Typical anti-Java bunk. You forgot the "Java is slow" comment by the way.
The truth is that there are B coders that write C and perl too. It really doesn't matter what tool you give a B coder, you still don't end up with A material.
In our shop, we code in both C++ and Java. Nobody upstairs tells us what to use, we even use a bit of perl now and then. Most of our stuff gets written in Java. Simply because its vastly easier than to do it in C. Java has a really fantastic set of libraries that allows very complex applications to be written easily. This lets us concentrate on producing a kick-ass product, instead of fiddling with memory allocation, etc.
For web applications, C and Perl are less than useless. Java app servers are so far beyond apache/modperl that the comparison is a joke.
As a C bigot and part time anti-Java stooge, I am sure that your inane construct of the A and B coders serves you well. It must be very satisfying to produce a bunch of C that does next to nothing, in between seg faults, and say to yourself, "This is a masterpiece and I am a god".
What we do in a month, you couldn't do in a year, and that, my friend, is why your shitty language of choice is headed the way of Ada.
With Newtonian physics if you accelerated at just 1g for 5 years, your final velocity would be a little over 5 times the speed of light and you would have traveled about 13 light years. So a ten year trip would cover over 26 light years.
Wouldn't a 3 year trip be less of a psycological hurdle than a 10 year one? Sure 26 years would have passed on Earth, but who cares? Would you rather miss 26 years of parchese with your friends back home and be on a ship for 3 years, or miss 10 years of parchese and be on a ship for 10 years? Either way, you better like your fellow crew members a great deal and not be leaving a family back home.
As for the mass issue, its moot, as the more mass I possess, the more mass I have to put into my rocket motor. My engine, will also create more energy as it converts more mass into more energy. So my propulsion system becomes equally more effective as my ship becomes more difficult to move. How ironic!
Relativity isn't a damper on interstellar travel. Newtonian mechanics is far more restrictive. A person can theoretically travel anywhere in the universe in a few years, thanks to relativity.
The paper is talking about effects on the order of 0.5*10^-10 m/s^2. I don't know how anyone could measure this with a pendulum. Also, the paper doesn't show that this effect isn't accounted for by Einstein's theory. I think they need to solve the equations for the Earth/Moon/Sol system before saying that the effect disproves the theory. The only theory they talk about is Newton's theory, eg. a = gm/r^2, which we already know doesn't hold for the scales that they are talking about.
Seems to me like the effect is most likely due to someone walking their dog a couple blocks away.
More interesting is how everyone wants to prove that Einstein's theory is wrong. Seems to me like a bit of brain-envy.
Nice try, but this article only goes about 0.5*10^-10 of the way to convincing me the chuck the field equations.
Run the machines as diskless clients. Boot them from the network. All of the files are managed on a central server. All of the software flows from the central server, but the processes execute on the local host.
Adding machines is easy, you just set up the bios to boot net and add some config entrys on the server.
You could do it all with cheap x86 gear and linux.
Another possibility is to create a bunch of x terminals out of old used machines and then have the users log into the central server using xdmcp. This would be a lot more difficult to secure, so I would lean towards the previous plan, myself.
Another linux solution, would be to create a "kick start" (Red Hat) cd so that you could easily re-install machines.
How about pulling the hard drives from the machines and using a cdrom based distro like knoppix? That would be really easy. You just plop the latest version into the cdrom drive. Doesn't allow you to configure stuff, but... If you have specific custom software that you want to give to the users, just implement it as a web application and then the users can surf to your site.
I've been doing computer stuff professionally for about 12 years now. Most of the people in my graduating class, Physics, ended up in some form of computer work.
I am in a position now where I have to select people to hire. I tend to look for people with science degrees and those that have been playing with computers since high school.
My reasoning is that science education teaches people to figure shit out, which is what computer work is all about. People that start programming early also display an interest in the work, and a bit of a hacker mentality which is always good. I try to stay away from comp sci graduates unless they have experience. The reason for this is that I find that they have a tendancy to over-engineer their code, adding unneeded complexity. The convese of this is the guy with no formal training who doesn't use abstraction when he should.
I guess I also try to pick people that have some experience using the tools and techniques that we are currently using, unix, Java, C++. An MCSE doesn't help much in our shop;-)
From the bottom up to where I lost interest: Ah, so facts are not interesting to you. got it.
No, it was the length of your response and the number of grammatical and typographic errors that made me lose interest.
Money doesn't make starships that can travel 3.5 light years in a reasonable time, and you of all people should know that. It certainly won't happen for 80 billion.
What does make starships? Borcht? How about we give the engineers at Nasa some money and see what they come up with? And why exactly should I know how much it costs to build such a craft? I am not an engineer.
As someone with a physics degree, you know damned well what we expect to happen when we travel at significant fractions of the speed of light.
I am not sure to what you are referring, relativity? I don't see how that would be a problem. As a proponent of manned space flight, I would think that you would be pretty happy about relativistic effects as they make it possible for a person to travel anywhere in the universe in their lifetime. But then, as you probably get the majority of your views about space exploration from Star Trek and various RPG's; you are probably waiting for the "warp" drive and the "worm-hole" methods. That way you can be back for lunch, and find that your twin brother hasn't aged a bit.
At ~10% of the speed of light the effects of relativity will be so minor as to go unnoticed, so you must be referring to something else, though I can't imagine what issues with Physics their might be, it seems fully possible, from a Physics point of view. Its no simple engineering task I imagine, but neither is providing beef to a guy on Mars.
Odds are that if you can travel 3.5 LY in even 20 years, you've managed to make nearby planets a very short trip.
Sure, but I am talking about exploration, you are talking about empire building,15th century style. I am interesting in learning something new about the universe, you are trying to rack up high score in Space Empires IV
Funny, you are talking about going to remote galaxies
Remote galaxies? Where did that come from? NEAREST STAR SYSTEM, eg. ~5ly. Last time I checked, the nearest galaxy would be the Magellanic Clouds, at around 200,000 light years.
while calling those of us who simply want to hop to the next planet over living in a fantasy world.
I am not saying that putting people on Mars is a Fantasy, its certainly possible, obviously, just not as exciting to me, personally, as sending a probe to another star system. To use your example of the 15-18th century explorers, eg. Cook. Having Cook transport settlers to Newfoundland would NOT qualify as exploration, sending Cook to survey the Pacific WOULD qualify as exploration. Can't you see the difference?
I could go on, but, as Chirchill said, "A fanatic is someone who won't change their mind and won't change the subject."
look at pictures of white water rapids. Then go white water rafting on those rapids. Now tell me which one was a more novel experience, and taught you more.
You seem unclear on the point that putting a human at a location in space is considerably more expensive than putting a robot there. I agree that putting a human on Mars would enhance our understanding of that planet more than sending a robot. Its just that the robots are so much cheaper. Given the choice of sending a human to Mars or an equivalently priced project, of, say, sending a robot to another star system. I would choose the latter, because I would be more interested in what the robot recorded there than whether mice feel like mating on Mars.
The "Saturn System" is no more "novel" thean LEO to a human. Neither one is our natural habitat, and therefore equally novel. Different than each other, yes. But not more or less novel to humans.
I was using the Websters definition of the word, novel, which is "New; recent; modern; fresh; strange; uncommon; rare; unusual.". By that definition it would be novel for a human to visit Saturn because no human has ever done that, whereas there have been many humans that have visited LEO.
So then Columbus was not an explorer in your eyes. He thought he was taking a different route (around the ocean) to a place we'd already been (India).
Correct, Columbus was after commercial gain, by accident he bumped into something novel, and thus discovered it; at least for europeans.
What will your 80B "remote sensing" instruments be doing in 20 years? Gathering dust as they are obsolete and nearly or totally useless.
The same thing as your space station.
Gimme 80 billion and in 20 years I'll have a *thiving* self sufficient Mars colony with money to spare.
Maybe you should talk to NASA, management acumen like you posess could be a real boon to their organization; considering the meager ISS that they built with their 80b.
Not ot be rude but are you completely ignorant about the laws of physics and the sheer size of the universe? Spend as much money as you can imagine and it will not change facts about how fast light travels, the odds of being in the path of a comumunication you can interecept AND understand.
I have a physics and an atronomy degree, so no, I am not. The size of the universe is "fukin huge". However the nearest star is maybe 3.5ly away, also a big freakin distance, but if we spent money on propulsion systems instead of human habitation modules, maybe we would be able to handle that.
The variety of human cultures you mention will be multiplied a thousand fold in a little as 100 years through colonization of space (starting with Mars).
You gotta be joking, who in their right mind would volunteer to move to Mars? What's the benefit for them? The most that you will get are a few scientists that want to do some research, and even that would be tough. How many people choose to live in a desert, or the antartica? What if they had to commit to 10 years at the research base and and another 5 years in transit. What kind of a wacko would sign up for that. Now if you first sent a robot and it happened to find gold or something, then maybe. But I think you are going to have a difficult time convincing the average sane person to take part in your vision of space exploration.
Your 15th century style, "conquest of the universe" does sound appeal, but I would suggest that instead of rocketing off in all directions, Buck Rogers style, we take the time to look through our bino's and bit and find an interesting place to go.
Especially if we run across any form of life much more advanced than a simple, single-cell form.
What if the life form lives in under 1000km of water at a temerature of 800K?
I guess when we find the "aliens" that you are looking for, the green skined orion chicks, then it would be good to be able to send Kirk to negotiate. But isn't it a little premature to send Kirk before we have found the hot alien babes? Why not spend the 80 billion on some remote sensing gear to find the earth like planets. Then send a robot to confirm the existense of the hot alien babes and then send Kirk?
There seems to be a struggle within NASA between the engineers and the scientists. The engineers would contend that building the space station is an accomplishment far beyond that of the space telescope, and yet the space telescope has produced far more useful information than the space station ever will. Heck, even those little rovers that cost, what, 100M, have produced more science than the space station.
It seems odd to me, and probably other astronomers that people would spend 80 billion on an orbiting cottage, when so much more could be done with that money.
Why build a vehicle before you have a place to go? We don't even know if we will need snow tires yet?
If we had spent the 80 billion on better remote sensing gear then we might, by now, have found earth like planets around other stars. We might, by now, have discovered alien radio transmissions, we might, by now, have retrieved fossils of former life forms from Mars. Any of which would teach us far more than a space staion would.
Unfortunately, fed with a constant diet of bad sci-fi, most people are incable of imagining any possible method of exploration that doesn't involve laser cannons and leather clad chicks.
Most people, it seems, are not interested in real exploration. People don't want to discover something new, they want to find the same thing somewhere else. That's why all the Star Trek "aliens" breathe the same air, look human, and run their societies like the United States, hell there is more variation in the real societies on earth than one finds in the english speaking universe of Star Trek.
Real exploration involves going somewhere new, not going to somewhere you have been, using a different route. The thing about learning is that one learns the most through novel experiences, the more completely unknown the experience the more you learn. Given a budget you can send a robot a lot farther than a human. Even if the human will provide 1000x the science of the robot, the robot will still deliver more information, because it will be in an area that is a million times more novel than the human. The Saturn system is far more novel than than low earth orbit. It costs 80 billion to send a humans into orbit to study Earth for a couple years, it costs 1 billion to send a robot to Saturn. You tell me which one is doing real exploration.
Holy cow, one person didn't agree with the Fraser Institute? Well, I guess its got to be crap then...
Seriously, if you can find another source on the net, that doesn't look like it was made by 4 year olds (eg. all text in <h1> and primary colors everywhere), I'd be interested to have a look. The Fraser one was all I could find.
I don't have any great respect for them in particular, though they aren't excatly the Alex de Tourqville Institute.
Anyway, given that the Fraser says its, on average, about July 10, which is pretty close to 50% and given that the Fraser is known to be a right leaning org, the true value is probably on the < 50% side. So you are probably correct in saying that Canadians pay less than 50% in taxes.
Enter your particulars, does the date come out after June 30? Then you are paying more than 50% tax.
Granted, this is an average, and assumes that you don't live like a hermit. Personally, I spend pretty much everything I make, and most of what I buy is subject to tons of tax. I don't sit at home munching on bulk crackers.
I was just responding to your ascertion that people don't pay 50% tax in Canada. I was pointing out that you forgot about Provincial income tax.
In reality 50% is probably a conservative estimate of the TOTAL tax that the AVERAGE Canadian must pay.
We have only talked about income tax. We haven't even gotten into the 14%+ you pay on every friggen thing you buy or do, in short, everything you CAN spend your money on is taxed again. Let's see how many I can name:
-GST 7% -PST (varies) 7% for me. -Liqour tax.. I don't know maybe 30-50%, I know that a bottle of vodka costs less than $5 before the tax, $35 after, and then GST on the tx of course. -Gas taxes another 30% or so duty. -Duties on all of the computer gear I buy from Taiwan. -2 words, dairy board. -CPP, people of my age will never collect this. -UI, another service fee. -Monthly health care premiums. -User fees for virtually every government service, drivers license, passport, etc. -Parking fees. -Homeowners tax. -911 tax on my phone bill.
I could probably go on but I have to get back to work so that I can continue to generate enough cash to keep Ottawa paved with gold.
I think its safe to say that most people in Canada pay more than half of their "40% off" salary into general revenue; so that the government can continue to buy Quebec votes and develop much needed golf courses in the PM's riding.
"SFU is not shipped with Windows because SFU currently contains open-source software, such as the GNU C compiler, which cannot be distributed with commercial software."
This doesn't sound right to me...
Sun distributes, bash and other GNU software with their OS, why can't MS?
Solaris already has tons of reasons to choose it over linux. Its only failing is that is has not completely adopted and integrated the gnu tools. Once they dump all of that old system V shit and replace with gnu, they will have a killer OS. Especially if they conform the layout as much as possible to the Linux standard.
If your main concern is the number of buttons that you have to push to produce the source code, and you are not concerned with clarity, then I suggest the following:
Um, ok, I want my C# app to run on Linux, oops, it doesn't work. Guess that mono just doesn't implement all the win32 "features". How about on Solaris, oops no, doesn't run their either, aix? no, irix? no, ok how about windows 98? nope.
Wonder what else it doesn't do. Does it work on my cell phone? nope, can I use it for free? no. About the only thing that it does that Java doesn't is allow/.'ers to code in C.
Its hard to believe that such a bastion of MS hate groups as/. would rather embrace an MS product like.net, than use a platform that, if not GPL, is at least given away for free by several companies, IBM, Sun, and Apple.
Before jumping on the MS band-wagon you should realize that they will never allow mono to become equal, better, or fully compatible to win32.NET. They will move the goal posts as fast as it takes to keep their suppremacy, and keep you buying software licenses.
The article clearly shows that Java is only faster in some of the categories. Personally, I have rewritten C++ apps in Java and found that I had no trouble making them run faster in Java, not to mention the fact that it took me a month to duplicate 4 month's worth of C++ functionality.
Its not impossible that Java would be faster at some things than C++, merely because the VM is written in C++. VM's have runtime advantages over languages like C++. A VM can optimize code based on how it is currently being used and where it is currently running, whereas C++ optimizations are a strictly compile-time exercise. If I create an app running on Linux/x86 and have it send an object to a Solaris/sparc machine, the object will optimize itself properly on both machines. If my application starts to use a particular segment of code heavilly then the VM can re-optimize for that execution pattern.
Java takes a hit by requiring a VM, but, as this article shows, the hit isn't that big and the payoffs are probably worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that there are a lot of interesting web apps written for 8-bit processors.
Typical anti-Java bunk. You forgot the "Java is slow" comment by the way.
The truth is that there are B coders that write C and perl too. It really doesn't matter what tool you give a B coder, you still don't end up with A material.
In our shop, we code in both C++ and Java. Nobody upstairs tells us what to use, we even use a bit of perl now and then. Most of our stuff gets written in Java. Simply because its vastly easier than to do it in C. Java has a really fantastic set of libraries that allows very complex applications to be written easily. This lets us concentrate on producing a kick-ass product, instead of fiddling with memory allocation, etc.
For web applications, C and Perl are less than useless. Java app servers are so far beyond apache/modperl that the comparison is a joke.
As a C bigot and part time anti-Java stooge, I am sure that your inane construct of the A and B coders serves you well. It must be very satisfying to produce a bunch of C that does next to nothing, in between seg faults, and say to yourself, "This is a masterpiece and I am a god".
What we do in a month, you couldn't do in a year, and that, my friend, is why your shitty language of choice is headed the way of Ada.
With Newtonian physics if you accelerated at just 1g for 5 years, your final velocity would be a little over 5 times the speed of light and you would have traveled about 13 light years. So a ten year trip would cover over 26 light years.
Wouldn't a 3 year trip be less of a psycological hurdle than a 10 year one? Sure 26 years would have passed on Earth, but who cares? Would you rather miss 26 years of parchese with your friends back home and be on a ship for 3 years, or miss 10 years of parchese and be on a ship for 10 years? Either way, you better like your fellow crew members a great deal and not be leaving a family back home.
As for the mass issue, its moot, as the more mass I possess, the more mass I have to put into my rocket motor. My engine, will also create more energy as it converts more mass into more energy. So my propulsion system becomes equally more effective as my ship becomes more difficult to move. How ironic!
Relativity isn't a damper on interstellar travel. Newtonian mechanics is far more restrictive. A person can theoretically travel anywhere in the universe in a few years, thanks to relativity.
The paper is talking about effects on the order of 0.5*10^-10 m/s^2. I don't know how anyone could measure this with a pendulum. Also, the paper doesn't show that this effect isn't accounted for by Einstein's theory. I think they need to solve the equations for the Earth/Moon/Sol system before saying that the effect disproves the theory. The only theory they talk about is Newton's theory, eg. a = gm/r^2, which we already know doesn't hold for the scales that they are talking about.
Seems to me like the effect is most likely due to someone walking their dog a couple blocks away.
More interesting is how everyone wants to prove that Einstein's theory is wrong. Seems to me like a bit of brain-envy.
Nice try, but this article only goes about 0.5*10^-10 of the way to convincing me the chuck the field equations.
Run the machines as diskless clients. Boot them from the network. All of the files are managed on a central server. All of the software flows from the central server, but the processes execute on the local host.
Adding machines is easy, you just set up the bios to boot net and add some config entrys on the server.
You could do it all with cheap x86 gear and linux.
Another possibility is to create a bunch of x terminals out of old used machines and then have the users log into the central server using xdmcp. This would be a lot more difficult to secure, so I would lean towards the previous plan, myself.
Another linux solution, would be to create a "kick start" (Red Hat) cd so that you could easily re-install machines.
How about pulling the hard drives from the machines and using a cdrom based distro like knoppix? That would be really easy. You just plop the latest version into the cdrom drive. Doesn't allow you to configure stuff, but... If you have specific custom software that you want to give to the users, just implement it as a web application and then the users can surf to your site.
I've been doing computer stuff professionally for about 12 years now. Most of the people in my graduating class, Physics, ended up in some form of computer work.
;-)
I am in a position now where I have to select people to hire. I tend to look for people with science degrees and those that have been playing with computers since high school.
My reasoning is that science education teaches people to figure shit out, which is what computer work is all about. People that start programming early also display an interest in the work, and a bit of a hacker mentality which is always good. I try to stay away from comp sci graduates unless they have experience. The reason for this is that I find that they have a tendancy to over-engineer their code, adding unneeded complexity. The convese of this is the guy with no formal training who doesn't use abstraction when he should.
I guess I also try to pick people that have some experience using the tools and techniques that we are currently using, unix, Java, C++. An MCSE doesn't help much in our shop
And now the US office processes over 300,000 applications per year. Its cool, how much smarter we are now.
From the bottom up to where I lost interest: Ah, so facts are not interesting to you. got it.
No, it was the length of your response and the number of grammatical and typographic errors that made me lose interest.
Money doesn't make starships that can travel 3.5 light years in a reasonable time, and you of all people should know that. It certainly won't happen for 80 billion.
What does make starships? Borcht? How about we give the engineers at Nasa some money and see what they come up with? And why exactly should I know how much it costs to build such a craft? I am not an engineer.
As someone with a physics degree, you know damned well what we expect to happen when we travel at significant fractions of the speed of light.
I am not sure to what you are referring, relativity? I don't see how that would be a problem. As a proponent of manned space flight, I would think that you would be pretty happy about relativistic effects as they make it possible for a person to travel anywhere in the universe in their lifetime. But then, as you probably get the majority of your views about space exploration from Star Trek and various RPG's; you are probably waiting for the "warp" drive and the "worm-hole" methods. That way you can be back for lunch, and find that your twin brother hasn't aged a bit.
At ~10% of the speed of light the effects of relativity will be so minor as to go unnoticed, so you must be referring to something else, though I can't imagine what issues with Physics their might be, it seems fully possible, from a Physics point of view. Its no simple engineering task I imagine, but neither is providing beef to a guy on Mars.
Odds are that if you can travel 3.5 LY in even 20 years, you've managed to make nearby planets a very short trip.
Sure, but I am talking about exploration, you are talking about empire building,15th century style. I am interesting in learning something new about the universe, you are trying to rack up high score in Space Empires IV
Funny, you are talking about going to remote galaxies
Remote galaxies? Where did that come from? NEAREST STAR SYSTEM, eg. ~5ly. Last time I checked, the nearest galaxy would be the Magellanic Clouds, at around 200,000 light years.
while calling those of us who simply want to hop to the next planet over living in a fantasy world.
I am not saying that putting people on Mars is a Fantasy, its certainly possible, obviously, just not as exciting to me, personally, as sending a probe to another star system. To use your example of the 15-18th century explorers, eg. Cook. Having Cook transport settlers to Newfoundland would NOT qualify as exploration, sending Cook to survey the Pacific WOULD qualify as exploration. Can't you see the difference?
I could go on, but, as Chirchill said, "A fanatic is someone who won't change their mind and won't change the subject."
From the bottom up to where I lost interest:
look at pictures of white water rapids. Then go white water rafting on those rapids. Now tell me which one was a more novel experience, and taught you more.
You seem unclear on the point that putting a human at a location in space is considerably more expensive than putting a robot there. I agree that putting a human on Mars would enhance our understanding of that planet more than sending a robot. Its just that the robots are so much cheaper. Given the choice of sending a human to Mars or an equivalently priced project, of, say, sending a robot to another star system. I would choose the latter, because I would be more interested in what the robot recorded there than whether mice feel like mating on Mars.
The "Saturn System" is no more "novel" thean LEO to a human. Neither one is our natural habitat, and therefore equally novel. Different than each other, yes. But not more or less novel to humans.
I was using the Websters definition of the word, novel, which is "New; recent; modern; fresh; strange; uncommon; rare; unusual.". By that definition it would be novel for a human to visit Saturn because no human has ever done that, whereas there have been many humans that have visited LEO.
So then Columbus was not an explorer in your eyes. He thought he was taking a different route (around the ocean) to a place we'd already been (India).
Correct, Columbus was after commercial gain, by accident he bumped into something novel, and thus discovered it; at least for europeans.
What will your 80B "remote sensing" instruments be doing in 20 years? Gathering dust as they are obsolete and nearly or totally useless.
The same thing as your space station.
Gimme 80 billion and in 20 years I'll have a *thiving* self sufficient Mars colony with money to spare.
Maybe you should talk to NASA, management acumen like you posess could be a real boon to their organization; considering the meager ISS that they built with their 80b.
Not ot be rude but are you completely ignorant about the laws of physics and the sheer size of the universe? Spend as much money as you can imagine and it will not change facts about how fast light travels, the odds of being in the path of a comumunication you can interecept AND understand.
I have a physics and an atronomy degree, so no, I am not. The size of the universe is "fukin huge". However the nearest star is maybe 3.5ly away, also a big freakin distance, but if we spent money on propulsion systems instead of human habitation modules, maybe we would be able to handle that.
The variety of human cultures you mention will be multiplied a thousand fold in a little as 100 years through colonization of space (starting with Mars).
You gotta be joking, who in their right mind would volunteer to move to Mars? What's the benefit for them? The most that you will get are a few scientists that want to do some research, and even that would be tough. How many people choose to live in a desert, or the antartica? What if they had to commit to 10 years at the research base and and another 5 years in transit. What kind of a wacko would sign up for that. Now if you first sent a robot and it happened to find gold or something, then maybe. But I think you are going to have a difficult time convincing the average sane person to take part in your vision of space exploration.
Your 15th century style, "conquest of the universe" does sound appeal, but I would suggest that instead of rocketing off in all directions, Buck Rogers style, we take the time to look through our bino's and bit and find an interesting place to go.
Especially if we run across any form of life much more advanced than a simple, single-cell form.
What if the life form lives in under 1000km of water at a temerature of 800K?
I guess when we find the "aliens" that you are looking for, the green skined orion chicks, then it would be good to be able to send Kirk to negotiate. But isn't it a little premature to send Kirk before we have found the hot alien babes? Why not spend the 80 billion on some remote sensing gear to find the earth like planets. Then send a robot to confirm the existense of the hot alien babes and then send Kirk?
There seems to be a struggle within NASA between the engineers and the scientists. The engineers would contend that building the space station is an accomplishment far beyond that of the space telescope, and yet the space telescope has produced far more useful information than the space station ever will. Heck, even those little rovers that cost, what, 100M, have produced more science than the space station.
It seems odd to me, and probably other astronomers that people would spend 80 billion on an orbiting cottage, when so much more could be done with that money.
Why build a vehicle before you have a place to go? We don't even know if we will need snow tires yet?
If we had spent the 80 billion on better remote sensing gear then we might, by now, have found earth like planets around other stars. We might, by now, have discovered alien radio transmissions, we might, by now, have retrieved fossils of former life forms from Mars. Any of which would teach us far more than a space staion would.
Unfortunately, fed with a constant diet of bad sci-fi, most people are incable of imagining any possible method of exploration that doesn't involve laser cannons and leather clad chicks.
Most people, it seems, are not interested in real exploration. People don't want to discover something new, they want to find the same thing somewhere else. That's why all the Star Trek "aliens" breathe the same air, look human, and run their societies like the United States, hell there is more variation in the real societies on earth than one finds in the english speaking universe of Star Trek.
Real exploration involves going somewhere new, not going to somewhere you have been, using a different route. The thing about learning is that one learns the most through novel experiences, the more completely unknown the experience the more you learn. Given a budget you can send a robot a lot farther than a human. Even if the human will provide 1000x the science of the robot, the robot will still deliver more information, because it will be in an area that is a million times more novel than the human. The Saturn system is far more novel than than low earth orbit. It costs 80 billion to send a humans into orbit to study Earth for a couple years, it costs 1 billion to send a robot to Saturn. You tell me which one is doing real exploration.
Holy cow, one person didn't agree with the Fraser Institute? Well, I guess its got to be crap then...
Seriously, if you can find another source on the net, that doesn't look like it was made by 4 year olds (eg. all text in <h1> and primary colors everywhere), I'd be interested to have a look. The Fraser one was all I could find.
I don't have any great respect for them in particular, though they aren't excatly the Alex de Tourqville Institute.
Anyway, given that the Fraser says its, on average, about July 10, which is pretty close to 50% and given that the Fraser is known to be a right leaning org, the true value is probably on the < 50% side. So you are probably correct in saying that Canadians pay less than 50% in taxes.
tax freedom day
Contrast this the states: (April 11) taxfoundation
Enter your particulars, does the date come out after June 30? Then you are paying more than 50% tax.
Granted, this is an average, and assumes that you don't live like a hermit. Personally, I spend pretty much everything I make, and most of what I buy is subject to tons of tax. I don't sit at home munching on bulk crackers.
I was just responding to your ascertion that people don't pay 50% tax in Canada. I was pointing out that you forgot about Provincial income tax.
In reality 50% is probably a conservative estimate of the TOTAL tax that the AVERAGE Canadian must pay.
We have only talked about income tax. We haven't even gotten into the 14%+ you pay on every friggen thing you buy or do, in short, everything you CAN spend your money on is taxed again. Let's see how many I can name:
-GST 7%
-PST (varies) 7% for me.
-Liqour tax.. I don't know maybe 30-50%, I know that a bottle of vodka costs less than $5 before the tax, $35 after, and then GST on the tx of course.
-Gas taxes another 30% or so duty.
-Duties on all of the computer gear I buy from Taiwan.
-2 words, dairy board.
-CPP, people of my age will never collect this.
-UI, another service fee.
-Monthly health care premiums.
-User fees for virtually every government service, drivers license, passport, etc.
-Parking fees.
-Homeowners tax.
-911 tax on my phone bill.
I could probably go on but I have to get back to work so that I can continue to generate enough cash to keep Ottawa paved with gold.
I think its safe to say that most people in Canada pay more than half of their "40% off" salary into general revenue; so that the government can continue to buy Quebec votes and develop much needed golf courses in the PM's riding.
The bad news can be found at http://www.cra-arc.gc.ca/tax/individuals/faq/taxra tes-e.html#provincial
The top tax bracket in Canada is 29% federal + 18% provincial (if you are a Newf). That's a total of 47% not including City tax.
So I would propose that one can end up paying more than 50% tax in Canada.
"SFU is not shipped with Windows because SFU currently contains open-source software, such as the GNU C compiler, which cannot be distributed with commercial software."
This doesn't sound right to me...
Sun distributes, bash and other GNU software with their OS, why can't MS?
Solaris already has tons of reasons to choose it over linux. Its only failing is that is has not completely adopted and integrated the gnu tools. Once they dump all of that old system V shit and replace with gnu, they will have a killer OS. Especially if they conform the layout as much as possible to the Linux standard.
I just want to see the story count go above 1000
BTW, I drive a 1990 Honda, but only 'cause it doesn't come with IE.
If your main concern is the number of buttons that you have to push to produce the source code, and you are not concerned with clarity, then I suggest the following:
if (c.e(t))...
Um, ok, I want my C# app to run on Linux, oops, it doesn't work. Guess that mono just doesn't implement all the win32 "features". How about on Solaris, oops no, doesn't run their either, aix? no, irix? no, ok how about windows 98? nope.
/.'ers to code in C.
/. would rather embrace an MS product like .net, than use a platform that, if not GPL, is at least given away for free by several companies, IBM, Sun, and Apple.
.NET. They will move the goal posts as fast as it takes to keep their suppremacy, and keep you buying software licenses.
Wonder what else it doesn't do. Does it work on my cell phone? nope, can I use it for free? no. About the only thing that it does that Java doesn't is allow
Its hard to believe that such a bastion of MS hate groups as
Before jumping on the MS band-wagon you should realize that they will never allow mono to become equal, better, or fully compatible to win32
So anyone that makes a device that can be used for copyright infingment is also culpable?
Can't a pen be used to copy a book? Look out bic.
What a funny piece of legislation. Is this for real?
-- Pens don't copy books, people do ---
Obviously the tests were flawed, the tester was biased, and Microsoft was behind it all.
The article clearly shows that Java is only faster in some of the categories. Personally, I have rewritten C++ apps in Java and found that I had no trouble making them run faster in Java, not to mention the fact that it took me a month to duplicate 4 month's worth of C++ functionality.
Its not impossible that Java would be faster at some things than C++, merely because the VM is written in C++. VM's have runtime advantages over languages like C++. A VM can optimize code based on how it is currently being used and where it is currently running, whereas C++ optimizations are a strictly compile-time exercise. If I create an app running on Linux/x86 and have it send an object to a Solaris/sparc machine, the object will optimize itself properly on both machines. If my application starts to use a particular segment of code heavilly then the VM can re-optimize for that execution pattern.
Java takes a hit by requiring a VM, but, as this article shows, the hit isn't that big and the payoffs are probably worth it.
I thought this was /., where's the:
"Linux beats Window$?"
and don't forget that "$"!
amd kills intel
C# murders Java
NT annihilates unix
ascii obliterates ebsdic
XML belittles html
Mac redefines Windows
SCSI uber alles
bash trumps ksh
csh cracks bash
sv strangles bsd
aix jack-boots sv
and lets not forget:
vt100 reins supreme over all other user interfaces that have been or ever will be invented!