> will blow OC192 out of the water > > Saddam's working on something along them lines;)
Other way around - http://www.centcom.mil/galleries/leaflets/showleaf lets.asp:)
"Civilian fiber optic cables have been targeted for destruction by backhoes. Repairing them places your filez at risk.
Civilian fiber optic cables are tools used by music and movie fans to suppress RIAA and MPAA Congressional lobbyists."
-- Alternate Histories of Earth: RIAA registers centcom. riaa.mil and starts flooding P2P networks with leaflets...
Re:One possible practical application?
on
The Space Elevator
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> How about instead of sending waste into space, we re-use this (recycle!) waste. All the waste we currently create (nuclear waste is an exception) can and should be recycled. If we just send it to space, we lose those valuable resources. Just a thought:)
Actually, our nuclear waste is the most useful waste we have, from a recycling perspective. Where else are you going to get transuranics to power RTGs for future spacecraft, or daughter radionuclides for portable heat sources when you want to melt your way through the Europan ice cap?
> If these guys can come up with some sort of mess free "practice pancake" kit with detailed instructions that can be read without a degree in math. I would be very interested.
1) Try it over the sink. 2) Flip it with a spatula, and once both sides of the pancake are cooked, you can get 4-5 practice flips out of it before you screw up badly enough to break the pancake. 3) Repeat with next pancake. 4) Apply butter, syrup, whatever you like to the big heaping plate of pancake frags, nuke in microwave for 30 seconds. Chow time!
> If you butter both sides, will it land on its edge? A better question, what if you butter the edge as well? > or > butter some bread and attach it to a cat, then throw it up in the air. Cats always land on their feet, but bread always lands butter side down, so the cat/bread combination will spin round and round indefinately... > >Isn't that almost the secret to flight? (Throw yourself at the ground... and miss.)
"After about 200 feet, it doesn't matter which side of the bread the cat is stapled to."
>> Now if we could only have some kind of a pancake flipping robot..... >
> Yes, leave it to geeks to spend thousands of dollars, and countless man-hours developing a machine to flip a pancake over. > > [.sig] Too much of a good thing is an awesome thing, but too much of an awesome thing is really really stupid.
And even more of an awesome thing than that...is a surefire way to get your web site with a pancake-flipping robot slashdotted!
> By using the acronyms ASIO, CIA and FBI you have activated the Australian Echelon System. Unfortunately due to budget cutbacks we cannot record your call right now. Please ring again between the hours of 9am and 5pm weekdays and an Echelon Recording Specialist will eavesdrop on your conversation. We value your information and look forwards to eavesdropping on you in the near future.
But if you're in a hurry, there's always...
"The NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and ask for one."
> Also, does that mean that some mentally retarded people are not considered human, since they cannot comprehend certain things and/or concepts.
Actually, in my view, "yes" - if they have human DNA, but if they're nonsentient, they get the same rights as vegetables. An acephalitic fetus ends up shaped like a cute little human infant, but it has no brain. It is not deserving of the title "human being", because without a brain, it has no consciousness, no "being"; it's a life support system for an organ farm.
> It's just a question....
And a damn good one.
Personally, I'd have a hard time dealing with breeding a non-sentient human, especially since sentience isn't usually an on/off thing. Thankfully, I have no desire to breed, and am therefore spared having to make the wrenching decision between "worth raising to adulthood" or "spare parts" my values system would otherwise force me to make.
> Look, if you believe in a soul, stem cell research is, at *least*, problematic. If you don't believe in a soul, ask yourself why murder is wrong.
/me looks at the worm wriggling on the shiny hook and takes a nibble. OK, the ethics of murder without reference to "soul".
I believe murder is wrong because I deem "human rights" to be something inherent in "human beings". I'm not going to go into cogito ergo sum and all that; I'm going to assert that sentience is the defining property of a human; it's what differentiates us greatly from the cow, and somewhat less-greatly from the octopus, whale, or chimpanzee.
Adult humans are clearly sentient. Infant humans are probably sentient, or have a very high probability of attaining sentience within a year or two. The (clinically, as opposed to the sense of having an MBA) brain-dead human is not sentient. Agglomerations of developing human cells are not sentient, and only have any potential for sentience with a large investment on the part of the host organism. Spammers are neither human nor sentient.
All cultures have strong taboos governing murder, and most cultures have equally strong taboos governing infanticide. The taboo against "pulling the plug" on the comatose is not universal, nor is the taboo against abortion. (In fact, both of those "taboos" are so non-universal that they are better considered social conventions.) And most of us would be ineligible to serve on a jury in the homicide trial of a man charged with the slaughter of a spammer; how could any user of email bring back a guilty verdict when no crime had been committed?
> Don't let THEM immantize the Gershenbeck continuum!
It was the year when they finally immanentized the Gernsbeck Continuum. On April 1, the world's great powers came closer to nuclear war than ever before, all because of an obscure island...
> And you would be in line for the benefits of Hitler's "research" [remember.org] too? I think not.
You may already have stood in such a line without knowing it. Many medical texts still use illustrations and diagrams from
Pernkopf's Atlas (Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy) to this day.
The Atlas is based on things learned during the commission of atrocities. Its author was a supporter of the regime responsible for those atrocities.
And yet, its contents have been used to save lives for 60 years, perhaps even including yours.
> For me the question is not *what* but who we're doing research on, and in the case of stem cell research, we've stepped over the line.
Do we throw out anatomy because it has benefited from what virtually the entire population of the planet agrees were war crimes performed on adult sentient beings?
If not, why should we throw out a technology that could lead to cure for Parkinson's, as well as the growth of replacement organs (possibly without an attached host body!) on the objections of a few religious fundamentalists ("life begins at conception / glob of undifferentiated cell has a soul" stage) or somewhat less-fundamental fundamentalists ("life begins when it looks cute / fetus" stage)?
It's not as easy a call as you might think, is it?:)
For the record (no point in bitching about bioethics unless you have the balls to make a stand - and while I disagree with your stand, I congratulate you on having one) I believe what Pernkopf did was grossly unethical, but I have no reservation and feel no guilt about being treated by doctors who learned from his work. I have no reservations about stem cell or fetal research. I see no contradiction between these two positions.
50 years from now, today's bioengineers may be looked upon as ignorant barbarians committing mass murder, or as the saviors of the human race. My position on bioengineering is the result of a moral choice, and I'm willing to accept any guilt on my conscience should I facts cause me to revisit it in the intervening half-century.
> >...flights to Mars taking weeks rather than months. > So that's what he meant by "Weeks not months"!
Great. Now our space program is anything like our war on Iraq. A nice idea, long overdue, but it'll never happen in our lifetimes. The UN^H^HNASA guys will issue plenty of resolutions calling for flights to Mars by... umm... sometime... and if we don't actually build a spacecraft, we'll... umm, how about we issue another resolution calling for a trip to Mars? We're good at that issuing resolution stuff.
> Yes, next idea: Catch bullets instead of finding old cans to recycle.
Well, as much as I'd like to see permanent lunar colonies, asteroids do have an advantage for mining - no (i.e. negligible) frickin' gravity well.
Not great for astronaut-miners, but very good for getting the cargo back to Earth.
There are near-earth objects that would require virtually no energy (delta-V sense of the word) to get to from Earth and due to the low delta-V and miniscule gravity well, even less energy to send stuff back from.
The Moon has a good advantage in terms of being able to dig/melt your way under the regolith for radiation shielding, though. Or you could skip the rad-shielding and use robots remote-controlled from Earth. The asteroids are way more than 3 light-seconds away.
> Doesn't the moon do pesky little things like, you know, "regulate the tides" and such? I mean, maybe we should keep the dirt there to keep our people from living underwater...
If we could move enough of the Moon's mass to affect its orbit in such a way to alter tidal patterns on Earth, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Because we'd be building freakin' Dyson spheres.
(I thought I was being trolled the first time I saw this point being made, but I've seen it twice now, and each time it was modded as "Insightful". What are they teaching in physics class these days? Oh, right. The people who teach "environmentalism" are there because they flunked physics.)
> This is a permissions issue, isn't it? If you don't have proper permissions set, anyone would find your porn, irrespective of how the file system is organized.
Well, yeah:)
But the original post to which I was replying cited the "no more files, it's just a database" approach as a solution to crawling through 1000s of directory trees on a 120G drive to find pr0n.mpg.
My gut reaction to that is "if you can't find your pr0n without using FindFast, you either have too much pr0n or no idea how to organize it."
Since we can never have too much pr0n (hey, it's/.), that leaves the organizational problem.
Since your pr0n doesn't come with metadata attached, a database replacement for a filesystem isn't gonna solve your problem. If end-users are too lazy to type in ID3 tags for their MP3z, what are the odds of them setting up metadata for their pr0n? And what sort of schema would be a "good" one for pr0n anyways?
Pr0n and mp3z are the canonical/.er "filing problem", but most of these problems apply to office documents, too.
Do you search by confidentiality level? Creator? Audience? Date?
Designing a schema for office docs is arguably harder than one for pr0n or mp3z. The only potential saving grace is that Microsoft will likely design the schema for the end user, because it can afford to do so.
It's not necessarily bad for dealing with Office documents, but IMNSHO, it can't scale to the point of replacing "files" altogether. How would you write code, for instance? (foo.c, bar.c, stdfoo.h)
Ultimately, this filesystem-as-database may end up being reduced to giving files one more attribute - a "location", composed of "dirs", separated by "slashes" - and a file browsing tool that allows you to "search for a file based on its location", in other words, re-creating the hierarchical filesystem at a shell level.
Maybe that'll work, but it seems like an awful lot of effort and overhead to duplicate something (a hierarchical file system) that we've had for 20 years.
> I loathe the Shuttle and the NASA bureaucracy, but I'd fly on one tomorrow if NASA gave me the chance.
> > "Then two decades from Gagarin, twenty years to the day. > Came a shuttle named Columbia, to open up the way. > And they said she's just a truck, but she's a truck that's aiming high. > See her big jets burning, see her fire in the sky."
*cut, paste, wipe tear from eye*
As a guy who cursed the cloud cover over my location at oh-dark-hundred one morning last month, that says it way better than I did.
> You'd have to set up Email2, with authenticated users, payment methods, billing, accounts, etc. AT ALL ISPs. It seems to me that it would be easier to try to get people to stop spamming voluntarily. That is, I don't think it'd be very easy!
I agree.
If you give me the choice between "SMTP without spam", and "SMTP-Barry, with only the spam that someone has paid my ISP to send me", I'm all for it.
That is, I'll continue to use SMTP, and block all SMTP-Barry traffic because I'm not interested in anything Barry's clients have to say, no matter how much they paid my ISP to get past the filter.
Unfortunately, if you give a spammer a choice between "SMTP where it costs $19.99 per disposable account to spam a million people and get $100 in responses" and "STMP-Barry, where it costs me $100K to spam a million people"...
...the spammers will also continue to use SMTP.
So don't give us the choice? Drop SMTP altogether for SMTP-Barry? Great. Now instead of getting 10 spams a day for Viagra, I get 10 spams a day for DaimlerChrysler. How am I better off?
(No, I'm not making that up about Chrysler - got a fucking turdlet for Chrysler products from Eddy Marin's "optin-subscription" spamhaus just a few days ago. Looks like Eddy's working his way up - he's also scammed Gonzaga University into working with him. Way to check references on your fucking marketing partners, Chrysler.)
> It's basically merging Office's FindFast feature (which is MSJET based?, IIRC) into the OS. > Now when I search for "PORNO*.MPG" it'll be querying a DB and getting my results instantly, rather than walking the entire directory structure. And when you have a world of 120 gig hard drives with thousands of subdirs, this is a really necessary feature.
That's a bug, not a feature!
Do you really want anyone to walk up to your machine and type "pr0n" and find your stash?
What's so wrong with remembering that your stash is in E:/APPS/MISC/FOO/BAR/goat?:)
More to the point, I can see some uses for a database type system with metadata (e.g. MP3z with specific ID3 attributes), but I don't see a need for it to replace the filesystem altogether. In the MP3 example, why not just scan the 120G drive and index the ID3 data, modifying the database as files are moved in/out of the/MP3 subtree?
The reason end users don't know where their files are stored is because the defaults of most products (especially MS-Office) are set up not to show them things like path names. You don't know if it's storing it in the OS's default place C:/Somethingorother/Documents and Settings/User Name, the application directory C:/Another/Long/Path Name, or the place the luser last saved something.
Crappy UI design is what leads users to scatter files all over the frickin' drive. Fix the crappy UI, and you don't need a database to replace the filesystem.
> A friend of mine's brother-in-law is an astro-nut, and, being a doctor, he's the one who's in charge of piecing back together the various assorted body parts that befell Texas some time ago. Nevertheless, despite the very fun job he's doing, he's still an eager beaver to go back up on the space shuttle... Astro-nut indeed...
Which is why the real tragedy wasn't the 7 lives - it was the waste of a $2B orbiter and $500M in launch costs.
Before you mod that as flamebait, hear me out. I loathe the Shuttle and the NASA bureaucracy, but I'd fly on one tomorrow if NASA gave me the chance.
When a vehicle costs $2B plus $500M per launch, you damn well want it to come back in one piece.
If a vehicle cost $50M, maybe you don't care if 10% of the damn things blow up on the pad.
If NASA said "We are going to explore Mars. We will train you. We will give you a flight on a launch vehicle. If you make it off the pad, and if you don't suffocate in space, and if you don't burn up on re-entry, you will land on Mars. You will grab the pick-axe and the geology textbook you were reading en route, and you will start digging. If your crew return vehicle makes it (and if we aren't lying about the existence of a crew return vehicle:), or you are able to trek across the surface 100 miles to the other guy's return vehicle and reactor, you will be able to fly back home in five years. You will be paid $100,000 per pound of rock you come back with, $1M per pound of ice, and $10M if we can prove the existence of Martian life at any point in the past from your samples, and $100M if you find a live specimen thereof."
I'd sign up for that, even without the cash rewards for the sample return. (The sample return part is to give NASA a motivation to get me back - or at least my freeze-dried carcass, as long as the rocks are OK! A 60-year-old might just say "fuck it", and send back an empty ship full of rocks so his grandkids can enjoy the money!)
And I suspect I'd still have to get in a line several miles long.
Anyone who thinks that "We need volunteers to send on missions where we know some of them are gonna die" would get no volunteers need only look as far as their military recruiting office, where people take on high-risk jobs at low pay levels, all for the sake of an idea, every day.
> They should hire H-1Bs to design and build everything. And if Apu complains about some "possible disaster", threaten to fire his ass. He won't talk back when he realizes losing his job will mean deportation.
No, even H-1Bs working 24/7 for NASA still wouldn't get the job done. NASA is to initiative what flypaper is to flies. Everyone wants to make stuff fly for their first few months, and then either quits for a real job, or discovers that filling out paperwork in order not to make stuff fly is real boring, but the pay is steady, and there's plenty of job security. Any H-1Bs would wind up in the same boat.
On the other hand, India has a high level of literacy, decent engineering skills, and a growing ballistic missile programme. (Though without dreams of global domination, you could argue that they don't need orbital capability.)
Despite an economy hobbled by regulation and bureaucracy (but currently under reform), I suspect India would be capable of putting together a pretty decent space programme.
Whaddya say, India? You and China in a space race for the colonization of Mars?
Slashdot Mirror
>
> Saddam's working on something along them lines
Other way around - http://www.centcom.mil/galleries/leaflets/showleaf lets.asp :)
Actually, our nuclear waste is the most useful waste we have, from a recycling perspective. Where else are you going to get transuranics to power RTGs for future spacecraft, or daughter radionuclides for portable heat sources when you want to melt your way through the Europan ice cap?
It's one thing to scale rockets up from 1000nm to 100,000km. You're starting with a technology that can reach 1000 nautical miles.
It's quite another thing when your starting point's scientists use "nm" in the sense of "nanometers".
Wanna impress me? Build a suspension bridge out of carbon nanotubes first.
1) Try it over the sink.
2) Flip it with a spatula, and once both sides of the pancake are cooked, you can get 4-5 practice flips out of it before you screw up badly enough to break the pancake.
3) Repeat with next pancake.
4) Apply butter, syrup, whatever you like to the big heaping plate of pancake frags, nuke in microwave for 30 seconds. Chow time!
> or
> butter some bread and attach it to a cat, then throw it up in the air. Cats always land on their feet, but bread always lands butter side down, so the cat/bread combination will spin round and round indefinately...
>
>Isn't that almost the secret to flight? (Throw yourself at the ground... and miss.)
"After about 200 feet, it doesn't matter which side of the bread the cat is stapled to."
>> Now if we could only have some kind of a pancake flipping robot.....
>
> Yes, leave it to geeks to spend thousands of dollars, and countless man-hours developing a machine to flip a pancake over.
>
> [.sig] Too much of a good thing is an awesome thing, but too much of an awesome thing is really really stupid.
And even more of an awesome thing than that ...is a surefire way to get your web site with a pancake-flipping robot slashdotted!
But if you're in a hurry, there's always...
"The NSA is now funding research not only in cryptography, but in all areas of advanced mathematics. If you'd like a circular describing these new research opportunities, just pick up your phone, call your mother, and ask for one."
- shamelessly ripped from somebody's .sig
Actually, in my view, "yes" - if they have human DNA, but if they're nonsentient, they get the same rights as vegetables. An acephalitic fetus ends up shaped like a cute little human infant, but it has no brain. It is not deserving of the title "human being", because without a brain, it has no consciousness, no "being"; it's a life support system for an organ farm.
> It's just a question....
And a damn good one.
Personally, I'd have a hard time dealing with breeding a non-sentient human, especially since sentience isn't usually an on/off thing. Thankfully, I have no desire to breed, and am therefore spared having to make the wrenching decision between "worth raising to adulthood" or "spare parts" my values system would otherwise force me to make.
> Remember that they don't just get paid to play video games, they get paid to FIND BUGS!
As opposed to customers, who pay to find bugs :)
And it's been 30 years since then... and we're already 30% of the way back!
I believe murder is wrong because I deem "human rights" to be something inherent in "human beings". I'm not going to go into cogito ergo sum and all that; I'm going to assert that sentience is the defining property of a human; it's what differentiates us greatly from the cow, and somewhat less-greatly from the octopus, whale, or chimpanzee.
Adult humans are clearly sentient. Infant humans are probably sentient, or have a very high probability of attaining sentience within a year or two. The (clinically, as opposed to the sense of having an MBA) brain-dead human is not sentient. Agglomerations of developing human cells are not sentient, and only have any potential for sentience with a large investment on the part of the host organism. Spammers are neither human nor sentient.
All cultures have strong taboos governing murder, and most cultures have equally strong taboos governing infanticide. The taboo against "pulling the plug" on the comatose is not universal, nor is the taboo against abortion. (In fact, both of those "taboos" are so non-universal that they are better considered social conventions.) And most of us would be ineligible to serve on a jury in the homicide trial of a man charged with the slaughter of a spammer; how could any user of email bring back a guilty verdict when no crime had been committed?
It was the year when they finally immanentized the Gernsbeck Continuum. On April 1, the world's great powers came closer to nuclear war than ever before, all because of an obscure island...
You may already have stood in such a line without knowing it. Many medical texts still use illustrations and diagrams from Pernkopf's Atlas (Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy) to this day.
The Atlas is based on things learned during the commission of atrocities. Its author was a supporter of the regime responsible for those atrocities.
And yet, its contents have been used to save lives for 60 years, perhaps even including yours.
> For me the question is not *what* but who we're doing research on, and in the case of stem cell research, we've stepped over the line.
Do we throw out anatomy because it has benefited from what virtually the entire population of the planet agrees were war crimes performed on adult sentient beings?
If not, why should we throw out a technology that could lead to cure for Parkinson's, as well as the growth of replacement organs (possibly without an attached host body!) on the objections of a few religious fundamentalists ("life begins at conception / glob of undifferentiated cell has a soul" stage) or somewhat less-fundamental fundamentalists ("life begins when it looks cute / fetus" stage)?
It's not as easy a call as you might think, is it? :)
For the record (no point in bitching about bioethics unless you have the balls to make a stand - and while I disagree with your stand, I congratulate you on having one) I believe what Pernkopf did was grossly unethical, but I have no reservation and feel no guilt about being treated by doctors who learned from his work. I have no reservations about stem cell or fetal research. I see no contradiction between these two positions.
50 years from now, today's bioengineers may be looked upon as ignorant barbarians committing mass murder, or as the saviors of the human race. My position on bioengineering is the result of a moral choice, and I'm willing to accept any guilt on my conscience should I facts cause me to revisit it in the intervening half-century.
Hey, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Germany with that.
> So that's what he meant by "Weeks not months"!
Great. Now our space program is anything like our war on Iraq. A nice idea, long overdue, but it'll never happen in our lifetimes. The UN^H^HNASA guys will issue plenty of resolutions calling for flights to Mars by... umm... sometime... and if we don't actually build a spacecraft, we'll... umm, how about we issue another resolution calling for a trip to Mars? We're good at that issuing resolution stuff.
Well, as much as I'd like to see permanent lunar colonies, asteroids do have an advantage for mining - no (i.e. negligible) frickin' gravity well.
Not great for astronaut-miners, but very good for getting the cargo back to Earth.
There are near-earth objects that would require virtually no energy (delta-V sense of the word) to get to from Earth and due to the low delta-V and miniscule gravity well, even less energy to send stuff back from.
The Moon has a good advantage in terms of being able to dig/melt your way under the regolith for radiation shielding, though. Or you could skip the rad-shielding and use robots remote-controlled from Earth. The asteroids are way more than 3 light-seconds away.
But if you ever are, just remember to set up two big nets to catch 'em. They usually travel in pairs.
Paging Alan Ralsky, Mr. Ralsky, your new colocation provider is waiting to meet you...
If we could move enough of the Moon's mass to affect its orbit in such a way to alter tidal patterns on Earth, we wouldn't be having this discussion.
Because we'd be building freakin' Dyson spheres.
(I thought I was being trolled the first time I saw this point being made, but I've seen it twice now, and each time it was modded as "Insightful". What are they teaching in physics class these days? Oh, right. The people who teach "environmentalism" are there because they flunked physics.)
Well, yeah :)
But the original post to which I was replying cited the "no more files, it's just a database" approach as a solution to crawling through 1000s of directory trees on a 120G drive to find pr0n.mpg.
My gut reaction to that is "if you can't find your pr0n without using FindFast, you either have too much pr0n or no idea how to organize it."
Since we can never have too much pr0n (hey, it's /.), that leaves the organizational problem.
Since your pr0n doesn't come with metadata attached, a database replacement for a filesystem isn't gonna solve your problem. If end-users are too lazy to type in ID3 tags for their MP3z, what are the odds of them setting up metadata for their pr0n? And what sort of schema would be a "good" one for pr0n anyways?
Pr0n and mp3z are the canonical /.er "filing problem", but most of these problems apply to office documents, too.
Do you search by confidentiality level? Creator? Audience? Date?
Designing a schema for office docs is arguably harder than one for pr0n or mp3z. The only potential saving grace is that Microsoft will likely design the schema for the end user, because it can afford to do so.
It's not necessarily bad for dealing with Office documents, but IMNSHO, it can't scale to the point of replacing "files" altogether. How would you write code, for instance? (foo.c, bar.c, stdfoo.h)
Ultimately, this filesystem-as-database may end up being reduced to giving files one more attribute - a "location", composed of "dirs", separated by "slashes" - and a file browsing tool that allows you to "search for a file based on its location", in other words, re-creating the hierarchical filesystem at a shell level.
Maybe that'll work, but it seems like an awful lot of effort and overhead to duplicate something (a hierarchical file system) that we've had for 20 years.
>
> "Then two decades from Gagarin, twenty years to the day.
> Came a shuttle named Columbia, to open up the way.
> And they said she's just a truck, but she's a truck that's aiming high.
> See her big jets burning, see her fire in the sky."
*cut, paste, wipe tear from eye*
As a guy who cursed the cloud cover over my location at oh-dark-hundred one morning last month, that says it way better than I did.
I agree.
If you give me the choice between "SMTP without spam", and "SMTP-Barry, with only the spam that someone has paid my ISP to send me", I'm all for it.
That is, I'll continue to use SMTP, and block all SMTP-Barry traffic because I'm not interested in anything Barry's clients have to say, no matter how much they paid my ISP to get past the filter.
Unfortunately, if you give a spammer a choice between "SMTP where it costs $19.99 per disposable account to spam a million people and get $100 in responses" and "STMP-Barry, where it costs me $100K to spam a million people"...
So don't give us the choice? Drop SMTP altogether for SMTP-Barry? Great. Now instead of getting 10 spams a day for Viagra, I get 10 spams a day for DaimlerChrysler. How am I better off?
(No, I'm not making that up about Chrysler - got a fucking turdlet for Chrysler products from Eddy Marin's "optin-subscription" spamhaus just a few days ago. Looks like Eddy's working his way up - he's also scammed Gonzaga University into working with him. Way to check references on your fucking marketing partners, Chrysler.)
> Now when I search for "PORNO*.MPG" it'll be querying a DB and getting my results instantly, rather than walking the entire directory structure. And when you have a world of 120 gig hard drives with thousands of subdirs, this is a really necessary feature.
That's a bug, not a feature!
Do you really want anyone to walk up to your machine and type "pr0n" and find your stash?
What's so wrong with remembering that your stash is in E:/APPS/MISC/FOO/BAR/goat? :)
More to the point, I can see some uses for a database type system with metadata (e.g. MP3z with specific ID3 attributes), but I don't see a need for it to replace the filesystem altogether. In the MP3 example, why not just scan the 120G drive and index the ID3 data, modifying the database as files are moved in/out of the /MP3 subtree?
The reason end users don't know where their files are stored is because the defaults of most products (especially MS-Office) are set up not to show them things like path names. You don't know if it's storing it in the OS's default place C:/Somethingorother/Documents and Settings/User Name, the application directory C:/Another/Long/Path Name, or the place the luser last saved something.
Crappy UI design is what leads users to scatter files all over the frickin' drive. Fix the crappy UI, and you don't need a database to replace the filesystem.
Which is why the real tragedy wasn't the 7 lives - it was the waste of a $2B orbiter and $500M in launch costs.
Before you mod that as flamebait, hear me out. I loathe the Shuttle and the NASA bureaucracy, but I'd fly on one tomorrow if NASA gave me the chance.
When a vehicle costs $2B plus $500M per launch, you damn well want it to come back in one piece.
If a vehicle cost $50M, maybe you don't care if 10% of the damn things blow up on the pad.
If NASA said "We are going to explore Mars. We will train you. We will give you a flight on a launch vehicle. If you make it off the pad, and if you don't suffocate in space, and if you don't burn up on re-entry, you will land on Mars. You will grab the pick-axe and the geology textbook you were reading en route, and you will start digging. If your crew return vehicle makes it (and if we aren't lying about the existence of a crew return vehicle :), or you are able to trek across the surface 100 miles to the other guy's return vehicle and reactor, you will be able to fly back home in five years. You will be paid $100,000 per pound of rock you come back with, $1M per pound of ice, and $10M if we can prove the existence of Martian life at any point in the past from your samples, and $100M if you find a live specimen thereof."
I'd sign up for that, even without the cash rewards for the sample return. (The sample return part is to give NASA a motivation to get me back - or at least my freeze-dried carcass, as long as the rocks are OK! A 60-year-old might just say "fuck it", and send back an empty ship full of rocks so his grandkids can enjoy the money!)
And I suspect I'd still have to get in a line several miles long.
Anyone who thinks that "We need volunteers to send on missions where we know some of them are gonna die" would get no volunteers need only look as far as their military recruiting office, where people take on high-risk jobs at low pay levels, all for the sake of an idea, every day.
No, even H-1Bs working 24/7 for NASA still wouldn't get the job done. NASA is to initiative what flypaper is to flies. Everyone wants to make stuff fly for their first few months, and then either quits for a real job, or discovers that filling out paperwork in order not to make stuff fly is real boring, but the pay is steady, and there's plenty of job security. Any H-1Bs would wind up in the same boat.
On the other hand, India has a high level of literacy, decent engineering skills, and a growing ballistic missile programme. (Though without dreams of global domination, you could argue that they don't need orbital capability.)
Despite an economy hobbled by regulation and bureaucracy (but currently under reform), I suspect India would be capable of putting together a pretty decent space programme.
Whaddya say, India? You and China in a space race for the colonization of Mars?