Re:The situation has changed, but you have not.
on
Business Under Fire
·
· Score: 1
wake up, man. The threat TODAY is from the United States Government.
Well considering how a terrific breeding ground for terrorism it's made in Irak, I'd say the parent looks more like Insightful or Intresting then Funny.
What I'm saying is there are two completly different skills that should be taught separately: programming and "producing a work that meets the design criteria". If you wanted to learn how to juggle apples on a line wouldn't you learn juggling and walking on a line separately and then practice them together? I doubt you'd ever learn how to juggle if you're constantly afraid of falling off... not to mention it's a lot more trouble to pick up an apple from the floor;)
This applies very well to programming... of which creativity is a very very big part. First you tech a language, then algorythms, then a drop of software engineering then working in teams and using written specifications.
Think of how annoying is to follow all those "stupid" rules like encapsulation when you're summing the first n integers... they're simply higher level concepts that can't be learnt by heart like the Coran. You must have the basis on which to apply them.
adding things that YOU feel add to the product, but which were neither requested by, or approved by the customer is counter-productive at best.
That is managerial decision. In the real world the ex-student will learn _very_ fast that unpaid work doesn't pay (pun intended). There's no need to stifle whatever creativity he may have as soon as you find it (which is a lot like the OP sounded like).
This discussion aside, what really bothers me is how arguments like this are used to justify and promote unprofesionalism among teachers. Kid learned something new, say Yay! and pat him on the back. That should be standard practice.
Oh crap! I'm so sick and tired of this excuse you can't even imagine it, more so because i first came up with it myself. But years later it's crystal clear that school is school and work practice is work practice and it's way to stupid to try to teach them both at once.
Yes, i'm all for learning in school how the real world works but not during and at the expense of regular classes. To be failed because "we haven't learned that yet" seems normal only by lack of imagination: you can't (as i couldn't for a long time) imagine a world where the teacher says: "wow, that's great!". And yet such schools do exist and it's by personal failure of each teacher that they aren't the norm.
IANAP, but as far as I remember the question is how big the system can get before it collapses into a specific state. If you take a small enough system, for example a photon, or a bunch of small particles (as much as an atom I think) they're in a quantum state, ie not a particular state but several at once. When you add to the system at a certain point it stops beeing "quantic" and collapses into a particular state.
By observing a particle one merges it into a much bigger system including the observer so it imediately collapses, weather it's a physicist or an ape;)
Come on guys! READ THE ARTICLE and stop bickering. Did you realise what this is about? What this means? This is... I was about to say history, but that's a cliche. Just think about it... from now on there is a cure for spinal injury. It'll take a while to go mainstream, but it's there. I think it's worth getting over politics for a while.
Of course, you're thinking "that's not fair to the companies, and they'll go out of business". Note that I never said that. If companies want to make money, they can fund their own research with their own money, and sell their drugs themselves.
Or they can manufactures the drugs in the public domain, or improve upon them, or find new areas to research or sell research resources to the government or or or and and and. Don't see how having some extra public domain research would hurt _anybody's_ finances. Oh sure, they may have to adapt a bit, but that's the really slimy part in our new shiny corporatist world economy: the easiest way to adapt is to bribe the governement. And you know what thay say about specialisation don't you?... smilodon it was?
I'm curious, since nobody ever mentioned the specific facts, who actualy suggested taking perfectly healthy, meant-to-become-babies embryos and killing them in order to harvest cells? An where do they propose to find the mothers to agree?
Because the way I understood it, it's about using embryos already aborted (intentionally or not), which kinda reduces the problem to the embryos not having a donor card. Am I out of the loop here?
If you make a balance, then over time as the benefits of science and exploration are realized suffering will decrease without additional money.
Just what I was saying... well, in reverse. Take care of things close to home, and resources for exploration will become available without effort.
I think truth is somewhere in the middle, balance beeing the key word here. But my main point was that the real frontier _now_ it's down here, not up there, and there's more to gain for a buck invested in installing net in ghana then in exploring mars (x-prize stuff notwithstanding).
On the other hand, maybe exploring space would create a sharper feeling that we're "down here" together... who knows.
There's something stunningly cool about pictures from 'other worlds' - amazing really. I do wish we would drop the 'financial' business sense, and just go in to space because we can. Does there even need to be a valid reason beyond 'why the hell not'
Let's go! Would you like to make a small contribution to exploration funds? minimum is $990...
We will go there someday, either because McDonalds will afford it as a marketing stunt or it'll be cost efective to mine the asteroids or some rich guy will make it fashionable to see the rings of saturn or...
But the time is not now. And I say this after watching more Enterprise episodes then it's good for me:) We simply have too much to do down here, starting with small things like freedom of speech;) to the big things like getting almost half the population into our world.
I could remind you of all the people in africa who're starving, but let's face it, i care about them just as much as you do: not at all. But think of milions of people who don't read newspapers. Or watch TV. Or have jobs in the sense we understand it. There are maybe 3 bilon civilised people in the world, and that's counting all china and india. Just imagine how it would be with 6! The richness of industry, research, culture that can come!
No, I don't think you can imagine. You're too engrossed in what's happening in your world... Don't you ever watch Google News or CNN and have a strong feeling you're only seeing part of the site of the same show over and over again? Don't you ever fing yourselves looking for the links to the rest of the site? Who THE FUCK cares about the SAME FUCKING bombing or elections or murder over and over again? Were are the news?! You know, the news? No, I doubt you do...
That's enough... I have work to do, and it's not what i wanted to say in the first place. On the bright side, I doubt I'll get any mod points to speak of...
Some people already mentioned video cameras installed in each pod (probably ATM-style, taking 1-2 snapshots per trip).
A good complement to this would be to encode identification info in the prepaid cards. Then if there's significant vandalism to a pod the bad guy can be identified. Not easy, granted, but simply knowing it can be done would certainly make them think twice.
I'm in an Eastern European country and our medical system is rather dangereus to your health. By far the best and safest way to solve a health problem is to know someone in the system, and bribe a couple of doctors too.
Doesn't sound very good, does it? Well, from what I just read it's exactly the same in US. Well, except from the bribing part (though it might work too), but here you'd get the same kind of attention if you came off the street that he's been given. You have to know personally a doctor, and if you have a serious problem you'd better know a specialist too, or have a way to reach one.
I'm exagerating of course. There are good chances that walking into a hospital would solve your problem, but the road from ER to a _good_ specialist is yours to tread, probably regardless of country. And his way is, I hope, most effective.
I completely agree, however any point of view that implies that what's good for them is automatically good for my is icky not to say dangereus, especially when they are much bigger then me.
Cost effective Wind Power (Kilowatts/Construction costs) would mean the end of middle east conflict, global warming, rural poverty in developing countries
Come on guys! This is still slashdot, not some popcorn news thingy. Surely by now most of you would have done the math and discovered that not oil is the gain in this war, but war itself, with all the chaos and spendings and red heringness it implies.
Can anybody please with a bit more time on their hands look up the numbers and compare oil profits in 5-10 years with the war-related spendings in the past 3 years? And mind you, I'm not even saying thet the expenses will be neccessary bigger, but that for the right people they count as profits too.
As for rural poverty in developing countries... if anybody still beleves this is a technical problem and not a social and/or political one, they're plain stupid. No offence. They really are.
It is not science and knowledge specifically which constitute a "threat to those in power". Bush et al. or whoever happens to be in power at the time are not likely to be dethroned by a sudden widespread and detailed comprehension of nuclear fusion for instance. No, it is the powerful incisive, rational, analytical and logical thought processes which a scientifically trained mind must posess that are truly disruptive to the "status quo" (if I may use such a loaded term).
And if I were inclined to be a conspiration theorist I'd say this is the reason why education worldwide is beeing done with 50 year old methods, and really laughable curriculums.
Most types of errors are manageable in a large project, in the sense that you can design the process around them and try to prevent them. What is much more difficult is to prevent exactly this kind of stupid mistakes, for the very reason that nobody would think thay can be made.
Now why they happen so often in space projects and the like? Because the sheer size of the project. When filling 10000 tanks, one or two get filled with diesel instead of gasoline by mistake. Same with these projects, magnified by the fact that you have 10000 completely differen simple/obvious operations to do. And like i said, managers are helpless against them because you can't even guess where bad luck/stupidity is going to strike this time.
The big problem comes from the high cost of putting mass in orbit, which means low redundacy and reliance on smart design, which makes the perfect conditions for a stupid mistake like this to ruin the whole thing. It's not their _fault_, it's just the rules of the game. They weren't good enough this time...
And the sort of person who complains about using leather is also likely to be the sort that complains about genetically modified foods.
And that, my friend, is the key. It's all about the kind of person you are, and very little about the issue at hand, be it vegetarian food or artificially grown leather. It's fashion, not logic that drives most people. Hell, a few posts up somebody (5 insightful) was ranting on how unhealthy beef is, and i doubt ter percent of slashdot readers ever bothered to research what a really healthy diet is even about. I'll give the rest a hint - it's balanced and it includes meat.
I happen to have given a lot of thought to the subject because i'm considering renting the software i'm making instead of selling it, and there are a few points I should make:
1. Nobody says the software must be at the service provider and not at the client. Few clientis would allow their confidential data to reside outside their company to name only one good reason.
This doesn't mean the software can't have a web interface, just that this decision is not forced by the services model.
2. Clients already pay for maintenance. What they get now is that this beeing the only money the software vendor gets, he's motivated to do a better job.
The price of the software matters much less to the user then it means to the vendor. What the user wants is to be convinced that this solution solves his problem and he can start to use it easely (weather the client is a person or a big company metters less). What the vendor wants is a chance to prove that to the client and of course to make money in the end. The price for the software if the software is sold is a bareer in this "partnership", because both user and vendor know that after the money is paid there is little more that can/will be done by either. By renting the software you make official a partnership that should anyway exist and last as long as possible.
Nothing compares to a code review done by a super-anal type who nitpicks over everything. It is amazing what such a person can catch in terms of weird edge cases, inefficiencies, and so forth, simply by making you sit there and justify what you've done. Like the reviewer said, they are emotionally draining, but are truly worth it.
Super-anal nitpicks guys are the very reason code reviews are so uncommon in practice. I can't remember how many times I had to explain that yes, this piece of code may be inefficient but i don't give a rats ass because: 1. premature optimisation is the root of all evil 2. well, actually the first said it better
Before code reviews can take place there should be a common understanding of what the programmer strives to optimise, which in most cases should be code size and clarity. After that... well, code reviews are solid gold.
And btw, I usually try to re-read my code before compiling, and I found that usually
bugs = compiling errors * 2 Anybody can confirm?
Yes, I use alot of Windows software, and no I'm not a Linux zealot (love Knoppix though). With the exception of IE (which I abandoned long ago), most Microsoft software I use (Office, Outlook) is "good enough" but certainly not great.
First a bit of backgdound info about me: I've been sysadmin at my highschool some 10 years ago and all network/server stuff I did was linux. I'm writing this from windows, but I dont't think since that time I've ever been without a linux partition on my computer and ocasionaly I've been without a windows one.
And I'd like to ask you: why do you not consider MS Office to be great software? I admit it's a strange question, and I'm ready to admit that the latest versions brought little that the common user could use, but as a whole they solve a HUGE problem. Don't take my word for it, think for yourself of the enormity of small tasks one program must perform to edit an average document. There is a reason there are so few competitors in this field and that is it's damn hard to make a better software then word 97. Word and excel are amongst the best in their domain as we speak and at times in the past have been by far the best, and are also probably the most used programs in the world. And if the competition have been capable of making better they would have, because office programs until recently have been many things but not cheap.
My point is that however we may not like MS business practices we achieve nothing by saying word sucks because it doesn't make coffe. Good software remains good software and all we can and should to is learn from it and try to make better. And no, I didn't read the article yet but I'm going to. If it's bullshit then so it is, but sure as hell I'm not going to ignore it just because it has something to do with bill gates.
Actually I was thinking 'bout when we get there and need a place to crash, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's about as cheap to get the ice from there as it is to lift it from earth. Don't know the numbers though...
Radiation? You could inflate it with water instead of air. If you can prevent it from freezing it opens some intresting posibilities... like bringing the "tent" from earth and the water from the moon... and there's a lot of water in the asteroid belt too. You can make huge buildings this way, even domes. Come to think of it, even frozen water may work just fine.
Hmm. There should be a way to legally try to cheat the system, either live, during elections (better, but there is the risk that smb may succed and keep quiet) or during special organized "drills". The latter is a lot less effective - for one thing every voter is automaticaly a suspect;) but seems to me it's still a lot better then the "it compiles! ship it!" approach.
That's just what I was thinking. If I was a fanatical git I'd also say we should rewrite all kernels in Java:) On the other hand, isn't that what Microsoft is doing with.NET?
MS is scaring me a little lately. They're taking the best ideeas from the industry and making a hell of a development framework. Which is just what they did on their first brake, with windows 3.1 - taken pretty much all the good ideeas at that time and past them together. Badly, yes, but good enough to be better the competition.
Slashdot Mirror
wake up, man. The threat TODAY is from the United States Government.
Well considering how a terrific breeding ground for terrorism it's made in Irak, I'd say the parent looks more like Insightful or Intresting then Funny.
What I'm saying is there are two completly different skills that should be taught separately: programming and "producing a work that meets the design criteria". If you wanted to learn how to juggle apples on a line wouldn't you learn juggling and walking on a line separately and then practice them together? I doubt you'd ever learn how to juggle if you're constantly afraid of falling off... not to mention it's a lot more trouble to pick up an apple from the floor
This applies very well to programming... of which creativity is a very very big part. First you tech a language, then algorythms, then a drop of software engineering then working in teams and using written specifications.
Think of how annoying is to follow all those "stupid" rules like encapsulation when you're summing the first n integers... they're simply higher level concepts that can't be learnt by heart like the Coran. You must have the basis on which to apply them.
adding things that YOU feel add to the product, but which were neither requested by, or approved by the customer is counter-productive at best.
That is managerial decision. In the real world the ex-student will learn _very_ fast that unpaid work doesn't pay (pun intended). There's no need to stifle whatever creativity he may have as soon as you find it (which is a lot like the OP sounded like).
This discussion aside, what really bothers me is how arguments like this are used to justify and promote unprofesionalism among teachers. Kid learned something new, say Yay! and pat him on the back. That should be standard practice.
Oh crap! I'm so sick and tired of this excuse you can't even imagine it, more so because i first came up with it myself. But years later it's crystal clear that school is school and work practice is work practice and it's way to stupid to try to teach them both at once.
Yes, i'm all for learning in school how the real world works but not during and at the expense of regular classes. To be failed because "we haven't learned that yet" seems normal only by lack of imagination: you can't (as i couldn't for a long time) imagine a world where the teacher says: "wow, that's great!". And yet such schools do exist and it's by personal failure of each teacher that they aren't the norm.
I believe that little elves are responsible for all of the world's ills. Kennedy was killed by an elf, for example.
... and how the FBI it's going to be on your ass if it really blows!
Even now, the elves are working on igniting a great volcano under yellostone park!
IANAP, but as far as I remember the question is how big the system can get before it collapses into a specific state. If you take a small enough system, for example a photon, or a bunch of small particles (as much as an atom I think) they're in a quantum state, ie not a particular state but several at once. When you add to the system at a certain point it stops beeing "quantic" and collapses into a particular state.
;)
By observing a particle one merges it into a much bigger system including the observer so it imediately collapses, weather it's a physicist or an ape
Come on guys! READ THE ARTICLE and stop bickering. Did you realise what this is about? What this means? This is... I was about to say history, but that's a cliche. Just think about it... from now on there is a cure for spinal injury. It'll take a while to go mainstream, but it's there. I think it's worth getting over politics for a while.
Of course, you're thinking "that's not fair to the companies, and they'll go out of business". Note that I never said that. If companies want to make money, they can fund their own research with their own money, and sell their drugs themselves.
Or they can manufactures the drugs in the public domain, or improve upon them, or find new areas to research or sell research resources to the government or or or and and and. Don't see how having some extra public domain research would hurt _anybody's_ finances. Oh sure, they may have to adapt a bit, but that's the really slimy part in our new shiny corporatist world economy: the easiest way to adapt is to bribe the governement. And you know what thay say about specialisation don't you?... smilodon it was?
I'm curious, since nobody ever mentioned the specific facts, who actualy suggested taking perfectly healthy, meant-to-become-babies embryos and killing them in order to harvest cells? An where do they propose to find the mothers to agree?
Because the way I understood it, it's about using embryos already aborted (intentionally or not), which kinda reduces the problem to the embryos not having a donor card. Am I out of the loop here?
If you make a balance, then over time as the benefits of science and exploration are realized suffering will decrease without additional money.
Just what I was saying... well, in reverse. Take care of things close to home, and resources for exploration will become available without effort.
I think truth is somewhere in the middle, balance beeing the key word here. But my main point was that the real frontier _now_ it's down here, not up there, and there's more to gain for a buck invested in installing net in ghana then in exploring mars (x-prize stuff notwithstanding).
On the other hand, maybe exploring space would create a sharper feeling that we're "down here" together... who knows.
There's something stunningly cool about pictures from 'other worlds' - amazing really. I do wish we would drop the 'financial' business sense, and just go in to space because we can. Does there even need to be a valid reason beyond 'why the hell not'
:) We simply have too much to do down here, starting with small things like freedom of speech ;) to the big things like getting almost half the population into our world.
Let's go! Would you like to make a small contribution to exploration funds? minimum is $990...
We will go there someday, either because McDonalds will afford it as a marketing stunt or it'll be cost efective to mine the asteroids or some rich guy will make it fashionable to see the rings of saturn or...
But the time is not now. And I say this after watching more Enterprise episodes then it's good for me
I could remind you of all the people in africa who're starving, but let's face it, i care about them just as much as you do: not at all. But think of milions of people who don't read newspapers. Or watch TV. Or have jobs in the sense we understand it. There are maybe 3 bilon civilised people in the world, and that's counting all china and india. Just imagine how it would be with 6! The richness of industry, research, culture that can come!
No, I don't think you can imagine. You're too engrossed in what's happening in your world... Don't you ever watch Google News or CNN and have a strong feeling you're only seeing part of the site of the same show over and over again? Don't you ever fing yourselves looking for the links to the rest of the site? Who THE FUCK cares about the SAME FUCKING bombing or elections or murder over and over again? Were are the news?! You know, the news? No, I doubt you do...
That's enough... I have work to do, and it's not what i wanted to say in the first place. On the bright side, I doubt I'll get any mod points to speak of...
Some people already mentioned video cameras installed in each pod (probably ATM-style, taking 1-2 snapshots per trip).
A good complement to this would be to encode identification info in the prepaid cards. Then if there's significant vandalism to a pod the bad guy can be identified. Not easy, granted, but simply knowing it can be done would certainly make them think twice.
I'm in an Eastern European country and our medical system is rather dangereus to your health. By far the best and safest way to solve a health problem is to know someone in the system, and bribe a couple of doctors too.
Doesn't sound very good, does it? Well, from what I just read it's exactly the same in US. Well, except from the bribing part (though it might work too), but here you'd get the same kind of attention if you came off the street that he's been given. You have to know personally a doctor, and if you have a serious problem you'd better know a specialist too, or have a way to reach one.
I'm exagerating of course. There are good chances that walking into a hospital would solve your problem, but the road from ER to a _good_ specialist is yours to tread, probably regardless of country. And his way is, I hope, most effective.
Good Luck!
Ya ya. And if all their employees would also be shareholders this would be true
I completely agree, however any point of view that implies that what's good for them is automatically good for my is icky not to say dangereus, especially when they are much bigger then me.
Cost effective Wind Power (Kilowatts/Construction costs) would mean the end of middle east conflict, global warming, rural poverty in developing countries
Come on guys! This is still slashdot, not some popcorn news thingy. Surely by now most of you would have done the math and discovered that not oil is the gain in this war, but war itself, with all the chaos and spendings and red heringness it implies.
Can anybody please with a bit more time on their hands look up the numbers and compare oil profits in 5-10 years with the war-related spendings in the past 3 years? And mind you, I'm not even saying thet the expenses will be neccessary bigger, but that for the right people they count as profits too.
As for rural poverty in developing countries... if anybody still beleves this is a technical problem and not a social and/or political one, they're plain stupid. No offence. They really are.
It is not science and knowledge specifically which constitute a "threat to those in power". Bush et al. or whoever happens to be in power at the time are not likely to be dethroned by a sudden widespread and detailed comprehension of nuclear fusion for instance. No, it is the powerful incisive, rational, analytical and logical thought processes which a scientifically trained mind must posess that are truly disruptive to the "status quo" (if I may use such a loaded term).
And if I were inclined to be a conspiration theorist I'd say this is the reason why education worldwide is beeing done with 50 year old methods, and really laughable curriculums.
Most types of errors are manageable in a large project, in the sense that you can design the process around them and try to prevent them. What is much more difficult is to prevent exactly this kind of stupid mistakes, for the very reason that nobody would think thay can be made.
Now why they happen so often in space projects and the like? Because the sheer size of the project. When filling 10000 tanks, one or two get filled with diesel instead of gasoline by mistake. Same with these projects, magnified by the fact that you have 10000 completely differen simple/obvious operations to do. And like i said, managers are helpless against them because you can't even guess where bad luck/stupidity is going to strike this time.
The big problem comes from the high cost of putting mass in orbit, which means low redundacy and reliance on smart design, which makes the perfect conditions for a stupid mistake like this to ruin the whole thing. It's not their _fault_, it's just the rules of the game. They weren't good enough this time...
And the sort of person who complains about using leather is also likely to be the sort that complains about genetically modified foods.
And that, my friend, is the key. It's all about the kind of person you are, and very little about the issue at hand, be it vegetarian food or artificially grown leather. It's fashion, not logic that drives most people. Hell, a few posts up somebody (5 insightful) was ranting on how unhealthy beef is, and i doubt ter percent of slashdot readers ever bothered to research what a really healthy diet is even about. I'll give the rest a hint - it's balanced and it includes meat.
I happen to have given a lot of thought to the subject because i'm considering renting the software i'm making instead of selling it, and there are a few points I should make:
1. Nobody says the software must be at the service provider and not at the client. Few clientis would allow their confidential data to reside outside their company to name only one good reason.
This doesn't mean the software can't have a web interface, just that this decision is not forced by the services model.
2. Clients already pay for maintenance. What they get now is that this beeing the only money the software vendor gets, he's motivated to do a better job.
The price of the software matters much less to the user then it means to the vendor. What the user wants is to be convinced that this solution solves his problem and he can start to use it easely (weather the client is a person or a big company metters less). What the vendor wants is a chance to prove that to the client and of course to make money in the end.
The price for the software if the software is sold is a bareer in this "partnership", because both user and vendor know that after the money is paid there is little more that can/will be done by either. By renting the software you make official a partnership that should anyway exist and last as long as possible.
Nothing compares to a code review done by a super-anal type who nitpicks over everything. It is amazing what such a person can catch in terms of weird edge cases, inefficiencies, and so forth, simply by making you sit there and justify what you've done. Like the reviewer said, they are emotionally draining, but are truly worth it.
Super-anal nitpicks guys are the very reason code reviews are so uncommon in practice. I can't remember how many times I had to explain that yes, this piece of code may be inefficient but i don't give a rats ass because:
1. premature optimisation is the root of all evil
2. well, actually the first said it better
Before code reviews can take place there should be a common understanding of what the programmer strives to optimise, which in most cases should be code size and clarity. After that... well, code reviews are solid gold.
And btw, I usually try to re-read my code before compiling, and I found that usually
bugs = compiling errors * 2
Anybody can confirm?
Yes, I use alot of Windows software, and no I'm not a Linux zealot (love Knoppix though). With the exception of IE (which I abandoned long ago), most Microsoft software I use (Office, Outlook) is "good enough" but certainly not great.
First a bit of backgdound info about me: I've been sysadmin at my highschool some 10 years ago and all network/server stuff I did was linux. I'm writing this from windows, but I dont't think since that time I've ever been without a linux partition on my computer and ocasionaly I've been without a windows one.
And I'd like to ask you: why do you not consider MS Office to be great software? I admit it's a strange question, and I'm ready to admit that the latest versions brought little that the common user could use, but as a whole they solve a HUGE problem. Don't take my word for it, think for yourself of the enormity of small tasks one program must perform to edit an average document. There is a reason there are so few competitors in this field and that is it's damn hard to make a better software then word 97.
Word and excel are amongst the best in their domain as we speak and at times in the past have been by far the best, and are also probably the most used programs in the world. And if the competition have been capable of making better they would have, because office programs until recently have been many things but not cheap.
My point is that however we may not like MS business practices we achieve nothing by saying word sucks because it doesn't make coffe. Good software remains good software and all we can and should to is learn from it and try to make better. And no, I didn't read the article yet but I'm going to. If it's bullshit then so it is, but sure as hell I'm not going to ignore it just because it has something to do with bill gates.
Actually I was thinking 'bout when we get there and need a place to crash, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's about as cheap to get the ice from there as it is to lift it from earth. Don't know the numbers though...
Radiation? You could inflate it with water instead of air. If you can prevent it from freezing it opens some intresting posibilities... like bringing the "tent" from earth and the water from the moon... and there's a lot of water in the asteroid belt too. You can make huge buildings this way, even domes. Come to think of it, even frozen water may work just fine.
Hmm. There should be a way to legally try to cheat the system, either live, during elections (better, but there is the risk that smb may succed and keep quiet) or during special organized "drills". The latter is a lot less effective - for one thing every voter is automaticaly a suspect ;) but seems to me it's still a lot better then the "it compiles! ship it!" approach.
That's just what I was thinking. If I was a fanatical git I'd also say we should rewrite all kernels in Java
MS is scaring me a little lately. They're taking the best ideeas from the industry and making a hell of a development framework. Which is just what they did on their first brake, with windows 3.1 - taken pretty much all the good ideeas at that time and past them together. Badly, yes, but good enough to be better the competition.