Interesting points. Interesting that we tax companies but don't let them vote, but let citizens who don't pay any taxes at all vote and affect laws and policies that move the tax burden even further from themselves.
Quoting Alexander Fraser Tytler from The Decline and Fall of the Athenian Republic (1776) [and subsequently debunked by snopes but intersting none-the-less]:
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that the democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the worldâ(TM)s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: âFrom bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.â
which also goes to show that even in democracy the people can still be lead to believe things that are simply not true. "torturing people", "invading a country against international law", "massacring its population with impunity"? Give me a break. Democracy is by no means perfect; the fact that you could believe such things despite a democratic society with essentially unrestricted access to information demonstrates an inherent weakness of democracy (note I said weakness, not a negative). And frankly the fact that you have just as much voting power as me terrifies me and is one of the reasons I believe pure democracy will always fail and precisely why I believe our founding fathers created the United States as a representative democracy.
Very false dichotomy, as there is a third possibility. He was the murder, and the victim of a corrupt investigation.
Why does everyone assume the worst (malice) when simple incompetence is more likely. Every bit of "frame/corrpution" evidence against the LAPD could equally be attributed to simple mistakes with the exception of the Mark Ferman audio tapes. In that case his own explanation (that he was acting in character and hamming it up for an author) seem just as plausible as the defense accusations of racism. Stupid, but plausible.
You said it better than I was about to... three of the five benchmarks are useless to me. I don't care how much space the install takes up, I don't care how long it takes to install because I only do that once and I don't care how long it takes to boot-up because I leave my computers on. Of the remaining two, I rarely if ever copy files from USB to HD and I have no idea how well this benchmark represents common task I perform such as browsing, movie watching and game playing.
This may have been true in 2002 or 2003 but this hasn't been an issue in a long time. When I first upgraded to XP, there were only a couple programs that I'd have to run as admin. Both were games. Hardly what I would call "required". There hasn't been a single piece of software I use in years that requires me to run as admin other than the occasional installer (and many of these now just prompt you for an admin password if you launch them from a limited user account)
You know... I was watching the proceedings today on CNN and Wolf Blitzer and another reporter actually started talking about how wonderful Obama's penmanship is. Really... his penmanship.
http://twitter.com/Slate/status/1134023605
Exactly, the initial CaLV configuration had something like 5 SSME's in the first stage, all of which would be thrown away each launch at incredible loss. This is a complex engine designed for reliability and reusability - a very different design point than for a expendible engine. It simply doesn't make sense to use such a complex, expensive engine and throw several of them into the ocean each launch.. Hence the move to RS-68.
Are you really comparing the paper study of some 50 engineers with the work that has been accomplished to date on Constellation? Just because you haven't seen an Ares launch doesn't mean the design isn't mature or is as "immature" the direct paper rocket. I am not knocking their design - it is a solid one. But similar designs were looked at in the ESAS study and found to be less desirable than at least the initial Ares I and V configuration. The Direct design is *years* behind the Ares I design. Seriously, the Ares I has been through SRR, SDR and PDR and numerous other reviews. Direct looks great... fast, easy and cheap simply because it has been studied enough to reveal its shortcomings. Three years ago Ares look fantastic on paper as well - then the reality of engineering development crept in and there are indeed challenges to overcome. Any other program (Direct, EELV, etc) will have the same unkown snags in their future.
Oh, and the first Ares test launch is this summer.
Ok, so there has been a lot going on with respect to constellation. Let me put some things in perspective. At the turn of the millennium it had become clear that tremendous expense of both shuttle and station had forced NASA human space flight out of the "exploration" business with all resources more or less locked up in LEO. Shuttle requires a veritable army of engineers and support personnel to maintain the vehicle and conduct operations and the costs to maintain this capability was crushing NASA. NASA felt "trapped" into their existing architecture with little hope for returning to an exploration role without significant additional funding. NASA needed to find a cheaper alternative to LEO that would free up the budget to being developing concepts beyond LEO.
Then comes the Columbia disaster and the subsequent investigation which recommended that shuttle be retired by 2010.
In 2004 Bush announces the Vision for Space Exploration clearly defining our country's goal to resume our manned exploration of the moon and Mars.
NASA conducts an extremely detailed study into literally hundreds of architecture design alternatives known as the Exploration Systems Architecture Study. It is a fantastic report - read it here. The study rejects using EELVs (due primarily to safety concerns)and recommends a shuttle-derived re-using shuttle and Apollo technology across the two launch vehicles (then called CLV and CaLV). The recommended architecture becomes the basis of the Constellation architecture. (Which later replaces Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) on the CaLV with RS-68 engines and extends teh CLV from 4-seg to 5-seg (which was actually in the original trade space). This configuration was chosen as it was both the safest configuration as well as having one of the lowest O&M costs (particularly compared with alternatives that leveraged SSMEs more heavily.) NASA is finally on a path to returning to a capability beyond LEO as well as dramatically reducing its workforce with the looming retirement of shuttle a somewhat simpler to maintain replacement
Therein lies the problem... as retirement looms and irreversible decisions begin to be made (reconfiguring pads, not-ordering certain long-lead items for shuttle, etc..) that huge workforce of shuttle support finally realize what Constellation means to their job security. Without shuttle and its extremely complex reusable sub-systems, many of these people will be out of a job and their pet projects in jeopardy.
Not surprisingly, there becomes no shortage of personnel at Shuttle-oriented NASA sites who begin advocating against Constellation and for an extension of Shuttle. Adding to the detractors are of course the disgruntled "establishment" consortium of launch providers, ULA, advocating using EELVs. Then there are the Direct guys who are brilliant NASA engineers but this concept was in essence already considered in the ESAS study and deemed less favorable than the CLV approach.
Add to the mix the political baggage that comes with the program's genesis stemming from an unpopular president and the oncoming president's commitment to "change" at all levels of government and you have a perfect storm of opposition - much of it which has absolutely nothing to do with the actual merits of the current design.
People who have not worked on Constellation simply don't understand how much work has gone into it compared with any of the above mentioned alternatives. Of course they look good now. They have been studied by small groups of engineers for months. Compare with the thousands who have been working on Constellation for years. Despite what anyone says about their program being cheaper or faster - any change at this point will result in
A final present from the Bush administration to the American people. The last thing that the Republican party did before disappearing.
Wow... ballsy to take a swipe at the Bush admin. Pretty sure the dems were in control of the house and senate when the bailouts passed and as far as historical funding of NASA goes... this may be enlightening.
Name for me one piece of legislation during the era of republican control that the democrats wanted to spend *less* on than republicans. The amount finally agreed to always was a compromise between a higher value the democrats wanted and what the republicans proposed. This is even true of the defense budget (pet projects), homeland security (more infrastructure), education (unfunded mandates), HHS, even the war authorization bills the dems proposed higher figures than republicans.
Don't get me wrong, you are exactly correct that republicans are responsible as they were in control. But to somehow use that fact to imply that the dems would have spent less is misleading.
I'm sure your friend isn't biased by the fact that he would probably lose his job because of Orion. One of the *whole points* of Constellation was to reduce the cost of space flight and increase capability. The Shuttle requires an army of tens of thousands to maintain it and prepare it for each launch (particularly at KSC) - all of the reason the shuttle is so expensive. NASA decided with Constellation they were going to try to reduce the O&M footprint to reduce life-cycle costs and everyone seemed to agree that that was a noble decision. Fast forward a few years and suddenly that army of shuttle maintainers realize their jobs are on the line... and suddenly they become very critical of Constellation. This is particularly pronounced from the folks at Marshall and KSC, both of whom have large contingent of Boeing employees who work on Shuttle or very specific shuttle technology (keep in mind Lockheed won the Orion contract). These are the people pushing for Direct and/or shuttle life extensions. I'm not saying their claims should be discounted out of hand - but you have to consider all motivations.
No.. he didn't find wrongdoing. He found nothing at all. In his own words. The most incriminating emails I've seen from wikileaks that many are attributing as "state business" are nothing of the sort. They were "party business" which makes them political by nature... but that doesn't make them official government business. In fact, it would be irresponsible and unethical for her *to not use* her yahoo account (or a republican party account) for the conduct of her campaign. If anyone can link to an email that appears to be state business... I'd love to see it.
I wrote a program in MATLAB to do this as well about 3 years ago. Unfortunately I never actually built one although I generated plans to build about 30, mostly family portraits and famous paintings. The reason I never built one is it would have been very expensive. I want to say that for something like a 3'x4' size piece of art it would have cost me ~$800 or so in parts alone... and then a few months to put it together.
I did this project after visiting legoland and being impressed with their lego mosics and used the opportunity to learn something about image processing. Here is basically what I did:
I intialized a canvas size and brick size (to give flexibility on what type of pieces I wanted to use). I then took an image and resized the canvas so that it would fit an integer number of rows and columns of legos. I then went through the each grid (lego) space and found the average color from my reference picture. I then mapped each of these to the closest color in the lego pallet. This didn't work really well... the solution (which I didn't know at the time) was dithering which is basically an error spreading 2-D filter you slide over the image. Once I employed dithering the results were actually quite good. There were some references images that worked out great, but a few I could never really get to look good because there just weren't the right colors in the lego pallet. I never addressed the structural issue,.. my plan was to either do it studs out and use a base plate to hold it together, or do another pass after the image pattern was done to find adjacent same colored legos and use a wider piece for them. This didn't happen very often though because of the dithering algo. I'd rather just glue the thing to a support and put it under glass...
Funny you should mention that because I wrote a program to make lego mosaics a few years ago and I *specifically* did it to render Starry Night. Looks WAY cool btw... I was inspired by seeing a version of it at legoland.
and it is actually very, very good. Took me about 10 min to learn some of the key combos for things like superscripts, numerators and denominators, and greek lower and upper case letters and before I knew it I was typing very complex equations just as fast as I could type prose. It even will even output a LaTeX formatted string if you want.
From the looks of the screenshots, it was used for personal and political communications.
This HAS to be done to avoid a charge of "misuse of state resources" - ie: doing "political activity" via public networks, which is illegal. Congressmen have gone to prison for doing just that.
Sorry but you are wrong. It might be wrong to do official business on a personal email account though. There is nothing wrong with doing political business with a personal email account. From the leaked emails that I have read, it looked like she was discussing campaign (non-state related) and encouraging a friend in the conduct of their congressional campaign (again, not state business). In fact, if she *were* to use her official account for such political campaign related activates.... that would be illegal! Unless she was conducting official state business with this email then she is in the right here...
FYI, she gained her reputation as a reformer early in her political career when she turned in the head of the republican party of Alaska for doing exactly what you seem to be saying she should be doing (he was using state time to do party business).
Slashdot Mirror
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that the democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the worldâ(TM)s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: âFrom bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.â
more discussion
Well said.
which also goes to show that even in democracy the people can still be lead to believe things that are simply not true. "torturing people", "invading a country against international law", "massacring its population with impunity"? Give me a break. Democracy is by no means perfect; the fact that you could believe such things despite a democratic society with essentially unrestricted access to information demonstrates an inherent weakness of democracy (note I said weakness, not a negative). And frankly the fact that you have just as much voting power as me terrifies me and is one of the reasons I believe pure democracy will always fail and precisely why I believe our founding fathers created the United States as a representative democracy.
Why does everyone assume the worst (malice) when simple incompetence is more likely. Every bit of "frame/corrpution" evidence against the LAPD could equally be attributed to simple mistakes with the exception of the Mark Ferman audio tapes. In that case his own explanation (that he was acting in character and hamming it up for an author) seem just as plausible as the defense accusations of racism. Stupid, but plausible.
Duke Nukem Forever
Hmmm... sounds like you'd be a better fit in the Air Force than the Marines.
no...have you?
didn't they do that in TNG?
um...and they are going to use this info how exactly? Last time I checked I didn't have an assigned seat at the theater.
You said it better than I was about to... three of the five benchmarks are useless to me. I don't care how much space the install takes up, I don't care how long it takes to install because I only do that once and I don't care how long it takes to boot-up because I leave my computers on. Of the remaining two, I rarely if ever copy files from USB to HD and I have no idea how well this benchmark represents common task I perform such as browsing, movie watching and game playing.
This may have been true in 2002 or 2003 but this hasn't been an issue in a long time. When I first upgraded to XP, there were only a couple programs that I'd have to run as admin. Both were games. Hardly what I would call "required". There hasn't been a single piece of software I use in years that requires me to run as admin other than the occasional installer (and many of these now just prompt you for an admin password if you launch them from a limited user account)
You know... I was watching the proceedings today on CNN and Wolf Blitzer and another reporter actually started talking about how wonderful Obama's penmanship is. Really... his penmanship. http://twitter.com/Slate/status/1134023605
Exactly, the initial CaLV configuration had something like 5 SSME's in the first stage, all of which would be thrown away each launch at incredible loss. This is a complex engine designed for reliability and reusability - a very different design point than for a expendible engine. It simply doesn't make sense to use such a complex, expensive engine and throw several of them into the ocean each launch.. Hence the move to RS-68.
Are you really comparing the paper study of some 50 engineers with the work that has been accomplished to date on Constellation? Just because you haven't seen an Ares launch doesn't mean the design isn't mature or is as "immature" the direct paper rocket. I am not knocking their design - it is a solid one. But similar designs were looked at in the ESAS study and found to be less desirable than at least the initial Ares I and V configuration. The Direct design is *years* behind the Ares I design. Seriously, the Ares I has been through SRR, SDR and PDR and numerous other reviews. Direct looks great... fast, easy and cheap simply because it has been studied enough to reveal its shortcomings. Three years ago Ares look fantastic on paper as well - then the reality of engineering development crept in and there are indeed challenges to overcome. Any other program (Direct, EELV, etc) will have the same unkown snags in their future. Oh, and the first Ares test launch is this summer.
Then comes the Columbia disaster and the subsequent investigation which recommended that shuttle be retired by 2010.
In 2004 Bush announces the Vision for Space Exploration clearly defining our country's goal to resume our manned exploration of the moon and Mars.
NASA conducts an extremely detailed study into literally hundreds of architecture design alternatives known as the Exploration Systems Architecture Study. It is a fantastic report - read it here. The study rejects using EELVs (due primarily to safety concerns)and recommends a shuttle-derived re-using shuttle and Apollo technology across the two launch vehicles (then called CLV and CaLV). The recommended architecture becomes the basis of the Constellation architecture. (Which later replaces Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) on the CaLV with RS-68 engines and extends teh CLV from 4-seg to 5-seg (which was actually in the original trade space). This configuration was chosen as it was both the safest configuration as well as having one of the lowest O&M costs (particularly compared with alternatives that leveraged SSMEs more heavily.) NASA is finally on a path to returning to a capability beyond LEO as well as dramatically reducing its workforce with the looming retirement of shuttle a somewhat simpler to maintain replacement
Therein lies the problem... as retirement looms and irreversible decisions begin to be made (reconfiguring pads, not-ordering certain long-lead items for shuttle, etc..) that huge workforce of shuttle support finally realize what Constellation means to their job security. Without shuttle and its extremely complex reusable sub-systems, many of these people will be out of a job and their pet projects in jeopardy.
Not surprisingly, there becomes no shortage of personnel at Shuttle-oriented NASA sites who begin advocating against Constellation and for an extension of Shuttle. Adding to the detractors are of course the disgruntled "establishment" consortium of launch providers, ULA, advocating using EELVs. Then there are the Direct guys who are brilliant NASA engineers but this concept was in essence already considered in the ESAS study and deemed less favorable than the CLV approach.
Add to the mix the political baggage that comes with the program's genesis stemming from an unpopular president and the oncoming president's commitment to "change" at all levels of government and you have a perfect storm of opposition - much of it which has absolutely nothing to do with the actual merits of the current design.
People who have not worked on Constellation simply don't understand how much work has gone into it compared with any of the above mentioned alternatives. Of course they look good now. They have been studied by small groups of engineers for months. Compare with the thousands who have been working on Constellation for years. Despite what anyone says about their program being cheaper or faster - any change at this point will result in
Wow... ballsy to take a swipe at the Bush admin. Pretty sure the dems were in control of the house and senate when the bailouts passed and as far as historical funding of NASA goes... this may be enlightening.
Name for me one piece of legislation during the era of republican control that the democrats wanted to spend *less* on than republicans. The amount finally agreed to always was a compromise between a higher value the democrats wanted and what the republicans proposed. This is even true of the defense budget (pet projects), homeland security (more infrastructure), education (unfunded mandates), HHS, even the war authorization bills the dems proposed higher figures than republicans. Don't get me wrong, you are exactly correct that republicans are responsible as they were in control. But to somehow use that fact to imply that the dems would have spent less is misleading.
I'm sure your friend isn't biased by the fact that he would probably lose his job because of Orion. One of the *whole points* of Constellation was to reduce the cost of space flight and increase capability. The Shuttle requires an army of tens of thousands to maintain it and prepare it for each launch (particularly at KSC) - all of the reason the shuttle is so expensive. NASA decided with Constellation they were going to try to reduce the O&M footprint to reduce life-cycle costs and everyone seemed to agree that that was a noble decision. Fast forward a few years and suddenly that army of shuttle maintainers realize their jobs are on the line... and suddenly they become very critical of Constellation. This is particularly pronounced from the folks at Marshall and KSC, both of whom have large contingent of Boeing employees who work on Shuttle or very specific shuttle technology (keep in mind Lockheed won the Orion contract). These are the people pushing for Direct and/or shuttle life extensions. I'm not saying their claims should be discounted out of hand - but you have to consider all motivations.
This is a prequel so wouldn't Picard be continuing *this* storyline?
No.. he didn't find wrongdoing. He found nothing at all. In his own words. The most incriminating emails I've seen from wikileaks that many are attributing as "state business" are nothing of the sort. They were "party business" which makes them political by nature... but that doesn't make them official government business. In fact, it would be irresponsible and unethical for her *to not use* her yahoo account (or a republican party account) for the conduct of her campaign. If anyone can link to an email that appears to be state business... I'd love to see it.
I did this project after visiting legoland and being impressed with their lego mosics and used the opportunity to learn something about image processing. Here is basically what I did:
I intialized a canvas size and brick size (to give flexibility on what type of pieces I wanted to use). I then took an image and resized the canvas so that it would fit an integer number of rows and columns of legos. I then went through the each grid (lego) space and found the average color from my reference picture. I then mapped each of these to the closest color in the lego pallet. This didn't work really well... the solution (which I didn't know at the time) was dithering which is basically an error spreading 2-D filter you slide over the image. Once I employed dithering the results were actually quite good. There were some references images that worked out great, but a few I could never really get to look good because there just weren't the right colors in the lego pallet. I never addressed the structural issue,.. my plan was to either do it studs out and use a base plate to hold it together, or do another pass after the image pattern was done to find adjacent same colored legos and use a wider piece for them. This didn't happen very often though because of the dithering algo. I'd rather just glue the thing to a support and put it under glass...
Funny you should mention that because I wrote a program to make lego mosaics a few years ago and I *specifically* did it to render Starry Night. Looks WAY cool btw... I was inspired by seeing a version of it at legoland.
Huh...someone must have forgotten to tell my instructor when we did spin training as neither of us were wearing parachutes...
and it is actually very, very good. Took me about 10 min to learn some of the key combos for things like superscripts, numerators and denominators, and greek lower and upper case letters and before I knew it I was typing very complex equations just as fast as I could type prose. It even will even output a LaTeX formatted string if you want.
This HAS to be done to avoid a charge of "misuse of state resources" - ie: doing "political activity" via public networks, which is illegal. Congressmen have gone to prison for doing just that.
Sorry but you are wrong. It might be wrong to do official business on a personal email account though. There is nothing wrong with doing political business with a personal email account. From the leaked emails that I have read, it looked like she was discussing campaign (non-state related) and encouraging a friend in the conduct of their congressional campaign (again, not state business). In fact, if she *were* to use her official account for such political campaign related activates.... that would be illegal! Unless she was conducting official state business with this email then she is in the right here...
FYI, she gained her reputation as a reformer early in her political career when she turned in the head of the republican party of Alaska for doing exactly what you seem to be saying she should be doing (he was using state time to do party business).