Second: You can have a satellite in geostationary orbit without it being around the equator.
A satellite in an equitorial geosynchronous orbit appears to always be in the same place relative to an observer on Earth. One in an inclinded orbit would appear to oscillate between two points.
You know, the geosynchronous belt is a big place, 224000km long big. Those ~300 satellites could easily be ~750 km apart, which should be no problem because they are all traveling at 0km/s relative to each other along their orbital paths.
A more likely problem is if they are too close together you need ground stations with narrower beam widths and more accuratly aligned. So as to ensure that you are transmitting/recieving with the "right" satellite and your transmissions arn't interfering with the "wrong" ones.
Not cheaper... it doesn't make rockets cost less. What it does do is allow a given rocket to carry more payload than it would be able to carry if launched from a location farther north.
Or for that matter further South...
The equator is the idea launching spot.
Hence the idea of SeaLaunch. Which means you can launch exactly on the equator.
Software upgrades used to be driven by customer demand for additional features. Somewhere along the line, companies realized that if they bumped a version number up to the next integer value, that many customers would automatically buy the newer version, believing that it would include a whole bunch of new features.
At some point most pieces of software become "feature complete". With any additional "features" belonging in the "bells and whistles" catagory. Software companies didn't even invent this concept it's more or less a copy of the car manufacturing industry having annual model changes.
Just stating that Windows costs money and Linux is free is not an accurate view of the picture. If you lose 4 hours of productivity over the course of a YEAR (that's 40 seconds per day) using linux instead of using windows, windows would have been cheaper.
Time still costs money when you use Windows. Even if you don't have to pay for XYZ upgrade it still needs a human to install it and check that it dosn't break anything. The Microsoft approach of deliberate "sphagetti programming" makes strange interactions between apparently unrelated sections rather more likely in the first place.
But consider LONG TERM costs. Like 5-10 years later,
The task here is the administration of a fairly large city. In order to do this effectivly people may need access to data which is several decades old.
It is really impressive to see that Munich went with Linux even though the price tag was higher than Microsoft's.
One thing they appeared quite concerned about was the possibility of hidden and/or recuring costs. There is also the issue of some of the money going to SuSE, thus staying within the German economy.
Business Guy: I'd love to if you just has [feature] which MS has and makes my life a lot easier.
OSS Developer: OK, that'll cost you $xxx
BG: OK, deal.
OSSD: OK, *hacks* done!
BG: Ooops, sorry, we don't want it anymore! No $$$ for you! OSSD: Aw, poop!
Alternativly OSSD might well say something along the lines of "I agreeed to do X, you agreed to pay Y. I've now done X, but you have refused to pay. Either pay up or explain to a judge why you shouldn't pay as you previously agreed".
Later, we re-elected John Stafford, the supervisor of elections, by a landslide.
Who supervised this election? Unless you have someone who is as much as possible independednt of all candidates then you can't really claim to have a fair election in the first place.
And the problem with machine vote counting is corruption of the people who made the machines. Unless the machines are totally open to independent scrutiny - at the very least, this includes placing all blueprints and firmware in the public domain,
This dosn't actually help much. You'd also need to allow random inspection of the machine(s) actually being used. To verify that what is used actually matches with the information released.
My point is simple. Forget money, forget porting, and forget market share. Go to Mozilla.org. There's a single binary release for Win32 that'll work on every version of Windows released in the past 8 years. It installs by double clicking it. Where's the Linux equivalent?! I'm sorry, but the tarball is not an acceptable alternative for the average user.
In a great many situations end user installable software is a very bad thing. The car equivalent would be the ability to exchange bits of the engine using the driving controls.
I think the fact is that approx 99.9999% of desktops get one OS installed when they're shipped from the factory and that OS remains on it until the day it dies.
If the machine is going to be used in any kind of "corporate" system most likely the very first thing which will happen is that the OEM install will be wiped. This covers the vast majority of computers.
Germany uses this system as well, as most of the rest of Europe. And I think the total number of people in europe at least equals that of the US population...heh.
The population of just the EU is larger than than of the US. The population of the entire continent is very much larger.
Oh, btw, it works fine. We usually get first estimates a short time after the ballots are closed. Granted, in a bigger country it would take longer, but as a voter, you really can't flamingo up here.
In many European countries elections take effect more or less immediatly. Whereas in the US there is typically several months before those elected actually take office.
The problem with hand counting is corruption of the people counting, when you have nice shiny machines doing it for you there is less risk of corruption and local miscounts,
You address this problem by having scruitneers watching the count. You'd then need a rather large conspiracy in order to get a wrong result.
though there is still the possibility of fraud, but only among the savvy,
Or those with money, fewer people means bribes are easier.
and not Mrs. Jones the volunteer counter who really want canidate 1 to win because he looks like a good boy.
At which point the representatives of every other candidate will be crying foul. With Mrs Jones getting her picture in the paper as the police cart her away for questioning. Then all her ballot papers, including those she had already "counted" will be randomly distributed to the other counters.
Are you from Canada? The Canadians use this method, which is why I ask. And it works fine for them. However, I think hand counts of 8 1/2 times the number of ballots* is a bit unreasonable.
You also have 8.5 times the number of people to do the counting. Anyway there are no national elections in the USA. The largest elections are statewide elections. Even here the whole thing is divided up into much smaller polling districts.
Online voting is being incouraged in the US because of its susceptibility to fraud, not its resistance.
Possibly the old joke about people breaking into The Kremlin and stealing the next years election results needs ammending to refer to the USA instead of the USSR. Or maybe Robert Mugabe will be congratulating the US on it's "fair and democratic" elections:)
Check out Black Box Voting: Ballot-tampering in the 21st Century. These people are not Luddites. The bulk of the serious critcism here is coming from people who know the most about the technologies employed - therefore the most qualified to scrutinize, and least-likely to be baffled by obtuse claims and jargon.
There is also that problem that even an expert cannot scrutinise a highly mechanised voting system at the point of use. This is the reason that most of the world uses very low tech voting and counting methods. Anyone can watch to see if papers are being sorted into the right pile and make a fuss if they are not. In most parts of the world votes are counted in public, which is impossible to do with a machine. IMHO one of the basic problems in the US is a lack of effective separation between people running the election and all of the candidates.
There are many apps that will run on 3.x but not 95, or 95 but not 98, or 9x but not NT, or NT but not 2000, or 2000 but not XP, and every other combination.
Actually it's even more fine grained than that quite a few apps broke between 95 and 95b. Some specify 98SE not 98. As well as it it some cases mattering which order apps are installed on Windows.
The problem is that for corporations, the training costs of teaching employees to use a new computer system is very real and so they want to use what the workers use at home (Windows).
Which version of Windows might that be? Considering that Windows keeps changing it's user interface... Also how many people have Windows machines hooked up to client-server networks at home?
I've always thought of the GPL as "Copyleft". If "Copyright" sits at one extreme, "Copyleft" sits on the other essentially using Copyright law against itself.
But in a way which is not dissimilar from the part of the US Constitution which allows copyright to exist in the first place.
Re:Here's an interesting quote
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 1
I would propose that the body that first enacts the standards into law should ensure that the producer of the standards is not out of pocket.
There is no such thing as an intrinsic right to not be "out of pocket". It would only be if a government specifically contracted some party to draft standards that, IMHO, they are owed anything.
But if they have provided any new and useful principles, or performed a useful analysis, then they deserve to be recompensed for their efforts.
If they did this off their own back why should anyone pay them anything? Even if someone is prepared to pay them then whatever they did is only worth what someone is prepared to pay them. Paying someone just because they did something sounds an awful lot like Communism.
Re:Here's an interesting quote
on
Open Source Law
·
· Score: 1
However, in the case of a copyrighted work, the argument for restricting distribution - at least temporarily - is that the resulting market advantage gives authors incentive to produce works.
Has anyone come up with a way to actually test if this is currently the case. (Even though it may have been the case a couple of hundred years ago.) It's not exactly hard to find examples of current copyright law acting to discourage creation and publication.
Slashdot Mirror
-empty space doesn't absorb radio energy
Whilst it dosn't absorb energy the energy spreads out according to the inverse square law.
-a focused beam doesn't disperse over distance like an omnidirectional transmission
Assuming you can focus it into a beam rather than a cone.
Second: You can have a satellite in geostationary orbit without it being around the equator.
A satellite in an equitorial geosynchronous orbit appears to always be in the same place relative to an observer on Earth. One in an inclinded orbit would appear to oscillate between two points.
You know, the geosynchronous belt is a big place, 224000km long big. Those ~300 satellites could easily be ~750 km apart, which should be no problem because they are all traveling at 0km/s relative to each other along their orbital paths.
A more likely problem is if they are too close together you need ground stations with narrower beam widths and more accuratly aligned. So as to ensure that you are transmitting/recieving with the "right" satellite and your transmissions arn't interfering with the "wrong" ones.
Not cheaper... it doesn't make rockets cost less. What it does do is allow a given rocket to carry more payload than it would be able to carry if launched from a location farther north.
Or for that matter further South...
The equator is the idea launching spot.
Hence the idea of SeaLaunch. Which means you can launch exactly on the equator.
Florida was chosen for the US space center because launch accidents will only drop debris in the ocean rather than on populated areas
Though if the accident is prior to or very soon after lift-off the KSC will still wind up covered in debries.
Software upgrades used to be driven by customer demand for additional features. Somewhere along the line, companies realized that if they bumped a version number up to the next integer value, that many customers would automatically buy the newer version, believing that it would include a whole bunch of new features.
At some point most pieces of software become "feature complete". With any additional "features" belonging in the "bells and whistles" catagory.
Software companies didn't even invent this concept it's more or less a copy of the car manufacturing industry having annual model changes.
Did Munich factor in the cost of replacing those 175 Windows applications with Linux-based ones?
Which they'd probably have needed to do even if they stuck with Windows. Since their reason for reconsidering was that Microsoft were EOLing NT.
Microsoft's offer (even at 31.9 million) sounded like the better deal and would not require recoding/replacing their custom apps.
They would still need extensive testing to ensure they worked correctly with XP/2003.
Just stating that Windows costs money and Linux is free is not an accurate view of the picture. If you lose 4 hours of productivity over the course of a YEAR (that's 40 seconds per day) using linux instead of using windows, windows would have been cheaper.
Time still costs money when you use Windows. Even if you don't have to pay for XYZ upgrade it still needs a human to install it and check that it dosn't break anything. The Microsoft approach of deliberate "sphagetti programming" makes strange interactions between apparently unrelated sections rather more likely in the first place.
But consider LONG TERM costs. Like 5-10 years later,
The task here is the administration of a fairly large city. In order to do this effectivly people may need access to data which is several decades old.
It is really impressive to see that Munich went with Linux even though the price tag was higher than Microsoft's.
One thing they appeared quite concerned about was the possibility of hidden and/or recuring costs.
There is also the issue of some of the money going to SuSE, thus staying within the German economy.
Business Guy: I'd love to if you just has [feature] which MS has and makes my life a lot easier.
OSS Developer: OK, that'll cost you $xxx
BG: OK, deal.
OSSD: OK, *hacks* done!
BG: Ooops, sorry, we don't want it anymore! No $$$ for you!
OSSD: Aw, poop!
Alternativly OSSD might well say something along the lines of "I agreeed to do X, you agreed to pay Y. I've now done X, but you have refused to pay. Either pay up or explain to a judge why you shouldn't pay as you previously agreed".
Secondly its annoying that it naggs you if you save in .doc format and tries to make you use its own proprietary format.
It's native format is zipped XML.
Later, we re-elected John Stafford, the supervisor of elections, by a landslide.
Who supervised this election? Unless you have someone who is as much as possible independednt of all candidates then you can't really claim to have a fair election in the first place.
And the problem with machine vote counting is corruption of the people who made the machines. Unless the machines are totally open to independent scrutiny - at the very least, this includes placing all blueprints and firmware in the public domain,
This dosn't actually help much. You'd also need to allow random inspection of the machine(s) actually being used. To verify that what is used actually matches with the information released.
My point is simple. Forget money, forget porting, and forget market share. Go to Mozilla.org. There's a single binary release for Win32 that'll work on every version of Windows released in the past 8 years. It installs by double clicking it. Where's the Linux equivalent?! I'm sorry, but the tarball is not an acceptable alternative for the average user.
In a great many situations end user installable software is a very bad thing.
The car equivalent would be the ability to exchange bits of the engine using the driving controls.
I think the fact is that approx 99.9999% of desktops get one OS installed when they're shipped from the factory and that OS remains on it until the day it dies.
If the machine is going to be used in any kind of "corporate" system most likely the very first thing which will happen is that the OEM install will be wiped.
This covers the vast majority of computers.
Germany uses this system as well, as most of the rest of Europe. And I think the total number of people in europe at least equals that of the US population...heh.
The population of just the EU is larger than than of the US. The population of the entire continent is very much larger.
Oh, btw, it works fine. We usually get first estimates a short time after the ballots are closed. Granted, in a bigger country it would take longer, but as a voter, you really can't flamingo up here.
In many European countries elections take effect more or less immediatly. Whereas in the US there is typically several months before those elected actually take office.
The problem with hand counting is corruption of the people counting, when you have nice shiny machines doing it for you there is less risk of corruption and local miscounts,
You address this problem by having scruitneers watching the count. You'd then need a rather large conspiracy in order to get a wrong result.
though there is still the possibility of fraud, but only among the savvy,
Or those with money, fewer people means bribes are easier.
and not Mrs. Jones the volunteer counter who really want canidate 1 to win because he looks like a good boy.
At which point the representatives of every other candidate will be crying foul. With Mrs Jones getting her picture in the paper as the police cart her away for questioning. Then all her ballot papers, including those she had already "counted" will be randomly distributed to the other counters.
Are you from Canada? The Canadians use this method, which is why I ask. And it works fine for them. However, I think hand counts of 8 1/2 times the number of ballots* is a bit unreasonable.
You also have 8.5 times the number of people to do the counting. Anyway there are no national elections in the USA. The largest elections are statewide elections. Even here the whole thing is divided up into much smaller polling districts.
Online voting is being incouraged in the US because of its susceptibility to fraud, not its resistance.
:)
Possibly the old joke about people breaking into The Kremlin and stealing the next years election results needs ammending to refer to the USA instead of the USSR. Or maybe Robert Mugabe will be congratulating the US on it's "fair and democratic" elections
Check out Black Box Voting: Ballot-tampering in the 21st Century. These people are not Luddites. The bulk of the serious critcism here is coming from people who know the most about the technologies employed - therefore the most qualified to scrutinize, and least-likely to be baffled by obtuse claims and jargon.
There is also that problem that even an expert cannot scrutinise a highly mechanised voting system at the point of use. This is the reason that most of the world uses very low tech voting and counting methods. Anyone can watch to see if papers are being sorted into the right pile and make a fuss if they are not. In most parts of the world votes are counted in public, which is impossible to do with a machine. IMHO one of the basic problems in the US is a lack of effective separation between people running the election and all of the candidates.
There are many apps that will run on 3.x but not 95, or 95 but not 98, or 9x but not NT, or NT but not 2000, or 2000 but not XP, and every other combination.
Actually it's even more fine grained than that quite a few apps broke between 95 and 95b. Some specify 98SE not 98. As well as it it some cases mattering which order apps are installed on Windows.
The problem is that for corporations, the training costs of teaching employees to use a new computer system is very real and so they want to use what the workers use at home (Windows).
Which version of Windows might that be? Considering that Windows keeps changing it's user interface... Also how many people have Windows machines hooked up to client-server networks at home?
I've always thought of the GPL as "Copyleft". If "Copyright" sits at one extreme, "Copyleft" sits on the other essentially using Copyright law against itself.
But in a way which is not dissimilar from the part of the US Constitution which allows copyright to exist in the first place.
I would propose that the body that first enacts the standards into law should ensure that the producer of the standards is not out of pocket.
There is no such thing as an intrinsic right to not be "out of pocket". It would only be if a government specifically contracted some party to draft standards that, IMHO, they are owed anything.
But if they have provided any new and useful principles, or performed a useful analysis, then they deserve to be recompensed for their efforts.
If they did this off their own back why should anyone pay them anything? Even if someone is prepared to pay them then whatever they did is only worth what someone is prepared to pay them.
Paying someone just because they did something sounds an awful lot like Communism.
However, in the case of a copyrighted work, the argument for restricting distribution - at least temporarily - is that the resulting market advantage gives authors incentive to produce works.
Has anyone come up with a way to actually test if this is currently the case. (Even though it may have been the case a couple of hundred years ago.) It's not exactly hard to find examples of current copyright law acting to discourage creation and publication.