I told her that I, in a small business, have to deal with between 300 and 500 junk emails per day, in addition to 'regular' emails from clients/customers/other
To me, having to deal with that much crap would be intolerable. BTW, I already do run my mail through a combination of SpamAssassin, Procmail-based spam and worm filters, and Spamcop. Yes, most spam is obvious by the subject/sender (and SpamAssassin catches most of those), but the trick is to dump those without accidentally pissing a customer or client off by trashing (or accidentally reporting) one of their e-mails.
Traditionally, you'd have to hire a screener to do this (think telephone receptionist.) E-mail's advantage of being asynchronous (since e-mails don't have to require immediate attention unlike a phone, you can personally repond rather than having someone filter), is lost when your e-mail load increases beyond a certain amount. I only have so many billable hours a day - I have to do actual work, in addition to taking care of mundane items like paying my bills, taking time off now and then, and running errands. With enough spam, screening my e-mails would become a full-time job (as it was before I gave up, and started filtering.)
BTW, I wouldn't be surprised if the woman was talking just about her personal e-mail load - a generic address is often split among a group of operators, since the legit inquiries alone would probably run into the hundreds per day. In that event, you'd have to multiply 70 to 80 e-mails by the number of operators. Think about it, if you as a small business have to deal with 300-500 junk e-mails per day, they as a much larger company probably have a lot more than just 80 junk e-mails per day.
Thank god I have a procmail script to filter out worm-ridden e-mails at the server. Downloading 30-emails with 200k attachements per mail (even over DSL) got old REALLY fast...
Re:I'm not that bad off
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ISP Chief on Spam
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· Score: 5, Insightful
It only takes one slip. And it doesn't even need to be you who posts your e-mail. Maybe a helpful customer recommends you to someone else in an online forum. Maybe a mailing list archive, or an e-mail excerpt gets posted to the web. Maybe your relative/friend/significant other is running MS Outlook, got hit by an e-mail worm, and started spewing worm infested e-mails with e-mail of everyone in their address book, including your e-mail.
Once a spammer gets a hold of it, they'll use it. They'll sell it. They'll extract the first portion (ie, the foo from foo@bar.com), and start pattern matching it against a library of domains in case you have multiple accounts (foo@aol.com, foo@yahho.com, foo@hotmail.com, foo@yourdomain.com, foo@foo.com, etc.). Hell, if your address is short enough, they don't even need to get your e-mail. They'll just generate it randomly, so they can claim it as on of their "13-million address CD", and woe to you if they actually score a hit.
Of course, the people who really get screwed are people who use e-mail for business, for example customer support, info, etc. So the next time you get really shitty e-mail service from your bank, ISP, etc., think about how much crap they had to wade through in order to get your message, and how much you have to pay in order to cover that overhead. The spammer isn't paying, that's for sure...
MPEG-4 is the open standard that they're adopting. That Quicktime 6 has support for MPEG-4 is incidental, and not at all the core issue. After all, if the mobile phones actually supported Quicktime, they'd be able to play a lot more than just MPEG-4.
It's called theft, harrasment, and interference.
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A Conference About Spam
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· Score: 5, Interesting
I run my own business. I rely on e-mail heavily to communicate with customers and clients (I get orders via e-mail, support questions, contract inquiries, etc.) I spend upwards of 5 non-billable hours each week having to take care of the crap that fills my order inboxes, customer support inboxes, and my main mailbox. This crap includes both spam and e-mail worms. I spend that 5 non-billable hours a week AFTER everything goes through filters (if I didn't have filters, then I'd be spending more like 20 hours a week) - and it's only getting worse.
So, to sum up - it's not just a few e-mails. And yes, e-mail is about communication, and spammers are destroying the value of e-mail as a communications medium. And, by extension, since my business relies on e-mail, spammers are destroying (or at least seriously disrupting) my business. I pay business taxes, my bottom line is being affected by these criminals, and I really wouldn't mind if we just outlawed spam altogether.
You want to know what's anti-american, anti-business, and anti-innovation? Scum who abuse public resources - namely, spammers.
What if you were a CEO? How would you feel about all this bad press?
I'd fire the asshole in the marketing department who decided mass-mail was an acceptable practice, and I'd lobby Congress to outlaw spam.
Turn manned space travel over to commercial enterprises and you will probably discover they are not interested in manned space travel. Hype about tourism or microgravity manufacturing notwithstanding, there's no near term prospect of making money there.
Which gives companies with lots of excess cash to put into future R&D a big leg up on the future. Multi-billion dollar companies routinely fund tiny pie-in-the-sky projects, as just-in-case insurance. Just in case the project actually delivers disruptive technology, and as a hedge against other companies (think patent portfolios.)
If we can get launch costs down, space manufacturing would be great. Build comsats in space, as robustly as you want - no more constraints where your equipment has to be super-light, and yet be able to survive a high-g launch. You could layer on massive amounts of shielding, and get by without spending the big bucks on super-radiation hardened processors. Park fuel in orbit, prefab components for a manned space station, hulls for ships, etc. Once we get out of the gravity well, it becomes incredibly cheap to get around.
Maybe it won't be a multinational corporation. Maybe it will be a upstart funded by some dot-com millionaire, staffed by a bunch of die-hard space geeks that manages to build the 21st century equivalent of the old Pacific Railroad, and thus comes to dominate heavy industry by controlling both transit and local resources.
As a people, the French were disarmed by the Germans. They wouldn't have been able to fight back, even if they had wanted to. To combat that, and to assist allied forces, the US developed one-shot pistols, made of cheap stamped metal, with a simple instruction sheet, that we dropped all over the countryside. The intent? To give the resistance a way to fighting back - not by using the one-shot pistol to assault the German forces, but by using that one shot to kill a German soldier and take his superior weapon.
I don't know if it worked or not, but it certainly wouldn't have been great for German morale for soldiers to get whacked by seemingly defenseless citizens, at random. Would that have won the war? Probably not, but it probably helped.
As it is, we beat up the Taliban, but Al Queda and Osama are still out there. Don't discount the power of 1000 barbarians with clubs and spears vs. a squad armed with machine guns. Where do you think the Afgahns got their weapons from? Mostly by taking them from the Russians!
I've heard in many cases that muggers, for instance, in highly armed neighborhoods will shoot the victim first off, because it's almost a certainty the victim is carrying blade or gun.
That seems like a logical thing for a criminal to do, but is that true? After all, if the whole neighborhood is armed, wouldn't it also be logical for them to then screen out all the punks who might decide to use their area as a hunting ground? The mugger only has to slip up once, and BLAM, the mugger is permanently removed. And what about the alternative? These days, muggers might just shoot you on sight just because it's fun. At least if you're armed, and you survive the initial confrontation (awareness is more valuable than armament - remember that), you can return fire.
I'd rather be able to defend myself, than to live as a defenseless sheep, at the mercy of an underfunded/understaffed police department, indifferent citizenry, and an overloaded justice system. Too bad it's almost impossible to get concealed carry permits in California, except for the rich, famous, and the politicians.
No gun in the hands of a citizen, or a million citizens, can "defend freedom".
Given that our army is a volunteer one, with a very large reserve/national guard contingent, that's a very large portion of the citizenry that is continually "defending freedom" on a daily basis. I'd bet that many of these part time, and full time citizen-soldiers, also privately own firearms. That's a lot of expertise in the hands of the citizenry, for good and for bad (witness the more extremist militia movements back in the 90's.)
The point that I'm getting to is that every government is made up of people, people who have been given by the populace (either willingly, or unwillingly) the power to govern. Enough people have to be willing to back the government, and enough people have to be willing to bend, in order for that government to be effective. However, it works both ways. If enough people decide not to bend (ie, our Rebel forefathers of the 18th century), and decide to back an alternative government, tyrannies that cannot be circumvented by legal means can be circumvented by extra-legal means.
I remember having a similar argument with my High School government teacher regarding the usefulness of the 2nd Amendment against a tyrannical government. She was of the opinion that with modern military might, the 2nd Amendment is useless - would you fight rocket launchers and tanks with a mere rifle? I pointed out that our superior military might didn't win us the battle in Vietnam, nor did it the Russians in Afghanistan (yes, we gave the Afghans Stinger missiles, but the Afghanis were doing plenty of damage on their own.) More importantly though, with our army being made up of citizens like you and I, a tyranny would have to secure absolute control over every piece of military hardware in order to prevent dissident units from making off with weapons, ammo, and equipment.
The rights of the government derive from the consent of the governed - including the right of self-defense and self-determination. If you believe that these rights are null and void, then we're already in trouble.
By manufacturing in the US, the money stays within the US economy, creating jobs here and generally having the same effect as the huge job contracts given by the government in the past (think FDR economics...) and, theoretically, improving the strength of the economy here (as opposed to improving the economy in Russia).
This is not the best argument to use, given that we would have to put money into stabilizing Russia if it ever go into dire straits financially (not to mention, an economically strong Russia is a great market for US products.) Additionally, had we been able to build the ISS for cheap, we could have used the rest of the money to build other items of use in space, items that we could have designed and built in the US. Finally, we should look at return on investment for the US taxpayer, since whatever economic gains you have in the US will be offset by the taxes on that income.
Bottom line, unless we do no trade with Russia (not true, they buy our wheat, we buy their oil, they sell boosters and launch facilities to private corporations, enabling stuff like SeaLaunch, and millions of dollars to both US and Russian economies), spending dollars abroad is not throwing the money away. Note that's spending dollars abroad, as opposed to no-strings aid, which usually is feel-good band-aid fix, rather than a real solution.
The ultimate economic engine is if they opened space up to commercial enterprise. Mining, manufacturing (of space items, like ships, satelities, power generation, etc.) Problem is, all of the available launch tech is expensive. Had we been able to spend our dollars better (ie, develop a SSTO delivery system, and let the Russians build the space station modules), maybe we might have been able to lower the barrier into space. As it is, we're stuck in the same rut we've been for the last 25 years. Sad.
Tapes are fine for backups, but I never expect to pull complete and usable data off of them after 6 months. Why? Tape degrades - it's nothing more than rust on platic. As humidity and temperature change, you can end up with a solid roll which will stick to your tape drive heads and result in whole patches of magnetic coating coming off. I worked on a project restoring data from 10+ year old reel-to-reel tape, and it was a nightmare. 1 out of 4 tapes was completely unusable.
Even worse, tape drive formats keep changing - and since tape drives are guaranteed to wear out, where are you going to get a working tape drive to restore data 5, 10, 15 years from now? I've gone through 3 tape drives in the last 8 years - thank god I got a CD burner early, that data I can still read (although it's about time to start recopying stuff from 1996.)
Basically, if you entrust your data to tape long term, you have to continuously copy that data to new tapes, and or new tape formats. Where tape has traditionally shined is as a short-term backup format, although with the drop in DVD-burner drives/media, and the high-cost of high-capacity tape drives/media, this may no longer be the case (assuming you get some peon to do the big backup on DVDs, and you get to do daily diffs - otherwise, having a bank of tape drives is cheaper on staff time.)
So basically you're saying we should have instead elected the fascist bastard who was running against Davis, right?
Davis was Lieutenant Governor long before he was Governor. In addition, he had to qualify for his own party's primary against another democratic challenger, before going on to the November election against a slate of challengers, including Independent, Green, and Reform party candidates. Unless every person he's ever run against was a facist bastard, voters have had many a chance to pick a different candidate.
Note that this was 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is located in San Francisco, California. Justices for this court are drawn from places like Hawaii and California, where the law has been drawn strictly against private firearms ownership. This court is also heavily stacked with Democratic appointees - of the 28 congressionally allowed spots, 17 are Democratic, and only 7 are Republican (yes, there are vacancies - you can blame the previously Democratically held Senate for that.) Worse, cases are usually decided by a 3 judge panel, so it isn't as though the decision was a consensus of all 24 active judges.
Please note, that this decision goes against the current administration's belief that the 2nd Amendment is an individual right, so I'd expect press from the White House regarding this in the near future. Basically, all this means is that they'll have to go to the next layer above the 9th circuit (Appellate? Supreme Court? Someone who remembers the judicial review process please speak up...) It probably would be more effective in the short term to amend the California Constitution to prohibit laws infringing on the individual right to bear arms, but given the politics here, we're probably better off waiting until the Supreme Court (which seems to have a better understanding of the Constitution) weighs in.
Another note - for those of you willing to sit through the 70 pages of court opinion (I just skipped to the back) you will notice that the court judged the 2nd amendment to be a collective right, and as such, the provision in the California assault weapons act allowing retired officers to hold so called assault weapons to be inconsistent with the intent of the CAWCA (California Assault Weapons Control Act.) I wonder what the Fraternal Order of Police has to say about this...
Final note. None of this would even be an issue if Bill Lockyer and Gray Davis had been cashiered a long time ago (yes, the original Roberti-Roos act was signed in 1989, but it only banned a few models specifically by name. The amended 1999 act, signed by Davis, bans firearms by type - no centerfire rifles with detachable magazines and flash surpressors, no fixed magazines greater than 10 rounds, etc.) Those of you who can, but don't vote, have only yourselves to blame...
It would be much more productive for us to preemptively secure the rights we'd get eventually (via public referendums/ballot initiatives, etc.), than to let the corporations force us to react. After all, it's easier to enact a law to restrict a right (ie, Californa and the "assault gun" ban), than it is to repeal that law and restore it. An additional benefit of forcing the issue is to bring the whole matter up for a true public debate.
Currently, all we hear is that consumers are crooks, that recordable CDs and the internet are solely responsible for the problems the record and movie companies are having, and that everyone needs to be sent to the reeducation camps to learn that COPIES ARE BAD. Based on this reasoning, the media companies are dictating technology and matters of the law. Give them enough room, and they'll set preceedent that will take a lot of time and money to overturn. I say, force their hand, and make them try and make a case to the general public, rather than skulking around the backrooms and corridors of Congress, buying off representatives to sponsor insane legislation, or having aides quietly changing the text of laws in the dark of the night.
Yes, there will be a war. When the execs figure out they cannot hold consumers hostage directly, they'll start charging other people more (like movie producers, when they want to license a track, live events, etc.) At some point, the content owners will price themselves out of whatever little market there is left. When that happens, those divisions will go under, and many fat-cat promoters, managers, lawyers, and other assorted corporate groupies from that division will be cut loose to sink or swim with the rest of us.
The only problem is whether or not the "reforms" they use to bludgeon the rest of the world into accepting ever more restrictive products are codified into permanant land-mines, which will serve to destroy fair use - or any use, for that matter. We know those music divisions are going under. They know it. We might as well act preemptively and:
#1. Get a law passed to enforce mandatory licensing. #2. Restrict the length of copyright to lifetime of the creator, plus 25 years, or 75 years for a corporation.
That way, the industry lawyers are tied up trying to undo our legislation, rather than the other way around.
But aren't you still subject to sudden "reprogramming" (aka upgrades), since the Tivo box calls home every night? That would be the issue I'd be most concerned about - that the studios one day would get a court injunction to force the company to remove features, and force ads upon the viewers - even the lifetime subscribers.
I'd much rather roll my own box, and control the whole shebang, though being the lazy bastard that I am, I've really been tempted to buy a standalone box (SonicBlue or Tivo...)
Management is politics. Politics is never looking bad and taking credit for someone else's work/achievements. Ergo, management won't tolerate risk, because it requires taking the chance that you'll look bad, and because taking a risk means there's nobody to crib off of.
Soon, whole portions of the company are filled with managers, and NOTHING GETS DONE.
Bad as managers are though, I'd argue lawyers are worse...
Keep in mind our seemingly excessive military spending pays dividends. In Kosovo, our European allies couldn't keep up because they lacked the command and control structures provided by superior technology. It really ended up being the US running the whole show up until the point where we handed over the checkpoints to the rest of the peacekeeping forces. Note I said European allies - I don't know the status of the Russian forces, so I really cannot comment on them. But NATO - the US is NATO's backbone...
They'll only survive in the long term if someone finds the book useful enough to have a copy of their own.
Or has so much disk space that they can compulsively collect all kinds of media in digital form, nevermind whether they're "good" or "bad". Consider all the treasures that packrats have accumulated over the years (like that guy who donated a lifetime's worth of sci-fi pulp magazines up in Canada). Maybe that guy actually felt every single story in those pages was worth saving - or maybe he just wanted to have a complete collection, irregardless of how crappy some of that content might have been.
Digitize it all, and let it be cached on the hard drives of a hundred thousand geeks with way too much free time on their hands. In a hundred years, we will let the historians and archivists of the future sort through the mess.
I think he meant PCB as in printed circuit board, not poly whatsit gives-you-cancer PCB. Then again, if it was made in a place where PCBs are still in use (are there any such places?), lord knows what could be in there.
Well, you could just let them starve to death. Once the population grows large enough, there will be insuffcient forage for them all, resulting in a big die off during the winter, assuming some idiots don't try to prop up their population by dropping bales of hay and putting out deer chow. If they don't want hunters to control the population by culling the herd, nature can do a sufficently through job if left to its own devices.
Re:Cringely is becoming Crufty
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Cringely on P2P
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I just borrowed my friend's Wallace and Grommit VHS tapes and recorded and burned VCDs of them.
It isn't like W&G has the resolution and production quality where a VCD degrades it.
Well, no, not after it's been recorded to VHS. After VHS, a well encoded VCD could be considered an improvement, especially if you started with the 24/25fps source material and didn't have to go through reverse pulldown.
Nevermind, a simple google search answered my question. The satellite in question is now known as PAS 22, and is owned and operated by Hughes (the salvor, and the original manufacturer.) It originally was supposed to be parked at 105.5E, geostationary, but ended up at 60W after the recovery operation. Two lunar flybys were used, first to stabilize orbit, and the second to improve it.
The downside of the recovery was that they had to burn off most of the 1700kg of available onboard propellant.
According to the article, it too was a victim of a bad 4th stage booster. This happened back in '98 - does anyone know if asiasat 3 made it back to Earth into the correct orbit?
Firefly is a great example of a show that runs counter to every trend on tv today. It is not dialogue driven - instead of shooting two pages of script per minute (like Friends), they're content with shooting maybe a half a page. There is no formulaic bad guy vs. good guy, with predictable special effects climax every episode. It is serial - every episode builds on previous episodes to develop the characters, instead of waiting a few seasons to give each character a defining moment.
Basically, it's a throwback to TV of maybe 40 years ago, with a deliberately slower pacing. As a result, it's pissing off executives, all of whom grew up on MTV and who are twiching for more dialogue, more scenes, more explosions. They don't feel that they're getting their money's worth, thus, lots of pressure on Josh to either change the show, or get quashed.
I only hope someone on one of the cable channels (SciFi, or Showtime) picks up Firefly, so I'll be able to catch the rest of the series when they syndicate it...
Mark my words, eventually all you'll see on network TV is Jerry Springer, Judge Judy, and America's Most Dangerous Police Chases, and the crap that they like to pass off as the nightly news. I only hope that we can limit the brain-damaged execs just to network tv, and keep stuff like PBS and cable relatively uncontaminated.
Consider the tanker that went down off the coast of Spain. When that sucker sprang a leak, they hired salvors to try and save the ship and the cargo (this was before Spain and Portugal told them to get lost, whereupon they sunk in choppy seas.) Assuming that we had infrastructure in space, could we apply a similar idea and have space salvors recovering satellites? That would seem to me a better idea than keeping a 3 man crew in orbit on taxpayer dollars just to maintain the ISS, and the insurance company that insures the satellite would probably pony up a few mil just so they could avoid paying out on that particular policy.
I use mine also to track cash expenses, scheduler, address book, notes for notes, games to pass the time, and now, ebooks, courtesy of the Baen free library and my recent purchase of War of Honor (with the CD of books included.) I also use it to hold dumps of text from my computer, and important bits of info (like how much 16mm Kodak film costs vs. 35mm, IP addresses of machines I administer, etc.)
I'd never go back to a paper planner - if I lose or accidentally destroy my palm pilot (which is 6 years old by the way, an original 512k USR Pilot upgraded to 2mb w/ IR), I have a spare I bought off of eBay for $40 sitting in my desk drawer, ready to be resynched with all of my data. If I manage to kill my spare, then I have a great excuse for picking up that Sony Clie with the WiFi card slot and the nice screen for eBook reading, which would then let me play mp3s while on the road... If I lost my paper planner, I'd have to shoot myself, unless I made scans or photocopies on a regular basis of the stuff in it. You don't know what panic is until you loose that faux-leather patterned Dayrunner, with your entire life stored in it. With the electronic equivalent, I just keep it hotsynced regularly. Much better.
Last time I saw, you could get refurb Xboxes from EB for $159. I thought about buying one, but I'm saving up for one of those Panasonic DVD recorders (HS2) instead...
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I told her that I, in a small business, have to deal with between 300 and 500 junk emails per day, in addition to 'regular' emails from clients/customers/other
To me, having to deal with that much crap would be intolerable. BTW, I already do run my mail through a combination of SpamAssassin, Procmail-based spam and worm filters, and Spamcop. Yes, most spam is obvious by the subject/sender (and SpamAssassin catches most of those), but the trick is to dump those without accidentally pissing a customer or client off by trashing (or accidentally reporting) one of their e-mails.
Traditionally, you'd have to hire a screener to do this (think telephone receptionist.) E-mail's advantage of being asynchronous (since e-mails don't have to require immediate attention unlike a phone, you can personally repond rather than having someone filter), is lost when your e-mail load increases beyond a certain amount. I only have so many billable hours a day - I have to do actual work, in addition to taking care of mundane items like paying my bills, taking time off now and then, and running errands. With enough spam, screening my e-mails would become a full-time job (as it was before I gave up, and started filtering.)
BTW, I wouldn't be surprised if the woman was talking just about her personal e-mail load - a generic address is often split among a group of operators, since the legit inquiries alone would probably run into the hundreds per day. In that event, you'd have to multiply 70 to 80 e-mails by the number of operators. Think about it, if you as a small business have to deal with 300-500 junk e-mails per day, they as a much larger company probably have a lot more than just 80 junk e-mails per day.
Thank god I have a procmail script to filter out worm-ridden e-mails at the server. Downloading 30-emails with 200k attachements per mail (even over DSL) got old REALLY fast...
It only takes one slip. And it doesn't even need to be you who posts your e-mail. Maybe a helpful customer recommends you to someone else in an online forum. Maybe a mailing list archive, or an e-mail excerpt gets posted to the web. Maybe your relative/friend/significant other is running MS Outlook, got hit by an e-mail worm, and started spewing worm infested e-mails with e-mail of everyone in their address book, including your e-mail.
Once a spammer gets a hold of it, they'll use it. They'll sell it. They'll extract the first portion (ie, the foo from foo@bar.com), and start pattern matching it against a library of domains in case you have multiple accounts (foo@aol.com, foo@yahho.com, foo@hotmail.com, foo@yourdomain.com, foo@foo.com, etc.). Hell, if your address is short enough, they don't even need to get your e-mail. They'll just generate it randomly, so they can claim it as on of their "13-million address CD", and woe to you if they actually score a hit.
Of course, the people who really get screwed are people who use e-mail for business, for example customer support, info, etc. So the next time you get really shitty e-mail service from your bank, ISP, etc., think about how much crap they had to wade through in order to get your message, and how much you have to pay in order to cover that overhead. The spammer isn't paying, that's for sure...
MPEG-4 is the open standard that they're adopting. That Quicktime 6 has support for MPEG-4 is incidental, and not at all the core issue. After all, if the mobile phones actually supported Quicktime, they'd be able to play a lot more than just MPEG-4.
I run my own business. I rely on e-mail heavily to communicate with customers and clients (I get orders via e-mail, support questions, contract inquiries, etc.) I spend upwards of 5 non-billable hours each week having to take care of the crap that fills my order inboxes, customer support inboxes, and my main mailbox. This crap includes both spam and e-mail worms. I spend that 5 non-billable hours a week AFTER everything goes through filters (if I didn't have filters, then I'd be spending more like 20 hours a week) - and it's only getting worse.
So, to sum up - it's not just a few e-mails. And yes, e-mail is about communication, and spammers are destroying the value of e-mail as a communications medium. And, by extension, since my business relies on e-mail, spammers are destroying (or at least seriously disrupting) my business. I pay business taxes, my bottom line is being affected by these criminals, and I really wouldn't mind if we just outlawed spam altogether.
You want to know what's anti-american, anti-business, and anti-innovation? Scum who abuse public resources - namely, spammers.
What if you were a CEO? How would you feel about all this bad press?
I'd fire the asshole in the marketing department who decided mass-mail was an acceptable practice, and I'd lobby Congress to outlaw spam.
Turn manned space travel over to commercial enterprises and you will probably discover they are not interested in manned space travel. Hype about tourism or microgravity manufacturing notwithstanding, there's no near term prospect of making money there.
Which gives companies with lots of excess cash to put into future R&D a big leg up on the future. Multi-billion dollar companies routinely fund tiny pie-in-the-sky projects, as just-in-case insurance. Just in case the project actually delivers disruptive technology, and as a hedge against other companies (think patent portfolios.)
If we can get launch costs down, space manufacturing would be great. Build comsats in space, as robustly as you want - no more constraints where your equipment has to be super-light, and yet be able to survive a high-g launch. You could layer on massive amounts of shielding, and get by without spending the big bucks on super-radiation hardened processors. Park fuel in orbit, prefab components for a manned space station, hulls for ships, etc. Once we get out of the gravity well, it becomes incredibly cheap to get around.
Maybe it won't be a multinational corporation. Maybe it will be a upstart funded by some dot-com millionaire, staffed by a bunch of die-hard space geeks that manages to build the 21st century equivalent of the old Pacific Railroad, and thus comes to dominate heavy industry by controlling both transit and local resources.
As a people, the French were disarmed by the Germans. They wouldn't have been able to fight back, even if they had wanted to. To combat that, and to assist allied forces, the US developed one-shot pistols, made of cheap stamped metal, with a simple instruction sheet, that we dropped all over the countryside. The intent? To give the resistance a way to fighting back - not by using the one-shot pistol to assault the German forces, but by using that one shot to kill a German soldier and take his superior weapon.
I don't know if it worked or not, but it certainly wouldn't have been great for German morale for soldiers to get whacked by seemingly defenseless citizens, at random. Would that have won the war? Probably not, but it probably helped.
As it is, we beat up the Taliban, but Al Queda and Osama are still out there. Don't discount the power of 1000 barbarians with clubs and spears vs. a squad armed with machine guns. Where do you think the Afgahns got their weapons from? Mostly by taking them from the Russians!
I've heard in many cases that muggers, for instance, in highly armed neighborhoods will shoot the victim first off, because it's almost a certainty the victim is carrying blade or gun.
That seems like a logical thing for a criminal to do, but is that true? After all, if the whole neighborhood is armed, wouldn't it also be logical for them to then screen out all the punks who might decide to use their area as a hunting ground? The mugger only has to slip up once, and BLAM, the mugger is permanently removed. And what about the alternative? These days, muggers might just shoot you on sight just because it's fun. At least if you're armed, and you survive the initial confrontation (awareness is more valuable than armament - remember that), you can return fire.
I'd rather be able to defend myself, than to live as a defenseless sheep, at the mercy of an underfunded/understaffed police department, indifferent citizenry, and an overloaded justice system. Too bad it's almost impossible to get concealed carry permits in California, except for the rich, famous, and the politicians.
No gun in the hands of a citizen, or a million citizens, can "defend freedom".
Given that our army is a volunteer one, with a very large reserve/national guard contingent, that's a very large portion of the citizenry that is continually "defending freedom" on a daily basis. I'd bet that many of these part time, and full time citizen-soldiers, also privately own firearms. That's a lot of expertise in the hands of the citizenry, for good and for bad (witness the more extremist militia movements back in the 90's.)
The point that I'm getting to is that every government is made up of people, people who have been given by the populace (either willingly, or unwillingly) the power to govern. Enough people have to be willing to back the government, and enough people have to be willing to bend, in order for that government to be effective. However, it works both ways. If enough people decide not to bend (ie, our Rebel forefathers of the 18th century), and decide to back an alternative government, tyrannies that cannot be circumvented by legal means can be circumvented by extra-legal means.
I remember having a similar argument with my High School government teacher regarding the usefulness of the 2nd Amendment against a tyrannical government. She was of the opinion that with modern military might, the 2nd Amendment is useless - would you fight rocket launchers and tanks with a mere rifle? I pointed out that our superior military might didn't win us the battle in Vietnam, nor did it the Russians in Afghanistan (yes, we gave the Afghans Stinger missiles, but the Afghanis were doing plenty of damage on their own.) More importantly though, with our army being made up of citizens like you and I, a tyranny would have to secure absolute control over every piece of military hardware in order to prevent dissident units from making off with weapons, ammo, and equipment.
The rights of the government derive from the consent of the governed - including the right of self-defense and self-determination. If you believe that these rights are null and void, then we're already in trouble.
By manufacturing in the US, the money stays within the US economy, creating jobs here and generally having the same effect as the huge job contracts given by the government in the past (think FDR economics...) and, theoretically, improving the strength of the economy here (as opposed to improving the economy in Russia).
This is not the best argument to use, given that we would have to put money into stabilizing Russia if it ever go into dire straits financially (not to mention, an economically strong Russia is a great market for US products.) Additionally, had we been able to build the ISS for cheap, we could have used the rest of the money to build other items of use in space, items that we could have designed and built in the US. Finally, we should look at return on investment for the US taxpayer, since whatever economic gains you have in the US will be offset by the taxes on that income.
Bottom line, unless we do no trade with Russia (not true, they buy our wheat, we buy their oil, they sell boosters and launch facilities to private corporations, enabling stuff like SeaLaunch, and millions of dollars to both US and Russian economies), spending dollars abroad is not throwing the money away. Note that's spending dollars abroad, as opposed to no-strings aid, which usually is feel-good band-aid fix, rather than a real solution.
The ultimate economic engine is if they opened space up to commercial enterprise. Mining, manufacturing (of space items, like ships, satelities, power generation, etc.) Problem is, all of the available launch tech is expensive. Had we been able to spend our dollars better (ie, develop a SSTO delivery system, and let the Russians build the space station modules), maybe we might have been able to lower the barrier into space. As it is, we're stuck in the same rut we've been for the last 25 years. Sad.
Tapes are fine for backups, but I never expect to pull complete and usable data off of them after 6 months. Why? Tape degrades - it's nothing more than rust on platic. As humidity and temperature change, you can end up with a solid roll which will stick to your tape drive heads and result in whole patches of magnetic coating coming off. I worked on a project restoring data from 10+ year old reel-to-reel tape, and it was a nightmare. 1 out of 4 tapes was completely unusable.
Even worse, tape drive formats keep changing - and since tape drives are guaranteed to wear out, where are you going to get a working tape drive to restore data 5, 10, 15 years from now? I've gone through 3 tape drives in the last 8 years - thank god I got a CD burner early, that data I can still read (although it's about time to start recopying stuff from 1996.)
Basically, if you entrust your data to tape long term, you have to continuously copy that data to new tapes, and or new tape formats. Where tape has traditionally shined is as a short-term backup format, although with the drop in DVD-burner drives/media, and the high-cost of high-capacity tape drives/media, this may no longer be the case (assuming you get some peon to do the big backup on DVDs, and you get to do daily diffs - otherwise, having a bank of tape drives is cheaper on staff time.)
So basically you're saying we should have instead elected the fascist bastard who was running against Davis, right?
Davis was Lieutenant Governor long before he was Governor. In addition, he had to qualify for his own party's primary against another democratic challenger, before going on to the November election against a slate of challengers, including Independent, Green, and Reform party candidates. Unless every person he's ever run against was a facist bastard, voters have had many a chance to pick a different candidate.
Note that this was 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is located in San Francisco, California. Justices for this court are drawn from places like Hawaii and California, where the law has been drawn strictly against private firearms ownership. This court is also heavily stacked with Democratic appointees - of the 28 congressionally allowed spots, 17 are Democratic, and only 7 are Republican (yes, there are vacancies - you can blame the previously Democratically held Senate for that.) Worse, cases are usually decided by a 3 judge panel, so it isn't as though the decision was a consensus of all 24 active judges.
Please note, that this decision goes against the current administration's belief that the 2nd Amendment is an individual right, so I'd expect press from the White House regarding this in the near future. Basically, all this means is that they'll have to go to the next layer above the 9th circuit (Appellate? Supreme Court? Someone who remembers the judicial review process please speak up...) It probably would be more effective in the short term to amend the California Constitution to prohibit laws infringing on the individual right to bear arms, but given the politics here, we're probably better off waiting until the Supreme Court (which seems to have a better understanding of the Constitution) weighs in.
Another note - for those of you willing to sit through the 70 pages of court opinion (I just skipped to the back) you will notice that the court judged the 2nd amendment to be a collective right, and as such, the provision in the California assault weapons act allowing retired officers to hold so called assault weapons to be inconsistent with the intent of the CAWCA (California Assault Weapons Control Act.) I wonder what the Fraternal Order of Police has to say about this...
Final note. None of this would even be an issue if Bill Lockyer and Gray Davis had been cashiered a long time ago (yes, the original Roberti-Roos act was signed in 1989, but it only banned a few models specifically by name. The amended 1999 act, signed by Davis, bans firearms by type - no centerfire rifles with detachable magazines and flash surpressors, no fixed magazines greater than 10 rounds, etc.) Those of you who can, but don't vote, have only yourselves to blame...
It would be much more productive for us to preemptively secure the rights we'd get eventually (via public referendums/ballot initiatives, etc.), than to let the corporations force us to react. After all, it's easier to enact a law to restrict a right (ie, Californa and the "assault gun" ban), than it is to repeal that law and restore it. An additional benefit of forcing the issue is to bring the whole matter up for a true public debate.
Currently, all we hear is that consumers are crooks, that recordable CDs and the internet are solely responsible for the problems the record and movie companies are having, and that everyone needs to be sent to the reeducation camps to learn that COPIES ARE BAD. Based on this reasoning, the media companies are dictating technology and matters of the law. Give them enough room, and they'll set preceedent that will take a lot of time and money to overturn. I say, force their hand, and make them try and make a case to the general public, rather than skulking around the backrooms and corridors of Congress, buying off representatives to sponsor insane legislation, or having aides quietly changing the text of laws in the dark of the night.
Yes, there will be a war. When the execs figure out they cannot hold consumers hostage directly, they'll start charging other people more (like movie producers, when they want to license a track, live events, etc.) At some point, the content owners will price themselves out of whatever little market there is left. When that happens, those divisions will go under, and many fat-cat promoters, managers, lawyers, and other assorted corporate groupies from that division will be cut loose to sink or swim with the rest of us.
The only problem is whether or not the "reforms" they use to bludgeon the rest of the world into accepting ever more restrictive products are codified into permanant land-mines, which will serve to destroy fair use - or any use, for that matter. We know those music divisions are going under. They know it. We might as well act preemptively and:
#1. Get a law passed to enforce mandatory licensing.
#2. Restrict the length of copyright to lifetime of the creator, plus 25 years, or 75 years for a corporation.
That way, the industry lawyers are tied up trying to undo our legislation, rather than the other way around.
But aren't you still subject to sudden "reprogramming" (aka upgrades), since the Tivo box calls home every night? That would be the issue I'd be most concerned about - that the studios one day would get a court injunction to force the company to remove features, and force ads upon the viewers - even the lifetime subscribers.
I'd much rather roll my own box, and control the whole shebang, though being the lazy bastard that I am, I've really been tempted to buy a standalone box (SonicBlue or Tivo...)
Management is politics. Politics is never looking bad and taking credit for someone else's work/achievements. Ergo, management won't tolerate risk, because it requires taking the chance that you'll look bad, and because taking a risk means there's nobody to crib off of.
Soon, whole portions of the company are filled with managers, and NOTHING GETS DONE.
Bad as managers are though, I'd argue lawyers are worse...
Keep in mind our seemingly excessive military spending pays dividends. In Kosovo, our European allies couldn't keep up because they lacked the command and control structures provided by superior technology. It really ended up being the US running the whole show up until the point where we handed over the checkpoints to the rest of the peacekeeping forces. Note I said European allies - I don't know the status of the Russian forces, so I really cannot comment on them. But NATO - the US is NATO's backbone...
They'll only survive in the long term if someone finds the book useful enough to have a copy of their own.
Or has so much disk space that they can compulsively collect all kinds of media in digital form, nevermind whether they're "good" or "bad". Consider all the treasures that packrats have accumulated over the years (like that guy who donated a lifetime's worth of sci-fi pulp magazines up in Canada). Maybe that guy actually felt every single story in those pages was worth saving - or maybe he just wanted to have a complete collection, irregardless of how crappy some of that content might have been.
Digitize it all, and let it be cached on the hard drives of a hundred thousand geeks with way too much free time on their hands. In a hundred years, we will let the historians and archivists of the future sort through the mess.
I think he meant PCB as in printed circuit board, not poly whatsit gives-you-cancer PCB. Then again, if it was made in a place where PCBs are still in use (are there any such places?), lord knows what could be in there.
Well, you could just let them starve to death. Once the population grows large enough, there will be insuffcient forage for them all, resulting in a big die off during the winter, assuming some idiots don't try to prop up their population by dropping bales of hay and putting out deer chow. If they don't want hunters to control the population by culling the herd, nature can do a sufficently through job if left to its own devices.
I just borrowed my friend's Wallace and Grommit VHS tapes and recorded and burned VCDs of them.
It isn't like W&G has the resolution and production quality where a VCD degrades it.
Well, no, not after it's been recorded to VHS. After VHS, a well encoded VCD could be considered an improvement, especially if you started with the 24/25fps source material and didn't have to go through reverse pulldown.
Nevermind, a simple google search answered my question. The satellite in question is now known as PAS 22, and is owned and operated by Hughes (the salvor, and the original manufacturer.) It originally was supposed to be parked at 105.5E, geostationary, but ended up at 60W after the recovery operation. Two lunar flybys were used, first to stabilize orbit, and the second to improve it.
The downside of the recovery was that they had to burn off most of the 1700kg of available onboard propellant.
According to the article, it too was a victim of a bad 4th stage booster. This happened back in '98 - does anyone know if asiasat 3 made it back to Earth into the correct orbit?
Firefly is a great example of a show that runs counter to every trend on tv today. It is not dialogue driven - instead of shooting two pages of script per minute (like Friends), they're content with shooting maybe a half a page. There is no formulaic bad guy vs. good guy, with predictable special effects climax every episode. It is serial - every episode builds on previous episodes to develop the characters, instead of waiting a few seasons to give each character a defining moment.
Basically, it's a throwback to TV of maybe 40 years ago, with a deliberately slower pacing. As a result, it's pissing off executives, all of whom grew up on MTV and who are twiching for more dialogue, more scenes, more explosions. They don't feel that they're getting their money's worth, thus, lots of pressure on Josh to either change the show, or get quashed.
I only hope someone on one of the cable channels (SciFi, or Showtime) picks up Firefly, so I'll be able to catch the rest of the series when they syndicate it...
Mark my words, eventually all you'll see on network TV is Jerry Springer, Judge Judy, and America's Most Dangerous Police Chases, and the crap that they like to pass off as the nightly news. I only hope that we can limit the brain-damaged execs just to network tv, and keep stuff like PBS and cable relatively uncontaminated.
Consider the tanker that went down off the coast of Spain. When that sucker sprang a leak, they hired salvors to try and save the ship and the cargo (this was before Spain and Portugal told them to get lost, whereupon they sunk in choppy seas.) Assuming that we had infrastructure in space, could we apply a similar idea and have space salvors recovering satellites? That would seem to me a better idea than keeping a 3 man crew in orbit on taxpayer dollars just to maintain the ISS, and the insurance company that insures the satellite would probably pony up a few mil just so they could avoid paying out on that particular policy.
I use mine also to track cash expenses, scheduler, address book, notes for notes, games to pass the time, and now, ebooks, courtesy of the Baen free library and my recent purchase of War of Honor (with the CD of books included.) I also use it to hold dumps of text from my computer, and important bits of info (like how much 16mm Kodak film costs vs. 35mm, IP addresses of machines I administer, etc.)
I'd never go back to a paper planner - if I lose or accidentally destroy my palm pilot (which is 6 years old by the way, an original 512k USR Pilot upgraded to 2mb w/ IR), I have a spare I bought off of eBay for $40 sitting in my desk drawer, ready to be resynched with all of my data. If I manage to kill my spare, then I have a great excuse for picking up that Sony Clie with the WiFi card slot and the nice screen for eBook reading, which would then let me play mp3s while on the road... If I lost my paper planner, I'd have to shoot myself, unless I made scans or photocopies on a regular basis of the stuff in it. You don't know what panic is until you loose that faux-leather patterned Dayrunner, with your entire life stored in it. With the electronic equivalent, I just keep it hotsynced regularly. Much better.
Last time I saw, you could get refurb Xboxes from EB for $159. I thought about buying one, but I'm saving up for one of those Panasonic DVD recorders (HS2) instead...