I'm not sure it's fair to characterize Rutan and Carmack this way.
Neither of these guys are professional rocket builders. They're both private individuals spending their (ample) money to compete for the X-prize. Rutan has previous experience building aircraft and has worked more at putting together a team and securing infrastructure to help with the build, but it's not as if Rutan is leading a billion-dollar team of button-down 1950's engineers at Boeing or something while Carmack is competing out of his back yard shed.
Just because Carmack posts his day-to-day struggles on the web for us all to enjoy (and I *do* enjoy it, BTW) doesn't imply that the SpaceShipOne team isn't encountering the exact same sorts of technical hurdles, supply problems, permit bullshit and etc. In other words, whichever wins will be a victory for the little guy because they're *both* the little guy.
Of course, the project we have to compare it to is John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace venture (since they have the decency to provide week-by-week status reports, which I consider manditory Monday reading). The folks at Armadillo are still working on getting their engines to light reliably (extra important since they're using five of them) and still haven't had anything like a successful test flight.
I dunno, man -- If I'm Carmack, I'm thinking it's time to really get at it if you're still serious about winning the X-prize. The SpaceShipOne folks seem to be putting them further and further into the rear-view. Which isn't to say they *can't* catch up; if the Armadillo team can get their engines lighting reliably, they should be about ready to bolt the thing together and start flying.
Man, this beats the heck out of money pits like the ISS, eh? Nothing like a little old fashioned get-the-prize competition to turn up some interesting stuff. Maybe a $100 billion prize for the first company to land people on Mars and bring them back ought to be next -- get the government to cooperate with permits and NASA to share their tech. I'd bet you'd see people there inside a decade.
When I try to play team sports, I usually sort of stress out when I try to do something like catch a ball because I'm afraid of messing up, and so I usually end up just hoping no one will throw the ball my way. A single-person sport would teach a person to rely on his or her self and to thus have more confidence, which would help in dealing with these "anti-intellectuals."
I don't mean to repeat myself, but team sports are good at building social skills for *EXACTLY* the reasons you mention as negatives.
Aside from learning valuable things like dealing with pressure, adversity and even (gasp) losing, team sports force you to get together with other people and spend time with them. It's a chance to learn that you're *not* better than everybody else, and to experience some of the diverse things that other people have to offer.
Trust me, I know what I'm talking about because I came to this sort of late myself. Labeling people as "stupid" or "anti-intellectual" is easily as bad as what any bully does, if a bit more subtle.
More than just physical activity, I've recently started thinking that *competetive* sports are a Good Think for a kid to experience.
I have a cousin whose parents always labeled him as "too good" for sports (so of course he ended up believing that, too). So, now not only has he never played a sport, but he looks down on people who do.
Just recently, he applied to one of the better acting schools in California. When he didn't get in, he threw a hissy fit worthy of a six year old -- stomped around the house, yelled at his folks, cried, made quasi-abusive calls to the college demanding to talk with the people in admissions, etc. This wasn't one night, either; this went on for months.
Simply put, he doesn't know how to lose. Or, maybe more specifically, he doesn't know how to react in a positive way when things don't fall the way he wants them to. All his life he's been sheltered from competition and told that he's gifted and better than everyone else and all the other crapola that parents in the 80's pushed on their kids, so when something happens to challenge this point of view he falls to pieces.
So, instead of getting a spot at another school and working on a transfer, he's convinced himself that the people in admissions are threatened by his talent and that they don't deserve him. When the school year starts, he'll be working part time at a coffee shop in San Francisco instead of going after his dreams.
Anyhow, when/if I have kids, you can bet they'll play something. Soccer, baseball, football, whatever -- aside from the other benefits of physical activity, I think it's a valuable place to learn how to deal with adversity (aka, lose).
Isolating children from peers and reality is not a good way to impart social skills. Communicating to them from a young age that they're special and better than other people is a negative towards producing functional adults.
Social skills are built through experience, now from memorizing a set of strategies for coping with the stupidity of other people. If part of that is learning to deal with people who don't like you (for any reason), well, that's life.
I see this sort of idiotic reasoning as crappy self-justification, sort of an "I'm better than everyone and that's why they hate me". People who adopt this sort of view are walking down a dangerous road towards more isolation (and probably the things that go with it, like depression or other psychological problems). It's the wrong way to go.
And I know of whence I speak -- I got my ass kicked on occassion in grade school. I had to deal with all the names and other bullshit. But hey, that's life. Learning to deal with advesity is what makes a person who they are.
That's actually not a bad idea (not for the reasons you've mentioned).
Martial Arts build self-confidence, discipline and involve teaching as well as learning (since the more advanced students will help the less advanced). This is probably a pretty good list of the things these kids need, especially if physical activity and the like aren't really their forte -- challenges are good.
I'm taking Tae Kwon Do as a 26 year-old, and I just wish I'd gotten into it sooner. I've only been at it a short time, and I already sound like one of the cheesy recruiting flyers.
As to your other point, you really shouldn't minimize the importance of a good set of social skills. Especially in our more complex world, interaction with others is a huge part of getting anything done. Being able to ask for (and accept) things, network, build relationships and function in social situations are damn nifty skills to have.
Anyhow, I think martial arts would be a good way to teach smart kids to be *smart*, rather than just bastions of niche knowledge.
But this isn't something that can bore holes in rocks or take detailed spectra of interesting spots, because there's no way to anchor the ball to the ground.
It seems to me that you could choose to stop the bestie at any time just by letting some of the air out of the bag. So long as you've remembered to include an air compressor in the design, you could just fill it back up using the local atmosphere when you were ready to get moving again.
Had this discussion, the "what would you do if you didn't need to worry about money" discussion, last weekend. The answer that popped into my head was actually a little bit shocking, even to myself.
I'd move back to Wisconsin, settle in Milwaukee where a lot of my friends ended up and open a nice Irish Pub.
It'd have a big wood bar with brass fixtures, comfortable booths with high backs, and outdoor seating for the summers. You'd be able to order quality food ranging from pastrami sandwitches to raw oysters to hot wings, and each week I'd have a special featuring food you don't see much in Wisconsin. There'd be a few big TVs to watch the Packers games during the season. And on Fridays, we'd have live jazz.
(sighs) Well, I can retire with a full pension when I'm 50 in 2027. Maybe then. Until then, it's driving a computer for me.
The perp could say "I was making a politcal parody like those pcitures of Bush next to Saddam or Osama."
Did you see the picture in question? It seems extremely unlikely that a reasonable person could take it as a parody because it is carefully created to appear original and was apparently presented as the genuine article. It was meant to be taken as an original work, not as a satirical offshoot of an original work.
You can buy a DOT certified breathalizer for about $100. A DUI in California costs about $10,000 by the time you're done with it. Hmmm. Going to have a drink now and then, don't rely on the govenrnment, do it yourself. You can also buy "go/no-go" strips for less than a dollar. Put one in your mouth and you're over/under depending on the color.
This is true.
I've actually done this -- I picked up a police-grade breathalizer, read the manual, etc. They thing I learned: These things are wildly inacurate. The margin of error seems to be about.03%, assuming that you've taken steps to ensure a good reading like rinsing your mouth out and waiting 15 minutes after your last drink.
That means that, to all available tests you could give yourself (weight/drink/time figuring, test strips, even a police breathalizer) you could be fine to drive, but the luck of the draw on the cop's equipment and you're in deep doo-doo.
Think about it: a.03% margin of error when the legal limit is.08% in most places. Imagine if radar guns could mess up the speed they clocked you at by more than a third... "Sir, I clocked you going 90 in that 65 zone".
But hey, drunk drivers are bad, so they don't deserve things like equal protection under the law or presumption of innocence.
(and no, I've never gotten a DUI or anything -- living close to BART is terrific in that way)
If they were smart they'd sign the guy. If they were *really* smart, they'd try to stomp on the album after it got good reviews, provoke a lot of press and buzz and *then* sign the guy and release the album.
Just for the record, I don't think anyone at EMI is really that smart.
Just finishing up downloading the first couple of tracks, and it's actually pretty good. I'm thinking that I'll burn a couple of copies for some folks in my office who share a similar taste in music. I don't like screwing artists so I don't usually do that sort of thing, but in this case I figure I'm just screwing some rich asshole music executive. That actually makes me feel all sort of warm and fuzzy inside...
that they haven't implemented some form of relay satellite over Mars already.
Well, they *are* using existing orbiters to communicate with the current generation of orbiters. You know, just like the headline there says.
I suspect that before any serious Mars exploration ramps up, a set of satellites in martian geosync would be a good idea. Not only would that facilitate communiation with anything actually on the planet, but it could also provide for a global positioning system.
The real issue up to this point is that we just haven't needed that sort of thing yet. If/when we send people (especially if we follow Zubrin's advice and send them for 500+ day stays, or my advice and just build a colony and get on with it), that will change. If nothing else, just increasing the amount of bits you can push by sending a constant stream of lower-power 1's and 0's to a satellite instead of screaming data at the DSN here on earth a few hours a day would probably be a big benefit to future missions.
So Doc Brown could build a time machine. He could build a sniper rifle using only the parts and engineering of the 1880's.
But he *couldn't* refine a goddamn gallon of gasoline? I mean, you've got oil and fairly advanced chemistry available to you -- what's the big hold up here? You only need enough quality to not gum up the engine on one 0-88 MPH run...
Actually, I think it would be easier to refute any claims that portions of the code were lifted now. Unlike with SCO, a full source tree exists for us to compare the potential offending code to.
As a side note, I actually feel bad for MS on this one. Seriously: This was *their* code. They paid for it, they kept it going over the last 20 years, they should be able to decide how it gets distributed.
We here at/. should all be as PO'ed by this as when we catch some asshat corp. using our code without regard to the licensing (in our case, the GPL).
I won't mirror this code any more than I'd steal my neighbor's lawn mower because someone else opened his garage door. It's not right.
Yeah, I think a lot of people stopped watching South Park after the first two seasons. The first season was shocking stuff at the time, but then they replayed it ad infinitum while they scrambled to punch out series 2, which wasn't nearly as good as it needed to be to match expectations.
Since then, SP has climbed back up to be something much better than it had ever been before. Season 6 and 7 have been as good as the Simpsons was in its heyday. It's just pushing another envelope than the Simpson was in the early '90s -- saying "shit" on TV, Lemmiwinks, Cartman's chili and some of the other holyGodIcan'tBelieveTheyDidThat moments owe their existance directly to the Simpsons.
On a slightly related note, South Park is a lot like the Simpsons in the fact that it's benefitted from having a very large cast of framiliar characters that have evolved over time. Butters, Jimmy, Timmy, Token, etc.
we lose 2 million engineering jobs, and gain 22 million pizza delivery jobs. Sounds like a great trade-off to me!
When all the tech jobs finally dry up and the only thing the US does better than the rest of the world is high-speed pizza delivery, I'll be first in line to work for Uncle Enzo. Being the Deliverator is actually sort of a long-standing ambition of mine...
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education PhD's, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Skyshadow is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills...
The Deliverator is a Type A driver with rabies. He is zeroing in on his home base, CosaNostra Pizza #3569, cranking up the left lane of CSV-5 at a hundred and twenty kilometers. His car is a black lozenge, just a dark place that reflects the tunnel of franchise signs -- the loglo. A row of orange lights burbles and churns across the front, where the grille would be if this were an air-breathing car. The orange light looks like a gasoline fire. It comes in people's rear windows, bounces off their rearview mirrors, projects a fiery mask across their eyes, reaches into their subconcious, and unearths fears of being pinned, fully conscious, under a detonating gas tank, makes them want to pull over and let the Deliverator overtake them in his black chariot of pepperoni fire...
I work for a large healthcare organization. A while back, we caught some heat because we were transferring a lot of patient data over to India for use in one of our offshore projects and a local newspaper found out about it. Our official response was "Hey, Americans do this work too. It's not necessarily safer there than here."
A month later, one of the outsourced programmers took off with a couple of backup tapes and blackmailed my company.
This exposed the real issue at hand here: Offshore workers aren't in America, which means that we found ourselves unable to bring the weight of American law enforcement to bear on this person. In America, we would have had the FBI kicking in this guy's door within the hour. Instead, this individual simply moved to a different part of India, which is apparently like moving to another planet for the purposes of getting them arrested. The issue was clamped down on by management before the resolution, but the word around the water cooler is that we just paid them off -- really, the amount of money they wanted was insignificant against the massive PR damage we were looking at.
So while it's true that a worker in America can spill private data just as easily as a worker in the third world, *getting away* with it is a completely different matter. Companies which offshore private data deserve the lawsuits they'll face when something like this actually plays out wrong...
Miriam Tauber, 24, makes no apologies for her lack of computer knowledge. To her, computers are like "moody people" who behave illogically.
Personally, I've found this "I'm ignorant and proud of it!" attitude to be a fairly common reaction to being unable to get one's head around something new. Of course, it's a lot more pathetic when it's a 24 year old (what 24 year old can't use a computer, fer chrissake?!?)
At one point, I sort of assumed that anybody could sit down and figure out a computer if they got past the intimidation factor and just took time to understand the basic paradigm by which things happen. I don't think that anymore -- instead, I've glommed onto the more cynical viewpoint that many people reach a certain age beyond which they're just basically incapable of picking up new things.
IMO, it's not *just* an age thing (look at Ms. Tauber). If you stall out learning new things for a couple of years, you lose the knack. That's why my 84 year-old grandfather can use the 'net for email, news and horse races (the guy knows more about streaming video than I do) but my various aunts and uncles can't get their heads around finding the Caps Lock key.
Anyhow, this started worrying me when I got out of college. That's why I feel it's important to read nonfiction or learn new skills (cooking, carpentry, Tae Kwon Do, whatever) and aggressively seek out new things to know.
When you take into account how expensive it is to build and maintain these things, it is pretty clear that the battlefield of the future may not have any American soldiers on it, but they will almost certainly have plenty of cannon fodder 3rd world soldiers on it.
Pft, you idiot. Non-Americans aren't people like the rest of us.
We're already halfway to where we need to be for a fully automated army. Think about it, nobody in America (at least, nobody who counts) gives a shit that tens of thousands of Iraqis got killed or maimed in the last year because the President needed a boost in the polls. Hell, a lot of people don't even care that our own servicemen and women are getting picked off at an ever-increasing rate so Bush could claim victory over the "terrorists" who so evil that they actually try and defend their own country from an invading superpower.
Do you think anyone will care about war and its consequences once we can slaughter people completely by remote control? Those peaceniks in the Pentagon must be creaming their pants over this one...
"Well before the end of the century, there will be no people on the battlefield."
"Except," he continued, "those pesky innocent civilians, who have complicated serious warmaking efforts for ages via their hostile acts of living on our battlegrounds. Well, they can now be slaughtered with even greater efficiency by soulless robots in their ever-growing search for weapons of mass destruction."
"I mean, remember that guy who stopped the tank at Tiennamen by standing in front of it? Ha! Good luck using that tactic against TankMaster v.06a! To it, that brave individual would register simple as 'non-threat to navigation object'. El squish-o."
Note to the General Dynamics guys who are working on this one: Thanks a bunch. This ought to make the life of any petty dictator, from Castro to Dick Cheney, far easier. I mean, bet you'll never see a robot put its chopper between a bunch of fleeing civilians and other robots who are massacring them.
These cultural problems would show up in reduced productivity. Rather than being worked out and adjusted for, cultural differences would have a real chance of becoming a serious issue.
The sort of problems that a multicultural development effort can cause were laid out for me at my last job -- we were a startup IP conferencing company. Roughly half the company, including the upper management and most of the developers, had come over from China within the last 2-3 years. The other half, the sales guys, marketing, QA and a release engineer (me) were all from the US.
To sum it up, it was absolutely intolerable.
First, there were essentially two offices, one speaking chinese and the other speaking english, which only interacted when forced to. You never realize how much you rely on small conversations, overheard bits of info and personal relationships until they're denied to you. Further, the company made zero effort to take down this language barrier.
Then there were the cultural problems. The Chinese work ethic (at least in that office) stressed that your contribution to the company was displayed by the number of hours you worked in any given week. So, the chinese half of the office would come in and "pace themselves" -- take long lunches (1.5+ hours, usually), eat dinner on the job, have their families stop after school, etc. Meanwhile, the Americans wanted to finish up their work and get home. I would often find myself with nothing to do but stuck at work for fear that the CEO wouldn't see me there during his nightly 7 PM rounds.
Worse than that were the not-so-obvious things, cultural problems that took time to become obvious. For example, one time diring my first month at the company, I traced an install bug to a certain developer's code (had my QA hat on that day). I mentioned it in a code review meeting, and got a response that was basically a chilly "I'm certain you are mistaken" -- a while afterwords it was pointed out to me that I'd embarressed him by pointing out the flaws in his code in front of the other developers. Too late, I'd made an enemy.
Anyhow, it was a horrible experience. Because the management apparently didn't think the cultural problems were worthy of their notice, the problems festered and grew, and in an amazingly short time the office balkanized into two camps which *hated* each other. Eventally, we stopped talking about the product and spent all our time dodging out of work and bitching about the CEO's obvious hiring of his mistress, the fact that the core code of our product was stolen from the lead developer's previous company and generally how much we hated the company but were afraid to leave (this was in the Deepest Darkest days of the recession).
Of course, the company tanked -- there's just no way it could have succeeded. It was the only time in my life I've been happy to be laid off. Looking back, I count this as a valuable lesson in the importance of morale and maintaining a cohesive team structure...
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Neither of these guys are professional rocket builders. They're both private individuals spending their (ample) money to compete for the X-prize. Rutan has previous experience building aircraft and has worked more at putting together a team and securing infrastructure to help with the build, but it's not as if Rutan is leading a billion-dollar team of button-down 1950's engineers at Boeing or something while Carmack is competing out of his back yard shed.
Just because Carmack posts his day-to-day struggles on the web for us all to enjoy (and I *do* enjoy it, BTW) doesn't imply that the SpaceShipOne team isn't encountering the exact same sorts of technical hurdles, supply problems, permit bullshit and etc. In other words, whichever wins will be a victory for the little guy because they're *both* the little guy.
Of course, the project we have to compare it to is John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace venture (since they have the decency to provide week-by-week status reports, which I consider manditory Monday reading). The folks at Armadillo are still working on getting their engines to light reliably (extra important since they're using five of them) and still haven't had anything like a successful test flight.
I dunno, man -- If I'm Carmack, I'm thinking it's time to really get at it if you're still serious about winning the X-prize. The SpaceShipOne folks seem to be putting them further and further into the rear-view. Which isn't to say they *can't* catch up; if the Armadillo team can get their engines lighting reliably, they should be about ready to bolt the thing together and start flying.
Man, this beats the heck out of money pits like the ISS, eh? Nothing like a little old fashioned get-the-prize competition to turn up some interesting stuff. Maybe a $100 billion prize for the first company to land people on Mars and bring them back ought to be next -- get the government to cooperate with permits and NASA to share their tech. I'd bet you'd see people there inside a decade.
I don't mean to repeat myself, but team sports are good at building social skills for *EXACTLY* the reasons you mention as negatives.
Aside from learning valuable things like dealing with pressure, adversity and even (gasp) losing, team sports force you to get together with other people and spend time with them. It's a chance to learn that you're *not* better than everybody else, and to experience some of the diverse things that other people have to offer.
Trust me, I know what I'm talking about because I came to this sort of late myself. Labeling people as "stupid" or "anti-intellectual" is easily as bad as what any bully does, if a bit more subtle.
I have a cousin whose parents always labeled him as "too good" for sports (so of course he ended up believing that, too). So, now not only has he never played a sport, but he looks down on people who do.
Just recently, he applied to one of the better acting schools in California. When he didn't get in, he threw a hissy fit worthy of a six year old -- stomped around the house, yelled at his folks, cried, made quasi-abusive calls to the college demanding to talk with the people in admissions, etc. This wasn't one night, either; this went on for months.
Simply put, he doesn't know how to lose. Or, maybe more specifically, he doesn't know how to react in a positive way when things don't fall the way he wants them to. All his life he's been sheltered from competition and told that he's gifted and better than everyone else and all the other crapola that parents in the 80's pushed on their kids, so when something happens to challenge this point of view he falls to pieces.
So, instead of getting a spot at another school and working on a transfer, he's convinced himself that the people in admissions are threatened by his talent and that they don't deserve him. When the school year starts, he'll be working part time at a coffee shop in San Francisco instead of going after his dreams.
Anyhow, when/if I have kids, you can bet they'll play something. Soccer, baseball, football, whatever -- aside from the other benefits of physical activity, I think it's a valuable place to learn how to deal with adversity (aka, lose).
Isolating children from peers and reality is not a good way to impart social skills. Communicating to them from a young age that they're special and better than other people is a negative towards producing functional adults.
Social skills are built through experience, now from memorizing a set of strategies for coping with the stupidity of other people. If part of that is learning to deal with people who don't like you (for any reason), well, that's life.
I see this sort of idiotic reasoning as crappy self-justification, sort of an "I'm better than everyone and that's why they hate me". People who adopt this sort of view are walking down a dangerous road towards more isolation (and probably the things that go with it, like depression or other psychological problems). It's the wrong way to go.
And I know of whence I speak -- I got my ass kicked on occassion in grade school. I had to deal with all the names and other bullshit. But hey, that's life. Learning to deal with advesity is what makes a person who they are.
Martial Arts build self-confidence, discipline and involve teaching as well as learning (since the more advanced students will help the less advanced). This is probably a pretty good list of the things these kids need, especially if physical activity and the like aren't really their forte -- challenges are good.
I'm taking Tae Kwon Do as a 26 year-old, and I just wish I'd gotten into it sooner. I've only been at it a short time, and I already sound like one of the cheesy recruiting flyers.
As to your other point, you really shouldn't minimize the importance of a good set of social skills. Especially in our more complex world, interaction with others is a huge part of getting anything done. Being able to ask for (and accept) things, network, build relationships and function in social situations are damn nifty skills to have.
Anyhow, I think martial arts would be a good way to teach smart kids to be *smart*, rather than just bastions of niche knowledge.
It seems to me that you could choose to stop the bestie at any time just by letting some of the air out of the bag. So long as you've remembered to include an air compressor in the design, you could just fill it back up using the local atmosphere when you were ready to get moving again.
(dives for cover)
I'd move back to Wisconsin, settle in Milwaukee where a lot of my friends ended up and open a nice Irish Pub.
It'd have a big wood bar with brass fixtures, comfortable booths with high backs, and outdoor seating for the summers. You'd be able to order quality food ranging from pastrami sandwitches to raw oysters to hot wings, and each week I'd have a special featuring food you don't see much in Wisconsin. There'd be a few big TVs to watch the Packers games during the season. And on Fridays, we'd have live jazz.
(sighs) Well, I can retire with a full pension when I'm 50 in 2027. Maybe then. Until then, it's driving a computer for me.
Personally, I woulda sued... Well... Me.
Did you see the picture in question? It seems extremely unlikely that a reasonable person could take it as a parody because it is carefully created to appear original and was apparently presented as the genuine article. It was meant to be taken as an original work, not as a satirical offshoot of an original work.
This is true.
I've actually done this -- I picked up a police-grade breathalizer, read the manual, etc. They thing I learned: These things are wildly inacurate. The margin of error seems to be about .03%, assuming that you've taken steps to ensure a good reading like rinsing your mouth out and waiting 15 minutes after your last drink.
That means that, to all available tests you could give yourself (weight/drink/time figuring, test strips, even a police breathalizer) you could be fine to drive, but the luck of the draw on the cop's equipment and you're in deep doo-doo.
Think about it: a .03% margin of error when the legal limit is .08% in most places. Imagine if radar guns could mess up the speed they clocked you at by more than a third... "Sir, I clocked you going 90 in that 65 zone".
But hey, drunk drivers are bad, so they don't deserve things like equal protection under the law or presumption of innocence.
(and no, I've never gotten a DUI or anything -- living close to BART is terrific in that way)
Just for the record, I don't think anyone at EMI is really that smart.
Just finishing up downloading the first couple of tracks, and it's actually pretty good. I'm thinking that I'll burn a couple of copies for some folks in my office who share a similar taste in music. I don't like screwing artists so I don't usually do that sort of thing, but in this case I figure I'm just screwing some rich asshole music executive. That actually makes me feel all sort of warm and fuzzy inside...
Well, they *are* using existing orbiters to communicate with the current generation of orbiters. You know, just like the headline there says.
I suspect that before any serious Mars exploration ramps up, a set of satellites in martian geosync would be a good idea. Not only would that facilitate communiation with anything actually on the planet, but it could also provide for a global positioning system.
The real issue up to this point is that we just haven't needed that sort of thing yet. If/when we send people (especially if we follow Zubrin's advice and send them for 500+ day stays, or my advice and just build a colony and get on with it), that will change. If nothing else, just increasing the amount of bits you can push by sending a constant stream of lower-power 1's and 0's to a satellite instead of screaming data at the DSN here on earth a few hours a day would probably be a big benefit to future missions.
But he *couldn't* refine a goddamn gallon of gasoline? I mean, you've got oil and fairly advanced chemistry available to you -- what's the big hold up here? You only need enough quality to not gum up the engine on one 0-88 MPH run...
As a side note, I actually feel bad for MS on this one. Seriously: This was *their* code. They paid for it, they kept it going over the last 20 years, they should be able to decide how it gets distributed.
We here at /. should all be as PO'ed by this as when we catch some asshat corp. using our code without regard to the licensing (in our case, the GPL).
I won't mirror this code any more than I'd steal my neighbor's lawn mower because someone else opened his garage door. It's not right.
Since then, SP has climbed back up to be something much better than it had ever been before. Season 6 and 7 have been as good as the Simpsons was in its heyday. It's just pushing another envelope than the Simpson was in the early '90s -- saying "shit" on TV, Lemmiwinks, Cartman's chili and some of the other holyGodIcan'tBelieveTheyDidThat moments owe their existance directly to the Simpsons.
On a slightly related note, South Park is a lot like the Simpsons in the fact that it's benefitted from having a very large cast of framiliar characters that have evolved over time. Butters, Jimmy, Timmy, Token, etc.
When all the tech jobs finally dry up and the only thing the US does better than the rest of the world is high-speed pizza delivery, I'll be first in line to work for Uncle Enzo. Being the Deliverator is actually sort of a long-standing ambition of mine...
The Deliverator used to make software. Still does, sometimes. But if life were a mellow elementary school run by well-meaning education PhD's, the Deliverator's report card would say: "Skyshadow is so bright and creative but needs to work harder on his cooperation skills...
The Deliverator is a Type A driver with rabies. He is zeroing in on his home base, CosaNostra Pizza #3569, cranking up the left lane of CSV-5 at a hundred and twenty kilometers. His car is a black lozenge, just a dark place that reflects the tunnel of franchise signs -- the loglo. A row of orange lights burbles and churns across the front, where the grille would be if this were an air-breathing car. The orange light looks like a gasoline fire. It comes in people's rear windows, bounces off their rearview mirrors, projects a fiery mask across their eyes, reaches into their subconcious, and unearths fears of being pinned, fully conscious, under a detonating gas tank, makes them want to pull over and let the Deliverator overtake them in his black chariot of pepperoni fire...
Guess my sig goes double now...
I work for a large healthcare organization. A while back, we caught some heat because we were transferring a lot of patient data over to India for use in one of our offshore projects and a local newspaper found out about it. Our official response was "Hey, Americans do this work too. It's not necessarily safer there than here."
A month later, one of the outsourced programmers took off with a couple of backup tapes and blackmailed my company.
This exposed the real issue at hand here: Offshore workers aren't in America, which means that we found ourselves unable to bring the weight of American law enforcement to bear on this person. In America, we would have had the FBI kicking in this guy's door within the hour. Instead, this individual simply moved to a different part of India, which is apparently like moving to another planet for the purposes of getting them arrested. The issue was clamped down on by management before the resolution, but the word around the water cooler is that we just paid them off -- really, the amount of money they wanted was insignificant against the massive PR damage we were looking at.
So while it's true that a worker in America can spill private data just as easily as a worker in the third world, *getting away* with it is a completely different matter. Companies which offshore private data deserve the lawsuits they'll face when something like this actually plays out wrong...
Personally, I've found this "I'm ignorant and proud of it!" attitude to be a fairly common reaction to being unable to get one's head around something new. Of course, it's a lot more pathetic when it's a 24 year old (what 24 year old can't use a computer, fer chrissake?!?)
At one point, I sort of assumed that anybody could sit down and figure out a computer if they got past the intimidation factor and just took time to understand the basic paradigm by which things happen. I don't think that anymore -- instead, I've glommed onto the more cynical viewpoint that many people reach a certain age beyond which they're just basically incapable of picking up new things.
IMO, it's not *just* an age thing (look at Ms. Tauber). If you stall out learning new things for a couple of years, you lose the knack. That's why my 84 year-old grandfather can use the 'net for email, news and horse races (the guy knows more about streaming video than I do) but my various aunts and uncles can't get their heads around finding the Caps Lock key.
Anyhow, this started worrying me when I got out of college. That's why I feel it's important to read nonfiction or learn new skills (cooking, carpentry, Tae Kwon Do, whatever) and aggressively seek out new things to know.
Use it or lose it.
In the release management profession, we prefer to think of that as more of an "escape" than a "release".
(cue the quotes about Klingon software)
Pft, you idiot. Non-Americans aren't people like the rest of us.
We're already halfway to where we need to be for a fully automated army. Think about it, nobody in America (at least, nobody who counts) gives a shit that tens of thousands of Iraqis got killed or maimed in the last year because the President needed a boost in the polls. Hell, a lot of people don't even care that our own servicemen and women are getting picked off at an ever-increasing rate so Bush could claim victory over the "terrorists" who so evil that they actually try and defend their own country from an invading superpower.
Do you think anyone will care about war and its consequences once we can slaughter people completely by remote control? Those peaceniks in the Pentagon must be creaming their pants over this one...
"Except," he continued, "those pesky innocent civilians, who have complicated serious warmaking efforts for ages via their hostile acts of living on our battlegrounds. Well, they can now be slaughtered with even greater efficiency by soulless robots in their ever-growing search for weapons of mass destruction."
"I mean, remember that guy who stopped the tank at Tiennamen by standing in front of it? Ha! Good luck using that tactic against TankMaster v.06a! To it, that brave individual would register simple as 'non-threat to navigation object'. El squish-o."
Note to the General Dynamics guys who are working on this one: Thanks a bunch. This ought to make the life of any petty dictator, from Castro to Dick Cheney, far easier. I mean, bet you'll never see a robot put its chopper between a bunch of fleeing civilians and other robots who are massacring them.
The sort of problems that a multicultural development effort can cause were laid out for me at my last job -- we were a startup IP conferencing company. Roughly half the company, including the upper management and most of the developers, had come over from China within the last 2-3 years. The other half, the sales guys, marketing, QA and a release engineer (me) were all from the US.
To sum it up, it was absolutely intolerable.
First, there were essentially two offices, one speaking chinese and the other speaking english, which only interacted when forced to. You never realize how much you rely on small conversations, overheard bits of info and personal relationships until they're denied to you. Further, the company made zero effort to take down this language barrier.
Then there were the cultural problems. The Chinese work ethic (at least in that office) stressed that your contribution to the company was displayed by the number of hours you worked in any given week. So, the chinese half of the office would come in and "pace themselves" -- take long lunches (1.5+ hours, usually), eat dinner on the job, have their families stop after school, etc. Meanwhile, the Americans wanted to finish up their work and get home. I would often find myself with nothing to do but stuck at work for fear that the CEO wouldn't see me there during his nightly 7 PM rounds.
Worse than that were the not-so-obvious things, cultural problems that took time to become obvious. For example, one time diring my first month at the company, I traced an install bug to a certain developer's code (had my QA hat on that day). I mentioned it in a code review meeting, and got a response that was basically a chilly "I'm certain you are mistaken" -- a while afterwords it was pointed out to me that I'd embarressed him by pointing out the flaws in his code in front of the other developers. Too late, I'd made an enemy.
Anyhow, it was a horrible experience. Because the management apparently didn't think the cultural problems were worthy of their notice, the problems festered and grew, and in an amazingly short time the office balkanized into two camps which *hated* each other. Eventally, we stopped talking about the product and spent all our time dodging out of work and bitching about the CEO's obvious hiring of his mistress, the fact that the core code of our product was stolen from the lead developer's previous company and generally how much we hated the company but were afraid to leave (this was in the Deepest Darkest days of the recession).
Of course, the company tanked -- there's just no way it could have succeeded. It was the only time in my life I've been happy to be laid off. Looking back, I count this as a valuable lesson in the importance of morale and maintaining a cohesive team structure...