perhaps now is a good time for JAXA to join in with NASA on the Project Constellation rocket program.
No, no, please no, a thousand times no.
If there's one thing we should have learned about launch vehicle engineering by now, it's that we do *not* want to decide based on viewgraphs and guesswork that we have now developed the One True Rocket Design which will make all other rockets unnecessary. That way leads to Space Shuttles, to NASP, to X-33, and so far I see no reason to doubt that Project Save-Our-Jobs-Program will be going down the same path.
Japan needs to design and build their own rockets. Perhaps Japan will make them more reusable, or design them for a higher flight rate with smaller per-flight payloads, or use all LOX/RP-1, or make any one of a hundred other different design choices which we ought to explore but which can't be tested in every alternative on a single vehicle. The more different organizations trying more variations, the better.
And although it might be nice for NASA's new program to get some outside funding, I suspect it will be far better for NASA's new program to get some outside competition. Money is a good motivator, true - but an even better motivator is the prospect of losing that money if someone else upstages you.
Of course, all that is irrelevant: Speaking of money, I should point out that the most important phrase of this story, "has not yet been allotted the budget for the ambitious project", was left out of the Slashdot summary. We see "Country X's space agency would like to go to the Moon" stories all the time, and they're hardly news. Of course every ambitious space program wants to go back to the Moon, and some of them will have administrators gutsy enough to say so publically; but someone let me know when anyone outside the USA has been given the billions of dollars necessary to do it.
Colbert was trying to make the point that the majority opinion isn't necessarily the right opinion.... we don't live in a democracy.
Wikipedia isn't a democracy, either. If it was, I'm pretty sure that the Colbert fans voting to prevent vandalism would vastly outnumber the Colbert fans voting to create it.
Wikipedia doesn't work via rule of the majority - in the short run (which is all you're guaranteed to see unless a page is locked down or you carefully investigate its edit history), it works via "rule of the last guy to hit Enter."
What you are describing is the stable versions proposal, and it's currently being worked on by the developers. Basically, an administrator would be able to go in and flag a specific revision as being "stable", and that's what all readers of the article would see. You could of course choose to see the development version or make edits to the development version, but it will take an administrator to update the stable version, and he will do so by comparing the changes since the last stable version and making sure everything is legitimate.
That doesn't really sound like what he was describing. I'll admit that any distinction between "what Wikipedia shows browsers by default" and "what the last edit was" will help, but beyond that your proposals differe significantly. Using a large number of trusted users and a length of elapsed time to mark versions as "stable", like TheRaven64 suggested, will scale much better but will still be prone to determined vandals. Requiring administrators to mark stable versions, like you describe, will prevent real vandalism from being committed without "insider" assistance, but will require a lot of administrators to keep stable versions up to date.
You're responding to a comment that specifically mentions that Colbert "taped the show"... and yet two moderators think you're "Insightful" rather than "Redundant". How did that happen?
And by the way, don't you realize that talkshows usually aren't aired live?
Close, but it doesn't sort alphabetically, and the / character has a double meaning on Unix systems and in URLs. 2006-08-02 is better, with the added bonus that it's part of the ISO standard.
Of course, it's harder to get interesting date numbers when you've got 8 digits to work with, two of them can't take many values and two or three more only change values very infrequently. 2011-11-02 20:11:11.02 is coming up, I guess.
Can you say for certain that every voter actualy double checked their record instead of just grabbing little piece of paper A and putting it in box B like they were told to?
They'll be told to double-check the printout, not to blindly pass it on, of course.
But that's beside the point - what is your obsession with self-destructive voters? If someone really doesn't want their vote to count, they'll just save themselves a trip and stay home on voting day! Nobody needs or intends to design a system that's capable of protecting people's votes from their own stupidity - the aspect of voting systems that's critical to democracy is the capability to protect people's votes from others' malice. A system with well-designed physical ballots can have that capability. An system with invisible electronic counters operated by invisible manifestations of secret code cannot.
It doesn't take a bunch of untrustworthy people to make a paper ballot vote skew, it just takes one skilled person. No more skill than a $30 / hour programmer, just a different skill.
As easily as adding a flaw to a computer program? Then why don't you share it with us? In a discussion about proof, you surely can't expect us to take something like that as an assertion, can you? Explain how, in a system where an empty ballot box has been examined by independent observers, filled in plain view with computer-printed votes by the voters, and then watched until counting time, the final count of ballots at a polling place can be wildly skewed by a single person.
And can you prove that the scan tron printed was exactly what the voted intended (remember people were confused over the fucking butterfly ballots).
No, but you can prove that the printed ballot was exactly what the voter claimed to intend, and you can make it much easier than in any other system for voters to successfully communicate their intentions. When you want to vote for the second candidate down the list and you don't realize that you need to punch the third hole down, that's confusing. When your printout shows you only the names and offices of the people you will be casting votes for, that's pretty simple.
Can you also prove that the scantron reported an acurate count for the double check?
Yes, by publically hand counting the paper ballots to verify.
Can you then prove that the scantron sheets that were sent to be verified are the same ones that made it into the fireproof boxes?
Yes, by allowing observers from any candidate to keep an eye on the boxes.
Can you then prove that the ones counted from the fireproof boxes are both all of the votes and the same accurate count from the original vote?
Yes - again, by allowing observers from any candidate to watch all the boxes.
Finaly, even if you can prove all of that, can you prove the voter voted for the person they wanted to win (again remember the buterfly ballots)?
I can prove that the voter got to see the name of the person they voted for. I can't prove the voter isn't retarded or hallucinating, of course, but I'm pretty sure that's not going to be an election-deciding problem.
In short, somewhere along the line, voting requires trust.
You're being ridiculous.
Yes, you have to trust that the poll workers and the observers you send to watch ballot boxes aren't all part of a big conspiracy against you. You have to trust that nobody has invented a teleporter capable of moving paper in and out of a watched closed box. You even have to do a large number of random hand recounts before you can trust that automatic paper counting machines haven't been compromised.
But none of these levels of trust are within orders of magnitude of the amount of trust you need to believe that complex closed source software has no unintentional bugs or security holes, that $30 an hour programmers can't be bribed by billion dollar political campaigns, and that invaluable electronic databases will only be accessible by people with the highest ethical standards.
Moreover, what happens in either case when your trust fails? It's easy to think that an incorrect election result is an incorrect election result - but if you can find the right dozen untrustworthy people to subvert a thousand paper ballots, it's simply not the same as if you can find the right one untrustworthy person to subvert a million electronic ballots. There's a difference in scale, not just a difference in kind.
(This is one of the surprisngly modern parts of Christianity, btw -- "and what you whisper in shadows will be shouted from rooftops" and all that.)
If you are less inclined to exercise your freedoms when you are being observed, well, then you probably are confusing "excerise your freedoms" with "break the rules of good behavior". Please go back to kindergarten, I think you missed a few lessons on how to operate in civilzied society.
Spoken like someone for whom "civilized society" has always been synonymous with "my own cultural mores". Ironically, that culture only survived to become a mainstream belief by carefully protecting its privacy amidst a larger, often hostile society. The fish symbol which car owners and companies use to advertise their Christianity today was originally intended to do the opposite, as a passcode to help Christians keep their beliefs secret from observers who might do them harm.
If I could force every Hollywood writer to spend a few hours reading before they scripted another line of "sci-fi", this is where I would send them all.
If Microsoft really takes these twelve items to heart, it could be a big shift for them.
Absolutely. It'll be just like when Gates announced "Trustworthy Computing" and made security Microsoft's top priority in 2002, and then their products stopped being insecure.
Dare to try "extreme reentry", just you and a suit and a chute
It sounds like you think you're kidding, but you're not. There were serious proposals for one-man emergency reentry systems that had little more than a heat shield and a prayer.
The project manager said "You wouldn't want to try something like this unless there was no way at all of landing in the disabled spaceship and the astronaut just had to bail out in space," but I'll bet there are more than a few cliffjumping skydiving whitewater-rafting types who would want to do it just for the thrill.
Left and right are not defined by things like same-sex marriage.
That sentence would be just as accurate if you deleted all but the first six words. "Left" and "right" are not defined. They are a failed attempt to map the many-dimensional space of political beliefs into a single-dimensional variable. This sort of either-or thinking is one of the reasons we're in such a mess today. People are willing to support the most heinous acts by someone they perceive as being on "my side" and condemn the most trivial transgressions by someone they perceive as being on "their side".
I have hope that someday we'll change our voting systems (starting locally, but ending up with a Constitutional amendment for federal elections) to use something smarter than plurality counting and thus end the two-party system... but it's a slim hope. If we can't even talk about politics in a way that admits more than two alternatives, how likely are we to be able to redesign our elections that way?
In a free market nobody can force anyone to do anything.
In a free market, I'd be the first in line to covertly buy a ring of land around your house. Sure, I wouldn't be "forcing" you to starve and die, but after you found yourself unable to pay my outrageous toll fee to get to work or the grocery store, our definition of "force" would start to feel irrelevant.
There are loads of natural monopolies in the world; while most of them aren't as potentially lethal as transportation right-of-way, each one is an opportunity to shut out competitors and squeeze people for every cent they'll bear.
No, it's not that small a group of people, you're just letting your political prejudice keep you from looking in the right places.
Remaining wary of the left wing isn't political prejudice, it's just common sense that should have been reinforced by the last 6 years. What kind of mindset is capable of thinking: "The federal government has screwed up our military planning, screwed up disaster relief, screwed up our intelligence gathering, screwed up our world reputation and diplomatic ties, screwed up our budget... but gee, I wish they were also in charge of our healthcare!"
You'd know God's "no" if you saw it, it doesn't look like what you're seeing. There's more flaming corpses.
I agree, that's what I'd expect too, but most religions' scriptures I've read seem to disagree. For an omnipotent creator of all physical law, God's "smite button" seems to be on the fritz an awful lot. Fortunately for Him, there always happens to be a nearby army with charismatic prophets and sharp weapons, eager to pick up the slack so God can do His killing by proxy. His latest volunteers have even started using jet planes and explosives for the "flaming corpses" touch. With that kind of efficiency, they hardly need God on their side at all!
What they want to do now is not look at the content, per se, but at the people who can be extorted from.
Oh, they absolutely want to look at both. Squeezing Google and EBay is one goal, certainly, but for the phone companies I suspect the primary goal is preventing their revenues from being eaten alive by voice over IP. Any internet service that can't handle VoIP is (almost by definition) as bad as dialup and won't attract customers, but any internet service that can handle VoIP is likely to eventually deprive them of $20 a month in phone revenues. The only way around that paradox is to stop being neutral about packet content: if data stream A comes from a video game and stream B is a VoIP connection, they want to degrade the quality of B until you've paid extra for it.
Of course, with a little more money paid to engineers instead of lobbyists, they could be trading that $20 a month in audio phone revenues for $50 a month in broadband/video phone revenues - but that would require them to be both smart and greedy, and they seem to have skipped smart.
That is what you buy when you buy software from anyone, the Right to Use the software.
No, you buy a copy of the software. The right to use that copy is implicit; nowhere does copyright law restrict that right to copyright holders, and it's as fundamental as the right to read a legally purchased copy of a book. Software companies originally tried to use a "you can't use our software without making a copy in RAM, so you need a license!" argument, but in the USA at least that was made explicitly legal in Title 17 a. 1. 117.
Of course, this is assuming that you walk into a store, pick out some software, hand them some money, and don't sign anything except a credit card receipt. If you buy anything by specifically agreeing to a license beforehand, then certainly the license terms apply.
And watch as the tab spacing of "lalala();" two lines down gets ruined.
He's right that mandating "tabs must be N spaces" is stupid, though. Use tabs to indent blocks of code, use spaces for aligning code that isn't in blocks, and people should be able to set whatever tab size they want without ruining anything.
int myfunc(int arg1,
Class arg2)/* use spaces here*/ { [TAB]assert (arg1 != arg2.size() &&/* and tabs here */ [TAB] arg2.is_valid())/* and a mix here */ }
Now, let's see if I can keep this from being mangled by Slashcode...
On preview: no, I can't. Well, imagine that the C in Class is directly under the i in int, and imagine that the a in arg2.is_valid() is directly under the a in arg1.
Of course, getting this right every time isn't easy when you're trying to think about your code and your editor has it's own ideas about indentation. I'd be very happy if anyone could tell me how to get Vim's autoindent to behave this way.
The use of decent engines if frivolously wasteful. I am not surprised Bezos is attracted to it.
No, because descent engines just reduce per-flight payload and use fuel. Payload can be increased by using a larger rocket or making more flights, and fuel is cheap.
Unlike fuel, orbital rockets are expensive. Throwing away a whole launch vehicle on every flight is wasteful. I am not surprised that cost-plus launch contractors are attracted to it.
What's happened? Did we redesign something? Are they so old that the parts are wearing out and we can't replace them as well as we built them to begin with? Are we just publicizing problems more now than we used to? I haven't seen anything to tell me why it seems we can't launch a shuttle without something faling off when the old ones flew without a publicized hitch.
What happened is that we realized what the real risks are. There are several failure scenarios which we had irrationally hoped were one-in-a-hundred-thousand events, but which we have been forced to admit are more like one-in-a-hundred events. Generally what forced the admission was when some unlucky Shuttle crew became the one-in-a-hundred.
Stuff fell off the Shuttles from the very first launches. It was never a serious problem until Columbia, partly because it's unlikely for any falling foam to do major damage, and mostly because we were lucky enough that "unlikely" didn't happen for a hundred flights. For that matter, the O rings on the SRBs eroded many times in the earliest Shuttle flights. It just wasn't until Challenger that one eroded badly enough for gas to break through and start tearing the thing apart.
Back when we thought that these sorts of things were unlikely to blow up a shuttle, we ignored the problems and flew anyway. We could probably continue ignoring problems and flying anyway, but we'd probably continue losing a Shuttle or two in every hundred flights. That's more risk than NASA is willing to accept.
It has nothing to do with "the old days" vs. "new tech". The Shuttles we're flying today were all built decades ago, and despite a few upgrades here and there, they're basically the same 1970s era technology designed to fit 1970s political compromises.
Dude, you're on Slashdot. If you were some bimbo news anchor on MSNBC you could get away with saying intergalactic. But this isn't even interstellar! It's in our own solar system, for crying out loud. The word you want is "interplanetary".
I blame the Beastie Boys. Who knows how many young minds were ruined by that "intergalactic planetary, planetary intergalactic" lyric?
At this point we should just hope that nobody thinks Jupiter is in "another dimension".
Erm, you still have to get the fuel up there right?.. and the cost of putting something up there is still reasonably proportional to weight?
Only for loose values of "reasonably". Other important factors include:
Required reliability - if an expendable launcher is 50% as expensive but only 95% as reliable, then it's worthless for launching humans, undesirable for precious cargo, but fantastic for fuel.
Flexibility with existing launch vehicles - if your mass budget for a mission creeps up to 10% more than your biggest launcher can lift, you can either spend millions of dollars lifting more fuel separately or billions creating a new rocket.
Flexibility with new launch vehicles - there are a lot of cheap space access ideas that won't work with "one launcher, one mission" plans. Electromagnetic "catapults" require too much acceleration for people and most cargo. Reusable vehicles may be cheaper per-pound but have smaller payloads per launch. Orbital assembly and orbital refueling can allow you to get the benefits of new spaceflight ideas without all the problems.
Competition! - Some of the biggest obstacles to cheap spaceflight aren't technological, they're economic. The more suppliers you can choose between, the better deals you can get. But is NASA going to trust their astronauts to a half dozen different rockets? Hell no - some people even think they deliberately increased the CEV mass to ensure that it would need a new NASA launcher instead of a commercial launcher. Even for probes and satellites, if you've spent a decade building a hundred million dollar science experiment, you're going to be very cautious about what you launch it on. But fuel? Fuel is cheap and fungible, many kinds are easily transferrable and storable, and any serious exploration of the solar system will require a lot of it in Low Earth Orbit. It's the perfect market for NASA to use to encourage and experiment with new commercial launch service suppliers. And once some of those suppliers have proven themselves by carrying commodity cargo, NASA will have more options for precious cargo, then eventually for human passengers.
Presumably, he wrote a patch that integrates libgphoto with Wine, thus enabling Picassa to download photos from digital cameras - a neccessary feature that would not have otherwise been available as part of the Wine API.
Are you sure? All the digital cameras I've ever used have been USB Storage devices - so, presuming your Linux distribution is friendly about autodetecting and automounting, downloading photos from cameras can be no more esoteric than reading a file off your hard drive.
Just consider that if we set aside school time for your teen kids to get together for a group bitching session many people would be upset, this isn't that much different.
You're right that it isn't much different from the school time already set aside for group bitching sessions, which my schools called "lunch time" and "passing period". During the former period, high school students were even encouraged to leave campus to go eat and socialize in public places filled with strange adults.
I don't think that kids should be on MySpace when they're suppose to be learning basic computer skills.
The ones who are on MySpace then already have basic computer skills - and if we're trying to teach them anything else on computers, then "you can play after you finish the lesson material" gives them a great incentive to learn.
Slashdot Mirror
perhaps now is a good time for JAXA to join in with NASA on the Project Constellation rocket program.
No, no, please no, a thousand times no.
If there's one thing we should have learned about launch vehicle engineering by now, it's that we do *not* want to decide based on viewgraphs and guesswork that we have now developed the One True Rocket Design which will make all other rockets unnecessary. That way leads to Space Shuttles, to NASP, to X-33, and so far I see no reason to doubt that Project Save-Our-Jobs-Program will be going down the same path.
Japan needs to design and build their own rockets. Perhaps Japan will make them more reusable, or design them for a higher flight rate with smaller per-flight payloads, or use all LOX/RP-1, or make any one of a hundred other different design choices which we ought to explore but which can't be tested in every alternative on a single vehicle. The more different organizations trying more variations, the better.
And although it might be nice for NASA's new program to get some outside funding, I suspect it will be far better for NASA's new program to get some outside competition. Money is a good motivator, true - but an even better motivator is the prospect of losing that money if someone else upstages you.
Of course, all that is irrelevant: Speaking of money, I should point out that the most important phrase of this story, "has not yet been allotted the budget for the ambitious project", was left out of the Slashdot summary. We see "Country X's space agency would like to go to the Moon" stories all the time, and they're hardly news. Of course every ambitious space program wants to go back to the Moon, and some of them will have administrators gutsy enough to say so publically; but someone let me know when anyone outside the USA has been given the billions of dollars necessary to do it.
Colbert was trying to make the point that the majority opinion isn't necessarily the right opinion. ... we don't live in a democracy.
Wikipedia isn't a democracy, either. If it was, I'm pretty sure that the Colbert fans voting to prevent vandalism would vastly outnumber the Colbert fans voting to create it.
Wikipedia doesn't work via rule of the majority - in the short run (which is all you're guaranteed to see unless a page is locked down or you carefully investigate its edit history), it works via "rule of the last guy to hit Enter."
What you are describing is the stable versions proposal, and it's currently being worked on by the developers. Basically, an administrator would be able to go in and flag a specific revision as being "stable", and that's what all readers of the article would see. You could of course choose to see the development version or make edits to the development version, but it will take an administrator to update the stable version, and he will do so by comparing the changes since the last stable version and making sure everything is legitimate.
That doesn't really sound like what he was describing. I'll admit that any distinction between "what Wikipedia shows browsers by default" and "what the last edit was" will help, but beyond that your proposals differe significantly. Using a large number of trusted users and a length of elapsed time to mark versions as "stable", like TheRaven64 suggested, will scale much better but will still be prone to determined vandals. Requiring administrators to mark stable versions, like you describe, will prevent real vandalism from being committed without "insider" assistance, but will require a lot of administrators to keep stable versions up to date.
Duh, talkshows are never aired live.
You're responding to a comment that specifically mentions that Colbert "taped the show"... and yet two moderators think you're "Insightful" rather than "Redundant". How did that happen?
And by the way, don't you realize that talkshows usually aren't aired live?
2006/8/2 is the only logical and correct format.
Close, but it doesn't sort alphabetically, and the / character has a double meaning on Unix systems and in URLs. 2006-08-02 is better, with the added bonus that it's part of the ISO standard.
Of course, it's harder to get interesting date numbers when you've got 8 digits to work with, two of them can't take many values and two or three more only change values very infrequently. 2011-11-02 20:11:11.02 is coming up, I guess.
Can you say for certain that every voter actualy double checked their record instead of just grabbing little piece of paper A and putting it in box B like they were told to?
They'll be told to double-check the printout, not to blindly pass it on, of course.
But that's beside the point - what is your obsession with self-destructive voters? If someone really doesn't want their vote to count, they'll just save themselves a trip and stay home on voting day! Nobody needs or intends to design a system that's capable of protecting people's votes from their own stupidity - the aspect of voting systems that's critical to democracy is the capability to protect people's votes from others' malice. A system with well-designed physical ballots can have that capability. An system with invisible electronic counters operated by invisible manifestations of secret code cannot.
It doesn't take a bunch of untrustworthy people to make a paper ballot vote skew, it just takes one skilled person. No more skill than a $30 / hour programmer, just a different skill.
As easily as adding a flaw to a computer program? Then why don't you share it with us? In a discussion about proof, you surely can't expect us to take something like that as an assertion, can you? Explain how, in a system where an empty ballot box has been examined by independent observers, filled in plain view with computer-printed votes by the voters, and then watched until counting time, the final count of ballots at a polling place can be wildly skewed by a single person.
And can you prove that the scan tron printed was exactly what the voted intended (remember people were confused over the fucking butterfly ballots).
No, but you can prove that the printed ballot was exactly what the voter claimed to intend, and you can make it much easier than in any other system for voters to successfully communicate their intentions. When you want to vote for the second candidate down the list and you don't realize that you need to punch the third hole down, that's confusing. When your printout shows you only the names and offices of the people you will be casting votes for, that's pretty simple.
Can you also prove that the scantron reported an acurate count for the double check?
Yes, by publically hand counting the paper ballots to verify.
Can you then prove that the scantron sheets that were sent to be verified are the same ones that made it into the fireproof boxes?
Yes, by allowing observers from any candidate to keep an eye on the boxes.
Can you then prove that the ones counted from the fireproof boxes are both all of the votes and the same accurate count from the original vote?
Yes - again, by allowing observers from any candidate to watch all the boxes.
Finaly, even if you can prove all of that, can you prove the voter voted for the person they wanted to win (again remember the buterfly ballots)?
I can prove that the voter got to see the name of the person they voted for. I can't prove the voter isn't retarded or hallucinating, of course, but I'm pretty sure that's not going to be an election-deciding problem.
In short, somewhere along the line, voting requires trust.
You're being ridiculous.
Yes, you have to trust that the poll workers and the observers you send to watch ballot boxes aren't all part of a big conspiracy against you. You have to trust that nobody has invented a teleporter capable of moving paper in and out of a watched closed box. You even have to do a large number of random hand recounts before you can trust that automatic paper counting machines haven't been compromised.
But none of these levels of trust are within orders of magnitude of the amount of trust you need to believe that complex closed source software has no unintentional bugs or security holes, that $30 an hour programmers can't be bribed by billion dollar political campaigns, and that invaluable electronic databases will only be accessible by people with the highest ethical standards.
Moreover, what happens in either case when your trust fails? It's easy to think that an incorrect election result is an incorrect election result - but if you can find the right dozen untrustworthy people to subvert a thousand paper ballots, it's simply not the same as if you can find the right one untrustworthy person to subvert a million electronic ballots. There's a difference in scale, not just a difference in kind.
(This is one of the surprisngly modern parts of Christianity, btw -- "and what you whisper in shadows will be shouted from rooftops" and all that.)
If you are less inclined to exercise your freedoms when you are being observed, well, then you probably are confusing "excerise your freedoms" with "break the rules of good behavior". Please go back to kindergarten, I think you missed a few lessons on how to operate in civilzied society.
Spoken like someone for whom "civilized society" has always been synonymous with "my own cultural mores". Ironically, that culture only survived to become a mainstream belief by carefully protecting its privacy amidst a larger, often hostile society. The fish symbol which car owners and companies use to advertise their Christianity today was originally intended to do the opposite, as a passcode to help Christians keep their beliefs secret from observers who might do them harm.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/
If I could force every Hollywood writer to spend a few hours reading before they scripted another line of "sci-fi", this is where I would send them all.
If Microsoft really takes these twelve items to heart, it could be a big shift for them.
Absolutely. It'll be just like when Gates announced "Trustworthy Computing" and made security Microsoft's top priority in 2002, and then their products stopped being insecure.
Dare to try "extreme reentry", just you and a suit and a chute
It sounds like you think you're kidding, but you're not. There were serious proposals for one-man emergency reentry systems that had little more than a heat shield and a prayer.
The project manager said "You wouldn't want to try something like this unless there was no way at all of landing in the disabled spaceship and the astronaut just had to bail out in space," but I'll bet there are more than a few cliffjumping skydiving whitewater-rafting types who would want to do it just for the thrill.
Left and right are not defined by things like same-sex marriage.
That sentence would be just as accurate if you deleted all but the first six words. "Left" and "right" are not defined. They are a failed attempt to map the many-dimensional space of political beliefs into a single-dimensional variable. This sort of either-or thinking is one of the reasons we're in such a mess today. People are willing to support the most heinous acts by someone they perceive as being on "my side" and condemn the most trivial transgressions by someone they perceive as being on "their side".
I have hope that someday we'll change our voting systems (starting locally, but ending up with a Constitutional amendment for federal elections) to use something smarter than plurality counting and thus end the two-party system... but it's a slim hope. If we can't even talk about politics in a way that admits more than two alternatives, how likely are we to be able to redesign our elections that way?
In a free market nobody can force anyone to do anything.
In a free market, I'd be the first in line to covertly buy a ring of land around your house. Sure, I wouldn't be "forcing" you to starve and die, but after you found yourself unable to pay my outrageous toll fee to get to work or the grocery store, our definition of "force" would start to feel irrelevant.
There are loads of natural monopolies in the world; while most of them aren't as potentially lethal as transportation right-of-way, each one is an opportunity to shut out competitors and squeeze people for every cent they'll bear.
No, it's not that small a group of people, you're just letting your political prejudice keep you from looking in the right places.
Remaining wary of the left wing isn't political prejudice, it's just common sense that should have been reinforced by the last 6 years. What kind of mindset is capable of thinking: "The federal government has screwed up our military planning, screwed up disaster relief, screwed up our intelligence gathering, screwed up our world reputation and diplomatic ties, screwed up our budget... but gee, I wish they were also in charge of our healthcare!"
You'd know God's "no" if you saw it, it doesn't look like what you're seeing. There's more flaming corpses.
I agree, that's what I'd expect too, but most religions' scriptures I've read seem to disagree. For an omnipotent creator of all physical law, God's "smite button" seems to be on the fritz an awful lot. Fortunately for Him, there always happens to be a nearby army with charismatic prophets and sharp weapons, eager to pick up the slack so God can do His killing by proxy. His latest volunteers have even started using jet planes and explosives for the "flaming corpses" touch. With that kind of efficiency, they hardly need God on their side at all!
What they want to do now is not look at the content, per se, but at the people who can be extorted from.
Oh, they absolutely want to look at both. Squeezing Google and EBay is one goal, certainly, but for the phone companies I suspect the primary goal is preventing their revenues from being eaten alive by voice over IP. Any internet service that can't handle VoIP is (almost by definition) as bad as dialup and won't attract customers, but any internet service that can handle VoIP is likely to eventually deprive them of $20 a month in phone revenues. The only way around that paradox is to stop being neutral about packet content: if data stream A comes from a video game and stream B is a VoIP connection, they want to degrade the quality of B until you've paid extra for it.
Of course, with a little more money paid to engineers instead of lobbyists, they could be trading that $20 a month in audio phone revenues for $50 a month in broadband/video phone revenues - but that would require them to be both smart and greedy, and they seem to have skipped smart.
That is what you buy when you buy software from anyone, the Right to Use the software.
No, you buy a copy of the software. The right to use that copy is implicit; nowhere does copyright law restrict that right to copyright holders, and it's as fundamental as the right to read a legally purchased copy of a book. Software companies originally tried to use a "you can't use our software without making a copy in RAM, so you need a license!" argument, but in the USA at least that was made explicitly legal in Title 17 a. 1. 117.
Of course, this is assuming that you walk into a store, pick out some software, hand them some money, and don't sign anything except a credit card receipt. If you buy anything by specifically agreeing to a license beforehand, then certainly the license terms apply.
He's right that mandating "tabs must be N spaces" is stupid, though. Use tabs to indent blocks of code, use spaces for aligning code that isn't in blocks, and people should be able to set whatever tab size they want without ruining anything.Now, let's see if I can keep this from being mangled by Slashcode...
On preview: no, I can't. Well, imagine that the C in Class is directly under the i in int, and imagine that the a in arg2.is_valid() is directly under the a in arg1.
Of course, getting this right every time isn't easy when you're trying to think about your code and your editor has it's own ideas about indentation. I'd be very happy if anyone could tell me how to get Vim's autoindent to behave this way.
The use of decent engines if frivolously wasteful. I am not surprised Bezos is attracted to it.
No, because descent engines just reduce per-flight payload and use fuel. Payload can be increased by using a larger rocket or making more flights, and fuel is cheap.
Unlike fuel, orbital rockets are expensive. Throwing away a whole launch vehicle on every flight is wasteful. I am not surprised that cost-plus launch contractors are attracted to it.
And I, $20.26!
Why do I have the sudden urge to spay or neuter my pets?
What's happened? Did we redesign something? Are they so old that the parts are wearing out and we can't replace them as well as we built them to begin with? Are we just publicizing problems more now than we used to? I haven't seen anything to tell me why it seems we can't launch a shuttle without something faling off when the old ones flew without a publicized hitch.
What happened is that we realized what the real risks are. There are several failure scenarios which we had irrationally hoped were one-in-a-hundred-thousand events, but which we have been forced to admit are more like one-in-a-hundred events. Generally what forced the admission was when some unlucky Shuttle crew became the one-in-a-hundred.
Stuff fell off the Shuttles from the very first launches. It was never a serious problem until Columbia, partly because it's unlikely for any falling foam to do major damage, and mostly because we were lucky enough that "unlikely" didn't happen for a hundred flights. For that matter, the O rings on the SRBs eroded many times in the earliest Shuttle flights. It just wasn't until Challenger that one eroded badly enough for gas to break through and start tearing the thing apart.
Back when we thought that these sorts of things were unlikely to blow up a shuttle, we ignored the problems and flew anyway. We could probably continue ignoring problems and flying anyway, but we'd probably continue losing a Shuttle or two in every hundred flights. That's more risk than NASA is willing to accept.
It has nothing to do with "the old days" vs. "new tech". The Shuttles we're flying today were all built decades ago, and despite a few upgrades here and there, they're basically the same 1970s era technology designed to fit 1970s political compromises.
Dude, you're on Slashdot. If you were some bimbo news anchor on MSNBC you could get away with saying intergalactic. But this isn't even interstellar! It's in our own solar system, for crying out loud. The word you want is "interplanetary".
I blame the Beastie Boys. Who knows how many young minds were ruined by that "intergalactic planetary, planetary intergalactic" lyric?
At this point we should just hope that nobody thinks Jupiter is in "another dimension".
Erm, you still have to get the fuel up there right? .. and the cost of putting something up there is still reasonably proportional to weight?
Only for loose values of "reasonably". Other important factors include:
Required reliability - if an expendable launcher is 50% as expensive but only 95% as reliable, then it's worthless for launching humans, undesirable for precious cargo, but fantastic for fuel.
Flexibility with existing launch vehicles - if your mass budget for a mission creeps up to 10% more than your biggest launcher can lift, you can either spend millions of dollars lifting more fuel separately or billions creating a new rocket.
Flexibility with new launch vehicles - there are a lot of cheap space access ideas that won't work with "one launcher, one mission" plans. Electromagnetic "catapults" require too much acceleration for people and most cargo. Reusable vehicles may be cheaper per-pound but have smaller payloads per launch. Orbital assembly and orbital refueling can allow you to get the benefits of new spaceflight ideas without all the problems.
Competition! - Some of the biggest obstacles to cheap spaceflight aren't technological, they're economic. The more suppliers you can choose between, the better deals you can get. But is NASA going to trust their astronauts to a half dozen different rockets? Hell no - some people even think they deliberately increased the CEV mass to ensure that it would need a new NASA launcher instead of a commercial launcher. Even for probes and satellites, if you've spent a decade building a hundred million dollar science experiment, you're going to be very cautious about what you launch it on. But fuel? Fuel is cheap and fungible, many kinds are easily transferrable and storable, and any serious exploration of the solar system will require a lot of it in Low Earth Orbit. It's the perfect market for NASA to use to encourage and experiment with new commercial launch service suppliers. And once some of those suppliers have proven themselves by carrying commodity cargo, NASA will have more options for precious cargo, then eventually for human passengers.
Presumably, he wrote a patch that integrates libgphoto with Wine, thus enabling Picassa to download photos from digital cameras - a neccessary feature that would not have otherwise been available as part of the Wine API.
Are you sure? All the digital cameras I've ever used have been USB Storage devices - so, presuming your Linux distribution is friendly about autodetecting and automounting, downloading photos from cameras can be no more esoteric than reading a file off your hard drive.
Just consider that if we set aside school time for your teen kids to get together for a group bitching session many people would be upset, this isn't that much different.
You're right that it isn't much different from the school time already set aside for group bitching sessions, which my schools called "lunch time" and "passing period". During the former period, high school students were even encouraged to leave campus to go eat and socialize in public places filled with strange adults.
I don't think that kids should be on MySpace when they're suppose to be learning basic computer skills.
The ones who are on MySpace then already have basic computer skills - and if we're trying to teach them anything else on computers, then "you can play after you finish the lesson material" gives them a great incentive to learn.