Well, we have to screw around with curly braces anyway. If you're going to be burdened with the convention of indenting, you might as well drop the curly braces and use the indentation itself to mark a block. Besides, if you're using using a half-way decent editor, indenting and unindenting blocks has got to be waaay easier then looking for the curly braces.
To paraphrase Larry Wall, a good language makes easy things easy, and difficult things not impossible. If the language by it's very nature doesn't need you wrap lines around in general, then supporting backslashes is a reasonable decision. Besides, if you use a backslash, it's a good hint that you're making the code harder to follow, and perhaps you should consider rewriting the code. After all, even the Linux CodingStyle document says that if you're wrapping off the right side of the screen, you need to refactor your code.
This just incorporates a convention that most scripting language writers use, as part of the language. What's wrong with that?
Python has done this before, by using indents to mark blocks. In terms of the "vision" or "philosophy" of Python, this is good fit.
Obviously, you would not want this for java, because Java chooses to give you flexibility (value judgement here) in whitespace and casing but gives you the burden (value judgement here) of curly braces.
I might add that scripting / interpreted languages cannot be considered to not be industrial strength because of funky syntax. Open source scripting languages like Python, Perl and TCL enable RAD with their scripted / interpreted nature while at the same time provide industrial-strength security and reliability because of their open-source-ness.
You seem have to forgotten Sun's new line of Opteron based servers.
But that's helping x86 survive and the x86 competition is only going to make x86 cheaper, and will ultimately make it even harder to keep Sparc around. They need to stop giving money to x86-based designs. If they were going to go the x86 way, they should have committed to it a long time ago. This is exactly the wrong time.
Apple still doesn't have a real 64 bit OS.
And Sun doesn't have iLife. What's your point? The companies have different focuses... if Apple wants to go after the G5/OSX server market, then it will eventually have to do this. But that's not their core business.
AMD is the company primarily battling Intel.
AMD and Intel may fight, but no matter who wins there, Sun will lose. If there wasn't a fight, they might have a chance because a monopoly on x86 would keep x86 prices higher.
Intel is not big iron.
You must be ignoring all those Linux or WinNT/Xeon machines that have been eating into Solaris/Sparc marketshare since the mid-90's.
Itanium is a failure.
I never mentioned Itanium in my comments, because it's not responsible for Sun dying... the Itaniums were frigging expensive.
Opteron is a success, and that is why Sun, IBM, HP, and plenty of smaller server vendors are using it.
On the contrary, Opteron is a success because Sun, IBM and HP are using it. Sun backed themselves into a corner - they should have gone with G4 and G5. IBM will sell you anything you want and then make money with services. And HP has no choice but Opteron... they (well Compaq) made the blunder of killing the Alpha, and everyone knew that Itanium was going to be too costly.
Regardless Apple is stuck in 2% marketshareland forever...
Possibly, but only if you completely discount G5/OSX based supercomputers, which as far as I can tell, are going to be more cost-effective than the Opterons.
... unless they bring back clones and/or release an x86 version of OSX.
I do agree that BeOS could have been a wonderful OS for Apple, but I'm not sure that the BSD-based-NeXT-based design was an entirely flawed choice... after all, it is winning them UNIX converts who are fairly pleased to find a somewhat familiar CLI under the hood. And as for clones, remember the Sun clones from Integrix waaay back in the 90's? They only hurt Sun's sales. Supporting clones is a nightmare, and will only make your software Microsoft-ish.
PS, I don't own an Apple product yet. I'm just interesting in businesses with geek products, so I can trade their stock.
I would bet that the thought of a baby would be on the order of 1,000,000 times of that of this robot.
Better we watch out then. That's only 30 years away in terms of compute capability if Moore's Law holds up (and it will hold up, because even if we can't make one chip faster, we can definitely keep adding parallelism).
Obviously I have absolutely no backing for those figures.
It doesn't matter. A human could be a billion times smarter, and that's only 30*2 = 60 years away because of the exponential nature of compute capability. If intellegence is an emergent property, you and I are going to see an man-made intelligent entity in our lifetime.
If you don't like it, protest or pray to stop it. I, on the other hand, am fascinated by this stuff (and would love to work on it).
1. Sun is not coming out with any innovative products.
Java is about the only cool thing to come out of Sun recently, and they haven't figured out how to make a profit from that.
2. Sun does not seem to have a clear business strategy.
Sun hasn't figured out how to respond to the threat from commodity hardware and they haven't figured out how to deal with Open Source.
3. Sun does not listen to their customers.
There a lot of people that wanted Sun hardware with out Solaris and a lot of people that wanted Solaris without the hardware. Sun forced people to buy both, and lost money from that... selling the hardware without Solaris was a no brainer, and selling Solaris for x86 was another no brainer. That, and the pricing for Solaris used to be too high... I mean, it's software... every copy you sell free money. After you've made the initial R&D costs back, you want to try and saturate the market with competitive pricing... they didn't do that.
4. Sun does not know which battles to not fight.
It was clear several years ago that Sparc was not going to be able to beat x86 in the long haul. It was it also clear last year that IBM G5 processors were going to kick butt, and IBM was looking for buyers. If Sun wanted to not support x86 and at the same time save money on R&D, they should have killed Sparc, purchased G5 processors from IBM for their boxes and ported Solaris to G5 would not be a big deal. IBM is going to replace AIX with Linux anyway, but Sun could offer Solaris as a replacement for AIX for all those people that wanted a UNIX derived from AT&T and not BSD.
Now let's look at Apple.
1. Apple has lots of innovative products.
The iPod on the hardware side, their dual G5 processor boxes, Firewire, their iLife series of apps.
2. Apple has a clear business strategy
They want to make cool, friendly, exclusive, high-margin products for the consumer market.
3. Apple listens to its customers
If there is a vacuum (in software) and someone else is not filling that vacuum or charging exorbitant amounts, Apples fills it with its software products. The keep making the UI easier to use and they take suggestions. And their pricing is reasonable for the features that you get.
4. Apple knows which battles to not fight.
IBM is fighting their processor battle with Intel. They didn't design the electronics for the iPod (although they did dictate the specs). They did the stuff that they were good at - the UI and the software.
Sun and Apple are very different companies with very different business models and attitudes.
QWERTY's effect, by reducing those annoying clashes, was to speed up typing rather than slow it down.
What Sholes did was slow down the fastest theoretical speed at which you could type, while at the same time increasing the fastest practical (given the technology available at the time). He didn't do it to slow people down, he did to speed them up.
That said, since he did slow the fastest theoretical speed, you can't argue that he didn't cripple his layout to slow people down. He did, at least theoretically, slow them down.
I'm trying to reply to two people at the same time... bear with me.
Don't blame the technology when its being used in perverted ways. You yourself said that is meant for shooting down planes. It should not have shocked anyone when they tried to use it for something else and it didn't work.
Now that's not entirely fair. They did ask for it to be modified, the contractor said yes, took the moeny for the modification. So you can't say it is "perverted" when everyone else calls it "technology reuse". The first HumVees were modified trucks... and met the requirements just fine, and you wouldn't call those perversions.
This country needs three things. First, a true capitalist system for defense contractors.
That's completely impractical. It costs too much to design a tank -- only about 3 or 4 companies in the United State could do it. Furthermore, the gov't doesn't want your tank, they want their tank.
For your information, we really only have 3 or 4 major players in the tank market. And there is evidence to prove that you're wrong... the JSF was designed in a reasonably capitalistic manner. All three contractors got a fixed amount of money for development, and the army picked the best prototype. Some manufacturers spent more than the money they got... but they wanted to assume the risk.
Actually, they are held liable. There is this long whole process called testing, the contractor is liable until the item passes the tests. The gov't won't assume liability until it passes tests.
What kind of tests are you taking about? Our soldiers have their guns jam on them regularly in Iraq and you mean to tell me that no one thought to test how the guns behave in dirty conditions? We can't completely deny that there have been big quality lapses in our weapons.
Third, absolutely, positively, no secret budgets of any kind. I am entirely pissed off with the pentagon filling up with all the kids who had secret treehouse clubs when they were kids and want to do the same shit now that they're 40.
You're damn right. Have you heard the military's defense of the Iraq war? "They were shooting at our planes, and we owe it to our troops"... owe what? To lose 500 more lives? To spend $100 billion dollars and rising oil prices?
Kennedy had the balls to get the Soviet missiles out of Cuba without firing a single shot. That's courage -- when everyone else is trying to justify war, you're trying to figure out a way to contain the situation without losing lives or billions of dollars of taxpayer's money.
But having the idea is the hard part, paying a hundred engineers to design and perfect it, that's the easy part, and DARPA is the perfect candidate for such a thing.
Respectfully, then you haven't done any engineering. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Especially regarding obstacle avoidance. It's doing the engineering and implementing that is the true test of whether it is feasible or not. Innovation is not thinking up ideas... it is thinking up ideas that work given real-world constraints.
The space elevator is a cool idea. But the true test is doing all the engineering to figure out whether it is feasible at all.
And if you let the teams compete, they'll come back and try harder next year, [...] Letting in slow starters isn't always bad, because with the right motivation they can put forward a lot of effort.
If you want to do this, do this separately from the real contest. Do a technology demo or something like that, where people can talk about their ideas and demonstrate their success or lack thereof. But stick to the bar that you set for the contest.
Screw it. If one team qualifies, one team takes the challenge. Chances are they're a shoe-in anyway considering they've already proven themselves more capable.
I couldn't agree more. I was in a team from my old University at an IEEE contest. Our robot had to find an IR signal that was modulated at 100 Khz with 50 mA (don't quote me on the exact numbers) through the IR emitter. Then we had to drive our robot to the emitter and do a few things, all autonomous.
We found out that it was really challenging to do this in practice... the signal was too weak and there was too much noise introduced by the filter and our amplifier. So we used lenses to get more light... complicated, given the overall dimensions and scope of the project, but pretty innovative.
We got there, and the university hosting the contest found that other teams (and their own team) were having a hard time seeing the IR emitter. So they doubled the current. Of course, then our reception system was too sensitive (couldn't remove the lenses because of packaging issues) because IR was bouncing off all kinds of things and we were picking it up. We tried to argue, but the hosts stated that it was in the interests of the contest (and of course, the home team).
Moral of the story: if you're going to organize a contest with rules, screw making the contest more interesting and stick with fair play. If the specs are published, and contestants don't make the specs, don't take away from the efforts of the contestants that actually made the specs. And no home teams to bias the judges.
Yours would be a world of excellent execution but minimal innovation. The prize would go to the fastest, cheapest, most efficient manufacturer.
All industries should be dominated by the fastest, cheapest, most efficient businesses. If everyone is ging to make the fastest and cheapest product, then it is easy to differentiate on other axes, but that requires R&D.
If you are an innovator, you know your competitors are going to acquire your innovations at some point. But the important point is that your innovations were in your product first. If you do innovate on a continual basis, you will be acknowledged as the market leader, have brand loyalty and can charge more. And you know you have to make your investment back before the cheapest manufacturers can catch up, but this only enforces fiscal discipline.
If you're the cheapest manufacturer, then you have the difference between your price point and the next guy up as a potential revenue stream for your R&D. You can increase your prices and use the extra money for R&D, or invest in R&D assured that your innovations will transfer into greater volume (yours, plus at least the next guy up) and you can take advantage of economies of scale to keep the price point the same while making the same profit.
(Of course, all of this is f***ed up if there is a monopoly around).
It has its upside and downside. I think China is becoming your world.
Are you claiming that the Chinese don't innovate? The first DVD player that played MP3 CDs and VCDs was Tiawanese, not Japanese, and it was cheaper. In that particular case, not only did the Tiawanese have cheaper manufacturing, but they also innovated.
Now I returned that DVD player back, because the UI was not good enough for me and the product didn't seem polished and I later purchase a better quality one. So again, for a particular innovation (DVD players playing MP3s), I was not content with the cheapest / most innovative. I was willing to pay for quality.
R&D is just one axis of businesses competing. Patents only give businesses that innovate first an bigger advantage than the natural benefits of innovation, allowing them to be inefficient and causing the consumer to pay more.
Finally, even copying your competition's features requires development if not research, especially if how something was done is kept a trade secret.
if you had tremendous amounts of R&D money invested, and someone else was turning your effort into market share and killing you,
If this were the case, then the blame would fall squarely on your shoulders for poor execution. Kodak had products based on outdated technology, and did the research for new technologoy but did not bring it to market fast enough (perhaps to milk the film products for all they are worth). If Sony managed to bring newer technology to the market faster, Kodak deserves to lose market share because of this.
This is just competition. When businesses compete, they compete in technology, marketing, price, time to market and other aspects. Kodak should have been out their making products using their R&D, not sitting on their butts working on licensing agreements. They had a better idea of the market because they had several products out there, and we know now that they had the technology for the next generation of products as well, but when Sony beat them to it and made better products because Kodak weren't competitive enough, they want to litigate?
That's why patents are stupid. If you do the R&D, keep it a trade secret until you are ready to release the product and then use the revenue from that product to innovate the next one. That how you beat your competitors, not by sitting on your laurels. If you aren't willing to replace your own products with better ones, other people will do it for you.
Perhaps for individual inventors, patents might make sense, because individual inventors have to overcome the barriers of entry in markets. But the current patent system itself creates a huge barrier of entry... 10K for a patent? Gimme a break.
Perhaps the best thing to do to the patent system is to "open source" it. Basically, anyone can apply for a patent. The docs are posted online. The patent is valid until someone demonstrates why it is obvious, or has been done before (exactly or in another medium). No patent examiners and no lawyers are needed in the application process. If there is a dispute, a judge looks over the body of comments and decides whether the patent is legit.
(The judge's involvement invariably happens with current patents anyway, except that right now the judge does not have any peer-review comments to look over, just those submitted by the disputers).
The two rovers cost $820 million together, see here.
I understand that the parent was meant to be funny, but I found the amount mind-boggling, and had to look it up.
Pipeline of jobs to India shuts down. Now you're back to 1 billion people, 10,000 jobs, and tax revenue of 100 million with which to feed them.
Ah... but the infrastructure that was developed because of the revenue stays, and it's infrastructure that both creates a demand for goods and services and enables goods and services to be sold.
Infrastructure can be intangible (talent, IP) or tangible (roads, power plants, fabs). The strength of an economy is how much money is moving around, so once enough people have buying power and enough infrastructure is in place, the economy goes into an upward spiral.
The ultimate question is, does India have more money than it had otherwise, and the answer is yes. The money keeps churning around, it doesn't "go away" until you destroy infrastructure (for instance, waste talent by shipping jobs away or close down factories).
Outsourcing jobs and manfacturing facilities makes a country poorer, so this is really bad for the U.S. We just haven't noticed because other areas of the economy were expanding, and there was a window where people had money and were really excited to spend it on the cheaper products from overseas before their jobs got shipped away as well...
I would also like to add that while we might get better coverage, all the redundancy in the robots (transmitters, receivers, motors, batteries, panels) increases the weight, which really adds to the launch costs. It's just easier to work on one or two robots and try to get 100% of the design right. Besides if you have a failure mode that destroys all of the robots, you're screwed.
Finally, they can now make the next Rovers by incorporating what they've learned so far. So we already have an iterative design process in place, which will get us better Rovers. The launch window only happens every two years, so it's not like we can iterate any faster than that, whether we have 2 rovers or 100 mini rovers.
And any technological advance that forwards mankind's status as a space-faring species is only beneficial to the entire species.
Consider a Mars base on the planet and not orbiting around it. Humans on the base will experience a low gravity environment all the time. Babies born on the base will grow to be a lot taller and a lot weaker than Earth babies.
When we move on to the next planet (say we find a lot of geothermal activity on Neptune keeping it warm), we will have to deal with other issues. The constraints of the living environment may dictate a different (but tolerable) gaseous composition, say mostly CO2 and O2 with no N2. Neptune babies may grow to develop different lung structures (not evolution, but just adaptation) in addition to being super-strong midgets because of the gravity.
Mars-raised humans will be different enough from Neptune-raised humans that we may have difficulty building any sort of kinship. Mars-raised humans will probably not be able to deal with Earth's gravity and much less Neptune's gravity and artificial atmosphere.
How are we going to relate to these creatures of the "same species"? Will we even connect or care about them, much less think about what is "beneficial to the entire species"?
While I think that Bill is a good guy for his philanthropy, I've seen other people who give until it hurts. I was invited to a local chruch in a poor community and I was astonished to see how much money these people were giving... as a percentage, any of those church-goers beat Gates hands-down.
It's even incredible when you think about what it means to give when you're living below the poverty line... everything you give cuts directly into your needs whereas when Bill gives, it doesn't even cut into his wants.
Of course, I'm not a philanthropist by any means so I'm not really qualified to comment.
Any system that rewards the most innate human instinct (survival and greed) will always be the most efficient. If that ain't capitalism, I don't know what is.
You're wrong. Mass looting does not an efficient system make.
Any system that rewards the most innate human instinct as long as it is not against the common good is the most efficient system, or
any system that rewards enlightened self-interest is the most efficient system. The "enlightened" part is each entity ensuring that their actions do not destry the system.
Any system that rewards pure self-interest only dies out from the "tragedy of the commons".
We want to promote people to invest money to make more money (self-interest expressed as Capitalism), but not at the cost of the system (protected by laws, hopefully put in place by a Democracy so that their is power equity).
P.S. There is only one innate instinct of humans (or all life) -- survial. Every other instinct or want is an extension of that...
There is no way the FTC will approve this. While the Justice Department may not have handled this case, the FTC has been handling corporate buy-outs and mergers decently for a while.
Is it just me, or is life imprisonment excessive for a DoS? Don't get me wrong, I think spammers are some of the worst scum among us, but surely the punishment should fit the crime?
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To paraphrase Larry Wall, a good language makes easy things easy, and difficult things not impossible. If the language by it's very nature doesn't need you wrap lines around in general, then supporting backslashes is a reasonable decision. Besides, if you use a backslash, it's a good hint that you're making the code harder to follow, and perhaps you should consider rewriting the code. After all, even the Linux CodingStyle document says that if you're wrapping off the right side of the screen, you need to refactor your code.
Python has done this before, by using indents to mark blocks. In terms of the "vision" or "philosophy" of Python, this is good fit.
Obviously, you would not want this for java, because Java chooses to give you flexibility (value judgement here) in whitespace and casing but gives you the burden (value judgement here) of curly braces.
I might add that scripting / interpreted languages cannot be considered to not be industrial strength because of funky syntax. Open source scripting languages like Python, Perl and TCL enable RAD with their scripted / interpreted nature while at the same time provide industrial-strength security and reliability because of their open-source-ness.
Not enough for The Wheel of Time fans...
P.S. I heard that the 2nd-last book is out in 2005. Yay!
But that's helping x86 survive and the x86 competition is only going to make x86 cheaper, and will ultimately make it even harder to keep Sparc around. They need to stop giving money to x86-based designs. If they were going to go the x86 way, they should have committed to it a long time ago. This is exactly the wrong time.
Apple still doesn't have a real 64 bit OS.
And Sun doesn't have iLife. What's your point? The companies have different focuses... if Apple wants to go after the G5/OSX server market, then it will eventually have to do this. But that's not their core business.
AMD is the company primarily battling Intel.
AMD and Intel may fight, but no matter who wins there, Sun will lose. If there wasn't a fight, they might have a chance because a monopoly on x86 would keep x86 prices higher.
Intel is not big iron.
You must be ignoring all those Linux or WinNT/Xeon machines that have been eating into Solaris/Sparc marketshare since the mid-90's.
Itanium is a failure.
I never mentioned Itanium in my comments, because it's not responsible for Sun dying... the Itaniums were frigging expensive.
Opteron is a success, and that is why Sun, IBM, HP, and plenty of smaller server vendors are using it.
On the contrary, Opteron is a success because Sun, IBM and HP are using it. Sun backed themselves into a corner - they should have gone with G4 and G5. IBM will sell you anything you want and then make money with services. And HP has no choice but Opteron... they (well Compaq) made the blunder of killing the Alpha, and everyone knew that Itanium was going to be too costly.
Regardless Apple is stuck in 2% marketshareland forever...
Possibly, but only if you completely discount G5/OSX based supercomputers, which as far as I can tell, are going to be more cost-effective than the Opterons.
I do agree that BeOS could have been a wonderful OS for Apple, but I'm not sure that the BSD-based-NeXT-based design was an entirely flawed choice... after all, it is winning them UNIX converts who are fairly pleased to find a somewhat familiar CLI under the hood. And as for clones, remember the Sun clones from Integrix waaay back in the 90's? They only hurt Sun's sales. Supporting clones is a nightmare, and will only make your software Microsoft-ish.
PS, I don't own an Apple product yet. I'm just interesting in businesses with geek products, so I can trade their stock.
Better we watch out then. That's only 30 years away in terms of compute capability if Moore's Law holds up (and it will hold up, because even if we can't make one chip faster, we can definitely keep adding parallelism).
Obviously I have absolutely no backing for those figures.
It doesn't matter. A human could be a billion times smarter, and that's only 30*2 = 60 years away because of the exponential nature of compute capability. If intellegence is an emergent property, you and I are going to see an man-made intelligent entity in our lifetime.
If you don't like it, protest or pray to stop it. I, on the other hand, am fascinated by this stuff (and would love to work on it).
1. Sun is not coming out with any innovative products.
Java is about the only cool thing to come out of Sun recently, and they haven't figured out how to make a profit from that.
2. Sun does not seem to have a clear business strategy.
Sun hasn't figured out how to respond to the threat from commodity hardware and they haven't figured out how to deal with Open Source.
3. Sun does not listen to their customers.
There a lot of people that wanted Sun hardware with out Solaris and a lot of people that wanted Solaris without the hardware. Sun forced people to buy both, and lost money from that... selling the hardware without Solaris was a no brainer, and selling Solaris for x86 was another no brainer. That, and the pricing for Solaris used to be too high... I mean, it's software... every copy you sell free money. After you've made the initial R&D costs back, you want to try and saturate the market with competitive pricing... they didn't do that.
4. Sun does not know which battles to not fight.
It was clear several years ago that Sparc was not going to be able to beat x86 in the long haul. It was it also clear last year that IBM G5 processors were going to kick butt, and IBM was looking for buyers. If Sun wanted to not support x86 and at the same time save money on R&D, they should have killed Sparc, purchased G5 processors from IBM for their boxes and ported Solaris to G5 would not be a big deal. IBM is going to replace AIX with Linux anyway, but Sun could offer Solaris as a replacement for AIX for all those people that wanted a UNIX derived from AT&T and not BSD.
Now let's look at Apple.
1. Apple has lots of innovative products.
The iPod on the hardware side, their dual G5 processor boxes, Firewire, their iLife series of apps.
2. Apple has a clear business strategy
They want to make cool, friendly, exclusive, high-margin products for the consumer market.
3. Apple listens to its customers
If there is a vacuum (in software) and someone else is not filling that vacuum or charging exorbitant amounts, Apples fills it with its software products. The keep making the UI easier to use and they take suggestions. And their pricing is reasonable for the features that you get.
4. Apple knows which battles to not fight.
IBM is fighting their processor battle with Intel. They didn't design the electronics for the iPod (although they did dictate the specs). They did the stuff that they were good at - the UI and the software.
Sun and Apple are very different companies with very different business models and attitudes.
What Sholes did was slow down the fastest theoretical speed at which you could type, while at the same time increasing the fastest practical (given the technology available at the time). He didn't do it to slow people down, he did to speed them up.
That said, since he did slow the fastest theoretical speed, you can't argue that he didn't cripple his layout to slow people down. He did, at least theoretically, slow them down.
Don't blame the technology when its being used in perverted ways. You yourself said that is meant for shooting down planes. It should not have shocked anyone when they tried to use it for something else and it didn't work.
Now that's not entirely fair. They did ask for it to be modified, the contractor said yes, took the moeny for the modification. So you can't say it is "perverted" when everyone else calls it "technology reuse". The first HumVees were modified trucks... and met the requirements just fine, and you wouldn't call those perversions.
This country needs three things. First, a true capitalist system for defense contractors.
That's completely impractical. It costs too much to design a tank -- only about 3 or 4 companies in the United State could do it. Furthermore, the gov't doesn't want your tank, they want their tank.
For your information, we really only have 3 or 4 major players in the tank market. And there is evidence to prove that you're wrong... the JSF was designed in a reasonably capitalistic manner. All three contractors got a fixed amount of money for development, and the army picked the best prototype. Some manufacturers spent more than the money they got... but they wanted to assume the risk.
Actually, they are held liable. There is this long whole process called testing, the contractor is liable until the item passes the tests. The gov't won't assume liability until it passes tests.
What kind of tests are you taking about? Our soldiers have their guns jam on them regularly in Iraq and you mean to tell me that no one thought to test how the guns behave in dirty conditions? We can't completely deny that there have been big quality lapses in our weapons.
Third, absolutely, positively, no secret budgets of any kind. I am entirely pissed off with the pentagon filling up with all the kids who had secret treehouse clubs when they were kids and want to do the same shit now that they're 40.
You're damn right. Have you heard the military's defense of the Iraq war? "They were shooting at our planes, and we owe it to our troops"... owe what? To lose 500 more lives? To spend $100 billion dollars and rising oil prices? Kennedy had the balls to get the Soviet missiles out of Cuba without firing a single shot. That's courage -- when everyone else is trying to justify war, you're trying to figure out a way to contain the situation without losing lives or billions of dollars of taxpayer's money.
Respectfully, then you haven't done any engineering. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Especially regarding obstacle avoidance. It's doing the engineering and implementing that is the true test of whether it is feasible or not. Innovation is not thinking up ideas... it is thinking up ideas that work given real-world constraints.
The space elevator is a cool idea. But the true test is doing all the engineering to figure out whether it is feasible at all.
And if you let the teams compete, they'll come back and try harder next year, [...] Letting in slow starters isn't always bad, because with the right motivation they can put forward a lot of effort.
If you want to do this, do this separately from the real contest. Do a technology demo or something like that, where people can talk about their ideas and demonstrate their success or lack thereof. But stick to the bar that you set for the contest.
I couldn't agree more. I was in a team from my old University at an IEEE contest. Our robot had to find an IR signal that was modulated at 100 Khz with 50 mA (don't quote me on the exact numbers) through the IR emitter. Then we had to drive our robot to the emitter and do a few things, all autonomous.
We found out that it was really challenging to do this in practice... the signal was too weak and there was too much noise introduced by the filter and our amplifier. So we used lenses to get more light... complicated, given the overall dimensions and scope of the project, but pretty innovative.
We got there, and the university hosting the contest found that other teams (and their own team) were having a hard time seeing the IR emitter. So they doubled the current. Of course, then our reception system was too sensitive (couldn't remove the lenses because of packaging issues) because IR was bouncing off all kinds of things and we were picking it up. We tried to argue, but the hosts stated that it was in the interests of the contest (and of course, the home team).
Moral of the story: if you're going to organize a contest with rules, screw making the contest more interesting and stick with fair play. If the specs are published, and contestants don't make the specs, don't take away from the efforts of the contestants that actually made the specs. And no home teams to bias the judges.
All industries should be dominated by the fastest, cheapest, most efficient businesses. If everyone is ging to make the fastest and cheapest product, then it is easy to differentiate on other axes, but that requires R&D.
If you are an innovator, you know your competitors are going to acquire your innovations at some point. But the important point is that your innovations were in your product first. If you do innovate on a continual basis, you will be acknowledged as the market leader, have brand loyalty and can charge more. And you know you have to make your investment back before the cheapest manufacturers can catch up, but this only enforces fiscal discipline.
If you're the cheapest manufacturer, then you have the difference between your price point and the next guy up as a potential revenue stream for your R&D. You can increase your prices and use the extra money for R&D, or invest in R&D assured that your innovations will transfer into greater volume (yours, plus at least the next guy up) and you can take advantage of economies of scale to keep the price point the same while making the same profit.
(Of course, all of this is f***ed up if there is a monopoly around).
It has its upside and downside. I think China is becoming your world.
Are you claiming that the Chinese don't innovate? The first DVD player that played MP3 CDs and VCDs was Tiawanese, not Japanese, and it was cheaper. In that particular case, not only did the Tiawanese have cheaper manufacturing, but they also innovated.
Now I returned that DVD player back, because the UI was not good enough for me and the product didn't seem polished and I later purchase a better quality one. So again, for a particular innovation (DVD players playing MP3s), I was not content with the cheapest / most innovative. I was willing to pay for quality.
R&D is just one axis of businesses competing. Patents only give businesses that innovate first an bigger advantage than the natural benefits of innovation, allowing them to be inefficient and causing the consumer to pay more.
Finally, even copying your competition's features requires development if not research, especially if how something was done is kept a trade secret.
If this were the case, then the blame would fall squarely on your shoulders for poor execution. Kodak had products based on outdated technology, and did the research for new technologoy but did not bring it to market fast enough (perhaps to milk the film products for all they are worth). If Sony managed to bring newer technology to the market faster, Kodak deserves to lose market share because of this.
This is just competition. When businesses compete, they compete in technology, marketing, price, time to market and other aspects. Kodak should have been out their making products using their R&D, not sitting on their butts working on licensing agreements. They had a better idea of the market because they had several products out there, and we know now that they had the technology for the next generation of products as well, but when Sony beat them to it and made better products because Kodak weren't competitive enough, they want to litigate?
That's why patents are stupid. If you do the R&D, keep it a trade secret until you are ready to release the product and then use the revenue from that product to innovate the next one. That how you beat your competitors, not by sitting on your laurels. If you aren't willing to replace your own products with better ones, other people will do it for you.
Perhaps for individual inventors, patents might make sense, because individual inventors have to overcome the barriers of entry in markets. But the current patent system itself creates a huge barrier of entry... 10K for a patent? Gimme a break.
Perhaps the best thing to do to the patent system is to "open source" it. Basically, anyone can apply for a patent. The docs are posted online. The patent is valid until someone demonstrates why it is obvious, or has been done before (exactly or in another medium). No patent examiners and no lawyers are needed in the application process. If there is a dispute, a judge looks over the body of comments and decides whether the patent is legit. (The judge's involvement invariably happens with current patents anyway, except that right now the judge does not have any peer-review comments to look over, just those submitted by the disputers).
The two rovers cost $820 million together, see here. I understand that the parent was meant to be funny, but I found the amount mind-boggling, and had to look it up.
Did anyone else read that as "nework of small ladders"?
Sometimes low-tech is the way to do it, but I'm not so sure about this time...
Pipeline of jobs to India shuts down. Now you're back to 1 billion people, 10,000 jobs, and tax revenue of 100 million with which to feed them.
Ah... but the infrastructure that was developed because of the revenue stays, and it's infrastructure that both creates a demand for goods and services and enables goods and services to be sold.
Infrastructure can be intangible (talent, IP) or tangible (roads, power plants, fabs). The strength of an economy is how much money is moving around, so once enough people have buying power and enough infrastructure is in place, the economy goes into an upward spiral.
The ultimate question is, does India have more money than it had otherwise, and the answer is yes. The money keeps churning around, it doesn't "go away" until you destroy infrastructure (for instance, waste talent by shipping jobs away or close down factories).
Outsourcing jobs and manfacturing facilities makes a country poorer, so this is really bad for the U.S. We just haven't noticed because other areas of the economy were expanding, and there was a window where people had money and were really excited to spend it on the cheaper products from overseas before their jobs got shipped away as well...
I would also like to add that while we might get better coverage, all the redundancy in the robots (transmitters, receivers, motors, batteries, panels) increases the weight, which really adds to the launch costs. It's just easier to work on one or two robots and try to get 100% of the design right. Besides if you have a failure mode that destroys all of the robots, you're screwed.
Finally, they can now make the next Rovers by incorporating what they've learned so far. So we already have an iterative design process in place, which will get us better Rovers. The launch window only happens every two years, so it's not like we can iterate any faster than that, whether we have 2 rovers or 100 mini rovers.
We should make this a poll topic!
Consider a Mars base on the planet and not orbiting around it. Humans on the base will experience a low gravity environment all the time. Babies born on the base will grow to be a lot taller and a lot weaker than Earth babies.
When we move on to the next planet (say we find a lot of geothermal activity on Neptune keeping it warm), we will have to deal with other issues. The constraints of the living environment may dictate a different (but tolerable) gaseous composition, say mostly CO2 and O2 with no N2. Neptune babies may grow to develop different lung structures (not evolution, but just adaptation) in addition to being super-strong midgets because of the gravity.
Mars-raised humans will be different enough from Neptune-raised humans that we may have difficulty building any sort of kinship. Mars-raised humans will probably not be able to deal with Earth's gravity and much less Neptune's gravity and artificial atmosphere.
How are we going to relate to these creatures of the "same species"? Will we even connect or care about them, much less think about what is "beneficial to the entire species"?
While I think that Bill is a good guy for his philanthropy, I've seen other people who give until it hurts. I was invited to a local chruch in a poor community and I was astonished to see how much money these people were giving... as a percentage, any of those church-goers beat Gates hands-down.
It's even incredible when you think about what it means to give when you're living below the poverty line... everything you give cuts directly into your needs whereas when Bill gives, it doesn't even cut into his wants.
Of course, I'm not a philanthropist by any means so I'm not really qualified to comment.
He would make a good US Attorney General, and I think he's on the short list of several Democratic candidates running for President.
So India is now outsourcing their analogies to us? I, for one, welcome our analogy-outsourcing wage-undercutting overlords!
This scheme used to work really well for me, until your post. I had to &^$#% change my slashdot password...
You're wrong. Mass looting does not an efficient system make.
Any system that rewards the most innate human instinct as long as it is not against the common good is the most efficient system, or any system that rewards enlightened self-interest is the most efficient system. The "enlightened" part is each entity ensuring that their actions do not destry the system.
Any system that rewards pure self-interest only dies out from the "tragedy of the commons".
We want to promote people to invest money to make more money (self-interest expressed as Capitalism), but not at the cost of the system (protected by laws, hopefully put in place by a Democracy so that their is power equity).
P.S. There is only one innate instinct of humans (or all life) -- survial. Every other instinct or want is an extension of that...
There is no way the FTC will approve this. While the Justice Department may not have handled this case, the FTC has been handling corporate buy-outs and mergers decently for a while.
Is it just me, or is life imprisonment excessive for a DoS? Don't get me wrong, I think spammers are some of the worst scum among us, but surely the punishment should fit the crime?