make it. If that much.
The very fact that music isn't free (or close to it) should suggest that there is something flawed with the thought that there is an infinite supply of it.
Songs aren't durable, eventually even the most catchy tune becomes uninteresting to its purchaser with time. As long as the purchaser is alive they seem to demand more songs on a varying expiration interval.
The flip side of this is that there aren't an infinite number of songs, and a given consumer is only interested in a subset of the finite songs available. If they want more music, they have to choose from this finite set. Further, given cultural tastes, the culture expires songs from the set of all songs on a regular basis.
So it is completely irrelevant that you can copy a song infinitely, there are only a finite number of unique songs available that anyone is interested in.
You want a copy of my popular song? I'm going to charge as much as I possibly can for it. As the exclusivity of a product increases, the cost of producing it has less and less impact with its cost. Because we've artificially said that the owner of the copyright has sole exclusive rights to produce it, songs are highly exclusive to their owner.
Notice that if people didn't prefer one song over another, this "monopoly" over the ownership of a song would not matter, and the cost to produce would enter into pricing.
Water isn't worth much right now, but if I had the only water in the country -- even if it were an infinite amount of it -- I'd be a billionaire.
When representing the outside world, it seems clear to me that you'd need a way to represent something being logically consistent as missing, unknown, or unknowable. My height is 6 foot, my gender is male, my last gynecological visit is NULL.
The argument is, perhaps that field should be normalized into a separate table of visit dates which does not contain an entry for me. That is the true NULL, that it isn't even present in the database.
I think it's more design philosophy than an issue of right/wrong. There are many complex problems that NULL solves quite handily by being able to represent that a relationship is impossible.
There is a story/legend that a guy goes into the DMV to renew the registration for his car, and when the guy gets the bill, it's missing a discount for $20 as he is a veteran. When he asks them to correct the bill, the person behind the counter says, "It's only $20, don't worry about it." To which the veteran asks the DMV worker, "Okay, how about you give me $20 from your wallet?" The DMW worker objects and reacts in shock. The veteran says, "So when it's my money it's nothing, but your $20 is a whole different matter."
If you've ever tried to do business with anyone from outside of the US, and maybe Europe, I think you'll find that it is a major disparity between how well businesses run between the two regions. Business Science may be the last science that the US has an advantage on, because it sure isn't the rest of them.
Other countries can compete for now on the basis of lower labor costs, and lower cost of environmental and other compliance. You can afford alot of waste and mismanagement in that stage, but when you're industrialized and you have an OSHA, and an EPA, and your labor unions are knocking at the door, suddenly you can't throw out a day's worth of bad production because that amounts to your profit. Other countries have gone from economic powerhouses that were going to own the US, to total stagnation in the span of months.
I'm not advocating anyone becoming a specialist in the science of business as an answer to this... the true answer is that your profession has to be competitive. And being a Scientist in the US is not competitive.
The laws of business aren't muddied with subjectiveness. Whether or not you will be better off giving something away for free will ultimately be determined by if you increased your well-being or lost the time and money (aka opportunity) invested. There is nothing subjective about the end-game.
That's not to say that it is always stupid to give something away. People have been giving things away in exchange for an opportunity since the beginning of economic time.
So, still within the framework of the laws of business, the question is what opportunity is created for those involved in free software. If the opportunity created is greater than that foregone, there will be free software. Whether or not it is competitive with commercially created software is an entirely different matter.
Because of the marginal and highly eventual return on the investment of free software it is a hobby or a side bet for those involved (whether the bet is being made by the individual not being paid, or a company who pays programmers but does not charge).
Now, if someone can demonstrate to all of us rational players know you can make a fortune giving away software, the tide may turn as we weigh the opportunity of going into commercial software versus free software, combined with needing to eat.
All still within the confines of the laws of business that you so much hate. Good luck making that fortune.
Definitely truth in all of that, I would add some additional points though, that are solid and real.
Alot of the purpose of certification/degrees/training is to ensure two things: consistent process, and consistent vocabulary. Many people can be self-taught and be very good at things, but use completely different depths to the steps they use for common procedures, and use different nomenclature for everything. This goes to the point of not knowing how to pronounce words common in the industry!
Also, people who have gone through the certification road of misery have done it with a group of people they could compare notes with, see different environments, take good ideas from them, and build a network that extends out to others that might have hiring, consultive, and other value.
Finally, they aren't trivial to get, and if one jumps through the hoops to do it it shows a certain professional commitment and commitment to the craft. Ie, that you aren't going to change your mind on your career in a few months, and that you are focused on improving your capabilities.
I agree 100% though that it is an indicator and not certain that any of the above is true. Particularly with the MCSE.
If the cash flows were reasonably consistent an NPV works just fine, the trouble is everyone thinks there is a mountain of money in the future that may or may not be there. Taking the mean is worthless... to your point, Google will either be a the basis of the global economy or a nobody in 10 years, it won't be the average of the cases unless it's heading up or down between them (at which point the game is over to buy it anyways).
So the valuation is a sort of mathematical expectation where the payout is huge and the probability is low. Lottery tickets are no bargain, everyone knows that you will lose money... but every day a handful of people walk away with huge returns. The same force is in effect here, risk is actually counter-intuitively expensive (unlike what a discount rate would imply). People are bidding up the limited number of lottery tickets based on their collective anticipation of the probabilities of winning versus the pain of losing.
For me, the price tag for each ticket is irrelevant. If you have ten tickets or twenty tickets in the Google lottery doesn't change the odds at all. It's all a question of if the amount you're investing is painful to lose, because you probably will.
I respect your inclusion of evolution into what you consider for your structure of understanding. And the recognition that as a theory that describes progression it doesn't describe origin (although coming from a book with the word in the title, interestingly).
The causality chain that ultimately put people here is a long complicated one by anyone's estimate. And where "god" sits in that chain has been influenced by our understanding of the world and how far back it pushes the necessity of "god" on the basis of things like irreducibility. Perhaps God is at the beginning of the causality chain. It doesn't seem as if science will ever be able to put anything at the start of it in any case.
But even if God exists, what created God? Whether God is at the start of our causality chain or nor is the smaller question compared to what is at the start causality chain for the universe that God (or whatever created our universe) exists within.
Then again, something eventually has to break the rule that it must be contained within something larger than itself. I hope. Maybe God knows that answer? Something tells me He is as stumped as we are. Fortunately our "virual" creations haven't become aware of their own existance so they can't join in on the fun. Yet.
Haberdash! Just to clear the records, Woolworths apothecary set the record using tried-and-true Difference Engine. What's for, you juveniles using your fangled Dalton mechanical calculators!
Having been at the plant where they make/support the XA/21, it's no wonder the thing failed. In the last few years they've axed the entire support crew, and tried to sub it out to recent high school grads. The last few good people worked really hard but couldn't document a single thing in the pressure to release systems.
As for the updates and how that works, etc, the XA/21 system uses RTU's in the field which are basically 1200 baud modems with some instrumentation and a simple controller. They call back into the main system every interval and update their status. From what I've read, however, the trouble was that the master server set had failed, and the secondary didn't switch over correctly. The RTU's were madly calling into the system reporting error status, but the XA/21 was dead and couldn't report good or bad status.
GE Energy can say that they can't test everything, but real problem is that they aren't testing much of anything in Melbourne any more...
The big business app vendors have mastered the buzzwords to impress the CxO's and boardrooms into believing they solve the problems. After all, if FORTUNE 100 software company whose software is used by everyone doesn't fix the problem, who can? The evaluators are shut off because the sale is predestined by the owner.
I saw this happen when my company evaluated a $2 million package by Big Software Company X and went away saying no way in hell. Then it came down from above to look into it, and $4 million and 2 years later it's still not done. The problem is, any project with that much money, and the big names on it can't (by definition) fail. So more money, more time, more frustration.
Of course, it's easy for someone so close to the implementor level to see it as management's fault. They turn around and see it as the implementors' fault for not doing it properly, since it works everywhere else so well.
They overruled the mechanics and bought the Jaguar, and don't want to look foolish and admit to the neighbors it's always in the shop. Articles like this are a positive sign though...
The purpose of the SRB's is to get the shuttle above the atmosphere and escape drag. After they fall away the shuttle is still something like 5000 m/s away from orbital velocity (which itself is 7000ish m/s), but the relatively "weak" main engines don't have to fight the atmosphere.
Even more, the last 20% of the fuel is really what kicks the shuttle along. They have the full power of the engines, but nearly all of the boost weight is gone. The thing boogies whereas on the ground they couldn't get the shuttle off the pad.
The external tank, main engine set up is one of the more amazing accomplishments of the shuttle design, without it the "land like a plane" would never have happened.
You are at 30,000 feet in your 747. You've been flying for 11 hours. You decide to go and do a prelanding check because hell, anything could have broken and you've got 200 innocent people on board. In your checklist you discover that one of the wings has lost 14 of its 18 welding points.
You can't repair anything away from your repair facility. You can't land the thing any differently than you normally would to reduce stress. And you can't transfer your passengers to a different plane while in the sky. There's no parachutes. Why did you even bother checking?
And that's a 747 very close to the surface going much slower built with much less exotic materials.
Well intentioned, but the reality is programmers are being wholesale replaced with foriegn labor. Businesses, especially non-IT ones, want nothing to programming or hiring programmers. Much less cater to them in any way above other employees.
A shower?? There's a guy in the Republic of Elbonia who's willing to work out of his hovel on a old 386 for $4 a day programming. He doesn't demand breaks, and there's no coffee machine to stock. And he's viewed as a nearly identical resource. Now is not the time to demand high priced add-ons. But... if we could just get the people of Elbonia to buy into this and equalize the market...
And their intention is clear: To add on another charge so they won't list your number. Instant $3 in revenue per subscriber. Normally it's called extortion, to the phone companies it's called "value added service".
How many astronauts have quit as a result of the accident? How many want to not be astronauts any more?
It's crazy when people talk about them like they are forced to be astronauts and die for no reason. Everyone dies, life is terminal. It's purely a matter of how and when, and astronauts die pushing science. They could take the safe path, work a corporate job in a cube pushing paper around and die another 30 years later from eating McDonalds their whole life. But exactly how is that a better fate?
Your rant is boring. You're endorsing that hindsight should be taken more seriously. When you figure out a way to implement hindsight in an evaluation before the fact, let us know.
Actually, it's not really so much need but productivity. If everyone went out tomorrow and spent all of their money on some useless thing, like dot-com stocks, and all of that money evaporated and was funneled into more useless things (like Ferraris) the productive uses of capital would diminish and... jobs would ultimately be lost because the economy would, shrink not grow, as we lost our ability to consume "productively". Read your business section for a real life example of this.
A bigger jet supposedly flys more people with less overhead. The trouble is that ultimately will mean less planes flying, less schedule freedom, and more of a pain overall for passengers. How many times have you missed the 8:00pm to London due to weather in Atlanta but you can grab the 9:30 from the same airline and arrive with minimal delay in time to make your meeting and catch the flight that evening to Dublin? It's happened to me a few times.
Put megaplanes in their place and I'm delayed a day getting to London, stuck in Atlanta, and I'm on the phone with airlines for hours trying to rearrange tickets and meetings. Not to mention it will take an hour just to get the passengers on the plane, and all of the lines as passengers simultaneously arrive instead of being spread out across mulitple flights when everything goes the way it should.
Productivity enhancement? Not for the passengers. It's an ego thing for Europe, like a skyscraper or a moon landing.
The NSDs provide the spark to ignite the CDF, which in turn ignites the LSC for shuttle vehicle destruction. The safe and arm device provides mechanical isolation between the NSDs and the CDF before launch and during the SRB separation sequence.
The mechanism is installed in the SRB's and the ET. Once away, there is no destruct capability documented. And why document one, but not another?
Someone needs to take the right side tires off of his car and tell him to drive to Cincinatti at 130 miles an hour. Have him compensate for increased rolling resistance by reprogramming his cruise control.
You lost me on the incredible leap of logic...
on
XML and Perl
·
· Score: 0, Insightful
As XML is just another text format, it follows that Perl will be just as good at processing XML documents.
Since my pasta maker is good at making pasta, and ice cream and pasta are both foods, it follows my pasta maker will be just as good at making ice cream.
Putting these recordings on P2P networks for anyone to download just denies descendants of the original artists of those recordings their rightful royalties.
Minor point, but copyrights are supposed to live for limited times to encourage creators to create so they can profit from their work. If the artist is dead, they can't be encouraged to create any more. Why should the decendants get anything for something their parent, or grandparent, etc. created? What valuable creative service have they provided short of being born?
I'd argue that this actually hurts the creative process because of the numbers of decendants getting money while artists (the creators) get an ever-smaller slice.
This reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld's old bit where instead of the wanted posters being up at the post office, the stamps should have the pictures. That way the postman, who walks around seeing people all day door to door, can do the searching.
Minor points is that bullet fingerprinting from the factory has not been proposed... rather using the fired cases for prints.
Larger point is that with either ID method, as a gun is used, the "prints" change. Some elements don't change (ie, rifling angles) but the key features to establish a match can change dramatically in just a few hundred rounds or even between cleanings. Typically when a firearm is matched in court it's because they capture the firearm, and the bullets compared were fired not too many rounds away from each other.
Keep in mind there hasn't been a single case where someone has been found, convicted, etc. based on purchase fired-case data and yet it costs major amounts of money to collect. Meanwhile the FBI doesn't pursue and prosecute individuals who attempt to buy guns from legitimate dealers (but are denied in background checks due to false info or other restrictions) because they don't have enough money.
The NRA wants (I think, I don't belong) to have the laws presently on the books enforced before new ones are added. If that's an extremist method, I guess I'm an extremist myself...
Slashdot Mirror
That's a good question. The inside of the rear cabin is vented shortly after lift-off, so it's not as if they expected to find none, they just found more than they expected. This indicates a leak or an instrumentation issue (one of the leak detection bottles failed to function at all), but keep in mind the SSME's have a pretty decent history of leaking from all sorts of places to the point of early engine shutdown (STS-93).
It sounds to me like NASA is trying to kill off the shuttle... even the most esoteric engineering problems make headlines these days.
Aside from conspiracy theories, the difference here is that stuff made in China is half the price of the other thing on the shelf, and Joe Walmart doesn't give a damn about his buddy's job if he can save that kind of money on his new Popeil Chicken Roaster. This isn't about a 10% savings for inferior goods.
At the end of the day, making the same old computer here in the US shouldn't be interesting to us. There's not much money in it, even if your company does it exceptionally well. Literally anyone can do it, and doing it outside of the US means little or no environmental compliance.
Now, as the US loses its ability to come up with the new stuff that can be made first here during the most profitable portion of a product's life, that's scary. Eventually, this means that the products will be invented in China, and the only stuff we'll be making is the low profit old-news products of yester-year because anyone can make it. If that much.
The very fact that music isn't free (or close to it) should suggest that there is something flawed with the thought that there is an infinite supply of it.
Songs aren't durable, eventually even the most catchy tune becomes uninteresting to its purchaser with time. As long as the purchaser is alive they seem to demand more songs on a varying expiration interval.
The flip side of this is that there aren't an infinite number of songs, and a given consumer is only interested in a subset of the finite songs available. If they want more music, they have to choose from this finite set. Further, given cultural tastes, the culture expires songs from the set of all songs on a regular basis.
So it is completely irrelevant that you can copy a song infinitely, there are only a finite number of unique songs available that anyone is interested in.
You want a copy of my popular song? I'm going to charge as much as I possibly can for it. As the exclusivity of a product increases, the cost of producing it has less and less impact with its cost. Because we've artificially said that the owner of the copyright has sole exclusive rights to produce it, songs are highly exclusive to their owner.
Notice that if people didn't prefer one song over another, this "monopoly" over the ownership of a song would not matter, and the cost to produce would enter into pricing.
Water isn't worth much right now, but if I had the only water in the country -- even if it were an infinite amount of it -- I'd be a billionaire.
When representing the outside world, it seems clear to me that you'd need a way to represent something being logically consistent as missing, unknown, or unknowable. My height is 6 foot, my gender is male, my last gynecological visit is NULL.
The argument is, perhaps that field should be normalized into a separate table of visit dates which does not contain an entry for me. That is the true NULL, that it isn't even present in the database.
I think it's more design philosophy than an issue of right/wrong. There are many complex problems that NULL solves quite handily by being able to represent that a relationship is impossible.
There is a story/legend that a guy goes into the DMV to renew the registration for his car, and when the guy gets the bill, it's missing a discount for $20 as he is a veteran. When he asks them to correct the bill, the person behind the counter says, "It's only $20, don't worry about it." To which the veteran asks the DMV worker, "Okay, how about you give me $20 from your wallet?" The DMW worker objects and reacts in shock. The veteran says, "So when it's my money it's nothing, but your $20 is a whole different matter."
I suspect we are in a similar situation here.
If you've ever tried to do business with anyone from outside of the US, and maybe Europe, I think you'll find that it is a major disparity between how well businesses run between the two regions. Business Science may be the last science that the US has an advantage on, because it sure isn't the rest of them.
Other countries can compete for now on the basis of lower labor costs, and lower cost of environmental and other compliance. You can afford alot of waste and mismanagement in that stage, but when you're industrialized and you have an OSHA, and an EPA, and your labor unions are knocking at the door, suddenly you can't throw out a day's worth of bad production because that amounts to your profit. Other countries have gone from economic powerhouses that were going to own the US, to total stagnation in the span of months.
I'm not advocating anyone becoming a specialist in the science of business as an answer to this... the true answer is that your profession has to be competitive. And being a Scientist in the US is not competitive.
The laws of business aren't muddied with subjectiveness. Whether or not you will be better off giving something away for free will ultimately be determined by if you increased your well-being or lost the time and money (aka opportunity) invested. There is nothing subjective about the end-game.
That's not to say that it is always stupid to give something away. People have been giving things away in exchange for an opportunity since the beginning of economic time.
So, still within the framework of the laws of business, the question is what opportunity is created for those involved in free software. If the opportunity created is greater than that foregone, there will be free software. Whether or not it is competitive with commercially created software is an entirely different matter.
Because of the marginal and highly eventual return on the investment of free software it is a hobby or a side bet for those involved (whether the bet is being made by the individual not being paid, or a company who pays programmers but does not charge).
Now, if someone can demonstrate to all of us rational players know you can make a fortune giving away software, the tide may turn as we weigh the opportunity of going into commercial software versus free software, combined with needing to eat.
All still within the confines of the laws of business that you so much hate. Good luck making that fortune.
Definitely truth in all of that, I would add some additional points though, that are solid and real.
Alot of the purpose of certification/degrees/training is to ensure two things: consistent process, and consistent vocabulary. Many people can be self-taught and be very good at things, but use completely different depths to the steps they use for common procedures, and use different nomenclature for everything. This goes to the point of not knowing how to pronounce words common in the industry!
Also, people who have gone through the certification road of misery have done it with a group of people they could compare notes with, see different environments, take good ideas from them, and build a network that extends out to others that might have hiring, consultive, and other value.
Finally, they aren't trivial to get, and if one jumps through the hoops to do it it shows a certain professional commitment and commitment to the craft. Ie, that you aren't going to change your mind on your career in a few months, and that you are focused on improving your capabilities.
I agree 100% though that it is an indicator and not certain that any of the above is true. Particularly with the MCSE.
If the cash flows were reasonably consistent an NPV works just fine, the trouble is everyone thinks there is a mountain of money in the future that may or may not be there. Taking the mean is worthless... to your point, Google will either be a the basis of the global economy or a nobody in 10 years, it won't be the average of the cases unless it's heading up or down between them (at which point the game is over to buy it anyways).
So the valuation is a sort of mathematical expectation where the payout is huge and the probability is low. Lottery tickets are no bargain, everyone knows that you will lose money... but every day a handful of people walk away with huge returns. The same force is in effect here, risk is actually counter-intuitively expensive (unlike what a discount rate would imply). People are bidding up the limited number of lottery tickets based on their collective anticipation of the probabilities of winning versus the pain of losing.
For me, the price tag for each ticket is irrelevant. If you have ten tickets or twenty tickets in the Google lottery doesn't change the odds at all. It's all a question of if the amount you're investing is painful to lose, because you probably will.
I respect your inclusion of evolution into what you consider for your structure of understanding. And the recognition that as a theory that describes progression it doesn't describe origin (although coming from a book with the word in the title, interestingly).
The causality chain that ultimately put people here is a long complicated one by anyone's estimate. And where "god" sits in that chain has been influenced by our understanding of the world and how far back it pushes the necessity of "god" on the basis of things like irreducibility. Perhaps God is at the beginning of the causality chain. It doesn't seem as if science will ever be able to put anything at the start of it in any case.
But even if God exists, what created God? Whether God is at the start of our causality chain or nor is the smaller question compared to what is at the start causality chain for the universe that God (or whatever created our universe) exists within.
Then again, something eventually has to break the rule that it must be contained within something larger than itself. I hope. Maybe God knows that answer? Something tells me He is as stumped as we are. Fortunately our "virual" creations haven't become aware of their own existance so they can't join in on the fun. Yet.
Haberdash! Just to clear the records, Woolworths apothecary set the record using tried-and-true Difference Engine. What's for, you juveniles using your fangled Dalton mechanical calculators!
Some things never change.
Having been at the plant where they make/support the XA/21, it's no wonder the thing failed. In the last few years they've axed the entire support crew, and tried to sub it out to recent high school grads. The last few good people worked really hard but couldn't document a single thing in the pressure to release systems.
As for the updates and how that works, etc, the XA/21 system uses RTU's in the field which are basically 1200 baud modems with some instrumentation and a simple controller. They call back into the main system every interval and update their status. From what I've read, however, the trouble was that the master server set had failed, and the secondary didn't switch over correctly. The RTU's were madly calling into the system reporting error status, but the XA/21 was dead and couldn't report good or bad status.
GE Energy can say that they can't test everything, but real problem is that they aren't testing much of anything in Melbourne any more...
The big business app vendors have mastered the buzzwords to impress the CxO's and boardrooms into believing they solve the problems. After all, if FORTUNE 100 software company whose software is used by everyone doesn't fix the problem, who can? The evaluators are shut off because the sale is predestined by the owner.
I saw this happen when my company evaluated a $2 million package by Big Software Company X and went away saying no way in hell. Then it came down from above to look into it, and $4 million and 2 years later it's still not done. The problem is, any project with that much money, and the big names on it can't (by definition) fail. So more money, more time, more frustration.
Of course, it's easy for someone so close to the implementor level to see it as management's fault. They turn around and see it as the implementors' fault for not doing it properly, since it works everywhere else so well.
They overruled the mechanics and bought the Jaguar, and don't want to look foolish and admit to the neighbors it's always in the shop. Articles like this are a positive sign though...
The purpose of the SRB's is to get the shuttle above the atmosphere and escape drag. After they fall away the shuttle is still something like 5000 m/s away from orbital velocity (which itself is 7000ish m/s), but the relatively "weak" main engines don't have to fight the atmosphere.
Even more, the last 20% of the fuel is really what kicks the shuttle along. They have the full power of the engines, but nearly all of the boost weight is gone. The thing boogies whereas on the ground they couldn't get the shuttle off the pad.
The external tank, main engine set up is one of the more amazing accomplishments of the shuttle design, without it the "land like a plane" would never have happened.
You are at 30,000 feet in your 747. You've been flying for 11 hours. You decide to go and do a prelanding check because hell, anything could have broken and you've got 200 innocent people on board. In your checklist you discover that one of the wings has lost 14 of its 18 welding points.
You can't repair anything away from your repair facility. You can't land the thing any differently than you normally would to reduce stress. And you can't transfer your passengers to a different plane while in the sky. There's no parachutes. Why did you even bother checking?
And that's a 747 very close to the surface going much slower built with much less exotic materials.
Well intentioned, but the reality is programmers are being wholesale replaced with foriegn labor. Businesses, especially non-IT ones, want nothing to programming or hiring programmers. Much less cater to them in any way above other employees.
A shower?? There's a guy in the Republic of Elbonia who's willing to work out of his hovel on a old 386 for $4 a day programming. He doesn't demand breaks, and there's no coffee machine to stock. And he's viewed as a nearly identical resource. Now is not the time to demand high priced add-ons. But... if we could just get the people of Elbonia to buy into this and equalize the market...
And their intention is clear: To add on another charge so they won't list your number. Instant $3 in revenue per subscriber. Normally it's called extortion, to the phone companies it's called "value added service".
How many astronauts have quit as a result of the accident? How many want to not be astronauts any more?
It's crazy when people talk about them like they are forced to be astronauts and die for no reason. Everyone dies, life is terminal. It's purely a matter of how and when, and astronauts die pushing science. They could take the safe path, work a corporate job in a cube pushing paper around and die another 30 years later from eating McDonalds their whole life. But exactly how is that a better fate?
Your rant is boring. You're endorsing that hindsight should be taken more seriously. When you figure out a way to implement hindsight in an evaluation before the fact, let us know.
Actually, it's not really so much need but productivity. If everyone went out tomorrow and spent all of their money on some useless thing, like dot-com stocks, and all of that money evaporated and was funneled into more useless things (like Ferraris) the productive uses of capital would diminish and... jobs would ultimately be lost because the economy would, shrink not grow, as we lost our ability to consume "productively". Read your business section for a real life example of this.
A bigger jet supposedly flys more people with less overhead. The trouble is that ultimately will mean less planes flying, less schedule freedom, and more of a pain overall for passengers. How many times have you missed the 8:00pm to London due to weather in Atlanta but you can grab the 9:30 from the same airline and arrive with minimal delay in time to make your meeting and catch the flight that evening to Dublin? It's happened to me a few times.
Put megaplanes in their place and I'm delayed a day getting to London, stuck in Atlanta, and I'm on the phone with airlines for hours trying to rearrange tickets and meetings. Not to mention it will take an hour just to get the passengers on the plane, and all of the lines as passengers simultaneously arrive instead of being spread out across mulitple flights when everything goes the way it should.
Productivity enhancement? Not for the passengers. It's an ego thing for Europe, like a skyscraper or a moon landing.
You mean the range safety system? Sorry, well documented.
The NSDs provide the spark to ignite the CDF, which in turn ignites the LSC for shuttle vehicle destruction. The safe and arm device provides mechanical isolation between the NSDs and the CDF before launch and during the SRB separation sequence.
The mechanism is installed in the SRB's and the ET. Once away, there is no destruct capability documented. And why document one, but not another?
Someone needs to take the right side tires off of his car and tell him to drive to Cincinatti at 130 miles an hour. Have him compensate for increased rolling resistance by reprogramming his cruise control.
As XML is just another text format, it follows that Perl will be just as good at processing XML documents.
Since my pasta maker is good at making pasta, and ice cream and pasta are both foods, it follows my pasta maker will be just as good at making ice cream.
Putting these recordings on P2P networks for anyone to download just denies descendants of the original artists of those recordings their rightful royalties.
Minor point, but copyrights are supposed to live for limited times to encourage creators to create so they can profit from their work. If the artist is dead, they can't be encouraged to create any more. Why should the decendants get anything for something their parent, or grandparent, etc. created? What valuable creative service have they provided short of being born?
I'd argue that this actually hurts the creative process because of the numbers of decendants getting money while artists (the creators) get an ever-smaller slice.
This reminds me of Jerry Seinfeld's old bit where instead of the wanted posters being up at the post office, the stamps should have the pictures. That way the postman, who walks around seeing people all day door to door, can do the searching.
Not a bad idea really...
Minor points is that bullet fingerprinting from the factory has not been proposed... rather using the fired cases for prints.
Larger point is that with either ID method, as a gun is used, the "prints" change. Some elements don't change (ie, rifling angles) but the key features to establish a match can change dramatically in just a few hundred rounds or even between cleanings. Typically when a firearm is matched in court it's because they capture the firearm, and the bullets compared were fired not too many rounds away from each other.
Keep in mind there hasn't been a single case where someone has been found, convicted, etc. based on purchase fired-case data and yet it costs major amounts of money to collect. Meanwhile the FBI doesn't pursue and prosecute individuals who attempt to buy guns from legitimate dealers (but are denied in background checks due to false info or other restrictions) because they don't have enough money.
The NRA wants (I think, I don't belong) to have the laws presently on the books enforced before new ones are added. If that's an extremist method, I guess I'm an extremist myself...