Secondly, his statement "the organization I work for is highly political, disorganized, and lacks accountability" suggests to me that he is working for a non-profit, not-for-profit, or similar organization....
It suggests he's working for a large organization. I've worked public and private sector. Small organizations are efficient and have great accountability. Large organizations are inefficient, political, and have no accountability. Whether they're for profit or not has no detectable impact on this that I've seen...
But how much of this rocket is cherry picked from NASA devolpments. [...] For my car to get better I have to get GM to devolp me a better engine.
Depends on what you mean by "better", which is of course relative to your goals. I think that, given the goals we're shooting for here, what you actually mean above is "worse". It will be worse if it doesn't make use of cheap, proven, and most importantly, off-the-shelf parts I can get from my local auto store.
The "Space Renaissance" doesn't come from developing new rockets. It comes from making them cheap and relatively common. The world didn't change the day the Wright Brothers flew. It changed the day you could go to the local airport and catch a flight to London.
Xcel's total wind power generation has been well over that for many years. (I remember reading about them going over 500 MW a few years ago, although I can't find the source now.) However, Xcel doesn't actually own most of the wind facilities is uses. The one 25 MW facility listed on the page you linked to is probably the only one they wholly own and operate themselves.
You realize your statement is illogical, right? I go to the grocery store for donuts. If I can find the donuts, it makes sense to go to the grocery store. If I can't find the donuts, it doesn't make sense to go to the grocery store. But it doesn't make sense to not go to the grocery store because it has things I don't go there for, e.g. bratwurst. I hate bratwurst, so it makes sense for me to skip it. It doesn't make sense for me to stop going to the grocery store because of it. The presence of things you don't go there for is an utterly illogical reason to cite for not going there. The absence of things you do go there, or the presence of things you find so offensive it drives you away, these would be sensible reasons to cite. If the sight or smell of bratwurst makes me vomit, and I'm so sensitive to it that I can't go to the grocery store without vomiting, then it make sense for me to not go to the grocery store for my donuts. But in explaining this, if I don't want to sound like an idiot, I should say something more than just, "I don't go to the grocery store for bratwurst." Indeed, that's not actually the reason why I'm not going, and I'm lying to myself and others if I try to pass that off as the reason.
I'm more creeped out by people who never miss an opportunity to misuse the term "self-proclaimed" as a dig at anyone even mildly well known. Anyone who gets even a small touch of fame, through no effort or fault of their own, invariably gets declared as having a god complex by these creeps who are just... I don't know. What IS the motivation behind these creeps?
Maybe he doesn't want to spend time moderating a site he is
no longer interested in, for example.
But it seems odd to imply that one of them is that
he is unable to afford to run it as
a hobby
without donations.
What he said doesn't imply that, at least in the strict sense of "imply". And I don't think it's implied in the looser sense either, since, as you point out, that wouldn't make much sense. You're misinterpreting what he actually did say. He never said he couldn't afford it. He did imply he wasn't interested in it anymore. If he's not interested in it anymore, he's obviously not going to pay for it. So, he'd either need to take donations or shut it down. Thus, he wouldn't need to take donations because it's too expensive for him to afford, he'd need to take donations because he's unwilling to spend any of his own money on it, regardless of how much he has.
As a general rule of thumb, if someone says something that doesn't seem to make sense, more often than not, it's because you've missed what he's saying, not because what he's saying actually makes no sense. Reinterpret until what was said makes sense, and you'll actually discover the full meaning of what was said, including the unstated implications. The surest sign that you've misread or misinterpreted something is that it sounds wrong. Reread and reinterpret at least twice more before concluding it actually is wrong. Most disagreements are actually over misunderstandings rather than over facts or even opinions.
Extremists tent to assume everyone else is an extremist too. They don't acknowledge the existence of moderate views or a defensible middle ground. Thus, anyone who they meet to expresses a view that makes it clear they aren't fundamentalist Christians are obviously pagans or atheists, and anyone they meet who isn't an extreme anarcho-capitalist is obviously a totalitarian communist. This strategy prevents them from ever having to consider a reasonable viewpoint in opposition to their own. They instantly transform it into an unreasonable one, then easily defeat the straw man. You suggest a reasonable course of action, they say "that's communism, and you see how well that worked out for the Soviet union."
Their favorite logical fallacy after the "straw man" is "The Slippery Slope". Anything that isn't their cup o' tea, even if it isn't the opposite extreme taken to the point of ludicrous, and thus isn't opposable for its own merits and flaws, is argued against because it's "the slippery slope to communism" or whatever. It's basically admitting there's nothing wrong with your proposal, so rather than point out the flaws in your proposal (which are either nonexistent or easily outweighed by the benefits), they say "it's the slippery slope to..." and then argue against that thing everyone agrees is bad. I saw Mike Huckabee argue the other day that stem-cell research is the slippery slope to murdering old people once they can no longer usefully work! We must oppose stem-cell research because murdering people just because they're old is a bad thing.
Anyhow, it's unsurprising that extremists like that take any statement they don't 100% agree with as making the speaker an obvious advocate for the opposite extreme.
There are a lot of reasons to believe SpaceX will have a hard time meeting their commitments and to disagree with NASA's assesment - take their success rate to date.
...
Thankfully, the people at NASA have more sophisticated means of evaluation that this...
Assuming you ignore all the evidence since WWII, your argument almost makes sense. Indeed, your best WWII fighter planes were ill-equipped to sink battleships of any era.
Today, of course, they could take one out easily. Indeed, as far back as the 80's I'd put more faith in a few Etendards with Exocets than a battleship, and little countries that couldn't hope to buy a battleship had no trouble buying Etendards and Exocets. Now, in the 21st century, not only would a full-size battleship be bloody expensive, but it'd be a bloody expensive asset you'd be afraid to take anywhere near a war zone, since the same amount of money put into making one battleship could buy enough hardware to sink a thousand of them easily. In the 21st century, the most well-equipped, well-funded, high tech navies can't hope to keep them safe from little third-world nations.
The only safe way to use a battleship these days would be to load it up with cruise missiles and keep it hundreds of miles away from the enemy at all times. But destroyers can fire cruises missiles from hundreds of miles away just as easily. The only thing the battleship had going for it was guns so big you couldn't put them on anything smaller. But the era of the big gun is long, long past. Might as well give all the seamen on board cutlasses while you're at it. The REAL reason we don't build battleships anymore is there's NOTHING they can do that can't be done better by something else today. Even if they weren't expensive, they'd still be ill-considered wastes of money.
Indeed. Once a company has a monopoly that utterly distorts the market and prevents it from having to deal with normal market forces like other companies, due to a lack of competition, they can use all the money they can rake it from this arrangement to engage in research no non-monopoly company in a competitive market can manage.
Indeed. People high-five their friend when he drives up in his brand new Corvette or Mustang when we could have just got a cheaper car, too. There's nothing mysterious about this product strategy, Detroit has been using it for years (as well as BMW, Nissan, etc.) Of course, unlike Detroit, Apple actually makes a profit using this model... XD
...your award is limited to actual damages; hardly worth the money Apple would be paying to its lawyers.
Do keep in mind, Apple is a hardware company. They sell computer systems, primarily, the rest is minutia. Apple is going to claim any sold Psystar is a lost *hardware* sale, and the amount of the damage is going to be the cost of a new Mac -- significantly more than the amount of money Psystar made per system (considering they sell their machines more cheaply). If Psystar's margins are anything like most PC makers, Apple's "actual damage" claim is going to be something like ten times more money than Psystar ever made, probably more than that, actually.
I think Apple is going to consider utterly destroying Psystar worth the lawyer's bill...
Humanity has been able to carry on numerous projects on a bigger scale than the average human's lifespan.
Not recently. That worked back in the day, but modern civilizations are democratic, and democracies can't do anything effectively beyond the length of an election cycle or two. A politician has no reason to pursue any action that won't yield rewards while he or she is still in office. Modern corporations aren't much better...
We should selectively breed some octopi for greater life span. They are beautiful and fascinating creatures and it would be wonderful if we had some longer lived ones to watch and spend time with.
I must say that I find it a bit disappointing that Fowler should call pedantry unacceptable. The message seems to be that majority vote determines truth.
The English language does not have an official standardization body (unlike many other languages), so, yeah, majority vote determines truth. What was once an error can become standard usage, and what was once standard usage can become an error, simply because people start speaking/writing differently. People like Fowler, if they're doing their job correctly, do not define correct usage, they document it, based on observation. If a particular error becomes common enough, it ceases to be an error, the language evolves in the direction that for whatever reason feels right to the majority of people speaking it.
It annoys pedants like me, who cringe whenever they hear words like "forums" (argh! it's "fora"!), but what can you do. You can try correcting people, and if you're successful, you prevent the language from evolving by preventing the shift from occurring, but some battles are lost causes. The regularization of all plurals in English, regardless of what language the words came from, is pretty much inevitable, like it or not.
Okay, part of your problem here is, you haven't set things up so that only httpd.conf files that pass configtest are allowed to sync up to the live system. (Gods forbid you've allowed to edit the config files on the live system directly.) The script that submits them should be checking their validity before putting them in place to the read by the next restart...
Does changing the heat flow of the Earth on a scale that will peturb plate techtonics sound like a safe idea to anyone?
Actually, if we're taking power OUT of the system (which is the whole point, after all), it sounds like a spectacularly good idea. You know how many people are killed by earthquakes? You know where all that destructive energy is coming from? I'd certainly rather see that energy powering my datacenter than shaking buildings to pieces.
Except it sounds like Obama wants to kill the Orion project.
I can't understand how they could be so keen on throwing $500 billion at failed banks and mortgage deadbeats, yet they have no problem cutting NASA's $30 billion budget.
Did you actually read the article you linked to? There's nothing in it that suggests Obama wants to kill the Orion project. Indeed, if he's looking at the cost of alternatives to the Ares rocket, it strongly suggests he plans to continue Orion. You don't need an Ares alternative if you're just going to kill Orion.
There's also no suggestion in the article that he has any intention of cutting NASA's budget.
...And take about $100 billion of that bailout money and put it into R&D, including space exploration. In the medium to long term, we will reap much richer economic rewards for such an investment.
Personally, I'd love to see NASA ax Orion and instead spend the money on space exploration, but make up your mind. Should we be spending money on space exploration, or spending a lot of money sending people somewhere we've already been?
I'm hoping we don't get into the same situation we got into back in the 80s where we spend immense amounts of money on the shuttle program and spend almost nothing at all on space exploration...
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, his statement "the organization I work for is highly political, disorganized, and lacks accountability" suggests to me that he is working for a non-profit, not-for-profit, or similar organization. ...
It suggests he's working for a large organization. I've worked public and private sector. Small organizations are efficient and have great accountability. Large organizations are inefficient, political, and have no accountability. Whether they're for profit or not has no detectable impact on this that I've seen...
But how much of this rocket is cherry picked from NASA devolpments. [...] For my car to get better I have to get GM to devolp me a better engine.
Depends on what you mean by "better", which is of course relative to your goals. I think that, given the goals we're shooting for here, what you actually mean above is "worse". It will be worse if it doesn't make use of cheap, proven, and most importantly, off-the-shelf parts I can get from my local auto store.
The "Space Renaissance" doesn't come from developing new rockets. It comes from making them cheap and relatively common. The world didn't change the day the Wright Brothers flew. It changed the day you could go to the local airport and catch a flight to London.
Xcel's total wind power generation has been well over that for many years. (I remember reading about them going over 500 MW a few years ago, although I can't find the source now.) However, Xcel doesn't actually own most of the wind facilities is uses. The one 25 MW facility listed on the page you linked to is probably the only one they wholly own and operate themselves.
As a sailor, I'm sure your maritime experience is vast. But... do you happen to know where Minnesota is? You might want to check a map... XD
I don't go to "Geek sites" for political adverts.
You realize your statement is illogical, right? I go to the grocery store for donuts. If I can find the donuts, it makes sense to go to the grocery store. If I can't find the donuts, it doesn't make sense to go to the grocery store. But it doesn't make sense to not go to the grocery store because it has things I don't go there for, e.g. bratwurst. I hate bratwurst, so it makes sense for me to skip it. It doesn't make sense for me to stop going to the grocery store because of it. The presence of things you don't go there for is an utterly illogical reason to cite for not going there. The absence of things you do go there, or the presence of things you find so offensive it drives you away, these would be sensible reasons to cite. If the sight or smell of bratwurst makes me vomit, and I'm so sensitive to it that I can't go to the grocery store without vomiting, then it make sense for me to not go to the grocery store for my donuts. But in explaining this, if I don't want to sound like an idiot, I should say something more than just, "I don't go to the grocery store for bratwurst." Indeed, that's not actually the reason why I'm not going, and I'm lying to myself and others if I try to pass that off as the reason.
I'm more creeped out by people who never miss an opportunity to misuse the term "self-proclaimed" as a dig at anyone even mildly well known. Anyone who gets even a small touch of fame, through no effort or fault of their own, invariably gets declared as having a god complex by these creeps who are just... I don't know. What IS the motivation behind these creeps?
Maybe he doesn't want to spend time moderating a site he is no longer interested in, for example. But it seems odd to imply that one of them is that he is unable to afford to run it as a hobby without donations.
What he said doesn't imply that, at least in the strict sense of "imply". And I don't think it's implied in the looser sense either, since, as you point out, that wouldn't make much sense. You're misinterpreting what he actually did say. He never said he couldn't afford it. He did imply he wasn't interested in it anymore. If he's not interested in it anymore, he's obviously not going to pay for it. So, he'd either need to take donations or shut it down. Thus, he wouldn't need to take donations because it's too expensive for him to afford, he'd need to take donations because he's unwilling to spend any of his own money on it, regardless of how much he has.
As a general rule of thumb, if someone says something that doesn't seem to make sense, more often than not, it's because you've missed what he's saying, not because what he's saying actually makes no sense. Reinterpret until what was said makes sense, and you'll actually discover the full meaning of what was said, including the unstated implications. The surest sign that you've misread or misinterpreted something is that it sounds wrong. Reread and reinterpret at least twice more before concluding it actually is wrong. Most disagreements are actually over misunderstandings rather than over facts or even opinions.
Extremists tent to assume everyone else is an extremist too. They don't acknowledge the existence of moderate views or a defensible middle ground. Thus, anyone who they meet to expresses a view that makes it clear they aren't fundamentalist Christians are obviously pagans or atheists, and anyone they meet who isn't an extreme anarcho-capitalist is obviously a totalitarian communist. This strategy prevents them from ever having to consider a reasonable viewpoint in opposition to their own. They instantly transform it into an unreasonable one, then easily defeat the straw man. You suggest a reasonable course of action, they say "that's communism, and you see how well that worked out for the Soviet union."
Their favorite logical fallacy after the "straw man" is "The Slippery Slope". Anything that isn't their cup o' tea, even if it isn't the opposite extreme taken to the point of ludicrous, and thus isn't opposable for its own merits and flaws, is argued against because it's "the slippery slope to communism" or whatever. It's basically admitting there's nothing wrong with your proposal, so rather than point out the flaws in your proposal (which are either nonexistent or easily outweighed by the benefits), they say "it's the slippery slope to ..." and then argue against that thing everyone agrees is bad. I saw Mike Huckabee argue the other day that stem-cell research is the slippery slope to murdering old people once they can no longer usefully work! We must oppose stem-cell research because murdering people just because they're old is a bad thing.
Anyhow, it's unsurprising that extremists like that take any statement they don't 100% agree with as making the speaker an obvious advocate for the opposite extreme.
Easy. Just get a small black hole. Shoot the photons around the gravity well. They'll last almost forever.
No problem, we should have the LHC back online this year. :)
There are a lot of reasons to believe SpaceX will have a hard time meeting their commitments and to disagree with NASA's assesment - take their success rate to date.
...
Thankfully, the people at NASA have more sophisticated means of evaluation that this...
Assuming you ignore all the evidence since WWII, your argument almost makes sense. Indeed, your best WWII fighter planes were ill-equipped to sink battleships of any era.
Today, of course, they could take one out easily. Indeed, as far back as the 80's I'd put more faith in a few Etendards with Exocets than a battleship, and little countries that couldn't hope to buy a battleship had no trouble buying Etendards and Exocets. Now, in the 21st century, not only would a full-size battleship be bloody expensive, but it'd be a bloody expensive asset you'd be afraid to take anywhere near a war zone, since the same amount of money put into making one battleship could buy enough hardware to sink a thousand of them easily. In the 21st century, the most well-equipped, well-funded, high tech navies can't hope to keep them safe from little third-world nations.
The only safe way to use a battleship these days would be to load it up with cruise missiles and keep it hundreds of miles away from the enemy at all times. But destroyers can fire cruises missiles from hundreds of miles away just as easily. The only thing the battleship had going for it was guns so big you couldn't put them on anything smaller. But the era of the big gun is long, long past. Might as well give all the seamen on board cutlasses while you're at it. The REAL reason we don't build battleships anymore is there's NOTHING they can do that can't be done better by something else today. Even if they weren't expensive, they'd still be ill-considered wastes of money.
Indeed. Once a company has a monopoly that utterly distorts the market and prevents it from having to deal with normal market forces like other companies, due to a lack of competition, they can use all the money they can rake it from this arrangement to engage in research no non-monopoly company in a competitive market can manage.
My screen is a digital to analog converter. Now where's my Internet?
You're soaking in it... :p
... copyright is not a verb.
The dictionary disagrees. Like many words in English, depending on context, it can be a noun, a verb, or an adjective.
Indeed. People high-five their friend when he drives up in his brand new Corvette or Mustang when we could have just got a cheaper car, too. There's nothing mysterious about this product strategy, Detroit has been using it for years (as well as BMW, Nissan, etc.) Of course, unlike Detroit, Apple actually makes a profit using this model... XD
...your award is limited to actual damages; hardly worth the money Apple would be paying to its lawyers.
Do keep in mind, Apple is a hardware company. They sell computer systems, primarily, the rest is minutia. Apple is going to claim any sold Psystar is a lost *hardware* sale, and the amount of the damage is going to be the cost of a new Mac -- significantly more than the amount of money Psystar made per system (considering they sell their machines more cheaply). If Psystar's margins are anything like most PC makers, Apple's "actual damage" claim is going to be something like ten times more money than Psystar ever made, probably more than that, actually.
I think Apple is going to consider utterly destroying Psystar worth the lawyer's bill...
Humanity has been able to carry on numerous projects on a bigger scale than the average human's lifespan.
Not recently. That worked back in the day, but modern civilizations are democratic, and democracies can't do anything effectively beyond the length of an election cycle or two. A politician has no reason to pursue any action that won't yield rewards while he or she is still in office. Modern corporations aren't much better...
We should selectively breed some octopi for greater life span. They are beautiful and fascinating creatures and it would be wonderful if we had some longer lived ones to watch and spend time with.
Octopus Howard Families? o.O
I must say that I find it a bit disappointing that Fowler should call pedantry unacceptable. The message seems to be that majority vote determines truth.
The English language does not have an official standardization body (unlike many other languages), so, yeah, majority vote determines truth. What was once an error can become standard usage, and what was once standard usage can become an error, simply because people start speaking/writing differently. People like Fowler, if they're doing their job correctly, do not define correct usage, they document it, based on observation. If a particular error becomes common enough, it ceases to be an error, the language evolves in the direction that for whatever reason feels right to the majority of people speaking it.
It annoys pedants like me, who cringe whenever they hear words like "forums" (argh! it's "fora"!), but what can you do. You can try correcting people, and if you're successful, you prevent the language from evolving by preventing the shift from occurring, but some battles are lost causes. The regularization of all plurals in English, regardless of what language the words came from, is pretty much inevitable, like it or not.
Okay, part of your problem here is, you haven't set things up so that only httpd.conf files that pass configtest are allowed to sync up to the live system. (Gods forbid you've allowed to edit the config files on the live system directly.) The script that submits them should be checking their validity before putting them in place to the read by the next restart...
Do you ding your dongs?
...only one thing I could do was ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long.
By the time this new storage technology becomes practical, they'll be able to distribute Duke Nukem Forever on it...
Does changing the heat flow of the Earth on a scale that will peturb plate techtonics sound like a safe idea to anyone?
Actually, if we're taking power OUT of the system (which is the whole point, after all), it sounds like a spectacularly good idea. You know how many people are killed by earthquakes? You know where all that destructive energy is coming from? I'd certainly rather see that energy powering my datacenter than shaking buildings to pieces.
Nah, real oldtimers just point to their ID#. ;)
Except it sounds like Obama wants to kill the Orion project.
I can't understand how they could be so keen on throwing $500 billion at failed banks and mortgage deadbeats, yet they have no problem cutting NASA's $30 billion budget.
Did you actually read the article you linked to? There's nothing in it that suggests Obama wants to kill the Orion project. Indeed, if he's looking at the cost of alternatives to the Ares rocket, it strongly suggests he plans to continue Orion. You don't need an Ares alternative if you're just going to kill Orion.
There's also no suggestion in the article that he has any intention of cutting NASA's budget.
...And take about $100 billion of that bailout money and put it into R&D, including space exploration. In the medium to long term, we will reap much richer economic rewards for such an investment.
Personally, I'd love to see NASA ax Orion and instead spend the money on space exploration, but make up your mind. Should we be spending money on space exploration, or spending a lot of money sending people somewhere we've already been?
I'm hoping we don't get into the same situation we got into back in the 80s where we spend immense amounts of money on the shuttle program and spend almost nothing at all on space exploration...