I think there is something you haven't considered - with a secure distribution channel, child porn can and will be produced on a comercial basis.
Which is precisely what Freenet doesn't do - provide a secure distribution channel. There is something you haven't considered - a distribution channel is a two way pipe. Not only must data flow to the consumer, but payments must flow to the producer.
McDonalds has gotten away from their core business long ago by offering too much on the menu. So, they don't have your burger, fries and drink ready when you arrive.
Largely because consumers won't tolerate food that's been sitting under infra-reds for half an hour anymore.
Also, the drive in window takes 20 minutes to get to, the driveway up to it is always full.
That depends greatly on a) which store you go to, and b) when you go to it. The McDonald's closest to my house only has a line wait over 5 mins during the 'rush' times (lunch and dinner), which is pretty much true over all the fast food places around here.
Not enough employees on the production line, those that are there are lost in the details of the now-complicated menu.
If you actually study the production process - you'll find the complexity isn't really there. A small number of basic ingredients are combined in multiple ways to make multiple menu items.
Splunk is promising that the wiki is completely vendor neutral, and can be compared to Wikipedia,
And from my POV, this isn't a point in it's favor.
Information that is at best incorrect or misleading, and at worst outright wrong lingers for months in the 'pedia, as do articles that are incomplete. Hardly what I want in a tech resource.
There are no flaming fanboys who defend, say, Wusthoff kitchen knives, regardless of the quality of those tools.
You should hang around chefs and serious foodies more often - as there is nothing they get more passionate about than their knives. The last time I visited my sister (a professional chef) we went to lunch with some of her friends (chefs, culinary students and instructors) and spent two hours discussing nothing but the merits and drawbacks of various brands of knives.
I come in for some derison because my (home) kitchen is an all Forschner shop - while they are bargain knives, they are the best in that price range and quite comparable with far more expensive knives. Most importantly - they fit my hand like they were made for me personally. I can do more with a Forschner than I can with a Wusthoff or other expensive brand - so I've traded or given away all my other knives.
That said... it seems to be this is a classic case of mass-induced elitism. I don't think the Amazon guy was off in his line of questioning. What's good for Microsoft or Sun might not be for Amazon or eBay, yet Scoble and his friend come across as the quitenssential "it" boys, giggling and stomping their little feet because the hick across the table doesn't know what the small fork is for - as if his life depended on it.
Indeed. Scoble and Isreal both gush over how other people fell at their feet to recieve their pearls of wisdom - and then heap scorn on Amazon for daring to question that wisdom. (Scoble's entry in particular sounds like a spoiled little child.)
I suppose if you live in that "blogosphere" long enough it must look to you like everyone is blogging and, more importantly, that everyone should be doing it. I don't think that's the case.
That's why I've steadily reduced my consumption of blogs over the past year or so - far too many once great blogs have become nothing but a mutual admiration and name dropping society. They spend more time writing about and linking to each other than they do about the topic their blog is nominally about - and the quality of the writing and thought seems to drop substantially once the blogger becomes part of the 'inner circle'.
I've found many corporate attempts at blogging to be underwhelming and downright stupid - if you don't "get it" then just don't do it at all. I doubt many millions of Amazon customers are going to decide one day that they won't spend a dime online anymore because Amazon doesn't have a blog.
The blogerati vastly overestimate their importance in the scheme of things I find. What kind of mindset does it take to tell a company that gets more page hits in an hour than you get in a month that they are doing something wrong?
For your information, you claimed no FACT, you made an ALLEGATION. I realize that to the Left, an allegation is as good as a fact if it supports your agenda, but the real world sees it differently.
A fascinating claim - since I'm about as conservative as they come. (More on that below.)
Here are FACTS: The huge unemployment you claim is the fault of Wal-Mart does not exist.
Did I claim there was 'huge unemployment'? No. I stated the simple, and widely known and well documented, fact that Wal-Mart moving into town leads to the loss of jobs as other retailers, especially mom 'n pops are forced out of business.
We are at "full employment" as it has been defined for the last seventy years (i.e. at or less than 5% unemployment--only the "hard-core unemployable" are still sitting around doing nothing).
Of course the goverment has jiggered the method of counting who is and who is not counted as 'employed' and 'unemployed' multiple times. (Not to mention the fact that the unemployment rate has only recently *dropped* to 5.1% The average over the last decade exceeds 5%.)
Meanwhile, the socialist utopias which your type holds up to the rest of us as the ideal, namely the countries of Old Europe, haven't been below 10% unemployment in more than ten years--and in fact, the "richest" of the EU countries, Germany and France, are above 15%, with no let-up in sight.
Another fascinating claim - as I didn't say anything about a 'utopia'. Equally fascinating is your attempt, again, to label me based on no evidence but that you've fabricated in your own mind. I'm about as far from Socialist as you can get - on that axis of the political chart I'm much more of a rational anarchist.
Okay, so the FACTS show that you are full of shit. Smell it?
What I smell is the smoke you are blowing. Your original post is wrong, and your reply managed to be even more wrong. (A significant accomplishment for which I give you what little credit you are do.)
Derek, I was a long time lurker in sci.space.* & a few other newsgroups where I valued your input. Ever since usenet more or less dried up & withered away, I have been wondering where all the interesting people (Henry Spencer, Brian Trosko, Frank Cray, Mike Combs, Cary Sublette, Scott Lowther, I could go on & on) went. Is there a website regrouping any of that old community that you know of?
Most people interested in serious discussion avoid the web like the plague, as it is hideously unsuited for such purposes.
Many of the people you list above still post and participate on Usenet. If you get a real newsreader and learn to use killfiles and how to ignore threads, it's quite pleasant place. (Web forums provide no such functionality, among their many other lacks.)
Whatever. The point is that "the market for quality baked goods" isn't able to be manipulated by you or a million "activists" with bumper stickers and signs.
The point is - you made a claim, but the facts fail to back the claim up.
It's hilarious how all your "remedies" are demonstrable failures, and all the "problems" you see amount to the strongest economy on earth.
That's an amusing statement considering that I proposed no 'remedies' nor noted any 'problems' - I only provided facts.
I mean, really, this is hardly the earth-shattering revelation I was expecting. Walmart sells cheap stuff. Company wants to sell expensive stuff. Company decides not to go with Walmart. There weren't any death threats or dirty tricks, just some calm discussion and reasonable logic.
I don't see why it's news that branding and quality are important.
If you don't see why it's news - you haven't been paying much attention to the retail sector over the last few years. Company after company well known for their branding and quality have thrown themselves over the precipice in order to sell at Wal-Mart.
Today, you still have lots and lots and lots of "sliced bread" being sold, and yet you still have a persistent market for quality baked goods.
The market for quality baked goods in this country is essentially non-existent (other than among the high end foodies in big cities). Quality baked goods are expensive - and they don't taste much like what most people think they should. (Mostly because most people have been conditioned to thinking that the 'store boughten' versions are the proper taste model.)
Supermarket bakeries abound - which makes you think there is such a market, but the reality is that what they push out is crap of abysmal quality. But it's fresh baked crap, so people flock to buy it thinking they are getting something 'better'
The one does not necessarily preclude the other, IN A FREE SOCIETY.
The numerous towns across America that have lost stores (and jobs) since Wal-Mart came to them tell a very different story.
A solution in search of a problem.
on
New Jet Engine Tested
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Scramjet (supersonic combustion ramjet) engines have no moving parts and take all of the oxygen they need (to burn hydrogen fuel) from the air, allowing for larger loads than rockets which must carry oxygen for fuel.
Unhappily when you go from handwaving theory to practical application - they don't work all that well. You trade the weight of the fuel for the scramjet for the weight of the turboject to get the ramjet up to speed, and for the weight of the ramjet to get the scramjet up to speed... plus the fuel for both.
Furthermore - a scramjet is nearly useless as the first stage of an orbital launcher, because it wants to cruise at a steady speed. An orbital launcher wants to be steadily accelerating. The weight of the rocket fuel saved is less of a penalty than the increase in mass needed for structural reinforcement and insulation. Further yet, rocket fuel is cheap in bulk, it would be nearly twenty times more expensive expensive to fill it with unleaded down at the local mini-mart, scram jet fuel is expensive, even in bulk. (And we haven't even gotten to billions of dollars needed to build the aerodynamic stage.)
Scramjets are a solution looking for a problem, not an answer to any question.
They have also thoroughly simulated the flight software, I believe with the hardware hooked up under simulated loads, as well. Of course, it's impossible to truly predict every contingency that the software will have to deal with, and given that the rocket began to exhibit uncontrolled roll rather than loss of power or anything like that, I suspect the problem does ultimately lie in the software rather than the power plant.
OTOH, it's entirely possible that the fault lies with the power plant components that contribute to roll control but not to thrust. There's no reason to suspect software over hardware on the basis of "it didn't lose thrust". (And given their hardware track record, there is much reason to suspect hardware. Watching the launch video shows that the 1st stage insulation blanket failed to seperate at launch as it should have for example.)
One other possibility I think fairly likely is vulnerability of their communications inside the rocket. Supposedly this is the first rocket to rely principly on ethernet, which reduces cost significantly over propriety methods. This is untested in flight, and interference or vibration may have caused problems.
Vibration is unlikely to have been a problem - if the proper connectors were used. Nor should interference have been a problem - as there should not have been a major change in the RFI enviroment.
I thought it a bit odd that the static test was for only three seconds and took place the day before the launch. I would not be surpised if the accident was a by-product of them pushing their schedule.
Pushing the schedule? This launch is eighteen months behind schedule.
The mobile phone doesn't mean that we are always available. It's a tool and should be used as a tool when appropriate. Not for every little whim or distraction.
Amen. I have friends who are pissed because I don't give them my cell phone number. They don't understand that I have a cell phone so that I can make calls when I want, not to be constantly distracted by what someone else thinks is important.
this has existed since humans had the ability to think about more than one thing at a time. i can be sitting in a room with zero distractions, listening to a presentation and i still drift in and out.
my wife has vivid memories of sitting in church as a child while her dad made to-do lists during the sermon.
it is a valuable skill, being able to give partial attention to multiple inputs. it keeps us alive in many situations. when i worked on a flight deck we called it 'keeping your head on a swivel'. and never getting too locked in to one thing. that was the way to get blown over or some other nastiness.
What you did on the flight deck, I did a couple of hundred feet below and the flyboys did a couple of thousand feet above both of us is a very different thing. We kept our background attention on multiple things - but the majority of our attention was focused on the task at hand. In the situation describe in TFA, the conference attendees were constantly switching their primary attention between multiple things.
From the article: 'Games cultivate - and exploit - possibility space better than any other medium. In linear storytelling, we can only imagine the possibility space that surrounds the narrative: What if Luke had joined the Dark Side? What if Neo isn't the One? In interactive media, we can explore it.'
Sure, we can explore what ever alternate paths the progammer/developer/marketing director puts into the game. And no matter how many alternate paths they add - it's still canned.
Butt ugly, horrible backends and still rolling in dough.
Those sites weren't that bad looking when they were first set up mid- to late-90s. The problem is that they are *so* popular, that changing the interface, even slightly, could result in tremendous user backlash.
The problem with that theory is that both sites have changed their designs and interface multiple times in the years since they were founded - without a trace of backlash.
I tell my clients to run a Google Groups search for my last name and technology of their choice.
1000+ articles posted in my area of expertise.
So? All that means is that you post alot. If I were one of your clients, I'd write you off as what you are - a self important puffer.
Google itself links me to some seriously fun stuff. First link just happens to point to my Amazon profile. I consider that as VERY lucky as that's a page I can modify as I see fit.
Certainly it's a page that you can modify as you see fit - and it confirms my initial impression of you as a self important puffer. (Lazy too - as the page you can modify as you see fit, hasn't been. The home page you refer to is a link farm.)
What myth are they busting here, exactly? That everything from RadioShack sucks?
Mythbusters (like Scrapheap Challenge/Junkyard Wars) before abandonded it's theoretical reason for existing pretty early on and replaced it with a chase after flash, dash, and glam.
In theory I agree...but my limited experience as a Wikipedia editor suggests that this isn't true. There may be no one overall guiding hand - with 1,000,000+ articles in English alone how could there be? - but I suspect a lot of areas have one or more guardians who watch closely over their areas of expertise.
I'd say that about 90% of the articles on the Wikipedia have guardians - the problem is that said gaurdians may or may not have any actual expertise in the fields covered by the articles they gaurd.
"What he haven't had is the will to discard the dead end path that boosters and spacecraft have taken and replace it the same standard methods that have worked time and again in virtually every other field of human economic behavior."
Care to flesh that comment out...?
Mass production, standardization, reduction of man hours required to build and operate, etc... etc... Bone simple stuff taught to every engineering and accounting and MBA graduate out there.
But utterly ignored in the space industry.
I see potential in the space elevator concept...A.C. Clarke Proposed it years before anyone took it seriously, and lets just say thus far his hard science fiction tends to be rather prophetic...but since that doesn't yet exist...how do we get to space with out Boosters?
Pfft. His hard SF if prophetic only if you cherry pick.
Really? Fascinating! Explain to me the technology we have to:
[snip list of handwaving fanboy fantasies]
That's just the point - we don't need any of those techologies. Not one.
Take heatshields for example - we don't some exotic material that may or may not work when it hits the real world. 'old fashioned' fiberglass and resin works just fine. What we need is to *automate the production of the heatshields*. Rather than designing them to the.9999 percentile, build bigger rockets so the heatshield design can have deeper margins! (The cost of a booster scales very weakly with size - but very strongly with the engineering effort needed to make it perform on the bleeding edge. We've been stuck on the bleeding edge for forty years.)
Need I keep going on? There is a huge amount of cost-cutting research going on right now, but sadly it is underfunded.
There's a lot of pigs eating at the trough and repeating the mantra "we need tech, we need tech, we need tech". Meanwhile perfectly serviceable tech gets discarded in favor of the next big thing. (Anyone with any knowledge of engineering history knows full well how few promising technologies ever deliver on their promises.) NASA and the Usual Suspects push this agenda because it keeps the money flowing from Congress. The L5 society and their ilk push this agenda because it fits their predjudices that space is a high tech science fiction endeavor. The public believes it because of years of FUD by the above groups.
Mass production is the key to cheap spaceflight
Yet therein lies the crux of the problem. Even if all of today's spacecraft were launched on the same type of rocket, it wouldn't be a very great degree of mass production. Yet such a proposal is clearly ludicrous; a rocket big enough to launch Cassini/Huygens would be an utter waste on a nanosat.
Given that 90% of all payloads launched per year over the last decade and more have been the same size +/- about 40%, such a proposal is clearly not ludicrous.
You mention the Ford Explorer. Ford produces several million of them every year; that's why their cost is so low. Want to try that with an Ariane-5 (lets just pretend than an Ariane-5 is big enough to launch everything; it's not, but lets pretend). It's 180 million per launch currently. If you're producing 50 a year, you might cut the price in half. 1,000 a year, perhaps a quarter. 50,000 a year? Perhaps a tenth. But who the heck do you think can afford 900 billion dollars to do even that moderate level of mass production?
An Ariane-5 costs what it does because tens of thousands of man-hours are needed to prepare it for launch. It costs what it does because it's handbuilt in a clean room. Only a fool would propose trying to mass produce the Ariane-5.
A new design, designed from the *start* for producibility and low man hours (both in production and preparation) is an entirely different matter. (It's also the gold standard for engineering design in virtually every field except space travel.)
Kayser is currently still trying to restart Otrag in the US. But you know what he needs? *Money*. You see where this is going? Money funds tech. Tech produces cost reductions.
Your blinders fit so tightly you don't even read what you write. Otrag doesn't need money to produce tech (niether did Rutan) - he needs money to produce *components*. Plain, simple, dirt cheap brute force components - exactly what I propose.
There's no saying that Otrag is "the" way to go (although it certainly deserves a chance). You need to invest in each scientifically sound, realistic route, because most of them will be failures. Only then will you get your costs down.
But what you propose is the exact opposite. You propose tossing away well developed tech - that has never been fully exploited, and standard engineering processes in favor of tommorows pie in the sky.
I remember the Challenger incident quite well. There was pressure on NASA to get the shuttle up in space so President Reagan could make the "historic" phone call to the first teacher in space during the middle of the State of the Union address.
You state that as if it were a fact - please privide a reference or a cite.
Of course, the Reagan Administration denied that there was any pressure on NASA or that they made arrangements to have a phone call made. I always did like the Reagan Administration for having a "it's sunny and you're rich" spin on the events.
Ah - here's the real truth. You don't have a reference, or a cite, or even a memory of the event.
What you have is an oft repeated rumor - a rumor for which not a shred of evidence exists. None. (And the Reagan Administration never denied the rumor, or adressed it in any way, shape, or form.) As I said, many people have looked for evidence, positive and negative, and none has ever appeared.
Slashdot Mirror
Information that is at best incorrect or misleading, and at worst outright wrong lingers for months in the 'pedia, as do articles that are incomplete. Hardly what I want in a tech resource.
I come in for some derison because my (home) kitchen is an all Forschner shop - while they are bargain knives, they are the best in that price range and quite comparable with far more expensive knives. Most importantly - they fit my hand like they were made for me personally. I can do more with a Forschner than I can with a Wusthoff or other expensive brand - so I've traded or given away all my other knives.
Indeed. Scoble and Isreal both gush over how other people fell at their feet to recieve their pearls of wisdom - and then heap scorn on Amazon for daring to question that wisdom. (Scoble's entry in particular sounds like a spoiled little child.)
That's why I've steadily reduced my consumption of blogs over the past year or so - far too many once great blogs have become nothing but a mutual admiration and name dropping society. They spend more time writing about and linking to each other than they do about the topic their blog is nominally about - and the quality of the writing and thought seems to drop substantially once the blogger becomes part of the 'inner circle'.
The blogerati vastly overestimate their importance in the scheme of things I find. What kind of mindset does it take to tell a company that gets more page hits in an hour than you get in a month that they are doing something wrong?
Nope, I use the commmon one.
A fascinating claim - since I'm about as conservative as they come. (More on that below.)
Did I claim there was 'huge unemployment'? No. I stated the simple, and widely known and well documented, fact that Wal-Mart moving into town leads to the loss of jobs as other retailers, especially mom 'n pops are forced out of business.
Of course the goverment has jiggered the method of counting who is and who is not counted as 'employed' and 'unemployed' multiple times. (Not to mention the fact that the unemployment rate has only recently *dropped* to 5.1% The average over the last decade exceeds 5%.)
Another fascinating claim - as I didn't say anything about a 'utopia'. Equally fascinating is your attempt, again, to label me based on no evidence but that you've fabricated in your own mind. I'm about as far from Socialist as you can get - on that axis of the political chart I'm much more of a rational anarchist.
What I smell is the smoke you are blowing. Your original post is wrong, and your reply managed to be even more wrong. (A significant accomplishment for which I give you what little credit you are do.)
Most people interested in serious discussion avoid the web like the plague, as it is hideously unsuited for such purposes.
Many of the people you list above still post and participate on Usenet. If you get a real newsreader and learn to use killfiles and how to ignore threads, it's quite pleasant place. (Web forums provide no such functionality, among their many other lacks.)
The point is - you made a claim, but the facts fail to back the claim up.
That's an amusing statement considering that I proposed no 'remedies' nor noted any 'problems' - I only provided facts.
Supermarket bakeries abound - which makes you think there is such a market, but the reality is that what they push out is crap of abysmal quality. But it's fresh baked crap, so people flock to buy it thinking they are getting something 'better'
The numerous towns across America that have lost stores (and jobs) since Wal-Mart came to them tell a very different story.Furthermore - a scramjet is nearly useless as the first stage of an orbital launcher, because it wants to cruise at a steady speed. An orbital launcher wants to be steadily accelerating. The weight of the rocket fuel saved is less of a penalty than the increase in mass needed for structural reinforcement and insulation. Further yet, rocket fuel is cheap in bulk, it would be nearly twenty times more expensive expensive to fill it with unleaded down at the local mini-mart, scram jet fuel is expensive, even in bulk. (And we haven't even gotten to billions of dollars needed to build the aerodynamic stage.)
Scramjets are a solution looking for a problem, not an answer to any question.
It's funny though. He's not mad enough to get off the public trough.
But utterly ignored in the space industry.
Pfft. His hard SF if prophetic only if you cherry pick.Take heatshields for example - we don't some exotic material that may or may not work when it hits the real world. 'old fashioned' fiberglass and resin works just fine. What we need is to *automate the production of the heatshields*. Rather than designing them to the .9999 percentile, build bigger rockets so the heatshield design can have deeper margins! (The cost of a booster scales very weakly with size - but very strongly with the engineering effort needed to make it perform on the bleeding edge. We've been stuck on the bleeding edge for forty years.)
There's a lot of pigs eating at the trough and repeating the mantra "we need tech, we need tech, we need tech". Meanwhile perfectly serviceable tech gets discarded in favor of the next big thing. (Anyone with any knowledge of engineering history knows full well how few promising technologies ever deliver on their promises.) NASA and the Usual Suspects push this agenda because it keeps the money flowing from Congress. The L5 society and their ilk push this agenda because it fits their predjudices that space is a high tech science fiction endeavor. The public believes it because of years of FUD by the above groups.Given that 90% of all payloads launched per year over the last decade and more have been the same size +/- about 40%, such a proposal is clearly not ludicrous.An Ariane-5 costs what it does because tens of thousands of man-hours are needed to prepare it for launch. It costs what it does because it's handbuilt in a clean room. Only a fool would propose trying to mass produce the Ariane-5.A new design, designed from the *start* for producibility and low man hours (both in production and preparation) is an entirely different matter. (It's also the gold standard for engineering design in virtually every field except space travel.)
Your blinders fit so tightly you don't even read what you write. Otrag doesn't need money to produce tech (niether did Rutan) - he needs money to produce *components*. Plain, simple, dirt cheap brute force components - exactly what I propose.But what you propose is the exact opposite. You propose tossing away well developed tech - that has never been fully exploited, and standard engineering processes in favor of tommorows pie in the sky.What you have is an oft repeated rumor - a rumor for which not a shred of evidence exists. None. (And the Reagan Administration never denied the rumor, or adressed it in any way, shape, or form.) As I said, many people have looked for evidence, positive and negative, and none has ever appeared.