... Dubya's crowd, I'm afraid this has been going on for much longer...
Back in the 50's and 60's there were research organizations throughout corporate America -- even a number of basic research departments (yes, that's right -- BASIC research, not just APPLIED research).
And corporate America had at least one eye focused on the big picture, making plans beyond the next quarter and being more concerned about the welfare of the company than their bonuses and severance packages.
Over the intervening years, we have seen not only basic, but applied research departments closed down in all but the largest companies. Emphasis has shifted to the current quarter (never mind the next quarter, we'll deal with it next quarter).
All that Dubya can take credit for is using the Religious Right to pummel the weakened science establishment. And the most likely reason he has chosen to attack the scientific establishment is that they ARE weakened and do not represent any sort of political (or other) power in contemporary society. Dubya picks his victims well.
The fault is in our society, and its view of science. Why we belittle the importance of science, and ignore the methodology of the scientific method, I know not, but it is manifested in the declining fraction of college and university science graduates for a much longer time than Dubya has been a factor.
Dubya is more the symptom of the problem than the cause.
Go ahead and compile the list of impressive references that say why you shouldn't chain yourself to IE.
And throw in some references to companies or organization's that have successfully abandoned IE.
It would be nice to see if IBM or your favorite local contractor will give you a quote for software support of Firefox/Mozilla/Opera/etc (I'm sure they will), just so you can prove that support IS available. The cost doesn't matter, just the proof that support exists.
But be sure to wrap it all in an obsequious concern for the reader's well-being...
"Sir, there's some rumors of a nasty goomba-virus out there, and what with all these references about how bad IE is, well, I'm just concerned that the senior management might take it poorly if they found out that we had committed to use IE in the face of all this, if we should spend a lot of money recovering from it, like we did for that Code Red thing, or the XYZ worm, that is. I just wanted to make sure you had all the information so you could support your decision should any questions be raised down the road, sir..."
Self-preservation is the only currency one has with pointy-headed management...
Sun won't be the one to clean room them either; they don't have to.
However, IBM has the capability to clean-room reverse engineer a free and open spec. So long as they are pushing a J2EE-centric application strategy opposing.NET, they have every reason to make a freely open implementation available to the rest of the world.
You're wrong about the motives of bin Laden -- he's merely another power-hungry despot who uses religious fanaticism to depose the Saud royals and place himself on the throne. His #2 is basically out to exterminate all Israelis, out of a deep and blinding hatred for them. Their use of radical Islamic fundamentalism is just a tool to achieve their own ends.
Without the topmost leadership, Al Qaeda would be much easier to deal with, as these men are talented leaders and planners who set policies and strategies that contribute significantly to Al Qaeda'a successes. We should move forward methodically and decisively to remove those individuals from our Reality and let them carry their grievances to Allah or Satan in person.
Hasn't it been already established that terrorists are not going after the guarded targets like nuclear reactors and such, using bioweapons, captured nukes or dirty bombs and the like?
Let's review some notably successful attacks and see if we can learn something...
In the destruction of the WTC, they used airline tickets and box cutters to commandeer commercial airlines and crash them into buildings having significant economic and human impact.
In the London tube bombings they repeated a tactic already proven in Spain, to use relatively small amounts of common explosives to wreck mass transit facilities.
In other parts of the world (including a prior attempt on the WTC) they have used car and truck bombs made of kerosene and fertilizer to achieve frighteningly effective results.
There is an awful lot of effort being expended protecting us from complex high-tech attacks, when the demonstrated pattern has been for Al Qaeda to use relatively low-tech methods and strike at targets that are easy to hit and achieve significant headlines. If we should learn anything from this, it is that Al Qaeda spends its terrorist money well, getting maximum effect for a minimum of resource.
What we need is more thought and less hasty action, so that we too, might be capable of effective action in return. Pointless blustering actions like this, intended to reassure the public and sustain existing administrations' terms in office, do more to aide and abet the enemy than to frustrate them. We need reason and logic as our allies, instead of keeping them locked in the basement.
Not to say that we shouldn't adopt reasonable means of securing high-impact targets, but we are ignoring medium and low-impact targets in favor of protecting the high-impact targets against exceedingly improbable attacks.
And of course the Real Problem is that it is impossible to protect everything. We must work on improving our intelligence operations against them, and surgically taking out Al Qaeda FROM THE TOP DOWN, if we are ever to achieve any sort of victory over them.
Why surgically? Because when you use a hammer to smite a fire ant, you wind up dealing with many more fire ants than you can handle. Flashy methods (e.g., large-scale military invasions) play right into the hands of Al Qaeda, becoming free recruiting tools and bringing millions of new budding terrorists into the fray.
Use covert assassinations instead, and spend more effort on attacking them in this way than on elaborate schemes to defend that which cannot be defended against every possible attack.
"When in Danger, or in Doubt, Run in Circles,
Scream and Shout" -- Laurence J. Peter.
Given that you are using 56K modem over a national telephone network that was originally based on analog circuits, and had evolved to a digital switched circuit network thirty years ago, why aren't you wondering how it is that you are still using a 56K modem when the bulk of the national communications infrastructure is digital? Shouldn't even a tiny bit of progress over the past 30 years have resulted in your landline being a fully digital connection by now, removing the need for a 56K dial-up modem?
Seems to me that any properly managed public utility would be an all digital one by now, using DSL technology as the standard offering to every customer, for the same amount of money (or less) than the ancient analog switched circuits used to cost.
So why is it that our "deregulated" telecommunications industry is lagging so far behind most of the rest of the world in bringing us the benefits of more cost-effective technology?
Has deregulation failed? Are the descendants of the Bell System merely milking the captive public, and using the former regulatory agencies to prevent competition or progress from ever occurring?
Why don't we have a vibrant industry of an alternate phone network over cable? VoIP is struggling to break out and fill that niche, but it just isn't thriving here in the Land of Opportunity.
In Switzerland, Skype is enjoying booming growth, and charging a tiny fraction of what the domestic US phone companies do to provide global call placement. If the call management function is so easy and cheap to provide, why don't we do this?
Why don't we have digital networks to every fixed phone line? The Koreans and Japanese do so, at transmission rates of 100 Mbps!! I don't accept the argument that it is because they are so densely populated, as Canada has fiber darn near everywhere, across large expanses of sparsely populated or unpopulated countryside.
If a municipality wants to provide WiFi (or WiMAX) as an inducement for new business to relocate there or to add an incentive for tourism, more power to them, but WHY DOESN'T EVERYONE IN AMERICA HAVE AT LEAST 1MBS DIGITAL SERVICE AT COMPARABLE PRICING TO 56K DIALUP CONNECTIONS?
WHY should, in this day and age, 56Kbps dialup access be cheaper than 1Mbps DSL?
It all depends on what kind of "work" office you have. If you're crammed into a cube with 3 other occupants (and I've seen & endured far worse), with 4 sets of phones, beepers, guests intruding on your concentration, then maybe a "home" office would work better for you.
If your "home" office is not exactly a fortress of solitude, such that you can't get work done there due to the distractions of phone, kids, or any of a number of other things that can break you out of work mode, then maybe an away-from-home work environment will work better for you.
If neither a place of business or your home is conducive to work from, you need to find/make a place that is.
While it's true that it probably has happened many times before, and we never knew it because we NEVER LOOKED!?!... the best argument for attempting to repair the tile filler extrusions is to confirm that it works.
I believe that the plethora of cameras that monitored this launch have given us so much data, along with the scrutiny applied upon arriving in orbit, that we will be able to improve things enormously.
We shoulda done this decades ago... Looking for problems before they raise up and kill people is just sound development practice... We have been very unimaginative in our search for unforeseen gotchas -- probably due to budgetary considerations.
I would, as an engineer, and mindful of the likelihood that this has probably happened before, opt to repair some and leave others as-is, so we can see the before-and-after in each case. Real world data beats carefully crafted experimental simulations every time. Of course, if you're going to trim the extruded material, one would have to be an idiot to leave the extrusions sticking out on a critical portion of the vehicle (assuming there exist portions that are less critical where they could be left alone).
Remember, this is an experimental space vehicle, and part of the experiment is to try to make it safer, without harming the occupants in the process.
BUT IT IS AN EXPERIMENTAL VEHICLE AND NOTHING IS GUARANTEED.
Don't think those who venture forth in it are unaware of the risk. Every one of them has the past disasters and the words of Alan Shepard tatooed on his/her heart:
"You know, being a test pilot isn't always the healthiest business in the world."
And knowing that, they don't hestitate to take the risk.
All that being said, the easiest and most certain way of reducing ice build-up on the external tank is top STOP LAUNCHING IT OUT OF A SWAMP. For instance, we could approach Chile and offer to lease a launch site in the Atacama desert -- the driest desert on earth, located at about 4000m altitude, and at less than 20 degrees off the equator, compared to the Cape Canaveral launch site's 28+ degrees off the equator. In addition to virtually eliminating the problems of ice build-up, you could increase payload capacity considerably by virtue of the 8 degrees closer to the equator and the 4000m higher starting point for the climb into space -- that's 4000m through the densest portion of the atmosphere.
Of course, there are the political impossibilities, like getting Dubya to explain this to his bro' Jeb about the need to take all that lovely gummint cash flow away from the Florida economy and send it offshore. Yeah, that'd be a toughie.
... that Bill Gates is doing more to destroy the odious concept of "software patents" than any amount of well-reasoned logic ever could.
Hell, let him patent the combination of individual letters into words, and the mathematical combination of numeric digits into other numeric digits -- assuming he hasn't already.
Whereas winning monopolistic dominance over the personal computer industry via dirty tricks, deceit, and ruthlessness wasn't enough to inflame people's sensibilities, allowing a single company to lock up an entire economy by exploiting the flaws in our patent system might be enough to provoke a response.
Hopefully that response will not be to award him the ownership papers to the United States.
1) would-be open source developers would have to pay a subscription fee to gain access to the "open code"...
2) and also sign NDA's prohibiting them from ever using or revealing any aspect of the code they had witnessed, in any other project for all eternity...
3) and agree to sign over any changees they submit to the protective care of the MPL QA Council (an affiliated steering committee composed of selected Microsoft employees)...
4) and sign over all patents and copyrights to the MPL QA Council.
This would be "sold" to corporate customers as a means of making sure their input made it into their Microsoft products, with the requisite vetting of user-supplied fixes and changes being their guarantee that no security holes would be introduced by those notorious "open source" developers.
maybe this will speed along a space shuttle replacement.
If they had continued with development of the X-33 instead of turning it over to the Air Force and canceling the NASA development work, we would probably have a replacement by now. Instead, it will take probably a decade and substantially more money to bring a replacement vehicle to fruition from this point.
I suspect that politically, the manned space program is dead here in the US, given the huge budget deficits and slipping technology base.
There is the possibility that a superior insulating technology will be arrived at quickly and the remaining few shuttles might fly again, but I wouldn't bet on it. There is too much to be gained politically by stabbing the wounded for that to be allowed to happen.
... it's like saying owning a screwdriver is illegal because it could be used to take the hinges off an insecure door.
Not Quite -- more like saying possession of a slim jim is illegal, despite it being a possible legitimate tool of locksmiths or an enabling tool of crime in the possession of a car thief.
Anybody know if possession of a slim jim is illegal anywhere in the US?
... documenting the history behind the concept of "Daylight Savings Time": Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, which documents the use of DST as a bogus issue used by newspapers and politicians over the past hundred years whenever they feel a need to wind up the public and boost circulation or, to wind up the public and divert attention from political issues of significance.
Suddenly those Turkish sheep that followed each other over the cliff don't seem so stoopid after all...
Then you can really appreciate the following logic --
If having DST 7 months out of 12 is good, and 9 months out of 12 is better, then BEST OF ALL WOULD BE... DST ALL YEAR ROUND!!!
We would be saving that extra hour of daylight all year long! The benefits are incalculable -- the savings from decreasing our dependence on imported oil alone are incredible!
Now rush right out and contact your legislators with this fantastic concept.
Computer Science has never been a "popular" major in the USofA, and has suffered right along with other technical majors, like engineering and the sciences, when the additional disincentives of age discrimination and pummeling the graduates with the horde of pointy-haired-managers for which American business has become a haven.
Go check out a copy of The Peter Principle (copyright 1969 -- pick up a used copy from Amazon) to confirm that the current decrepit state of our managerial skilz is nothing new.
When the nation's leaders stop rewarding managerial ineptitude and punishing technical workers, we might have a chance of turning this around. You can count on other nations (China, anyone?) not making this particular blunder.
If it offers hope to anyone, in today's WSJ (subscription required) there is a piece advocating outsourcing of our outrageously overpaid top management to bring excessive top management compensation under control. It's the 7th most-emailed article today. But it will take a long time after such practices begin (assuming they ever begin) before they filter down through the corporate structure and clueless incompetence is no longer rewarded.
G5s cannot go into laptops... ... IBM's announcement of the low power G5 eliminates this as a viable rant...
G4 development stalled... ... check out Freescale's e600 line of single-core/dual-core G4s -- G4 development doesn't seem to be stalled to me, in fact, it looks to be possibly better tha IBM's notebook-capable G5...
A Steve Jobs control issue meltdown is hardly a conspiracy theory, it's more of an established pattern of behavior (I know, that's not what the referenced article was about, but it seems to be the most rational explanation for the switch).
Any good conspiracy theory has got to include Microsoft, as they have such a marvelous track record of success through conspiring to take away the oxygen of everyone else in the room. If you want a conspiracy theory, how about Microsoft soaking up IBM's fab capacity or engineering resource, leaving Apple to twist in the wind? That's lame too, but still better than your "better theory".
"When better conspiracy theories are needed, they will be found on Slashdot".
While it would be just the thing for a scratch of shallow cut, if it were applied to a deeper cut you might only manage to seal off the blood loss to the outside world, and continue hemorrhaging internally.
OK, so at the retail level, exactly what IS the difference in price between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray?
If it's only about a buck, then the price is probably secondary to the quality and quantity of the data contained therein, so that if a Blu-Ray disk can contain more goodies than a single-layer HD-DVD, it would get the nod.
Other factors include the cost of enabling an HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive to also read (and write) CDs and contemporary DVDs. What is the projected cost to the consumer of each of these types of drive?
For all the furor surrounding the HD disk format issue, I have not seen any estimates for these important data.
I was going to toss my rant into the ring...
on
Improving Education?
·
· Score: 1
... but then I noticed that (at least when filtered at a threshhold of 4 or better) that I was in more-or-less complete agreement with the general flavor of the responses thus far.
The problem in our educational system is not that we don't spend enough on it, it's not that we're teaching the wrong way or the wrong subjects in our schools, it's a fundamental problem of how our society treats an "education".
It's a cultural, rather than a structural problem. In the US of A, academic excellence is simply *not* the goal our society has when sending kids to school. We send our children to school for the following reasons:
to keep them occupied while Mom and Dad are at work.
because it's the law that they have to go to some school, and if we were to home-school them, we would run afoul of reason#1.
so they can develop socially -- and we put 100% of the responsibility for that on the school, which is exactly where it DOES NOT belong.
So far as I can see, the greatest motivation people (kids) have to attend school is to participate in the social interactions -- which at an institutional level are most prominently displayed in their athletic programs, not in their academic programs.
The only reason many poor inner-city kids (yes, I know I'm stereotyping, bear with me a moment) have to attend school is to be part of the sports team (football, basketball, etc) and set foot upon that path up the economic staircase, regardless of the fact that it has the worst success rate of any path they could choose. And in the suburban schools, the motivation is no different, although the goals are typically greater social standing rather than a career in the pro ball teams. The rarity is the kid who buckles down and studies to attain scholarships or simply to LEARN.
If we look at poor rural areas of India, or at the successes of the Asian countries in promoting education, do we see athletics as having any significant role in a school? I think not (some knowledgeable soul can step in right now and correct me if I'm way off base in this).
While there is a pressing need for an athletic program in our schools, it should not be about competition, but about healthy exercise. There is simply no need to have competitive athletics in our primary or secondary school systems.
Obviously, these recommendations are never going to fly in the land of Ignorance. There is too much money and power invested in the status quo. So what can you, as a parent, REALLY DO?
Make the sacrifices necessary and home school your kid(s). You don't have to be an expert teacher, you can recruit help (ideas, plans, tutors) from all kinds of places. But your job is to organize things and be sure that it is working. You will need to somehow manage the socialization aspects as well. And the athletics. Locate a local swim team or soccer club -- but make it one that is NOT affiliated with a school. There's nothing wrong with competitive athletics, except when they occur in a scholastic framework and distort the social values away from education.
If you can't do that, consider moving to another country. I find Canadians to be well adjusted (and polite!), remarkably creative and very well educated. Or move to India or an Asian country.
enroll your kids in a good private school. It will be cheaper to leave the country, and it won't be as effective as either of the first two. But it will be head and shoulders above taking your chances in the public school system.
For the record, I took option 3 with my kids. They turned out OK, and I spent a fortune in out-of-state college education, after spending another fortune for 12 years of private schooling for each of them -- I might have made a mistake there, but they went to good schools and had the opportunity to learn from the best. At a rough guess (as the song says, don't do the math), about a half million, all told.
I thought that NeoOffice/J used Java to integrate with the OS X GUI, providing a Java layer for the OpenOffice innards to paint the screen through.
Or is this announcement something similar to the recent pronouncement that with 10.4, APIs were frozen, so developers would no longer have to target a morphing platform?
I believe that either the same or a similar situation exists with Camino.
Steve has burned his bridges behind him with Motorola, now IBM, and when he becomes an annoyance not worth the trouble for Intel to bow to him, AMD's the only place left to go.
Slashdot Mirror
... Dubya's crowd, I'm afraid this has been going on for much longer...
Back in the 50's and 60's there were research organizations throughout corporate America -- even a number of basic research departments (yes, that's right -- BASIC research, not just APPLIED research).
And corporate America had at least one eye focused on the big picture, making plans beyond the next quarter and being more concerned about the welfare of the company than their bonuses and severance packages.
Over the intervening years, we have seen not only basic, but applied research departments closed down in all but the largest companies. Emphasis has shifted to the current quarter (never mind the next quarter, we'll deal with it next quarter).
All that Dubya can take credit for is using the Religious Right to pummel the weakened science establishment. And the most likely reason he has chosen to attack the scientific establishment is that they ARE weakened and do not represent any sort of political (or other) power in contemporary society. Dubya picks his victims well.
The fault is in our society, and its view of science. Why we belittle the importance of science, and ignore the methodology of the scientific method, I know not, but it is manifested in the declining fraction of college and university science graduates for a much longer time than Dubya has been a factor.
Dubya is more the symptom of the problem than the cause.
Go ahead and compile the list of impressive references that say why you shouldn't chain yourself to IE.
And throw in some references to companies or organization's that have successfully abandoned IE.
It would be nice to see if IBM or your favorite local contractor will give you a quote for software support of Firefox/Mozilla/Opera/etc (I'm sure they will), just so you can prove that support IS available. The cost doesn't matter, just the proof that support exists.
But be sure to wrap it all in an obsequious concern for the reader's well-being...
"Sir, there's some rumors of a nasty goomba-virus out there, and what with all these references about how bad IE is, well, I'm just concerned that the senior management might take it poorly if they found out that we had committed to use IE in the face of all this, if we should spend a lot of money recovering from it, like we did for that Code Red thing, or the XYZ worm, that is. I just wanted to make sure you had all the information so you could support your decision should any questions be raised down the road, sir..."
Self-preservation is the only currency one has with pointy-headed management...
However, IBM has the capability to clean-room reverse engineer a free and open spec. So long as they are pushing a J2EE-centric application strategy opposing .NET, they have every reason to make a freely open implementation available to the rest of the world.
Hope springs eternal ...
You're wrong about the motives of bin Laden -- he's merely another power-hungry despot who uses religious fanaticism to depose the Saud royals and place himself on the throne. His #2 is basically out to exterminate all Israelis, out of a deep and blinding hatred for them. Their use of radical Islamic fundamentalism is just a tool to achieve their own ends.
Without the topmost leadership, Al Qaeda would be much easier to deal with, as these men are talented leaders and planners who set policies and strategies that contribute significantly to Al Qaeda'a successes. We should move forward methodically and decisively to remove those individuals from our Reality and let them carry their grievances to Allah or Satan in person.
Let's review some notably successful attacks and see if we can learn something...
There is an awful lot of effort being expended protecting us from complex high-tech attacks, when the demonstrated pattern has been for Al Qaeda to use relatively low-tech methods and strike at targets that are easy to hit and achieve significant headlines. If we should learn anything from this, it is that Al Qaeda spends its terrorist money well, getting maximum effect for a minimum of resource.
What we need is more thought and less hasty action, so that we too, might be capable of effective action in return. Pointless blustering actions like this, intended to reassure the public and sustain existing administrations' terms in office, do more to aide and abet the enemy than to frustrate them. We need reason and logic as our allies, instead of keeping them locked in the basement.
Not to say that we shouldn't adopt reasonable means of securing high-impact targets, but we are ignoring medium and low-impact targets in favor of protecting the high-impact targets against exceedingly improbable attacks.
And of course the Real Problem is that it is impossible to protect everything. We must work on improving our intelligence operations against them, and surgically taking out Al Qaeda FROM THE TOP DOWN, if we are ever to achieve any sort of victory over them.
Why surgically? Because when you use a hammer to smite a fire ant, you wind up dealing with many more fire ants than you can handle. Flashy methods (e.g., large-scale military invasions) play right into the hands of Al Qaeda, becoming free recruiting tools and bringing millions of new budding terrorists into the fray.
Use covert assassinations instead, and spend more effort on attacking them in this way than on elaborate schemes to defend that which cannot be defended against every possible attack.
"When in Danger, or in Doubt, Run in Circles, Scream and Shout" -- Laurence J. Peter.
Given that you are using 56K modem over a national telephone network that was originally based on analog circuits, and had evolved to a digital switched circuit network thirty years ago, why aren't you wondering how it is that you are still using a 56K modem when the bulk of the national communications infrastructure is digital? Shouldn't even a tiny bit of progress over the past 30 years have resulted in your landline being a fully digital connection by now, removing the need for a 56K dial-up modem?
Seems to me that any properly managed public utility would be an all digital one by now, using DSL technology as the standard offering to every customer, for the same amount of money (or less) than the ancient analog switched circuits used to cost.
So why is it that our "deregulated" telecommunications industry is lagging so far behind most of the rest of the world in bringing us the benefits of more cost-effective technology?
Has deregulation failed? Are the descendants of the Bell System merely milking the captive public, and using the former regulatory agencies to prevent competition or progress from ever occurring?
Why don't we have a vibrant industry of an alternate phone network over cable? VoIP is struggling to break out and fill that niche, but it just isn't thriving here in the Land of Opportunity.
In Switzerland, Skype is enjoying booming growth, and charging a tiny fraction of what the domestic US phone companies do to provide global call placement. If the call management function is so easy and cheap to provide, why don't we do this?
Why don't we have digital networks to every fixed phone line? The Koreans and Japanese do so, at transmission rates of 100 Mbps!! I don't accept the argument that it is because they are so densely populated, as Canada has fiber darn near everywhere, across large expanses of sparsely populated or unpopulated countryside.
If a municipality wants to provide WiFi (or WiMAX) as an inducement for new business to relocate there or to add an incentive for tourism, more power to them, but WHY DOESN'T EVERYONE IN AMERICA HAVE AT LEAST 1MBS DIGITAL SERVICE AT COMPARABLE PRICING TO 56K DIALUP CONNECTIONS?
WHY should, in this day and age, 56Kbps dialup access be cheaper than 1Mbps DSL?
It all depends on what kind of "work" office you have. If you're crammed into a cube with 3 other occupants (and I've seen & endured far worse), with 4 sets of phones, beepers, guests intruding on your concentration, then maybe a "home" office would work better for you.
If your "home" office is not exactly a fortress of solitude, such that you can't get work done there due to the distractions of phone, kids, or any of a number of other things that can break you out of work mode, then maybe an away-from-home work environment will work better for you.
If neither a place of business or your home is conducive to work from, you need to find/make a place that is.
I believe that the plethora of cameras that monitored this launch have given us so much data, along with the scrutiny applied upon arriving in orbit, that we will be able to improve things enormously.
We shoulda done this decades ago... Looking for problems before they raise up and kill people is just sound development practice... We have been very unimaginative in our search for unforeseen gotchas -- probably due to budgetary considerations.
I would, as an engineer, and mindful of the likelihood that this has probably happened before, opt to repair some and leave others as-is, so we can see the before-and-after in each case. Real world data beats carefully crafted experimental simulations every time. Of course, if you're going to trim the extruded material, one would have to be an idiot to leave the extrusions sticking out on a critical portion of the vehicle (assuming there exist portions that are less critical where they could be left alone).
Remember, this is an experimental space vehicle, and part of the experiment is to try to make it safer, without harming the occupants in the process.
BUT IT IS AN EXPERIMENTAL VEHICLE AND NOTHING IS GUARANTEED.
Don't think those who venture forth in it are unaware of the risk. Every one of them has the past disasters and the words of Alan Shepard tatooed on his/her heart:
"You know, being a test pilot isn't always the healthiest business in the world."
And knowing that, they don't hestitate to take the risk.
All that being said, the easiest and most certain way of reducing ice build-up on the external tank is top STOP LAUNCHING IT OUT OF A SWAMP. For instance, we could approach Chile and offer to lease a launch site in the Atacama desert -- the driest desert on earth, located at about 4000m altitude, and at less than 20 degrees off the equator, compared to the Cape Canaveral launch site's 28+ degrees off the equator. In addition to virtually eliminating the problems of ice build-up, you could increase payload capacity considerably by virtue of the 8 degrees closer to the equator and the 4000m higher starting point for the climb into space -- that's 4000m through the densest portion of the atmosphere.
Of course, there are the political impossibilities, like getting Dubya to explain this to his bro' Jeb about the need to take all that lovely gummint cash flow away from the Florida economy and send it offshore. Yeah, that'd be a toughie.
... that Bill Gates is doing more to destroy the odious concept of "software patents" than any amount of well-reasoned logic ever could.
Hell, let him patent the combination of individual letters into words, and the mathematical combination of numeric digits into other numeric digits -- assuming he hasn't already.
Whereas winning monopolistic dominance over the personal computer industry via dirty tricks, deceit, and ruthlessness wasn't enough to inflame people's sensibilities, allowing a single company to lock up an entire economy by exploiting the flaws in our patent system might be enough to provoke a response.
Hopefully that response will not be to award him the ownership papers to the United States.
... or the Microsoft Public License.
...
...
...
It would work like this:
1) would-be open source developers would have to pay a subscription fee to gain access to the "open code"
2) and also sign NDA's prohibiting them from ever using or revealing any aspect of the code they had witnessed, in any other project for all eternity
3) and agree to sign over any changees they submit to the protective care of the MPL QA Council (an affiliated steering committee composed of selected Microsoft employees)
4) and sign over all patents and copyrights to the MPL QA Council.
This would be "sold" to corporate customers as a means of making sure their input made it into their Microsoft products, with the requisite vetting of user-supplied fixes and changes being their guarantee that no security holes would be introduced by those notorious "open source" developers.
If they had continued with development of the X-33 instead of turning it over to the Air Force and canceling the NASA development work, we would probably have a replacement by now. Instead, it will take probably a decade and substantially more money to bring a replacement vehicle to fruition from this point.
I suspect that politically, the manned space program is dead here in the US, given the huge budget deficits and slipping technology base.
There is the possibility that a superior insulating technology will be arrived at quickly and the remaining few shuttles might fly again, but I wouldn't bet on it. There is too much to be gained politically by stabbing the wounded for that to be allowed to happen.
Not Quite -- more like saying possession of a slim jim is illegal, despite it being a possible legitimate tool of locksmiths or an enabling tool of crime in the possession of a car thief.
Anybody know if possession of a slim jim is illegal anywhere in the US?
... after using different age images to impart spin is to have maps of wholely fictional places out of fantasy.
Not that Silicon Valley isn't a fictional place out of fantasy.
Suddenly those Turkish sheep that followed each other over the cliff don't seem so stoopid after all...
Then you can really appreciate the following logic --
If having DST 7 months out of 12 is good, and 9 months out of 12 is better,
then BEST OF ALL WOULD BE... DST ALL YEAR ROUND!!!
We would be saving that extra hour of daylight all year long!
The benefits are incalculable -- the savings from decreasing our dependence on imported oil alone are incredible!
Now rush right out and contact your legislators with this fantastic concept.
DO IT NOW.
Go check out a copy of The Peter Principle (copyright 1969 -- pick up a used copy from Amazon) to confirm that the current decrepit state of our managerial skilz is nothing new.
When the nation's leaders stop rewarding managerial ineptitude and punishing technical workers, we might have a chance of turning this around. You can count on other nations (China, anyone?) not making this particular blunder.
If it offers hope to anyone, in today's WSJ (subscription required) there is a piece advocating outsourcing of our outrageously overpaid top management to bring excessive top management compensation under control. It's the 7th most-emailed article today. But it will take a long time after such practices begin (assuming they ever begin) before they filter down through the corporate structure and clueless incompetence is no longer rewarded.
G5s cannot go into laptops ...
... IBM's announcement of the low power G5 eliminates this as a viable rant...
G4 development stalled ...
... check out Freescale's e600 line of single-core/dual-core G4s -- G4 development doesn't seem to be stalled to me, in fact, it looks to be possibly better tha IBM's notebook-capable G5 ...
A Steve Jobs control issue meltdown is hardly a conspiracy theory, it's more of an established pattern of behavior (I know, that's not what the referenced article was about, but it seems to be the most rational explanation for the switch).
Any good conspiracy theory has got to include Microsoft, as they have such a marvelous track record of success through conspiring to take away the oxygen of everyone else in the room. If you want a conspiracy theory, how about Microsoft soaking up IBM's fab capacity or engineering resource, leaving Apple to twist in the wind? That's lame too, but still better than your "better theory".
"When better conspiracy theories are needed, they will be found on Slashdot".
I'm not sure how much help this would be for you.
While it would be just the thing for a scratch of shallow cut, if it were applied to a deeper cut you might only manage to seal off the blood loss to the outside world, and continue hemorrhaging internally.
Republican sheep? Democrat sheep?
Nope... they were Slashdot sheep!
OK, so at the retail level, exactly what IS the difference in price between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray?
If it's only about a buck, then the price is probably secondary to the quality and quantity of the data contained therein, so that if a Blu-Ray disk can contain more goodies than a single-layer HD-DVD, it would get the nod.
Other factors include the cost of enabling an HD-DVD/Blu-Ray drive to also read (and write) CDs and contemporary DVDs. What is the projected cost to the consumer of each of these types of drive?
For all the furor surrounding the HD disk format issue, I have not seen any estimates for these important data.
The problem in our educational system is not that we don't spend enough on it, it's not that we're teaching the wrong way or the wrong subjects in our schools, it's a fundamental problem of how our society treats an "education".
It's a cultural, rather than a structural problem. In the US of A, academic excellence is simply *not* the goal our society has when sending kids to school. We send our children to school for the following reasons:
- to keep them occupied while Mom and Dad are at work.
- because it's the law that they have to go to some school, and if we were to home-school them, we would run afoul of reason#1.
- so they can develop socially -- and we put 100% of the responsibility for that on the school, which is exactly where it DOES NOT belong.
So far as I can see, the greatest motivation people (kids) have to attend school is to participate in the social interactions -- which at an institutional level are most prominently displayed in their athletic programs, not in their academic programs.The only reason many poor inner-city kids (yes, I know I'm stereotyping, bear with me a moment) have to attend school is to be part of the sports team (football, basketball, etc) and set foot upon that path up the economic staircase, regardless of the fact that it has the worst success rate of any path they could choose. And in the suburban schools, the motivation is no different, although the goals are typically greater social standing rather than a career in the pro ball teams. The rarity is the kid who buckles down and studies to attain scholarships or simply to LEARN.
If we look at poor rural areas of India, or at the successes of the Asian countries in promoting education, do we see athletics as having any significant role in a school? I think not (some knowledgeable soul can step in right now and correct me if I'm way off base in this).
While there is a pressing need for an athletic program in our schools, it should not be about competition, but about healthy exercise. There is simply no need to have competitive athletics in our primary or secondary school systems.
Obviously, these recommendations are never going to fly in the land of Ignorance. There is too much money and power invested in the status quo. So what can you, as a parent, REALLY DO?
For the record, I took option 3 with my kids. They turned out OK, and I spent a fortune in out-of-state college education, after spending another fortune for 12 years of private schooling for each of them -- I might have made a mistake there, but they went to good schools and had the opportunity to learn from the best. At a rough guess (as the song says, don't do the math), about a half million, all told.
Duh-oh!
Camino has nothing to do with Java -- it uses a native Cocoa to wrap the C++ Gecko innards in.
I thought that NeoOffice/J used Java to integrate with the OS X GUI, providing a Java layer for the OpenOffice innards to paint the screen through.
Or is this announcement something similar to the recent pronouncement that with 10.4, APIs were frozen, so developers would no longer have to target a morphing platform?
I believe that either the same or a similar situation exists with Camino.
Steve has burned his bridges behind him with Motorola, now IBM, and when he becomes an annoyance not worth the trouble for Intel to bow to him, AMD's the only place left to go.
Change is Good... ... You go first.