Try explaining that "statistical anomaly" to the white person who didn't get the job... because of their skin color!
What you're endorsing is discrimination, my friend, and unless I missed something somewhere it's against the law to discriminate against someone based on their race, religion, creed, age, sex, or national origin. Of course, you're saying that it's perfectly alright for some people to be discriminated against as long as some other people benefit from it. Right...you just keep on feeling righteous about your attitude. Just know that if you reversed the words "black" and "white", you'd have Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the rest of the race-baiting entourage threatening lawsuits, boycotts, and more. But if you're white...hey, don't feel bad, some other white person got hired somewhere, so you're just out of luck. Sounds an awful lot like what happened to black people back in the 60's. It wasn't right then, it isn't right now.
"All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others" -- George Orwell, Animal Farm
Why should the color of a persons skin or their sex be considered over how well they perform their job?
Good question, Vic. The answer is this: diversity.
No, the real answer is "racial quotas", which is the total opposite of a meritocracy. Companies are rampantly reviewing their workforces to make sure they've got "enough of the minorities" to keep the lawsuits away. Is this really the best we can do? Whatever happened to "this person is the best one for the job because of their superlative skills" instead of "we're hiring you because you're black"?
Whatever good intentions there were when "affirmative action" was put in place have long since degenerated into reverse discrimination these days. Discrimination of any type, whether it's in favor of or against minorities, is a bad thing and is actually illegal, although in this liberal day and age you'd have a hard time getting any judge (who wants to keep their job) to rule in such a manner.
I do not buy into the assertion that because a CEO is earning 20x, he's contributing 20x.
Really? And what measurements did you make in order to come to that conclusion? A good CEO is worth every penny he or she is paid, while bad ones aren't worth a single penny or a single share of stock. Good CEO's can drive the company to new business, higher profits, and allow their employees to share in that wealth.
Further, before you denigrate all CEO's, what about the lowly guy (or group) that came up with an idea, marketed it, and formed a hugely successful business from it. It's their company; they risked a lot to make it, and worked very hard for it. Who are you to dictate to them what's "reasonable"?
I for one am a bit tired of the constant vitriol on/. against anyone in the corporate management structure. For every corrupt, lying, stealing, cheating CEO out there there are hundreds of hardworking, dedicated, worth-every-penny CEO's that go to the mat for their company every day. If you don't think so then why don't you try going out and forming your own company and see how easy it is......just like I did. Anybody can complain about a situation. It takes someone with balls to actually do something about it.
I think his meaning was more rooted in the probabilities of such events. Take the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis #1: We are the only life in the universe. Given the stupendous, enormous, unfathomable size of the universe, the billions of years of possible evolution, the quadrillions of possible planetary systems, and the innumerable number of possible chemical reactions, if we're all that there is then it goes against every probability that there is. This could be a powerful argument that something, somewhere, somehow put us here.
Hypothesis #2: We are not the only life in the universe. If this is true (and I belive that it is) the life should be everywhere, but due to our current technological limitations we're too spread out to find each other just yet. The more life we find, the less likely it is that life is the result of some external influence.
Corollary to Hypothesis #2: If life is everywhere in the universe, one could argue that the preponderance of life indicates that the universe was engineered in such a fashion to create life. This again implies the existence of a creator with a master plan for us, life in general, or the universe itself. Indeed, it is possible that our "laws" of physics, matter, energy, and so forth were engineered at the time the universe was created, and all God has to do now is sit back and watch us develop. This, then, raises the age-old question of whether we really have free will or if our destinies are already charted. Heisenberg says no if for no other reason than quantum mechanics, but can we ever really know?
You mis-state the situation. To add further enhancement, it's more like "there are strangers asking for access to your home so they can do your dishes. You know absolutely nothing about these people. They could be saints, they could be rapists, you just don't know. Therefore, before anyone is allowed into your home, you must find out as much as you can about them and their intentions before letting them touch your china, silverware, etc."
This is only common sense. It is not saying that no foreign nationals can be involved. It is saying that any that are involved must be screened. If the policy has a fault is that it should be screening anyone, foreign or domestic, who's involved in the project. However, the article doesn't address that issue, and it's quite possible that all domestic participants are already screened as a matter of course.
To a prisoner of war, sitting chained to a chair in some interrogation chamber after just being repeatedly subjected to beatings, whippings, and electric shock torture and probably doped up on sodium pentothal, even the threat of action against their family by someone who has even a sliver of information about them would seem very real indeed.
Suppose the following scenario: you are kidnapped, taken to a small room and tortured, then someone asks you for classified information, or to betray your country, or to do something that every fiber in your being resists. Then that person proceeds to enumerate the names, ages, addresses, and medical conditions of your family members. Perhaps they include a bit of data on where they go out to eat, or where they work, of if there's an alarm system on their house. They don't have to say where they got the data, the very fact that they have it at all could lead you to believe that they have much, much more of it. Most military members have family somewhere that doesn't live on base (parents, siblings, etc.) Information is the most valuable tool an enemy can have.
It wasn't my intention to debate the truth or mysticism of the Bible, it was to put a hypothesis forward. Most hardcore Bible believers interpret Genesis quite literally, yet there are numerous inconsistencies in the behavior of God.
Not that it matters in this discussion, but my personal opinion is that there is indeed a God that is responsible for all creation, but that we frail, faulty humans have endowed him with some very un-Godly human traits like anger, love, and other limitations that I don't think really pertain to such a being. It is our nature as humans to try and fathom the unexplainable by reflecting our own traits onto the mystery. We have "humanized" God in this manner.
I have frequently questioned why many of the morals passed down in the Biblical code should exist. Why does God care about sex outside of marriage? What shouldn't we lie, cheat, and steal? Why does God care? And if we aren't supposed to do these things, why have we been endowed with the ability to do them at all? If we disappoint or anger God, why doesn't he just rewind the clock and make us "right" the first time around? Ask these questions of someone in the clergy and you'll get a bunch of non-answers that range from "we are not supposed to know the mind of God" to "that's blasphemy".
But more the the point...can a non-omnipotent human ever possibly understand the motivations and actions of God? Is it possible that so many differences exist in modes of thought that logic as we know simply does not apply?
A very good question -- does God have a starting point at all, though? Let us suppose that God exists, and that he is an omnipotent being that created the universe as we know it. Omnipotence implies that he is not bound by our conventional laws of cause and effect. In short, if someone is capable of "being" outside of our so-called "linear" time, then it is quite possible for that being to have no beginning and no end. Sure, it flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but humans are incapable of perceiving such an arrangement in the same way that blind people are incapable of understanding color. Without a common frame of reference, we simply cannot compare.
Of course, omnipotence brings up a few questions all on its own. For example, if God is omnipotent, why does the book of Genesis have him wandering around Eden looking for Adam & Eve? Doesn't he know where they are? Why did he bother telling them not to eat of the Tree of Life? Couldn't he already know that they would disobey? It's like the old paradox: is God so powerful he can create a rock he cannot lift? No matter what the answer to the question is, it implies limitations on God's part, and that rules out omnipotence. Unless, of course, God selectively chooses to not be omnipotent at times, but it strains credulity to try and answer why that may be.
It's awful funny that the poor, downtrodden, disease-ridden Iraqi people have endured all this suffering whilst their kind, gentle, benevolent leader "father" Saddam has rebuilt all his palaces as well as created a few new ones since the war.
The truth is that the U.S. has not embargoed ANY humanitarian aid to Iraq, just the oil, and only because Saddam refused to allow weapons inspectors to do their jobs -- which were required by U.N. declaration, if you'll recall.
Seems you're pointing the finger at a target of convenience, the U.S., instead of the real monster, Saddam. But again, I am not surprised as deep thinking processes don't happen very often here on Slashdot.
First off, I'd love to see your evidence that the U.S. has "murder[ed] hundreds of thousands of civilians" and "pillage[d] the country for its natural resources". I'm assuming you're talking about Afghanistan, since it's current. Exactly what "resources" are we pillaging? There's not much there to take, except perhaps some oil, but there's no way to extract it as the country is in ruins -- ruins of self-inflicted wars since the Soviet's left two decades ago.
Plus, I want to know where you got the "hundreds of thousands" figures. Man, we must've dropped some really neat bombs to kill that many people! We didn't drop anywhere near enough munitions to kill that many people unless they were all just clustered somewhere in the middle of the desert. Of course, you have proof of this, right? Who am I kidding, this is Slashdot, the land of making grandiose, unsupportable, unsubstantiated claims.
Now, next I shall enlighten you a bit on how government budgets work. You simply can't take the entire defense spending of a nation and spend it elsewhere without some pretty severe effects. For example, you would immediately create a few million unemployed military people. And then all the industries that depend on military spending, from Boeing on down to the dry cleaners on military bases, would rapidly go out of business and lay off even more millions. Then their suppliers would tank, and so on and so forth. Anyone with the slightest understanding of economics would know that what you propose is folly of the highest possible order. And, let's not forget, with no military we would be defenseless, as well as having no further say-so at all in world events. Do you want folks like Saddam running the show? Didn't think so.
I don't see LoTR as being any harder to film than a bunch of other splashy biblical and historic epics. Most of the flashy stuff in Peter Jackson's films does not reflect any great requirement for special effects in the books themselves. It's basically a story with medieval warfare and a few monsters Harryhausen could have done a creditable job with.
I'm going to have to disagree with you here. Would it be possible to film it using 1970's or 1980's technology? Sure, but to do it the same justice that Jackson has done with LotR you'd have to have a budget about five times as big -- for each film, not all three together. Take the opening battle sequence of Fellowship. Imagine doing that with extras. You'd need 10,000 of them, along with about 5,000 makeup artists, propmakers, choreographers, cinematographers, cameras, cooks, and bus drivers. It is possible, but completely impractical. Films that have attempted this in the past (Spartacus, Cleopatra) have invariably run afoul of budgeting problems. Most have been flops, and even those that did succeed usually only broke even years after release. I would argue that any film seeking to be that ambitious with spending in the last forty years would likely be vetoed by any studio as too risky. Why spend that kind of cash when you can make ten mediocre teen slasher flicks for the same money? For that matter, can you imagine the Balrog being done with stop-motion camera work? I sure can't. Matte paintings for Isengard? I shudder at the thought. No, there's very good reasons why such a thing has not been done until now.
All film adaptations require major changes to the original stories. This is hardly unique to SF. I am well aware of the intricacies of this process. You may recall that War and Peace has been made several times into films and the Les Miserables was made into a pretty decent musical. Gee, do you think they left some stuff out?
There is a huge difference between something being filmed and something being filmed well. Excising vast amounts of material from books in order to squeeze it down to 2 hours is no mean task. Some have been done better than others, some not. I would argue that War and Peace was a pitiful rendering of the book, and the book itself was not that spectacular. Rarely, the film can actually improve on the book (The Shining is the only example I can think of), but it's incredibly rare.
Tolkien's works are so lush, so detailed, so interwoven that to condense them without losing the essence is like saying how far you can compress the Mona Lisa before the picture no longer is faithful to the original. Any loss is awful, but only a careful algorithm can maintain the essense of her smile while giving you a smaller file size. The gifts required for a screenwriter, cinematographer, director, and producer to all work together and produce such a masterpiece are difficult to find in "these degenerate days" (quote from "Foundation", for you Asimov fans). It's much easier to make dreck than something good.
Yes, yes, yes...I read the damned appendices. Yes, I know there's a gargantuan amount of info in there, from Bilbo's entire family tree to the history of the Dwarven race. While that provides an admirable backstory to the trilogy, it is not absolutely necessary to read the appendices to understand and enjoy the books themselves. Saying that folks who haven't read the appendices are clueless is like saying that folks who don't look at the "extras" section of their DVD's never get the "whole" movie.
My point was to say that although there are a lot of undercurrents, backstories, and so forth running throughout the LotR, the meat of the story is about Bilbo & Company taking the ring to Orodruin (Mount Doom to those of you who didn't "read the appendices"). Battles are fought, heroes are slain, Orcs are beheaded, and more happens along the way, but each of those items ADDS to the overall arc of the story. None of them are true "sub-plots" on their own. A sub-plot would be something like Aragorn's love interest, or the whole Tom Bombadil thing. Asimov's "Foundation" series is structured in a VASTLY different way.
What really bugs me is that with hundreds of great SF (and fantasy) novels that have never been made into films, folks spend hundreds of millions making terrible scripts into films. Sure, making Lord of the Rings into a film is a no brainer -- we had to wait fifty years for that?!
We didn't have to wait fifty years for a LotR movie, as animated versions of this have been around since the seventies, but we did have to wait this long for a live action version. Why? Many considered Tolkien's work to be unfilmable because of the sweeping grandeur of Middle Earth, the incredible sets that would've been required for Moria, Helm's Deep, Isengard, Bard-dur, etc...the costs would've been astronomical and even the best minature sets look like, well, itsy-bitsy cities. Computer technology finally allowed LotR to be "filmed" with the sweep and scope that the work demanded, all for a practical budget of "only" US$270 million.
You go on to list a large number of fantastic works, but just because a novel is outstanding does not mean it can be translated into a reasonable film. Take Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy, something I am intimately familiar with. Can you imagine the trimming, the skimming, and the condensing that would be required to do just one of the books? It's not like LotR where there's one neat overarching story arc (the destruction of the One Ring) with very few subplots -- Foundation is rife with Hari Seldon, Hober Mallow, and Empire sub-stories. Peter Jackson had to excise one of the larger sub-stories in LotR (Tom Bombadil) just to get Fellowship on the screen in three and a half hours. I can't imagine this being done to Foundation without leaving gaping holes.
Further, you have to consider that once could take an outstanding work of literature and make an outstanding picture out of it and -- here's a shock -- 80% of your audience will be too stupid to understand it or be interested in it. How many space battles were there in "Foundation"? Not many. It is a cerebral book, and I think that our society has declined so much in the last half-century (largely aided by Hollywood, mind you) that most people these days crave style over substance. To that end, Hollywood has had an oversupply of the former and far, far too little of the latter. Witness how many movies these days just plain suck. What few gems we get from time to time frequently come from outside the establishment (Memento comes to mind) or from big-time directors who can throw their weight around to get a film done their way (although this backfired hugely with George Lucas).
I couldn't disagree more. Go take a look at all of Ebert's reviews of all the Star Trek movies. He gave reasonably good (3.5 stars) reviews to First Contact and The Voyage Home, but everything else has displayed his obvious inablity (or lack of desire) to bother to understand the "pseudoscientific technobabble".
First off, it's not all babble. Ebert makes a sweeping pronouncement that consoles shouldn't spark and explode because, in a future where we beam things around, electricity isn't carried in the walls. Excuse me? In a present where we can send terabytes of information zipping around the globe daily on this "Internet" thingy, companies still have filing cabinets, FedEx is doing wonderful business, and fax machines are ubiquitous. Some things just stay put because either they're good solutions to problems or because the new stuff just doesn't do a significantly better job than the old stuff. Of course, it would be pointless to explain to Ebert that the Enterprise uses plasma to pipe energy from place to place, and that a ruptured plasma conduit would do some neat sparking and exploding. It's obvious he doesn't care and is more than willing to pan that which he is ignorant to.
Such reviewers do the genre itself a total disservice simply by their total ignorance of what's being done within the movie. Please note as well that Ebert is the same doofus who gave Star Wars - The Phantom Menace three and a half stars. Was Menace as good as First Contact? Given the vehemence reserved for what Star Wars has become to the Slashdot masses, I'd say it's a resounding "NO!", but that's just me.
The folks who are panning this movie are the same ones that have panned just about every Trek ever done, and they're panning it for the same reasons as always: they don't understand the technobabble, they don't get the special effects, and they don't understand the plot. If Nemesis is bad, it'll be because of the latter, as the two former "issues" have never been issues for those who have closely followed the series/movies.
Quite honestly, I think these reviewers are as clueless and ignorant as the vast majority of movie audiences, and that's why they just don't like films like this. For geeks everywhere, though, this sounds like a movie romp into familiar territory, and if you liked the Trek predecessors, this one is probably going to be likable as well. A bomb like Final Frontier it is not.
Issue #1: You're taking my argument to an illogically absurd extreme in order to make your point. You prove nothing other than the fact that any idea, taken to an absurd extreme, breaks down. Obviously punishment should be proportional to the crime, within reason and with respect to the actual damage (psychological and economical as well as physical) to the victim.
Issue #2: "Sure, the girl being raped has a very traumatic experience, but she isn't *dead*". You seem to have practically no ability to understand the incredible damage done to female who is a rape victim. Being male, I cannot speak from any perspective on this other than to pontificate on what I've heard. Most rape victims are emotionally scarred for life. Marriages fail. Jobs are lost. Suicides are not uncommon. Someone can pretty damned well devestate your life in some pretty hideous ways and leave you physically whole. Does that make their crime any less heinous? Of course not. Groping someone on the train is NOT the same as raping them, and I don't think you're unintelligent enough to believe otherwise. If you can think of no better argument than that then we're both wasting our time.
As for your vigilante comment, I will point out that no one on this planet has your best interests in mind more than you. It is nobody's responsibility to protect you other than you, and you shirk that responsibility at a fearful cost. I happen to value my life far too much to trust anyone else to defend it other than myself. If they want to help, so much the better, but ultimately if someone wishes to kill me I'm damned sure not going to make it easy for them by being disarmed and aloof about the threats around me.
And if you think you live in a threat-free environment, you're deluding yourself. Anyone can break into your house, your apartment, your car, or even your place of work and do harm to you or your property. True, the likelihood is low, but there are people who buy lottery tickets in the hopes that they will win although the chances of being mugged, murdered, or raped are much higher than winning the lottery.
It's your life, though, so do as you will. Do not presume to tell others that they cannot do as they would.
When everyone has guns, every confrontation is automatically escalated to limit. It only take a fleeting thought to end someone's life with a gun.
Ironically, the converse of your statement supports individual gun ownership. If you know that any potential conflict will be "automatically escalated to the limit", that serves as a powerful deterrent to confrontation in the first place.
"An armed society is a polite society" I wish I could find the author of this quote and credit them, as the statement is quite true. If you were the biggest kid on the block you'd have little to fear by picking a fight with anyone smaller than you. Your likelihood of being a bully is much higher, as there's nothing stopping you but good human nature (something lacking these days).
If, however, you weren't the biggest kid on the block, but everyone was of equal size, your likelihood of a successful fight is much lower, statistically no better than 50%. Therefore, you're much less likely to pick that fight, especially if there's little to be gained.
Escalate the "biggest kid on the block" to "armed thug on the street". If you know your intended victims are unlikely to be packing, you can rape, murder, and rob with relative impunity. If, however, your intended victims are as well armed (or better) than you, that's a powerful incentive to either find less able victims or to abandon your raping, murdering, and robbing ways. Ask just about any criminal behind bars who he fears more, an armed civilian or an armed cop. Unanimously they'll say the armed civilian. Why? Because criminals know that threatened civilians are highly likely to draw, shoot, and kill their assailants, whereas police are taught restraint, measured force response, and so forth.
For that matter, if you really want a good, objective person to ask, ask a policeman what he/she thinks about personal firearm ownership by law-abiding citizens. Practically unanimously they're in favor of it. You'd think it'd be otherwise, as proliferation of guns would tend to endanger police. Not the case, though. They much prefer the deterrent aspect of personal gun ownership.
As society, should we let take a hypothetical person and let them be raped, or let them kill the rapist?
Why don't you ask the person who's about to be raped what they think? After all, the rapist isn't losing anything at all, he's taking. The person being raped, however, is being abused.
So, as a society, should we let someone be abused, demeaned, ravaged, and possibly left for dead after serving as a semen dispensary simply because we want to protect the life and liberty of the very person performing the above actions? What kind of twisted logic is that? How do you think the rapist would answer this question? How to you think the victim would?
Here's how it should be: if you are performing actions that deprive anyone else of their life, liberty, property, or ability to pursue happiness, you deserve nothing less than having all of the above removed from you. As for the ultimate punishment, that is up to neither of us; that's what juries are for.
Your statement is true only in the sense that no tooling, dies, jigs, or parts exist today, but that's specious and misleading. What takes the most time in desiging a heavy-lift platform? I'll tell you: research and development. If we were to reproduce the Saturn V we'd only have to do a token amount of R&D compared to making a new platform from scratch. The cost savings would be immense. Articles in Air & Space and Discover magazine have already been published, and the numbers are sound.
If any country gains ascendancy in space-based weaponry we could all regret it one day, but we (the U.S.) do not have control over that situation. If a foreign power wishes to deploy orbital weapons, we can't stop them, short of going to war ourselves.
However, don't delude yourself into thinking that "Star Wars" was a platform for space-based offensive weaponry. It was defensive in nature, designed to shoot down mid-flight ICBM's and warheads. There wasn't a single weapon on the drawing boards that could do any noticeable damage to anything on the ground.
No doubt some will disagree with this, claiming that you could loft nukes, or perhaps some sort of laser in orbit could hit something on the ground. Poppycock! Why? Stay with me.
Why would you want a nuke in orbit? What advantage would it possibly give you? Answer: none. There is nothing an orbital nuke could hit that a cruise missle couldn't also hit, and cruise missles cost about 1% of what it would cost to loft an orbital nuke platform. Further, orbital targets are very vulnerable, because their paths are fixed. A single anti-satellite rocket (which existed in the U.S.S.R. in quantity) could destroy your nuke platform quite easily, and again at about the tenth of the cost it would take to deploy such a nuke platform in the first place. Orbital weaponry not only makes no military sense, it makes no economic sense either.
I fail to see where you get your information on seek times from. If you compare apples to apples (in this case, a 7200RPM SCSI to a 7200RPM IDE) then you'll note that access times are identical for identical makes of drives. The drive internals are identical, it's the electronics that are different. In fact, SCSI command overhead can actually make a single SCSI drive slower than a similar IDE drive, but in reality the difference is well below the noticeable threshold.
You are, however, most likely comparing something like a 15,000RPM SCSI to a 7,200RPM IDE, and obviously rotational latency of the faster spinning drive will be about half that of the slower spinning drive. Bravo! You've discovered the obvious. Now, examine your price points and you'll note that to get about a 1ms-2ms decrease in access times (arguably a 20%-30% reduction in overall latency) you've spent about 400% more. Does this make sense whatsoever? Only if you (a) have money to burn or (b) you've got some business use that absolutely demands the highest performance money can buy. Cases (a) and (b) exist in far rarer amounts than not. I will also point out that in addition to costing more your 15K RPM drive also carries with it a mandatory active cooling arrangement (more noise), higher power consumption (upgrade that power supply), and more noise (even more noise).
For 95% of hard drive applications in the world users will not notice the benefits of SCSI. The advent of gargantuan caches, both in the form of onboard controller cache and operating system caching algorithms, means that random read performance is not as important in most instances as it was five years ago. File sizes are getting larger as well, trending towards better sequential access times.
Does SCSI have a place? Absolutely -- wherever you need insane expandability (more than 8 drives), or the absolute fastest possible access times (database servers with huge databases), or hot swap capability, SCSI is the way to go. But those markets are relatively narrow, and in almost every case you're going to be spending someone else's money (the company's) instead of your own. It's easy to justify SCSI when it doesn't come out of your own pocket.
You'd be amazed at how wrong this conventional "reusable" wisdom is; not that you haven't put some thought into it, but history and current events shows it to be wrong.
Take, for example, the Saturn V moon rockets. This behemoth rocket, standing who-knows-how-many stories tall, and all you get back is this teensy little capsule with three astronauts in it. Wasteful, eh?
Well, yes it is, but engineers plan that wastefullness into the system. For example, the massive Jupiter engines that were on the first stage of the Saturn V were designed to work once, and only once. As such, you immediately can dispense with one of the largest expenses of the shuttle fleet -- namely, the tear down and inspection process following every launch. There's nothing to inspect when your launch system is expendable. Ironically, the shuttle costs more per pound of payload than the Saturn V did, even taking inflation into account, and the inspection procedures are a large part of this.
Take it a step further and you'll see that reliability comes into play. How many shuttle launches have been delayed or scrubbed due to equipment failure? Quite a few, and it's because the shuttle has sacrificed much to the altar of reusability. Weight, the evil bugaboo of the space program, has been ruthlessly trimmed to the point where things aren't as overengineered as the were in the Apollo days. Such cuts had to be made or the shuttle wouldn't be able to carry as much as a postcard into orbit. Apollo, by contrast, was rarely delayed because the equipment wasn't being pushed as hard as the Shuttle is. Again, Saturn V's were designed with finite lifetimes, and the engineers used that to build cheaper, more reliable, but somewhat less efficient systems.
Lastly, reusability comes at a heavy cost in payload capacity. The shuttle can only reach low earth orbit, and only a few orbital trajectories at that. Why do you think so many companies still use Delta's for satellite launches? It's cheaper and it's more reliable, otherwise you'd bet that companies would be bashing down NASA's door trying to get space on a shuttle launch.
I'll leave you with a good analogy from the motorsports world: drag racing. A Top Fuel dragster is designed to do one thing -- run the quarter mile as fast as possible. To that end, the engines are designed to be torn down and practically rebuilt in between runs, and are junked after a very few runs. Why is that? Well, parts designers realized that to design a longer, more reusable lifespan into these engines would either diminish their competitiveness (heavier components last longer but hurt performance) or cost an unholy amount of money in exotic materials and technologies. The analogy is not complete, of course, since drag engines still cost a fortune, but you get the picture as big, dumb boosters do not cost a fortune with respect to the shuttle.
The shuttle is, and has been, a political jobs program. It should never have been made, and should not be continued. Manned spaceflight to LEO could be just as easily accomplished with cheaper, expendable boosters like the ones we were using forty years ago. In fact, with the technology advances of today, those yesteryear boosters could be much cheaper to operate today than they were then.
Re:SCSI for workstations?
on
IDE RAID Examined
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· Score: 5, Insightful
You apparently didn't read the article, and have no current experience with IDE RAID systems. Take at look at the sustained tranfer rates of the 3Ware system. They meet just about any SCSI controller you're likely to find when paired with good 7200RPM drives. The myth that SCSI is the only way to get reliable sustained transfers is just that -- a myth. SCSI's only advantage now is reduced cable clutter and having up to 15 drives on one controller, but who needs that many drives these days when 120GB drives are available for next to nothing?
You are neglecting the side benefits of several programs you mention. For example, laser research during the "Star Wars" program has led to cost-effective, power efficient, miniature lasers that now reside in your DVD player and CD-ROM. The trickle-down effect of this type of research has long been documented, and has been prevalent in our society since the Manhattan Project. You cannot discount defense spending without also discounting the inumerable benefits that have come from those programs.
I used to think an awful lot like the author of this article. I was fed up with how stupid my bosses were, how poorly I was treated and paid, and how wasteful I thought the company was.
So I started my own business. What an education that was!
I've found that, as a business owner, I have to work far harder than I ever anticipated in order to keep the company viable. There's a tremendous amount of work going on that employees of a company never see and are rarely aware of, work that has to be done by someone with good management skills. If that work is being done properly then the employees never know about it and they're able to do their jobs.
I have a great deal of respect now for entrepeneurs who risk a great deal to start a new business. It takes guts, patience, perserverance, and more to do that.
Any fool can sit around and bitch and moan about how much they hate their company/boss/workplace/insert-bitch-and-moan-noun- here, but how many of those very same people could effectively run a business, turn a profit, and employ someone else? This is not meant to be condescending, but instead a wakeup call to geeks. If you don't like how someone is doing something, go try doing it yourself. You may find that it's much harder than you first supposed.
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Try explaining that "statistical anomaly" to the white person who didn't get the job... because of their skin color!
What you're endorsing is discrimination, my friend, and unless I missed something somewhere it's against the law to discriminate against someone based on their race, religion, creed, age, sex, or national origin. Of course, you're saying that it's perfectly alright for some people to be discriminated against as long as some other people benefit from it. Right...you just keep on feeling righteous about your attitude. Just know that if you reversed the words "black" and "white", you'd have Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and the rest of the race-baiting entourage threatening lawsuits, boycotts, and more. But if you're white...hey, don't feel bad, some other white person got hired somewhere, so you're just out of luck. Sounds an awful lot like what happened to black people back in the 60's. It wasn't right then, it isn't right now.
"All animals are created equal, but some animals are more equal than others" -- George Orwell, Animal Farm
Good question, Vic. The answer is this: diversity.
No, the real answer is "racial quotas", which is the total opposite of a meritocracy. Companies are rampantly reviewing their workforces to make sure they've got "enough of the minorities" to keep the lawsuits away. Is this really the best we can do? Whatever happened to "this person is the best one for the job because of their superlative skills" instead of "we're hiring you because you're black"?
Whatever good intentions there were when "affirmative action" was put in place have long since degenerated into reverse discrimination these days. Discrimination of any type, whether it's in favor of or against minorities, is a bad thing and is actually illegal, although in this liberal day and age you'd have a hard time getting any judge (who wants to keep their job) to rule in such a manner.
I do not buy into the assertion that because a CEO is earning 20x, he's contributing 20x.
/. against anyone in the corporate management structure. For every corrupt, lying, stealing, cheating CEO out there there are hundreds of hardworking, dedicated, worth-every-penny CEO's that go to the mat for their company every day. If you don't think so then why don't you try going out and forming your own company and see how easy it is... ...just like I did. Anybody can complain about a situation. It takes someone with balls to actually do something about it.
Really? And what measurements did you make in order to come to that conclusion? A good CEO is worth every penny he or she is paid, while bad ones aren't worth a single penny or a single share of stock. Good CEO's can drive the company to new business, higher profits, and allow their employees to share in that wealth.
Further, before you denigrate all CEO's, what about the lowly guy (or group) that came up with an idea, marketed it, and formed a hugely successful business from it. It's their company; they risked a lot to make it, and worked very hard for it. Who are you to dictate to them what's "reasonable"?
I for one am a bit tired of the constant vitriol on
I think his meaning was more rooted in the probabilities of such events. Take the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis #1: We are the only life in the universe. Given the stupendous, enormous, unfathomable size of the universe, the billions of years of possible evolution, the quadrillions of possible planetary systems, and the innumerable number of possible chemical reactions, if we're all that there is then it goes against every probability that there is. This could be a powerful argument that something, somewhere, somehow put us here.
Hypothesis #2: We are not the only life in the universe. If this is true (and I belive that it is) the life should be everywhere, but due to our current technological limitations we're too spread out to find each other just yet. The more life we find, the less likely it is that life is the result of some external influence.
Corollary to Hypothesis #2: If life is everywhere in the universe, one could argue that the preponderance of life indicates that the universe was engineered in such a fashion to create life. This again implies the existence of a creator with a master plan for us, life in general, or the universe itself. Indeed, it is possible that our "laws" of physics, matter, energy, and so forth were engineered at the time the universe was created, and all God has to do now is sit back and watch us develop. This, then, raises the age-old question of whether we really have free will or if our destinies are already charted. Heisenberg says no if for no other reason than quantum mechanics, but can we ever really know?
You mis-state the situation. To add further enhancement, it's more like "there are strangers asking for access to your home so they can do your dishes. You know absolutely nothing about these people. They could be saints, they could be rapists, you just don't know. Therefore, before anyone is allowed into your home, you must find out as much as you can about them and their intentions before letting them touch your china, silverware, etc."
This is only common sense. It is not saying that no foreign nationals can be involved. It is saying that any that are involved must be screened. If the policy has a fault is that it should be screening anyone, foreign or domestic, who's involved in the project. However, the article doesn't address that issue, and it's quite possible that all domestic participants are already screened as a matter of course.
To a prisoner of war, sitting chained to a chair in some interrogation chamber after just being repeatedly subjected to beatings, whippings, and electric shock torture and probably doped up on sodium pentothal, even the threat of action against their family by someone who has even a sliver of information about them would seem very real indeed.
Suppose the following scenario: you are kidnapped, taken to a small room and tortured, then someone asks you for classified information, or to betray your country, or to do something that every fiber in your being resists. Then that person proceeds to enumerate the names, ages, addresses, and medical conditions of your family members. Perhaps they include a bit of data on where they go out to eat, or where they work, of if there's an alarm system on their house. They don't have to say where they got the data, the very fact that they have it at all could lead you to believe that they have much, much more of it. Most military members have family somewhere that doesn't live on base (parents, siblings, etc.) Information is the most valuable tool an enemy can have.
It wasn't my intention to debate the truth or mysticism of the Bible, it was to put a hypothesis forward. Most hardcore Bible believers interpret Genesis quite literally, yet there are numerous inconsistencies in the behavior of God.
Not that it matters in this discussion, but my personal opinion is that there is indeed a God that is responsible for all creation, but that we frail, faulty humans have endowed him with some very un-Godly human traits like anger, love, and other limitations that I don't think really pertain to such a being. It is our nature as humans to try and fathom the unexplainable by reflecting our own traits onto the mystery. We have "humanized" God in this manner.
I have frequently questioned why many of the morals passed down in the Biblical code should exist. Why does God care about sex outside of marriage? What shouldn't we lie, cheat, and steal? Why does God care? And if we aren't supposed to do these things, why have we been endowed with the ability to do them at all? If we disappoint or anger God, why doesn't he just rewind the clock and make us "right" the first time around? Ask these questions of someone in the clergy and you'll get a bunch of non-answers that range from "we are not supposed to know the mind of God" to "that's blasphemy".
But more the the point...can a non-omnipotent human ever possibly understand the motivations and actions of God? Is it possible that so many differences exist in modes of thought that logic as we know simply does not apply?
Est-ce qu'avec Babelfish de mon côté, comment je peux perdre?
English Translation: With Babelfish on my side, how can I lose?
A very good question -- does God have a starting point at all, though? Let us suppose that God exists, and that he is an omnipotent being that created the universe as we know it. Omnipotence implies that he is not bound by our conventional laws of cause and effect. In short, if someone is capable of "being" outside of our so-called "linear" time, then it is quite possible for that being to have no beginning and no end. Sure, it flies in the face of conventional wisdom, but humans are incapable of perceiving such an arrangement in the same way that blind people are incapable of understanding color. Without a common frame of reference, we simply cannot compare.
Of course, omnipotence brings up a few questions all on its own. For example, if God is omnipotent, why does the book of Genesis have him wandering around Eden looking for Adam & Eve? Doesn't he know where they are? Why did he bother telling them not to eat of the Tree of Life? Couldn't he already know that they would disobey? It's like the old paradox: is God so powerful he can create a rock he cannot lift? No matter what the answer to the question is, it implies limitations on God's part, and that rules out omnipotence. Unless, of course, God selectively chooses to not be omnipotent at times, but it strains credulity to try and answer why that may be.
It's awful funny that the poor, downtrodden, disease-ridden Iraqi people have endured all this suffering whilst their kind, gentle, benevolent leader "father" Saddam has rebuilt all his palaces as well as created a few new ones since the war.
The truth is that the U.S. has not embargoed ANY humanitarian aid to Iraq, just the oil, and only because Saddam refused to allow weapons inspectors to do their jobs -- which were required by U.N. declaration, if you'll recall.
Seems you're pointing the finger at a target of convenience, the U.S., instead of the real monster, Saddam. But again, I am not surprised as deep thinking processes don't happen very often here on Slashdot.
First off, I'd love to see your evidence that the U.S. has "murder[ed] hundreds of thousands of civilians" and "pillage[d] the country for its natural resources". I'm assuming you're talking about Afghanistan, since it's current. Exactly what "resources" are we pillaging? There's not much there to take, except perhaps some oil, but there's no way to extract it as the country is in ruins -- ruins of self-inflicted wars since the Soviet's left two decades ago.
Plus, I want to know where you got the "hundreds of thousands" figures. Man, we must've dropped some really neat bombs to kill that many people! We didn't drop anywhere near enough munitions to kill that many people unless they were all just clustered somewhere in the middle of the desert. Of course, you have proof of this, right? Who am I kidding, this is Slashdot, the land of making grandiose, unsupportable, unsubstantiated claims.
Now, next I shall enlighten you a bit on how government budgets work. You simply can't take the entire defense spending of a nation and spend it elsewhere without some pretty severe effects. For example, you would immediately create a few million unemployed military people. And then all the industries that depend on military spending, from Boeing on down to the dry cleaners on military bases, would rapidly go out of business and lay off even more millions. Then their suppliers would tank, and so on and so forth. Anyone with the slightest understanding of economics would know that what you propose is folly of the highest possible order. And, let's not forget, with no military we would be defenseless, as well as having no further say-so at all in world events. Do you want folks like Saddam running the show? Didn't think so.
I don't see LoTR as being any harder to film than a bunch of other splashy biblical and historic epics. Most of the flashy stuff in Peter Jackson's films does not reflect any great requirement for special effects in the books themselves. It's basically a story with medieval warfare and a few monsters Harryhausen could have done a creditable job with.
I'm going to have to disagree with you here. Would it be possible to film it using 1970's or 1980's technology? Sure, but to do it the same justice that Jackson has done with LotR you'd have to have a budget about five times as big -- for each film, not all three together. Take the opening battle sequence of Fellowship. Imagine doing that with extras. You'd need 10,000 of them, along with about 5,000 makeup artists, propmakers, choreographers, cinematographers, cameras, cooks, and bus drivers. It is possible, but completely impractical. Films that have attempted this in the past (Spartacus, Cleopatra) have invariably run afoul of budgeting problems. Most have been flops, and even those that did succeed usually only broke even years after release. I would argue that any film seeking to be that ambitious with spending in the last forty years would likely be vetoed by any studio as too risky. Why spend that kind of cash when you can make ten mediocre teen slasher flicks for the same money? For that matter, can you imagine the Balrog being done with stop-motion camera work? I sure can't. Matte paintings for Isengard? I shudder at the thought. No, there's very good reasons why such a thing has not been done until now.
All film adaptations require major changes to the original stories. This is hardly unique to SF. I am well aware of the intricacies of this process. You may recall that War and Peace has been made several times into films and the Les Miserables was made into a pretty decent musical. Gee, do you think they left some stuff out?
There is a huge difference between something being filmed and something being filmed well. Excising vast amounts of material from books in order to squeeze it down to 2 hours is no mean task. Some have been done better than others, some not. I would argue that War and Peace was a pitiful rendering of the book, and the book itself was not that spectacular. Rarely, the film can actually improve on the book (The Shining is the only example I can think of), but it's incredibly rare.
Tolkien's works are so lush, so detailed, so interwoven that to condense them without losing the essence is like saying how far you can compress the Mona Lisa before the picture no longer is faithful to the original. Any loss is awful, but only a careful algorithm can maintain the essense of her smile while giving you a smaller file size. The gifts required for a screenwriter, cinematographer, director, and producer to all work together and produce such a masterpiece are difficult to find in "these degenerate days" (quote from "Foundation", for you Asimov fans). It's much easier to make dreck than something good.
Yes, yes, yes...I read the damned appendices. Yes, I know there's a gargantuan amount of info in there, from Bilbo's entire family tree to the history of the Dwarven race. While that provides an admirable backstory to the trilogy, it is not absolutely necessary to read the appendices to understand and enjoy the books themselves. Saying that folks who haven't read the appendices are clueless is like saying that folks who don't look at the "extras" section of their DVD's never get the "whole" movie.
My point was to say that although there are a lot of undercurrents, backstories, and so forth running throughout the LotR, the meat of the story is about Bilbo & Company taking the ring to Orodruin (Mount Doom to those of you who didn't "read the appendices"). Battles are fought, heroes are slain, Orcs are beheaded, and more happens along the way, but each of those items ADDS to the overall arc of the story. None of them are true "sub-plots" on their own. A sub-plot would be something like Aragorn's love interest, or the whole Tom Bombadil thing. Asimov's "Foundation" series is structured in a VASTLY different way.
We didn't have to wait fifty years for a LotR movie, as animated versions of this have been around since the seventies, but we did have to wait this long for a live action version. Why? Many considered Tolkien's work to be unfilmable because of the sweeping grandeur of Middle Earth, the incredible sets that would've been required for Moria, Helm's Deep, Isengard, Bard-dur, etc...the costs would've been astronomical and even the best minature sets look like, well, itsy-bitsy cities. Computer technology finally allowed LotR to be "filmed" with the sweep and scope that the work demanded, all for a practical budget of "only" US$270 million.
You go on to list a large number of fantastic works, but just because a novel is outstanding does not mean it can be translated into a reasonable film. Take Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy, something I am intimately familiar with. Can you imagine the trimming, the skimming, and the condensing that would be required to do just one of the books? It's not like LotR where there's one neat overarching story arc (the destruction of the One Ring) with very few subplots -- Foundation is rife with Hari Seldon, Hober Mallow, and Empire sub-stories. Peter Jackson had to excise one of the larger sub-stories in LotR (Tom Bombadil) just to get Fellowship on the screen in three and a half hours. I can't imagine this being done to Foundation without leaving gaping holes.
Further, you have to consider that once could take an outstanding work of literature and make an outstanding picture out of it and -- here's a shock -- 80% of your audience will be too stupid to understand it or be interested in it. How many space battles were there in "Foundation"? Not many. It is a cerebral book, and I think that our society has declined so much in the last half-century (largely aided by Hollywood, mind you) that most people these days crave style over substance. To that end, Hollywood has had an oversupply of the former and far, far too little of the latter. Witness how many movies these days just plain suck. What few gems we get from time to time frequently come from outside the establishment (Memento comes to mind) or from big-time directors who can throw their weight around to get a film done their way (although this backfired hugely with George Lucas).
I couldn't disagree more. Go take a look at all of Ebert's reviews of all the Star Trek movies. He gave reasonably good (3.5 stars) reviews to First Contact and The Voyage Home, but everything else has displayed his obvious inablity (or lack of desire) to bother to understand the "pseudoscientific technobabble".
First off, it's not all babble. Ebert makes a sweeping pronouncement that consoles shouldn't spark and explode because, in a future where we beam things around, electricity isn't carried in the walls. Excuse me? In a present where we can send terabytes of information zipping around the globe daily on this "Internet" thingy, companies still have filing cabinets, FedEx is doing wonderful business, and fax machines are ubiquitous. Some things just stay put because either they're good solutions to problems or because the new stuff just doesn't do a significantly better job than the old stuff. Of course, it would be pointless to explain to Ebert that the Enterprise uses plasma to pipe energy from place to place, and that a ruptured plasma conduit would do some neat sparking and exploding. It's obvious he doesn't care and is more than willing to pan that which he is ignorant to.
Such reviewers do the genre itself a total disservice simply by their total ignorance of what's being done within the movie. Please note as well that Ebert is the same doofus who gave Star Wars - The Phantom Menace three and a half stars. Was Menace as good as First Contact? Given the vehemence reserved for what Star Wars has become to the Slashdot masses, I'd say it's a resounding "NO!", but that's just me.
The folks who are panning this movie are the same ones that have panned just about every Trek ever done, and they're panning it for the same reasons as always: they don't understand the technobabble, they don't get the special effects, and they don't understand the plot. If Nemesis is bad, it'll be because of the latter, as the two former "issues" have never been issues for those who have closely followed the series/movies.
Quite honestly, I think these reviewers are as clueless and ignorant as the vast majority of movie audiences, and that's why they just don't like films like this. For geeks everywhere, though, this sounds like a movie romp into familiar territory, and if you liked the Trek predecessors, this one is probably going to be likable as well. A bomb like Final Frontier it is not.
Issue #1: You're taking my argument to an illogically absurd extreme in order to make your point. You prove nothing other than the fact that any idea, taken to an absurd extreme, breaks down. Obviously punishment should be proportional to the crime, within reason and with respect to the actual damage (psychological and economical as well as physical) to the victim.
Issue #2: "Sure, the girl being raped has a very traumatic experience, but she isn't *dead*". You seem to have practically no ability to understand the incredible damage done to female who is a rape victim. Being male, I cannot speak from any perspective on this other than to pontificate on what I've heard. Most rape victims are emotionally scarred for life. Marriages fail. Jobs are lost. Suicides are not uncommon. Someone can pretty damned well devestate your life in some pretty hideous ways and leave you physically whole. Does that make their crime any less heinous? Of course not. Groping someone on the train is NOT the same as raping them, and I don't think you're unintelligent enough to believe otherwise. If you can think of no better argument than that then we're both wasting our time.
As for your vigilante comment, I will point out that no one on this planet has your best interests in mind more than you. It is nobody's responsibility to protect you other than you, and you shirk that responsibility at a fearful cost. I happen to value my life far too much to trust anyone else to defend it other than myself. If they want to help, so much the better, but ultimately if someone wishes to kill me I'm damned sure not going to make it easy for them by being disarmed and aloof about the threats around me.
And if you think you live in a threat-free environment, you're deluding yourself. Anyone can break into your house, your apartment, your car, or even your place of work and do harm to you or your property. True, the likelihood is low, but there are people who buy lottery tickets in the hopes that they will win although the chances of being mugged, murdered, or raped are much higher than winning the lottery.
It's your life, though, so do as you will. Do not presume to tell others that they cannot do as they would.
When everyone has guns, every confrontation is automatically escalated to limit. It only take a fleeting thought to end someone's life with a gun.
Ironically, the converse of your statement supports individual gun ownership. If you know that any potential conflict will be "automatically escalated to the limit", that serves as a powerful deterrent to confrontation in the first place.
"An armed society is a polite society"
I wish I could find the author of this quote and credit them, as the statement is quite true. If you were the biggest kid on the block you'd have little to fear by picking a fight with anyone smaller than you. Your likelihood of being a bully is much higher, as there's nothing stopping you but good human nature (something lacking these days).
If, however, you weren't the biggest kid on the block, but everyone was of equal size, your likelihood of a successful fight is much lower, statistically no better than 50%. Therefore, you're much less likely to pick that fight, especially if there's little to be gained.
Escalate the "biggest kid on the block" to "armed thug on the street". If you know your intended victims are unlikely to be packing, you can rape, murder, and rob with relative impunity. If, however, your intended victims are as well armed (or better) than you, that's a powerful incentive to either find less able victims or to abandon your raping, murdering, and robbing ways. Ask just about any criminal behind bars who he fears more, an armed civilian or an armed cop. Unanimously they'll say the armed civilian. Why? Because criminals know that threatened civilians are highly likely to draw, shoot, and kill their assailants, whereas police are taught restraint, measured force response, and so forth.
For that matter, if you really want a good, objective person to ask, ask a policeman what he/she thinks about personal firearm ownership by law-abiding citizens. Practically unanimously they're in favor of it. You'd think it'd be otherwise, as proliferation of guns would tend to endanger police. Not the case, though. They much prefer the deterrent aspect of personal gun ownership.
As society, should we let take a hypothetical person and let them be raped, or let them kill the rapist?
Why don't you ask the person who's about to be raped what they think? After all, the rapist isn't losing anything at all, he's taking. The person being raped, however, is being abused.
So, as a society, should we let someone be abused, demeaned, ravaged, and possibly left for dead after serving as a semen dispensary simply because we want to protect the life and liberty of the very person performing the above actions? What kind of twisted logic is that? How do you think the rapist would answer this question? How to you think the victim would?
Here's how it should be: if you are performing actions that deprive anyone else of their life, liberty, property, or ability to pursue happiness, you deserve nothing less than having all of the above removed from you. As for the ultimate punishment, that is up to neither of us; that's what juries are for.
Your statement is true only in the sense that no tooling, dies, jigs, or parts exist today, but that's specious and misleading. What takes the most time in desiging a heavy-lift platform? I'll tell you: research and development. If we were to reproduce the Saturn V we'd only have to do a token amount of R&D compared to making a new platform from scratch. The cost savings would be immense. Articles in Air & Space and Discover magazine have already been published, and the numbers are sound.
If any country gains ascendancy in space-based weaponry we could all regret it one day, but we (the U.S.) do not have control over that situation. If a foreign power wishes to deploy orbital weapons, we can't stop them, short of going to war ourselves.
However, don't delude yourself into thinking that "Star Wars" was a platform for space-based offensive weaponry. It was defensive in nature, designed to shoot down mid-flight ICBM's and warheads. There wasn't a single weapon on the drawing boards that could do any noticeable damage to anything on the ground.
No doubt some will disagree with this, claiming that you could loft nukes, or perhaps some sort of laser in orbit could hit something on the ground. Poppycock! Why? Stay with me.
Why would you want a nuke in orbit? What advantage would it possibly give you? Answer: none. There is nothing an orbital nuke could hit that a cruise missle couldn't also hit, and cruise missles cost about 1% of what it would cost to loft an orbital nuke platform. Further, orbital targets are very vulnerable, because their paths are fixed. A single anti-satellite rocket (which existed in the U.S.S.R. in quantity) could destroy your nuke platform quite easily, and again at about the tenth of the cost it would take to deploy such a nuke platform in the first place. Orbital weaponry not only makes no military sense, it makes no economic sense either.
I fail to see where you get your information on seek times from. If you compare apples to apples (in this case, a 7200RPM SCSI to a 7200RPM IDE) then you'll note that access times are identical for identical makes of drives. The drive internals are identical, it's the electronics that are different. In fact, SCSI command overhead can actually make a single SCSI drive slower than a similar IDE drive, but in reality the difference is well below the noticeable threshold.
You are, however, most likely comparing something like a 15,000RPM SCSI to a 7,200RPM IDE, and obviously rotational latency of the faster spinning drive will be about half that of the slower spinning drive. Bravo! You've discovered the obvious. Now, examine your price points and you'll note that to get about a 1ms-2ms decrease in access times (arguably a 20%-30% reduction in overall latency) you've spent about 400% more. Does this make sense whatsoever? Only if you (a) have money to burn or (b) you've got some business use that absolutely demands the highest performance money can buy. Cases (a) and (b) exist in far rarer amounts than not. I will also point out that in addition to costing more your 15K RPM drive also carries with it a mandatory active cooling arrangement (more noise), higher power consumption (upgrade that power supply), and more noise (even more noise).
For 95% of hard drive applications in the world users will not notice the benefits of SCSI. The advent of gargantuan caches, both in the form of onboard controller cache and operating system caching algorithms, means that random read performance is not as important in most instances as it was five years ago. File sizes are getting larger as well, trending towards better sequential access times.
Does SCSI have a place? Absolutely -- wherever you need insane expandability (more than 8 drives), or the absolute fastest possible access times (database servers with huge databases), or hot swap capability, SCSI is the way to go. But those markets are relatively narrow, and in almost every case you're going to be spending someone else's money (the company's) instead of your own. It's easy to justify SCSI when it doesn't come out of your own pocket.
You'd be amazed at how wrong this conventional "reusable" wisdom is; not that you haven't put some thought into it, but history and current events shows it to be wrong.
Take, for example, the Saturn V moon rockets. This behemoth rocket, standing who-knows-how-many stories tall, and all you get back is this teensy little capsule with three astronauts in it. Wasteful, eh?
Well, yes it is, but engineers plan that wastefullness into the system. For example, the massive Jupiter engines that were on the first stage of the Saturn V were designed to work once, and only once. As such, you immediately can dispense with one of the largest expenses of the shuttle fleet -- namely, the tear down and inspection process following every launch. There's nothing to inspect when your launch system is expendable. Ironically, the shuttle costs more per pound of payload than the Saturn V did, even taking inflation into account, and the inspection procedures are a large part of this.
Take it a step further and you'll see that reliability comes into play. How many shuttle launches have been delayed or scrubbed due to equipment failure? Quite a few, and it's because the shuttle has sacrificed much to the altar of reusability. Weight, the evil bugaboo of the space program, has been ruthlessly trimmed to the point where things aren't as overengineered as the were in the Apollo days. Such cuts had to be made or the shuttle wouldn't be able to carry as much as a postcard into orbit. Apollo, by contrast, was rarely delayed because the equipment wasn't being pushed as hard as the Shuttle is. Again, Saturn V's were designed with finite lifetimes, and the engineers used that to build cheaper, more reliable, but somewhat less efficient systems.
Lastly, reusability comes at a heavy cost in payload capacity. The shuttle can only reach low earth orbit, and only a few orbital trajectories at that. Why do you think so many companies still use Delta's for satellite launches? It's cheaper and it's more reliable, otherwise you'd bet that companies would be bashing down NASA's door trying to get space on a shuttle launch.
I'll leave you with a good analogy from the motorsports world: drag racing. A Top Fuel dragster is designed to do one thing -- run the quarter mile as fast as possible. To that end, the engines are designed to be torn down and practically rebuilt in between runs, and are junked after a very few runs. Why is that? Well, parts designers realized that to design a longer, more reusable lifespan into these engines would either diminish their competitiveness (heavier components last longer but hurt performance) or cost an unholy amount of money in exotic materials and technologies. The analogy is not complete, of course, since drag engines still cost a fortune, but you get the picture as big, dumb boosters do not cost a fortune with respect to the shuttle.
The shuttle is, and has been, a political jobs program. It should never have been made, and should not be continued. Manned spaceflight to LEO could be just as easily accomplished with cheaper, expendable boosters like the ones we were using forty years ago. In fact, with the technology advances of today, those yesteryear boosters could be much cheaper to operate today than they were then.
You apparently didn't read the article, and have no current experience with IDE RAID systems. Take at look at the sustained tranfer rates of the 3Ware system. They meet just about any SCSI controller you're likely to find when paired with good 7200RPM drives. The myth that SCSI is the only way to get reliable sustained transfers is just that -- a myth. SCSI's only advantage now is reduced cable clutter and having up to 15 drives on one controller, but who needs that many drives these days when 120GB drives are available for next to nothing?
You are neglecting the side benefits of several programs you mention. For example, laser research during the "Star Wars" program has led to cost-effective, power efficient, miniature lasers that now reside in your DVD player and CD-ROM. The trickle-down effect of this type of research has long been documented, and has been prevalent in our society since the Manhattan Project. You cannot discount defense spending without also discounting the inumerable benefits that have come from those programs.
I used to think an awful lot like the author of this article. I was fed up with how stupid my bosses were, how poorly I was treated and paid, and how wasteful I thought the company was.
- here, but how many of those very same people could effectively run a business, turn a profit, and employ someone else? This is not meant to be condescending, but instead a wakeup call to geeks. If you don't like how someone is doing something, go try doing it yourself. You may find that it's much harder than you first supposed.
So I started my own business. What an education that was!
I've found that, as a business owner, I have to work far harder than I ever anticipated in order to keep the company viable. There's a tremendous amount of work going on that employees of a company never see and are rarely aware of, work that has to be done by someone with good management skills. If that work is being done properly then the employees never know about it and they're able to do their jobs.
I have a great deal of respect now for entrepeneurs who risk a great deal to start a new business. It takes guts, patience, perserverance, and more to do that.
Any fool can sit around and bitch and moan about how much they hate their company/boss/workplace/insert-bitch-and-moan-noun