It pretty clearly states that the road is to be built over ice, and that one of the major issues is going to be verifying that no crevasses, ice shifts, etc, have occurred. Since the Antarctic continent is buried in ice sheets that are kilometers thick, clearing away the ice doesn't seem like a practical option.
Sean
Perhaps you can explain to me how it would even be POSSIBLE to park a geo-synchronous satellite over the South Pole. Since the principle of operation of geo-synchronous satellite is that it's orbital speed == the speed of the earth's rotation over which it's parked, and that the speed of rotation at the earth's poles is by definition zero, that would mean the satellite would have to be orbitting at speed zero. Doesn't seem too likely, does it.
From the article:..useful in a wide variety of missions where avoiding civilian casualties is a major concern.
One would think that with the US being the "Good Guys" that avoiding civilian casualties would be a goal of all missions.
Yes, the US does always want to avoid civilian casualties, and yet... avoiding civilian casualties is not always a major concern. How can this be? Easy. Many battlefields don't have civilians on them, so you don't need to be concerned about civilian casualties.
You don't speak for everyone. On the contrary, I think that most people realize that e-mail delivery isn't guaranteed - and therefore they expect that truly vital messages will need to be backed up with a phone call or some other means, to be sure the message was delivered.
I would prefer to lose one or two legitimate mails in return for a virtually zero rate of missed detections.
Sean
True story - virtual reality foxhole digging sim
on
Mood-Sensing Computer
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· Score: 1
When I was still in the Navy, I got sent to a class on military modeling and simulation. The guy teaching the class was an Army vet who told the story of an Army command in Alaska. This outfit was in trouble because, funny as it seems, they were losing proficiency in digging foxholes (there's more to it than just digging a hole, apparently). There were some kind of environmental restrictions on digging in their area (I think it would have screwed up the permafrost? can't remember), so they needed some substitute.
Somebody came up with the brilliant idea of building a virtual reality foxhole digging system, which was going to have force-feedback shovels, etc, etc... they were well on their way to expending vast quantities of money on this thing when somebody said, "Hey! Why don't we just ship some dirt up here?" The project was quietly dropped.
So while it's usually true that the gov't will buy anything if it's cool enough, in this case, reason prevailed.
Hmmm. If you think that the 2nd amendment doesn't (or shouldn't) allow for people to personally own firearms... how do you propose that they rise up against the oppressive government?
It really sucks because it's easy to use and integrates some nice features automatically.
You're kidding me, right?
Because users end up putting valuable company information in there, not realizing that they've locked up the info in a format that's useless to the rest of the company.
I guess you didn't know that every bit of data in Notes can be exposed as XML - trivially.
For example, it's really hard getting sales people to keep corporate contact information up-to-date once they've started keeping their contact info in Notes.
You're right, keeping two separate databases, one for "corporate data", and one for the individual users, is dumb. So get rid of your other corporate database and use Notes for both - getting you a unified data model AND all the nice stuff for your users. Or use the built in tools to integrate your corporate DB with Notes. Duh.
Sorry for the rant, but Notes has cost me a lot of hassle over the years. Truly an awful product.
Sorry, I didn't realize that the objective for company IT departments was to make systems integrators happy. I foolishly believed that they were supposed to support the needs of the line-of-business types. My mistake.
The reason Notes has a non-standard interface... it was developed before the standard! Notes Release 1 came out in something like 1986 - long before Windows became a big thing. So by the time Windows did appear, Lotus with left with two unappetizing options: 1) totally revamp their interface to conform with Microsoft's "standard", and piss off all their existing users, or 2) keep doing what they were doing, and piss off potential new users.
Keep in mind that the "standard" you refer to is not something the user community at large agreed to - it was forced down our throats by M$. I hardly think Lotus can be faulted merely because they didn't play along.
This is not to say that I'm totally in love with the Notes interface - it does have significant weaknesses (but these are markedly reduced in Notes 6). But the underlying power and security in Notes is well worth the trouble.
... but it doesn't. Companies have used their power over the legislative process to get the best of all worlds... for them. So now we can neither (legally) copy our own software/music NOR get the kind of backup and exchange service you mention.
So I think I can understand why the original poster was a little disgusted with licensing.
2.99e8 m/s is the speed of light, which is also the speed of x-rays, the speed of infrared... and the speed of radio. So the fact that it uses RF vs. visible spectrum has nothing to do with the speed.
Sean
The only argument I've heard is non-technical and goes something like this: J2EE is hard, meaning that if your company adopts it, you'll have to shell out a lot of cash for expensive J2EE developers - whereas if you went with.net, you could hire cheap pseudo-VB guys/gals. No comment on the truthfulness of this.
The counter-argument that is sometimes heard... yeah, but J2EE is actually HERE - a proven, stable environment..Net is still mostly vapor.
They will NOT pay 5 cents to contact you, and under this system, that means their mail/calls would not get through to you.
Whether it's practical to implement this system is another question, and I leave it to people more knowledgable than I am.
Sean
If you'd read the article, you'd understand that the spammers are NOT the ones adopting the proposed solution - users are. Under the proposed system, the spammers consent to the system is not required. Either they agree to pay the token, or their mail is not delivered to you. There's no provision for them to just not pay the fee and mail you anyway.
There are more than one greenhouse gas (methane and CO2 come to mind) but only CO2 is present in any quantity in the atmosphere. Making energy AND getting rid of CO2 is more or less impossible... because CO2 requires an energy INPUT to break up.
As far as creating life forms just to crack CO2... we already have these. They're called green plants. And they already do such a good job that in spite of all the CO2 inputs to the atmosphere, it remains a trace constituent.
The bottom line is that I doubt that there's much reason to create special creatures for this purpose, since it's unlikely they could do better than the plants that have been evolving to scavenge CO2 for millions of years. It would be a lot more feasible and less risky to just move to alternative energy sources.
Sean
It does by default identify itself as a Domino server in the greeting. Of course, you can turn this off if you want, but an admin who knew enough to turn off that feature would probably a) be smart enough to turn off mail relaying and b) be smart enough to keep up to date with his Domino patches!
Sean
It wasn't IBM who launched the lawsuit.
on
ORBZ Shuts Down
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· Score: 1
That would be unimaginably silly. The suit was filed by the city of Battle Creek, MI, which was running an unpatched version of Domino, and now wants to blame its troubles on ORBZ.
Sean
Slashdot Mirror
It pretty clearly states that the road is to be built over ice, and that one of the major issues is going to be verifying that no crevasses, ice shifts, etc, have occurred. Since the Antarctic continent is buried in ice sheets that are kilometers thick, clearing away the ice doesn't seem like a practical option. Sean
Perhaps you can explain to me how it would even be POSSIBLE to park a geo-synchronous satellite over the South Pole. Since the principle of operation of geo-synchronous satellite is that it's orbital speed == the speed of the earth's rotation over which it's parked, and that the speed of rotation at the earth's poles is by definition zero, that would mean the satellite would have to be orbitting at speed zero. Doesn't seem too likely, does it.
Sean
Yes, the US does always want to avoid civilian casualties, and yet... avoiding civilian casualties is not always a major concern. How can this be? Easy. Many battlefields don't have civilians on them, so you don't need to be concerned about civilian casualties.
Sean
You don't speak for everyone. On the contrary, I think that most people realize that e-mail delivery isn't guaranteed - and therefore they expect that truly vital messages will need to be backed up with a phone call or some other means, to be sure the message was delivered.
I would prefer to lose one or two legitimate mails in return for a virtually zero rate of missed detections.
Sean
When I was still in the Navy, I got sent to a class on military modeling and simulation. The guy teaching the class was an Army vet who told the story of an Army command in Alaska. This outfit was in trouble because, funny as it seems, they were losing proficiency in digging foxholes (there's more to it than just digging a hole, apparently). There were some kind of environmental restrictions on digging in their area (I think it would have screwed up the permafrost? can't remember), so they needed some substitute.
Somebody came up with the brilliant idea of building a virtual reality foxhole digging system, which was going to have force-feedback shovels, etc, etc... they were well on their way to expending vast quantities of money on this thing when somebody said, "Hey! Why don't we just ship some dirt up here?" The project was quietly dropped.
So while it's usually true that the gov't will buy anything if it's cool enough, in this case, reason prevailed.
Sean
Hmmm. If you think that the 2nd amendment doesn't (or shouldn't) allow for people to personally own firearms... how do you propose that they rise up against the oppressive government?
Sean
If they want to serve me ads that I'm likely to be interested in, I don't mind.
What I DO mind is getting bombarded with phone, e-mail, and snail mail spam - and fake registration data takes care of that problem nicely.
Sean
You're kidding me, right?
I guess you didn't know that every bit of data in Notes can be exposed as XML - trivially.
You're right, keeping two separate databases, one for "corporate data", and one for the individual users, is dumb. So get rid of your other corporate database and use Notes for both - getting you a unified data model AND all the nice stuff for your users. Or use the built in tools to integrate your corporate DB with Notes. Duh.
Sorry, I didn't realize that the objective for company IT departments was to make systems integrators happy. I foolishly believed that they were supposed to support the needs of the line-of-business types. My mistake.
The reason Notes has a non-standard interface... it was developed before the standard! Notes Release 1 came out in something like 1986 - long before Windows became a big thing. So by the time Windows did appear, Lotus with left with two unappetizing options: 1) totally revamp their interface to conform with Microsoft's "standard", and piss off all their existing users, or 2) keep doing what they were doing, and piss off potential new users.
Keep in mind that the "standard" you refer to is not something the user community at large agreed to - it was forced down our throats by M$. I hardly think Lotus can be faulted merely because they didn't play along.
This is not to say that I'm totally in love with the Notes interface - it does have significant weaknesses (but these are markedly reduced in Notes 6). But the underlying power and security in Notes is well worth the trouble.
Sean
... but it doesn't. Companies have used their power over the legislative process to get the best of all worlds... for them. So now we can neither (legally) copy our own software/music NOR get the kind of backup and exchange service you mention.
So I think I can understand why the original poster was a little disgusted with licensing.
Sean
2.99e8 m/s is the speed of light, which is also the speed of x-rays, the speed of infrared... and the speed of radio. So the fact that it uses RF vs. visible spectrum has nothing to do with the speed. Sean
The only argument I've heard is non-technical and goes something like this: J2EE is hard, meaning that if your company adopts it, you'll have to shell out a lot of cash for expensive J2EE developers - whereas if you went with .net, you could hire cheap pseudo-VB guys/gals. No comment on the truthfulness of this.
The counter-argument that is sometimes heard... yeah, but J2EE is actually HERE - a proven, stable environment. .Net is still mostly vapor.
Sean
... of course, I listed my home country as Uzbekistan... Sean
They will NOT pay 5 cents to contact you, and under this system, that means their mail/calls would not get through to you. Whether it's practical to implement this system is another question, and I leave it to people more knowledgable than I am. Sean
If you'd read the article, you'd understand that the spammers are NOT the ones adopting the proposed solution - users are. Under the proposed system, the spammers consent to the system is not required. Either they agree to pay the token, or their mail is not delivered to you. There's no provision for them to just not pay the fee and mail you anyway.
Sean
There are more than one greenhouse gas (methane and CO2 come to mind) but only CO2 is present in any quantity in the atmosphere. Making energy AND getting rid of CO2 is more or less impossible... because CO2 requires an energy INPUT to break up. As far as creating life forms just to crack CO2... we already have these. They're called green plants. And they already do such a good job that in spite of all the CO2 inputs to the atmosphere, it remains a trace constituent. The bottom line is that I doubt that there's much reason to create special creatures for this purpose, since it's unlikely they could do better than the plants that have been evolving to scavenge CO2 for millions of years. It would be a lot more feasible and less risky to just move to alternative energy sources. Sean
It does by default identify itself as a Domino server in the greeting. Of course, you can turn this off if you want, but an admin who knew enough to turn off that feature would probably a) be smart enough to turn off mail relaying and b) be smart enough to keep up to date with his Domino patches! Sean
That would be unimaginably silly. The suit was filed by the city of Battle Creek, MI, which was running an unpatched version of Domino, and now wants to blame its troubles on ORBZ. Sean
Yup. Patch has been available for some time now... I believe it was fixed in 5.0.9, which has been out for at least several months. Sean