Just ask yourself a question, where would the grease had come from?
Hint: think that most of continental Europe was under napoleonian rule, so getting at Spanish and or Italian olive oil was not a problem and grease was not the export of the colonies, whether in Africa, in the Caribbean or anywhere else. It was coffee, cacao, and sugar mostly.
It sounds like your French Govt. approved education omitted the fact that the French occupation of Spain was a miserable failure resisted tooth an nail by the Spanish. The term 'Guerilla' means 'little war' and refers to the Spanish resistance.
France was in no position to export anything from Spain during the occupation and certainly not bulk produce. The flow of material was the other way, from France into Spain.
As for France not suffering food availability problems, Napoleon's army which mostly starved to death during the retreat from Moscow would have disagreed if the sadistic dictator had not murdered them all.
Please refresh my memory..how much is the war on terror costing us?
Seriously..when i figure out my personal finances, i start looking at the largest expenses first, and seeing if i can't trim those or cut them completely.
Its a fair question, but I look at my largest discretionary spending first. My largest expense is my mortgage, my second largest childcare, I don't have any option in those cases. The largest elements in the US federal budget are payment on the debt and repayment of social security obligations. Those are not optional.
The 'war on terror' has two parts, a compulsory one and an optional one. Most reasonable people would agree that the number on priority should be eliminating Osama Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri. I have no complaint about the money spent there. The invasion of Iraq on the other hand has eliminated Saddam (good) and led to the election of an Iranian backed Shiite theocratic regime with no support from the Sunni areas. That is not a result I would consider to justify the $300 bn expense so far or the $600bn likely total cost.
If we want to apply space station logic to the war on terror though we could say that the cost is justified by the 'spinoffs' that the war will create. There is no field that has generated as much spinoff technology as war. The rapid developments in MSI and LSI in the mid 70s were funded by the pentagon as part of their electronic battlefield program developed in direct response to the US catastrophe in Vietnam.
Both applied and basic research are valuable pursuits that have paid off in many ways. Basic research, like astronomy, often pays off much better in cultural value than economic, and that's okay by me. I'm not here on Earth just to make money to leave my family and government.
This is a different issue. What I am saying here is evaluate the programs on their direct merits first.
Hubble has provided real direct benefits, albeit mainly in the cultural field. We know more about the origins of the universe, we are able to better understand basic physics.
The Appolo program produced real direct political benefits. JFK funded the program for one reason, to spend the USSR into the ground. His objective was achieved, the USSR was broken psychologically in 1969, it just continued moving for another two decades.
There were certainly some spin offs from Appolo, but the same effects could have been achieved for far less by direct investment in research into the relevant fields.
The 'spinoff' effect can work both ways. I work in computer security, it has taken us two decades to escape from the seriously warped views that entered the field because early funding came almost exclusively from military contracts. One reason that the Internet is insecure is that the security models being applied are completely wrong for its current application.
LOL, funny how you are denouncing the space program while using a device that most likely uses VLSI components. Guess what the push for MSI and later LSI which lead to VLSI was made mostly by NASA requirements for highly integrated devices using this new thing called a "transistor" which until then no one really had a use for, except for some fancy qualities as an amplifier.
That is bogus, there were plenty of applications that needed compact logic. The Air Force was a much bigger consumer of MSI and LSI than NASA.
What I am denouncing here is the idea that there is something unique to space exploration in generating spinoffs. All (good) science should produce results in other fields.
Given the choice of Hubble or the space station it is very clear which will produce more science, Hubble is the winner by miles. Hubble is providing more data about the early state of the universe than any other source. The occupants of the space station are doing no experiments at all, they are just keeping the station running.
Thank goodness you were in no way shape or form in charge of any basic research programme.
That really is a funny statement. I don't regard the space station as research of any kind. It is at best an engineering challenge.
But you are completely wrong about influence on funding.
Well that begs an interesting question: why should NASA's mission be scientific? It is the national space agency, I don't see a problem with them working on manned space exploration.
NASA costs $15 billion per year to run. Thats rather a lot of money for a government with a $500 billion deficit to be spending on feel good programs.
The only way that the Mars trip becomes viable is with a space elevator. The shuttle and the space station are irrelevant. All they are doing is finding out what we know already, people's bodies start to deteriorate significantly after six months or so in space. And that is within the protection of the earth's magnetic field.
To get to Mars we need a ship with artificial gravity and there is no way we can lift one using conventional rocketry.
Dick Feynman once pointed out that if you take any seriously complex engineering task that is done on an infrequent basis it is very difficult to get the success rate above 98% or so. The sheer number of places where you have an opportunity for error is immense. So far we have had about 100 shuttle launches and the rate of failure is 2%. If you do the calculation in terms of failures per mile flown you arrive at a figure that is pretty much comparable to commercial airline flights.
I don't think that there is much chance that the shuttle will ever launch again. The degree of political risk is huge, so far they are talking about May/June but its one of those dates that just keeps slipping a month each month.
You never know what you will develop until you have a strong need. BTW Teflon has nothing to do with the space program. It was developed for the Atomic bomb project. It was uses for seals exposed to Florine.
Hah! see my other post, Teflon was invented in 1938, before the Manhattan project started.
When you push the state of the art you never know what you will develop. IC based computers where developed for the Apollo program. Why never before? because no needed computer that small before. I mean why would you need a computer smaller than a desk or even a room?
The USSR did not develop ICs and still put rockets into space. In fact the ICs did not become important in space until after the Appolo program. They were pretty finiky until the 1970s.
Kilby was funded by Texas Instruments, Noyce by Fairchild. Both companies were working for the Pentagon, not NASA. The first applications for the ICs were in the US Airforce and the minuteman missile (1962). There is a big difference between using an IC in a missile where it has to work for no more than a few minutes and using one in a satelite or such.
There are certainly links between research fields but space is certainly not unique in having a spinoff effect and you do not get spinoffs without also doing basic research in the area in question. The World Wide Web put together ideas from twenty years of formal comp sci research with a different perspective to reach the breakthrough.
I don't see any reason why we should expect that diverting funds from worthwhile science like Hubble to worthless science like the space station is going to result in a net gain through the spinoff effect. Space has been enormously well funded for fifty years. Sending people to the moon does not create any seriously interesting new challenges.
In fact, Teflon is among the (at the top of the list I believe, but I'm not willing to back that up) most slippery materials known to man. Not simply the cheapest or most widely available, it is extremely unique.
Teflon was the product of research into friction-free plastics by Dupont in 1938. It was not a spinnoff from the space race, in fact it predates NASA.
So sorry, there is not one part of the fable that is accurate. NASA did not invent teflon, did not invent the idea of applying it to machinery and cerainly not to saucepans.
"Why make a new Hubble? They could just buy back the one in the Smithsonian."
Possibly, I suspect that it is not completely functional and the main mirror may not be the optically accurate one made at a cost of $15 million or so.
But it would be a good starting point. I'll bet that even the Smithsonian would rather the thing was put to decent use.
The main problem is the mirror and assembling the whole thing in a dust free environment.
On the subject of plans, the ISS is a completely different botch up. The Hubble plans are really well understood because hundreds of copies were made, checked and rechecked when we were going over the whole saga of the spherical aberation in the mirror.
Part of the scientific process that often goes overlooked is that when you are trying to solve one problem, you often solve other problems that lie along the way, and sometimes you make accidental discoveries that lead to developments that you never thought might be related. Thus, science for science's sake is generally a far more useful [and maybe even noble] pursuit than most of the other things we do.
This is trotted out every time that the space program needs justifying and guess what, its bogus. Non stick frying pans were being developed during the Napoleonic wars when the English embargo prevented the French getting their hands on enough cooking grease. Hence LeCreuset.
It gets even wobblier when you get to the old CERN home of the Web stuff. The folk who go on about that don't mention that CERN never assigned any staff to the Web project directly other than Tim during the time Tim was at CERN. There were three students who worked with Tim and another four people from another group who did the Web because they beleived in it. When it came to setting up the Web consortium the CERN director sent to bat for the Web project EU grant wise told the committee that the priority at CERN was physics and the Web was not considered important.
Even when you get to communications satelites the story is somewhat murky. Most satelites are being launched by the French or the Chinese and NASA has done its best to make use of those facilities as hard as possible.
If you want to research networking then give money to networking, if you want to research biochemistry give the money to biochemists. Do not give the money to a bunch of astrophyscists in the hope that they will solve your networking, fusion, and life sciences problems in their spare time. It does not work that way. The only way you can see a return on 'spinoff' research is if you have programs in place to identify and invest in them. NASA ditched all that years ago and there is zero chance of picking any of it up in the current budget cut environment.
There is no way that shutting down Hubble and spending the money on the space station is going to get even 1% of the science that Hubble has delivered already. The basic problem here is that NASA sees its mission as manned space exploration and that has very little to do with science.
There is one solution to the problem that has not been discussed much. There were two mirrors made, the bent one that is up there today and the reserve that was made (corectly) by Kodak for testing purposes. The Kodak mirror must still be in storage somewhere, there are duplicates of pretty much all the equipment. the parts could probably be bolted together to make a duplicate for $50 million or even less. The French, Russians and Chinese would probably put it into orbit for $50 million at commercial rates and given the cargo it could probably be done at no cost in return for telescope time.
The cost of Hubble is almost all in the design. Making a duplicate should be much, much cheaper.
True, but there should be some distinctive difference. Perhaps one should pick a character set as the "default" and have any non-default character displayed in red + flashing + bold?
I would prefer to have an anti-phishing plug in that looks for these types of tricks. If a domain name is all cyrilic then there is unlikely to be a problem. Its the domain names that only have one foreign character and a homologue at that that are a potential threat.
Are we just going to have this continuing debate in which every side is inaccurately reduced to one slashdot-blurb-sized sound bite?
But the starting point for the flamewar was Gosling doing precisely that.
I get really tired of security being thrown around to score idiotic debating points. That is what Gosling was doing, if he had bothered to do any research on the.NET security framework he would know that the security mechanisms prevent the type of mixing he was complaining about.
Don's description of the problem is completely straightforward. There are three possible cases and everyone agrees that Java supports two of those cases. C# adds another case because the designers did not want to have to abandon code management just to avoid the type system.
Yes, RISKS digest warned about this well over a year ago when IDN was being discussed.
And micr0soft.com was registered what? a decade or so ago?
This is NOT a new exploit, it is a problem that SSL CAs have known about for years. The internationalization has not changed the job of an SSL registrar which is checking that the company asking for a cert for paypal, owns the domain name AND is authentically registered as a legitimate company.
A homologue can do the first of these but not the second, not unless they want to be on the pointy end of a lawsuit. If you attempt to register paypal.com or paypal-billing.com or any other cousin domain and you are not Paypal Inc. a division of EBay you has just committed fraud. Moreover the SSL registration process should have verified your name and details when you registered.
The SSL cert on the schmoo site is not registered by a well known CA, far from it, the web site does not even show how to get a cert from them.
There is no risk here if everyone does their job properly. Folk reading slashdot in English might not see the need for international domain names, the 80-90% of Internet users that are not native English speakers have other opinions.
Trying to make the case that George W Bush and the republicans ruined the economy over the last four years is just flat-out ridiculous. Even ignoring the fundamental economic problems he inherited (again, the incredible loss of wealth after the dot coms went down in flames, for example), on 9/11/2001 billions of dollars were lost in addition to the people who were murdered.
Always got an excuse. This is the no responsibility crowd.
The biggest reason for the continued recession is that the economic stimulus package was nothing of the sort. All the money went to payoffs for rich campaign contri-bribe-tors.
Cutting the inheritance tax is not a financial stimumlus for the economy. The massive budget deficit is 66% due to the tax cuts for the wealthiest of the wealthy and the reason long term money is expensive is the markets can see what effect this is having on the deficit.
What's the difference between the Clinton economy and Bushs?
Glad you asked, 7 years of record growth vs 4 years of stagnation and decline. The economy has only recently got back to the point it was at when Clinton left office.
Bushs economy is adding jobs at a rate faster than any time in history.
Again totally untrue, during the Clinton economy the number of people looking for jobs actually declined. Under Bush it has risen and is still rising. The recent months of 'rising employment' only just keep pace with the rising workforce. Clinton did much, much better.
Clinton and Reagan both inherited recessions as well. Most recent US recessions have been over within two years. Bush still has not got the economy back on track despite having blown a huge hole in the budget with his tax cuts for the non-working rich.
I don't beleive in helping people who don't help themselves. The parts of the economy that are getting hit by outsourcing are the low wage states with low investment in education and no union rights. The parts of the US economy that are recovering are the Democrat states, New York, Massachusetts, California. Places where people have been willing to pay taxes to pay for good education for the past twenty plus years.
maybe the work itself doesn't seem hard (to you), but the conditions they have to suffer are really sweatshop-like
BBC had a report about it recently, a dozen workers stuffed into a small, dark room with computers and only a sleeping bag may sound LAN party style to us - but we can leave the party anytime, they can't
The fact is that most countries, even in the third world have employment laws that require better employment conditions than in the US. They may not always be observed but the fact that a company is in India does not automatically mean that the working conditions are like the black hole of Calcutta. There are sweatshops in New York City, they are not unique to the third world.
As for taking jobs from American workers, most of the lost jobs are in the red states. Sorry, but I would rather send my money abroad. If people can't tell the difference between the Clinton economy and the Dufus economy then they deserve everything they get.
The problem here is that it will be very difficult to take Gosling seriously when he talks about anything in future. This does not make me think any better of Sun.
Nobody is going to use C or C++ to write a completely new program under.NET. There are occasions where I might use C for something I wanted to make cross platform but no way would I ever go near C++.
Most people who are going to use the new.NET support are people who have legacy C programs and want to gradually transition them to the.NET base in stages. The makes a good deal of sense.
The other constituency is folk who are writing stuff that is almost but not quite at driver level.
Is plausable - except for the dominance of MCA as an architecture. PS/2 was already a market loser, without OS support.
Compaq and friends succesfully pushed EISA, while AST was moderately confusing things with "Cupid32". Others were doing the same.
Which is why OS/2 was doomed from the start. There was absolutely no way that Compaq and the rest of the industry was going to let IBM control diddly. They were going to go for a non IBM O/S regardless.
The importance of protected mode on the 286 is somewhat overstated. The problem was that Intel botched the 286, it was not usable. That is why Microsoft wanted IBM to develop OS/2 for the 386. But that could not happen because IBM had promised that the PC AT would be upgradeable.
Compaq and co did not care much about that, the cost difference between a 286 and a 386 was minor compared to the cost of allowing IBM to stick their ass in a vice and turn the screw. If windows had not run on the 286 then the whole market would have been delayed somewhat, but IBM would never have become the dominant player.
Compaq and the rest crowned Microsoft because they were not IBM and they did not compete in the hardware area.
I used to assume that Knuth simply acknowledged that CS had gotten too big to be summarized by a single introductory text. But it turns out that he's still working on it, even as the size of the project continues to grow. ("Volume 4" will actually be 4 volumes!)
I first met Knuth before I started my doctorate, that was almost twenty years ago. Volume 4 was already notoriously overdue at the time.
I don't think that Knuth's objective is suited to a book any more. The most appropriate form for an encyclopeadia would be a peer moderated Wiki. But that is not Knuth's point the most appropriate medium for describing algorithms is not assembler.
I think that the role of books in the field has to be different now. We do not need exhaustive catalogues of 'stuff'. What we need is the best, most relevant 'stuff'.
Take parsing for example. All students are still taught yacc and bottom up parsing as if it was the greatest thing. In fact it does not work for natural languages and it is too flexible for computer languages.
LISP does not have an LR(1) parser, it has a FSR with a minor extension to balance brackets. XML does not have an LR(1) parser either. In fact there is not much difference between XML and LISP when you look at parser design, the only differences are that the brackets get pointy and there is a strange need to repeat the first item of the list at the end...
What we really need is a book that shows students how they can apply the theory to actually do really useful stuff. The yacc approach teaches them to stay down at the level of the weeds, it does not teach building larger scale abstractions.
Call me crazy, but I think that in the richest country in the world, everyone should have access to affordable healthcare. Anyone care to argue this point?
That will soon be the case. Unless you hadn't noticed the GDP of India and China are both growing at a much faster rate than the US economy and are certain to continue that way. China has universal health care already and will overtake the US in about 15 years.
If you want to get snarky and say 'per capita' then there are several countries where due to oil or whatever people are richer on average.
Perhaps after Bush has trashed the US economy and made sure that the limits to US power are understood by everyone and folk are looking at how to repair the damage folk will start to ask why the ordinary person got to see so little of the wealth when the US had it. This process started in Japan after their economy hit the rocks ten years ago. The reason the economy has not pulled out is that the average Japanese is no longer prepared to be a workaholic in a rabbithutch. People are demanding a fair share of the wealth.
The Bush recession may end up being a good thing in the end for the American people even if it is likely to end up very bad for the rich.
Apple has some nice LCD monitors with the features you describe: they are 17- and 20-inch, they have wifi antennas, sound input and output, USB, FireWire and Ethernet ports, DVD burners... OK, let's just face it: PCs suck.
Thats a PC in the montor which is cheating. Sony has an almost identical PC.
I do not want to buy a fully integrated system. At the moment my monitors last for on average two machines. I expect to pay more for my next monitor than my next PC.
Even at Sony prices which are not cheap, I will spend less for my next system than an equivalent Mac.
You should not only fit a CD-ROM, but actually a DVD-RW combo. In other words, you have failed to fit a PC in Mac Mini, so comparing its speed or price is quite pointless. I hate to say it as a PC user, but the result of this experiment is clear: Mac: 1, PC: 0.
Only because it is not irritating the Macheads as much as people hoped.
If you want to talk seriously small PC then take a look at the Sony laptops, they have one that is so small you could mistake it for a mousemat.
I am sure that within 6 months we will see a lot of machines with this approximate size. I would much rather that someone came out with a seriously good machine that is slightly bigger and fanless.
I would like a machine that is about 1" high and a suitable form factor to serve as a base for an 18" LCD monitor, it should not be more than about 6" deep. That should be enough to pack in two 3.5" disks, a p4 processor, decent high end video and these days I consider WiFi and bluetooth to be basic requirements.
The thing that really anoys me about the PC form factor is the monitor cable. They are all way to thick and clunky and they only carry the monitor signal. I want sound, Usb and firewire to all plug into the same port, plus the monitor is probably a better site for the wifi antenae. What we really need is to get rid of the monitor cable altogether and have a fibre optic like they use for dolby digital.
If I could have all the peripheral plug in points built into the base of the monitor I don't much care what the box looks like. It can go in a cupboard.
Another kneejerk from a corpratist whose.sig says "Don't just save the whales - collect the whole set" in every post.
I have only been using the sig for a week now, this is the second post since I took out the one bashing Bush.
You're such a corporatist that you can't even conceive how a corporation can shut off network access to some features, to force an upgrade.
Nope, I just happen to have spent time with the OFX message set. If I connect up to Bank America from my home PC using Microsoft Money the system does not connect through Microsoft or Intuit. It connects direct, I would be surprised if Intuit was any different.
The Intuit spiel is pretty hard to make out, they could be withdrawing the features or they could be withdrawing support on the feature. From what I know of how those features work I don't think they can be disabled any more than Netscape could stop you connecting to slashdot. The bits don't go that way.
I think it rather amusing that despite the constant anti-Microsoft whine on slashdot, when you get down to it the alternatives that have beaten them in some market tend to be much worse. I don't use Intuit because the losers don't sell versions of tax cut more than three years old which is a real pain if you need to extract info from a five year old file. The copy protection fiasco and the general irritation factor of using tax cut last time round are the reason I use TaxCut instead.
Intuit are nowhere near as bad as Real Player (yet) but they look like they are getting there.
I would just prefer to see the information without the idiot editorial comment. There is absolutely nothing immoral or stupid about buying software, particularly when there is no alternative with the same functionality.
If software doesn't run on your OS and doesn't talk to your bank then the fact that it's open doesn't help much.
Michael's knee jerk comments are like one of those idiot 'anti-globalists' who blame every problem on corporations.
Sure there are some real issues with the fairness of world trade rules and poor countries are often at a major disadvantage to rich ones. But Michael's is just a knee jerk reaction with no analysis or thought: 'ah its the slashdot crowd so I need to do is say something nasty about proprietary code and everyone will cheer!'
It is not clear to me what has happened with Intuit because the story has come to us through at least two lossy channels. We don't have the original letter, only the complaint to Cory. Cory himself is an inaccurate scribe where this sort of thing is concerned.
I don't see how Intuit could remove previously supported features, particularly the bill pay feature where they are not even in the loop. What I suspect is going on here is that there is an ongoing move to align the older OFX communitation protocols to align them with modern protocols like XML and Web Services. When OFX came out XML was only begining. We certainly had not done XML Signature yet.
I suspect that the original message was a somewhat inaccurate message that appeared to come from Intuit of the form 'you need an upgrade'. Heck, the message may not even be from Intuit at all, it may just be a spammer trying to sell hijacked software.
Cripes. I read about it this morning and could see it wasn't even remotely likely as it would have to cut the mustard with the feds, i.e.:
And you think that Dufus would treat Fox News and Murdoch any less favorably than they treated their pals in Enron? Bush does not beleive in any restrictions on corporate power, Kenneth Lay is still free despite his role in the biggest fraud in US history.
Murdoch is a big investor in XM radio, the Republicans would like to control satelite radio before it can become a competitor for talk radio. Taking Howard Stern and Air America off the air and keeping them off is a big priority for rove and co.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like your French Govt. approved education omitted the fact that the French occupation of Spain was a miserable failure resisted tooth an nail by the Spanish. The term 'Guerilla' means 'little war' and refers to the Spanish resistance.
France was in no position to export anything from Spain during the occupation and certainly not bulk produce. The flow of material was the other way, from France into Spain.
As for France not suffering food availability problems, Napoleon's army which mostly starved to death during the retreat from Moscow would have disagreed if the sadistic dictator had not murdered them all.
Its a fair question, but I look at my largest discretionary spending first. My largest expense is my mortgage, my second largest childcare, I don't have any option in those cases. The largest elements in the US federal budget are payment on the debt and repayment of social security obligations. Those are not optional.
The 'war on terror' has two parts, a compulsory one and an optional one. Most reasonable people would agree that the number on priority should be eliminating Osama Bin Laden and Al Zawahiri. I have no complaint about the money spent there. The invasion of Iraq on the other hand has eliminated Saddam (good) and led to the election of an Iranian backed Shiite theocratic regime with no support from the Sunni areas. That is not a result I would consider to justify the $300 bn expense so far or the $600bn likely total cost.
If we want to apply space station logic to the war on terror though we could say that the cost is justified by the 'spinoffs' that the war will create. There is no field that has generated as much spinoff technology as war. The rapid developments in MSI and LSI in the mid 70s were funded by the pentagon as part of their electronic battlefield program developed in direct response to the US catastrophe in Vietnam.
This is a different issue. What I am saying here is evaluate the programs on their direct merits first.
Hubble has provided real direct benefits, albeit mainly in the cultural field. We know more about the origins of the universe, we are able to better understand basic physics.
The Appolo program produced real direct political benefits. JFK funded the program for one reason, to spend the USSR into the ground. His objective was achieved, the USSR was broken psychologically in 1969, it just continued moving for another two decades.
There were certainly some spin offs from Appolo, but the same effects could have been achieved for far less by direct investment in research into the relevant fields.
The 'spinoff' effect can work both ways. I work in computer security, it has taken us two decades to escape from the seriously warped views that entered the field because early funding came almost exclusively from military contracts. One reason that the Internet is insecure is that the security models being applied are completely wrong for its current application.
That is bogus, there were plenty of applications that needed compact logic. The Air Force was a much bigger consumer of MSI and LSI than NASA.
What I am denouncing here is the idea that there is something unique to space exploration in generating spinoffs. All (good) science should produce results in other fields.
Given the choice of Hubble or the space station it is very clear which will produce more science, Hubble is the winner by miles. Hubble is providing more data about the early state of the universe than any other source. The occupants of the space station are doing no experiments at all, they are just keeping the station running.
Thank goodness you were in no way shape or form in charge of any basic research programme.
That really is a funny statement. I don't regard the space station as research of any kind. It is at best an engineering challenge.
But you are completely wrong about influence on funding.
NASA costs $15 billion per year to run. Thats rather a lot of money for a government with a $500 billion deficit to be spending on feel good programs.
The only way that the Mars trip becomes viable is with a space elevator. The shuttle and the space station are irrelevant. All they are doing is finding out what we know already, people's bodies start to deteriorate significantly after six months or so in space. And that is within the protection of the earth's magnetic field.
To get to Mars we need a ship with artificial gravity and there is no way we can lift one using conventional rocketry.
Dick Feynman once pointed out that if you take any seriously complex engineering task that is done on an infrequent basis it is very difficult to get the success rate above 98% or so. The sheer number of places where you have an opportunity for error is immense. So far we have had about 100 shuttle launches and the rate of failure is 2%. If you do the calculation in terms of failures per mile flown you arrive at a figure that is pretty much comparable to commercial airline flights.
I don't think that there is much chance that the shuttle will ever launch again. The degree of political risk is huge, so far they are talking about May/June but its one of those dates that just keeps slipping a month each month.
Hah! see my other post, Teflon was invented in 1938, before the Manhattan project started.
When you push the state of the art you never know what you will develop. IC based computers where developed for the Apollo program. Why never before? because no needed computer that small before. I mean why would you need a computer smaller than a desk or even a room?
The USSR did not develop ICs and still put rockets into space. In fact the ICs did not become important in space until after the Appolo program. They were pretty finiky until the 1970s.
Kilby was funded by Texas Instruments, Noyce by Fairchild. Both companies were working for the Pentagon, not NASA. The first applications for the ICs were in the US Airforce and the minuteman missile (1962). There is a big difference between using an IC in a missile where it has to work for no more than a few minutes and using one in a satelite or such.
There are certainly links between research fields but space is certainly not unique in having a spinoff effect and you do not get spinoffs without also doing basic research in the area in question. The World Wide Web put together ideas from twenty years of formal comp sci research with a different perspective to reach the breakthrough.
I don't see any reason why we should expect that diverting funds from worthwhile science like Hubble to worthless science like the space station is going to result in a net gain through the spinoff effect. Space has been enormously well funded for fifty years. Sending people to the moon does not create any seriously interesting new challenges.
Teflon was the product of research into friction-free plastics by Dupont in 1938. It was not a spinnoff from the space race, in fact it predates NASA.
In a DuPont laboratory back in 1938, Roy J. Plunkett was researching refrigeration gases. He had connected a cylinder of freon 1114, or tetrafluoroethylene, to his equipment, but nothing came out. Rather than throw the cylinder away, he weighed it and found that the actual weight exceeded the figure on the target weight. So he cut the cylinder in half and saw a white, waxy substance he later identified as a polymer of tetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), popularly known as the DuPont trademark Teflon®:. Had he not been wise enough to investigate what was in the cylinder, this Fluorocarbon resin might never have been discovered. i>
So sorry, there is not one part of the fable that is accurate. NASA did not invent teflon, did not invent the idea of applying it to machinery and cerainly not to saucepans.
Possibly, I suspect that it is not completely functional and the main mirror may not be the optically accurate one made at a cost of $15 million or so.
But it would be a good starting point. I'll bet that even the Smithsonian would rather the thing was put to decent use.
The main problem is the mirror and assembling the whole thing in a dust free environment.
On the subject of plans, the ISS is a completely different botch up. The Hubble plans are really well understood because hundreds of copies were made, checked and rechecked when we were going over the whole saga of the spherical aberation in the mirror.
This is trotted out every time that the space program needs justifying and guess what, its bogus. Non stick frying pans were being developed during the Napoleonic wars when the English embargo prevented the French getting their hands on enough cooking grease. Hence LeCreuset.
It gets even wobblier when you get to the old CERN home of the Web stuff. The folk who go on about that don't mention that CERN never assigned any staff to the Web project directly other than Tim during the time Tim was at CERN. There were three students who worked with Tim and another four people from another group who did the Web because they beleived in it. When it came to setting up the Web consortium the CERN director sent to bat for the Web project EU grant wise told the committee that the priority at CERN was physics and the Web was not considered important.
Even when you get to communications satelites the story is somewhat murky. Most satelites are being launched by the French or the Chinese and NASA has done its best to make use of those facilities as hard as possible.
If you want to research networking then give money to networking, if you want to research biochemistry give the money to biochemists. Do not give the money to a bunch of astrophyscists in the hope that they will solve your networking, fusion, and life sciences problems in their spare time. It does not work that way. The only way you can see a return on 'spinoff' research is if you have programs in place to identify and invest in them. NASA ditched all that years ago and there is zero chance of picking any of it up in the current budget cut environment.
There is no way that shutting down Hubble and spending the money on the space station is going to get even 1% of the science that Hubble has delivered already. The basic problem here is that NASA sees its mission as manned space exploration and that has very little to do with science.
There is one solution to the problem that has not been discussed much. There were two mirrors made, the bent one that is up there today and the reserve that was made (corectly) by Kodak for testing purposes. The Kodak mirror must still be in storage somewhere, there are duplicates of pretty much all the equipment. the parts could probably be bolted together to make a duplicate for $50 million or even less. The French, Russians and Chinese would probably put it into orbit for $50 million at commercial rates and given the cargo it could probably be done at no cost in return for telescope time.
The cost of Hubble is almost all in the design. Making a duplicate should be much, much cheaper.
I would prefer to have an anti-phishing plug in that looks for these types of tricks. If a domain name is all cyrilic then there is unlikely to be a problem. Its the domain names that only have one foreign character and a homologue at that that are a potential threat.
But the starting point for the flamewar was Gosling doing precisely that.
I get really tired of security being thrown around to score idiotic debating points. That is what Gosling was doing, if he had bothered to do any research on the .NET security framework he would know that the security mechanisms prevent the type of mixing he was complaining about.
Don's description of the problem is completely straightforward. There are three possible cases and everyone agrees that Java supports two of those cases. C# adds another case because the designers did not want to have to abandon code management just to avoid the type system.
And micr0soft.com was registered what? a decade or so ago?
This is NOT a new exploit, it is a problem that SSL CAs have known about for years. The internationalization has not changed the job of an SSL registrar which is checking that the company asking for a cert for paypal, owns the domain name AND is authentically registered as a legitimate company.
A homologue can do the first of these but not the second, not unless they want to be on the pointy end of a lawsuit. If you attempt to register paypal.com or paypal-billing.com or any other cousin domain and you are not Paypal Inc. a division of EBay you has just committed fraud. Moreover the SSL registration process should have verified your name and details when you registered.
The SSL cert on the schmoo site is not registered by a well known CA, far from it, the web site does not even show how to get a cert from them.
There is no risk here if everyone does their job properly. Folk reading slashdot in English might not see the need for international domain names, the 80-90% of Internet users that are not native English speakers have other opinions.
Always got an excuse. This is the no responsibility crowd.
The biggest reason for the continued recession is that the economic stimulus package was nothing of the sort. All the money went to payoffs for rich campaign contri-bribe-tors.
Cutting the inheritance tax is not a financial stimumlus for the economy. The massive budget deficit is 66% due to the tax cuts for the wealthiest of the wealthy and the reason long term money is expensive is the markets can see what effect this is having on the deficit.
Glad you asked, 7 years of record growth vs 4 years of stagnation and decline. The economy has only recently got back to the point it was at when Clinton left office.
Bushs economy is adding jobs at a rate faster than any time in history.
Again totally untrue, during the Clinton economy the number of people looking for jobs actually declined. Under Bush it has risen and is still rising. The recent months of 'rising employment' only just keep pace with the rising workforce. Clinton did much, much better.
Clinton and Reagan both inherited recessions as well. Most recent US recessions have been over within two years. Bush still has not got the economy back on track despite having blown a huge hole in the budget with his tax cuts for the non-working rich.
I don't beleive in helping people who don't help themselves. The parts of the economy that are getting hit by outsourcing are the low wage states with low investment in education and no union rights. The parts of the US economy that are recovering are the Democrat states, New York, Massachusetts, California. Places where people have been willing to pay taxes to pay for good education for the past twenty plus years.
The fact is that most countries, even in the third world have employment laws that require better employment conditions than in the US. They may not always be observed but the fact that a company is in India does not automatically mean that the working conditions are like the black hole of Calcutta. There are sweatshops in New York City, they are not unique to the third world.
As for taking jobs from American workers, most of the lost jobs are in the red states. Sorry, but I would rather send my money abroad. If people can't tell the difference between the Clinton economy and the Dufus economy then they deserve everything they get.
Nobody is going to use C or C++ to write a completely new program under .NET. There are occasions where I might use C for something I wanted to make cross platform but no way would I ever go near C++.
Most people who are going to use the new .NET support are people who have legacy C programs and want to gradually transition them to the .NET base in stages. The makes a good deal of sense.
The other constituency is folk who are writing stuff that is almost but not quite at driver level.
Which is why OS/2 was doomed from the start. There was absolutely no way that Compaq and the rest of the industry was going to let IBM control diddly. They were going to go for a non IBM O/S regardless.
The importance of protected mode on the 286 is somewhat overstated. The problem was that Intel botched the 286, it was not usable. That is why Microsoft wanted IBM to develop OS/2 for the 386. But that could not happen because IBM had promised that the PC AT would be upgradeable.
Compaq and co did not care much about that, the cost difference between a 286 and a 386 was minor compared to the cost of allowing IBM to stick their ass in a vice and turn the screw. If windows had not run on the 286 then the whole market would have been delayed somewhat, but IBM would never have become the dominant player.
Compaq and the rest crowned Microsoft because they were not IBM and they did not compete in the hardware area.
I first met Knuth before I started my doctorate, that was almost twenty years ago. Volume 4 was already notoriously overdue at the time.
I don't think that Knuth's objective is suited to a book any more. The most appropriate form for an encyclopeadia would be a peer moderated Wiki. But that is not Knuth's point the most appropriate medium for describing algorithms is not assembler.
I think that the role of books in the field has to be different now. We do not need exhaustive catalogues of 'stuff'. What we need is the best, most relevant 'stuff'.
Take parsing for example. All students are still taught yacc and bottom up parsing as if it was the greatest thing. In fact it does not work for natural languages and it is too flexible for computer languages.
LISP does not have an LR(1) parser, it has a FSR with a minor extension to balance brackets. XML does not have an LR(1) parser either. In fact there is not much difference between XML and LISP when you look at parser design, the only differences are that the brackets get pointy and there is a strange need to repeat the first item of the list at the end...
What we really need is a book that shows students how they can apply the theory to actually do really useful stuff. The yacc approach teaches them to stay down at the level of the weeds, it does not teach building larger scale abstractions.
That will soon be the case. Unless you hadn't noticed the GDP of India and China are both growing at a much faster rate than the US economy and are certain to continue that way. China has universal health care already and will overtake the US in about 15 years.
If you want to get snarky and say 'per capita' then there are several countries where due to oil or whatever people are richer on average.
Perhaps after Bush has trashed the US economy and made sure that the limits to US power are understood by everyone and folk are looking at how to repair the damage folk will start to ask why the ordinary person got to see so little of the wealth when the US had it. This process started in Japan after their economy hit the rocks ten years ago. The reason the economy has not pulled out is that the average Japanese is no longer prepared to be a workaholic in a rabbithutch. People are demanding a fair share of the wealth.
The Bush recession may end up being a good thing in the end for the American people even if it is likely to end up very bad for the rich.
Thats a PC in the montor which is cheating. Sony has an almost identical PC.
I do not want to buy a fully integrated system. At the moment my monitors last for on average two machines. I expect to pay more for my next monitor than my next PC.
Even at Sony prices which are not cheap, I will spend less for my next system than an equivalent Mac.
Only because it is not irritating the Macheads as much as people hoped.
If you want to talk seriously small PC then take a look at the Sony laptops, they have one that is so small you could mistake it for a mousemat.
I am sure that within 6 months we will see a lot of machines with this approximate size. I would much rather that someone came out with a seriously good machine that is slightly bigger and fanless.
I would like a machine that is about 1" high and a suitable form factor to serve as a base for an 18" LCD monitor, it should not be more than about 6" deep. That should be enough to pack in two 3.5" disks, a p4 processor, decent high end video and these days I consider WiFi and bluetooth to be basic requirements.
The thing that really anoys me about the PC form factor is the monitor cable. They are all way to thick and clunky and they only carry the monitor signal. I want sound, Usb and firewire to all plug into the same port, plus the monitor is probably a better site for the wifi antenae. What we really need is to get rid of the monitor cable altogether and have a fibre optic like they use for dolby digital.
If I could have all the peripheral plug in points built into the base of the monitor I don't much care what the box looks like. It can go in a cupboard.
I have only been using the sig for a week now, this is the second post since I took out the one bashing Bush.
You're such a corporatist that you can't even conceive how a corporation can shut off network access to some features, to force an upgrade.
Nope, I just happen to have spent time with the OFX message set. If I connect up to Bank America from my home PC using Microsoft Money the system does not connect through Microsoft or Intuit. It connects direct, I would be surprised if Intuit was any different.
The Intuit spiel is pretty hard to make out, they could be withdrawing the features or they could be withdrawing support on the feature. From what I know of how those features work I don't think they can be disabled any more than Netscape could stop you connecting to slashdot. The bits don't go that way.
I think it rather amusing that despite the constant anti-Microsoft whine on slashdot, when you get down to it the alternatives that have beaten them in some market tend to be much worse. I don't use Intuit because the losers don't sell versions of tax cut more than three years old which is a real pain if you need to extract info from a five year old file. The copy protection fiasco and the general irritation factor of using tax cut last time round are the reason I use TaxCut instead.
Intuit are nowhere near as bad as Real Player (yet) but they look like they are getting there.
I would just prefer to see the information without the idiot editorial comment. There is absolutely nothing immoral or stupid about buying software, particularly when there is no alternative with the same functionality.
The patch may be quick. It will still take a long time to deploy.
No, Windows has had automatic update for years now. Every machine I have is fully current with patches.
What would be the proportion of Linux systems running with heap protection?
Michael's knee jerk comments are like one of those idiot 'anti-globalists' who blame every problem on corporations.
Sure there are some real issues with the fairness of world trade rules and poor countries are often at a major disadvantage to rich ones. But Michael's is just a knee jerk reaction with no analysis or thought: 'ah its the slashdot crowd so I need to do is say something nasty about proprietary code and everyone will cheer!'
It is not clear to me what has happened with Intuit because the story has come to us through at least two lossy channels. We don't have the original letter, only the complaint to Cory. Cory himself is an inaccurate scribe where this sort of thing is concerned.
I don't see how Intuit could remove previously supported features, particularly the bill pay feature where they are not even in the loop. What I suspect is going on here is that there is an ongoing move to align the older OFX communitation protocols to align them with modern protocols like XML and Web Services. When OFX came out XML was only begining. We certainly had not done XML Signature yet.
I suspect that the original message was a somewhat inaccurate message that appeared to come from Intuit of the form 'you need an upgrade'. Heck, the message may not even be from Intuit at all, it may just be a spammer trying to sell hijacked software.
And you think that Dufus would treat Fox News and Murdoch any less favorably than they treated their pals in Enron? Bush does not beleive in any restrictions on corporate power, Kenneth Lay is still free despite his role in the biggest fraud in US history.
Murdoch is a big investor in XM radio, the Republicans would like to control satelite radio before it can become a competitor for talk radio. Taking Howard Stern and Air America off the air and keeping them off is a big priority for rove and co.