> I'm probably not the first to remind anyone that even WITH all the technology currently utilized by the US military, it has still been unable to bring down a man who lives in caves.
I hope I'm not the first to remind you that the "man who lives in caves", whom the US has been "unable" to bring down, hasn't been seen for about two years. Interestingly enough, it was about two years ago that the US military chose to use three of its (small-num) daisy-cutter FAE munitions on one site in one day.
Now, that's not to say the guy's successors aren't willing to use a set of pre-recorded tapes (even a cave-dweller could have guessed in late 2000, that there'd eventually be US troops in $COUNTRY, for many values of $COUNTRY, and to record a set of messages accordingly) in order to convey messages to other enemy cells.
But the guy himself? No fucking way. The total lack of video, and the ambiguity of the ramblings in the audio, makes him about as alive as Nat King Cole was when he "recorded" that execrable "Unforgettable" duet with his daughter, which is even less alive than JFK was when they filmed Forrest Gump.
Allow me to rant for a bit:
'Ee's not plannin'! 'E's passed on! This man in a cave is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker!' E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in pieces! If the shock wave hadn't splattered 'im all over the walls, 'e'd be pushing up the daisies, or at least the daisy-cutters! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-MAN-IN-A-CAVE!!
> "I'm afraid both of you have jumped to the wrong conclusions." says the mathematician. "There
exists at least one sheep in Scotland, at least one side of which is black."
Also not exactly tech, but certainly the tech industry:
A shepherd is tending his flock when a black 5 series BMW pulls up in his
field. A dude jumps out of the car wearing $2000 loafers, an Armani suit,
Gucci tie, Blancpain watch.
"Hey Shepherd" says the Dude, "if I can guess exactly how many sheep you
have in this field, can I have one of them?".
The Shepherd looks at the field and says "I'm a punting man; give it your best shot".
The Dude whips out his WAP and calls a satellite flyover service and gives them a telephone number. 10 minutes later, an overhead view is faxed to the Dude and he counts up the animals.
"Shepherd, you have exactly 1218 sheep".
The Shepherd confirms this is correct and the Dude opens the trunk of the Beemer and puts an animal in the trunk.
"Tell me sir" says the Shepherd, "if I can guess what you do for a living, can I have my animal back?"
"Sure", says the Dude, grinning.
"You are a IT Consultant and you work for either Accenture or KPMG"
"Fuck!! Right on" exclaims the Dude "How didja guess?"
"Well" says the Shepherd "Firstly you turned up unannounced, unwanted and with no prior warning. Then you told me what I already knew. And then you proved you knew absolutely nothing about my business. So give me back my fuckin' dog".
Has anyone here read "Fallen Dragon" by Peter Hamilton. In it, they get a captured terrorist to expose his actions by putting him in a simulation without him knowing. They accurately observe his abilities and reactions and use it to gather leads to his organisation. This is a much simplified rendering - but that would be self-incrimination alright.
Yeah, but that was Back in the Red, by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, wasn't it?
"MAP, an Explorer mission, cost about $145 million."
If I understand correctly...
Measuring the age of universe, calculating initial proportions of baryonic matter vs. energy, and deriving shape of universe: $145M.
Shuttle flight to install ISS module: $500M.
Shuttle flight to watch ants float in zero-G: 7 deaths, $500M for launch, $2.0B for new shuttle.
Your Congressional District's seat at the trough of Shuttle/ISS pork: "Priceless."
Now that I've bashed, some constructive criticism - cut NASA in half.
One half - NAA - I'll call the National Aeronautics Administration. Its job will be pure Aeronautics. Launch vehicles. Rockets. Engines. From pricy Shuttles to half-decent Shuttle-C heavy-lift modifications, to cheap expendables, to funky crewed vehicles like X-33, VentureStar, or DC-X.
The other half - N(whoops!) let's call it the NSSA - National Space Science Administration - will do science. Build probes. Stick 'em on rockets built by the NAA, or LockMart, Boeing, or Armadillo, and do some frickin' science.
Under such a scenario, we could have avoided the Shuttle/ISS debacle completely; NAA might have had concerns about losing funding once the last Shuttle was built, and probably would have had a significant incentive to keep asking Congress for funding to build newer, better, cheaper-per-pound launch vehicles.
Why? Because they'd be under competitive pressure from every other contractor under the sun building launch vehicles to launch NSSA's space probes. Perhaps NSSA would have come to the same mistake NASA did - and decided that we Really Needed a Space Station - but even if that were the case, the design requirements of ISS would have immediately mandated a heavy lift vehicle, wholly unlike the Shuttle.
In such a scenario, NSSA would have had the choice between building ISS with three FooCorp Big Dumb Booster flights, or 30-40 NAA Shuttle flights.
Unlike the current NASA monolith, in which both halves exist to feed each other, a separate NSSA would have been loathe to spend its hard-begged budgetbucks to use another government department's (i.e. "NAA's") Shuttle, particularly in the face of cheaper alternatives. (And likewise, NAA, seeing that it had no Shuttle customers, would have been forced to spend its hard-begged budgetbucks building the Shuttle's successor, or find itself on the Congressional chopping block.)
> Now I have to deal with wallhackers outside of Counter Strike.
Look on the bright side - in the next release, wallhacking won't be cheating, it'll just be another piece of equipment. (dr00l, someone gimme one of these and a paintball gun...)
> > "Send up a weather baloon connected to your serial/parallel port."
So that's what they call it these days! When I first heard about this sorta thing, all they had wuz gerbils! Showin' my age, I guess.
> That works fine until the first thunderstorm... I hope you're wearing rubber gloves while typing.
And that's how the goatse guy got to look the way he does!
And y'know, I took one look at the goatse guy, and re-read snake-oil claims made by these crypto guys. Kinda 'splains everything. Pulled straight from there.
Slashdot - where you learn something new every day. Even when you'd really rather not.
> I'm not going to debate cost effectiveness or anything (space science is quite over my head), but it is interesting that 30% of 1.5 billion dollars is 450 million dollars (imagine what I could do with even 1 percent of that...).
Cheap.
$1.5B - three shuttle launches to put some ISS modules together. Of the three ISS crew members, 2.5 person-days are required to keep the thing up, leaving one guy able to spend four hours a day... doing very little science.
$1.5B - plunk a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere, find out what's below the cloud tops, make multiple passes by every moon, and get pictures/magnetometer data of everything around Jupiter and each of its moons. Prove the existence of liquid water beneath Europa, demonstrate a liquid/slush ocean on Callisto, observe volcanoes on Io, and if you're just after pretty pictures, keep in mind that had Galileo's high-gain antenna actually worked, we'd have gotten thousands of times as many pictures as we did.
Naw, scrap that science stuff. It's only good for a couple of years of billion-dollar pork while it's under construction, but once it's in the air, it's just a few million bucks worth of lousy scientists. Screw that. We need more shuttle/ISS flights, because they're the only things that can keep that gigadollar NASA contractor pork flowing for decades.
> Contraction: universe will eventually implode. >
Expansion: universe will expand forever. > >Sadly, neither is a particularly pleasant ending. In the first case, we all get sucked into the mother of all black holes,
Nit-picky thought:
In the first case, we are already inside the event horizon of the mother of all black holes.
A "closed universe" can be pretty easily described as a region of "space" containing sufficient mass that nothing - not even light - can escape it, and inside of which, all matter is inexorably drawn towards a singularity.
> [Dear Multivac] How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?
The freaky part is that the answer "just wait long enough for one highly-improbable quantum fluctuation to do it for you" (Stephen Hawking's hypothesis that our universe is the result of a quantum fluctuation), and the notion that a universe-sized Multivac would "think" in timeless instants (progressively slower as the heat death / entropy increase resulted in ever-smaller heat differentials, and thus ever-slower clock cycles), really dovetail nicely with the ending of the Asimov story you reference.
The truly cool part is that Asimov, at the time of writing, had no way of knowing how close he might have actually been. Asimov went from the "thermodynamics/entropy requires that Multivac will have to run extremely slowly towards the end stages", Hawking picked up on the possibility that a universe-sized quantum fluctuation is inevitable given an infinite amount of time to wait, and both arrived at pretty much the same net result; a Big Bang.
> Well actually this is the last tool I needed to completely cut loose from MS office. I run a database of Volunteers for a large folk festival. Every year I have to send out several mailings to about 1000 people at a time. To automate the process, I shoot out mailing labels in Access. I tried writing my own mailing list program, but frankly I have a database to run. I've written my share of drivers to know that if a canned product will do it for you USE IT.
Exactly.
I can't speak for all developers, but for me, one of the hardest things to do is to pick up where someone else left off. I don't know jack about the guy's code, don't know where he puts stuff, don't know what the variables mean, zip.
Unless you're part of the development team, you can't just "write the missing stuff" in an afternoon.
And that leaves you with three unpleasant options: (1) Bang your head against the wall for a few hours, days, weeks until you figure out how to patch something together, (2) ask/beg/wait for the developers to build it for you, or (3) Use the canned MS crapware.
For your situation - this being the last tool you need to cut Billgatus' apron strings - it might actually be worth a few days/weeks of head-banging:)
For a lot of users who haven't cut over yet, the time/effort payoff is much smaller. If you can get a Winblows system installed in less than an hour (umm, and keep it behind a firewall for a few more hours while you kill off the un-necessary "services" and security patches), and your goal is to have a box that you can use for gaming, multimedia playback, and office-type apps that you're bringing home from work, most folks will continue to use M$ware, even if only in a dual-boot system.
> 3) simply installed the RPMs. > >
I'm not sure what the hell qualifies this guy to be able to do much of anything in Linux much less tie MySQL to OO via ODBC.
Yeah! Stupid fucking luzer! He heard that "RPMs" were packages you "installed". So he installed them!
What a fucking luser. He's not worthy of running MySQL with an office package via ODBC.
He's, like, such a fucking luser, he's only qualified to... umm... click SETUP.EXE and install MS Access and MS Office, which, umm... oh...
...look. We were just kidding all along. Some people have taken that to mean that this is using spreadsheets hooked into live databases to solve engineering or business problems.
It's not. It's about using a cool technology (MySQL) and another cool technoogy (Open Office) and a third cool technology (ODBC), and, like, who cares if only the developers on the project can get it to work. Getting it to work - scratching that itch - is what counts. Once we've got it working, we can go on to playing with the next shiny thing.
If it's about using the software, just use that Microsoft crap.
What's that? You say that even though it's crap, at least you can install it in 20 minutes and start doing your business or engineering problems with it? Geez, it's always about you, isn't it?
> Mind you, I did give some of that refund back.. oh, what was the checkblock, CA Endangered Species Fund.:P
Hey, your money, your prerogative. The one thing I actually like about the CA forms is that there's that list of "tax-me-more" options. You wanna donate to something with a big enough lobby to referendum its way onto the 540, go ahead.
I'd like to go the next step and see a "please allocate 1% of my already-owed tax dollars to one of the following programmes", followed by a list of programmes/departments.
(Yes, one of Evil Master Plans(tm) is to referendum that 1% to 75%, and to expand the list of programmes/departments to include everything. The spotted owls, the public schools, the roads, the military, the cops, and NASA - if people want 'em, they gotta pay for 'em. Year 1 might see almost no military spending, but that'll self-correct in Year 2 when people realize it's gonna take $300B/y for the Army Corps of Engineers to clean up the poop from 500,000 goddamn owls per acre.:-)
> I know as well as anyone how much we owe the tech industry, but what are the geeks going to do if we piss them off with Internet taxes? Leave?" > -- California governor Gray Davis at a private dinner > >"Why does my homepage say '3y3 0wnZ0rr j00 gr3y d@v1Z!'? What does that mean, exactly?" > -- California governor Gray Davis, looking at his computer in three months.
"Why does my CA tax return have a new line with the instruction 'enter all remaining assets here (wh0z 0wnz0r1ng n0w, fux0r?)' line on it?"
-- The last Kalifornistan geek who hasn't already left for Nevada, puzzling over his 540 (CA State Tax form) in four months.
> Let's hope that somewhere out there a terrorist is about to be arrested, and when the agents break down his door he is reading a Katz column. > > Laugh. This Patriot Act II followup can make it that bad, if the government wants to use it that way.
Look on the bright side. What if they get the wrong apartment, and catch Katz writing his column, instead of some terrorst just reading it?
Skipping the trial saves half a dozen court reporters' lives from death by carpal tunnel syndrome during Katz' opening statements.
> It reminds me of some german Pastor who said something like > > "First they came for the Jews > and I did not speak out because I was ...not a Jew, and living comfortably in NYC, it was fashionable to sympathize with the plightofthepalestinians.
Then they came for the WTC,
and I did not speak out,
because I did not work there. And I hated my broker anyway.
Then they came for the capitalists pumping oil in Venezuela,
and I did not speak out,
because I was not a capitalist. Viva Chavez!
Then they came for the troops overseas,
and I did not speak out,
because I was not a soldier and will never have to be one.
Then they came for the Starbucks around the corner, killing 10 with an explosive belt,
and I did not speak out,
because I only drink coffee brewed from organic beans grown under "fair trade" guidelines.
Then they came for the trite,
and 10 kilotons later, there was no one left
to speak out for me.
> Valentine's Day > Venereal Disease
> VD. Coincidence?
At least one of the two is easily and cheaply cured by an injection of penicillin.
Re:This has to be tough for familes to hear...
on
Latest Columbia News
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> I disagree. First, even if the science is "2nd rate" it's fantastic PR for science. Second, this mission was doing some really vital science (like the low G fire experiments) that will come in handy if we ever want to get off this planet for any sustained amount of time.
This was the last scientific Shuttle mission scheduled until 2008.
Every other scheduled Shuttle flight was dedicated to building the ISS.
The ISS cannot be used for science, because it holds three people, two-and-a-half of whom work full-time to keep the lights on.
The ISS holds can only hold three people because its escape/rescue pod only holds three people.
The ISS escape/rescue mechanism holds three people because NASA cancelled the higher-capacity crew return vehicle it had scheduled.
NASA cancelled this vehicle programme because... (ta-dah!)...it might replace the Shuttle. And heaven knows, with $500M of pork at stake per launch we can't get rid of the Shuttle! We need the shuttle to build... the ISS!
You want "fantastic PR for science?" For every $500M Shuttle/ISS launch you cancel, fund three $150M Pathfinder-class missions to Mars, the asteroid belt, or nearby comets.
Scrapping the Shuttle/ISS project for scientific missions would result in not just better PR for science ("Look! Pictures from another world that nobody's ever seen before!" versus "Look, another guy in a spacesuit with the Shuttle's rear engines in the background"), but better science, too.
> Now, don't get me wrong, only hardcore l33t h4x0rs still use twm, but clearly the commercial software industry isn't the only place that suffers from reinventing the wheel and forcing the user to learn about its fancy new gearshift.
There's wisdom there - anyone who actually spent the time following/switching to/from fvwm2, Enlightenment, Afterstep, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, saw[mill|fish|tooth], Wi[n]dowMaker and me[t|nd]acity...
...never actually got to spend enough time doing anything but fucking around with window managers to qualify as hardcore l33t.
New window manager? Cool. But since a mouse is something I use to figure out which xterm I wanna type in, can it really improve my life? My productivity?
So I've got a boring-azz Slowaris desktop with CDE on it. Who cares how hard CDE sux0rz (and it sux0rz h4rd ind33d), as long as I can mouse over to an xterm and get some frickin' work done. (Does my background look lame? Sure, but since it's covered with black-on-white xterms, and I never see it, what do I care?)
>> you cut a couple of pounds of good beef into approximately 1" cubes, skewer them on long fondue forks, and dunk them in a pot of boiling oil.
Tip to the ladies. If you want anything "romantic" to happen, don't tell your beau about how much you like cutting beef into cubes, skewering chopped beef onto fondue forks, nor dunking chopped, skewered, beef into boiling oil. Just trust me on this.
> So you spent college wanking off to other people's cyber-sex? > > What's that called, um, meta-cyber-sex? Anonymous three-way? Text voyeurism? Textual harrasment? Even more pathetic than most geeks' college sexual misadventures?
> 1. Your approach to long term financial management > 2. What you're going to do when you mom comes to stay next month. > 3. Your preferred brand of dishwasher, and why. > 4. How you deal with awkward family moments, like funerals of uncles you never really knew that well to begin with. > 5. How you brush your teeth. > 6. Poetry you write. >7. Anything about Ayn Rand. > 8. Your opinion, based on ample experience, on how to deal with failed relationships. > 9. How much high school sucked for you personally. > 10. Anything about Anne Rice.
Well, for starters, I don't mind Great Big Blowing Void Day that much. Because I don't want kids, I don't need a girlfriend, and that makes GBBVD much cheaper. Not having kids saves me thousands a year in expenses, plus tens of thousands of year in college savings requirements. If I had a wife and kids, I wouldn't be able to retire by 40.
My Mom's dead, you insensitive clod! All because my uncle fucked up when repairing her Whirlpool. It's Maytag all the way for me. Thankfully, I got the uncle back a few weeks ago - hey, Uncle, bet you don't know why Aunt Peg was walkin' funny through the whole famn damily reunion!
Avoid spin brushes,
They don't get pubes out at all,
Aunt Peg told me so
Anyways, I don't need or want a girlfriend for GBBVD, but if I had one, I'd be sure to make sure she's the kind of gal who meets the criteria of my values system and who liked it rough. Hey, it's all about Love and Selfishness.
And what is it with women, anyways? I emailed that essay to my last girlfriend and she never spoke to me again. Then, after dissing me about Rand, she went out with some goddamn architecture student who banged her like he was on the Gong show. Shows you what she knew. Last I heard, she dumped him for a vampire fetishist who enjoyed the Sleeping Beauty series.
> Thank you, 38 states, for killing online sales. That was a brilliant solution to a temporary financial crisis, because none of those companies ever employed anyone in your state... right?
More to the point.
"...and now they never will."
Way to go, Gray Davis. You've just destroyed another few thousand jobs in CA!
If I ran an online business with a physical presence in CA (*laughing* - yeah, like anyone in their right minds would start a business in the most overtaxed, over-regulated State in the Union), the first thing I'd be doing is (1) shutting it the fuck down, and (2) sending a snail-mailing to my CA customer list informing them that as of February 28, 2003, we'd no longer have a physical presence in CA, so that if you'll just delay your purchase by three weeks, we'll be delighted save you an extra 8.25% over our CA-based competition.
Buy it in CA for $1000 + 8.25% = $1080.25.
Buy it two weeks from NV for $1010 + $20 shipping = $1030.00. My customer saves 5%, and my gross margins go up 1%.
And I also get to fire my legion of accountants and lawyers I had to hire to figure out CA's byzantine regulations.
Sing it, motherfuckers! SING IT! SING, YOU BASTARDS, SING!
"Hey, Nevada, here we come!
'Ways from where I started from,
Where casino lights glow Winter to Spring,
From nighttime to dawning,
Away from the taxes on everything!
Gray Da-vis says,
"Pay your freight"
That's why I can hardly wait,
To escape his Golden Gate,
Hey, Nevada, here I come!"
Slashdot Mirror
I hope I'm not the first to remind you that the "man who lives in caves", whom the US has been "unable" to bring down, hasn't been seen for about two years. Interestingly enough, it was about two years ago that the US military chose to use three of its (small-num) daisy-cutter FAE munitions on one site in one day.
Now, that's not to say the guy's successors aren't willing to use a set of pre-recorded tapes (even a cave-dweller could have guessed in late 2000, that there'd eventually be US troops in $COUNTRY, for many values of $COUNTRY, and to record a set of messages accordingly) in order to convey messages to other enemy cells.
But the guy himself? No fucking way. The total lack of video, and the ambiguity of the ramblings in the audio, makes him about as alive as Nat King Cole was when he "recorded" that execrable "Unforgettable" duet with his daughter, which is even less alive than JFK was when they filmed Forrest Gump.
Allow me to rant for a bit:
'Ee's not plannin'! 'E's passed on! This man in a cave is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker!' E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in pieces! If the shock wave hadn't splattered 'im all over the walls, 'e'd be pushing up the daisies, or at least the daisy-cutters! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! THIS IS AN EX-MAN-IN-A-CAVE!!
Your required movie watching for this weekend: "Weekend at Bernie's"
Also not exactly tech, but certainly the tech industry:
A shepherd is tending his flock when a black 5 series BMW pulls up in his field. A dude jumps out of the car wearing $2000 loafers, an Armani suit, Gucci tie, Blancpain watch.
"Hey Shepherd" says the Dude, "if I can guess exactly how many sheep you have in this field, can I have one of them?".
The Shepherd looks at the field and says "I'm a punting man; give it your best shot".
The Dude whips out his WAP and calls a satellite flyover service and gives them a telephone number. 10 minutes later, an overhead view is faxed to the Dude and he counts up the animals.
"Shepherd, you have exactly 1218 sheep".
The Shepherd confirms this is correct and the Dude opens the trunk of the Beemer and puts an animal in the trunk.
"Tell me sir" says the Shepherd, "if I can guess what you do for a living, can I have my animal back?"
"Sure", says the Dude, grinning.
"You are a IT Consultant and you work for either Accenture or KPMG"
"Fuck!! Right on" exclaims the Dude "How didja guess?"
"Well" says the Shepherd "Firstly you turned up unannounced, unwanted and with no prior warning. Then you told me what I already knew. And then you proved you knew absolutely nothing about my business. So give me back my fuckin' dog".
Yeah, but that was Back in the Red, by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, wasn't it?
(Ah, the world loves a bastard!)
"MAP, an Explorer mission, cost about $145 million."
If I understand correctly...
Measuring the age of universe, calculating initial proportions of baryonic matter vs. energy, and deriving shape of universe: $145M.
Shuttle flight to install ISS module: $500M.
Shuttle flight to watch ants float in zero-G: 7 deaths, $500M for launch, $2.0B for new shuttle.
Your Congressional District's seat at the trough of Shuttle/ISS pork: "Priceless."
Now that I've bashed, some constructive criticism - cut NASA in half.
One half - NAA - I'll call the National Aeronautics Administration. Its job will be pure Aeronautics. Launch vehicles. Rockets. Engines. From pricy Shuttles to half-decent Shuttle-C heavy-lift modifications, to cheap expendables, to funky crewed vehicles like X-33, VentureStar, or DC-X.
The other half - N(whoops!) let's call it the NSSA - National Space Science Administration - will do science. Build probes. Stick 'em on rockets built by the NAA, or LockMart, Boeing, or Armadillo, and do some frickin' science.
Under such a scenario, we could have avoided the Shuttle/ISS debacle completely; NAA might have had concerns about losing funding once the last Shuttle was built, and probably would have had a significant incentive to keep asking Congress for funding to build newer, better, cheaper-per-pound launch vehicles.
Why? Because they'd be under competitive pressure from every other contractor under the sun building launch vehicles to launch NSSA's space probes. Perhaps NSSA would have come to the same mistake NASA did - and decided that we Really Needed a Space Station - but even if that were the case, the design requirements of ISS would have immediately mandated a heavy lift vehicle, wholly unlike the Shuttle.
In such a scenario, NSSA would have had the choice between building ISS with three FooCorp Big Dumb Booster flights, or 30-40 NAA Shuttle flights.
Unlike the current NASA monolith, in which both halves exist to feed each other, a separate NSSA would have been loathe to spend its hard-begged budgetbucks to use another government department's (i.e. "NAA's") Shuttle, particularly in the face of cheaper alternatives. (And likewise, NAA, seeing that it had no Shuttle customers, would have been forced to spend its hard-begged budgetbucks building the Shuttle's successor, or find itself on the Congressional chopping block.)
Look on the bright side - in the next release, wallhacking won't be cheating, it'll just be another piece of equipment. (dr00l, someone gimme one of these and a paintball gun...)
So that's what they call it these days! When I first heard about this sorta thing, all they had wuz gerbils! Showin' my age, I guess.
> That works fine until the first thunderstorm... I hope you're wearing rubber gloves while typing.
And that's how the goatse guy got to look the way he does!
And y'know, I took one look at the goatse guy, and re-read snake-oil claims made by these crypto guys. Kinda 'splains everything. Pulled straight from there.
Slashdot - where you learn something new every day. Even when you'd really rather not.
Cheap.
$1.5B - three shuttle launches to put some ISS modules together. Of the three ISS crew members, 2.5 person-days are required to keep the thing up, leaving one guy able to spend four hours a day... doing very little science.
$1.5B - plunk a probe into Jupiter's atmosphere, find out what's below the cloud tops, make multiple passes by every moon, and get pictures/magnetometer data of everything around Jupiter and each of its moons. Prove the existence of liquid water beneath Europa, demonstrate a liquid/slush ocean on Callisto, observe volcanoes on Io, and if you're just after pretty pictures, keep in mind that had Galileo's high-gain antenna actually worked, we'd have gotten thousands of times as many pictures as we did.
Naw, scrap that science stuff. It's only good for a couple of years of billion-dollar pork while it's under construction, but once it's in the air, it's just a few million bucks worth of lousy scientists. Screw that. We need more shuttle/ISS flights, because they're the only things that can keep that gigadollar NASA contractor pork flowing for decades.
> Expansion: universe will expand forever.
>
>Sadly, neither is a particularly pleasant ending. In the first case, we all get sucked into the mother of all black holes,
Nit-picky thought:
In the first case, we are already inside the event horizon of the mother of all black holes.
A "closed universe" can be pretty easily described as a region of "space" containing sufficient mass that nothing - not even light - can escape it, and inside of which, all matter is inexorably drawn towards a singularity.
> "Let there be light!"
>And there will be light
(Oh dear. Multivac evolved out of Slashdot. Does that make CowboyNeal a God? *shudder*)
The freaky part is that the answer "just wait long enough for one highly-improbable quantum fluctuation to do it for you" (Stephen Hawking's hypothesis that our universe is the result of a quantum fluctuation), and the notion that a universe-sized Multivac would "think" in timeless instants (progressively slower as the heat death / entropy increase resulted in ever-smaller heat differentials, and thus ever-slower clock cycles), really dovetail nicely with the ending of the Asimov story you reference.
The truly cool part is that Asimov, at the time of writing, had no way of knowing how close he might have actually been. Asimov went from the "thermodynamics/entropy requires that Multivac will have to run extremely slowly towards the end stages", Hawking picked up on the possibility that a universe-sized quantum fluctuation is inevitable given an infinite amount of time to wait, and both arrived at pretty much the same net result; a Big Bang.
Exactly.
I can't speak for all developers, but for me, one of the hardest things to do is to pick up where someone else left off. I don't know jack about the guy's code, don't know where he puts stuff, don't know what the variables mean, zip.
Unless you're part of the development team, you can't just "write the missing stuff" in an afternoon.
And that leaves you with three unpleasant options: (1) Bang your head against the wall for a few hours, days, weeks until you figure out how to patch something together, (2) ask/beg/wait for the developers to build it for you, or (3) Use the canned MS crapware.
For your situation - this being the last tool you need to cut Billgatus' apron strings - it might actually be worth a few days/weeks of head-banging :)
For a lot of users who haven't cut over yet, the time/effort payoff is much smaller. If you can get a Winblows system installed in less than an hour (umm, and keep it behind a firewall for a few more hours while you kill off the un-necessary "services" and security patches), and your goal is to have a box that you can use for gaming, multimedia playback, and office-type apps that you're bringing home from work, most folks will continue to use M$ware, even if only in a dual-boot system.
>
> I'm not sure what the hell qualifies this guy to be able to do much of anything in Linux much less tie MySQL to OO via ODBC.
Yeah! Stupid fucking luzer! He heard that "RPMs" were packages you "installed". So he installed them!
What a fucking luser. He's not worthy of running MySQL with an office package via ODBC.
He's, like, such a fucking luser, he's only qualified to... umm... click SETUP.EXE and install MS Access and MS Office, which, umm... oh...
It's not. It's about using a cool technology (MySQL) and another cool technoogy (Open Office) and a third cool technology (ODBC), and, like, who cares if only the developers on the project can get it to work. Getting it to work - scratching that itch - is what counts. Once we've got it working, we can go on to playing with the next shiny thing.
If it's about using the software, just use that Microsoft crap. What's that? You say that even though it's crap, at least you can install it in 20 minutes and start doing your business or engineering problems with it? Geez, it's always about you, isn't it?
Hey, your money, your prerogative. The one thing I actually like about the CA forms is that there's that list of "tax-me-more" options. You wanna donate to something with a big enough lobby to referendum its way onto the 540, go ahead.
I'd like to go the next step and see a "please allocate 1% of my already-owed tax dollars to one of the following programmes", followed by a list of programmes/departments.
(Yes, one of Evil Master Plans(tm) is to referendum that 1% to 75%, and to expand the list of programmes/departments to include everything. The spotted owls, the public schools, the roads, the military, the cops, and NASA - if people want 'em, they gotta pay for 'em. Year 1 might see almost no military spending, but that'll self-correct in Year 2 when people realize it's gonna take $300B/y for the Army Corps of Engineers to clean up the poop from 500,000 goddamn owls per acre. :-)
> -- California governor Gray Davis at a private dinner
>
>"Why does my homepage say '3y3 0wnZ0rr j00 gr3y d@v1Z!'? What does that mean, exactly?"
> -- California governor Gray Davis, looking at his computer in three months.
"Why does my CA tax return have a new line with the instruction 'enter all remaining assets here (wh0z 0wnz0r1ng n0w, fux0r?)' line on it?"
-- The last Kalifornistan geek who hasn't already left for Nevada, puzzling over his 540 (CA State Tax form) in four months.
>
> Laugh. This Patriot Act II followup can make it that bad, if the government wants to use it that way.
Look on the bright side. What if they get the wrong apartment, and catch Katz writing his column, instead of some terrorst just reading it?
Skipping the trial saves half a dozen court reporters' lives from death by carpal tunnel syndrome during Katz' opening statements.
Win/win, man.
>
> "First they came for the Jews
> and I did not speak out
because I was
Then they came for the WTC,
and I did not speak out,
because I did not work there. And I hated my broker anyway.
Then they came for the capitalists pumping oil in Venezuela,
and I did not speak out,
because I was not a capitalist. Viva Chavez!
Then they came for the troops overseas,
and I did not speak out,
because I was not a soldier and will never have to be one.
Then they came for the Starbucks around the corner, killing 10 with an explosive belt,
and I did not speak out,
because I only drink coffee brewed from organic beans grown under "fair trade" guidelines.
Then they came for the trite,
and 10 kilotons later, there was no one left
to speak out for me.
> Venereal Disease
> VD. Coincidence?
At least one of the two is easily and cheaply cured by an injection of penicillin.
This was the last scientific Shuttle mission scheduled until 2008.
Every other scheduled Shuttle flight was dedicated to building the ISS.
The ISS cannot be used for science, because it holds three people, two-and-a-half of whom work full-time to keep the lights on.
The ISS holds can only hold three people because its escape/rescue pod only holds three people.
The ISS escape/rescue mechanism holds three people because NASA cancelled the higher-capacity crew return vehicle it had scheduled.
NASA cancelled this vehicle programme because... (ta-dah!) ...it might replace the Shuttle. And heaven knows, with $500M of pork at stake per launch we can't get rid of the Shuttle! We need the shuttle to build... the ISS!
You want "fantastic PR for science?" For every $500M Shuttle/ISS launch you cancel, fund three $150M Pathfinder-class missions to Mars, the asteroid belt, or nearby comets.
Scrapping the Shuttle/ISS project for scientific missions would result in not just better PR for science ("Look! Pictures from another world that nobody's ever seen before!" versus "Look, another guy in a spacesuit with the Shuttle's rear engines in the background"), but better science, too .
There's wisdom there - anyone who actually spent the time following/switching to/from fvwm2, Enlightenment, Afterstep, WindowMaker, Enlightenment, saw[mill|fish|tooth], Wi[n]dowMaker and me[t|nd]acity...
New window manager? Cool. But since a mouse is something I use to figure out which xterm I wanna type in, can it really improve my life? My productivity?
So I've got a boring-azz Slowaris desktop with CDE on it. Who cares how hard CDE sux0rz (and it sux0rz h4rd ind33d), as long as I can mouse over to an xterm and get some frickin' work done. (Does my background look lame? Sure, but since it's covered with black-on-white xterms, and I never see it, what do I care?)
Tip to the ladies. If you want anything "romantic" to happen, don't tell your beau about how much you like cutting beef into cubes, skewering chopped beef onto fondue forks, nor dunking chopped, skewered, beef into boiling oil. Just trust me on this.
OK, I gave your girlfriend the orgasm. Now can I get back to the Q3A fragfest I had planned?
>
> What's that called, um, meta-cyber-sex? Anonymous three-way? Text voyeurism? Textual harrasment? Even more pathetic than most geeks' college sexual misadventures?
No, it's alled "Total Information Awareness" *G*
So what you're saying is, that if the guy has bad credit, it may be a blessing in disguise, as it's more likely he'll get the job? ;-)
> 2. What you're going to do when you mom comes to stay next month.
> 3. Your preferred brand of dishwasher, and why.
> 4. How you deal with awkward family moments, like funerals of uncles you never really knew that well to begin with.
> 5. How you brush your teeth.
> 6. Poetry you write.
>7. Anything about Ayn Rand.
> 8. Your opinion, based on ample experience, on how to deal with failed relationships.
> 9. How much high school sucked for you personally.
> 10. Anything about Anne Rice.
Well, for starters, I don't mind Great Big Blowing Void Day that much. Because I don't want kids, I don't need a girlfriend, and that makes GBBVD much cheaper. Not having kids saves me thousands a year in expenses, plus tens of thousands of year in college savings requirements. If I had a wife and kids, I wouldn't be able to retire by 40.
My Mom's dead, you insensitive clod! All because my uncle fucked up when repairing her Whirlpool. It's Maytag all the way for me. Thankfully, I got the uncle back a few weeks ago - hey, Uncle, bet you don't know why Aunt Peg was walkin' funny through the whole famn damily reunion!
Avoid spin brushes,
They don't get pubes out at all,
Aunt Peg told me so
Anyways, I don't need or want a girlfriend for GBBVD, but if I had one, I'd be sure to make sure she's the kind of gal who meets the criteria of my values system and who liked it rough. Hey, it's all about Love and Selfishness.
And what is it with women, anyways? I emailed that essay to my last girlfriend and she never spoke to me again. Then, after dissing me about Rand, she went out with some goddamn architecture student who banged her like he was on the Gong show. Shows you what she knew. Last I heard, she dumped him for a vampire fetishist who enjoyed the Sleeping Beauty series.
God, high school sucked.
More to the point.
"...and now they never will."
Way to go, Gray Davis. You've just destroyed another few thousand jobs in CA!
If I ran an online business with a physical presence in CA (*laughing* - yeah, like anyone in their right minds would start a business in the most overtaxed, over-regulated State in the Union), the first thing I'd be doing is (1) shutting it the fuck down, and (2) sending a snail-mailing to my CA customer list informing them that as of February 28, 2003, we'd no longer have a physical presence in CA, so that if you'll just delay your purchase by three weeks, we'll be delighted save you an extra 8.25% over our CA-based competition.
Buy it in CA for $1000 + 8.25% = $1080.25.
Buy it two weeks from NV for $1010 + $20 shipping = $1030.00. My customer saves 5%, and my gross margins go up 1%.
And I also get to fire my legion of accountants and lawyers I had to hire to figure out CA's byzantine regulations.
Sing it, motherfuckers! SING IT! SING, YOU BASTARDS, SING!
"Hey, Nevada, here we come!
'Ways from where I started from,
Where casino lights glow Winter to Spring,
From nighttime to dawning,
Away from the taxes on everything!
Gray Da-vis says,
"Pay your freight"
That's why I can hardly wait,
To escape his Golden Gate,
Hey, Nevada, here I come!"