I've been dealing with convention centers for a long time -- I used to perform IT work for some of the largest convention fixture companies (they build the displays you see). I was always amazed at the mess of union guidelines and government mandates that came with setting up at convention centers. I knew it would only be time before they started jumping on morality, too. Government loves to try to control morality.
If you actually read TFA, you'll find that it's not the goverment doing this - it's E3 itself. But it's actually work to read TFA and to think about the meaning of the article - like too many Americans today you prefer bias over facts. It's simple, it's soundbite, and it doesn't tax the brain.
And people wonder why our country is going to hell in a handbasket.
Right. It takes *real* moral strength to get a 502.1 million dollar salary rather than a 505.9 million dollar salary. Google execs make an attempt to not look evil, one that costs them nothing, and the editors eat it up.
The stock could crash and they could also end up with not much more than that $1.
Which part of "they've sold stock hundreds of millions" don't you understand? That's cash money in the bank. The stock could crash to under a dollar a share and they wouldn't even notice.
Yes, they made a lot of money last year. Their statement by taking $1 again this year is that they have confidence in the stability of their business.
Normally execs and founders selling large blocks of stock indicates a lack of confidence in the company. One of the key indicators that it's time to get out is when insiders start selling in large quantities.
"We don't think it's reasonable to assume we're going to gain a lot of share from Google," Chief Financial Officer Susan Decker said in an interview. "It's not our goal to be No. 1 in Internet search. We would be very happy to maintain our market share."
"maintain our market share" is what's interesting. She doesn't even say increase. That is not a good sign for Yahoo's search business.
So? Yahoo's great strength in search is, or at least was, it's directory, it's still the best out there for that matter. Also, Yahoo - unlike Google - is widely diversified with revenue streams beyond that of advertising and eye attractors beyond the slim few that Google offers. I personally spend as much, if not more, time on Yahoo than Google.
They could be getting a multi-million dollar salary *and* the stock money. Good faith efforts go a long way in my book.
Right. It takes *real* moral strength to get a 502.1 million dollar salary rather than a 505.9 million dollar salary. Google execs make an attempt to not look evil, one that costs them nothing, and the editors eat it up.
This is a question for software developers - does a company like Google have a system that generally produces "1.0 quality" software after a certain amount of time, or does it depend entirely on the nature of a particular project?
I wonder about Google's mythical 'quality'. These are after all the people who released a map application without a scale, and an email application with the 'delete' button hidden and time-consuming to acess.
Google News has an even deeper and more subtle flaw - it fails to meet it's espoused goal of providing a broader perspective. All too often it's 'clusters' consist of news sources repeating, or rewriting, the same [AP|Rueters|Bloomberg|BBC|Whoever] press release. This gives the impression of legitimacy to the story - but reality they all trace back to same narrow selection of sources.
What sounds like the bigger problem is all the tiny hard to track fragments, the sort of stuff created when stages of a rocket seperate explosively. Here, perhaps, more work could be done in developing rockets and satellites that don't shed this sort of garbage.
Well, welcome to 2006 - where not shedding debris has been the gold standard for a decade and more. Contrary to the TFA, the problem *is* being adressed. Among other things, every major rocket manufacturer has modified stages of theirs that will be left in orbit to depressurize themselves at the end of the burn - no pressure, no breakup. Every major rocket manufacturer has replaced their seperation systems with ones that don't shed parts.
Google was the last place where I would expect to find a champion of privacy rights.Google would not exist if it lost our trust. In my eyes, they have to do everything possible to not break that trust. Remember without us, google are nothing.
Ah, the Slashdot conceit - that there is enough of them to make anyone notice.
I had a private eye contact me because a young runaway teen (~15 yo) was using my e-mail services. I had previously enabled all logging (another fun story) and so I checked the logs, verified the story (I also found the kid listed on the missing and exploited children website) and tracked down where the kid was. I call up the private eye and not too long later the kid was returned home.
One could bitch about privacy but frankly the safety of child is a little more important.
And you made the child more safe - how?
Sure the child porn people could do their searches elsewhere but with years of backlogs, it's a little late for a significant number of them. Google no doubt also has a cache of numerous child porn sites which could be used as evidence in trials.
Oh, yes - such caches will make wonderful evidence in Google's own trials. Child pornography is illegal you know.
Specifically, the founders hold all the voting stock of the Company. Everyone else has non-voting stock. Even if other investors hold a large number of shares of non-voting stock, which outnumber the voting shares, they can't do squat. This was a brilliant move on Google's part. Fund the Company like a public one, but run it like a private one (ie with long-term goals and responsibility).
To my mind - that's evil as hell. They are acting (in public) like a traditional joint stock corporation, but in reality they pulled a scam and got away with it. This is just one (among many other) reasons that GOOG is not in my portfolio.
Google is a marketing and advertising company. First, foremost, and mostly only. The don't be evil thing is superb marketing that gained them a groundswell of grassroots support, good for them.
Bullshit. Google is a bunch of the smartest people on the planet that use disposable commodity hardware and open source, freely available software to index all off the freely available information in the world and organizes it for people so they can find what they are looking for. If you cannot find for free what is freely available, you can pay a nominal fee and ask http://answers.google.com/answers/, and then they will give you the answer.
That's the geek/hacker theory - but it's not the truth.
They don't even need marketing. They have the best real estate in the world on the internet, and people throw money at them left and right for advertising space because of their popularity and effectiveness at doing what they do.
The bulk of their income comes from AdWords - and they serve AdWords on an order of magnitude more pages than their own.
[snippage remainder of disconnected-from-reality rant.]
But yeah, wine in a barrel tastes 'more complex'. Better? I don't know...I don't care. But the wine snobs I know can actually tell you the type of barrel it was stored in by the characteristics of the wine (apparently its not hard to figure out if you studied the subject).
Back before a local microbrewery was bought out by a mega chain... A bunch of us used to head up to their fairly rural brewpub every Friday. Without training, just by experience - we could tell when the kegs behind the bar had been swapped out to a new batch.
Given 52 weeks with 5 business days, 8 hours/day, gives a salary of $19,760 before taxes for the day shifters. Is that above the US poverty line? In Saskatchewan (where most of basic healthcare is taken care of, and things like food are a bit cheaper), our poverty line is around $16,000/year. Any medical problem in the US is going to cost hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars -- I've seen what your drugs cost at the corner store. If you adjust it, I'd say they're probably pretty close to the poverty line.
So what? It's a hard notion for many to accept - but not everyone can make $25/hour. Not everyone is going to live a nice suburban life with.3 acres, 2.5 kids, and all the other 'white picket fence' blather.
People are social creatures. But the outgoing aspect of it applies more to singles or couples without children. Couples with children have no time to go be social.
Only if you subscribe to the fairly recent (in the last twenty years or less) notion that parents are to spend most, if not all, of their available energy on their children. OTOH, when I was a child, parents with kids had plenty of time to be social. They hired babysitters. They went to the park (with their kids) and socialized while their children played. The visited other folks house and socialized while their children played. Heck, I used to look forward to my parent bridge night - it meant I got to sleep over at whichever parent was hosting that month. (Or I had my friends over to play in my 'fort' (I.E. sandbox).)
Three other factors that have contributed to the view that couples with children have no time for socializing;
The perception that adults cannot socialize except in kid-unfriendly enviroments. Adult socialization increasingly seems to require alchohol, extremely loud music, overpriced food - or some combination of the three.
The notion that kids must be involved in organized activities from an early age. It's hard to have the energy/time to socialize when a parent spends half the evening driving little Johnni to soccer practice, little Jenni to dance practice, and little Jerri to fingerpainting empowerment classes.
The most deadly factor however is this; nobody spends any time getting involved with their neighbors anymore.
the wonders of chinese slave labor. I guess you can do that when you have a billion people and a ton of them in jail/reeducation camps.
There seems to be a degree of confusion here. Building a fusion reactor is not like making trainers in a sweatshop. A huge proportion of the work done will simply be in the design.
A great deal of the cost is in the laying of steel and pouring of concrete and winding the tokomak and a huge number of other skilled and semi-skilled jobs. The design of the thing is cheap in comparison.
That requires engineers and mathematicians and believe me, engineers and mathmos of this level who aren't getting an acceptable wage in China can find a job damn easily in England.
Assuming the unlikely case where China allows them to emigrate.
Disney doesn't suffer for it's lack of ability to produce a decent product, it suffers from the same ideas and ways of thinking which have brought it down from its hey-day, when mean old Unca Walt was in charge.
Looking at the bottom line, Disney doesn't suffer much at all. For a company that sucks as much as they/.ers would have you believe - they are making a hell of a lot of money.
Currently, and since its conception, the world's space programs have been based on the model that we can just leave shit we don't need in space.
Um - no. The current model uses seperation systems that produce no debris and ensures that rocket stages are depressurised when they are spent. (Which means they stay in one easily trackable piece.)
Where were the great minds of NASA to say "Wait...what is going to happen with the rocket parts we are leaving out there."
About 1984-85 or so IIRC. The problems aren't solved, not by a long shot, but they are being worked on.
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Anyways, my point is, stop talking out of your ass. Shit happens when the task at hand is difficult, and reliable, affordable launchers are difficult.
No, reliable affordable launchers using obsolete design methodologies is difficult. Don't kid yourself into believing that they way NASA and the Big Space dinosaurs do things is the only way. A hint can be seen by comparing the failure rate of Western launches (2.2%) with the failure rate of Russian launchers (1.4%). The Russians use a different design philosophy than does NASA and the dinosaurs, their failure rate is noticeably less.
Probably because you're trying to wrap a fragile aluminum and composite cylinder around a HUGE FUCKING EXPLOSION and ride it in precisely the correct direction at really high velocity and acceleration.
Here's another clue for you: A modern 747, fully loaded, generates as much thrust as John Glenn's Atlas. At the time of his flight, about 4% of all Atlas launches fail. In 2006 around 3% of all Atlas launches fail.
How many 747 engines have blown up in the last five years? Zero. Even if you count in fuel tank explosions like that which brought down TWA flight 800 - you get 4 incidents out of hundreds of thousands of flights.
People have been deluded for forty years that space is far more difficult than it needs to be - because forty years ago NASA chose a design philosophy that they have never deviated from, even in the face of evidence that other paths exist.
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Any other brand of engineer that designed something that failed as much as 2% of the timep>WTF are you talking about? American RTG's have never failed to contain radioactivity. That's 100%.
Before Challenger the O-rings never failed. Before Columbia a chunk of foam never caused significant damage. Dodging a bullet does not make one bulletproof.
Because of the faulty way that launchers are engineered - nothing on it's payload is built above the minimum requirements. They can't afford to spend the weight.
That's just dishonest.
No, it's a stone cold fact. Launchers today are still built with the mindset that evolved in the late 50's and early 60's, "engines (of any size) are hard to build, so everything must be as light as possible". Clustering engines back then was a hard problem too - which did nothing but reinforce that mindset.
But today, niether is true. We have a much better understanding of how to build high performance engines, and clustering is a largely solved problem - but we still design launchers and payloads as if it were 1966 rather than 2006.
The minimum requirements of an RTG are not low, as you try to dishonestly imply.
Try buying some reading comprehension, as I never said or implied that the RTG standards were low - I said they could not be built above the minimum requirements (which are not low).
If you're going to claim that the engineers are wrong, it's up to you to make your case why the engineers are wrong. Lay the numbers on me, I can understand them.
It's not about numbers - its about design philosophies. We've stuck with the same one for forty years, and it's not working.
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Except the RTGs are designed to withstand the explosion of a rocket and subsequent impact to the earth without vaporizing or scattering the radioactive material across the globe.
False. They are designed to have a high probability of not failing - they are not impregnable.
In fact in at least one case the RTG was recovered, reconditioned, and put into the replacement rocket and launched again.
Certainly. And the Shuttle flew 24 times with a faulty O-ring design, and 100+ times with shedding foam. Dodging a bullet once, or even a few times, does not make one bulletproof.
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Conversely, if you are using a solid-fuel motor, you don't even have the option of shutting the engine down if something goes catastrophically wrong.
Pherhaps you better study up on space technology - because this line, and the rest of your paragraph shows you know nothing but the party line. There is in fact at least two different ways of shutting a solid down safely. (The Shuttle can't use them because of it's piggback configuration - but the CEV will.) And it's not a new development either - it was first fielded on the Polaris A-1, forty plus years ago.
If you have better ideas for putting usefully-sized payloads into space with minimal risk, I'm sure NASA would be willing to listen.
That's the whole problem - NASA (and the rest of the Big Space dinosaurs) isn't interested in listening. They've been told for years, but show no willingness to change.
What was cool about the floppy born virus is that it is easy for collectors to store. I knew I guy who had a big box full of infected floppies. Hundreds of em'. All labeled with the virus that was on them. Some had multiple viruses. Neat stuff.
The computer store I worked at in the early 90's had an extensive collection that we used to test AV programs and to train techs on virus detection and removal. We kept 'em in a double locked file cabinet, and only me and the other senior tech each had one key, and were the only ones allowed to handle them.
About the same time the local BBS community had a persistent infection of "___" (I don't remember at this late date) that we could not find the vector of - not matter how paranoid we seemed to get. It was finally traced to a machine at the local library that we all trusted (mistakenly as it turned out). They had a machine that had it's HD filled with shareware - and the tech routinely disinfected it (and it needed it!). The libraries tech guy would clean the machine, then come home and let us know it was clean. One or more of us would be waiting when the library opened, assuming that the machine had remained off all night - and was thus still 'safe'. Problem was, one of the librarians had a game disk she'd play after hours or before opening - and it was infected.
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No, it's abysmal. Nuclear submarines are hard, nuclear power plants are hard - neither has anywhere near the failure rate.
Apples and oranges - nuclear submarines have a very controllable nuclear reactor for their power, and never go faster than 30 mph or so. Yet, there are still accidents. Nuclear power plants don't move at all, yet there are still accidents, some of which have affected large areas of the world.
Yes- accidents happen. But you miss the essential point, their failure rate is far, far, lower than that of space travel. In no other field of engineering is such a failure rate tolerated with a shrug of the shoulders and such an utter lack of curiosity. (The failure rate has not changed noteably in thirty years.)
The United States has suffered 17 fatalities in more than 40 years of manned space exploration. The USS Thresher disaster killed more than seven times that many by itself.
The number of people killed is a meaningless metric.
A fully loaded current model 747 at takeoff generates the same amount of energy that John Glenn's Atlas booster did in 1962. The failure rate of the Atlas has changed little since then - how many 747's blow up on take off each year?
Again, apples and oranges - how many 747s accelerate from zero to 17,000 mph in less than 10 minutes? Also, a current 747-400 with RB211 engines can develop about 250,000 pounds of thrust, which is about 80% of Glenn's Atlas, 20% of the thrust of the New Horizons launch vehicle, and less than 3% of the thrust of a Saturn V at launch.
Again - you miss the point. We handle energies on the magnitude of that needed for spaceflight hundreds (if not thousands) of times a day - with a failure rate orders of magnitude lower. 747's don't blow up, niether did Concorde, or Blackbird.
I won't say that NASA can't improve, but the fundamental fact remains that space travel is a risky venture.
And that's just my point - it's not a fundemental fact, but an inescapable result of the evolutionary dead end that launcher development has followed to date. You wrongly assume that because things have always been so, there is no other possible path. So long as people just shrug their shoulders and don their blinders it will remain so. I find it telling that you expend energy on proving me 'wrong' (and failing because you don't understand the issues, instead assuming you do and just repeating the party line), and none on questioning whether things might be different and how.
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It's not the plutonium that's the problem - it's the system that accepts such a failure rate as normal.
I'd say that considering the difficulty of what's being attempted, a failure rate of one in fifty is still doing pretty well.
No, it's abysmal. Nuclear submarines are hard, nuclear power plants are hard - neither has anywhere near the failure rate.
Putting a payload in space involves lots of energy being released very quickly using dangerous and often unstable substances using very complex machines,
A fully loaded current model 747 at takeoff generates the same amount of energy that John Glenn's Atlas booster did in 1962. The failure rate of the Atlas has changed little since then - how many 747's blow up on take off each year?
there's an inherent danger in that which people often can do precious little to mitigate.
That's been the party line for nearly fifty years - and it's wrong. There are several well known ways of significantly dropping the risk of launch failure - but they violate the assumptions and perceptions that NASA and Big Space have developed over the years. (And in the short term they will raise the costs of space acess - even if in the longer term they slash them dramatically.)
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no fewer than nine have resulted in the radioactive material being returned to earth."
And yet, no major ecological disaster has ensued. Perhaps the danger is overstated?
Maybe the danger is overstated, maybe we have just dodged the bullets. There's no clear way to differentiate between two - but there are well known ways to reduce the possibility of launch accidents.
Slashdot Mirror
And the various members of the alt.space community wonder why they can't get any respect...
And people wonder why our country is going to hell in a handbasket.
Google News has an even deeper and more subtle flaw - it fails to meet it's espoused goal of providing a broader perspective. All too often it's 'clusters' consist of news sources repeating, or rewriting, the same [AP|Rueters|Bloomberg|BBC|Whoever] press release. This gives the impression of legitimacy to the story - but reality they all trace back to same narrow selection of sources.
[snippage remainder of disconnected-from-reality rant.]
Three other factors that have contributed to the view that couples with children have no time for socializing;
How many 747 engines have blown up in the last five years? Zero. Even if you count in fuel tank explosions like that which brought down TWA flight 800 - you get 4 incidents out of hundreds of thousands of flights.
People have been deluded for forty years that space is far more difficult than it needs to be - because forty years ago NASA chose a design philosophy that they have never deviated from, even in the face of evidence that other paths exist.
But today, niether is true. We have a much better understanding of how to build high performance engines, and clustering is a largely solved problem - but we still design launchers and payloads as if it were 1966 rather than 2006.
Try buying some reading comprehension, as I never said or implied that the RTG standards were low - I said they could not be built above the minimum requirements (which are not low).It's not about numbers - its about design philosophies. We've stuck with the same one for forty years, and it's not working.About the same time the local BBS community had a persistent infection of "___" (I don't remember at this late date) that we could not find the vector of - not matter how paranoid we seemed to get. It was finally traced to a machine at the local library that we all trusted (mistakenly as it turned out). They had a machine that had it's HD filled with shareware - and the tech routinely disinfected it (and it needed it!). The libraries tech guy would clean the machine, then come home and let us know it was clean. One or more of us would be waiting when the library opened, assuming that the machine had remained off all night - and was thus still 'safe'. Problem was, one of the librarians had a game disk she'd play after hours or before opening - and it was infected.