From the MSNBC story: Microsoft and most of the class action attorneys in the case are in favor of a deal that would require the company to spend more than $1 billion to put software and computers into some of the poorest U.S. schools.
Don't the lawyers get paid a percentage of the value of the settlement? The bigger the paper value of the settlement, the bigger their new boat... or am I just a cynic?
Microsoft will donate new servers to slashdot... of course, the slash code will have to be ported over to visual basic... slashdot's url will change to slashdot.msn.com... and instead of submitters using psuedonyms like EccentricAnomaly, passport will allow them to use their credit card numbers...
Seems like the GPS could be used as an alternate controller for Quake.... Then head on out to your neighborhood salt flats... Actually, you could do this now with a GPS and a laptop:)
Here are some "cool" animations where you can see the ice caps melting. Also, here's a JPL press release which is a little more level headed than the news coverage.
I *never* said space-based anywhere in my post. Your comments are well thought out and I wouldn't mod you down for that, but I certainly wouldn't mod you up because you didn't read the article.
Apologies for the brain fart in reading your post. I did read the article though.
The anti-satellite laser is on the *ground* somewhere in the desert, probably the testing grounds near White Sands National Monument, in the gypsum fields. It's less of a "laser" and more of an "electromagnetic radiation emmitter" and it fries the satellites less by heat and more by a super-concentrated burst of radio energy.
It's less of a laser because it's not a laser but a microwave weapon... possibly a maser but not necessarily a maser... These things can also take down aircraft and disable automobiles.
Re:This raises some frightening questions
on
Battlefield Lasers
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· Score: 2
So what's to keep the defense dept. from using these things for assassinations, or ground warfare?
Simple... they don't work that well. The best they can do is heat up thin metal rocket skins and make them burst because of the pressurized fuel inside... most rockets are so weak structurally that they would collapse if you drained the fuel out of them.
These lasers are too weak to do much damage. The worst they can do to people is use laser light to blind people... which is pretty bad, but it ain't no death star.
The U.S. also has an anti-satellite laser weapon that has been tested and confirmed to work by overloading the circuits
This sounds bogus.
1) These lasers are huge. They are talking about systems that are deployed on tractor trailers or on modified 747s. Why would you launch this into space?
2) These lasers use up their chemical lasing medium with each shot. Why would you launch a space-based system that you have to reload?
3) A big problem with these systems is scattering by the atmosphere and they require advanced adaptive optics to counteract turbulence. They're having enough trouble getting this to work with ground and air based systems... why would they go with a space based system when you then have to contend with going through several layers of the atmosphere as well as really high orbital velocities.
4) You would need a constellation of many, many satellites to always be overhead a given conflict zone.. unless you put these things way up in geosynchronous orbit which sounds pretty crazy to me.
Space-based lasers might be useful to interdict ICBMS (and even that is dubious)... you certainly don't want a space based system to interdict theater ballistic missiles.
Here's a quote: "Linux applications rarely employ graphics, and most of them are already linear, just like the mode (speech or braille) that is our Karma. All other things being equal, Linux is the best operating system for a blind user."
The author makes several interesting points like 'ed' is better than 'vi' or 'emacs' and mentions some interesting tweaks to basic utilities such as 'ls' to make it more usable for the blind.
So we now have two choices: a) give away our identities to a monopoly and depend on them to do even basic banking or b) give away our identities to a cartel (er... uh... alliance) and depend on them... Why can't we each just have control of our own identity instead of depending on.NET or some clone of.NET?
I did some tutoring for blind students in college and UNIX systems were much easier to use than Windows for blind students just because you could do everything without a GUI. The braille displays or auditory displays work best with text and with UNIX type systems you can do pretty much anything at the command prompt and text only... even web browsing.
Deep, Deep, down in the sprawling dungeons below Redmond, Washington:
"Yes, Yes, my precious"
"Uhhh... Mr. Gates?"
"WHAT are you doing here!"
"Uhhh... sir, I was sent my the legal team... ya know, Nazgul, Balrog, & son... it seems a court ruling in California put a crimp in our plan to rid oursleves of that vile website, slash-"
"DON'T say that word!!...well, I guess we need to go to plan B... Send forth the flying monkeys!! Muhahaha!!"
"Uh, sir.. we don't have any flying monkeys... all we have is Dancing Monkey boy..."
"Crap... forget this, I'm just going to stay down here and play with my invisibility ring"
If I were Google, I would just keep a table mapping IP addresses to voting records. So your second vote for a page merely replaces your first vote, instead of counting as another vote. Would that be enough?
There's a way to get by googly IP logging: Hey kids! Free porn, just click here first to rank our site as the best purple sneaker site on the web. -or- a spammer could write some javascript that does someone's voting for them everytime they visit the spammer's web page or ran a spammer-sponsored plug-in.
But what about this... google takes the highest and lowest moderated sites and has one of their employees look at it and their guy does the actual ranking. This way they can maximize the effectiveness of their employees in spam-hunting.
CNN has Steve Job's opinion on the Microsoft deal. He says, "We're baffled that a settlement imposed against Microsoft for breaking the law should allow, even encourage, them to unfairly make inroads into education -- one of the few markets left where they don't have monopoly power"
I guess anyone could have guessed this would be Apple's view of the settlement.
Where do we get the electricty to get the hydrogen to seperate from the water?
We still are getting the majority of our power from fossil fuel burning and until more earth friendly sources of power are used, this is not a well thought out answer.
Computers are electrically powered anyway.. the same electricity used to charge a battery can be used to generate hydrogen fuel from water... I think this process uses less electricity than charging a battery so there is a net savings in electricity.
C|Net seems to think the security problem is with Google:
"The guys at Google thought, 'How cool that we can offer this to our users' without thinking about security. If you want to do this right, you have to think about security from the beginning and have a very solid approach to software design and software development that is based on what bad guys might possibly do to cause your program grief."
This is crazy. Google isn't doing anything wrong. The problem is with the idiots who don't spend five minutes to check that their secret data is really hidden.
This is like blaming a dog owner when his dog bites a burgler... er uh, nevermind.
Melvin Kelvin, descendant of the esteemed Lord Kelvin credited with the discovery of absolute zero has begun suing world thermometer makers for patent infringement...
It's just as silly, evil, and wrong to patent algorithms as to patent math or basic science discoveries... what if Leibnitz and Newton patented calculus? Boy, I'd love to have a patent on pi...
Patents don't protect inventors anyway... just look at how RCA held up Philo Farnsworth's Television patent in court until it expired and he couldn't get any money for it.
Thanks to the FBI, a whole new market is now being pushed into exploring the world of alternative operating systems.
The problem here is that terrorists need to run Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in order to be compatible with all of the other various terrorist organizations. I mean, how embarrassing would it be to have your terrorist plot foiled because a cell can't open your powerpoint presentation detailing the operation.
Now that Windows XP has instant messaging built in, the productivity of your average terrorist will shoot way up as he will be able to get timely responses from his colleagues to time-critical questions about chemical and biological agents... Again, who wants an embarrassing mishap from messing up a chemical weapons mixture just because the response time from an email just isn't fast enough.
Of course, these advantages may be eroded by the need to keep various licenses up to date with Microsoft. As soon as you fill in your organization as "Al Queda" or "Hamas" when you register Widows..bam, the FBI has got you right there.
I deal with lots of legacy code in FORTRAN that is as much as 30 years old... very robust, very well tested code that would take years to rewrite in another language. I also use newer stuff written in C/C++, Matlab, Perl, Python, and some other languages developed in house.
Being able to tie together different languages saves a lot of development time. It's very useful when I just need to solve a problem and move on... which is what I do 99% of the time and I almost never have to write code that will be used again after a few months.
The biggest problem I run into is that most books on various languages do a horrible job at documenting basic syntax in a way I can look up in the index quickly and I spend a lot of time trying to remember if language X uses if-elsif-else-fi or if-elseif-else-end or whatever.
...and porting to different systems isn't that big a deal if the platforms are all different flavors of unix (which anymore means you use anything but windows)...
They are held together in the same way that magnets can stick together -- the isotope has a positive charge and the molecular cage has a negative charge.
Magnets do not stick together because one has a positive charge and the other has a negative charge. I learned this in third grade science.
And a good proportion of those references are papers showing where he's wrong. Or other people having to continue the work he left half baked as he zoomed on to other things.
I don't see the problem here. Research is by definition 'half baked'. Zubrin contributes by generating technically reasonable ideas. If other people build upon these ideas and write subsequent papers they must have some value. If his ideas were really crackpot then they'd be ignored.
Opinions so strong that they leave little room for alternate opinions or thoughts.
This is fair... but it's also a common trait among people in the Space community. All of these people with strong opinions help to test new ideas. Its much harder to prove a pig-headed person wrong than someone who doesn't care one way or the other.
Much of his planning and programs are vaporware, untested in the field, and many barely lab tested.
If his planning and programs were fully developed and tested then he'd already be heading to Mars. Everything has to start somewhere, and that's where Zubrin's ideas are: at the start. You gotta wait a few years and let the tests be run. (there isn't a lot of money available for these kinds of tests, so it'll be a while) You can't expect a fully formed plan to go to Mars to spring from the head of anyone.
"Mars Society president Robert Zubrin is especially vulnerable, being labeled no less than a "messianic" "cult" leader by Robert Park."
I've met Bob Zubrin. The guy is a strong advocate and sometimes exudes a little bit of a used car salesman vibe... but that aside, the guy is as sharp as a tack and really knows what he's talking about. Calling Zubrin a crackpot is totally unfair. He has written many papers and journal articles that are widely referenced.
Zubrin is very strongly focused on the goal of putting humans on Mars and he has very strong opinions on how that goal ought to be reached. Sure, he is very aggressive in pursuing his agenda -- but he needs to be if he is to see people on Mars in his lifetime.
If Robert Park thinks what Zubrin's talking about is voodoo science, Park doesn't know anything about aerospace engineering. Ask any professor or engineer who actually knows about rocket science and they'll tell you that Zubrin's Mars Direct scheme is currently one of the best ideas out there for sending humans to Mars.
The computer was shipped via UPS flight 1331 which is occasionally used by the Canadian Secret Police for black ops. It seems that a group of terrorists from Greenland were attempting to infiltrate Quebec and poison the Maple Syrup harvest and blame it on the OntarioFirst! movement, thus giving more fuel to the Quebec independence movement. (If Quebec gets its independence Newfoundland will be cut off from the rest of Canada and ripe for invasion by Greenlander nationalists who have strived for centuries to liberate Vinland from the yoke of Canadian oppression.)
Well, flight 1331 was diverted to drop paratroopers into Northern Quebec in an attempted to foil the dastardly Greenlander plot. After the paratroopers were dropped, unexpected windsheer downed flight 1331 over Hudson bay.
Search and rescue failed to find any traces of flight 1331, but the copilot, Red McFearson miraculously survived. Red managed to swim his way onto an iceberg.
On his iceberg, Red had many adventures... including a near fatal attempt to milk a polar bear in desperation brought on by hunger. However, it turns out that polar bears like to be milked and Red was able to survive.
Only two things kept Red going during those months stranded on the iceberg suckling the polar bear... his special relationship he developed with a hocky puck, Marsha... and his drive to fulfill his duty and DELIVER YOU PACKAGE which he was able to salvage from the wreckage.
So, you see, you have no room to complain and you should be greatful for the patriotic, dedicated men and women of UPS.
Slashdot Mirror
From the MSNBC story: Microsoft and most of the class action attorneys in the case are in favor of a deal that would require the company to spend more than $1 billion to put software and computers into some of the poorest U.S. schools.
Don't the lawyers get paid a percentage of the value of the settlement? The bigger the paper value of the settlement, the bigger their new boat... or am I just a cynic?
why dont' we create a slashdot settlement?
Microsoft will donate new servers to slashdot... of course, the slash code will have to be ported over to visual basic... slashdot's url will change to slashdot.msn.com... and instead of submitters using psuedonyms like EccentricAnomaly, passport will allow them to use their credit card numbers...
Seems like the GPS could be used as an alternate controller for Quake.... Then head on out to your neighborhood salt flats... Actually, you could do this now with a GPS and a laptop :)
Here are some "cool" animations where you can see the ice caps melting. Also, here's a JPL press release which is a little more level headed than the news coverage.
I *never* said space-based anywhere in my post. Your comments are well thought out and I wouldn't mod you down for that, but I certainly wouldn't mod you up because you didn't read the article.
Apologies for the brain fart in reading your post. I did read the article though.
The anti-satellite laser is on the *ground* somewhere in the desert, probably the testing grounds near White Sands National Monument, in the gypsum fields. It's less of a "laser" and more of an "electromagnetic radiation emmitter" and it fries the satellites less by heat and more by a super-concentrated burst of radio energy.
It's less of a laser because it's not a laser but a microwave weapon... possibly a maser but not necessarily a maser... These things can also take down aircraft and disable automobiles.
So what's to keep the defense dept. from using these things for assassinations, or ground warfare?
Simple... they don't work that well. The best they can do is heat up thin metal rocket skins and make them burst because of the pressurized fuel inside... most rockets are so weak structurally that they would collapse if you drained the fuel out of them.
These lasers are too weak to do much damage. The worst they can do to people is use laser light to blind people... which is pretty bad, but it ain't no death star.
The U.S. also has an anti-satellite laser weapon that has been tested and confirmed to work by overloading the circuits
This sounds bogus.
1) These lasers are huge. They are talking about systems that are deployed on tractor trailers or on modified 747s. Why would you launch this into space?
2) These lasers use up their chemical lasing medium with each shot. Why would you launch a space-based system that you have to reload?
3) A big problem with these systems is scattering by the atmosphere and they require advanced adaptive optics to counteract turbulence. They're having enough trouble getting this to work with ground and air based systems... why would they go with a space based system when you then have to contend with going through several layers of the atmosphere as well as really high orbital velocities.
4) You would need a constellation of many, many satellites to always be overhead a given conflict zone.. unless you put these things way up in geosynchronous orbit which sounds pretty crazy to me.
Space-based lasers might be useful to interdict ICBMS (and even that is dubious)... you certainly don't want a space based system to interdict theater ballistic missiles.
This is an interesting link, The Command-Line Interface - Ideal For Blind Users. It is a detailed discussion of what makes a computer more user friendly for blind users.
Here's a quote: "Linux applications rarely employ graphics, and most of them are already linear, just like the mode (speech or braille) that is our Karma. All other things being equal, Linux is the best operating system for a blind user."
The author makes several interesting points like 'ed' is better than 'vi' or 'emacs' and mentions some interesting tweaks to basic utilities such as 'ls' to make it more usable for the blind.
So we now have two choices: a) give away our identities to a monopoly and depend on them to do even basic banking or b) give away our identities to a cartel (er... uh... alliance) and depend on them... Why can't we each just have control of our own identity instead of depending on .NET or some clone of .NET?
I did some tutoring for blind students in college and UNIX systems were much easier to use than Windows for blind students just because you could do everything without a GUI. The braille displays or auditory displays work best with text and with UNIX type systems you can do pretty much anything at the command prompt and text only... even web browsing.
Also, neither the movie or the miniseries did Duncan Idaho justice. In the novels, he's a badass but he doesn't even do anything in the miniseries.
We'll just have to see how the zombie Duncan does in the new mini-series.
I don't know who wrote it, but I found the source -- it's an old winner of the obfuscated C code contest.
Deep, Deep, down in the sprawling dungeons below Redmond, Washington:
...well, I guess we need to go to plan B... Send forth the flying monkeys!! Muhahaha!!"
"Yes, Yes, my precious"
"Uhhh... Mr. Gates?"
"WHAT are you doing here!"
"Uhhh... sir, I was sent my the legal team... ya know, Nazgul, Balrog, & son... it seems a court ruling in California put a crimp in our plan to rid oursleves of that vile website, slash-"
"DON'T say that word!!
"Uh, sir.. we don't have any flying monkeys... all we have is Dancing Monkey boy..."
"Crap... forget this, I'm just going to stay down here and play with my invisibility ring"
If I were Google, I would just keep a table mapping IP addresses to voting records. So your second vote for a page merely replaces your first vote, instead of counting as another vote. Would that be enough?
There's a way to get by googly IP logging: Hey kids! Free porn, just click here first to rank our site as the best purple sneaker site on the web. -or- a spammer could write some javascript that does someone's voting for them everytime they visit the spammer's web page or ran a spammer-sponsored plug-in.
But what about this... google takes the highest and lowest moderated sites and has one of their employees look at it and their guy does the actual ranking. This way they can maximize the effectiveness of their employees in spam-hunting.
CNN has Steve Job's opinion on the Microsoft deal. He says, "We're baffled that a settlement imposed against Microsoft for breaking the law should allow, even encourage, them to unfairly make inroads into education -- one of the few markets left where they don't have monopoly power"
I guess anyone could have guessed this would be Apple's view of the settlement.
Where do we get the electricty to get the hydrogen to seperate from the water?
We still are getting the majority of our power from fossil fuel burning and until more earth friendly sources of power are used, this is not a well thought out answer.
Computers are electrically powered anyway.. the same electricity used to charge a battery can be used to generate hydrogen fuel from water... I think this process uses less electricity than charging a battery so there is a net savings in electricity.
C|Net seems to think the security problem is with Google:
"The guys at Google thought, 'How cool that we can offer this to our users' without thinking about security. If you want to do this right, you have to think about security from the beginning and have a very solid approach to software design and software development that is based on what bad guys might possibly do to cause your program grief."
This is crazy. Google isn't doing anything wrong. The problem is with the idiots who don't spend five minutes to check that their secret data is really hidden.
This is like blaming a dog owner when his dog bites a burgler... er uh, nevermind.
Melvin Kelvin, descendant of the esteemed Lord Kelvin credited with the discovery of absolute zero has begun suing world thermometer makers for patent infringement...
It's just as silly, evil, and wrong to patent algorithms as to patent math or basic science discoveries... what if Leibnitz and Newton patented calculus? Boy, I'd love to have a patent on pi...
Patents don't protect inventors anyway... just look at how RCA held up Philo Farnsworth's Television patent in court until it expired and he couldn't get any money for it.
Thanks to the FBI, a whole new market is now being pushed into exploring the world of alternative operating systems.
The problem here is that terrorists need to run Word, Excel, and Powerpoint in order to be compatible with all of the other various terrorist organizations. I mean, how embarrassing would it be to have your terrorist plot foiled because a cell can't open your powerpoint presentation detailing the operation.
Now that Windows XP has instant messaging built in, the productivity of your average terrorist will shoot way up as he will be able to get timely responses from his colleagues to time-critical questions about chemical and biological agents... Again, who wants an embarrassing mishap from messing up a chemical weapons mixture just because the response time from an email just isn't fast enough.
Of course, these advantages may be eroded by the need to keep various licenses up to date with Microsoft. As soon as you fill in your organization as "Al Queda" or "Hamas" when you register Widows..bam, the FBI has got you right there.
I deal with lots of legacy code in FORTRAN that is as much as 30 years old... very robust, very well tested code that would take years to rewrite in another language. I also use newer stuff written in C/C++, Matlab, Perl, Python, and some other languages developed in house.
Being able to tie together different languages saves a lot of development time. It's very useful when I just need to solve a problem and move on... which is what I do 99% of the time and I almost never have to write code that will be used again after a few months.
The biggest problem I run into is that most books on various languages do a horrible job at documenting basic syntax in a way I can look up in the index quickly and I spend a lot of time trying to remember if language X uses if-elsif-else-fi or if-elseif-else-end or whatever.
...and porting to different systems isn't that big a deal if the platforms are all different flavors of unix (which anymore means you use anything but windows)...
Unless the government starts persecuting people on Linux and *BSD systems, because they are inimical to the FBI's spying methods.
If the government started outlawing Unixes they'd have to take on HP, IBM, SUN and now Apple too...
They are held together in the same way that magnets can stick together -- the isotope has a positive charge and the molecular cage has a negative charge.
Magnets do not stick together because one has a positive charge and the other has a negative charge. I learned this in third grade science.
And a good proportion of those references are papers showing where he's wrong. Or other people having to continue the work he left half baked as he zoomed on to other things.
I don't see the problem here. Research is by definition 'half baked'. Zubrin contributes by generating technically reasonable ideas. If other people build upon these ideas and write subsequent papers they must have some value. If his ideas were really crackpot then they'd be ignored.
Opinions so strong that they leave little room for alternate opinions or thoughts.
This is fair... but it's also a common trait among people in the Space community. All of these people with strong opinions help to test new ideas. Its much harder to prove a pig-headed person wrong than someone who doesn't care one way or the other.
Much of his planning and programs are vaporware, untested in the field, and many barely lab tested.
If his planning and programs were fully developed and tested then he'd already be heading to Mars. Everything has to start somewhere, and that's where Zubrin's ideas are: at the start. You gotta wait a few years and let the tests be run. (there isn't a lot of money available for these kinds of tests, so it'll be a while) You can't expect a fully formed plan to go to Mars to spring from the head of anyone.
"Mars Society president Robert Zubrin is especially vulnerable, being labeled no less than a "messianic" "cult" leader by Robert Park."
I've met Bob Zubrin. The guy is a strong advocate and sometimes exudes a little bit of a used car salesman vibe... but that aside, the guy is as sharp as a tack and really knows what he's talking about. Calling Zubrin a crackpot is totally unfair. He has written many papers and journal articles that are widely referenced.
Zubrin is very strongly focused on the goal of putting humans on Mars and he has very strong opinions on how that goal ought to be reached. Sure, he is very aggressive in pursuing his agenda -- but he needs to be if he is to see people on Mars in his lifetime.
If Robert Park thinks what Zubrin's talking about is voodoo science, Park doesn't know anything about aerospace engineering. Ask any professor or engineer who actually knows about rocket science and they'll tell you that Zubrin's Mars Direct scheme is currently one of the best ideas out there for sending humans to Mars.
The computer was shipped via UPS flight 1331 which is occasionally used by the Canadian Secret Police for black ops. It seems that a group of terrorists from Greenland were attempting to infiltrate Quebec and poison the Maple Syrup harvest and blame it on the OntarioFirst! movement, thus giving more fuel to the Quebec independence movement. (If Quebec gets its independence Newfoundland will be cut off from the rest of Canada and ripe for invasion by Greenlander nationalists who have strived for centuries to liberate Vinland from the yoke of Canadian oppression.)
Well, flight 1331 was diverted to drop paratroopers into Northern Quebec in an attempted to foil the dastardly Greenlander plot. After the paratroopers were dropped, unexpected windsheer downed flight 1331 over Hudson bay.
Search and rescue failed to find any traces of flight 1331, but the copilot, Red McFearson miraculously survived. Red managed to swim his way onto an iceberg.
On his iceberg, Red had many adventures... including a near fatal attempt to milk a polar bear in desperation brought on by hunger. However, it turns out that polar bears like to be milked and Red was able to survive.
Only two things kept Red going during those months stranded on the iceberg suckling the polar bear... his special relationship he developed with a hocky puck, Marsha... and his drive to fulfill his duty and DELIVER YOU PACKAGE which he was able to salvage from the wreckage.
So, you see, you have no room to complain and you should be greatful for the patriotic, dedicated men and women of UPS.