Oh noes, CPU use spikes to 100%!
on
Firefox Secrets
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· Score: 1
I demand that all my programs leave 50% of the CPU idle and take twice as long!
Yes, the Infoworld article actually uses the phrase "spikes to 100%" - apparently a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Of course, there's a difference between taking 100% CPU while loading a page and taking 100% indefinitely, and I used to see my firefox process doing the latter too. The way to fix it is to install FlashBlock, and not to click on the banner ads that busy loop on your CPU just to put a punchable monkey on the screen.
We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer.
Unfortunately, for every Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars universe, there's a hundred Han Solos and a billion Uncle Owens. If the only compelling content you can create is for Han Solos, you'd better have some very good AI to fill the Uncle Owen roles. If the only compelling content you can create is for Luke Skywalkers, then congratulations, you're writing a single player game. The only reason to put a thousand Luke Skywalker players in the same universe is because a few of them can be tricked into giving you monthly fees that way.
This isn't a Star Wars specific problem, of course. Heroic epics are epic because they involve unique heroes performing universe-changing actions. When your weeks of character development finally make you able to reach and slay the uber-dragon, that dragon had better stay dead. When an NPC congratulates you on your successful quest one minute and hands the same quest to someone else the next, it becomes obvious that you're not interacting with a story, you're playing a pretty modern version of pinball.
Of course there's no easy way to fix that - it's easier to write scripted content and hand out copies to every player than to write code that makes it natural for players to create their own content. I'd like to see MMORPG worlds evolve like SimCity/Civilization/Masters Of Orion/etc. games - frontier settlements would be founded by groups of players not created by designers, and enemies would actually threaten to destroy those settlements not just sit in dungeons waiting to be killed.
The interesting part is that Wikipedia did so well so quickly. Wikipedia's only been around since 2001, but they wrote the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1771.
Well, the articles tested "covered topics including Agent Orange, quarks and synchrotrons". Brittanica hasn't had two centuries head start on any of those.
I would hesitate to call this a "very low thrust" engine, since 100kw is somewhere around 140 horsepower.
Thrust is not measured in kilowatts (or horsepower, or any unit of power). It's measured in units of force, like Newtons.
I'd say you're comparing apples to oranges, but it's even worse than that. How is force related to energy? By the equation Energy = Force * Exhaust Velocity. The higher your exhaust velocity is (and on mass-efficient rockets like these, it's huge), the lower your thrust is for the same energy input. Other posters have already pointed out how many orders of magnitude more power typical chemical rockets use, but those huge ratios actually *understate* how much more thrust they produce.
It's a shame they don't have all their archives online; the only links I could find to Study Reveals: Babies Are Stupid seem to be missing some funny pictures and captions.
OpenOffice is evolving from one of the buggiest, most bloated office suites it has ever been my displeasure to use. It's not yet as good as it should be, but it's a major improvement over what it used to be.
And so they get to write off $30,000 in unrecoverable recepits on their taxes. Schweet!
Only if they've already written that $30,000 onto their books as revenues or if they've got a crooked accountant. And if they've got a crooked accountant cheating on their taxes, why would they want to send a paper trail to an ex-customer?
Smith said the ability to prioritize traffic would benefit consumers, such as with online services providing medical alerts.
Prioritizing medical alerts? Is he saying his ISP currently can't get a few kilobytes of HTML to its customers without prioritization? Did any of the "reporters" and "analysts" there call him on this? He's either lying or incompetent, and either way I'm glad I'm neither a customer or a shareholder of his company.
But even if you ignore the ridiculous example, isn't the doublespeak here obvious? He's trying to defend a system where he would be able to assign priorities to his customers' traffic, but because that's impossible he's instead pointing out how nice it would be if his customers could prioritize their own traffic. Sure, if the router at the other end of my 300kB/sec could keep track of what priority I've given network connections and could bump higher priority data ahead in the queue, that would be good. If the router at the other end of my dad's 5kB/sec could do the same, that would be fantastic. If either router instead kept track of what priority my ISPs think my network traffic should have, that would be horrible. All the old private computer networks from AOL to Compuserve to Prodigy learned painfully that their customers wanted a global internet, and now all the new big internet providers are having fantasies of turning our global internet back into their own private networks.
I'm not sure why Google, Amazon, and eBay are leading the fight on our side, though - are they actually worried that broadband connections will become so crippled that an HTML storefront or search engine might be noticeably impacted? This isn't about web traffic, this is about phone companies that want to sell you gigabytes of TV-over-IP for affordable prices, but without being forced to make generic packets cheap enough for kilobytes of voice-over-IP to take all their current revenues away.
Most games are not attempting to communicate, but are rather trying to entertain their audience.
That's true, but it's also true about most movies, most books, and most songs. People are simply much more willing to pay money for entertainment than for communication - and in fact if you consider "making someplace prettier" to be a form of entertainment then I'd also say most paintings and most sculptures qualify as entertainment more than as art.
But, just as with all those other media, there are some exceptionally artistic games, and in fact I'd say that the medium has more potential than traditional art forms. Traditional art only allows the public to participate through interpretation, whereas game players can really create part of their artistic experience. Certainly games with meaningful player choices and interactive stories are rare, but movies with audience choices and interactive stories are impossible.
According to the article, we don't pile into the theatres at $9 a pop to watch them:
House of the Dead cost $22,000,000 including marketing costs. It's worldwide gross was $13,818,181. That's a LOSS of $9,000,000 by my calculator. Alone in the Dark cost approx $32,000,000 including marketing costs. To date its worldwide gross is $6,040,827. That is an even more impressive LOSS of $26,000,000.
I'd want to doublecheck those numbers, though, based on the author's odd ideas about tax law:
But crucially, the bizarre tax laws in Germany mean that any wealthy Germans who invest in a movie can write-off the production cost, delay paying their taxes and generally reduce their tax burden. When you disseminate all the boring legal business law surrounding it the bottom line is this - the German investors in a movie only pay tax on any RETURNS the movie makes, their investment is 100% deductible, so the minute the movie makes a profit, said investor has to start paying tax.
He first claims that Germany has "bizarre tax laws" which only tax businesses on their profits rather than their costs (isn't that how every country's tax laws work?!), then he seems to believe that a tax writeoff of $1 reduces your tax by $1 (which still wouldn't make the movie investors any money) rather than reducing your taxable income by $1 (which means the investors are still losing money, just not quite as much). I don't know anything about German tax law, but I've seen more than a few people who mistakenly think that's how writeoffs work in the USA, so I'd like to see some references before I believe that Germany's tax code is based on our urban legends.
Plus the investors can actually borrow money to put towards investment and write that off too.
Yes, if you borrow money and lose it, then your taxable income gets reduced by the amount you lost. But why the hell would anyone do that on purpose? Instead of paying (marginal tax rate) * (money borrowed) to the government, you'd have to pay 100% * (money borrowed) to your creditors!
Wrong. A script that purports to be a copy of the source may be open for everybody to read. The source that actually gets used is on a corporate computer where it can only be read by a few programmers, and the binaries that are produced are invisible magnetic patterns that can't be read by anybody. In between the purported source code and the actual binary code are half a dozen places where someone could have broken in to the system (whether physically, electronically, or just by handing over enough money) and inserted a back door.
Although it may be possible to create a primarily electronic system which doesn't allow votes to be undetectably changed or removed, it's not simple, and it requires you to cope with the possibility that the hardware or software may be tampered with. This isn't an easy problem, which is why most democracy advocates want to replace it with a simpler problem: creating a primarily paper system with electronic interfaces that allow paper ballots to be more easily and accurately created and counted.
Which is certainly good, but to me says more about the previous implementation than it does about Goto's work.
Yeah, that previous implementation must have totally sucked. I know all my linear algebra software is written around an assembly language core, hand tuned for each new version of a half dozen processors, and designed from the start to minimize TLB misses instead of just naively trying to fit a dataset into L1 or L2 cache. I don't know why those retards at the universities and national labs were ever using anything else!
(closing Slashdot, going back to working on my shamefully unoptimized C++ numerics code...)
The "current" crop of alternate theories are actually 200 years old.
You're thinking of "creationism", a non-current alternate theory that says "God created life on Earth in seven days, in the order and fashion described in Genesis."
That's been replaced by "intelligent design", a current alternate non-theory that says "Some superhuman intelligence created life, at some time, somehow, wink wink."
Although "intelligent design" advocates don't want to promote it to hypothesis status by proposing any mechanisms of their own (at least they're trying not to elaborate on "wink wink" while the courts are watching), they are having loads of fun trotting out old anti-evolution canards. Modern efforts are aimed toward redefining the word theory to include "intelligent design", "astrology", and "my theory is that your theory is stupid!"
The content on SeaCode and Lakota's sites is pretty thin, but that's the author's fault not the designer's. Wired seems to like breaking stories into multiple pages to increase hit rates at the cost of annoyed customers, and adds clutter with font size buttons for people who can't figure out their own browsers. Both Wired and SeaCode are using fixed widths to make my browser display a narrow column of text surrounded by unnecessary whitespace, but half the pages on the internet have that problem. I suppose Lakota's subpage titles are pretty sad, as are the flash text buttons on their "company" page - is Lakota the one you meant?
Err...wait, what are they complaining about again that they want to get rid of Web..er..I mean Usenet? It seems to me both are different implementations that exhibit the same problems.
Nope. Usenet exhibits the problem that there is no editorial control or moderation system, so your own killfiles are the only way of finding the good posts and ignore the bad. The Web exhibits the problem that there is often editorial control and moderation systems, so groupthink and confirmation bias causes most of us to find the posts fitting our preconceived ideas and ignore the posts that would challenge us.
Personally, I think the latter problem is more important. People are much more savvy about spam and viruses than they are about cognitive dissonance and self-examination.
nah recompile is a bit too good... I would go with rehash...
Maybe "rewrite" would be more accurate? If Microsoft could get a 64-bit version of Windows just by recompiling, they would never have bothered with 32-bit Windows NT on Alpha.
Even for a novice programmer, code like if(x == 456) is self-explanatory, no comments are needed.
You're right - how could it be possible not to know what that code is doing? (The rule is, the only magic numbers allowed are -1, 0, and 1. 456 is right out.)
Okay, but that's going to get really hard to debug!
if (x == (1+1)*(1+1+1+1)*((1+1+1+1)*(1+1+1+1)*(1+1+1+1)-(1+ 1+1+1+1+1+1)))
And to think, my company decided creating and maintaining an open-source product was too much work...
If your company is the sole copyright owner of an open source project, their two legal requirements under open source license are: jack and squat. Licenses are just what allow non-copyright-owners to redistribute - and if the GPL or LGPL are too complex for you, as a copyright owner you are free to choose other licenses.
If you want your product to be a derived work of other open-source products under the GPL and LGPL, there's a simple solution: distribute source code along with your binaries, and you don't have to offer to repeat that distribution later. Not much work at all, is it?
So, do you actually have a company that will now be reconsidering their stance on open source, or am I just feeding a troll?
Put an end to the "pass our evil laws and we'll give you money for campaign advertisements" status quo, and it'll just be replaced with "pass our evil laws and we'll publish our own advertisements for your campaign" - same effect, except that anyone who can't afford to buy a whole TV commercial will be out of the loop. Put an end to that, and it'll be replaced with "pass our evil laws and we'll publish 'news' stories that might as well be advertisements for your campaign" - same effect, except that anyone without a media empire will be out of the loop.
Legalized political bribery doesn't work because companies get away with giving politicians money for support, it works because they give politicians votes for support, and that works because they can get our votes for advertising money. That'll stop as soon as voters are informed enough to do their own research and make opinions without regard to ads... which is to say, not in my lifetime.
Unmanned rockets/satellites/probes such as the Ariane is where true space exploration lies. If something goes wrong it doesn't take lives with it. It is inherently more practical.
How much would you have to be paid for a job on which you had a 2% chance of dying? I'd do it for $400K even if it didn't let me go to orbit. Even if you assume for some reason that high performance vehicle pilots are more risk-averse than I am, you're still not going to come up with a cost to life that exceeds the cost of the most expensive satellites and the launch vehicles themselves.
Unmanned flights aren't inherently more practical, they're just inherently safer PR. If every company risked losing hundreds of billions of dollars of funding any time an employee died, we wouldn't have any bridges or skyscrapers until we could build them with robots.
They don't condone the rioters' actions, but are not afraid to cite the likely causes - neglect of what have become inner-city ghettoes and discrimination against the inhabitants.
Wouldn't it be ironic if a culture of blame-shifting rationalizations for violence was a likely cause of violence?
The world is full of poor people and players of violent video games; that won't start terrifying me until *after* we've convinced them that they're no longer solely responsible for their actions.
Slashdot Mirror
Indicating to them that there's either a super-secret installation there or a giant penis statue?
Or both!
I demand that all my programs leave 50% of the CPU idle and take twice as long!
Yes, the Infoworld article actually uses the phrase "spikes to 100%" - apparently a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
Of course, there's a difference between taking 100% CPU while loading a page and taking 100% indefinitely, and I used to see my firefox process doing the latter too. The way to fix it is to install FlashBlock, and not to click on the banner ads that busy loop on your CPU just to put a punchable monkey on the screen.
Why, this is the most exciting news I've heard since the last time it happened!
Which was about six months ago!
And six months before that, and six months before that, and six months before that, for more than a decade!
We really needed to give people the experience of being Han Solo or Luke Skywalker rather than being Uncle Owen, the moisture farmer.
Unfortunately, for every Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars universe, there's a hundred Han Solos and a billion Uncle Owens. If the only compelling content you can create is for Han Solos, you'd better have some very good AI to fill the Uncle Owen roles. If the only compelling content you can create is for Luke Skywalkers, then congratulations, you're writing a single player game. The only reason to put a thousand Luke Skywalker players in the same universe is because a few of them can be tricked into giving you monthly fees that way.
This isn't a Star Wars specific problem, of course. Heroic epics are epic because they involve unique heroes performing universe-changing actions. When your weeks of character development finally make you able to reach and slay the uber-dragon, that dragon had better stay dead. When an NPC congratulates you on your successful quest one minute and hands the same quest to someone else the next, it becomes obvious that you're not interacting with a story, you're playing a pretty modern version of pinball.
Of course there's no easy way to fix that - it's easier to write scripted content and hand out copies to every player than to write code that makes it natural for players to create their own content. I'd like to see MMORPG worlds evolve like SimCity/Civilization/Masters Of Orion/etc. games - frontier settlements would be founded by groups of players not created by designers, and enemies would actually threaten to destroy those settlements not just sit in dungeons waiting to be killed.
The interesting part is that Wikipedia did so well so quickly. Wikipedia's only been around since 2001, but they wrote the first edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica in 1771.
Well, the articles tested "covered topics including Agent Orange, quarks and synchrotrons". Brittanica hasn't had two centuries head start on any of those.
Energy = Force * Exhaust Velocity
As long as I'm nitpicking units, I shouldn't be screwing up my own - that should say Power (energy per time) on the left of the equation, not energy.
I would hesitate to call this a "very low thrust" engine, since 100kw is somewhere around 140 horsepower.
Thrust is not measured in kilowatts (or horsepower, or any unit of power). It's measured in units of force, like Newtons.
I'd say you're comparing apples to oranges, but it's even worse than that. How is force related to energy? By the equation Energy = Force * Exhaust Velocity. The higher your exhaust velocity is (and on mass-efficient rockets like these, it's huge), the lower your thrust is for the same energy input. Other posters have already pointed out how many orders of magnitude more power typical chemical rockets use, but those huge ratios actually *understate* how much more thrust they produce.
It's a shame they don't have all their archives online; the only links I could find to Study Reveals: Babies Are Stupid seem to be missing some funny pictures and captions.
OpenOffice is evolving from one of the buggiest, most bloated office suites it has ever been my displeasure to use. It's not yet as good as it should be, but it's a major improvement over what it used to be.
And so they get to write off $30,000 in unrecoverable recepits on their taxes. Schweet!
Only if they've already written that $30,000 onto their books as revenues or if they've got a crooked accountant. And if they've got a crooked accountant cheating on their taxes, why would they want to send a paper trail to an ex-customer?
Smith said the ability to prioritize traffic would benefit consumers, such as with online services providing medical alerts.
Prioritizing medical alerts? Is he saying his ISP currently can't get a few kilobytes of HTML to its customers without prioritization? Did any of the "reporters" and "analysts" there call him on this? He's either lying or incompetent, and either way I'm glad I'm neither a customer or a shareholder of his company.
But even if you ignore the ridiculous example, isn't the doublespeak here obvious? He's trying to defend a system where he would be able to assign priorities to his customers' traffic, but because that's impossible he's instead pointing out how nice it would be if his customers could prioritize their own traffic. Sure, if the router at the other end of my 300kB/sec could keep track of what priority I've given network connections and could bump higher priority data ahead in the queue, that would be good. If the router at the other end of my dad's 5kB/sec could do the same, that would be fantastic. If either router instead kept track of what priority my ISPs think my network traffic should have, that would be horrible. All the old private computer networks from AOL to Compuserve to Prodigy learned painfully that their customers wanted a global internet, and now all the new big internet providers are having fantasies of turning our global internet back into their own private networks.
I'm not sure why Google, Amazon, and eBay are leading the fight on our side, though - are they actually worried that broadband connections will become so crippled that an HTML storefront or search engine might be noticeably impacted? This isn't about web traffic, this is about phone companies that want to sell you gigabytes of TV-over-IP for affordable prices, but without being forced to make generic packets cheap enough for kilobytes of voice-over-IP to take all their current revenues away.
Most games are not attempting to communicate, but are rather trying to entertain their audience.
That's true, but it's also true about most movies, most books, and most songs. People are simply much more willing to pay money for entertainment than for communication - and in fact if you consider "making someplace prettier" to be a form of entertainment then I'd also say most paintings and most sculptures qualify as entertainment more than as art.
But, just as with all those other media, there are some exceptionally artistic games, and in fact I'd say that the medium has more potential than traditional art forms. Traditional art only allows the public to participate through interpretation, whereas game players can really create part of their artistic experience. Certainly games with meaningful player choices and interactive stories are rare, but movies with audience choices and interactive stories are impossible.
According to the article, we don't pile into the theatres at $9 a pop to watch them:
House of the Dead cost $22,000,000 including marketing costs. It's worldwide gross was $13,818,181. That's a LOSS of $9,000,000 by my calculator. Alone in the Dark cost approx $32,000,000 including marketing costs. To date its worldwide gross is $6,040,827. That is an even more impressive LOSS of $26,000,000.
I'd want to doublecheck those numbers, though, based on the author's odd ideas about tax law:
But crucially, the bizarre tax laws in Germany mean that any wealthy Germans who invest in a movie can write-off the production cost, delay paying their taxes and generally reduce their tax burden. When you disseminate all the boring legal business law surrounding it the bottom line is this - the German investors in a movie only pay tax on any RETURNS the movie makes, their investment is 100% deductible, so the minute the movie makes a profit, said investor has to start paying tax.
He first claims that Germany has "bizarre tax laws" which only tax businesses on their profits rather than their costs (isn't that how every country's tax laws work?!), then he seems to believe that a tax writeoff of $1 reduces your tax by $1 (which still wouldn't make the movie investors any money) rather than reducing your taxable income by $1 (which means the investors are still losing money, just not quite as much). I don't know anything about German tax law, but I've seen more than a few people who mistakenly think that's how writeoffs work in the USA, so I'd like to see some references before I believe that Germany's tax code is based on our urban legends.
Plus the investors can actually borrow money to put towards investment and write that off too.
Yes, if you borrow money and lose it, then your taxable income gets reduced by the amount you lost. But why the hell would anyone do that on purpose? Instead of paying (marginal tax rate) * (money borrowed) to the government, you'd have to pay 100% * (money borrowed) to your creditors!
The source is open for everybody to read right?
Wrong. A script that purports to be a copy of the source may be open for everybody to read. The source that actually gets used is on a corporate computer where it can only be read by a few programmers, and the binaries that are produced are invisible magnetic patterns that can't be read by anybody. In between the purported source code and the actual binary code are half a dozen places where someone could have broken in to the system (whether physically, electronically, or just by handing over enough money) and inserted a back door.
Although it may be possible to create a primarily electronic system which doesn't allow votes to be undetectably changed or removed, it's not simple, and it requires you to cope with the possibility that the hardware or software may be tampered with. This isn't an easy problem, which is why most democracy advocates want to replace it with a simpler problem: creating a primarily paper system with electronic interfaces that allow paper ballots to be more easily and accurately created and counted.
Which is certainly good, but to me says more about the previous implementation than it does about Goto's work.
Yeah, that previous implementation must have totally sucked. I know all my linear algebra software is written around an assembly language core, hand tuned for each new version of a half dozen processors, and designed from the start to minimize TLB misses instead of just naively trying to fit a dataset into L1 or L2 cache. I don't know why those retards at the universities and national labs were ever using anything else!
(closing Slashdot, going back to working on my shamefully unoptimized C++ numerics code...)
The "current" crop of alternate theories are actually 200 years old.
You're thinking of "creationism", a non-current alternate theory that says "God created life on Earth in seven days, in the order and fashion described in Genesis."
That's been replaced by "intelligent design", a current alternate non-theory that says "Some superhuman intelligence created life, at some time, somehow, wink wink."
Although "intelligent design" advocates don't want to promote it to hypothesis status by proposing any mechanisms of their own (at least they're trying not to elaborate on "wink wink" while the courts are watching), they are having loads of fun trotting out old anti-evolution canards. Modern efforts are aimed toward redefining the word theory to include "intelligent design", "astrology", and "my theory is that your theory is stupid!"
The content on SeaCode and Lakota's sites is pretty thin, but that's the author's fault not the designer's. Wired seems to like breaking stories into multiple pages to increase hit rates at the cost of annoyed customers, and adds clutter with font size buttons for people who can't figure out their own browsers. Both Wired and SeaCode are using fixed widths to make my browser display a narrow column of text surrounded by unnecessary whitespace, but half the pages on the internet have that problem. I suppose Lakota's subpage titles are pretty sad, as are the flash text buttons on their "company" page - is Lakota the one you meant?
Err...wait, what are they complaining about again that they want to get rid of Web..er..I mean Usenet? It seems to me both are different implementations that exhibit the same problems.
Nope. Usenet exhibits the problem that there is no editorial control or moderation system, so your own killfiles are the only way of finding the good posts and ignore the bad. The Web exhibits the problem that there is often editorial control and moderation systems, so groupthink and confirmation bias causes most of us to find the posts fitting our preconceived ideas and ignore the posts that would challenge us.
Personally, I think the latter problem is more important. People are much more savvy about spam and viruses than they are about cognitive dissonance and self-examination.
nah recompile is a bit too good... I would go with rehash...
Maybe "rewrite" would be more accurate? If Microsoft could get a 64-bit version of Windows just by recompiling, they would never have bothered with 32-bit Windows NT on Alpha.
Even for a novice programmer, code like if(x == 456) is self-explanatory, no comments are needed.
+ 1+1+1+1+1+1)))
You're right - how could it be possible not to know what that code is doing? (The rule is, the only magic numbers allowed are -1, 0, and 1. 456 is right out.)
Okay, but that's going to get really hard to debug!
if (x == (1+1)*(1+1+1+1)*((1+1+1+1)*(1+1+1+1)*(1+1+1+1)-(1
And to think, my company decided creating and maintaining an open-source product was too much work...
If your company is the sole copyright owner of an open source project, their two legal requirements under open source license are: jack and squat. Licenses are just what allow non-copyright-owners to redistribute - and if the GPL or LGPL are too complex for you, as a copyright owner you are free to choose other licenses.
If you want your product to be a derived work of other open-source products under the GPL and LGPL, there's a simple solution: distribute source code along with your binaries, and you don't have to offer to repeat that distribution later. Not much work at all, is it?
So, do you actually have a company that will now be reconsidering their stance on open source, or am I just feeding a troll?
Where the hell does this end?
About the same point the "donations" do.
Put an end to the "pass our evil laws and we'll give you money for campaign advertisements" status quo, and it'll just be replaced with "pass our evil laws and we'll publish our own advertisements for your campaign" - same effect, except that anyone who can't afford to buy a whole TV commercial will be out of the loop. Put an end to that, and it'll be replaced with "pass our evil laws and we'll publish 'news' stories that might as well be advertisements for your campaign" - same effect, except that anyone without a media empire will be out of the loop.
Legalized political bribery doesn't work because companies get away with giving politicians money for support, it works because they give politicians votes for support, and that works because they can get our votes for advertising money. That'll stop as soon as voters are informed enough to do their own research and make opinions without regard to ads... which is to say, not in my lifetime.
Unmanned rockets/satellites/probes such as the Ariane is where true space exploration lies. If something goes wrong it doesn't take lives with it. It is inherently more practical.
How much would you have to be paid for a job on which you had a 2% chance of dying? I'd do it for $400K even if it didn't let me go to orbit. Even if you assume for some reason that high performance vehicle pilots are more risk-averse than I am, you're still not going to come up with a cost to life that exceeds the cost of the most expensive satellites and the launch vehicles themselves.
Unmanned flights aren't inherently more practical, they're just inherently safer PR. If every company risked losing hundreds of billions of dollars of funding any time an employee died, we wouldn't have any bridges or skyscrapers until we could build them with robots.
They don't condone the rioters' actions, but are not afraid to cite the likely causes - neglect of what have become inner-city ghettoes and discrimination against the inhabitants.
Wouldn't it be ironic if a culture of blame-shifting rationalizations for violence was a likely cause of violence?
The world is full of poor people and players of violent video games; that won't start terrifying me until *after* we've convinced them that they're no longer solely responsible for their actions.
Sony bastard: "Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Interviewer: "Do you know what a UFIA is?"