Dunno... a Win32 Cocoa + Cygwin source + Darwin stuff sources + say, Fink? It might scare Apple clear the hell out of even wanting to do that (e.g. the possibility is there that someone might cobble together an OSX emulator that runs atop 'doze. Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me, and no it wouldn't make sense, but that prolly doesn't stop Apple from being afraid of such a possibility:)
/P (who is going to have a few nightmares of his own based off of that thought now...)
Not much different from FPS games, then...
on
Legend of the Syndicate
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Seriously - Clans have often formed and vanished before they'd even played their first match. Some have lasted as long as a specific MOD have, while others have spanned many a game, and continue to this day (though not as many as there once were, IIRC).
Just like MMPORG's, some groups were casual (they did it more as a social event than anything competitive or rather, 'striving to be the best'). Others have members that perhaps loathe each other, but at the same time they're such good players, they stick together for the success rate.
Drama and BS aside (which happens quite often), once in awhile you simply fall into a pile of friends you meet at a server and everyone just clicks. It doesn't matter what game it is, you simply hang out and enjoy the hell out of each other as much as you enjoy the game. (I'll happily spare the planet a long boring tale of how many an odd night was spent while the ex was at work, and I was playing on an old Quake2 Weapons Factory server. Suffice it to say that many of the players on that old TCA-owned box had come to recognize each other as friends. It was also kinda funny to have someone in spec reading poetry over chat, while we were killing each other repeatedly. Crap - too late. Sorry 'bout that).
IMHO, nothing really changed from the days when everyone was an LPB and everyone played something that didn't require much thought beyond (maybe) what the other team might be doing to steal your flag.
Apple can do that with XP right now, and simply continue to do so until XP's EOL. It's not like Vista is being adopted widespread, and --more importantly-- it isn't as if 3rd-party Windows' Developer mindshare is falling all over itself to take advantage of Vista-specific features.
That, and, umm, wouldn't such a move sort of alienate the Developer mindshare for OSX? I guess I don't grok the incentive to help nudge Win32/64 developers to download Xcode and go to town if they see that they can continue to use Visual Studio.NET and just hum along in building apps that compile once but run on both platforms.
Apple (or rather, the friendly folks who make Parallels) could use that as a stop-gap (a couple-years' long one) to get behind pushing WINE, CrossOver, Cedega, etc etc... if indeed that's where they're wanting to go.
I like the angle, it has appeal, but it seems more damaging in the long run than to simply work on increasing marketshare among customers to the point where Windows-only dev shops are forced to take a good hard look at coding for OSX for competitive edge and survival reasons.
Besides... if Apple really wanted to give incentives, they could/should push for building tools that make cross-compiling hella easier, with maybe an IDE that can replace VS.NET on Windows entirely, say, with a modified Xcode that --oh by the way-- has a handy and nearly automatic suite of tools to make compiling OSX apps easier for the dev who uses it.
I would add to that the widely recorded and widely available facts and evidence,still in overwhelming abundance, that the Holocaust left behind of its existence.
Otherwise, why was GP so easily labeled as "Troll"? While ID may seem silly, it is a perfect example of free thought in action. Note that the GP didn't say "logical thinking", or "scientific thinking"... but "free thinking".
As for holocaust denial itself, why not allow it? Mentioning it as a reason to ban other forms of thought is IMHO a red herring. Why? Because anyone foolish enough to deny the Holocaust can have all the arguments they care to scrounge so easily refuted, that it would be laughable to watch 'em try.
As a converse, what if it became mandatory curricula to ban any mention of homosexuality as anything beyond self-initiated voluntary behavior (or worse, the pre-1970's wrong-but-widely-accepted definition of it as a mental illness)? Suddenly people would be up in arms, no?
Free thinking is free thinking - be it good or bad.
If anything, a far more important --and sorely needed-- tweak to curricula would be to provide children with the mental tools necessary to sustain self-initiated critical and rational thought -- no matter what the subject. As a former public school teacher, I can say with certainty that I won't be holding my breath waiting for that to occur.:/
There's a difference between accidentally changing the climate on the earth as a side-effect of using fossil fuels, vs. intentionally changing the climate by dropping comets onto the planet.
That's a fair 'cop - but even if we do it intentionally, can we even be somewhat certain that it would even work at all, let alone in the time scale suggested by TFA? Seriously - no matter what side of the global warming debate you or I may sit on, I can say for certain that we (as humanity) haven't even grokked all of the factors that feed into changing our own climate. Who is to say that all this comet-slamming won't simply give us the Same Mars, but with more craters and a lot more dust (as posited by others in this thread... a lack of gravity and solar wind may well happily carry off all the stuff that we've been kicking up towards building an atmosphere for it)?
I think we're still 20-50 years away from just being able to get people to Mars and back, and 100 years away from being able to do things like move comets and asteroids and direct them where we want them. And at that point, our fossil-fuel fueled lifestyles may have been scaled back so far that any kind of industrial activities in space become politically and economically impossible.
The former part of this I (only partially) agree with - we're going to need a lot more in the way of technological (and literal) horsepower to get things like comets and asteroids moving at will or whim. We could however get people to Mars and back using off-the-shelf technology. Problem with that is, the risk factor is nearly stratospheric if you do that with current tech. I figure within 15-20 years max we could bring the risk factor to that of Apollo, if we actually work at it.
I do have a question, though: Why would a fossil-fuel-free lifestyle suddenly make space colonization a political risk?
Also, why can we not use space itself (e.g. Solar) as a means to end fossil fuel dependence? I don't see any Earth-bound tech or energy source as being the means to satisfy energy consumption demands now, let alone 50-100 years hence, so unless we all reverted to a pre-industrial society, we'd be kinda screwed w/o a large and long-term source of energy... there happens to be one nearby; we just have to get ourselves above the atmosphere to use it effectively.
There is also population; it isn't shrinking, and won't any time soon. What better place for a crowded person to find some space... than Space?
We don't even know 100% for certain (political and environ-assertions aside) if we're capable of modifying temperatures on Earth by a couple of degrees over 200+ years of industrialization... and this guy suggests that we can jack up an atmosphere 100x thinner, w/ 100x the CO2, by at least 100+ degrees Fahrenheit, in less than 100 years?
We're not even counting the gravity well penalties of getting back and forth that'll be present, at least within the next 100 years.
Personally, I prefer what Parent is suggesting - let's concentrate (for now) on putting large orbital colonies in nearby space within this century, plus a couple on the moon (where the gravity isn't so much of a hassle).
We can explore Mars in the interim, and once we manage to overcome gravity easily enough later, then we can start parking folks there in large numbers.
there was little to no footage of the circumstances leading up to the famous footage
That there was no videoed justification for their actions doesn't mean that there is any possible justification. I don't see how anybody could defend their actions. There is nothing he could have done that would warrant such a beating. He could have just killed a cop next to them and still they shouldn't have acted how they did. The job of the police is not to punish offenders which is what they appeared to be doing.
Dunno - ever try to subdue some idiot buddy cruising on PCP? It ain't fun, and no matter how gentle you try to be, fists will be thrown, and adrenaline will soar. Anyone who tells me that they could weather the treatment and still not retaliate a little -all while trying to subdue someone in that condition- is either: a) Mother Teresa, or b) simply bullshitting. Sucks being human sometimes.
How does 24/7 unfiltered solar power, in an environment where you can build collectors the size of Delaware sound?
How about enough helium-3 to power even the world's worst inefficient fusion technology uninterrupted for a couple of tens of thousands of years?
How about some energy sources that nobody can conceivably ever control (thus removing the whole oil kleptocracy of OPEC's membership?)
No? Because solar power alone could do the trick once sufficient manufacturing facilities are sent aloft, and the solution would be near-permanent.
, stem cell research
Why not medical research beyond that, all of which can lead to advances just as great, if not greater (and the bonus is, we can take all the stem cells we want along for the ride)?
water acquisition etc.
Ever try to get/conserve water on a waterless body such as the Moon? How about acquiring water from Mars, Asteroids, Comets, etc? One would suspect that the technology gained there could easy translate, no?
We should secure the "future of humanity" by addressing our terrestrial problems, as opposed to solving extraterrestrial problems that will hopefully yield a technological trickle down. No doubt, I like Temperpedic pillows and freeze dried ice cream, but I'd also love for our country to never to funnel money into crazy nations chocked with bubbling crude.
So why can't we do both at the same time, at least with the problems you've presented so far?
Sucks that short-term politics and pet pork takes precedence over the future of humanity itself.
What are you smoking? Do you seriously believe that "humanity" has any hope of colonizing another planet to "save" itself?
One fine day, we're going to have to get a substantial portion of our population off of this rock. Whether the reason is due to the sun swelling up in its death throes, because some ginormous asteroid is about to fall onto the Earth and go 'splat... or because unfiltered solar power and Helium-3(maybe) are the only long-term means to save humanity from a world bereft of any large and usable source of energy with which to continue civilization itself.
The reasons are numerous; all of them are not only possible, but are highly probable (and at least one is certain) over a given distance of time.
I'm not saying we should all jump tomorrow morning at 9am, but the facts remain that we either learn to leave our crib, or we die in it. Personally, I prefer the sooner-rather-than-later approach to discovering how to get us up there, so that by the time something ugly does come along, there will be enough humans off-planet to keep the species going nicely. We cannot do that if we simply sit here with thumb in arse and continually shovel the work off to the next generation.
It's been half a century since we first put people in space, and now we're still "just" putting a select elite few up into space to screw around with silly zero-g experiments with little commercial or scientific value.
Kinda sucks, doesn't it? Thank politics, I suppose (for example, Mssr. Carter literally forced NASA to scrap all of the tech that went into Saturn V, right down to the blueprints... aside from a few museum pieces, we currently have nothing from that part of Apollo).
...is absolutely batshit insane. It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to build protected self-contained habitats on earth.
See above; some problems can't be solved by simply building a bubble someone deep inside the Earth.
For those of us old enough to remember Rodney King in the early '90s, you may have noticed that there was little to no footage of the circumstances leading up to the famous footage, which clouded the issue greatly. It didn't matter that the cops involved all reported that King was all hopped-over on a hallucinogen, and was actively fighting the arrest up until the portion that was filmed.
The results of the whole brouhaha led to some rather huge riots, economic damage, bloodshed.
Without context being filmed, and with TV news reporters on a tight time line (spurred on by a sense of ratings), this will likely compel the filmers and the reporters to leave out the context in order to grab the sensational footage. The events chain is pretty ugly, and mostly predictable:
Witness films event. Witness sells the sensational parts of it for $$$ to local news station. News station trims it down further to the most serious ass-whooping in order to grab more eyeballs. Everyone watching will gloss over the cops' side of the story (if it's even presented), and think "those fscking dirty-assed cops! They should pay!" Popular opinion of local PD sinks just that much lower, fueled by only half the story... unpleasant relations increase as does fear and loathing of the local PD...
While I do like the concept, I fear the implementation.
...we'd all just happily ignore apple and their irrelevant computers...
Well, OSX is BSD-based, and certain quarters have been harping on about BSD's supposed Netcraft-confirmed death for years...;)
...while feeling superior because our portable music players sound better, look cooler, and do more for less than an ipod.
Meh - I have a lot of Apple products because they do what their makers say they do, have nice uptimes, don't fall over and go 'splat', don't require an OS reload periodically (I've been running OSX 10.3 on my home box ever since 2004 or so), and they don't get turned into some script kiddie's lil' spam-bot at the drop of an exploit. While some/most of this may/may not change over time, it's been rather great in the meanwhile.
Kind of why I like using Linux and *BSD both personally and professionally, come to think of it...
How many humans do you think even a large meteor strike can kill off? Remember, a large percentage of mammals, reptiles, insects, and aquatic life survived the K-T extinction event, and they had ZERO access to technology.
IIRC, no land creature of over a couple of kilos managed it (though many oceanic creatures of that size did).
The estimated size of the K-T asteroid was roughly 10 km wide. That's considered 'still fairly small' as far as Near Earth Objects go.
When the cost to get payload to the surface of Mars is on the order of several to many tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram, and the cost to get it back all the higher, you're not looking at "the future of humanity". You're looking at a boondoggle that's ripping off actual science programs -- not to mention, money that could instead be put into research to reduce launch costs.
Question - how much did it cost to fund Christopher Columbus' initial 1492 expedition? (Considering that it required royal patronage... I'm thinking it was nearly the same order of expense). In retrospect, that cost was paid back and then profited by history (consider the combined GDP's and natural resources found in Canada, the US, Mexico, Central and South America...)
At this day in age, a manned Mars Mission is a "feel-good trip". It has nothing at all to do with the future of humanity. In 1495, Spain felt pretty ripped off by the lack of all that promised gold, got no shorter commercial route to China, found only indigenous 'heathens' that got in the way of colonization... all they got out of it was a bit of gold and a nasty societal nicotine habit (oh - and Syphilis). Yet for some odd reason it all turned out to be a good thing for human history.
Why should Mars (and the rest of the Solar System for that matter) be any different? We can't simply live here forever, y'know.
Sucks that short-term politics and pet pork takes precedence over the future of humanity itself. (disclosure: I don't give a frig WHICH party is at fault - this simply sucks):/
If NASA is that busy, then why not offload some of its activities to the private sector fer cryin' out loud?
...they'll make the same changes that they did when ordered to remove IE from Windows 95?
( "what? We did it because we were told to! Not our fault your desktop is all broke now!" )
Okay, so prolly not like that. But seriously; they could've avoided the bad PR by just responding to a quiet request in the first place, instead of being pushed into it... as usual.
I realize there's prolly some sort of 'we only do it when we have to' mentality prevalent in Redmond, but when is someone there going to realize that maybe, you know, they can take a chance and do The Right Thing - when the asking is being done quietly and politely, and not finally and grudgingly do it later when there's a big fat lawsuit or four hanging over their heads?
I know, I know... but I still have some small bit of dreamer left in me.
While the GPL is the GPL is the GPL, I wonder if this will lead to any kind of animosity between, say, RH and SuSE?
Even worse (serious question), will this lead to less interoperability between those who refuse MSFT and those who sold their souls (IMHO)? Sure, YaST vs. YUM type stuff will always be present, but what of deeper items, say things that would otherwise wind up being incorporated in kernel.org? I wish I had a better way to articulate the question ATM, but the jist is that maybe the whole 'divide and conquer' plan may work more than most folks think it will, in that either by necessity of 'patent deals' or by necessity of what-have-you, the coders @ Novell won't or can't spread their improvements to RH and vice-versa.
IMHO, that is a greater danger than any lawsuit blustering and posturing that has been coming out of Redmond.
Bullshit. Take it out of the pay of Every city and school official that is making 6 figures or more. That's the price you pay to be the rich man sucking on the government teat. Starting with the mayor and city manager, take it out of their salaries.
*shrug* - works for me... whatever it takes to get 'em out of their own mess. OTOH, somebody appointed those cretins to office, and they in turn were elected...
Even a cursory reading of the Founders' beliefs and thoughts on the US Federal Government was that states are individual entities, experiments in diversity of regional and local government (yes, right down to their budgets - otherwise, states and locales would've never been allowed to levy taxes, and everything would've been disbursed from Federal revenues all this time). The common bond was that they accepted and abided by a common set of rules (e.g. the US Constitution), and pitched in together on Federal matters (Defense, taxation/tarriffs, infrastructure, etc), each according to their ability and population.
Large-scale Disasters (Katrina), local debts incurred from assisting in (or cleaning up after) national emergencies (e.g. 9/11 or Oklahoma City), or debts incurred by the actions or mishaps any federal agency or branch makes in a locale (say, a fighter jet plowing into something accidentally)? No problem - totally cool with the Feds helping out in the money department.
Bailing out the bad decisions made by a pack of politicians at some distant city council? Nope: they dug their hole - they can float bonds or raise property taxes to un-dig themselves out of it. If I have no vote or say in how that California county spends its discretionary budget, why should I (some random taxpayer up in Oregon) be liable for their mistakes?
After all, if you or I do something dumb and run up a mountain of unpayable debt, the Feds certainly wouldn't be breaking their necks to bail us out... so why should cities and/or counties have such a privilege?
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Dunno... a Win32 Cocoa + Cygwin source + Darwin stuff sources + say, Fink? It might scare Apple clear the hell out of even wanting to do that (e.g. the possibility is there that someone might cobble together an OSX emulator that runs atop 'doze. Why anyone would want to do that is beyond me, and no it wouldn't make sense, but that prolly doesn't stop Apple from being afraid of such a possibility :)
Just like MMPORG's, some groups were casual (they did it more as a social event than anything competitive or rather, 'striving to be the best'). Others have members that perhaps loathe each other, but at the same time they're such good players, they stick together for the success rate.
Drama and BS aside (which happens quite often), once in awhile you simply fall into a pile of friends you meet at a server and everyone just clicks. It doesn't matter what game it is, you simply hang out and enjoy the hell out of each other as much as you enjoy the game. (I'll happily spare the planet a long boring tale of how many an odd night was spent while the ex was at work, and I was playing on an old Quake2 Weapons Factory server. Suffice it to say that many of the players on that old TCA-owned box had come to recognize each other as friends. It was also kinda funny to have someone in spec reading poetry over chat, while we were killing each other repeatedly. Crap - too late. Sorry 'bout that).
IMHO, nothing really changed from the days when everyone was an LPB and everyone played something that didn't require much thought beyond (maybe) what the other team might be doing to steal your flag.
That, and, umm, wouldn't such a move sort of alienate the Developer mindshare for OSX? I guess I don't grok the incentive to help nudge Win32/64 developers to download Xcode and go to town if they see that they can continue to use Visual Studio .NET and just hum along in building apps that compile once but run on both platforms.
Apple (or rather, the friendly folks who make Parallels) could use that as a stop-gap (a couple-years' long one) to get behind pushing WINE, CrossOver, Cedega, etc etc... if indeed that's where they're wanting to go.
I like the angle, it has appeal, but it seems more damaging in the long run than to simply work on increasing marketshare among customers to the point where Windows-only dev shops are forced to take a good hard look at coding for OSX for competitive edge and survival reasons.
Besides... if Apple really wanted to give incentives, they could/should push for building tools that make cross-compiling hella easier, with maybe an IDE that can replace VS .NET on Windows entirely, say, with a modified Xcode that --oh by the way-- has a handy and nearly automatic suite of tools to make compiling OSX apps easier for the dev who uses it.
Otherwise, why was GP so easily labeled as "Troll"? While ID may seem silly, it is a perfect example of free thought in action. Note that the GP didn't say "logical thinking", or "scientific thinking"... but "free thinking".
As for holocaust denial itself, why not allow it? Mentioning it as a reason to ban other forms of thought is IMHO a red herring. Why? Because anyone foolish enough to deny the Holocaust can have all the arguments they care to scrounge so easily refuted, that it would be laughable to watch 'em try.
As a converse, what if it became mandatory curricula to ban any mention of homosexuality as anything beyond self-initiated voluntary behavior (or worse, the pre-1970's wrong-but-widely-accepted definition of it as a mental illness)? Suddenly people would be up in arms, no?
Free thinking is free thinking - be it good or bad.
If anything, a far more important --and sorely needed-- tweak to curricula would be to provide children with the mental tools necessary to sustain self-initiated critical and rational thought -- no matter what the subject. As a former public school teacher, I can say with certainty that I won't be holding my breath waiting for that to occur. :/
That's a fair 'cop - but even if we do it intentionally, can we even be somewhat certain that it would even work at all, let alone in the time scale suggested by TFA? Seriously - no matter what side of the global warming debate you or I may sit on, I can say for certain that we (as humanity) haven't even grokked all of the factors that feed into changing our own climate. Who is to say that all this comet-slamming won't simply give us the Same Mars, but with more craters and a lot more dust (as posited by others in this thread... a lack of gravity and solar wind may well happily carry off all the stuff that we've been kicking up towards building an atmosphere for it)?
I think we're still 20-50 years away from just being able to get people to Mars and back, and 100 years away from being able to do things like move comets and asteroids and direct them where we want them. And at that point, our fossil-fuel fueled lifestyles may have been scaled back so far that any kind of industrial activities in space become politically and economically impossible.The former part of this I (only partially) agree with - we're going to need a lot more in the way of technological (and literal) horsepower to get things like comets and asteroids moving at will or whim. We could however get people to Mars and back using off-the-shelf technology. Problem with that is, the risk factor is nearly stratospheric if you do that with current tech. I figure within 15-20 years max we could bring the risk factor to that of Apollo, if we actually work at it.
I do have a question, though: Why would a fossil-fuel-free lifestyle suddenly make space colonization a political risk?
Also, why can we not use space itself (e.g. Solar) as a means to end fossil fuel dependence? I don't see any Earth-bound tech or energy source as being the means to satisfy energy consumption demands now, let alone 50-100 years hence, so unless we all reverted to a pre-industrial society, we'd be kinda screwed w/o a large and long-term source of energy... there happens to be one nearby; we just have to get ourselves above the atmosphere to use it effectively.
There is also population; it isn't shrinking, and won't any time soon. What better place for a crowded person to find some space... than Space?
We're not even counting the gravity well penalties of getting back and forth that'll be present, at least within the next 100 years.
Personally, I prefer what Parent is suggesting - let's concentrate (for now) on putting large orbital colonies in nearby space within this century, plus a couple on the moon (where the gravity isn't so much of a hassle).
We can explore Mars in the interim, and once we manage to overcome gravity easily enough later, then we can start parking folks there in large numbers.
True, but packing the SDK as a downloadable option w/ Xcode would be a hella nice gesture...
That there was no videoed justification for their actions doesn't mean that there is any possible justification. I don't see how anybody could defend their actions. There is nothing he could have done that would warrant such a beating. He could have just killed a cop next to them and still they shouldn't have acted how they did. The job of the police is not to punish offenders which is what they appeared to be doing.
Dunno - ever try to subdue some idiot buddy cruising on PCP? It ain't fun, and no matter how gentle you try to be, fists will be thrown, and adrenaline will soar. Anyone who tells me that they could weather the treatment and still not retaliate a little -all while trying to subdue someone in that condition- is either: a) Mother Teresa, or b) simply bullshitting. Sucks being human sometimes.
How does 24/7 unfiltered solar power, in an environment where you can build collectors the size of Delaware sound?
How about enough helium-3 to power even the world's worst inefficient fusion technology uninterrupted for a couple of tens of thousands of years?
How about some energy sources that nobody can conceivably ever control (thus removing the whole oil kleptocracy of OPEC's membership?)
No? Because solar power alone could do the trick once sufficient manufacturing facilities are sent aloft, and the solution would be near-permanent.
, stem cell researchWhy not medical research beyond that, all of which can lead to advances just as great, if not greater (and the bonus is, we can take all the stem cells we want along for the ride)?
water acquisition etc.Ever try to get/conserve water on a waterless body such as the Moon? How about acquiring water from Mars, Asteroids, Comets, etc? One would suspect that the technology gained there could easy translate, no?
We should secure the "future of humanity" by addressing our terrestrial problems, as opposed to solving extraterrestrial problems that will hopefully yield a technological trickle down. No doubt, I like Temperpedic pillows and freeze dried ice cream, but I'd also love for our country to never to funnel money into crazy nations chocked with bubbling crude.So why can't we do both at the same time, at least with the problems you've presented so far?
Sucks that short-term politics and pet pork takes precedence over the future of humanity itself.
What are you smoking? Do you seriously believe that "humanity" has any hope of colonizing another planet to "save" itself?
One fine day, we're going to have to get a substantial portion of our population off of this rock. Whether the reason is due to the sun swelling up in its death throes, because some ginormous asteroid is about to fall onto the Earth and go 'splat... or because unfiltered solar power and Helium-3(maybe) are the only long-term means to save humanity from a world bereft of any large and usable source of energy with which to continue civilization itself.
The reasons are numerous; all of them are not only possible, but are highly probable (and at least one is certain) over a given distance of time.
I'm not saying we should all jump tomorrow morning at 9am, but the facts remain that we either learn to leave our crib, or we die in it. Personally, I prefer the sooner-rather-than-later approach to discovering how to get us up there, so that by the time something ugly does come along, there will be enough humans off-planet to keep the species going nicely. We cannot do that if we simply sit here with thumb in arse and continually shovel the work off to the next generation.
It's been half a century since we first put people in space, and now we're still "just" putting a select elite few up into space to screw around with silly zero-g experiments with little commercial or scientific value.Kinda sucks, doesn't it? Thank politics, I suppose (for example, Mssr. Carter literally forced NASA to scrap all of the tech that went into Saturn V, right down to the blueprints... aside from a few museum pieces, we currently have nothing from that part of Apollo).
...is absolutely batshit insane. It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper and easier to build protected self-contained habitats on earth.See above; some problems can't be solved by simply building a bubble someone deep inside the Earth.
The results of the whole brouhaha led to some rather huge riots, economic damage, bloodshed.
Without context being filmed, and with TV news reporters on a tight time line (spurred on by a sense of ratings), this will likely compel the filmers and the reporters to leave out the context in order to grab the sensational footage. The events chain is pretty ugly, and mostly predictable:
Witness films event. Witness sells the sensational parts of it for $$$ to local news station. News station trims it down further to the most serious ass-whooping in order to grab more eyeballs. Everyone watching will gloss over the cops' side of the story (if it's even presented), and think "those fscking dirty-assed cops! They should pay!" Popular opinion of local PD sinks just that much lower, fueled by only half the story... unpleasant relations increase as does fear and loathing of the local PD...
While I do like the concept, I fear the implementation.
...we'd all just happily ignore apple and their irrelevant computers...Well, OSX is BSD-based, and certain quarters have been harping on about BSD's supposed Netcraft-confirmed death for years... ;)
...while feeling superior because our portable music players sound better, look cooler, and do more for less than an ipod.Meh - I have a lot of Apple products because they do what their makers say they do, have nice uptimes, don't fall over and go 'splat', don't require an OS reload periodically (I've been running OSX 10.3 on my home box ever since 2004 or so), and they don't get turned into some script kiddie's lil' spam-bot at the drop of an exploit. While some/most of this may/may not change over time, it's been rather great in the meanwhile.
Kind of why I like using Linux and *BSD both personally and professionally, come to think of it...
1) it ain't SciFi 2) it is based in solid physics and economics.
I agree that we should focus on the steps necessary to get to Mars, but it appears that Congress is out to cut the funding from even that.
IIRC, no land creature of over a couple of kilos managed it (though many oceanic creatures of that size did).
The estimated size of the K-T asteroid was roughly 10 km wide. That's considered 'still fairly small' as far as Near Earth Objects go.
When the cost to get payload to the surface of Mars is on the order of several to many tens of thousands of dollars per kilogram, and the cost to get it back all the higher, you're not looking at "the future of humanity". You're looking at a boondoggle that's ripping off actual science programs -- not to mention, money that could instead be put into research to reduce launch costs.
Question - how much did it cost to fund Christopher Columbus' initial 1492 expedition? (Considering that it required royal patronage... I'm thinking it was nearly the same order of expense). In retrospect, that cost was paid back and then profited by history (consider the combined GDP's and natural resources found in Canada, the US, Mexico, Central and South America...)
At this day in age, a manned Mars Mission is a "feel-good trip". It has nothing at all to do with the future of humanity.In 1495, Spain felt pretty ripped off by the lack of all that promised gold, got no shorter commercial route to China, found only indigenous 'heathens' that got in the way of colonization... all they got out of it was a bit of gold and a nasty societal nicotine habit (oh - and Syphilis). Yet for some odd reason it all turned out to be a good thing for human history.
Why should Mars (and the rest of the Solar System for that matter) be any different? We can't simply live here forever, y'know.
If NASA is that busy, then why not offload some of its activities to the private sector fer cryin' out loud?
It'll be just as effective, no? (or did these yahoos forget about those little A/V out ports on the back of each player?)
(as /me ducks and runzlakhell...)
( "what? We did it because we were told to! Not our fault your desktop is all broke now!" )
Okay, so prolly not like that. But seriously; they could've avoided the bad PR by just responding to a quiet request in the first place, instead of being pushed into it... as usual.
I realize there's prolly some sort of 'we only do it when we have to' mentality prevalent in Redmond, but when is someone there going to realize that maybe, you know, they can take a chance and do The Right Thing - when the asking is being done quietly and politely, and not finally and grudgingly do it later when there's a big fat lawsuit or four hanging over their heads?
I know, I know... but I still have some small bit of dreamer left in me.
Even worse (serious question), will this lead to less interoperability between those who refuse MSFT and those who sold their souls (IMHO)? Sure, YaST vs. YUM type stuff will always be present, but what of deeper items, say things that would otherwise wind up being incorporated in kernel.org? I wish I had a better way to articulate the question ATM, but the jist is that maybe the whole 'divide and conquer' plan may work more than most folks think it will, in that either by necessity of 'patent deals' or by necessity of what-have-you, the coders @ Novell won't or can't spread their improvements to RH and vice-versa.
IMHO, that is a greater danger than any lawsuit blustering and posturing that has been coming out of Redmond.
Well, they're normally called buffer overflows but yeah... dunno how it fit in this one...
*shrug* - works for me... whatever it takes to get 'em out of their own mess. OTOH, somebody appointed those cretins to office, and they in turn were elected...
Just a thought.
Even a cursory reading of the Founders' beliefs and thoughts on the US Federal Government was that states are individual entities, experiments in diversity of regional and local government (yes, right down to their budgets - otherwise, states and locales would've never been allowed to levy taxes, and everything would've been disbursed from Federal revenues all this time). The common bond was that they accepted and abided by a common set of rules (e.g. the US Constitution), and pitched in together on Federal matters (Defense, taxation/tarriffs, infrastructure, etc), each according to their ability and population.
Large-scale Disasters (Katrina), local debts incurred from assisting in (or cleaning up after) national emergencies (e.g. 9/11 or Oklahoma City), or debts incurred by the actions or mishaps any federal agency or branch makes in a locale (say, a fighter jet plowing into something accidentally)? No problem - totally cool with the Feds helping out in the money department.
Bailing out the bad decisions made by a pack of politicians at some distant city council? Nope: they dug their hole - they can float bonds or raise property taxes to un-dig themselves out of it. If I have no vote or say in how that California county spends its discretionary budget, why should I (some random taxpayer up in Oregon) be liable for their mistakes?
After all, if you or I do something dumb and run up a mountain of unpayable debt, the Feds certainly wouldn't be breaking their necks to bail us out... so why should cities and/or counties have such a privilege?