> "Air Force instead paid to launch a dummy payload and a pair of small research satellites."
Our tax dollars at work.
Would you rather that they had put another $Billion of our tax dollars into a spy satellite that would be uselessly drifting in space right now because of the partial failure of this untested rocket?
You don't understand. You can't eat a bond. Every hamburger that you eat this year was produced this year.
Supply and demand works in real time. If you have a bunch of bonds you saved up, but there aren't enough burger flippers left to run the economy, the value of your bonds will plummet.
Ultimately, the viability of any retirement system is determined by the proportion of active workers to retirees during each passing year.
Sadly, just about everyone I've talked to about this just doesn't get it. They've been conditioned to believe that the value of investments invariably grows over time. That works at an individual level, but it doesn't work at a global scale. Most everything you consume today is produced by current workers. You can't "save up" half of the economy in advance in hopes of seeing a day when half of the people are lounging around collecting full benefits.
Yes, let's compare it to social security, which is so ill concieved that its about to go broke within my generation.
*Any* retirement system whatsoever would be going broke within a generation. The basic problem is that people are living longer. If you keep a fixed retirement age, over time you get more people sitting on their asses in this economy supported by fewer people working. That fundamental truth is invariant regardless of what kinds of paper certificates you try to shuffle around, be they stocks, treasury bonds or whatever. It doesn't matter if the government "owns" the pieces of paper or the retirees do; their value will rise and fall with supply and demand, and there's going to be a lot of retirees with a big supply of paper.
There are only one possible way to fix the problem: increase the retirement age. Ultimately, that's what will be done to "fix" social security. Talking about doing anything else is just a red herring.
Sure Zip drives sucked. However, they came out *before* firewire, and it was years before firewire got the critical mass that makes them useful for data exchange. You were the one harping on ubiquity, weren't you? Maybe the external Zip drive was a hack, but on day one they were usable on over 90% of the machines in existence. That's something that firewire drives can't touch even today.
At any rate, I hope that you're not using the same external hard drive to trot around town with your massive MP3 collection, indiscriminately mount on your friends' machines, and back up your critical system data.
For the record: I've probably been using SCSI tech on x86 PC's since before you started computing.
Bad guess. I've been using internal drives since before there were any PCs or SCSI.
I have to agree that SCSI sucks, and it's even more overpriced than Apple gear. However, it's just not true that PC users never had an external drive option. Back in the day I used a parallel-port Zip drive to address your friends-and-family scenario. As soon as CD-R drives became popular, however, the needs were covered with internal drives, and my Zip drive was relegated to the dustbin of history.
This notion that everything needs to be in the case is just something that the lameness of PC's has beat into people. You think that way because for the longest time you simply didn't have any other viable option.
PCs have supported firewire just about as long as Macs, and they've had SCSI since day 1. It's always been a viable option.
The reason that PC users typically use internal drives is because they're cheaper. *Any* external drive will cost more because of the need for its own case and possibly its own power supply. Add volume pricing into the mix, and the price of an internal drive is typically half that of a similar external drive. Some people can't understand why anybody would put any consideration of price into selecting a product, but yes, it actually happens in the real world.
What's more, some people actually like their computing functionality to fit into a nice tidy box. They don't want to clutter up their workspace with a dozen dongles, pods and shoeboxes hooked together with a tangled mass of daisy-chained cables.
For once Intel was starting from a somewhat clean slate.
Actually, Intel tried starting from a clean slate a couple of times. These either resulted in a dead end (i960), or a miserable failure (iAPX 432, i860). One would think that they should have learned their lesson by now.
The kiosks in question aren't stamp machines (which have been around for 40 years or more), but a complete self-service post office.
The cameras were originally included to solve one of the hardest technological problems with faithfully implementing a mechanical post office. It's necessary for the machine to recognize when the line of waiting customers has filled the entire lobby and is just starting to snake out the front door. That's the precise time that the machines need to pop up the cardboard "Closed" sign on all but one of their stations.
Stop thinking of the government like it's a private citizen with a credit card. That analogy leads you to conclusions that aren't just wrong, they're really, really wrong.
You're right. Unlike a credit card, the government can just print its way out of any economic dilemma. It's a great strategy, and I'm glad we're finally using it. Just look at the what the Weimar Republic was able to achieve!
Somebody's going to have to chip in and bring Iraq into the 21st century. Why us? Because we can. No other reason at all.
That's total bullcrap. You do things like climb Mt. Everest because "you can". You don't send countless billions of dollars to a hostile country when you're already trillions in debt.
The reason we're dumping all of this money into Iraq is to save face. Our leaders made a colossal mistake. They invaded a country on based on inaccurate or fabricated pretenses (don't give me any revisionist reasons; I remember full well exactly what reasons were given prior to the invasion), and now they're trying to cover their asses.
Yes, that's why we legalized shoplifting and beating up smaller children for lunch money decades ago.
Anti-shoplifting measures take place on the merchant's private property. Because of this, most of the time they are able to take steps to enforce honesty without abridging anybody's rights.
Stolen lunch money may be a (minor) injustice, but we don't see multibillion-dollar industries attempting to base their earnings on trusting kids with their lunch money. Nobody has proposed Draconian measures to prevent lunch money theft.
Face it, children are not going to be honest. The only way to enforce this stuff is taking drastic steps to either stamp out unrestricted general-purpose computers, or to slap huge fines and/or jail time on their parents.
Everything in life is a tradeoff. Copyrights are there to encourage production of more content. Is it really worth such a hit on freedom to get some more media content? I say no. We already have far more than enough content, and most of that is crap. If it's a choice between letting Hollywood shrink a little or living in a police state, I'll take the former.
The point is that when copyright holders attempt to take action against those people, you all start crying "They're suing children!" So they sue the P2P networks instead, and you start crying "Unfair! Go sue the users!" So they...
That's the kind of absurd situation you get when you set up an economic system that is dependent on the honesty of children.
When copyright was invented, copying equipment was too costly for anybody but dedicated publishing companies to afford. The system depended on the publishers' honesty, backed up by the ease of enforcing the law when only a few thousand printing presses were in existence. It worked OK back then.
Time marches on. Now, most every child in America can get his or her hands on equipment that can effortlessly access and make bulk copies of most media.
Instead of adjusting the copyright system to account for the new reality, the knee-jerk reaction seems to be trying to revoke everyone's right to own fully general-purpose computers.
Aharonian argues in his complaint that software copyright laws violate the right to due process enshrined in the U.S. Constitution because they do not provide clear boundaries for appropriate use. That means industry players and courts do not have a clear idea of the rules.
"Until you're sued and a judge makes up his mind about what is the idea and expression (at stake), no one knows," Aharonian said in an interview.
Maybe so, but patents are even worse. At least with copyright, there's one set of rules that apply to all cases. With patents, the boundaries are determined by the set of all claims in every patent that exists. That's millions of rules to check against each new line of code I write, with hundreds more being added every single day. What's worse, these claims are written by the very people who benefit from them, and they are often intentionally obfuscated by their authors.
IMHO, copyrights are actually a good match for software *source code*, since it looks and feels a lot like a work of literature. The same isn't so true for object code. Since it is a "weakly encrypted" mechanical transformation of the source, it doesn't provide the customer with any of the benefits of knowledge that copyrights on literature and music were originally intended to promote. However, patents are a particularly poor match for software because of the O(n^2) legal problem of needing to check millions of lines of code against millions of patent claims. (That's a job on the order of 10^12 operations for every large program out there!)
I believe that object code would be better be protected by a totally new IP concept that is tailored specifically for the unique properties of software. Object code would not be eligible for either copyright or patents as they exist today.
It might be something like a standardized EULA that properly balances the interests of the vendor and the customer. (IMO, one-sided vendor-written EULAs should also be disallowed unless they get an actual ink-and-paper signature on a valid contract prior to the sale). Instead of being based on the concept of physical copies like standard copyright, which doesn't map well to networks of computers, it would be based on the actual usage patterns of computer software. The rights of someone to compile some source code they have into object code, or to make copies of object code, would be dictated by this new concept, not by copyright.
I think that the new form of protection would ideally provide some weak protection against blatant ripoffs of look-and-feel and innovative new features, but it should explicitely allow for interoperability. Maybe published APIs and file formats should be required to get any IP protection at all. To combat monopoly-protecting market barriers, any protections under this new concept would also be subject to the stipulation that they can be licensed by anyone under reasonable-and-nondiscriminatory terms.
Of course, don't hold your breath wating for anything like this to happen in the real world.
I admit that I haven't been in the electronic football game market recently, but I can't see how anybody could argue that those 27 little LED blips on my game system resemble any particular NFL team or player. I don't think that any game manufacturer actually needs to worry about this issue.
For example, the Abu Ghraib story ran 19+ times on the front pages, but the story about Saddam Hussein's torture of women and children ran far fewer times.
The news wasn't that torture was going on in the world. The news was that the USA (you know, the "good guys") was joining in on it.
why do 'greens' throw so much effort into things like wind, solar, and hydro, when the only real solution to replacing fossil fuels is nuclear power?
I don't know about what greens think, but nuclear power has totally unacceptable WMD proliferation risks and should be entirely eliminated. During the most recent presidential debates, both candidates agreed that the single largest current threat to the USA is loose nuclear weapons.
The majority of the poorly-controlled nukes in the world were created by countries who hid their development behind "nuclear power experiments" and other similar excuses. If nuclear power were totally banned worldwide, then a zero-tolerance policy could be imposed on all fissionable material-related activity, which would greatly reduce the risks that even more countries will covertely develop nuclear weapons. These countries would no longer be able to blabber about "we're trying to ensure our energy independence" when inspectors start asking questions.
In order for nuclear power to put any kind of dent in worldwide energy usage beyond the single-digit percentage it currently provides, then every country in the world would have to start running massive breeder reactors. That's just a ridiculous prospect.
IIRC, the latest estimates suggest that only Mercury and Venus will actually be swallowed, and the earth might survive (although its surface will be baked into a single ocean of lava). However, my point was that any fusion will not be any closer than today.
Nuclear plants do not produce anything near 2,772 tons of radionucleides of 'ash' (burnt fuel) per year.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Natural uranium and thorium are only slightly radioactive; that's how they've managed to stay around for the billions of years since the earth was formed. Spent nuclear fuel is many orders of magnitude more radioactive, and it undergoes a similar number of decays per kilogram in only a few thousand years. Comparing them by weight is meaningless.
I was under the impression that when the sun expands into a red giant, it will be because the fusion core has transitioned to burning heavier elements. The surface of the sun will get much bigger (and closer) because the outer layers will swell up in response to the increased energy output, but the outer layers will have extremely low density. The fusion core itself will probably be smaller (due to the increased pressure needed to support burning heavier elements), making the actual fusion reactions slightly farther away than they are today.
Is anyone out there giving any thought to how a programming language should be structured to make it easy to code using a speech recognition engine?
I can just imagine a printout at a code review:
125 ok... make a function that takes an array 126 of nodes and makes a hash from the node 127 names... umm, ok, not the tree data nodes, 128 I mean the index nodes. oh, and make sure to 129 use a multihash, not a normal hash. good. Now, 130 the thing is we need to make sure the hash is 131 always consistent with the master index, so 132 put a mutex around the operation... not there, 133 it needs to go over the whole function./* Oh 134 Hey, Joe! How was the hot date last night? 135 Hahaha! Sounds Great! */ Ummm ok, where was 136 I? Oh yeah... mutex... that looks ok. 137 Oh yeah, you need to return the number 138 of nodes that changed. 139 Thanks.
f they suddenly broke everything fixing things up years ago, you'd not flame anyway?
We're talking about NT here, since Win9X is a total loss as far as security goes. They were just introducing it at the time I'm referring to, so there would have been little to break initially.
If they had thought through the security issues of each additional new feature that they've added since then before they introduced it, there *wouldn't have been breakage*.
And they richly deserve all the flames. They should have started focusing heavily on security circa 1994. But they didn't, so they got flamed for almost a decade until they finally started to wise up.
Now, they get more flames because in their desperate attempt to belatedly patch up their wares, they're breaking much of the code that was written to their old lame security models. They knew that they should have fixed these models many years ago, but they didn't, and they nevertheless encouraged everyone to continue writing to them. They deserve these new flames because the compatibility problems are a result of their own procrastination. If they hadn't let things get this bad, there wouldn't be so many screwups now.
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Our tax dollars at work.
Would you rather that they had put another $Billion of our tax dollars into a spy satellite that would be uselessly drifting in space right now because of the partial failure of this untested rocket?
Supply and demand works in real time. If you have a bunch of bonds you saved up, but there aren't enough burger flippers left to run the economy, the value of your bonds will plummet. Ultimately, the viability of any retirement system is determined by the proportion of active workers to retirees during each passing year.
Sadly, just about everyone I've talked to about this just doesn't get it. They've been conditioned to believe that the value of investments invariably grows over time. That works at an individual level, but it doesn't work at a global scale. Most everything you consume today is produced by current workers. You can't "save up" half of the economy in advance in hopes of seeing a day when half of the people are lounging around collecting full benefits.
*Any* retirement system whatsoever would be going broke within a generation. The basic problem is that people are living longer. If you keep a fixed retirement age, over time you get more people sitting on their asses in this economy supported by fewer people working. That fundamental truth is invariant regardless of what kinds of paper certificates you try to shuffle around, be they stocks, treasury bonds or whatever. It doesn't matter if the government "owns" the pieces of paper or the retirees do; their value will rise and fall with supply and demand, and there's going to be a lot of retirees with a big supply of paper.
There are only one possible way to fix the problem: increase the retirement age. Ultimately, that's what will be done to "fix" social security. Talking about doing anything else is just a red herring.
At any rate, I hope that you're not using the same external hard drive to trot around town with your massive MP3 collection, indiscriminately mount on your friends' machines, and back up your critical system data.
Bad guess. I've been using internal drives since before there were any PCs or SCSI.
I have to agree that SCSI sucks, and it's even more overpriced than Apple gear. However, it's just not true that PC users never had an external drive option. Back in the day I used a parallel-port Zip drive to address your friends-and-family scenario. As soon as CD-R drives became popular, however, the needs were covered with internal drives, and my Zip drive was relegated to the dustbin of history.
If what you say is true, your friends and family won't be able to share your tangle of external drives anyway because they probably don't have Macs.
At any rate, PC users realized long ago that it's easier to carry around a CD or DVD than to carry around a heavy, fragile $300 disk drive.
PCs have supported firewire just about as long as Macs, and they've had SCSI since day 1. It's always been a viable option.
The reason that PC users typically use internal drives is because they're cheaper. *Any* external drive will cost more because of the need for its own case and possibly its own power supply. Add volume pricing into the mix, and the price of an internal drive is typically half that of a similar external drive. Some people can't understand why anybody would put any consideration of price into selecting a product, but yes, it actually happens in the real world.
What's more, some people actually like their computing functionality to fit into a nice tidy box. They don't want to clutter up their workspace with a dozen dongles, pods and shoeboxes hooked together with a tangled mass of daisy-chained cables.
Actually, Intel tried starting from a clean slate a couple of times. These either resulted in a dead end (i960), or a miserable failure (iAPX 432, i860). One would think that they should have learned their lesson by now.
Well of course they would need to have phones. How else would they be able to coordinate with their offshore quilt suppliers?
The cameras were originally included to solve one of the hardest technological problems with faithfully implementing a mechanical post office. It's necessary for the machine to recognize when the line of waiting customers has filled the entire lobby and is just starting to snake out the front door. That's the precise time that the machines need to pop up the cardboard "Closed" sign on all but one of their stations.
You're right. Unlike a credit card, the government can just print its way out of any economic dilemma. It's a great strategy, and I'm glad we're finally using it. Just look at the what the Weimar Republic was able to achieve!
That's total bullcrap. You do things like climb Mt. Everest because "you can". You don't send countless billions of dollars to a hostile country when you're already trillions in debt.
The reason we're dumping all of this money into Iraq is to save face. Our leaders made a colossal mistake. They invaded a country on based on inaccurate or fabricated pretenses (don't give me any revisionist reasons; I remember full well exactly what reasons were given prior to the invasion), and now they're trying to cover their asses.
Anti-shoplifting measures take place on the merchant's private property. Because of this, most of the time they are able to take steps to enforce honesty without abridging anybody's rights.
Stolen lunch money may be a (minor) injustice, but we don't see multibillion-dollar industries attempting to base their earnings on trusting kids with their lunch money. Nobody has proposed Draconian measures to prevent lunch money theft.
Face it, children are not going to be honest. The only way to enforce this stuff is taking drastic steps to either stamp out unrestricted general-purpose computers, or to slap huge fines and/or jail time on their parents.
Everything in life is a tradeoff. Copyrights are there to encourage production of more content. Is it really worth such a hit on freedom to get some more media content? I say no. We already have far more than enough content, and most of that is crap. If it's a choice between letting Hollywood shrink a little or living in a police state, I'll take the former.
That's the kind of absurd situation you get when you set up an economic system that is dependent on the honesty of children.
When copyright was invented, copying equipment was too costly for anybody but dedicated publishing companies to afford. The system depended on the publishers' honesty, backed up by the ease of enforcing the law when only a few thousand printing presses were in existence. It worked OK back then.
Time marches on. Now, most every child in America can get his or her hands on equipment that can effortlessly access and make bulk copies of most media.
Instead of adjusting the copyright system to account for the new reality, the knee-jerk reaction seems to be trying to revoke everyone's right to own fully general-purpose computers.
Maybe so, but patents are even worse. At least with copyright, there's one set of rules that apply to all cases. With patents, the boundaries are determined by the set of all claims in every patent that exists. That's millions of rules to check against each new line of code I write, with hundreds more being added every single day. What's worse, these claims are written by the very people who benefit from them, and they are often intentionally obfuscated by their authors.
IMHO, copyrights are actually a good match for software *source code*, since it looks and feels a lot like a work of literature. The same isn't so true for object code. Since it is a "weakly encrypted" mechanical transformation of the source, it doesn't provide the customer with any of the benefits of knowledge that copyrights on literature and music were originally intended to promote. However, patents are a particularly poor match for software because of the O(n^2) legal problem of needing to check millions of lines of code against millions of patent claims. (That's a job on the order of 10^12 operations for every large program out there!)
I believe that object code would be better be protected by a totally new IP concept that is tailored specifically for the unique properties of software. Object code would not be eligible for either copyright or patents as they exist today.
It might be something like a standardized EULA that properly balances the interests of the vendor and the customer. (IMO, one-sided vendor-written EULAs should also be disallowed unless they get an actual ink-and-paper signature on a valid contract prior to the sale). Instead of being based on the concept of physical copies like standard copyright, which doesn't map well to networks of computers, it would be based on the actual usage patterns of computer software. The rights of someone to compile some source code they have into object code, or to make copies of object code, would be dictated by this new concept, not by copyright.
I think that the new form of protection would ideally provide some weak protection against blatant ripoffs of look-and-feel and innovative new features, but it should explicitely allow for interoperability. Maybe published APIs and file formats should be required to get any IP protection at all. To combat monopoly-protecting market barriers, any protections under this new concept would also be subject to the stipulation that they can be licensed by anyone under reasonable-and-nondiscriminatory terms.
Of course, don't hold your breath wating for anything like this to happen in the real world.
You can try it yourself; gcc happily and silently compiles it unless you turn on warnings.
The moral of the story: always turn on all warnings when compiling C code.
I admit that I haven't been in the electronic football game market recently, but I can't see how anybody could argue that those 27 little LED blips on my game system resemble any particular NFL team or player. I don't think that any game manufacturer actually needs to worry about this issue.
The news wasn't that torture was going on in the world. The news was that the USA (you know, the "good guys") was joining in on it.
I don't know about what greens think, but nuclear power has totally unacceptable WMD proliferation risks and should be entirely eliminated. During the most recent presidential debates, both candidates agreed that the single largest current threat to the USA is loose nuclear weapons.
The majority of the poorly-controlled nukes in the world were created by countries who hid their development behind "nuclear power experiments" and other similar excuses. If nuclear power were totally banned worldwide, then a zero-tolerance policy could be imposed on all fissionable material-related activity, which would greatly reduce the risks that even more countries will covertely develop nuclear weapons. These countries would no longer be able to blabber about "we're trying to ensure our energy independence" when inspectors start asking questions.
In order for nuclear power to put any kind of dent in worldwide energy usage beyond the single-digit percentage it currently provides, then every country in the world would have to start running massive breeder reactors. That's just a ridiculous prospect.
IIRC, the latest estimates suggest that only Mercury and Venus will actually be swallowed, and the earth might survive (although its surface will be baked into a single ocean of lava). However, my point was that any fusion will not be any closer than today.
You're comparing apples and oranges. Natural uranium and thorium are only slightly radioactive; that's how they've managed to stay around for the billions of years since the earth was formed. Spent nuclear fuel is many orders of magnitude more radioactive, and it undergoes a similar number of decays per kilogram in only a few thousand years. Comparing them by weight is meaningless.
I was under the impression that when the sun expands into a red giant, it will be because the fusion core has transitioned to burning heavier elements. The surface of the sun will get much bigger (and closer) because the outer layers will swell up in response to the increased energy output, but the outer layers will have extremely low density. The fusion core itself will probably be smaller (due to the increased pressure needed to support burning heavier elements), making the actual fusion reactions slightly farther away than they are today.
I can just imagine a printout at a code review:
We're talking about NT here, since Win9X is a total loss as far as security goes. They were just introducing it at the time I'm referring to, so there would have been little to break initially.
If they had thought through the security issues of each additional new feature that they've added since then before they introduced it, there *wouldn't have been breakage*.
Now, they get more flames because in their desperate attempt to belatedly patch up their wares, they're breaking much of the code that was written to their old lame security models. They knew that they should have fixed these models many years ago, but they didn't, and they nevertheless encouraged everyone to continue writing to them. They deserve these new flames because the compatibility problems are a result of their own procrastination. If they hadn't let things get this bad, there wouldn't be so many screwups now.