Think about how many dozens of MS employees must have read the text of this speech before it went up on their site. Notice that not once in the entire text of this speech does he use an apostrophe.
Now why the heck would you take advice on intellectual property and business models from a company that can't even create grammatically correct English text? Why would you buy software from these guys?
...is the fact that so few people read or understood the article before posting about it. The majority of comments I've read are from people who seem to think that the article proposed moving the Earth with one large asteroid. That's not right. They're talking about using a series of small asteroids (or the same one over and over, whatever) over a long period of time to produce a series of gentle tugs. C'mon guys, pay attention.
Now, here's a cool thought: they mentioned the necessity of moving Venus and Mars at the same time to prevent orbital instability. Why not move all three planets into the same orbit? That is, each planet would have the other two sitting in its trojan points. Perhaps that would make subsequent orbital adjustments trickier, though. I don't know, my orbital mechanics class was a long time ago.
As somebody else pointed out, this does sound quite a bit like the Puppeteer homeworlds in Larry Niven's "Ringworld".
Human cloning's real ethical problem is the same as that of all of the other ridiculously expensive reproductive technologies that have been developed. We don't need more births, we need fewer. There are too many people being born already, regardless of whether they're cloned, grown in a test tube, or born to a sixty-year old woman. Spending millions of dollars to pull this kind of stunt is completely irresponsible.
But what's even worse is this: If you read the Yahoo article, this same guy also has a project to grow human sperm in mice.
Slashdot Mirror
Think about how many dozens of MS employees must have read the text of this speech before it went up on their site. Notice that not once in the entire text of this speech does he use an apostrophe.
Now why the heck would you take advice on intellectual property and business models from a company that can't even create grammatically correct English text? Why would you buy software from these guys?
...is the fact that so few people read or understood the article before posting about it. The majority of comments I've read are from people who seem to think that the article proposed moving the Earth with one large asteroid. That's not right. They're talking about using a series of small asteroids (or the same one over and over, whatever) over a long period of time to produce a series of gentle tugs. C'mon guys, pay attention.
Now, here's a cool thought: they mentioned the necessity of moving Venus and Mars at the same time to prevent orbital instability. Why not move all three planets into the same orbit? That is, each planet would have the other two sitting in its trojan points. Perhaps that would make subsequent orbital adjustments trickier, though. I don't know, my orbital mechanics class was a long time ago.
As somebody else pointed out, this does sound quite a bit like the Puppeteer homeworlds in Larry Niven's "Ringworld".
Human cloning's real ethical problem is the same as that of all of the other ridiculously expensive reproductive technologies that have been developed. We don't need more births, we need fewer. There are too many people being born already, regardless of whether they're cloned, grown in a test tube, or born to a sixty-year old woman. Spending millions of dollars to pull this kind of stunt is completely irresponsible.
But what's even worse is this: If you read the Yahoo article, this same guy also has a project to grow human sperm in mice.
Now that is disturbing. Ick.
The point is, how long would it take that MCSE to set up a Win2K cluster versus the high school student on Linux?
We are beginning to reach the point where it becomes easier, not just cooler, to do things in Linux.