An audience. No artist wants to perform without one.
They also give a niche for OSS people to use the programs daily under real workloads, allowing them to practise and deepen their understanding, and test their work out in the "real world".
They also give y'all OSS-based jobs, where you don't have to put up with Microsoft Sodding Windows.
They don't look enough alike to be a convincing debunk, and they don't do a thing to attack the many non-disk UFO stories (spheres, triangles, and what-have-you). Even if UFOs were true (on which I claim ignorance and hence, neutrality) a more sensible explanation would be both parties making use of shapes designed to exploit the same atmospheric physics.
The sad truth is that, these days, companies are run by accountants and lawyers. These are exactly the people who look at what the money does, and NOT at what happens to the world around. Nobody seems to care about 10, or 20 years down the road. As long as the cash is on the table NOW, and LOTS of it, all is good.
That's the difference between incumbents, and blue sky investors. A modern economy has room for both, and the one can build money to fund the other. Paul Allen funding Scaled Composites, for example.
...is not that they want to kill astronauts, but rather that the origin, intent, structure and funding of the organization are inimical to sensible space travel.
NASA has many skilled and motivated people, but they're doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons, even when they aren't sidetracked into congressional pork.
NASA's guiding vision ("mankind's conquest of space") is abstract, effectively infinite in scope, and impersonal. It does not have a "bottom line". Hence they are blind to weigh up and choose concrete goals. They're aiming so high they want to get there immediately, and not stop to ask "why?". But, it's the "why" that tells you "how", and "ought I?".
They're underfunded to attack an infinity, by definition - and OVERfunded to develop sensible space travel. Their successes have all been of a "brute force and megabucks" sort. Rather than having to build slowly towards a true technology of space travel, each step justified by measurable, personal utility, they've operated on the principle that enough money will punt anything into orbit, and they'll learn on the job and find a justification for it later. All such vehicles are prototypes, and unsafe.
You need fuel. You need fuel to push the fuel. You need fuel to push the tank that holds the fuel. And chemical fuels only give so much push-per-quantity. For a given fuel, the ratio of fuel-mass to rocket-mass is a constant, and the vast majority of it is fuel.
That's why rockets drop pieces. Less tank to push. But dropped pieces are expensive and wasteful, meaning rockets are too expensive to be much use.
The best chemical fuel, liquid hydrogen and oxygen, just barely scrapes the threshold at which it can launch a sensibly sized single staged rocket into orbit, maybe. It's so close that the difference between "will" and "won't" is lost inside the calculation's margin of error.
Seeing the situation as "duplicated effort" is too simplistic. There is structure behind the apearance of chaos. One or two leading implementations, many also-rans, and a continuing fizz of new and abandoned efforts. Popular generalists, niche but viable specialists. This is exactly the sort of structure you'd expect from an evolution-like process. Far from being wasted effort, it's highly effective, both at fulfilling everybody's needs, and at keeping the lead competitors on their toes.
It's all envy dressed up as philosophy. A way for leeches to salve their conscience. The cow is stealing from the leech collective! It has so much blood and we have so little! Unfair! Redistribute the blood, comrades!
The copyright licensing schemes only got negotiated on TV&radio because (1) the govt monopolizes broadcast licenses, so the number of broadcasters is low and easy to determine (2) it's very obvious who is transmitting what. Obviously, these don't apply to p2p.
I can see what you mean: monitor and log downloads at the ISP, pay fees to artists, spread the cost across customer subscriptions. Perhaps negotiate a blanket license for the ISPs instead of pay-per-play. Whatever. I just can't see that model working without it being universal and compelled. People would just pick the cheaper no-surcharge ISPs.
Any market-acceptable surcharge would never cover for the "lost money" of music companies. Even my cheapskate broadband can pull down ten bundled albums or a nice quality cinema movie per day. Spread that as thin as you please, and it's still a lot of $$$. Especially with everyone joining in, ecouraged by the hypothetical ISP's "all you can eat" license.
Namely: to comply they have to mention it's spam. Yeah I know the law doesn't say HOW they have to mention it. But they have to do it somehow or other. The english language and its derived acronyms are bountiful, but not infinite. Sooner or later, all the boilerplate phrasings are going to make their way into my bayesian filters. Likewise with the boilerplate for "opt me out".
I suspect a lot of spammers will comply (or at least emulate the appearance thereof), so as to paint themselves as "legitimate". My filters thank them in advance, for they shall feed well. *insert sfx: deep booming evil laughter*
All the hysteria about genetic engineered beasties is just crazy. So what if they escape? It's just more biodiversity. So what if they replace native populations of lesser-splodged-mudslurpers? That's evolution in action, baby!
Hard coding styles and scripts into the page is totally un-idiomatic for XML, anyhow. You're trying to merge two totally unalike parseable languages inside one document. Jumping through hoops is to be expected.
..and in other news, today a man was fined half a million dollars and jailed for five years for evading email taxes. IRS agents say that Joseph Smith of One Horse, Nebraska filed fraudulent SMTP logs and is suspected of having had encrypted tunnels to email servers in tax havens abroad. Reportedly, the prosecutor is also looking to charge him with evading the new web-page-hit tax, after his legal defense fund page was posted to the popular news site "Microsoft Slashdot".
Attorney general for life John Ashcroft commented "too late, assholes. In twenty oh three you let the camel get his nose in the tent, and now he's screwing your wife."
Also, their lawsuit is to recover payment for an actual physical use: as a parking lot for the research probe NASA abandoned there. Redefining even an unmodified field from "just a bit of grass" into "a parking lot" certainly improves its value.
That aside, even a failed lawsuit wouldn't be a total loss - if the court conceded the treaty was bunk (or inapplicable, since a strict reading of it only prohibits governments from claiming land), but judged the claim bogus for other reasons, such as lack of physical posession.
Basically, like their site explains, the improvement is in terms of legal standing. Putting effort into defending the claim demonstrates active ownership as opposed to passive abandonment. Similar to how this works with defending trade marks, etc. The claim thus becomes more plausibly-valid, even in the absence of posession.
This expenditure and the resulting increase in speculative value constitutes "improvement".
That doesn't match up to what OrbDev says and does: namely that while pointing and saying "it's mine" establishes the claim**, it's a pretty weak claim until one actually "mixes ones labor with it" and "improves it" (i.e. in this case, by going to the bother of publicising the claim, and defending it in court). This being the "one tenth of the law", in the absence of the "nine-tenths" that is posession. So this is less silly than it at first looks.
(**Claims have to relate to a specific thing, not a category, so you can't claim "all dark matter" or some such.)
...on January 27, 1967, when they nationalized 99.9* percent of everything. The UN Outer Space Treaty purports to make the entirety of outer space off limits to property, held in trust for "mankind". Supposedly, Earth is the single oasis of individual ownership in the vast communist deeps. Yes, I said communist, and I meant it! What else do you call banning all private ownership - of nearly everthing in existence? Besides pure bloody minded hubris.
...there no such thing as "overpaid". Just an opportunity looking for smart entrepreneurs. These simultaneously communicate the change in demand, relieve the pressure, and profit thereby. A win-win situation.
Only a forcibly rigged market can contain overpricing, due to somebody having a "guild monopoly". The Orthodontists mentioned are, I believe, an example of this.
Slashdot Mirror
I like the wild west approach. Short rope, tall tree, byebye spammer.
An audience. No artist wants to perform without one.
They also give a niche for OSS people to use the programs daily under real workloads, allowing them to practise and deepen their understanding, and test their work out in the "real world".
They also give y'all OSS-based jobs, where you don't have to put up with Microsoft Sodding Windows.
They don't look enough alike to be a convincing debunk, and they don't do a thing to attack the many non-disk UFO stories (spheres, triangles, and what-have-you). Even if UFOs were true (on which I claim ignorance and hence, neutrality) a more sensible explanation would be both parties making use of shapes designed to exploit the same atmospheric physics.
...is not that they want to kill astronauts, but rather that the origin, intent, structure and funding of the organization are inimical to sensible space travel.
NASA has many skilled and motivated people, but they're doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons, even when they aren't sidetracked into congressional pork.
NASA's guiding vision ("mankind's conquest of space") is abstract, effectively infinite in scope, and impersonal. It does not have a "bottom line". Hence they are blind to weigh up and choose concrete goals. They're aiming so high they want to get there immediately, and not stop to ask "why?". But, it's the "why" that tells you "how", and "ought I?".
They're underfunded to attack an infinity, by definition - and OVERfunded to develop sensible space travel. Their successes have all been of a "brute force and megabucks" sort. Rather than having to build slowly towards a true technology of space travel, each step justified by measurable, personal utility, they've operated on the principle that enough money will punt anything into orbit, and they'll learn on the job and find a justification for it later. All such vehicles are prototypes, and unsafe.
Need another shuttle, again.
You need fuel. You need fuel to push the fuel. You need fuel to push the tank that holds the fuel. And chemical fuels only give so much push-per-quantity. For a given fuel, the ratio of fuel-mass to rocket-mass is a constant, and the vast majority of it is fuel.
That's why rockets drop pieces. Less tank to push. But dropped pieces are expensive and wasteful, meaning rockets are too expensive to be much use.
The best chemical fuel, liquid hydrogen and oxygen, just barely scrapes the threshold at which it can launch a sensibly sized single staged rocket into orbit, maybe. It's so close that the difference between "will" and "won't" is lost inside the calculation's margin of error.
That's the main reason rocket science is hard.
NO GOVERNMENT aboard. At all.
Concorde was a state funded project, almost exclusively flown by state subsidised airlines bearing national badges (Air France and British Airways).
Engineer them to taste good.
Then not only are they quickly munched when escaping, they also make novel and intriguing party snacks.
"Two Mc GlowingFish burgers, coke and large fries, coming up sir. Welcome to the twentyfirst century!"
Seeing the situation as "duplicated effort" is too simplistic. There is structure behind the apearance of chaos. One or two leading implementations, many also-rans, and a continuing fizz of new and abandoned efforts. Popular generalists, niche but viable specialists. This is exactly the sort of structure you'd expect from an evolution-like process. Far from being wasted effort, it's highly effective, both at fulfilling everybody's needs, and at keeping the lead competitors on their toes.
...it's just that the heaviest users are all virgins, so nobody's had an opportunity to notice.
It's all envy dressed up as philosophy. A way for leeches to salve their conscience. The cow is stealing from the leech collective! It has so much blood and we have so little! Unfair! Redistribute the blood, comrades!
The copyright licensing schemes only got negotiated on TV&radio because (1) the govt monopolizes broadcast licenses, so the number of broadcasters is low and easy to determine (2) it's very obvious who is transmitting what. Obviously, these don't apply to p2p.
I can see what you mean: monitor and log downloads at the ISP, pay fees to artists, spread the cost across customer subscriptions. Perhaps negotiate a blanket license for the ISPs instead of pay-per-play. Whatever. I just can't see that model working without it being universal and compelled. People would just pick the cheaper no-surcharge ISPs.
Any market-acceptable surcharge would never cover for the "lost money" of music companies. Even my cheapskate broadband can pull down ten bundled albums or a nice quality cinema movie per day. Spread that as thin as you please, and it's still a lot of $$$. Especially with everyone joining in, ecouraged by the hypothetical ISP's "all you can eat" license.
...which amounts to nationalizing all art. (He who pays the piper, etc.)
Unless you like Soviet hymns to tractor production statistics, that probably isn't such a great idea.
Namely: to comply they have to mention it's spam. Yeah I know the law doesn't say HOW they have to mention it. But they have to do it somehow or other. The english language and its derived acronyms are bountiful, but not infinite. Sooner or later, all the boilerplate phrasings are going to make their way into my bayesian filters. Likewise with the boilerplate for "opt me out".
I suspect a lot of spammers will comply (or at least emulate the appearance thereof), so as to paint themselves as "legitimate". My filters thank them in advance, for they shall feed well. *insert sfx: deep booming evil laughter*
All the hysteria about genetic engineered beasties is just crazy. So what if they escape? It's just more biodiversity. So what if they replace native populations of lesser-splodged-mudslurpers? That's evolution in action, baby!
Glowy fish are good! I want some!
Hard coding styles and scripts into the page is totally un-idiomatic for XML, anyhow. You're trying to merge two totally unalike parseable languages inside one document. Jumping through hoops is to be expected.
..and in other news, today a man was fined half a million dollars and jailed for five years for evading email taxes. IRS agents say that Joseph Smith of One Horse, Nebraska filed fraudulent SMTP logs and is suspected of having had encrypted tunnels to email servers in tax havens abroad. Reportedly, the prosecutor is also looking to charge him with evading the new web-page-hit tax, after his legal defense fund page was posted to the popular news site "Microsoft Slashdot".
Attorney general for life John Ashcroft commented "too late, assholes. In twenty oh three you let the camel get his nose in the tent, and now he's screwing your wife."
...but "weak" isn't "none at all".
Also, their lawsuit is to recover payment for an actual physical use: as a parking lot for the research probe NASA abandoned there. Redefining even an unmodified field from "just a bit of grass" into "a parking lot" certainly improves its value.
That aside, even a failed lawsuit wouldn't be a total loss - if the court conceded the treaty was bunk (or inapplicable, since a strict reading of it only prohibits governments from claiming land), but judged the claim bogus for other reasons, such as lack of physical posession.
Basically, like their site explains, the improvement is in terms of legal standing. Putting effort into defending the claim demonstrates active ownership as opposed to passive abandonment. Similar to how this works with defending trade marks, etc. The claim thus becomes more plausibly-valid, even in the absence of posession.
This expenditure and the resulting increase in speculative value constitutes "improvement".
That doesn't match up to what OrbDev says and does: namely that while pointing and saying "it's mine" establishes the claim**, it's a pretty weak claim until one actually "mixes ones labor with it" and "improves it" (i.e. in this case, by going to the bother of publicising the claim, and defending it in court). This being the "one tenth of the law", in the absence of the "nine-tenths" that is posession. So this is less silly than it at first looks.
(**Claims have to relate to a specific thing, not a category, so you can't claim "all dark matter" or some such.)
...on January 27, 1967, when they nationalized 99.9* percent of everything. The UN Outer Space Treaty purports to make the entirety of outer space off limits to property, held in trust for "mankind". Supposedly, Earth is the single oasis of individual ownership in the vast communist deeps. Yes, I said communist, and I meant it! What else do you call banning all private ownership - of nearly everthing in existence? Besides pure bloody minded hubris.
This treaty is the dragon that the Eros Project is trying to slay. They are attempting to creeate case law backing the natural right to claim, take, and use unowned frontier land - even in space.
If you support private space ventures such as X-Prize, you should also support OrbDev.
...there no such thing as "overpaid". Just an opportunity looking for smart entrepreneurs. These simultaneously communicate the change in demand, relieve the pressure, and profit thereby. A win-win situation.
Only a forcibly rigged market can contain overpricing, due to somebody having a "guild monopoly". The Orthodontists mentioned are, I believe, an example of this.
If you had cured cancer, wouldn't you feel inclined to hype it?
Next they ought to combine efforts with these people, and with these folks to set up a recruitment program for pilots...