Sorta offtopic, but funny. At the time "I Love You" began circulating, I was on active duty in the Navy. Someone evidently was (illegally) moving files between the secret (SIPRNET) network and the unclassified one, because a raging infection of "I Love You" broke out on the SIPR side. I managed to avoid getting it, because the first thing I saw when I opened my e-mail that morning was a message with the "I Love You" subject line... from the Marine colonel the next deck up. I was pretty sure he really didn't love me (and if he did, I really didn't want to know), so I didn't open the mail.
... it's the camera. GPS turn-by-turn navigation sounds excellent and I'll probably buy it someday. But a camera? Why the hell would I want to look at a bunch of pictures to try to figure out which of these vaguely similar looking stores is really that True Value in Chesapeake, VA, that I used to use and need to get back to? I just want to look up the NAME of the place.
I get that different people have different needs, but I have a hard time believing that anyone will find this useful enough to actually pay for.
Yes, I understand that there are critters living in the Grand Canyon. But let's say, just for the sake of argument, that it was totally barren. The Grand Canyon would still be of more value as a tourist destination than a garbage dump, or iron mine.
If you think we should stay on this rock until a meteor wipes us out, you are complicit in a crime worse than genocide: the extermination of life as we know it in the universe.
Oh, please. Being "complicit in a crime" would entail an actual crime being committed. A meteor wiping out human life would be an act of nature. Godwin's Law, anyone?
As the only life forms with the ability to travel to other planets, it is our responsibility to bring life to other planets! This is far more important than trying to maintain some "balance" of nature. There never has been and never will be such a balance, anyway.
First of all, our ability to travel to other planets is very marginal. We've done it only a handful of times, over 20 years ago, and only to our own satellite. There is no evidence that we would EVER be able to travel fast enough to make colonizing other solar systems a realistic possibility, at least at a cost anyone would be willing to pay. And where do you get the idea that it's our responsibility to spread life? Who's going to hold us responsible?
Space travel is the most important persuit in the history of Earth. Without it, there will eventually be no life.
Unless space travel can help us violate the laws of thermodynamics, eventually there'll be no life anyway.
Look, I'm in favor of space travel. But all these arguments essentially boil down to "we have to move into space, well, because we just have to!". If you're going to advocate colonizing outer space, you won't get anywhere unless you can figure out how it helps us NOW (or at least in the near future). Otherwise no one is going to be interested in the tremendous sacrifices involved in doing so.
and? it's a *lifeless rock*. Who cares if it's a lifeless rock covered in garbage, a lifeless rock that no longer has iron in it, or a lifeless rock that's just a lifeless rock?
The Grand Canyon - it's a lifeless rock. Who cares if it's a lifeless rock covered in garbage... etc.
The point is that unspoiled places have a value besides what we can extract from them. While I'm not saying we should never mine anything, we ought to be sure that we don't spoil something that's of greater value as scenery, a destination, etc, than we can get out of it by mining, farming, and so forth. I happen to think that mining the moon is more likely to burn money than make it, so I'm not too keen on the idea of mining it.
Why is the assumption here that a) the space shuttle is the only method of getting material from the moon to earth (send the shuttle to the moon to pick it up? Are you nuts?
The space shuttle is only an EXAMPLE. Obviously it's not capable of performing the mission discussed here, but you can use it to get an idea of what it would cost to transport stuff to and from space. To do mining, you'd have to design an entirely new space transport system. You think that'd be cheap?
b) that the only goal is mining "rock" from the moon to send back to earth?
The point was that ANYTHING you mine on the moon would to humongously expensive to transport back to earth. Your choices are a) send back raw material for processing on earth or b) build processing facilities in space/on the moon. Either would be tremendously expensive - even if you were to build in place, there'd be expenses involved in sending up the capital equipment you'd require. Presumably you'd need workers, who'd want really, really big compensation in return for the high level of risk, spartan conditions, and rarity of home visits. The workers would require life support. So you'd have to bring water, etc, or mine THAT in place and do hydroponics. Think about what it would take to build a manufacturing plant in the middle of the Sahara desert. Then imagine having to lift everything needed to do this straight up for 250K miles.
Calculating the cost of mining the moon using the cost of launching a shuttle to earth orbit makes no sense. The shuttle is not the cheapest or most efficient way to get mass into orbit
But it's the only system we actually HAVE. See above for costs to design/build a "more efficient" system.
and it sure as hell isn't the easiest way to get it back down (gravity does a good job of that)
Exactly right. But if you want your returning materials to actually SURVIVE the return trip without burning up or getting smashed to pieces, gravity won't do the job. You'll need a re-entering spacecraft.
How about using the moon's massive solar power potential to railgun things into earth orbit? Maybe titanium, with its very expensive, earth-evironment unfriendly, power-hungry processing requirements?
So all we'd need to do is bring/make railguns and massive solar arrays on the lunar surface. See above for the enormous cost of doing this. Not economically feasible even for titanium.
Second, we need titanium and items made therefrom in space for making habitats, ships, exploration probes, and so on.
You obviously have a different definition of "need" than I do. We might "want" to do these things, but how do you figure we need to? Who would want to pay the gigantic costs for this stuff? The fact is, the only reason we would "need" any of this is to support the aforementioned space activities! Your reasoning is circular.
I could go on, but you get the idea. I'm definitely down with the idea that space exploration is valuable enough to do just for the scientific benefits. Maybe in the process we'll figure out enough about how to do it that economic activity becomes viable (I'm not holding my breath). But I'm not in favor of spending truly ludicrous amounts of money on space-based manufacturing just for the sake of space-based manufacturing.
The problem isn't that the government is holding back private industry - the government is mostly in the pocket of private industry anyway. The real issue is that no one can figure out how to make any MONEY by going into space. And until the dreaded government figures out how to solve the problems involved in getting to and from space, and working there, at a reasonable cost (I'm not holding my breath that this will happen in my lifetime), private industry is going to continue to pass on space exploration.
Sean
... because private industry has done such a bang-up job of space exploration so far. The fact is that the costs of space explorations are humongous, and the (monetary) payoffs are non-existent, at least so far. This is not a great recipe for the ultimate triumph of capitalism in space.
Sean
This is a very important point. We're talking about a simulation of a chaotic system. It has to be fed ground-truth data - lots of it - on a regular and frequent basis, or it will diverge rather quickly from reality. And with no weather stations, etc, on Jupiter, there's no way to gather the data.
For example, would people want one law against murder that listed all the punishments or would they prefer many laws with one for each type of punishment? Lawyers/politicians seem to prefer a greater number unfortunately.
This is not an accident. Prosecutors achieve career success by winning convictions. The more offenses there are, the easier it is to get convictions. So they lobby lawmakers to make more things illegal. Lawmakers being mostly lawyers themselves, go along.
But stripping a guy down in front of a woman trumps that in your book.
Please. At least a dozen people were KILLED as a result of torture in Abu Ghraib. The pictures of our soldiers posing with the bodies were all over the internet. Do you really mean to tell me you didn't notice that?
You still stated that we are currently living in the darkest days since Jim Crow laws. I'm just playing devil's advocate. Clinton intentionally turned his back on China's human rights violations, which include ACTUAL torture and transmigration (killing off the male population, colonizing and breeding a people out of existence).
You have got to be fucking kidding me. The Chinese crimes were committed by... wait for it... that's right, CHINA. A country we have very little ability to influence. No matter how you twist it, Clinton is not to blame for what the Chinese government did. On the other hand, the crimes in Abu Ghraib were committed by, yes, that's right, agents of the US GOVERNMENT, who were acting on legal advice provided by the Secretary of Defense.
So please spare me the argument that Clinton's trade liberalization with China is somehow morally equivalent to US Government-conducted torture of prisoners.
I haven't worked with either product in a while, and I got them confused. But Quickplace does have at least some of the same stuff. I just created a test Quickplace at the IBM trial site, and you can create rooms and store folders in them (the metaphor's a little confusing - are the "folders" just stacked on the floor of the "room"?).
Anyway, my apologies for talking about the wrong product.
I think the point here is that literally ANYTHING would have been a better use of our funds than the mess in Iraq. We've spent the $300B dollars, and the situation is objectively far worse than it would have been if we'd simply done nothing.
Superconductivity is a phenomenon occurring in certain materials at low temperatures, characterized by exactly zero electrical resistance
I don't understand your objection. No one claims that any energy is being obtained for nothing, just that electrons can move through the superconductor without resistance.
Sean
Jeez, I get tired of hearing this
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Lotus vs. SharePoint
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· Score: 4, Informative
The "interface hall of shame" site is ludicrously out of date. It refers to Notes release 4.6, for God's sake! That was released in what, 1996? We're up to version 7 now! It's a little silly to keep harping on an interface that hasn't even been used in 10 years.
And criticizing Lotus Notes because you don't like the interface of a Notes application is somewhat like criticizing Linux because you don't like the GIMP. Applications can be well or poorly designed in any environment.
Sean
You're not talking about Domino...
on
Lotus vs. SharePoint
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· Score: 3, Informative
the big end user problem in Domino is the limited hierarchy. You have rooms, cabinets, folders, and files.
Rooms, cabinets, folders, files, etc; are not Domino features... they're Quickplace features. Domino applications can be developed to have any sort of hierarchy you want. Quickplace comes out of the box with the room/cabinet... architecture you refer to.
Probably, though, the comparison of Quickplace to Sharepoint is more relevant anyway, as Domino is the full-fledged application server, and Quickplace is the easy document collaboration product. Quickplace specs match a lot more directly to Sharepoint than Domino specs do.
I don't want to browse any webpage with my cellphone!
This may come as a shocking revelation to you, but you aren't everyone. When I'm stuck at the doctor's office waiting for my appointment, or when my wife is hogging the downstairs computer and I'm too lazy to go find another one, or my cable modem service is down, or when I'm on the road and I want me some Mapquest directions... I want to be able to read web pages on my phone.
This doesn't mean that I think a ".mobi" domain is a great idea - for lots of reasons covered elsewhere in this discussion, I think it's dumb. But just because you don't personally want to read web pages on your phone doesn't mean it shouldn't be possible.
It's called classified for a reason. It's impossible to run a national security program without secrets. Or, it would be very ineffective. In this environment security IS maintained through obscurity.
The example of the Cold War is instructive here. One of the parties was really, really good at keeping secrets. It did things like lock people up without trial, torture people, and suppress dissent as treason against the state. The other party had a (relatively) free press, strong guarantees for the accused, and lots of trouble keeping its secrets against the spies of the other.
I've been saying all along that a Windows model of their handheld isn't a BAD idea but letting their own OS suffer because of it wasn't a good idea. They should have simply been released together, or atleast released close enough together that it wouldn't have been almost half a year that people had to wait. After all, I've been a loyal palm owner since Palm II and to be perfectly honest, I feel almost like they've taken a giant dump on my loyalty.
When you say "their own OS", what exactly are you talking about? Palm spun off their OS business a long time ago. The new OS company, "PalmSource", was itself bought up by a Chinese firm. If the OS and hardware were still part of the same concern, you can bet that a Windows model would never have been released at all.
the high cost of health care is due to the cartelization and licensing of doctors and medicine, as well as government regulations.
This is without a doubt the dumbest thing I have ever seen written on Slashdot, and that's saying something. For one thing, it's objectively false. The reasons for high health costs are covered pretty well here (what they don't address is the spiraling costs of administration resulting from insurance paper shuffling). The bottom line is that medical care isn't very well provided via the market - customers don't have the information they need to compare providers, and as the linked article points out, no one is particularly interested in going for the lowest bidder when they need heart surgery done. "Cartelization" and "excessive government regulations" are nothing more than strawmen for the radical right to tilt at.
Even if your proposition WERE true, what exactly do you propose to do? Get rid of government regulations on medicine? Do away with physician licensing? That would lower costs, all right. Of course, you'd never have any way of knowing which of the hundreds of "doctors" in the phone book was a quack, but who cares, right? Big insurance companies would save lots of money.
I think you meant:
Most industrialized "first world" countries ration healthcare for their citizens;
So do we. You get whatever amount of health care your insurance company decides you need, at a cost greatly inflated over so called "socialist" systems.
A buddy of mine used to claim he thought socialized medicine would be fine, except that in the event of a really serious problem, he wanted access to the "best care money can buy". My standard reply was that he couldn't AFFORD the best care money could buy (he was a university professor in national security affairs - not rich by any means). In any case, a single-payer system such as proposed by Hillary Clinton wouldn't have prevented you from spending as much of your own money as you wanted on medical care.
I was in the military for many years. While on active duty, I effectively had socialized medicine. I'm here to tell you, socialized medicine is good and you definitely want it. Compared to the ridiculousness that is private insurance, socialized medicine is heaven on earth.
A perfect example of a small business would be a small construction contractor...
Notorious for hiring illegal aliens at obscenely low wages...
... a small, privately operated, tax accounting office
Hard to characterize, but frequently are one-man/woman or family-run (i.e. no real employees) operations...
or a family-run restaurant
If large enough to need to hire outside the family, see "contractors" above.
Are you aware that businesses this small aren't even required to pay minimum wage, to say nothing of benefits? I worked at a small, family run restaurant for a number of years as a busboy, and never got within $.50 of minimum wage.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorta offtopic, but funny. At the time "I Love You" began circulating, I was on active duty in the Navy. Someone evidently was (illegally) moving files between the secret (SIPRNET) network and the unclassified one, because a raging infection of "I Love You" broke out on the SIPR side. I managed to avoid getting it, because the first thing I saw when I opened my e-mail that morning was a message with the "I Love You" subject line... from the Marine colonel the next deck up. I was pretty sure he really didn't love me (and if he did, I really didn't want to know), so I didn't open the mail.
Sean
For your reading pleasure:
http://timlambert.org/2005/12/ddt-ban-myth-bingo/
Please, post some more. I'm getting close to a bingo!
... it's the camera. GPS turn-by-turn navigation sounds excellent and I'll probably buy it someday. But a camera? Why the hell would I want to look at a bunch of pictures to try to figure out which of these vaguely similar looking stores is really that True Value in Chesapeake, VA, that I used to use and need to get back to? I just want to look up the NAME of the place.
I get that different people have different needs, but I have a hard time believing that anyone will find this useful enough to actually pay for.
Sean
Yes, I understand that there are critters living in the Grand Canyon. But let's say, just for the sake of argument, that it was totally barren. The Grand Canyon would still be of more value as a tourist destination than a garbage dump, or iron mine.
The same thing is probably true of the moon.
Sean
Says who? Why does life have to have a purpose?
Oh, please. Being "complicit in a crime" would entail an actual crime being committed. A meteor wiping out human life would be an act of nature. Godwin's Law, anyone?
First of all, our ability to travel to other planets is very marginal. We've done it only a handful of times, over 20 years ago, and only to our own satellite. There is no evidence that we would EVER be able to travel fast enough to make colonizing other solar systems a realistic possibility, at least at a cost anyone would be willing to pay. And where do you get the idea that it's our responsibility to spread life? Who's going to hold us responsible?
Unless space travel can help us violate the laws of thermodynamics, eventually there'll be no life anyway.
Look, I'm in favor of space travel. But all these arguments essentially boil down to "we have to move into space, well, because we just have to!". If you're going to advocate colonizing outer space, you won't get anywhere unless you can figure out how it helps us NOW (or at least in the near future). Otherwise no one is going to be interested in the tremendous sacrifices involved in doing so.
Sean
The Grand Canyon - it's a lifeless rock. Who cares if it's a lifeless rock covered in garbage... etc.
The point is that unspoiled places have a value besides what we can extract from them. While I'm not saying we should never mine anything, we ought to be sure that we don't spoil something that's of greater value as scenery, a destination, etc, than we can get out of it by mining, farming, and so forth. I happen to think that mining the moon is more likely to burn money than make it, so I'm not too keen on the idea of mining it.
Sean
The space shuttle is only an EXAMPLE. Obviously it's not capable of performing the mission discussed here, but you can use it to get an idea of what it would cost to transport stuff to and from space. To do mining, you'd have to design an entirely new space transport system. You think that'd be cheap?
The point was that ANYTHING you mine on the moon would to humongously expensive to transport back to earth. Your choices are a) send back raw material for processing on earth or b) build processing facilities in space/on the moon. Either would be tremendously expensive - even if you were to build in place, there'd be expenses involved in sending up the capital equipment you'd require. Presumably you'd need workers, who'd want really, really big compensation in return for the high level of risk, spartan conditions, and rarity of home visits. The workers would require life support. So you'd have to bring water, etc, or mine THAT in place and do hydroponics. Think about what it would take to build a manufacturing plant in the middle of the Sahara desert. Then imagine having to lift everything needed to do this straight up for 250K miles.
But it's the only system we actually HAVE. See above for costs to design/build a "more efficient" system.
Exactly right. But if you want your returning materials to actually SURVIVE the return trip without burning up or getting smashed to pieces, gravity won't do the job. You'll need a re-entering spacecraft.
So all we'd need to do is bring/make railguns and massive solar arrays on the lunar surface. See above for the enormous cost of doing this. Not economically feasible even for titanium.
You obviously have a different definition of "need" than I do. We might "want" to do these things, but how do you figure we need to? Who would want to pay the gigantic costs for this stuff? The fact is, the only reason we would "need" any of this is to support the aforementioned space activities! Your reasoning is circular.
I could go on, but you get the idea. I'm definitely down with the idea that space exploration is valuable enough to do just for the scientific benefits. Maybe in the process we'll figure out enough about how to do it that economic activity becomes viable (I'm not holding my breath). But I'm not in favor of spending truly ludicrous amounts of money on space-based manufacturing just for the sake of space-based manufacturing.
Sean
The problem isn't that the government is holding back private industry - the government is mostly in the pocket of private industry anyway. The real issue is that no one can figure out how to make any MONEY by going into space. And until the dreaded government figures out how to solve the problems involved in getting to and from space, and working there, at a reasonable cost (I'm not holding my breath that this will happen in my lifetime), private industry is going to continue to pass on space exploration. Sean
... because private industry has done such a bang-up job of space exploration so far. The fact is that the costs of space explorations are humongous, and the (monetary) payoffs are non-existent, at least so far. This is not a great recipe for the ultimate triumph of capitalism in space. Sean
AcronymKillerFox is a great extension... but I didn't understand your reference about turning bathroom tissue into bathroom tissue.
Sean
[rimshot]
This is a very important point. We're talking about a simulation of a chaotic system. It has to be fed ground-truth data - lots of it - on a regular and frequent basis, or it will diverge rather quickly from reality. And with no weather stations, etc, on Jupiter, there's no way to gather the data.
Sean
This is not an accident. Prosecutors achieve career success by winning convictions. The more offenses there are, the easier it is to get convictions. So they lobby lawmakers to make more things illegal. Lawmakers being mostly lawyers themselves, go along.
Sean
Please. At least a dozen people were KILLED as a result of torture in Abu Ghraib. The pictures of our soldiers posing with the bodies were all over the internet. Do you really mean to tell me you didn't notice that?
You have got to be fucking kidding me. The Chinese crimes were committed by... wait for it... that's right, CHINA. A country we have very little ability to influence. No matter how you twist it, Clinton is not to blame for what the Chinese government did. On the other hand, the crimes in Abu Ghraib were committed by, yes, that's right, agents of the US GOVERNMENT, who were acting on legal advice provided by the Secretary of Defense.
So please spare me the argument that Clinton's trade liberalization with China is somehow morally equivalent to US Government-conducted torture of prisoners.
Sean
I haven't worked with either product in a while, and I got them confused. But Quickplace does have at least some of the same stuff. I just created a test Quickplace at the IBM trial site, and you can create rooms and store folders in them (the metaphor's a little confusing - are the "folders" just stacked on the floor of the "room"?).
Anyway, my apologies for talking about the wrong product.
Sean
I think the point here is that literally ANYTHING would have been a better use of our funds than the mess in Iraq. We've spent the $300B dollars, and the situation is objectively far worse than it would have been if we'd simply done nothing.
Sean
I quote from Wikipedia:
I don't understand your objection. No one claims that any energy is being obtained for nothing, just that electrons can move through the superconductor without resistance.
Sean
The "interface hall of shame" site is ludicrously out of date. It refers to Notes release 4.6, for God's sake! That was released in what, 1996? We're up to version 7 now! It's a little silly to keep harping on an interface that hasn't even been used in 10 years.
And criticizing Lotus Notes because you don't like the interface of a Notes application is somewhat like criticizing Linux because you don't like the GIMP. Applications can be well or poorly designed in any environment.
Sean
Rooms, cabinets, folders, files, etc; are not Domino features... they're Quickplace features. Domino applications can be developed to have any sort of hierarchy you want. Quickplace comes out of the box with the room/cabinet... architecture you refer to.
Probably, though, the comparison of Quickplace to Sharepoint is more relevant anyway, as Domino is the full-fledged application server, and Quickplace is the easy document collaboration product. Quickplace specs match a lot more directly to Sharepoint than Domino specs do.
Sean
This may come as a shocking revelation to you, but you aren't everyone. When I'm stuck at the doctor's office waiting for my appointment, or when my wife is hogging the downstairs computer and I'm too lazy to go find another one, or my cable modem service is down, or when I'm on the road and I want me some Mapquest directions... I want to be able to read web pages on my phone.
This doesn't mean that I think a ".mobi" domain is a great idea - for lots of reasons covered elsewhere in this discussion, I think it's dumb. But just because you don't personally want to read web pages on your phone doesn't mean it shouldn't be possible.
Sean
The example of the Cold War is instructive here. One of the parties was really, really good at keeping secrets. It did things like lock people up without trial, torture people, and suppress dissent as treason against the state. The other party had a (relatively) free press, strong guarantees for the accused, and lots of trouble keeping its secrets against the spies of the other.
Which side won, again?
Sean
So, is this why Goto is considered harmful?
[rimshot]
Sean
When you say "their own OS", what exactly are you talking about? Palm spun off their OS business a long time ago. The new OS company, "PalmSource", was itself bought up by a Chinese firm. If the OS and hardware were still part of the same concern, you can bet that a Windows model would never have been released at all.
Sean
This is without a doubt the dumbest thing I have ever seen written on Slashdot, and that's saying something. For one thing, it's objectively false. The reasons for high health costs are covered pretty well here (what they don't address is the spiraling costs of administration resulting from insurance paper shuffling). The bottom line is that medical care isn't very well provided via the market - customers don't have the information they need to compare providers, and as the linked article points out, no one is particularly interested in going for the lowest bidder when they need heart surgery done. "Cartelization" and "excessive government regulations" are nothing more than strawmen for the radical right to tilt at.
Even if your proposition WERE true, what exactly do you propose to do? Get rid of government regulations on medicine? Do away with physician licensing? That would lower costs, all right. Of course, you'd never have any way of knowing which of the hundreds of "doctors" in the phone book was a quack, but who cares, right? Big insurance companies would save lots of money.
Sean
So do we. You get whatever amount of health care your insurance company decides you need, at a cost greatly inflated over so called "socialist" systems.
A buddy of mine used to claim he thought socialized medicine would be fine, except that in the event of a really serious problem, he wanted access to the "best care money can buy". My standard reply was that he couldn't AFFORD the best care money could buy (he was a university professor in national security affairs - not rich by any means). In any case, a single-payer system such as proposed by Hillary Clinton wouldn't have prevented you from spending as much of your own money as you wanted on medical care.
I was in the military for many years. While on active duty, I effectively had socialized medicine. I'm here to tell you, socialized medicine is good and you definitely want it. Compared to the ridiculousness that is private insurance, socialized medicine is heaven on earth.
Sean
Notorious for hiring illegal aliens at obscenely low wages...
Hard to characterize, but frequently are one-man/woman or family-run (i.e. no real employees) operations...
If large enough to need to hire outside the family, see "contractors" above.
Are you aware that businesses this small aren't even required to pay minimum wage, to say nothing of benefits? I worked at a small, family run restaurant for a number of years as a busboy, and never got within $.50 of minimum wage.
Sean