Lets work on sub orbital jet flights to cut down flight times from 24 hours from Europe to Australia to 3 hours; I know plenty of people that would happily pay extra for that convenience.
You can bet that FedEx and UPS are looking at what Scaled Composites did and continue to do with SpaceShip One. I'm sure they would love to be able to advertise "Previous Day Shipping!" Plus, being able to ship perishable items such as drugs, organs, or speciality foods (for the "stupid rich" quadrant of people) anywhere in the world within hours could make them quite a bit of money and enhance their image.
As a side effect, we will be enhancing rocket technology and our understanding of the dynamics of objects in that medium. We need to lay down a lot of groundwork in a focused effort before we can seriously look at colonising space.
Like the advent of the Interstate Highway system or the Internet, we won't really know what to do with the new tech until we have it. And what we make with it won't resemble anything the planners and thinkers have in mind right now.
I enjoyed it growing up, since even though we weren't poor, you could see it from our house, and meat was not an everyday thing for us. Spam had the benefit of being cheap, lasted a long time stored up, and could be used many ways.
That reminds me, I need to cycle out some old cans of food from my emergency kit, maybe I'll cycle some cans of Spam in...
Fox was so desperate to promote "That 80's Show" that they devoted > 80% of their own ad time to it. I got so sick and tired of seeing the stupid head with the new cell phone in the bar that I was ready to throw a bottle at the TV. If they had only spent 1 out of every 10 ad slots that they used to promote "That 80's Show" to a "Firefly" ad, the show probably wouldn't have failed as badly.
The number "5.0" was arrived at by dropping the leading "1." from "1.5.0". Where you might have expected to see 1.5.0, it is now 5.0 (and where it was 1.5, it is now 5).
Reminds me of the old Procter and Bergman (Firesign Theater members) album, "TV or Not TV", where they explain the currency devaluation:
"What was five is two, what was two is one, what was one is nothing..."
Well, considering the "obligation to the shareholders" is to make lots of money, then the Apple Stores should stop selling Macs and start selling Windows boxes, because they would make more sales and hence more money.:-)
i've recently started DVRing Angel (need to find a better verb, since i have a replayTV, and saying i Tivo a show doesn't feel right)
You could use "time-shifting"; not a new term, but it rolls off the tongue and most people will probably assume you're using a DVR for that, as noone can program their VCRs, surely.
Plus, "time-shifting" (or better yet "timeshifting" has that "futuristic" feel to it: "I'm timeshifting the very fabric of broadcast television itself!!!"
So, they weren't allowed to attend an international forum as representatives of the US government. Were they arrested, or put under gag order, or otherwise silenced from speaking publicly? Looks like they weren't allowed to speak at a meeting that they weren't invited to. Free speech doesn't enter into it.
The bottom line is, the Bush Administration is a priori defined as "unethical". If no one described the previous actions by others as "unethical", what else would make the same actions by Bush be labelled "unethical" except for the presumption of default unethical behavior?
As a side note (no, not C#:-), some of the best software developers I've known were music majors or musicians on the side. There seems to be some correlation between musical ability (or appreciation), mathematics, and computer science.
Gee, maybe someone should write a book about it...:-)
I've been in "the business" for over 20 years now, and I'll have to disagree with you. I've developed software for nearly a dozen wildly different fields, from satellite downlink analysis, through document management, artificial intelligence, and now business systems. I am as far from an expert in any of those fields as you can get, yet the software I wrote (and maintained in many cases) worked, worked to the specifications, and worked with very few bugs. The reason is, I learned how to design and write software, and didn't try to learn how to do the job of the EEs or cognitive psychologists or business analysts that I wrote the software for.
I learned (from many of the best) that there is a common space of problems that software solves, regardless of the domain. The software must take known data, apply known processes to that data, evaluate the correctness of that data and those processes, and produce output data that is correct and usable by the user. The software must handle incorrect data and other adverse conditions without producing incorrect data, and must be designed as simply as possible in order to solve the problems. The outputs must be produced in a timely manner, which is likely orders of magnitude faster than the experts could produce them.
As a software developer, my task has always been to make sure the software works, not to redesign the formulas or processes according to something I learned from a high-school chemistry book or some such. My responsibility is to always go to the experts with any questions about processes or data, not to try to figure out the right way nor to make assumptions based on my experience.
I know how to design and write software, and over the years I have learned how to extract the necessary information from the experts in order to solve their problem, regardless of the domain. Asking "What", "How", "Where from", "Where to", "What happens if", and "When" have been the most useful to do my job. I have almost never needed to know "Why", and I often have to get the experts back onto the previous questions when they start giving background on "why" the process is the way it is, or "why" the data is in a particular format, for example.
If a CS curriculum can teach you how to create software that answers the important questions, and teaches you how to ask them, then it is useful for any domain. Being domain nonspecific also allows you to apply for and get more jobs than specifying one area of auxiliary expertise.
At least, it has for me and some others that I know.
(PS) Fortran was the first language I learned back in '76, and some of the worst Fortran I ever saw was the IMSL function library I used in '84. Horrible spagetti code from Hell, and all written by engineers and statisticians!
It takes a lot more design time and effort to make your underlying design flexible enough to handle many changes. But, that design time and effort costs money, money that no one in either management or on the customer side is willing to pay. It also means that once a design has been settled on, implemented, and fielded, major rewrites will almost never happen. The attitude is "it works, it's making us money, and the customer is mostly happy with it, why change?" Unfortunately circumstances arise where the code no longer works due to outside changes (business rules change, operating system upgrades, customer requirements change, etc.) but still no one wants to pay to redesign based on the new environment.
Plus, a "design written with change in mind" can only accomodate so much, case in point, the project I'm working on currently was designed and implemented on Solaris with Sybase and Motif, and the customer wants a version in Visual Basic.NET on WinXP with Oracle. I'd really like to see a design flexible enough to accomodate that kind of change!
Slashdot Mirror
Carter has been advising Presidents to go "nookier", but only Clinton listened...
"Offtopic?" Obviously someone needs to check the charge on their "Sensayuma" device...
That's why you need a portable EMP gun.
See if MP3 stands up to EMP...
As long as you have proper shielding for your own equipment, of course.
Like the advent of the Interstate Highway system or the Internet, we won't really know what to do with the new tech until we have it. And what we make with it won't resemble anything the planners and thinkers have in mind right now.
It's just the way things work out...
I enjoyed it growing up, since even though we weren't poor, you could see it from our house, and meat was not an everyday thing for us. Spam had the benefit of being cheap, lasted a long time stored up, and could be used many ways.
That reminds me, I need to cycle out some old cans of food from my emergency kit, maybe I'll cycle some cans of Spam in...
What, you don't have an emergency kit?
I find your lack of faith disturbing...
That means he can sue himself for the lost sales!
3. Profit!
Well, what am I supposed to do with this Twonky?
Fox was so desperate to promote "That 80's Show" that they devoted > 80% of their own ad time to it. I got so sick and tired of seeing the stupid head with the new cell phone in the bar that I was ready to throw a bottle at the TV. If they had only spent 1 out of every 10 ad slots that they used to promote "That 80's Show" to a "Firefly" ad, the show probably wouldn't have failed as badly.
Oh, and where is "That 80's Show" now?
Reminds me of the old Procter and Bergman (Firesign Theater members) album, "TV or Not TV", where they explain the currency devaluation:
"What was five is two, what was two is one, what was one is nothing..."
Well, considering the "obligation to the shareholders" is to make lots of money, then the Apple Stores should stop selling Macs and start selling Windows boxes, because they would make more sales and hence more money.
Yes. Calling Bush a fascist is "insightful" and "informative", but saying he isn't is "flamebait" and "troll."
That's the way it is on Slashdot, you just have to accept it.
So, they weren't allowed to attend an international forum as representatives of the US government. Were they arrested, or put under gag order, or otherwise silenced from speaking publicly? Looks like they weren't allowed to speak at a meeting that they weren't invited to. Free speech doesn't enter into it.
The bottom line is, the Bush Administration is a priori defined as "unethical". If no one described the previous actions by others as "unethical", what else would make the same actions by Bush be labelled "unethical" except for the presumption of default unethical behavior?
Of course, that's not what he said, but oh well...
Jimmy Carter called it "nukeeyer" for 4 years.
So, are you saying the people who were removed had some kind of inalienable right to be on the panel or whatever?
Most likely rectal..
As a side note (no, not C# :-), some of the best software developers I've known were music majors or musicians on the side. There seems to be some correlation between musical ability (or appreciation), mathematics, and computer science.
:-)
Gee, maybe someone should write a book about it...
I've been in "the business" for over 20 years now, and I'll have to disagree with you. I've developed software for nearly a dozen wildly different fields, from satellite downlink analysis, through document management, artificial intelligence, and now business systems. I am as far from an expert in any of those fields as you can get, yet the software I wrote (and maintained in many cases) worked, worked to the specifications, and worked with very few bugs. The reason is, I learned how to design and write software, and didn't try to learn how to do the job of the EEs or cognitive psychologists or business analysts that I wrote the software for.
I learned (from many of the best) that there is a common space of problems that software solves, regardless of the domain. The software must take known data, apply known processes to that data, evaluate the correctness of that data and those processes, and produce output data that is correct and usable by the user. The software must handle incorrect data and other adverse conditions without producing incorrect data, and must be designed as simply as possible in order to solve the problems. The outputs must be produced in a timely manner, which is likely orders of magnitude faster than the experts could produce them.
As a software developer, my task has always been to make sure the software works, not to redesign the formulas or processes according to something I learned from a high-school chemistry book or some such. My responsibility is to always go to the experts with any questions about processes or data, not to try to figure out the right way nor to make assumptions based on my experience.
I know how to design and write software, and over the years I have learned how to extract the necessary information from the experts in order to solve their problem, regardless of the domain. Asking "What", "How", "Where from", "Where to", "What happens if", and "When" have been the most useful to do my job. I have almost never needed to know "Why", and I often have to get the experts back onto the previous questions when they start giving background on "why" the process is the way it is, or "why" the data is in a particular format, for example.
If a CS curriculum can teach you how to create software that answers the important questions, and teaches you how to ask them, then it is useful for any domain. Being domain nonspecific also allows you to apply for and get more jobs than specifying one area of auxiliary expertise.
At least, it has for me and some others that I know.
(PS) Fortran was the first language I learned back in '76, and some of the worst Fortran I ever saw was the IMSL function library I used in '84. Horrible spagetti code from Hell, and all written by engineers and statisticians!
It takes a lot more design time and effort to make your underlying design flexible enough to handle many changes. But, that design time and effort costs money, money that no one in either management or on the customer side is willing to pay. It also means that once a design has been settled on, implemented, and fielded, major rewrites will almost never happen. The attitude is "it works, it's making us money, and the customer is mostly happy with it, why change?" Unfortunately circumstances arise where the code no longer works due to outside changes (business rules change, operating system upgrades, customer requirements change, etc.) but still no one wants to pay to redesign based on the new environment.
.NET on WinXP with Oracle. I'd really like to see a design flexible enough to accomodate that kind of change!
Plus, a "design written with change in mind" can only accomodate so much, case in point, the project I'm working on currently was designed and implemented on Solaris with Sybase and Motif, and the customer wants a version in Visual Basic