Fifteen years may as well be fifty in terms of Russian economic and political stability, not to mention international relations.
The article is light on logistical details, but assuming that we're more Robert Zubrin than we are BattleStar Galactica, the mission will involve a long period of technological development followed by deployments of resources in advance of human explorers. That's a long time for a lot of factors to remain "in the window", IMHO. Even the ISS didn't manage to remain entirely in that window, and that was far more flexible in terms of planets lining up and such.
I'm pleased at least to see that it's on the TODO list at NASA, but I don't take this too seriously.
Slashdot is always good for a laugh. Where do we disagree, Kintanon (aside perhaps, from buying your children porn)? Of course your children have to be prepared for that backseat.
I just humbly submit that a culture that glorifies unbounded and consequence free gratification is not the best educator for this subject. Furthermore, surely you agree that porn is the ultimate expression of action without consequence? I don't imagine that porn films nowadays end with the young stud in a hospital bed wasting away from AIDS.
I think the problem with these kinds of predictions (and hey, anyway, it's a lot of fun) is that while people are fairly good at predicting the advance of human knowledge, they are very poor at anticipating the economic ramifications.
There's a great commercial with Captain Sisko where he says "This is the year 2000; where are the promised flying cars?" He then goes on to correctly point out that the advance of telecommunications has substantially decreased the demand for real world transportation.
Could we have flying cars today? Absolutely. I have a model of one on my desk. It's just that there's no great push for one. Sure I'd like one, but it doesn't solve any great problem in anyone's life, at least not without creating ten more.
Technology is often the least important factor in the success of a new invention.
Bullshit. It's better to children to be shielded (yes, Slashdotters, shielded) from both. But given the choice, I'd rather my children see violence than sexuality.
, why? Because generally violence is shown with a consequence. Stupid 80's A-Team aside, generally when there's a shoot out, somebody gets shot, maybe dies. And even if there's not, it takes me two seconds to explain the consequences.
Are the consequences of promiscuity shown? Of course not, because that's a buzzkill. Children seeing sexual acts is a bad thing because children don't yet possess the ability to place them in a moral context. They are unable place violence in context either, so they should be protected from that, too.
You do a great job as a parent, and the kid never gets within a million miles of a shootout. But you know what? He/she will end up in the back seat at 16 years old. We have a very serious defect in our (American) culture that pursues pleasure without regard to consequences, particularly in our sexuality. We're so screwed up that we equate "sexuality" with "interpersonal relationships".
Anyway, you're right about the Matrix not being a kids film.
I think it's unlikely that space flight will come to an end. Manned spaceflight perhaps, but there's too much strategic importance to space now to simply mothball it.
I don't take the grounding of the Concorde as a sign of anything except the fact that few people really needed or wanted to get across the pond that fast, as opposed to take three times as long. I mean think about the economics; a quick tour of Expedia shows a roundtrip flight from Dallas Fort Worth International (my home base) to Gatwick to be about $600 (not a bad price, now that I look at it), and about 15 hours (flying east sucks). Cut the time in half to 7.5 hours. Am I willing to pay double? Yeah, probably, but I'm still not able to get any work done in London. Cut it in half again to ~4 hours. Now I can squeeze in a half day, but I'm paying $2400. For it to be worth my while, I have to be pulling down $4800 of value a day (or $2400 if you factor in the saved time on the return trip as well). Not too many folks with those kind of mathematics.
So that just leaves the people for whom price is not an object, and that is not a good class to build an extremely capital and labor intensive business on.
But they don't control what you read. It's just that if, after the fact you're under investigation for being a terrorist, yeah, having checked out books on making bombs just might be relevant to the investigation!
Now IANAL, and I have heard some talk of erosion of the need to get a subpoena for this stuff, and I disagree with that. We need to have a judge playing ref on this stuff.
But failing that, I guess I just don't see a special privelege for checking out books. Consider that on one hand, it would be admissable in court that I purchased the supplies for a bomb but not that I checked out a book on how to make one. Really it comes down to the question of: why should library records be inadmissable? What special privelege exists? And before you answer, make sure that you believe that at least something should be admissable in terrorist investigations, otherwise you're wasting everyone's time here.
So basically the Patriot Act says that library records can be used in terrorist investigations. Is that it, or is there something more sinister I'm missing? Honestly, I'm not trying to troll here.
If that is it...then good grief, what are we talking about here? What is there about borrowing a book that should make it a sacrosanct activity like confessional, or attorney-client privelege? I'm sorry, but what books someone has borrowed certainly seems like it could be relevant to me. We're supposed to ignore this information, why?
Price fixing is only effective for price-inelastic goods (things you'll generally buy the same amount of regardless of how high the price rises, like oil). The reason for this is that as producers collude to keep the price up, people turn to lower priced alternatives. This is expressed in plain English as "well, I'll settle for hamburged if steak is that expensive." While I'm not sure whether your comment about patent infringement makes sense, it's irrelevant because it wouldn't be a rational approach to maximizing revenue. This is kind of hard to understand without seeing a graph. Lest you think I'm just a right wing supply sider nutcase, here's a citation.
Additionally, price fixing is only practical for oligopolistic (few sellers), commoditized products as well. This is why OPEC was such a big deal back in the seventies. I don't see that LCD monitors are any of these things.
The poster has the Alpha and Omega of the analysis in the post: the market bears the price. One by one, manufacturing advantages will arise, and out of pure selfishness and greed, the manufactures will cut prices in an attempt to steal market share. Additionally, as OLED's hit the market, demand for LCDs will fall, and there will be price pressure there.
Hey! You and I can throw a ball around a few hours a week and make major cash!
What? You mean I have to practice 20-30 hours a week for 15 years? You mean I press my body towards extremes of physical conditioning? You mean I have to not sit on my ass drinking Mountain Dew and Doritos?
The logic proposed is a tautology: employers don't reprice labor because their competitors would snatch up their employees.
By definition, this means that the aggregate price of labor has not changed! I think a more insightful approach to the problem is that labor has become monopolistically competitive, especially in the IT market.
What the hell does monopolistic competition mean? It means that while there may be alternatives similar to a product or service, there is nothing that is exactly like it. You can buy hamburgers from dozens of places, but you can only buy a Whopper from McDonalds. It's the same with IT workers: I can employ programmers anywhere, but I'll have a really difficult time finding another programmer with a background in SQL, assembler and the obscure graphics package we chose to use because he knew it.
The economic logic the article proposes applies to commodities. As frustrating as it seems in the IT market, most labor is highly specialized and is therefore not a commodity.
Re:What if another coutry did the same ?
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Convenient. So anyone who is with us is bribed, but of course, our opposition is simply principled.
What you're describing is unanimity. It doesn't matter anyway. Three undeniable facts:
1. Hussein has WMD (he has refused to account for the ones that Tariq Aziz has admitted to having as recently as six months ago)
2. Hussein burns with hatred for the U.S.
3. Hussein could easily pass WMD's to terrorists in a way that would make them untraceable (we still have no f*cking clue where the Daschle anthrax attack came from)
So why wouldn't Hussein pass weapons to terorrists? Issue closed. Next issue...
Let's assume, stupidly, for the sake of argument, that Israel and Iraq are the same thing. According to your argument, you would prefer that we be consistently wrong rather than consistently right. What is so frustrating about dealing with the anti-war left is that there is no substance to the opposition: if some media talking head said "we should oppose the war because it's high in carbohydrates" suddenly you guys would be on the Atkins diet.
Re:What if another coutry did the same ?
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The truth is, unfortunately, is that it is certain that innocent Iraqis will die. The only question will be whether they die in a war to liberate their countrymen or, for example, in machine designed to shred plastic, or with their son's limbs in the jaws of wild dogs. Sorry for the harsh language but if you can't distinguish this as evil, the problem is with you.
Oh, by the way: show me the Iraqis in your anti-war protests. Better yet, listen to this Iraqi on the subject. And while you're at it, show me the other country that has ever pledged to avoid civilian casualties at all turns. China? Russia? And while I'm at it, imagine a world in which either of those lovely fellows dominate the world. Having trouble? Ask a Tibetan or Hungarian (that thought courtesy of John Derbyshire).
Finally, you are factually incorrect about no consensus in the U.N. We absolutely have a consensus; it is simply that there are countries that oppose us and possess veto power.
Why do you cry only now, when Hussein's regime has caused the death of more than 2 million Iraqis? Note sadly the innocents that will die in this conflict, and then weep with joy at the lives they will be free to live when this is over.
"Well, I'm as much agin' killin' as ever, sir. But, it was this way, Colonel. When I started out, I felt just like you said. But, when I hear them machine guns a-goin' and all them fellers are droppin' around me, I figured that them guns was killin' hundreds, maybe thousands. There weren't nothin' anybody could do but to stop them guns. And, that's what I done."
It is right and proper that we have strong moral objections to killing. It is also important that we choose the most moral choice from those available to us. Reasonably, the alternative to this project is placing a human in harm's way.
All of this reminds me of Schumpeter's famous phrase "creative destruction". What has happened is that there was an enormous swell in the demand curve for IT workers in the late nineties with the tech boom. This drove wages up, as the supply curve lagged. As new people entered the field, the supply curve slid out to accomodate demand.
Here's where it always sucks for those workers. The demand curve contracted sharply after the tech bubble burst, so the wages dropped correspondingly. This of course is what every sector (except for the government sector, unfortunately) faces from time to time. A micro-example is the set of jobs created for building a house. Suddenly the house is finished and demand falls to zero.
So what's the long term prognosis? Unless some new wave emerges that causes another correspondingly large shift in demand for tech workers, wages will be where they are, and probably fall further with international competition.
The bright side of all of this, and it's hard for us tech workers to see, is that everyone else gets cheap software and information services. This is the way the system works. The alternative is to chase demand curve shifts and change careers every ten years or so, which is probably not such a bad idea from a spiritual point of view anyhow.
It is, assuming that you're talking about you and me living there. It's also possibly that we could meet halfway: terraform Mars to move it closer to Earth's biosphere, and then genetically engineer human(?) beings that can live there.
Nope, but that's what I used to believe. The truth is that one's principles require sacrifices sometimes. What you're saying is that there are no beliefs worth sacrifices, vis a vis, wealthy people are not required to make sacrifices for their beliefs. QED.
I think upon consideration you'll discover that's not what you believe either.
It sounds like you already know everything you need to know. Now you simply need to summon the courage of your beliefs.
You may be fired because of your beliefs. At that point, you just have to decide which is more valuable: your beliefs or your jobs (hint: your beliefs are). On the other hand, your boss may simply be having a weak moment in his own beliefs. You ought to try to talk to him about this, and not in a self-righteous way. Try to make the case that you can't build a successful company or a successful life without character. Your company and your own bank account might prosper in the short run, but eventually the way the universe works catches up to you...even if it's not before you die.
At any rate, it sounds like you've got the right tickets to begin with. Good luck.
Mystro TV is a complex multimedia system that will require vast legal agreements between consumers, networks and other multinational corporations. Additionally, it will serve two masters (consumers and networks) rather than one.
Slashdot Mirror
Fifteen years may as well be fifty in terms of Russian economic and political stability, not to mention international relations.
The article is light on logistical details, but assuming that we're more Robert Zubrin than we are BattleStar Galactica, the mission will involve a long period of technological development followed by deployments of resources in advance of human explorers. That's a long time for a lot of factors to remain "in the window", IMHO. Even the ISS didn't manage to remain entirely in that window, and that was far more flexible in terms of planets lining up and such.
I'm pleased at least to see that it's on the TODO list at NASA, but I don't take this too seriously.
Slashdot is always good for a laugh. Where do we disagree, Kintanon (aside perhaps, from buying your children porn)? Of course your children have to be prepared for that backseat.
I just humbly submit that a culture that glorifies unbounded and consequence free gratification is not the best educator for this subject. Furthermore, surely you agree that porn is the ultimate expression of action without consequence? I don't imagine that porn films nowadays end with the young stud in a hospital bed wasting away from AIDS.
I think the problem with these kinds of predictions (and hey, anyway, it's a lot of fun) is that while people are fairly good at predicting the advance of human knowledge, they are very poor at anticipating the economic ramifications.
There's a great commercial with Captain Sisko where he says "This is the year 2000; where are the promised flying cars?" He then goes on to correctly point out that the advance of telecommunications has substantially decreased the demand for real world transportation.
Could we have flying cars today? Absolutely. I have a model of one on my desk. It's just that there's no great push for one. Sure I'd like one, but it doesn't solve any great problem in anyone's life, at least not without creating ten more.
Technology is often the least important factor in the success of a new invention.
Bullshit. It's better to children to be shielded (yes, Slashdotters, shielded) from both. But given the choice, I'd rather my children see violence than sexuality.
, why? Because generally violence is shown with a consequence. Stupid 80's A-Team aside, generally when there's a shoot out, somebody gets shot, maybe dies. And even if there's not, it takes me two seconds to explain the consequences.
Are the consequences of promiscuity shown? Of course not, because that's a buzzkill. Children seeing sexual acts is a bad thing because children don't yet possess the ability to place them in a moral context. They are unable place violence in context either, so they should be protected from that, too.
You do a great job as a parent, and the kid never gets within a million miles of a shootout. But you know what? He/she will end up in the back seat at 16 years old. We have a very serious defect in our (American) culture that pursues pleasure without regard to consequences, particularly in our sexuality. We're so screwed up that we equate "sexuality" with "interpersonal relationships".
Anyway, you're right about the Matrix not being a kids film.
I think it's unlikely that space flight will come to an end. Manned spaceflight perhaps, but there's too much strategic importance to space now to simply mothball it. I don't take the grounding of the Concorde as a sign of anything except the fact that few people really needed or wanted to get across the pond that fast, as opposed to take three times as long. I mean think about the economics; a quick tour of Expedia shows a roundtrip flight from Dallas Fort Worth International (my home base) to Gatwick to be about $600 (not a bad price, now that I look at it), and about 15 hours (flying east sucks). Cut the time in half to 7.5 hours. Am I willing to pay double? Yeah, probably, but I'm still not able to get any work done in London. Cut it in half again to ~4 hours. Now I can squeeze in a half day, but I'm paying $2400. For it to be worth my while, I have to be pulling down $4800 of value a day (or $2400 if you factor in the saved time on the return trip as well). Not too many folks with those kind of mathematics.
So that just leaves the people for whom price is not an object, and that is not a good class to build an extremely capital and labor intensive business on.
I'm a Texan living in Texas. Whenever a Canadian asks me what I think of Canada, I say "I don't."
But they don't control what you read. It's just that if, after the fact you're under investigation for being a terrorist, yeah, having checked out books on making bombs just might be relevant to the investigation!
Now IANAL, and I have heard some talk of erosion of the need to get a subpoena for this stuff, and I disagree with that. We need to have a judge playing ref on this stuff.
But failing that, I guess I just don't see a special privelege for checking out books. Consider that on one hand, it would be admissable in court that I purchased the supplies for a bomb but not that I checked out a book on how to make one. Really it comes down to the question of: why should library records be inadmissable? What special privelege exists? And before you answer, make sure that you believe that at least something should be admissable in terrorist investigations, otherwise you're wasting everyone's time here.
So basically the Patriot Act says that library records can be used in terrorist investigations. Is that it, or is there something more sinister I'm missing? Honestly, I'm not trying to troll here.
If that is it...then good grief, what are we talking about here? What is there about borrowing a book that should make it a sacrosanct activity like confessional, or attorney-client privelege? I'm sorry, but what books someone has borrowed certainly seems like it could be relevant to me. We're supposed to ignore this information, why?
This is really just fossil fuels for the extremely impatient.
Price fixing is only effective for price-inelastic goods (things you'll generally buy the same amount of regardless of how high the price rises, like oil). The reason for this is that as producers collude to keep the price up, people turn to lower priced alternatives. This is expressed in plain English as "well, I'll settle for hamburged if steak is that expensive." While I'm not sure whether your comment about patent infringement makes sense, it's irrelevant because it wouldn't be a rational approach to maximizing revenue. This is kind of hard to understand without seeing a graph. Lest you think I'm just a right wing supply sider nutcase, here's a citation.
Additionally, price fixing is only practical for oligopolistic (few sellers), commoditized products as well. This is why OPEC was such a big deal back in the seventies. I don't see that LCD monitors are any of these things.
The poster has the Alpha and Omega of the analysis in the post: the market bears the price. One by one, manufacturing advantages will arise, and out of pure selfishness and greed, the manufactures will cut prices in an attempt to steal market share. Additionally, as OLED's hit the market, demand for LCDs will fall, and there will be price pressure there.
The laser's woman done him wrong...
Sounds like a good argument to limit the power of government, perhaps with some kind of limiting document, a sort of constitution...
Ah, wait. We already tried that and people chose government services over liberty.
Hey! You and I can throw a ball around a few hours a week and make major cash!
What? You mean I have to practice 20-30 hours a week for 15 years? You mean I press my body towards extremes of physical conditioning? You mean I have to not sit on my ass drinking Mountain Dew and Doritos?
Suddenly I don't feel so smug and superior.
Their vision for the world of Middle East really helped shape the movie
Vision of Middle Earth, one would think. I'm one to talk, though; I identified a Whopper as coming from McDonalds a few days ago on Slashdot.
The logic proposed is a tautology: employers don't reprice labor because their competitors would snatch up their employees.
By definition, this means that the aggregate price of labor has not changed! I think a more insightful approach to the problem is that labor has become monopolistically competitive, especially in the IT market.
What the hell does monopolistic competition mean? It means that while there may be alternatives similar to a product or service, there is nothing that is exactly like it. You can buy hamburgers from dozens of places, but you can only buy a Whopper from McDonalds. It's the same with IT workers: I can employ programmers anywhere, but I'll have a really difficult time finding another programmer with a background in SQL, assembler and the obscure graphics package we chose to use because he knew it.
The economic logic the article proposes applies to commodities. As frustrating as it seems in the IT market, most labor is highly specialized and is therefore not a commodity.
Convenient. So anyone who is with us is bribed, but of course, our opposition is simply principled.
What you're describing is unanimity. It doesn't matter anyway. Three undeniable facts:
1. Hussein has WMD (he has refused to account for the ones that Tariq Aziz has admitted to having as recently as six months ago)
2. Hussein burns with hatred for the U.S.
3. Hussein could easily pass WMD's to terrorists in a way that would make them untraceable (we still have no f*cking clue where the Daschle anthrax attack came from)
So why wouldn't Hussein pass weapons to terorrists? Issue closed. Next issue...
Let's assume, stupidly, for the sake of argument, that Israel and Iraq are the same thing. According to your argument, you would prefer that we be consistently wrong rather than consistently right. What is so frustrating about dealing with the anti-war left is that there is no substance to the opposition: if some media talking head said "we should oppose the war because it's high in carbohydrates" suddenly you guys would be on the Atkins diet.
The truth is, unfortunately, is that it is certain that innocent Iraqis will die. The only question will be whether they die in a war to liberate their countrymen or, for example, in machine designed to shred plastic, or with their son's limbs in the jaws of wild dogs. Sorry for the harsh language but if you can't distinguish this as evil, the problem is with you.
Oh, by the way: show me the Iraqis in your anti-war protests. Better yet, listen to this Iraqi on the subject. And while you're at it, show me the other country that has ever pledged to avoid civilian casualties at all turns. China? Russia? And while I'm at it, imagine a world in which either of those lovely fellows dominate the world. Having trouble? Ask a Tibetan or Hungarian (that thought courtesy of John Derbyshire).
Finally, you are factually incorrect about no consensus in the U.N. We absolutely have a consensus; it is simply that there are countries that oppose us and possess veto power.
Why do you cry only now, when Hussein's regime has caused the death of more than 2 million Iraqis? Note sadly the innocents that will die in this conflict, and then weep with joy at the lives they will be free to live when this is over.
"Well, I'm as much agin' killin' as ever, sir. But, it was this way, Colonel. When I started out, I felt just like you said. But, when I hear them machine guns a-goin' and all them fellers are droppin' around me, I figured that them guns was killin' hundreds, maybe thousands. There weren't nothin' anybody could do but to stop them guns. And, that's what I done."
It is right and proper that we have strong moral objections to killing. It is also important that we choose the most moral choice from those available to us. Reasonably, the alternative to this project is placing a human in harm's way.
All of this reminds me of Schumpeter's famous phrase "creative destruction". What has happened is that there was an enormous swell in the demand curve for IT workers in the late nineties with the tech boom. This drove wages up, as the supply curve lagged. As new people entered the field, the supply curve slid out to accomodate demand.
Here's where it always sucks for those workers. The demand curve contracted sharply after the tech bubble burst, so the wages dropped correspondingly. This of course is what every sector (except for the government sector, unfortunately) faces from time to time. A micro-example is the set of jobs created for building a house. Suddenly the house is finished and demand falls to zero.
So what's the long term prognosis? Unless some new wave emerges that causes another correspondingly large shift in demand for tech workers, wages will be where they are, and probably fall further with international competition.
The bright side of all of this, and it's hard for us tech workers to see, is that everyone else gets cheap software and information services. This is the way the system works. The alternative is to chase demand curve shifts and change careers every ten years or so, which is probably not such a bad idea from a spiritual point of view anyhow.
It is, assuming that you're talking about you and me living there. It's also possibly that we could meet halfway: terraform Mars to move it closer to Earth's biosphere, and then genetically engineer human(?) beings that can live there.
Nope, but that's what I used to believe. The truth is that one's principles require sacrifices sometimes. What you're saying is that there are no beliefs worth sacrifices, vis a vis, wealthy people are not required to make sacrifices for their beliefs. QED.
I think upon consideration you'll discover that's not what you believe either.
It sounds like you already know everything you need to know. Now you simply need to summon the courage of your beliefs.
You may be fired because of your beliefs. At that point, you just have to decide which is more valuable: your beliefs or your jobs (hint: your beliefs are). On the other hand, your boss may simply be having a weak moment in his own beliefs. You ought to try to talk to him about this, and not in a self-righteous way. Try to make the case that you can't build a successful company or a successful life without character. Your company and your own bank account might prosper in the short run, but eventually the way the universe works catches up to you...even if it's not before you die.
At any rate, it sounds like you've got the right tickets to begin with. Good luck.
Hook up ELIZA with her own voice and let the telemarketer spin their wheels for half an hour or so:
Telemarketer: Would you like to learn how to save on your long distance bills?
Eliza: Oh, i like to learn what to save on my long distance bills.
Telemarketer : Well, with our super saver program you can make long distance calls for just 39 cents a minute!
Eliza: Oh, i can make long distance calls for just 39 cents a minute.
Telemarketer: Uh, yes. So can I sign you up?
Eliza: You are sure?
Telemarketer: Um, yeah. Are you interested in signing up for our long distance service?
Eliza: Would you prefer if I were not interested in signing up for our long distance service?
It was the Patriot Act that enabled authorities to use foreign intelligence...something to think about.
Mystro TV is a complex multimedia system that will require vast legal agreements between consumers, networks and other multinational corporations. Additionally, it will serve two masters (consumers and networks) rather than one.
TIVO is a hard drive with multimedia software.
Guess who wins?