The only reason why Launch is expensive is because we use a launch vehicle exactly once. the Shuttle never had a chance of lowering the costs since it recycled all of the wrong parts.
The Shuttle recycled the most expensive part - and that was the *wrong* part? The mind boggles at the amount of doublethink required to reach that conclusion.
OTOH, If grasshopper is successful AND SpaceX can get at least 10 launches per F9 LV, then we will likely see launch costs of below $.5-1M / Tonne to LEO. At that point, Space is simply a new frontier. And yes, we will see loads of needs for coders.
Translated that reads: "When confronted with facts that run counter to my beliefs, I'll just repeat my beliefs again."
The commercial aviation business is much, much bigger than space is likely to be for decades - and it's a tiny specialty. This is reality, deal with it.
BTW, I am not certain how old you are, but, I was using the internet back in the 80s.
I know teenagers that were using the 'net back in the 80's. So your attempt at impressing fails massively. Not that having access to the net back then marks you as anything special. Implying that it does so does mark you so - but not in a good way.
And for reference, later this year I'll pass the half-century mark.
At that time, if you told business ppl that MS and the internet would become fundaemental to their future, they would laugh you out. They all thought that it would remain small specialties.
Trying to compare the future of space coders to consumer and business coders when the latter market is literally millions of times as large? That's laughable, and clueless.
Yahoo has a pretty healthy bank account and revenue stream, as anyone who actually read their financials (as opposed to parroting how "Yahoo is dying") knows.
Derek, you, myself and others have been closely following space for sometime. You know that if Bigelow gets going, and SpaceX really gets launch cheap, then we are going to the moon and mars SOON.
Maybe, probably not. When launch gets cheap, [non professional] people will finally realize what professionals knew all along - vehicles and equipment designed to survive and operate in extreme and unusual environments are inherently expensive. (There's a reason why MIL-SPEC gear is more expensive than consumer grade equipment.) The Moon and Mars (and LEO for that matter) aren't anything like opening up the new world - they're Antarctica. Difficult and dangerous to get to, requiring extensive and expensive support from 'home', and utterly lacking in a supporting economic case beyond wealthy tourists.
And yes, there will be LOADS of coding needed.
I never claimed otherwise - only that the size of the field is going to far smaller than people think. Specialized niche programming fields always are. (It's a particular flaw of many application programmers that they believe they can code anything without deep knowledge of the problem domain. They're like MBA's that way.)
Nobody will want something like Windows creating the blue screams of death. They will want an OS that works. Period.
Again, I never claimed otherwise. But it's very likely the OS won't resemble anything the uneducated masses think of as an OS. In most real world situations like that, the user never even *sees* the OS.
It's possible that he's not just thinking about his high school but, in the long run, maintaining downloads for the rest of his country's schools so that everything is configured for their locality, language, needs and hardware.
There's absolutely zero evidence of that - and abundant evidence otherwise.
I mean, the costs drop dramatically when you can provide very simple commands and you don't need to enter a product key or worry about updates from a company but rather it can be all administered by one smart kid/staff at the school?
In a world where one smart kid/staff couldn't administer a Windows system, that would be a reasonable question.
Yes, heaven forbid they learn how the system works and learn how to modify it and build on it.
Let's be real here - you don't need to know how a system works to use it. Not to mention, other than writing a few very basic scripts 99.99999% of those kids will ever modify or build on the system. Exposing them to a non standard system is like teaching kids in the US to drive on right hand drive cars on the right hand side of the road. It's ridiculous and stupid, and does nothing but handicap them to no good end.
If you don't like Open Source then don't use it. Simple? Those of us who want to learn will continue using it.
If that were the choice here - I'd happily agree with you. But it's not.
. Next time you want to move to a third-world country and provide for people who often have next to nothing, we'll then pay attention to how you think it should be done.
The poster isn't moving to a third world country - he's airdropping a bunch of computers and moving on with his life. He seemingly doesn't give a rat fuck about whether his setup is actually useful, or can be maintained locally, or what they kids can or will do with it - he's more concerned with spreading his gospel.
I am a firm believer in the Open Source philosophy so proprietary software is not on my radar."
I stopped reading right there. Setting up a computer lab is a good question for Ask Slashdot. Setting up a philosophical/religious indoctrination center is not.
Probably not. If people looked in 2D, then yeah, I could see it, but in reality your eyes have a limited ability to keep multiple things in focus at once. We don't care about that for the most part because we're able to change focus very quickly.
That's a long solved problem [for HUD's], just make the display focus at infinity - that way you don't have to refocus. (Seriously folks, stop and think a minute... while Google Glass is new, HUD's aren't. These are old, long solved problems.)
Also, relying on just one OS puts you at the mercy of any latent bug in that specific system. Having a diversity of OSes in use mitigates that problem.
Having a diversity of OSes puts you at the mercy of random and subtle bugs in one OS that require customizing either the OS or the code. (Which customization carriers further hazards of it's own.) Relying on one OS mitigates that problem.
I think it could do great things for establishing accountability.
Dream on. The problem with "accountability" isn't that they are in Washington - it's that most people don't pay attention except to campaign and part spin, and otherwise don't really care so long as their district gets the bacon.
It's all a simple matter of area: With an electric vehicle my entire transportation energy usage can pretty much be covered with a small rooftop solar system. To do it with biofuels would require acres of space.
I hope you're talking about the rooftop of your house... because the rooftop of your car isn't anywhere even close to powering much more than your radio.
That being said - if your house solar array is powering your car, that means you're drawing power from the grid for your house. Or driving so very little or consuming so little power at your house that you're a pretty much a statistical anomaly way the hell out on the end of the bell curve. (Charitably assuming you're not just completely clueless.)
Either way, as is usually the case, you aren't the world. Not everyone lives in a sunny clime. Or in low density single family housing (where there's a lot of rooftop per individual). The space requirements have to be solved not just for you - but for *everyone*. Your 'solution' doesn't do this.
Outrage sells just as much as sex - and since there's no nudity on Slashdot... outrage is the only demographic left to pander to. Seriously, you've never noticed the number of badly written summaries and stories published seemingly just to fan the flames and provide an opportunity for a Two Minute Hate?
People are just pointing out that Google has a pattern of introducing services as trial balloons, and then discontinuing them a few years later if it doesn't fit into their overalls strategy.
What this is really about is a banker-government that will do anything and everything possible to prevent alternatives to their fiat + fractional reserve monopoly on money.
The problem with your thesis is this - it's utterly and completely wrong. Subject to a few simple rules, the government doesn't give a shit whether you conduct your business in dollars, bitcoins, or mason jars full of hamster poop.
Anyone can playact a childish form of appearing intelligent by asking stupid questions. Real intelligence appears in the form of making a case for one's positions.
The problem with all this is that "money laundering" generally comes from activities which are victimless crimes, and are therefore not a crime because they don't affect anyone but the person doing them.
Yeah - that money from a protection racket or from running a prostitution ring or from embezzling... no victims there. Or to put it another way, if you think ill-gotten gains only come from money that appears from thin air, you're either *very* innocent about how the world works or utterly and completely clueless.
Bit Coin works even if there are no "firms" to issue or exchange. Therefore, there is no one to regulate.
On the contrary. Just because there is no one 'issuing' or 'exchanging' Bitcoins doesn't mean that businesses and individuals using Bitcoins can't be regulated. Like MtGox and the other Bitcoin exchanges, or companies that accept Bitcoins in lieu of US dollars for goods and services.
In some ways, this may also pave the way for wider acceptance of Bitcoins because more traditional companies are wary of accepting alternate currencies because they don't know how they'll be treated under the law.
Similarly - How on earth do you survive in modern times without knowing how to Google or having the common sense to ask for help?
The author is a complete ass, and this crappy "review" disinclines me to listen to anything else he has to say. Cooking is like any other skill, you can't follow instructions robotically and expect to come out with an edible result - you have to think and you have to practice. Yes, you'll screw stuff up, but you won't learn without trying.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure. So long as you're willing to accept the sharp and extreme limitations that come with that remote camera.
[[Citation Needed]]
Advertising in the sky is old, old news... planes have been skywriting and towing banners for decades.
The Shuttle recycled the most expensive part - and that was the *wrong* part? The mind boggles at the amount of doublethink required to reach that conclusion.
Translated that reads: "When confronted with facts that run counter to my beliefs, I'll just repeat my beliefs again."
The commercial aviation business is much, much bigger than space is likely to be for decades - and it's a tiny specialty. This is reality, deal with it.
I know teenagers that were using the 'net back in the 80's. So your attempt at impressing fails massively. Not that having access to the net back then marks you as anything special. Implying that it does so does mark you so - but not in a good way.
And for reference, later this year I'll pass the half-century mark.
Trying to compare the future of space coders to consumer and business coders when the latter market is literally millions of times as large? That's laughable, and clueless.
You might go study some history before posting arrant nonsense.
Reliability, maintainability, installation, liability, insurance, service... pretty much everything in fact.
Yahoo has a pretty healthy bank account and revenue stream, as anyone who actually read their financials (as opposed to parroting how "Yahoo is dying") knows.
Maybe, probably not. When launch gets cheap, [non professional] people will finally realize what professionals knew all along - vehicles and equipment designed to survive and operate in extreme and unusual environments are inherently expensive. (There's a reason why MIL-SPEC gear is more expensive than consumer grade equipment.) The Moon and Mars (and LEO for that matter) aren't anything like opening up the new world - they're Antarctica. Difficult and dangerous to get to, requiring extensive and expensive support from 'home', and utterly lacking in a supporting economic case beyond wealthy tourists.
I never claimed otherwise - only that the size of the field is going to far smaller than people think. Specialized niche programming fields always are. (It's a particular flaw of many application programmers that they believe they can code anything without deep knowledge of the problem domain. They're like MBA's that way.)
Again, I never claimed otherwise. But it's very likely the OS won't resemble anything the uneducated masses think of as an OS. In most real world situations like that, the user never even *sees* the OS.
There's absolutely zero evidence of that - and abundant evidence otherwise.
In a world where one smart kid/staff couldn't administer a Windows system, that would be a reasonable question.
Let's be real here - you don't need to know how a system works to use it. Not to mention, other than writing a few very basic scripts 99.99999% of those kids will ever modify or build on the system. Exposing them to a non standard system is like teaching kids in the US to drive on right hand drive cars on the right hand side of the road. It's ridiculous and stupid, and does nothing but handicap them to no good end.
If that were the choice here - I'd happily agree with you. But it's not.
The poster isn't moving to a third world country - he's airdropping a bunch of computers and moving on with his life. He seemingly doesn't give a rat fuck about whether his setup is actually useful, or can be maintained locally, or what they kids can or will do with it - he's more concerned with spreading his gospel.
I am a firm believer in the Open Source philosophy so proprietary software is not on my radar."
I stopped reading right there. Setting up a computer lab is a good question for Ask Slashdot. Setting up a philosophical/religious indoctrination center is not.
That's a long solved problem [for HUD's], just make the display focus at infinity - that way you don't have to refocus. (Seriously folks, stop and think a minute... while Google Glass is new, HUD's aren't. These are old, long solved problems.)
Having a diversity of OSes puts you at the mercy of random and subtle bugs in one OS that require customizing either the OS or the code. (Which customization carriers further hazards of it's own.) Relying on one OS mitigates that problem.
TANSTAAFL.
Even if it went up an order of magnitude... you're still only talking a few thousand jobs. Not something I'd want to build a career plan on.
Dream on. The problem with "accountability" isn't that they are in Washington - it's that most people don't pay attention except to campaign and part spin, and otherwise don't really care so long as their district gets the bacon.
I hope you're talking about the rooftop of your house... because the rooftop of your car isn't anywhere even close to powering much more than your radio.
That being said - if your house solar array is powering your car, that means you're drawing power from the grid for your house. Or driving so very little or consuming so little power at your house that you're a pretty much a statistical anomaly way the hell out on the end of the bell curve. (Charitably assuming you're not just completely clueless.)
Either way, as is usually the case, you aren't the world. Not everyone lives in a sunny clime. Or in low density single family housing (where there's a lot of rooftop per individual). The space requirements have to be solved not just for you - but for *everyone*. Your 'solution' doesn't do this.
Outrage sells just as much as sex - and since there's no nudity on Slashdot... outrage is the only demographic left to pander to. Seriously, you've never noticed the number of badly written summaries and stories published seemingly just to fan the flames and provide an opportunity for a Two Minute Hate?
LOL - nice analogy and nice callbacks to Slashdot of yore! :)
Google has a strategy?
*sigh* You're right of course. But the author is still a jackass for pandering to that.
The problem with your thesis is this - it's utterly and completely wrong. Subject to a few simple rules, the government doesn't give a shit whether you conduct your business in dollars, bitcoins, or mason jars full of hamster poop.
Anyone can playact a childish form of appearing intelligent by asking stupid questions. Real intelligence appears in the form of making a case for one's positions.
Yeah - that money from a protection racket or from running a prostitution ring or from embezzling... no victims there. Or to put it another way, if you think ill-gotten gains only come from money that appears from thin air, you're either *very* innocent about how the world works or utterly and completely clueless.
On the contrary. Just because there is no one 'issuing' or 'exchanging' Bitcoins doesn't mean that businesses and individuals using Bitcoins can't be regulated. Like MtGox and the other Bitcoin exchanges, or companies that accept Bitcoins in lieu of US dollars for goods and services.
In some ways, this may also pave the way for wider acceptance of Bitcoins because more traditional companies are wary of accepting alternate currencies because they don't know how they'll be treated under the law.
Similarly - How on earth do you survive in modern times without knowing how to Google or having the common sense to ask for help?
The author is a complete ass, and this crappy "review" disinclines me to listen to anything else he has to say. Cooking is like any other skill, you can't follow instructions robotically and expect to come out with an edible result - you have to think and you have to practice. Yes, you'll screw stuff up, but you won't learn without trying.