"it almost sounds like they're saying that if you want to save billions of dollars you have to do.. some.. (no!)... work!?!?"
But too many people think that switching to Linux, Apache, etc, simply means that you don't have to pay for software anymore. And then they're shocked at the expenses that are racked up on things like re-training, support contracts (have you seen what Red Hat charges?) custom software cost due to migration, etc.
I'm a fan of open source software, but I'm under no illusion that it's always the right solution. High end Unix systems like Solaris still have better administration tools and built in virtualization, which is one reason why Linux doesn't completely own the 'nix market. When Qualcomm was looking at a mass-switch to open source (and ditching their Solaris-based infrastructure), they were unhappy about the state of management tools, and estimated that switching to open source would cost them more money, not less.
Bottom line: analyze, determine your needs, and use the best solution for the job, whatever it is.
"The Digital Media branch was restructured into one publishing division along with the companyâ(TM)s Missing Manual group, Oâ(TM)Reilly Technology Exchange and its Head First series, Winge said."
Without actually seeing the company's financials, this could well just be standard streamlining for better efficiency, perhaps a proactive move before they're seriously hit. The story noted that they've been through much worse before, after they had to seriously trim their 300+ employees after the dot com bust.
Foreign makes have better fuel efficiency and more variety to choose from.
Not really. Japanese companies are putting more emphasis on hybrids (and have better developed hybrid-tech), and so they get a lot of press in that regard, with some models topping 50mpg in fuel economy. But most cars sold are still conventional gasoline models, and in that regard, Japanese and American models are broadly similar in terms of fuel economy. Compare for instance, two competitors in the sedan market, a 2009 V-6 Toyota Camry, and a 2009 V-6 Ford Taurus. The Camry gets 19/28 mpg, and the Taurus gets 18/28.
As for the "more variety"... where? The beauty of Japanese car company philosophy is that they offer few models. Instead of offering vehicles for every possible niche, the Japanese companies have a few, well-designed and well-built models. Part of the problem that American companies have(and especially GM) is that they'll sell 3 to 5 versions of the same car, sometimes with little difference in the sheet metal. American car companies take "platforming"... using a base car platform to make multiple models... to ridiculous extremes.
Now I'll be able to remember all of those awesome hallucinations I've been having!
Forget the hallucination stuff. Look at the spider web studies.
Various studies have been done giving drugs to spiders, and using their webs as evidence of the effects. My family doctor has a poster of these webs in his offices to show patients what these substances can do to you, and I think most people would be shocked at how extremely the spiders were affected by caffeine, which you can see in this photo.
My wife's mother has Alzheimer's, and she lives with us, so I'm acutely aware of what it does to people, and heavy doses of caffeine is definitely the lesser of two evils here. But it will still be nice to have a treatment that doesn't have it's own harsh side effects.
No UAV is capable of fighting a mannned air craft and winning.
On a one to one basis, maybe no. But what about a ten to one basis? UAVs are a lot cheaper, and a lot more expendable.
If you can occupy the enemy's airforce with some UAVs, while others bombard the airstrips, you win.
Well, considering that computers can think and react faster than any human (if properly programmed), it's very feasible that one day, UAV's will have the software and AI to absolutely dominate manned fighters. Not only that, but UAV's don't have the same limitations as human pilots do... think of things like G-forces, and the requirement to carry life-support equipment. Without things like oxygen tanks and ejections seats and cockpits, you can free up a lot of space... for fuel, or to simply make the aircraft lighter and smaller. You also don't have to worry about things like blacking out in high-G turns. All equipment has limitations, but today, the major impediment to performance is the human factor. Our current planes, not to mention our future ones, are limited more by the limitations of their pilots than by their physical structures.
There was a cheesy movie in the early 80's called Deal of the Century, a remarkably silly diatribe against arms dealing... but considering that it was made 25 years ago, it was prescient in one of its features: a UAV called the Peacemaker that could out-fight and out-fly any manned fighter, at one point literally flying circles around Gregory Hines in his state-of-the-art manned fighter. The Peacemaker is only defeated when Chevy Chase disables it by attacking its remote control pilot back at the airfield. The Peacemaker was smaller than manned fighters, and could be launched from the back of a trailer.
Considering the advance of lightweight materials, CPU's, and software, it's only a matter of time before we can build an unmanned fighter that, like the fictitious Peacemaker, can fly rings around F-22's.
Where are you getting those figures? Your larger point... UAV's are cheap compared to manned fighters... still stands, but your figures for the manned fighters are off significantly. Your F-22 price is waaay to high, and ironically, the price for the F-35 is too low. No one really knows for sure, as Lockheed Martin and the Air Force fudges their financial figures on this, but the most credible figures for an F-22 is between $120 and $140 million a copy (flyaway cost), and at around $87 million per copy for an F-35A.
Both are wayyy to expensive, but at least the F-22 will do what it promises... dominate air-to-air battles. The F-35 is beginning to look like an expensive pig in a poke. If UAV's can become more and more capable (and stay cheap), you're right in that the trend of replacing some manned missions with unmanned planes will only accelerate.
At 60+, Mantalban was still built like a god with big slabs of muscle.
OTH, the pudgier Shatner has built a wonderful successful career of fine roles since star trek.
So it depends on how you are scoring.
Shatner tends to be naturally pudgier, but he's still in good shape, especially for his age. James Spader remarked that Shatner would do more pushups on the set than he himself could do when he was younger.
Montalban kept in shape too; he just had better genes.
And I'll BUY BUY BUY tomorrow... do you seriously think anything has fundamentally changed in Apple's business? It still remains to be seen.
Well, yeah, something fundamental has changed. Steve Jobs won't be there. Look at Apple's history. That makes all the difference in the world.
When the guy does die... whenever that is... it's going to be earth shattering in the tech sector, and you'll never see anything like it in this business again. Jobs is the Elvis of the computing business. When he goes, you'll see people weeping on TV. Silly or not, that's the way it will be. And the endless speculation for months (and years) will be "Can Apple survive without Steve Jobs?".
Of course they're morally bankrupt. However they also play an important role in the ecosystem.
What? How in the hell are malware writers an "important part of the ecosystem"?
This is the Internet, not Wild Kingdom. In nature, real virus infections do indeed serve a natural purpose. On a computer, it serves nothing but the ends of assholes and criminals. There's no justification... none whatsoever... for what these guys do. And don't give me that farcical security argument, either. They're not doing the world any favors by violating other people's computers.
"There seems to be a big stretch between a serial killer and some guy writing malicious code."
Not for me. Because everytime I have to clean up something they've unleashed on the world, I want to become a serial killer... by hunting every single one of them down and feeding them their entrails.
I know stupid end users are part of the problem, but the responsibility originates with the scumbags writing the virus/trojan/worm. This is awful of me, but there really are times I wish someone would hang these bastards.
No one is advocating bringing back the fairness doctrine. This is a right-wing/libertarian talking point. Let it go, ffs.
The Senate Majority Leader and Speaker of the House are both on record as stating that it should be re-instated. So are powerful colleagues Diane Feinstein, John Kerry, Barney Frank, and Charles Schumer. Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico has stated in October that he plans to draft legislation to this effect in the new Congressional term.
Will they actually do it? Or succeed? Probably not. Barrack Obama has changed his mind and now opposes reinstating it, and after some polls showed that voters were overwhelmingly against it. And political pundits now say that Reid and Pelosi will probably try to block such measures from even coming to a vote... they don't want to give the GOP any ammunition on this.
So, we're probably safe. But to claim that no one wants to do it or that no one is advocating it is patently absurd.
There's been far too little scrutiny of a number of Obama appointees... he seems to be stacking the cabinet with nothing but extreme left-wingers every chance he gets.
So much for people who thought he was "honest" or "centrist."
The left is apoplectic right now because most of the truly powerful cabinet picks are centrists, or in some cases, even center right. Obama is getting the occasional doctranaire liberal for a post, but most of them are minor cabinet positions in the great scheme of things. Look at the lefty blogs and message boards, and they're quite pissed at Obama, and feel like he betrayed them. And maybe he did. Maybe he told them what they wanted to hear, and planned on being a centrist all along, as that's the likliest path to a second term. If he came in with both socialist-guns a'blazin, that would validate what Republicans were afraid of. He's been pretty smart in steering clear of that so far, to the anguish of many of his fervent supporters. Re-appointing Gates to SecDef was not only very smart, it felt like a dagger in the back of his anti-war supporters. Now he's even talking about delaying the closing of Gitmo.
People like Carol Browner may or may not be some kind of crypto-commie, but right now it looks like her "climate czar" position will be all sound and fury, with little substance. With the economy in the dumps, I just don't see Obama being stupid enough to let her or anyone else start shutting down factories and energy plants.
Nope, this does not serve as a proof that a deity is unnecessary, since the research is based on observations of life. In other words, even if this is successful, already existing life was a prerequisite.
Regardless, unless there's an angle I'm missing here, man creating true life from scratch... real, living creatures from nothing... wouldn't that disprove the existence of God according to scriptures? Because according to the ones I read, only the God of the Bible can create life. If some scientist actually managed to create real life, then it seems to me that would prove that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob doesn't exist.
Which is why I don't believe it'll ever happen. Any other Biblical scholars/philosophers, if you see a hole in this argument, by all means, throw it out there.
Yup, and we've been down this road before. 1992, in fact. We were in the middle of building the Superconducting Supercollider, and during the Presidential election, non-physicists lobbied to kill "big science" projects, basically so that the money could be re-routed to their projects.
That cost us the lead in international physics. CERN built their super collider, and never looked back. That also got us the "better, faster, cheaper" mantra at NASA in the 90's, which got us a string of space probe failures. I'm afraid we're now going to go in that same direction again.
We've been slouching towards a recession for awhile, the PS3 and XBOX 360 were horribly expensive for what they do, the PS2 still plays great games and has a large user base... plus, it's what? Under $130 dollars?
My son has been asking for one of the next gen consoles, and I just won't buy one right now. I see I'm not the only one taking a stand on the price issue. If we get anything new next year, likely it'll be a Wii so that the whole family can participate. Lots of other customers seem to be thinking this way too... doesn't the Wii now lead the next gens in sales and adoption?
In the meantime, in my continuing quest to teach my children the value of a buck, we'll keep on using the PS2 for now, squeezing out all of the "value" from it that we can. Is there a better time than now to teach kids the difference between necessary and unnecessary expenses?
" Jobs does not seem to be the type to hide it if he knew he had cancer."
Forgive me, I've been working long hours today, and perhaps I'm just dense, or perhaps my sarcasm/humor meter is dead at the moment, but isn't that precisely what he did the first time, Doc? Basically hide his illness for what, damn near a year? If you believe what you read with the "special diet" treatment, it also looks like he was kind of in denial about the seriousness of the whole thing too.
Being that he had pancreatic cancer, he's probably on a special diet. A fatty diet causes a pancreas much grief.
It didn't help him with his first bout of cancer. He's been on a "special diet" since his early twenties. He's a pescetarian.... usually, the only "meat" he'll eat is fish. Otherwise, he's a fruits, vegetables, and grains guy. It's not like he had unhealthy eating habits before. That's one of the reasons I think he's seriously sick, and this "hormone imbalance" stuff is just PR to delay the inevitable.
The latter is NOT a joke, but a prediction, given how "in bed" the UK government is with Microsoft.
Well, you are turning your Trident missile subs over to something called ""Windows for Submarines". We don't have much room to mock you here in the colonies though, because apparently our new class of aircraft carrier will use a version of W2K3 server as well.
Since they have nationalized, guaranteed health care for all citizens, I'm curious as to what you think is improper about it. They spend a great deal of money on the system. It seems to me that all nationalized health care systems are moving to this system where the amount of care a citizen gets is in direct proportion to how much it will cost, or how hard it will be to save the patient (born pre-mature, sickly old patient, etc). So it's not like the UK is alone in making these kinds of value judgments on their citizen-patients.
Not that I endorse that kind of thinking, or their nationalized health care systems... I most definitely don't. But I'm curious as to why you're a critic of their system.
The U.K. government might as well just announce that their subjects no longer have any rights at all. They have effectively all been removed in practice.
This is where a unified, written Constitution comes in handy. Yeah, those can be abused as well... the Right wing points to courts basically ignoring the 10th Amendment for decades, and the Left Wing points to a number of Bush wartime programs. But the fact is, it's still much easier to plead your case in courts when you have your Constitution on paper, in clear written form, instead of a collection of traditions and court cases.
Want to complain that the US government is doing illegal searches and seizures? At least you have a 4th Amendment to point to and say "you're violating this law". In a country with an un-written Constitution, even if there's a court precedent on the issue, without a written Constitution, the government can simply decree a thing, and it's so, until they're booted out of office.
It doesn't matter how efficient journalistic gum-shoeing becomes, because the end product will still be subject to a certain amount of spin by the publisher.
The only thing that will save "journalistic integrity" is the journalism field adhering to openly stated ethical principle and practices. No amount of technology is going to fix that problem.
"Freedom is the right to be left alone, and the obligation to leave others alone, unless there is voluntary association between all relevant parties."
Which, in my opinion, is a problem of the "free software movement" vs. the "open source" guys. The open source guys seem cool that people choose to use proprietary stuff if they wish. As long as you can use what you want, fine with them. The problem is with zealots claiming that there is no freedom unless everyone is using GNU-something. That's not freedom.
That's heresy in some quarters, but at this point, I don't think we can justify another trip to the moon, because we certainly aren't going to Mars anytime soon anyway, which was the whole point of going back to the Moon in the first place... to begin the process of setting up a Lunar base for future Mars exploration.
As expensive as it is, right now, the Shuttle is actually useful for some tasks that we're committed to... ISS support, for instance. The whole Orion program was basically just a re-do of Saturn/Apollo anyway. And we shouldn't do that if it's just out of nostalgia. It has to actually accomplish something significant.
During the 60's and the first race to the moon, NASA engineers were told that money wasn't a problem, time was. Unfortunately, money is very much a problem right now, and the "money is no object" days are long gone. Like anything else the federal government does, NASA's activities need a justification for the price. I simply don't think we can justify another moonshot right now.
Slashdot Mirror
"it almost sounds like they're saying that if you want to save billions of dollars you have to do .. some .. (no!) ... work!?!?"
But too many people think that switching to Linux, Apache, etc, simply means that you don't have to pay for software anymore. And then they're shocked at the expenses that are racked up on things like re-training, support contracts (have you seen what Red Hat charges?) custom software cost due to migration, etc.
I'm a fan of open source software, but I'm under no illusion that it's always the right solution. High end Unix systems like Solaris still have better administration tools and built in virtualization, which is one reason why Linux doesn't completely own the 'nix market. When Qualcomm was looking at a mass-switch to open source (and ditching their Solaris-based infrastructure), they were unhappy about the state of management tools, and estimated that switching to open source would cost them more money, not less.
Bottom line: analyze, determine your needs, and use the best solution for the job, whatever it is.
"The Digital Media branch was restructured into one publishing division along with the companyâ(TM)s Missing Manual group, Oâ(TM)Reilly Technology Exchange and its Head First series, Winge said."
Without actually seeing the company's financials, this could well just be standard streamlining for better efficiency, perhaps a proactive move before they're seriously hit. The story noted that they've been through much worse before, after they had to seriously trim their 300+ employees after the dot com bust.
Foreign makes have better fuel efficiency and more variety to choose from.
Not really. Japanese companies are putting more emphasis on hybrids (and have better developed hybrid-tech), and so they get a lot of press in that regard, with some models topping 50mpg in fuel economy. But most cars sold are still conventional gasoline models, and in that regard, Japanese and American models are broadly similar in terms of fuel economy. Compare for instance, two competitors in the sedan market, a 2009 V-6 Toyota Camry, and a 2009 V-6 Ford Taurus. The Camry gets 19/28 mpg, and the Taurus gets 18/28.
As for the "more variety"... where? The beauty of Japanese car company philosophy is that they offer few models. Instead of offering vehicles for every possible niche, the Japanese companies have a few, well-designed and well-built models. Part of the problem that American companies have(and especially GM) is that they'll sell 3 to 5 versions of the same car, sometimes with little difference in the sheet metal. American car companies take "platforming"... using a base car platform to make multiple models... to ridiculous extremes.
Now I'll be able to remember all of those awesome hallucinations I've been having!
Forget the hallucination stuff. Look at the spider web studies.
Various studies have been done giving drugs to spiders, and using their webs as evidence of the effects. My family doctor has a poster of these webs in his offices to show patients what these substances can do to you, and I think most people would be shocked at how extremely the spiders were affected by caffeine, which you can see in this photo.
My wife's mother has Alzheimer's, and she lives with us, so I'm acutely aware of what it does to people, and heavy doses of caffeine is definitely the lesser of two evils here. But it will still be nice to have a treatment that doesn't have it's own harsh side effects.
No UAV is capable of fighting a mannned air craft and winning.
On a one to one basis, maybe no. But what about a ten to one basis? UAVs are a lot cheaper, and a lot more expendable.
If you can occupy the enemy's airforce with some UAVs, while others bombard the airstrips, you win.
Well, considering that computers can think and react faster than any human (if properly programmed), it's very feasible that one day, UAV's will have the software and AI to absolutely dominate manned fighters. Not only that, but UAV's don't have the same limitations as human pilots do... think of things like G-forces, and the requirement to carry life-support equipment. Without things like oxygen tanks and ejections seats and cockpits, you can free up a lot of space... for fuel, or to simply make the aircraft lighter and smaller. You also don't have to worry about things like blacking out in high-G turns. All equipment has limitations, but today, the major impediment to performance is the human factor. Our current planes, not to mention our future ones, are limited more by the limitations of their pilots than by their physical structures.
There was a cheesy movie in the early 80's called Deal of the Century, a remarkably silly diatribe against arms dealing... but considering that it was made 25 years ago, it was prescient in one of its features: a UAV called the Peacemaker that could out-fight and out-fly any manned fighter, at one point literally flying circles around Gregory Hines in his state-of-the-art manned fighter. The Peacemaker is only defeated when Chevy Chase disables it by attacking its remote control pilot back at the airfield. The Peacemaker was smaller than manned fighters, and could be launched from the back of a trailer.
Considering the advance of lightweight materials, CPU's, and software, it's only a matter of time before we can build an unmanned fighter that, like the fictitious Peacemaker, can fly rings around F-22's.
lets see
1 $400 million dollar F-22
10 $40 million dollar F-35
or
Where are you getting those figures? Your larger point... UAV's are cheap compared to manned fighters... still stands, but your figures for the manned fighters are off significantly. Your F-22 price is waaay to high, and ironically, the price for the F-35 is too low. No one really knows for sure, as Lockheed Martin and the Air Force fudges their financial figures on this, but the most credible figures for an F-22 is between $120 and $140 million a copy (flyaway cost), and at around $87 million per copy for an F-35A.
Both are wayyy to expensive, but at least the F-22 will do what it promises... dominate air-to-air battles. The F-35 is beginning to look like an expensive pig in a poke. If UAV's can become more and more capable (and stay cheap), you're right in that the trend of replacing some manned missions with unmanned planes will only accelerate.
At 60+, Mantalban was still built like a god with big slabs of muscle.
OTH, the pudgier Shatner has built a wonderful successful career of fine roles since star trek.
So it depends on how you are scoring.
Shatner tends to be naturally pudgier, but he's still in good shape, especially for his age. James Spader remarked that Shatner would do more pushups on the set than he himself could do when he was younger.
Montalban kept in shape too; he just had better genes.
If you outlaw profanity, only outlaws will have profanity.
And I'll BUY BUY BUY tomorrow... do you seriously think anything has fundamentally changed in Apple's business? It still remains to be seen.
Well, yeah, something fundamental has changed. Steve Jobs won't be there. Look at Apple's history. That makes all the difference in the world.
When the guy does die... whenever that is... it's going to be earth shattering in the tech sector, and you'll never see anything like it in this business again. Jobs is the Elvis of the computing business. When he goes, you'll see people weeping on TV. Silly or not, that's the way it will be. And the endless speculation for months (and years) will be "Can Apple survive without Steve Jobs?".
... Apple now has the thinnest, lightest CEO on the market.
Of course they're morally bankrupt. However they also play an important role in the ecosystem.
What? How in the hell are malware writers an "important part of the ecosystem"?
This is the Internet, not Wild Kingdom. In nature, real virus infections do indeed serve a natural purpose. On a computer, it serves nothing but the ends of assholes and criminals. There's no justification... none whatsoever... for what these guys do. And don't give me that farcical security argument, either. They're not doing the world any favors by violating other people's computers.
"There seems to be a big stretch between a serial killer and some guy writing malicious code."
Not for me. Because everytime I have to clean up something they've unleashed on the world, I want to become a serial killer... by hunting every single one of them down and feeding them their entrails.
I know stupid end users are part of the problem, but the responsibility originates with the scumbags writing the virus/trojan/worm. This is awful of me, but there really are times I wish someone would hang these bastards.
No one is advocating bringing back the fairness doctrine. This is a right-wing/libertarian talking point. Let it go, ffs.
The Senate Majority Leader and Speaker of the House are both on record as stating that it should be re-instated. So are powerful colleagues Diane Feinstein, John Kerry, Barney Frank, and Charles Schumer. Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico has stated in October that he plans to draft legislation to this effect
in the new Congressional term.
Will they actually do it? Or succeed? Probably not. Barrack Obama has changed his mind and now opposes reinstating it, and after some polls showed that voters were overwhelmingly against it. And political pundits now say that Reid and Pelosi will probably try to block such measures from even coming to a vote... they don't want to give the GOP any ammunition on this.
So, we're probably safe. But to claim that no one wants to do it or that no one is advocating it is patently absurd.
There's been far too little scrutiny of a number of Obama appointees... he seems to be stacking the cabinet with nothing but extreme left-wingers every chance he gets.
So much for people who thought he was "honest" or "centrist."
The left is apoplectic right now because most of the truly powerful cabinet picks are centrists, or in some cases, even center right. Obama is getting the occasional doctranaire liberal for a post, but most of them are minor cabinet positions in the great scheme of things. Look at the lefty blogs and message boards, and they're quite pissed at Obama, and feel like he betrayed them. And maybe he did. Maybe he told them what they wanted to hear, and planned on being a centrist all along, as that's the likliest path to a second term. If he came in with both socialist-guns a'blazin, that would validate what Republicans were afraid of. He's been pretty smart in steering clear of that so far, to the anguish of many of his fervent supporters. Re-appointing Gates to SecDef was not only very smart, it felt like a dagger in the back of his anti-war supporters. Now he's even talking about delaying the closing of Gitmo.
People like Carol Browner may or may not be some kind of crypto-commie, but right now it looks like her "climate czar" position will be all sound and fury, with little substance. With the economy in the dumps, I just don't see Obama being stupid enough to let her or anyone else start shutting down factories and energy plants.
Nope, this does not serve as a proof that a deity is unnecessary, since the research is based on observations of life. In other words, even if this is successful, already existing life was a prerequisite.
Regardless, unless there's an angle I'm missing here, man creating true life from scratch... real, living creatures from nothing... wouldn't that disprove the existence of God according to scriptures? Because according to the ones I read, only the God of the Bible can create life. If some scientist actually managed to create real life, then it seems to me that would prove that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob doesn't exist.
Which is why I don't believe it'll ever happen. Any other Biblical scholars/philosophers, if you see a hole in this argument, by all means, throw it out there.
And fund our research instead.
Yup, and we've been down this road before. 1992, in fact. We were in the middle of building the Superconducting Supercollider, and during the Presidential election, non-physicists lobbied to kill "big science" projects, basically so that the money could be re-routed to their projects.
That cost us the lead in international physics. CERN built their super collider, and never looked back. That also got us the "better, faster, cheaper" mantra at NASA in the 90's, which got us a string of space probe failures. I'm afraid we're now going to go in that same direction again.
We've been slouching towards a recession for awhile, the PS3 and XBOX 360 were horribly expensive for what they do, the PS2 still plays great games and has a large user base... plus, it's what? Under $130 dollars?
My son has been asking for one of the next gen consoles, and I just won't buy one right now. I see I'm not the only one taking a stand on the price issue. If we get anything new next year, likely it'll be a Wii so that the whole family can participate. Lots of other customers seem to be thinking this way too... doesn't the Wii now lead the next gens in sales and adoption?
In the meantime, in my continuing quest to teach my children the value of a buck, we'll keep on using the PS2 for now, squeezing out all of the "value" from it that we can. Is there a better time than now to teach kids the difference between necessary and unnecessary expenses?
" Jobs does not seem to be the type to hide it if he knew he had cancer."
Forgive me, I've been working long hours today, and perhaps I'm just dense, or perhaps my sarcasm/humor meter is dead at the moment, but isn't that precisely what he did the first time, Doc? Basically hide his illness for what, damn near a year? If you believe what you read with the "special diet" treatment, it also looks like he was kind of in denial about the seriousness of the whole thing too.
Being that he had pancreatic cancer, he's probably on a special diet. A fatty diet causes a pancreas much grief.
It didn't help him with his first bout of cancer. He's been on a "special diet" since his early twenties. He's a pescetarian.... usually, the only "meat" he'll eat is fish. Otherwise, he's a fruits, vegetables, and grains guy. It's not like he had unhealthy eating habits before. That's one of the reasons I think he's seriously sick, and this "hormone imbalance" stuff is just PR to delay the inevitable.
The latter is NOT a joke, but a prediction, given how "in bed" the UK government is with Microsoft.
Well, you are turning your Trident missile subs over to something called ""Windows for Submarines". We don't have much room to mock you here in the colonies though, because apparently our new class of aircraft carrier will use a version of W2K3 server as well.
"The UK doesn't have proper health care"
Since they have nationalized, guaranteed health care for all citizens, I'm curious as to what you think is improper about it. They spend a great deal of money on the system. It seems to me that all nationalized health care systems are moving to this system where the amount of care a citizen gets is in direct proportion to how much it will cost, or how hard it will be to save the patient (born pre-mature, sickly old patient, etc). So it's not like the UK is alone in making these kinds of value judgments on their citizen-patients.
Not that I endorse that kind of thinking, or their nationalized health care systems... I most definitely don't. But I'm curious as to why you're a critic of their system.
The U.K. government might as well just announce that their subjects no longer have any rights at all. They have effectively all been removed in practice.
This is where a unified, written Constitution comes in handy. Yeah, those can be abused as well... the Right wing points to courts basically ignoring the 10th Amendment for decades, and the Left Wing points to a number of Bush wartime programs. But the fact is, it's still much easier to plead your case in courts when you have your Constitution on paper, in clear written form, instead of a collection of traditions and court cases.
Want to complain that the US government is doing illegal searches and seizures? At least you have a 4th Amendment to point to and say "you're violating this law". In a country with an un-written Constitution, even if there's a court precedent on the issue, without a written Constitution, the government can simply decree a thing, and it's so, until they're booted out of office.
It doesn't matter how efficient journalistic gum-shoeing becomes, because the end product will still be subject to a certain amount of spin by the publisher.
The only thing that will save "journalistic integrity" is the journalism field adhering to openly stated ethical principle and practices. No amount of technology is going to fix that problem.
"Freedom is the right to be left alone, and the obligation to leave others alone, unless there is voluntary association between all relevant parties."
Which, in my opinion, is a problem of the "free software movement" vs. the "open source" guys. The open source guys seem cool that people choose to use proprietary stuff if they wish. As long as you can use what you want, fine with them. The problem is with zealots claiming that there is no freedom unless everyone is using GNU-something. That's not freedom.
That's heresy in some quarters, but at this point, I don't think we can justify another trip to the moon, because we certainly aren't going to Mars anytime soon anyway, which was the whole point of going back to the Moon in the first place... to begin the process of setting up a Lunar base for future Mars exploration.
As expensive as it is, right now, the Shuttle is actually useful for some tasks that we're committed to... ISS support, for instance. The whole Orion program was basically just a re-do of Saturn/Apollo anyway. And we shouldn't do that if it's just out of nostalgia. It has to actually accomplish something significant.
During the 60's and the first race to the moon, NASA engineers were told that money wasn't a problem, time was. Unfortunately, money is very much a problem right now, and the "money is no object" days are long gone. Like anything else the federal government does, NASA's activities need a justification for the price. I simply don't think we can justify another moonshot right now.