Republican in libertarian clothing to draw the lunatic and paranoia votes. And then Rand Paul will continue voting Republican.
It's a strategy that's worked well for him for quite some time now. People support him for his current soundbites, and ignore his voting record and anything older than a couple of hours ago. (The last Presidential election cycle, Slashdot was at times practically a Rand Paul For President discussion forum.)
I think you missed the big one: lots of people might actually start using Google+.
I doubt that lack of anonymous accounts hurt G+ all that much, despite the enormous amount of noise generated by a relatively small number of people over the issue. Google's insanely stupid "invitation only" method of signing up coupled with their very feature incomplete system at launch likely did far more harm than anything else. Google just doesn't seem to get social media, and their lackadaisical "benign neglect" management style and... unique approach to UI doesn't help either.
I like G+ very few trolls and flamebaits. I've had some good conversations. It was nice being in a science thread and not here AGW denier bullshit, and actually discuss the science. Many other examples as well.
That's a function of who is on your friends list, or who the community moderator is and how well they do their job, etc... etc... not of the host platform.
If everybody's default behaviour is to muddy the waters by generating all kinds of contradictory data, the background noise level becomes so high that discerning fact from fiction is very difficult. Governments and corporations already use this tactic against the population
And it's effective against the population because they don't have access to what governments and corporations do - Big Data. (And because they have the easy task of manipulating emotion, rather than the difficult task of manipulating data.) Unless literally everything you ever do/say/type is [pseudo-random] misinformation (or you're exceptionally consistent with your cover story), sooner rather than later the truth will start to stand out from the background noise.
To the people who make optical systems, lens hoods, and such... I'd imagine it's pretty significant. Not every discovery needs to world changing to be significant.
So long as the child traffickers sell them for adoption into family homes... and not to those who will raise them for prostitution, or raise them for farm labor, or raise them to cripple them and set them to begging, or...
MIRV's and decoys can cheaply and easily neutralize any form of missile defense.
Well, no. Because MIRV's can't defeat terminal defenses and effective decoys generally either a) aren't cheap, and/or b) have noticeable and significant impact on the weapon's performance. Much of the propaganda about decoys comes from either the 1960's (before the advent of modern signal processing techniques) or from folks who oppose the systems but haven't actually been able to provide examples of such cheap decoys.
Hamas fires inaccurate artillery rockets, unlikely to actually hit anything
Huh? What are you smoking? They're 100% gaurunteed to hit something as what goes up must come down. The problem they pose to Israel is that the something their going to hit is somewhere in a crowded city, meaning potential civilian casualties.
From TFA in the Bulletin: "Regular readers of the Bulletin are well aware of the long history of inflated claims of missile defense efficiency."
Regular readers are also well aware of the extreme and longstanding bias (running back to the 1960's) of the Bulletin's editors against missile defense (because even a partially effective defense weakens their case for nuclear disarmament, their true goal) and the long history of inflated "criticism" that purports to claim that it cannot possibly work. This... is just more of the same. They don't actually have any numbers or anything resembling hard data - just the opinion of expert(s) whose bias on the issue is well known.
The experiments you proposed (in a test lab, and in LEO) have already been conducted
Not in partial G in LEO they haven't.
As for the latter, There's a reason we are still sending spectrometers and chemistry labs to mars. We can simulate the albedo and density of martian regolith, and to a limited extent, we can also simulate the mean bulk chemical constituents, but that does not mean that the regolith simulants produced in a lab will have the same engineering properties of real martial regolith.
Did you even remember what you wrote? The second "experiment" had to do with wind, not regolith.
Here's a hint, we have known about waves and wave mechanics for years, but we still build and use wave tanks, and still do tests in oceans for experimental ocean craft.
We use wave tanks to test things about waves that are very inconvenient or impossible to test at full scale. (Neither of these things have anything to do with your proposed experiments.) And yes, we still do tests in ocean for experimental craft, but they almost never have to do with the bits that can be tested in a wave tank because there's a bunch of bits that can't be tested in a wave tank. (And again, this has nothing to do with either of your proposed "experiments".)
Here's a hint for you: You're a clueless moron who think that using big words means you're intelligent. You're wrong on that count - all it does is prove you're a parrot that can repeat things it has no capability of understanding.
Neither of your payloads need to go Mars. For the first, all the requisite conditions save gravity can be simulated here on Earth. (And if you must simulate gravity, it will be far cheaper to send a centrifuge to LEO.) For the second, all the requisite data is available and merely awaits someone with a computer and some spare time to write the simulation.
And that's real science is done - small scale tests and simulations first to determine if it's even worth it to try larger scale experiments. What you propose is how a fifth grader, or the Mars One staff, thinks science is done.
For the price of one nuclear carrier we could have 50 diesel carrier groups with planes.
Not a chance in hell. The cruisers, destroyers, and support ships that make up a carrier group along with the carrier cost a fair fraction of the cost of the carrier itself, and the air wing isn't cheap either.
I know professor that showed that for the price of 1 F14 you could equip a squadron of DeHavalin mosquitoes with Phoenix missiles. Stealth because they are made out of wood and 50 guided missiles will ace any fighter pilot in the sky.
Did he also show you whether or not the de Havilland Mosquito could take the stress of carrying a 1000lb missile and rebound stress of dropping the same? (They only carried 500lb bombs in service.) That it could carry 1,300 lbs of AWG-9 radar in it's nose? (Where the Mosquito basically had only essentially weightless empty space.) That it could provide the several kilowatts of power needed to operate said radar?
Etc... etc...
I suspect he didn't, and that like you (with your laughable claim about the carriers) hadn't a clue what he was talking about.
The main reasons I've seen for people bagging on him are envy or ideology (Tesla got a government loan - that they paid back, SpaceX got NASA money - to deliver cargo cheaper than any competitor, etc...)
You don't seem to realize that Tesla *borrowed* the funds he used to pay back the government loan - so he's still in debt and still tottering on the edge because he hasn't brought a car to the mass market. That's not envy or ideology, that's a stone cold fact like the sun rising in the East tomorrow morning.
SpaceX may be cheaper, but so what? Their demonstrated flight rate, schedule reliability, and flight reliability are far, far below industry averages. As with Tesla, they're tottering on the edge and propped up with government money. (Because their performance is so low, Again, this isn't envy or ideology, it's stone cold facts.
I can see only two reasons why you might make the claim you did - either you're completely ignorant of the facts, or you just handwave them away like any fan boy does when confronted with unpleasant reality. (In which case, you're pretty much a poster boy for exactly the kind of clueless fan boy I was talking about.)
Yep, happened exactly as it always does, the Musk fan boys have been at it - because they can't stand the truth or anything that doesn't smack of adulation verging on worship.
"Ma Bell" hasn't been a thing since 1982 when AT&T volunteered to divest itself of its regional local telcos. AT&T retained ownership of YellowPages and they remained the dominant business directory but competition in the last decade has been fierce.
*sigh* You know damn well what "Ma Bell" is shorthand for. So does everyone who read what I wrote who has an IQ above room temperature. The simple fact is, you were wrong. Not all listings were paid advertisement no matter how much you squirm and blow bullshit.
That's not what I took away from TFA and anyone who did should not try and run a business as it is wishful thinking. In fact it is entirely the business owner's responsibility to ensure information about his business is accurate.
If that's not what you took away from the TFA, then you're stupid beyond belief. The rest of what I quoted just confirms that - because you have no clue how hard it is to run a significant business and how much effort it takes to keep track to prevent yourself from being victimized. (Or, if you've run or are running a significant business and haven't encountered either, you should count yourself lucky for being out at the end of the bell curve. But I vote stupid based on the evidence.)
Plus I don't think Google information can kill a place in just a few weeks.
It wasn't "just a few weeks", it was nearly a year per TFA.
This was discussed already and the general conclusion was the restaurant had very poor service.
Discussed by who? Where? And what was the authority of the group who held the discussion to reach such a decision? Or are you seriously asking me to decide based on your links one of which is the one that's being blamed in the first place? Not to mention, if you check the dates of the bad reviews on Yelp and Trip Advisor you find many of them are from the period when the staff had been cut in response to the business drop off. (Further proof, if needed, that whoever "discussed" this as you claim is clueless.)
And these aren't recent complaints, they go back to 2010.
And there are good reviews in the same period, but you fail to mention those. Not to mention you fail to adress how complaints in 2010 can lead to a sudden and massive drop off years later. And you fail to address the fact that his information *was* changed.
While he doesn't have absolute control of any one of those industries, he's sounding more and more like a modern Andrew Carnegie, maybe with some Benjamin Franklin mixed in.
Seriously? I knew Musk's personality cult was getting bad, but this is a new low. On the philanthropic front, Musk isn't even bloody close to what either Andrew Carnegie or BenjaminFranklin left for posterity.
(Yeah, I know the Musk fan boy club will mod me down, so be it. The truth remains the truth.)
What you might not have known (but should have) is all those listings in the yellow pages were paid advertisements. The yellow page market used to be extremely competitive with numerous companies fighting for a business' 2" x 2" to full page ad.
The grandparent was talking about the One Book To Rule Them All - Ma Bell's, everyone with a phone line in a given area got one on their doorstep for free and it was the most widely used one. If you had a business line from Ma Bell, you got a one line entry (business name and phone number) in the standard type face, size, and color in one category for free. Extra categories, larger print, display ads, all these cost extra. (In areas with multiple books (a city and a county book for example), being in more than one cost extra as well.)
The quicker you can catch the nefarious mischief the quicker you can curtail any damage.
The point of TFA is that a business owner shouldn't have to spend time and money policing multiple sites in order to protect himself from trolls and malicious mischief. Especially because so many of them manipulate the information presented so that bad reviews predominate - which they then charge the business to clear up.
It's word of mouth in the internet age which is both good and bad.
From a user's perspective - it's pretty much nothing but bad. Between the tendency of people to complain more than they congratulate, deliberate manipulation by website operators, and various forms of trolling and mischief... the 'net is virtually completely unreliable.
And the system has been more-or-less broken for a very long time. In the mid 1980's I got back from a SSBN patrol to find waiting for me in the mail a notice from Selective Service warning me that having failed to register I was ineligible for all manner of Federal programs. (I hadn't registered because I enlisted in the Navy shortly after my 17th birthday.) Of course being on active duty or a veterans trumps Selective Service registration for eligibility, and it took a letter from my command along with a copy of my (IIRC) Page 2 to finally get them to go away.
For an organization that basically has one job, they aren't very good at it. (Even by the usual low standards applicable to government organizations.)
One hundred *billion* dollars? Enough to buy about 5000 Apache attack helicopters (I would not like to be on the wrong end of those). Why do I think this program will end up with a tiny, tiny fraction of that?
Actually, only about 2500 at the current (FY2014) fly-away price ($35 million) of a new build current model (AH-64E).
True. This is as much a popularity contest as anything else.
If I were to select the "best programmer", my list would probably start with guys who write software that has to run in the "real world"... like the Shuttle GNC software which has to navigate in real time, while controlling the vehicles systems, and do this completely with a bug or a failure. Or the software that hundreds (thousands?) of airliners are running that is almost as stringent. Or... plenty of other programmers who must deal with real world problem domains as well as the limits of their hardware, firmware, OS, and programming language.
Yeah, I know, the argument could be made that this would just result in a list of "best programmers of type X" and there's a ton of potential values for X.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a strategy that's worked well for him for quite some time now. People support him for his current soundbites, and ignore his voting record and anything older than a couple of hours ago. (The last Presidential election cycle, Slashdot was at times practically a Rand Paul For President discussion forum.)
Had G+ launched into the same vacuum that Facebook did... you'd have a point. But they didn't.
And sure, they eventually gave people large numbers of invites, but by then the damage had already been done.
I doubt that lack of anonymous accounts hurt G+ all that much, despite the enormous amount of noise generated by a relatively small number of people over the issue. Google's insanely stupid "invitation only" method of signing up coupled with their very feature incomplete system at launch likely did far more harm than anything else. Google just doesn't seem to get social media, and their lackadaisical "benign neglect" management style and... unique approach to UI doesn't help either.
That's a function of who is on your friends list, or who the community moderator is and how well they do their job, etc... etc... not of the host platform.
And it's effective against the population because they don't have access to what governments and corporations do - Big Data. (And because they have the easy task of manipulating emotion, rather than the difficult task of manipulating data.) Unless literally everything you ever do/say/type is [pseudo-random] misinformation (or you're exceptionally consistent with your cover story), sooner rather than later the truth will start to stand out from the background noise.
That sound you heard is my point going over your head. (Hint: Being the lowest level grunt in a field is not "being exploited".)
To the people who make optical systems, lens hoods, and such... I'd imagine it's pretty significant. Not every discovery needs to world changing to be significant.
So long as the child traffickers sell them for adoption into family homes... and not to those who will raise them for prostitution, or raise them for farm labor, or raise them to cripple them and set them to begging, or...
Junior guys in [field] aren't as well known as senior guys and do most of the grunt work.
Film at 11.
Well, no. Because MIRV's can't defeat terminal defenses and effective decoys generally either a) aren't cheap, and/or b) have noticeable and significant impact on the weapon's performance. Much of the propaganda about decoys comes from either the 1960's (before the advent of modern signal processing techniques) or from folks who oppose the systems but haven't actually been able to provide examples of such cheap decoys.
Huh? What are you smoking? They're 100% gaurunteed to hit something as what goes up must come down. The problem they pose to Israel is that the something their going to hit is somewhere in a crowded city, meaning potential civilian casualties.
From TFA in the Bulletin: "Regular readers of the Bulletin are well aware of the long history of inflated claims of missile defense efficiency."
Regular readers are also well aware of the extreme and longstanding bias (running back to the 1960's) of the Bulletin's editors against missile defense (because even a partially effective defense weakens their case for nuclear disarmament, their true goal) and the long history of inflated "criticism" that purports to claim that it cannot possibly work. This... is just more of the same. They don't actually have any numbers or anything resembling hard data - just the opinion of expert(s) whose bias on the issue is well known.
Not in partial G in LEO they haven't.
Did you even remember what you wrote? The second "experiment" had to do with wind, not regolith.
We use wave tanks to test things about waves that are very inconvenient or impossible to test at full scale. (Neither of these things have anything to do with your proposed experiments.) And yes, we still do tests in ocean for experimental craft, but they almost never have to do with the bits that can be tested in a wave tank because there's a bunch of bits that can't be tested in a wave tank. (And again, this has nothing to do with either of your proposed "experiments".)
Here's a hint for you: You're a clueless moron who think that using big words means you're intelligent. You're wrong on that count - all it does is prove you're a parrot that can repeat things it has no capability of understanding.
Neither of your payloads need to go Mars. For the first, all the requisite conditions save gravity can be simulated here on Earth. (And if you must simulate gravity, it will be far cheaper to send a centrifuge to LEO.) For the second, all the requisite data is available and merely awaits someone with a computer and some spare time to write the simulation.
And that's real science is done - small scale tests and simulations first to determine if it's even worth it to try larger scale experiments. What you propose is how a fifth grader, or the Mars One staff, thinks science is done.
Not a chance in hell. The cruisers, destroyers, and support ships that make up a carrier group along with the carrier cost a fair fraction of the cost of the carrier itself, and the air wing isn't cheap either.
Did he also show you whether or not the de Havilland Mosquito could take the stress of carrying a 1000lb missile and rebound stress of dropping the same? (They only carried 500lb bombs in service.) That it could carry 1,300 lbs of AWG-9 radar in it's nose? (Where the Mosquito basically had only essentially weightless empty space.) That it could provide the several kilowatts of power needed to operate said radar?
Etc... etc...
I suspect he didn't, and that like you (with your laughable claim about the carriers) hadn't a clue what he was talking about.
You don't seem to realize that Tesla *borrowed* the funds he used to pay back the government loan - so he's still in debt and still tottering on the edge because he hasn't brought a car to the mass market. That's not envy or ideology, that's a stone cold fact like the sun rising in the East tomorrow morning.
SpaceX may be cheaper, but so what? Their demonstrated flight rate, schedule reliability, and flight reliability are far, far below industry averages. As with Tesla, they're tottering on the edge and propped up with government money. (Because their performance is so low, Again, this isn't envy or ideology, it's stone cold facts.
I can see only two reasons why you might make the claim you did - either you're completely ignorant of the facts, or you just handwave them away like any fan boy does when confronted with unpleasant reality. (In which case, you're pretty much a poster boy for exactly the kind of clueless fan boy I was talking about.)
Which is it?
Yep, happened exactly as it always does, the Musk fan boys have been at it - because they can't stand the truth or anything that doesn't smack of adulation verging on worship.
*sigh* You know damn well what "Ma Bell" is shorthand for. So does everyone who read what I wrote who has an IQ above room temperature. The simple fact is, you were wrong. Not all listings were paid advertisement no matter how much you squirm and blow bullshit.
If that's not what you took away from the TFA, then you're stupid beyond belief. The rest of what I quoted just confirms that - because you have no clue how hard it is to run a significant business and how much effort it takes to keep track to prevent yourself from being victimized. (Or, if you've run or are running a significant business and haven't encountered either, you should count yourself lucky for being out at the end of the bell curve. But I vote stupid based on the evidence.)
Musk strikes me as a lot of things... Carnegie and Franklin aren't among them.
He's an emerging master at PR and managing public opinion, and his fan base (very prevalent here on Slashdot) just laps it up.
It wasn't "just a few weeks", it was nearly a year per TFA.
Discussed by who? Where? And what was the authority of the group who held the discussion to reach such a decision? Or are you seriously asking me to decide based on your links one of which is the one that's being blamed in the first place? Not to mention, if you check the dates of the bad reviews on Yelp and Trip Advisor you find many of them are from the period when the staff had been cut in response to the business drop off. (Further proof, if needed, that whoever "discussed" this as you claim is clueless.)
And there are good reviews in the same period, but you fail to mention those. Not to mention you fail to adress how complaints in 2010 can lead to a sudden and massive drop off years later. And you fail to address the fact that his information *was* changed.
Etc... etc...
Seriously? I knew Musk's personality cult was getting bad, but this is a new low. On the philanthropic front, Musk isn't even bloody close to what either Andrew Carnegie or Benjamin Franklin left for posterity.
(Yeah, I know the Musk fan boy club will mod me down, so be it. The truth remains the truth.)
The grandparent was talking about the One Book To Rule Them All - Ma Bell's, everyone with a phone line in a given area got one on their doorstep for free and it was the most widely used one. If you had a business line from Ma Bell, you got a one line entry (business name and phone number) in the standard type face, size, and color in one category for free. Extra categories, larger print, display ads, all these cost extra. (In areas with multiple books (a city and a county book for example), being in more than one cost extra as well.)
The point of TFA is that a business owner shouldn't have to spend time and money policing multiple sites in order to protect himself from trolls and malicious mischief. Especially because so many of them manipulate the information presented so that bad reviews predominate - which they then charge the business to clear up.
From a user's perspective - it's pretty much nothing but bad. Between the tendency of people to complain more than they congratulate, deliberate manipulation by website operators, and various forms of trolling and mischief... the 'net is virtually completely unreliable.
And the system has been more-or-less broken for a very long time. In the mid 1980's I got back from a SSBN patrol to find waiting for me in the mail a notice from Selective Service warning me that having failed to register I was ineligible for all manner of Federal programs. (I hadn't registered because I enlisted in the Navy shortly after my 17th birthday.) Of course being on active duty or a veterans trumps Selective Service registration for eligibility, and it took a letter from my command along with a copy of my (IIRC) Page 2 to finally get them to go away.
For an organization that basically has one job, they aren't very good at it. (Even by the usual low standards applicable to government organizations.)
Actually, only about 2500 at the current (FY2014) fly-away price ($35 million) of a new build current model (AH-64E).
True. This is as much a popularity contest as anything else.
If I were to select the "best programmer", my list would probably start with guys who write software that has to run in the "real world"... like the Shuttle GNC software which has to navigate in real time, while controlling the vehicles systems, and do this completely with a bug or a failure. Or the software that hundreds (thousands?) of airliners are running that is almost as stringent. Or... plenty of other programmers who must deal with real world problem domains as well as the limits of their hardware, firmware, OS, and programming language.
Yeah, I know, the argument could be made that this would just result in a list of "best programmers of type X" and there's a ton of potential values for X.