> Imagine 1/2 inch thick steel on a coil rolling off and bending up into the air off the conveyer as it is being cut since it cannot roll and be cut at the same time, but the machine keeps feeding so the steel bows. When the steel flops back down it makes quite a ruckuss too. It was the loudest thing I'd heard short of working on pulse jets and tesla coils with a friend.
I listen to industrial music. Sounds like fun, at least for a day or two. Even more fun if they'd be crazy enough to let you bring the pulse jet and the Tesla coil to work for musical accompaniment.
("Okay, suppose we set up a really big spark gap and use the ejected sheet steel to trigger it...")
> I still use my Ultra 5 (the 360Mhz model) as my second desktop machine. Runs Solaris 9, blackbox and an assortment of KDE apps (mostly KMail and Konqueror). It's a bit slow but does the job, plus there are few keyboards that beat the Type 5c.
I got an Ultra 5 without a Type 5c. I went to a surplus store and bought a Type 5c for $5.00.
And that's only because I had to power it down to add a stick of semi-generic RAM in it last year. Uptime prior to that was a year and a couple of days.
Two questions:
1) Are the 333MHz/2M CPU modules cheaper now? I'd love to swap out the 360MHz/256k CPU for a big-cache model?
2) What's the quickest/easiest way to get Mozilla running on Solaris 7? I've been stuck at Nutscrape 4.x, because of some horrid maze of library dependences that I've never been able to figure out. And Solaris 7 because a legacy app I need to use at work never got ported to 8. (Yes, the box is behind a firewall.:)
I love my Ultra 5. If the company retires this box, I'm buying it.
> If both planets had life completely independently (no rocks with bacteria flying through space) it would tell us that it's very likely there is life elsewhere in the universe.
And if both planets had life that was very similar to each other, it would be highly probable (given that Earth's gravity well is deeper than that of Mars, and there was almost certainly no life on Earth at the time of the impact that created our moon, not is it likely any such life would have survived) that we are Martians.
> Not just funny. This is a case where the grammar police should be flogging the editor with a soggy ramen noodle. I, too, read it as if Forbes was sympathizing with the poor & abusing fax.com.
And just how do you propose we determine which forbes.com editor has the soggy ramen noodle? And why is he deserving of a flogging while the other editors aren't?
> >" It looks like SCO has finally ditched their failing product line in favor of 24/7 litigation and PR work." > > Show some objectivity, or I have no reason to bother reading the story you found, since I must assume you are pushing an agenda, rather than reporting news.
...because the fact that SCO has ditched a failing product line in favor of 24/7 litigation and PR work ceased to be "news" six months ago.
> Is there actually a market for orbital recovery?
No. There's some stupid treaty that says Hubble's too heavy to be deorbited, so it has to be brought back intact in the back of the Shuttle.
And the official reason Hubble's being canned is because it's "unsafe" - a damaged Shuttle on a Hubble repair mission (which NASA suddenly decided it cares about) cannot change inclination to dock with ISS.
So the ironic part is that it's "unsafe" to fly the Shuttle out there to save Hubble. But we're going to take exactly the same risks to fly it out there to bring it downh in a few years anyways.
Given that most of the money for the Hubble repair mission has already been spent, and given that the Shuttle's time is over, I'd call for 3 volunteers, and take my changes on launching the damn thing anyways.
"We haven't fixed a damn thing. We were only going to launch your shuttle two or three more times anyways, so we're treating the Shuttle as an expendable launch vehicles that happens to have landing gear. So yes, there's a 2% chance that what killed the last shuttle will kill your shuttle, and you along with it. There's also a 98% chance you'll come back as heroes for having kept Hubble in good condition long enough for JWST to come online. Any takers?"
The Hubble is obsolescent. But it does vastly more science than ISS ever did, or ever will do. For that reason alone, it's worth risking a few lives to keep aloft. For the record, I'd volunteer for such a mission. I'm sure most astronauts would too.
(None of this diminishes the fact that it would have been cheaper to skip the Shuttle, use a Big Dumb Booster, and just launch a new Hubble every 5 years, the way they do with spy satellites. But it's too late for that option now.)
> Of course, they won't be able to test "advanced drilling technology" on the ISS. Here is part that is pure porky corporate welfare. They want taxpayer money to subsidize R&D for Bushy's crony CEOs
"Horizontal drilling" increased continental Natural Gas reserves by huge amounts over the past decade or two. It's why you can still afford to waste the stuff heating your house, rather than just cooking with it.
Just suppose that 20 years from now, laser drills are cutting exploration and production costs of natural gas by huge margins, enabling North American companies to burn the stuff to crack the oil out of the Alberta Tar Sands (which contain more oil than Saudi Arabia) and tell OPEC to go fuck themselves. North American energy independence.
And we'll have a moonbase, where we'll be starting to mine Helium-3, or fuse all that silicate stuff into solar panels, and beam the power back to Earth. Planetary energy independence.
Will we be saying "Bushy's corny CEOs", or will we be saying "Holy crap. That space programme we started in 2004 had some really awesome spinoffs!"
But you're right. All that rocketry stuff was just pork for Bell Labs and Raytheon. Transistors? Integrated circuits? Pah! Just subsidized R&D for Kennedy and Nixon's crony CEOs.
The only reason for those smaller, more expensive gadgets, is so that better guidance "computers" can be crammed into the spatial constraints of the nose cones of missiles. Nobody will ever benefit from those technologies, because vaccuum tubes are just fine for radios and televisions, and business can do all the "computing" it need with a room full of clerks and hand-operated mechanical calculators, thank you very much! We should never have gone to the moon in 1969.
Some Shitweasel Fluffed in a Press Release: > "The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
...only so long as the user is using IE6.0 with all the security features disabled and all the auto-download and auto-execute flags turned to their lowest possible settings!
> I don't want to remove the SA rule for Habeas. They have an interesting and original idea that I would like to see work.
Likewise.
The more people who do remove the SA rule for Habeas, however, the more damage this spammer has done to Habeas' customers -- and consequently, to Habeas.
Every system that starts using X-Habeas-SWE as an automatic "+5.0" (instead of (-5.0)) in their SA scoring mechanism, is another $BIGNUM in damages for which Habeas can sue when this spammer is finally brought to court.
This is the Habeas test case. Either Habeas is able to enforce its trademark and copyright, and sue this spammer off the face of the earth, or Habeas - the company - dies, due to the efforts of one spammer.
> I was at a lodge in Kenya just after dusk, and was told that there was a leopard in at a baited tree across the river. It was too dark for me to make it out, so I set up my camera on a tripod, and quickly had a crowd around the LCD watching a very clear picture of the leopard!
And at the hospital, while they were stitching me back together, I told them "God as my witness, I had no idea leopards could see in the infrared."
> Arabs don't hate Jews, they hate Israel. A racist state set up by terrorists and supported by racists. > >
EVERYONE should hate Israel, just as they shouldn't hate Jews.
Yup Yup. And the Klan doesn't hate African Americans. Honest. Them's just a bunch of good ol' boys who are "proud to be white".
Personally, I'm disappointed this guy got modded -1, Flamebait.
He should have been modded +1, Informative. Because even though he's trolling, he exposes the Arab mindset perfectly: a culture of hatred, victimization, and self-pity, a culture that breeds nothing but violence and oppression. Brought up on a diet of propaganda such as that parroted by the above troll, most people in that region really do think like that. All of them would, if the "religious" "leaders" had their way. Inculating anti-Semitism has historically been one of the most effective ways to control a population.
The best thing that could ever happen to Saudi Arabia would be for a fleet of C-5 Galaxies to airdrop pictures of of Natalie Portman, NAKED, PETRIFIED, IN HOT GRITS (there, we're on topic now!), over every square inch of that country in a wave of cultural imperialism that will consign his brand of Islam (and perhaps all of Islam) into the dustbin of history forever.
Open Letter to the Fundamentalist Moslems of Planet Earth: Your impotent death cult is doomed, and neither your false God nor his false prophet can save it. We invite you to join the civilized world the fun way: DEMOCRACY. WHISKEY. SEXY. We're the civilized world. We're here, we drink beer, and we're not going away.
> It really irks me how everybody talks about "manned" missions. From an interview with Dan Goldin, NASA director: > >Dan Goldin: Can I respectfully push on you a little bit, and say "we have robotic missions and we have piloted missions." We do not have "manned missions" at NASA. We have thirty female astronauts. > > DB: Okay > >DG: I don't want to be pushy about this, but when I took this job, I told my daughters, "You will no longer use the name 'the manned spacecraft program.'"
Tackhead: Mr. Goldin, can I respectfully push back a little bit, and ask you, as NASA director, to spend a little more of your time concentrating on how to send piloted spacecraft to Mars instead of fucking around with language and identity politics like the sniveling bureaucrat you've just proven yourself to be?
DG: Okay.
Tackhead: I don't want to be pushy about this, but when I paid you taxpayer dollars for this job, I shouldn't have to tell you that "I don't care if your astronauts have cocks or cunts. I care about your ability to get them into space, and if they haven't volunteered for a one-way trip (which the Shuttle astronauts sure as fuck didn't), I care about your ability to bring them back again alive. I care more about these things than your crass display of oversensitivity towards people who think gender politics are more important than space exploration."
> I keep thinking death row. Find some with an okay education on death row and all appeals exhausted. Die in the chair today, or spend 5 years on mars before dieing, your choice.
Brings whole new meaning to the phrase "I'll bet there are people who'd kill for a chance to go on a Mars mission":)
I'd probably kill a spammer, except that it might be hard to find a jury that would convict me or not, especially once they found out my "motive" was "to get convicted of capital murder in order to be eligible for the 2045 Mars expedition".
Maybe spammers will be extinct by 2045, in which case geeks will have a moral dilemma on their hands.
> The people that can make it to Mars, live as long as possible and contribute to science and exploration are not neccessarily the same people that would be willing to take on such a mission.
True. But you could find a few. I'd volunteer for it, and I'd qualify. I know enough about geology that you could say "find me some interesting rocks, break them apart with this hammer, and put them under this microscope and tell me if you see anything interesting", and succeed. (I could also handle orders like "Remember rock AF41Q that you found six weeks ago? Take it off the shelf and put it in the sample return vehicle. Take rock CX29B out of the sample return vehicle, because AF41Q is more interesting.")
Anything else I need to know about geology, I could learn from watching videos and reading textbooks archived onto a set of DVDs that would accompany me during the six-month trip.
Two hours of my time (or yours, or damn near anyone else's) on Mars would teach us more about the history of wherever we landed than we've learned in the past 30 years.
> Tonight on your local cable network: LIVE from MARS; Are they still alive? Any progress with building the return vehicle? What happens between John and Mary? Do not miss their high flying sex experience!"
I'm with you on the Reality TV version of it. You could probably fund the whole mission by selling advertisements and (in states where it's legal) betting on the outcome. "Tonight! The air supply is down to 3% after the oxygen scrubbers went down in Month Six! Can our crew effect repairs in the last hours remaining? And if they can't, tonight will be the grand finale, when we find out who'll be the last one gasping? PLACE YOUR BETS NOW!"
> This increase of value is attributed to the secretary, even though s/he directly produced no value.
We'll have to look more closely at "value" here - which is the point of your post. I submit that the secretary adds substantial value, both in terms of offloading work from the CFO (freeing up his time to do things that add more value than pressing "delete" for every telemarketer in his voicemail), and in terms of doing things the CFO can't do (namely, "making his ideas look as good in print as they sound when he dictates into his speech-to-text software":)
> One could easily make the same point for a teacher who allows the prospective CFO to create
value (maybe). Does this mean the teacher is also a secondary producer of value?
Interesting set of questions you pose.
Teacher: Yes, but only insofar as the education enables someone to become a CFO. An eighth-grader is not a CFO. The teacher has not created a CFO. The teacher has added no value to the company, only to Little Johnny in eighth grade. How much value she's added to Little Johnny is something to be decided by Johnny's parents, who are paying the bills.
Depending on the quality of education offered, some teachers are underpaid, and some teachers are overpaid.
A private school (versus a public school) can charge more for its services only so long as it offers a better product (better teachers) to those paying the bills - parents who want Johnny to grow up to be a CFO. It uses that money to hire better teachers -- teachers who are more likely to create future CFOs.
A public schoolteacher giving private-quality education to public school students is grossly underpaid. (And given the quality of public school students, will eventually get disillusioned with working within the bureaucracy and leave for the private sector anyways:)
Conversely, a private schoolteacher giving public-quality education to private school students is being grossly overpaid... and will soon be out of a job as soon as Johnny's parents see an "B+" beside "i rote this essay cuz i dont want to loose my hole langage skills" in English.
> Do the CFOs parents also contribute value solely because their children did?
None at all. Squeezing a kid out of your nether orifice doesn't make you a producer of anything other than yet another food tube.
If those parents invest in Johnny's education (or hire nannies and tutors:), however, Johnny may turn into a CFO. If Johnny chooses to take care of his parents after he becomes CFO, however, Johnny's parents will have gotten a great return on their investment.
(If Johnny's parents hire nannies and expect a return on the investment, they'd better make damn sure they're good nannies, because Johnny won't give a damn about his absentee parents. If Johnny's parents are already millionaires, that might be fine, because they won't need Johnny's money when they're old and grey. If they're too poor to afford to send Johnny to private school, they might have one of them stay home to educate Johnny where public school fails him. Johnny will grow up to be well-educated, no matter how badly his public school teachers try to screw him up, and he'll be immensely grateful to his parents. The parents "sacrifices" a $5/h minimum wage job, and if Johnny does well, never has to worry about eating dog food for retirement, because Johnny knows who gave him a good education. That's a great ROI for the parents:-)
> The concept of value added is entirely subjective, and we clearly define it differently.
Agreed. This started out as an economic discussion - I define value as a function "return on [financial] investment". That "financial" doesn't have to be dollars - it can be an opportunity cost.
For instance, if I take the afternoon off to play golf, it's a net loss for me and my employer. I pay m
> Most of the progams require you to a)get a job, b)being training for a job or C)looking for a job.
Uh huh. And how do you get trained for a job? You take a government-sponsored job training programme (private contractor, government porkbarrel).
And how do you prove you're looking for a job? You fill out forms that get processed by the government's army of clerical employees.
And where does the government get those clerical workers? From people it sent to training programmes.
So in order to pay out your $3/hour in welfare, the government has to pay two other people to process the forms. And run the bogus training programmes. The dollars that actually go to the food tube on welfare are a small portion of the dollars actually spent in the process of feeding the food tube.
To bring us back on topic, welfare is a bureaucracy - it strives to perpetuate its own existence, rather like NASA, the Shuttle, and the ISS:-)
> And just one question, how much does a secretary produce? or a storew clerk? or a CFO?
CFO: By making good strategic decisions, he adds billions of dollars in shareholder value. (When he fucks up, he costs the company billions.)
But no matter how many good ideas I have, if I write "ok guys we did good this year but we need too ad lotta shrholder vallue next year to" in my annual report, I look like an illiterate ass, and investors dump my stock. I cost the company billions.
Secretary: If I'm a CFO, my time is worth hundreds of dollars per hour. A secretary turns my gibberish into "We are pleased with our performance in 2003, and continue to stress the need to add shareholder value in 2004."
If you're a major shareholder, or a potential acquirer, she's very nice to you and forwards you to my phone, which I answer, and I tell you about all the great things I'm going to do. She also says "Mr. Tackhead is unavailable at the moment, I'll forward you to his voice mail" (and then forwards you to/dev/null) if she thinks you're a telemarketer.
If I'm a CFO, my secretary produces my image, and she saves me a lot of time. That's worth a lot of money to me. But there are a lot of literate, articulate people with good phone skills, so I don't have to pay the secretary $100K/year. (But at the CFO of a fortune 500 level, maybe I might, because I want the fucking best secretary the market has to offer. For $100K/year, she probably knows half of Wall Street's top analysts by voice, and knows who's worth forwarding to me, forwarding to my voice mail, and who can be/dev/nulled.)
Store Clerk - exactly the same analogy. If I sell widgets in a store, a guy who puts 'em on the shelf and doesn't fuck up the pricing produces "accurate pricing stamps stuck on shelved widgets", and that's worth the $5/hour I pay him.
Unfortunately for the clerk, unskilled labor is almost always available at the minimum wage. And he can't add value to my organization in the way that a good secretary can.
> I remember someone in the Sun workstation room of my school playing a crappy version of the Star Wars theme ; we were all wondering where the fun was in that (since we all had that famous sally.au and 007.au) when he said that the file was only a few ko (we had a 2Mo quota then) thanks to a new system he had found on xarchie...yes, mp3 !
w00t. Sun.au files!
My first introduction "digital music" was also sally.au (and with some fun with xhost and.rhosts, we told Sally to pretend to enjoy herself by jumping to random machines in the lab, whereupon we walked away and watched hilarity ensue through a nearby window), followed up immediately by both parts of Negativland's "U2" parody.
The ironic part is that I got the.au files (and later, the MP3s) of the Negativland tracks because you couldn't buy the U2 parody due to U2's label suing Negativland for copyright infringement. That's right. RIAA's landsharks were suing people to PREVENT people from BUYING music. (Because, of course, it was music that they didn't control. So it's OK to sue people for producing it.) The only way to obtain the tracks in question was to digitize and pirate them.
Eventually it all got settled, and the world has been able to download "the forbidden single" directly from the band's own website in a wide variety of formats, including (of course) MP3 for several years now.
> Funding for welfare, etc., isn't designed to wipe out poverty. You can't wipe out poverty. It's
designed to mitigate the damage caused by poverty, to wit, lawlessness, public health (poverty makes life dangerous for everybody) and human suffering (and it's no fun).
Like crack, the first hit is free.
Funding for welfare, etc, isn't designed to wipe out poverty or mitigate its effects. It's designed to perpetuate poverty, because a permanent underclass of non-producing food tubes dependent upon the government to steal wealth from the producing food-tubes can be relied upon to always support the government.
If you're at the top of the food chain, the more poor, and the worse off they are, and the faster they breed, the more power you have over producer and parasite alike.
Consider the relationship between shepherd, sheepdog, and sheep. Sure, the sheepdog gets to have lots of "fun" by running circles around the flock. The "fun" the sheepdog has is immaterial to the farmer's purpose for the sheepdog, namely to have a few animals running freely enough to keep the flock in a predictable state, grazing contentedly until harvest time.
> Second lunacy: only add $1B to NASA's budget. They will have to gut every other program to fund this return to the moon, and they appear to be eager to do so.
Actually, I think they need only abandon the white-elephant ISS ("Give Russian ICBM engineers somewhere to work other than Iraq") and the white-elephant Shuttle ("It can repair the Hubble... at twice the cost of launching a new one! OK, so at least it can go to ISS... at ten times the cost of a Soyuz! It can make real expensive fireworks... but it kills 7 people at a time when it self-destructs, unlike Mir!")
Given the number of Slashdotters (myself included) calling for the scrapping of the wasteful ISS and Shuttle projects and the diversion of the remaining funds into real R&D or science, I think the plan is a Good Thing.
Make me Emperor, and I'd double or triple NASA's budget by cutting $30-50B by goring someone else's oxen. Maybe some crack whores will die of AIDS instead of consuming $30000/year worth of medications paid for by the taxpayer. Maybe some people on welfare will have to get real fucking jobs instead of shoveling taxpayer dollars to crack and dope dealers. Maybe the crack and dope dealers will have to get real fucking jobs because I'd also cut the DEA's budget by 10% per year and divert 4% of the DEA to HomeSec, 4% to local police, 1% to NASA, and 1% back to the taxpayer.
Maybe I'd rather see us build spaceships and see what sorts of technology spins off, rather than fund the NEA so that liberal arts grads can dip crucifixes into jars of piss, or scream "cunt" a few dozen times.
But I'm not the Emperor. If the Emperor says that $1B is all we can spare in new funding for basic research, that's still $1B more for basic research than was allocated before, and that's $1B less that goes to programmes I don't support. Fine by me.
> Attention free software developers. Yeah, you. And anyone who posts projects to Freshmeat:
> >
The next person to write an app with a gratuitous G, K, or X at the beginning (gPornViewer, kFlamewriter, XBitTwiddler) wins scorn, derision, and a swift kick in the ass, absolutely free of charge. Moreso if you use a name that's already taken.
Funny. I read the original Slashdot thread and came up with gAss and AssK, in that order. I suppose it could have been worse. What if a KDE bigot developed a pr0n app?
Slashdot Mirror
I listen to industrial music. Sounds like fun, at least for a day or two. Even more fun if they'd be crazy enough to let you bring the pulse jet and the Tesla coil to work for musical accompaniment.
("Okay, suppose we set up a really big spark gap and use the ejected sheet steel to trigger it...")
I got an Ultra 5 without a Type 5c. I went to a surplus store and bought a Type 5c for $5.00.
$ uptime 9:36am up 225 day(s), 23:24, 1 user, load average: 0.07, 0.06, 0.05
And that's only because I had to power it down to add a stick of semi-generic RAM in it last year. Uptime prior to that was a year and a couple of days.
Two questions:
1) Are the 333MHz/2M CPU modules cheaper now? I'd love to swap out the 360MHz/256k CPU for a big-cache model? :)
2) What's the quickest/easiest way to get Mozilla running on Solaris 7? I've been stuck at Nutscrape 4.x, because of some horrid maze of library dependences that I've never been able to figure out. And Solaris 7 because a legacy app I need to use at work never got ported to 8. (Yes, the box is behind a firewall.
I love my Ultra 5. If the company retires this box, I'm buying it.
And if both planets had life that was very similar to each other, it would be highly probable (given that Earth's gravity well is deeper than that of Mars, and there was almost certainly no life on Earth at the time of the impact that created our moon, not is it likely any such life would have survived) that we are Martians.
And just how do you propose we determine which forbes.com editor has the soggy ramen noodle? And why is he deserving of a flogging while the other editors aren't?
>
> Show some objectivity, or I have no reason to bother reading the story you found, since I must assume you are pushing an agenda, rather than reporting news.
No. There's some stupid treaty that says Hubble's too heavy to be deorbited, so it has to be brought back intact in the back of the Shuttle.
And the official reason Hubble's being canned is because it's "unsafe" - a damaged Shuttle on a Hubble repair mission (which NASA suddenly decided it cares about) cannot change inclination to dock with ISS.
So the ironic part is that it's "unsafe" to fly the Shuttle out there to save Hubble. But we're going to take exactly the same risks to fly it out there to bring it downh in a few years anyways.
Given that most of the money for the Hubble repair mission has already been spent, and given that the Shuttle's time is over, I'd call for 3 volunteers, and take my changes on launching the damn thing anyways.
"We haven't fixed a damn thing. We were only going to launch your shuttle two or three more times anyways, so we're treating the Shuttle as an expendable launch vehicles that happens to have landing gear. So yes, there's a 2% chance that what killed the last shuttle will kill your shuttle, and you along with it. There's also a 98% chance you'll come back as heroes for having kept Hubble in good condition long enough for JWST to come online. Any takers?"
The Hubble is obsolescent. But it does vastly more science than ISS ever did, or ever will do. For that reason alone, it's worth risking a few lives to keep aloft. For the record, I'd volunteer for such a mission. I'm sure most astronauts would too.
(None of this diminishes the fact that it would have been cheaper to skip the Shuttle, use a Big Dumb Booster, and just launch a new Hubble every 5 years, the way they do with spy satellites. But it's too late for that option now.)
"Horizontal drilling" increased continental Natural Gas reserves by huge amounts over the past decade or two. It's why you can still afford to waste the stuff heating your house, rather than just cooking with it.
Just suppose that 20 years from now, laser drills are cutting exploration and production costs of natural gas by huge margins, enabling North American companies to burn the stuff to crack the oil out of the Alberta Tar Sands (which contain more oil than Saudi Arabia) and tell OPEC to go fuck themselves. North American energy independence.
And we'll have a moonbase, where we'll be starting to mine Helium-3, or fuse all that silicate stuff into solar panels, and beam the power back to Earth. Planetary energy independence.
Will we be saying "Bushy's corny CEOs", or will we be saying "Holy crap. That space programme we started in 2004 had some really awesome spinoffs!"
But you're right. All that rocketry stuff was just pork for Bell Labs and Raytheon. Transistors? Integrated circuits? Pah! Just subsidized R&D for Kennedy and Nixon's crony CEOs.
The only reason for those smaller, more expensive gadgets, is so that better guidance "computers" can be crammed into the spatial constraints of the nose cones of missiles. Nobody will ever benefit from those technologies, because vaccuum tubes are just fine for radios and televisions, and business can do all the "computing" it need with a room full of clerks and hand-operated mechanical calculators, thank you very much! We should never have gone to the moon in 1969.
> "The only format that loads completely before it is allowed to play, the Full Screen Superstitial is guaranteed to play perfectly for every consumer, every time."
In other words, Mr. Shitweasel, "No they aren't".
Does anyone remember Shoshkeles?
Neither do I. Nor do Lynx, Netscape 3.x, 4.x, Mozilla, nor Thunderbird.
Likewise.
The more people who do remove the SA rule for Habeas, however, the more damage this spammer has done to Habeas' customers -- and consequently, to Habeas.
Every system that starts using X-Habeas-SWE as an automatic "+5.0" (instead of (-5.0)) in their SA scoring mechanism, is another $BIGNUM in damages for which Habeas can sue when this spammer is finally brought to court.
This is the Habeas test case. Either Habeas is able to enforce its trademark and copyright, and sue this spammer off the face of the earth, or Habeas - the company - dies, due to the efforts of one spammer.
No, a Haiku merely requires a word suggestive of a season.
Copyrighted poems
Now merely signify spam.
Fuck you, it's winter.
And at the hospital, while they were stitching me back together, I told them "God as my witness, I had no idea leopards could see in the infrared."
>
> EVERYONE should hate Israel, just as they shouldn't hate Jews.
Yup Yup. And the Klan doesn't hate African Americans. Honest. Them's just a bunch of good ol' boys who are "proud to be white".
Personally, I'm disappointed this guy got modded -1, Flamebait.
He should have been modded +1, Informative. Because even though he's trolling, he exposes the Arab mindset perfectly: a culture of hatred, victimization, and self-pity, a culture that breeds nothing but violence and oppression. Brought up on a diet of propaganda such as that parroted by the above troll, most people in that region really do think like that. All of them would, if the "religious" "leaders" had their way. Inculating anti-Semitism has historically been one of the most effective ways to control a population.
The best thing that could ever happen to Saudi Arabia would be for a fleet of C-5 Galaxies to airdrop pictures of of Natalie Portman, NAKED, PETRIFIED, IN HOT GRITS (there, we're on topic now!), over every square inch of that country in a wave of cultural imperialism that will consign his brand of Islam (and perhaps all of Islam) into the dustbin of history forever.
Open Letter to the Fundamentalist Moslems of Planet Earth: Your impotent death cult is doomed, and neither your false God nor his false prophet can save it. We invite you to join the civilized world the fun way: DEMOCRACY. WHISKEY. SEXY. We're the civilized world. We're here, we drink beer, and we're not going away.
>
>Dan Goldin: Can I respectfully push on you a little bit, and say "we have robotic missions and we have piloted missions." We do not have "manned missions" at NASA. We have thirty female astronauts.
>
> DB: Okay
>
>DG: I don't want to be pushy about this, but when I took this job, I told my daughters, "You will no longer use the name 'the manned spacecraft program.'"
Tackhead: Mr. Goldin, can I respectfully push back a little bit, and ask you, as NASA director, to spend a little more of your time concentrating on how to send piloted spacecraft to Mars instead of fucking around with language and identity politics like the sniveling bureaucrat you've just proven yourself to be?
DG: Okay.
Tackhead: I don't want to be pushy about this, but when I paid you taxpayer dollars for this job, I shouldn't have to tell you that "I don't care if your astronauts have cocks or cunts. I care about your ability to get them into space, and if they haven't volunteered for a one-way trip (which the Shuttle astronauts sure as fuck didn't), I care about your ability to bring them back again alive. I care more about these things than your crass display of oversensitivity towards people who think gender politics are more important than space exploration."
Brings whole new meaning to the phrase "I'll bet there are people who'd kill for a chance to go on a Mars mission" :)
I'd probably kill a spammer, except that it might be hard to find a jury that would convict me or not, especially once they found out my "motive" was "to get convicted of capital murder in order to be eligible for the 2045 Mars expedition".
Maybe spammers will be extinct by 2045, in which case geeks will have a moral dilemma on their hands.
> You forgot to apply your political correctness correction factor.
Ahem, I believe you meant to say White President Condemns African-American to Death in the name of Colonialism!
Bah, and you call yourself PC.
Gene Roddenberry from beyond the grave: "STOP RICK BERMAN BEFORE HE SCREWS UP THE CANON AGAIN!"
True. But you could find a few. I'd volunteer for it, and I'd qualify. I know enough about geology that you could say "find me some interesting rocks, break them apart with this hammer, and put them under this microscope and tell me if you see anything interesting", and succeed. (I could also handle orders like "Remember rock AF41Q that you found six weeks ago? Take it off the shelf and put it in the sample return vehicle. Take rock CX29B out of the sample return vehicle, because AF41Q is more interesting.")
Anything else I need to know about geology, I could learn from watching videos and reading textbooks archived onto a set of DVDs that would accompany me during the six-month trip.
Two hours of my time (or yours, or damn near anyone else's) on Mars would teach us more about the history of wherever we landed than we've learned in the past 30 years.
> Tonight on your local cable network: LIVE from MARS; Are they still alive? Any progress with building the return vehicle? What happens between John and Mary? Do not miss their high flying sex experience!"
I'm with you on the Reality TV version of it. You could probably fund the whole mission by selling advertisements and (in states where it's legal) betting on the outcome. "Tonight! The air supply is down to 3% after the oxygen scrubbers went down in Month Six! Can our crew effect repairs in the last hours remaining? And if they can't, tonight will be the grand finale, when we find out who'll be the last one gasping? PLACE YOUR BETS NOW!"
I sympathize, but consider who you're talking about.
The only job of a Congresscritter is to pass laws. That's why it's called the legislative branch.
When the only tool you have is an axe, every problem looks like hours of fun.
When the only tool you have is the ability to create laws, every problem looks like it needs a law passed.
We'll have to look more closely at "value" here - which is the point of your post. I submit that the secretary adds substantial value, both in terms of offloading work from the CFO (freeing up his time to do things that add more value than pressing "delete" for every telemarketer in his voicemail), and in terms of doing things the CFO can't do (namely, "making his ideas look as good in print as they sound when he dictates into his speech-to-text software" :)
> One could easily make the same point for a teacher who allows the prospective CFO to create value (maybe). Does this mean the teacher is also a secondary producer of value?
Interesting set of questions you pose.
Teacher: Yes, but only insofar as the education enables someone to become a CFO. An eighth-grader is not a CFO. The teacher has not created a CFO. The teacher has added no value to the company, only to Little Johnny in eighth grade. How much value she's added to Little Johnny is something to be decided by Johnny's parents, who are paying the bills.
Depending on the quality of education offered, some teachers are underpaid, and some teachers are overpaid.
A private school (versus a public school) can charge more for its services only so long as it offers a better product (better teachers) to those paying the bills - parents who want Johnny to grow up to be a CFO. It uses that money to hire better teachers -- teachers who are more likely to create future CFOs.
A public schoolteacher giving private-quality education to public school students is grossly underpaid. (And given the quality of public school students, will eventually get disillusioned with working within the bureaucracy and leave for the private sector anyways :)
Conversely, a private schoolteacher giving public-quality education to private school students is being grossly overpaid... and will soon be out of a job as soon as Johnny's parents see an "B+" beside "i rote this essay cuz i dont want to loose my hole langage skills" in English.
> Do the CFOs parents also contribute value solely because their children did?
None at all. Squeezing a kid out of your nether orifice doesn't make you a producer of anything other than yet another food tube.
If those parents invest in Johnny's education (or hire nannies and tutors :), however, Johnny may turn into a CFO. If Johnny chooses to take care of his parents after he becomes CFO, however, Johnny's parents will have gotten a great return on their investment.
(If Johnny's parents hire nannies and expect a return on the investment, they'd better make damn sure they're good nannies, because Johnny won't give a damn about his absentee parents. If Johnny's parents are already millionaires, that might be fine, because they won't need Johnny's money when they're old and grey. If they're too poor to afford to send Johnny to private school, they might have one of them stay home to educate Johnny where public school fails him. Johnny will grow up to be well-educated, no matter how badly his public school teachers try to screw him up, and he'll be immensely grateful to his parents. The parents "sacrifices" a $5/h minimum wage job, and if Johnny does well, never has to worry about eating dog food for retirement, because Johnny knows who gave him a good education. That's a great ROI for the parents :-)
> The concept of value added is entirely subjective, and we clearly define it differently.
Agreed. This started out as an economic discussion - I define value as a function "return on [financial] investment". That "financial" doesn't have to be dollars - it can be an opportunity cost.
For instance, if I take the afternoon off to play golf, it's a net loss for me and my employer. I pay m
Uh huh. And how do you get trained for a job? You take a government-sponsored job training programme (private contractor, government porkbarrel).
And how do you prove you're looking for a job? You fill out forms that get processed by the government's army of clerical employees.
And where does the government get those clerical workers? From people it sent to training programmes.
So in order to pay out your $3/hour in welfare, the government has to pay two other people to process the forms. And run the bogus training programmes. The dollars that actually go to the food tube on welfare are a small portion of the dollars actually spent in the process of feeding the food tube.
To bring us back on topic, welfare is a bureaucracy - it strives to perpetuate its own existence, rather like NASA, the Shuttle, and the ISS :-)
> And just one question, how much does a secretary produce? or a storew clerk? or a CFO?
CFO: By making good strategic decisions, he adds billions of dollars in shareholder value. (When he fucks up, he costs the company billions.)
But no matter how many good ideas I have, if I write "ok guys we did good this year but we need too ad lotta shrholder vallue next year to" in my annual report, I look like an illiterate ass, and investors dump my stock. I cost the company billions.
Secretary: If I'm a CFO, my time is worth hundreds of dollars per hour. A secretary turns my gibberish into "We are pleased with our performance in 2003, and continue to stress the need to add shareholder value in 2004."
If you're a major shareholder, or a potential acquirer, she's very nice to you and forwards you to my phone, which I answer, and I tell you about all the great things I'm going to do. She also says "Mr. Tackhead is unavailable at the moment, I'll forward you to his voice mail" (and then forwards you to /dev/null) if she thinks you're a telemarketer.
If I'm a CFO, my secretary produces my image, and she saves me a lot of time. That's worth a lot of money to me. But there are a lot of literate, articulate people with good phone skills, so I don't have to pay the secretary $100K/year. (But at the CFO of a fortune 500 level, maybe I might, because I want the fucking best secretary the market has to offer. For $100K/year, she probably knows half of Wall Street's top analysts by voice, and knows who's worth forwarding to me, forwarding to my voice mail, and who can be /dev/nulled.)
Store Clerk - exactly the same analogy. If I sell widgets in a store, a guy who puts 'em on the shelf and doesn't fuck up the pricing produces "accurate pricing stamps stuck on shelved widgets", and that's worth the $5/hour I pay him.
Unfortunately for the clerk, unskilled labor is almost always available at the minimum wage. And he can't add value to my organization in the way that a good secretary can.
w00t. Sun .au files!
My first introduction "digital music" was also sally.au (and with some fun with xhost and .rhosts, we told Sally to pretend to enjoy herself by jumping to random machines in the lab, whereupon we walked away and watched hilarity ensue through a nearby window), followed up immediately by both parts of Negativland's "U2" parody.
The ironic part is that I got the .au files (and later, the MP3s) of the Negativland tracks because you couldn't buy the U2 parody due to U2's label suing Negativland for copyright infringement. That's right. RIAA's landsharks were suing people to PREVENT people from BUYING music. (Because, of course, it was music that they didn't control. So it's OK to sue people for producing it.) The only way to obtain the tracks in question was to digitize and pirate them.
Wired also has an article on the mess.
Eventually it all got settled, and the world has been able to download "the forbidden single" directly from the band's own website in a wide variety of formats, including (of course) MP3 for several years now.
Like crack, the first hit is free.
Funding for welfare, etc, isn't designed to wipe out poverty or mitigate its effects. It's designed to perpetuate poverty, because a permanent underclass of non-producing food tubes dependent upon the government to steal wealth from the producing food-tubes can be relied upon to always support the government.
If you're at the top of the food chain, the more poor, and the worse off they are, and the faster they breed, the more power you have over producer and parasite alike.
Consider the relationship between shepherd, sheepdog, and sheep. Sure, the sheepdog gets to have lots of "fun" by running circles around the flock. The "fun" the sheepdog has is immaterial to the farmer's purpose for the sheepdog, namely to have a few animals running freely enough to keep the flock in a predictable state, grazing contentedly until harvest time.
Actually, I think they need only abandon the white-elephant ISS ("Give Russian ICBM engineers somewhere to work other than Iraq") and the white-elephant Shuttle ("It can repair the Hubble... at twice the cost of launching a new one! OK, so at least it can go to ISS... at ten times the cost of a Soyuz! It can make real expensive fireworks... but it kills 7 people at a time when it self-destructs, unlike Mir!")
Given the number of Slashdotters (myself included) calling for the scrapping of the wasteful ISS and Shuttle projects and the diversion of the remaining funds into real R&D or science, I think the plan is a Good Thing.
Make me Emperor, and I'd double or triple NASA's budget by cutting $30-50B by goring someone else's oxen. Maybe some crack whores will die of AIDS instead of consuming $30000/year worth of medications paid for by the taxpayer. Maybe some people on welfare will have to get real fucking jobs instead of shoveling taxpayer dollars to crack and dope dealers. Maybe the crack and dope dealers will have to get real fucking jobs because I'd also cut the DEA's budget by 10% per year and divert 4% of the DEA to HomeSec, 4% to local police, 1% to NASA, and 1% back to the taxpayer.
Maybe I'd rather see us build spaceships and see what sorts of technology spins off, rather than fund the NEA so that liberal arts grads can dip crucifixes into jars of piss, or scream "cunt" a few dozen times.
But I'm not the Emperor. If the Emperor says that $1B is all we can spare in new funding for basic research, that's still $1B more for basic research than was allocated before, and that's $1B less that goes to programmes I don't support. Fine by me.
And the dinosaurs couldn't handle one asteroid.
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> The next person to write an app with a gratuitous G, K, or X at the beginning (gPornViewer, kFlamewriter, XBitTwiddler) wins scorn, derision, and a swift kick in the ass, absolutely free of charge. Moreso if you use a name that's already taken.
Funny. I read the original Slashdot thread and came up with gAss and AssK, in that order. I suppose it could have been worse. What if a KDE bigot developed a pr0n app?