$50 millions US dollars might as well be pennies. It's very sad that the mission failed, but this is just not a waste of any substantial amount of money. Hopefully the UK space program has learned a few things and can try again based on what they've learned. I bet it costs more than 50 million to introduce a new food product (and I bet most of those fail too).
The cost is probbably more in moral and PR for the UK space program. NASA suffered from this a few years ago. I really hope the UK tries again and is successful next time.
I think some increased quality control would be quite usefull.
And I'm sure the engineers who designed it would agree with you 100%. The root problem as another poster pointed out was there wasn't enough money to do that. The budget was shoestring $50 million. You can't go to mars for less than it costs to make a movie about going to mars.
The entire way the movie is done? There's not a lot of dialogue, it's not a conventional means of storytelling, etc. It's also far from a ripoff of 1984, though there's obvious similarities.
You don't have to like it, that's fine. But at least be critical on what's actually in the movie.
You make it sound like a bad movie. I think it's a movie that's definately not for everyone. If you don't like slow, philosophical movies stay far far away from THX-1138. If you like movies where you might think a bit and aren't entirely straightforward, you'd probbably like this movie.
I really thought it might never happen. It's a somewhat obscure film, but I think it's a great one. For those of you who haven't seen it, it's a totalitarian society in which:
A drug violation means being under-medicated.
Most identity is removed, people don't have names, only prefix-suffix designations.
Sex is illegal
You confess your sins in booths to a recording of a Jesus-like picture of Ohm
I've gotta disagree with you here. While Schizophrenia may be "more common than you think" that's a pretty lame reason to include it as an "ask slashdot". AIDS is probbably more common than you think, is that the next Ask Slashdot? The point is that Slashdot is a techno-geek news site, and this just doesn't relate to techno-geekdom. You could have an article about "new treatment for schizo", or "what causes schizo", or even "schizo on the rise in US, computers to blame". But an article discussing everyones experiences is NOT techno-geekdom. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it, this just isn't the place to discuss it.
I'm almost positive there are FAR better places to ask this question than a techno-geek news site. There certainly must be blogs specific to this disease. I'm sure there's been many books written, and medical professionals can be found in better places.
And to those moderators who modded this as insightful?.......Shame on you.
Shame on them? What's wrong with modding something up that probbably 9/10 people thought of when they first read the article? Oh yes, we're never supposed to question the motives of someone who's suffered. Now you "shame" them because they haven't played the appropriate social game. I find that extremely manipulative.
Louis Pasture came up with the first vaccine for anthrax well over a century ago, and yet Bayer is sitting on the Cipro patent like it was something new.
Cipro is a powerfull antibiotic that was not developed to treat anthrax, but as an antibiotic to treat diseases that had become resistant to other antibiotics. The fact that there's a vaccine (with suspect dangers) for anthrax, a very rare and non-contagious disease unless you happen to be a grazing animal doesn't negate the fact that you need to treat it if someone is exposed to anthrax. People aren't vaccinated against anthrax routinely because there's more risk for the vaccine than there is that you'll actually be exposed to anthrax.
You're right that the drug companies aren't all they're cracked up to be. But you're wrong that drug companies haven't come up with usefull products that help some people. The AIDS drugs are a good example of this. You can survive AIDS now because of drugs developed by the pharmeceutical industry (well, if you live in a developed country). Without patents, these drugs would likely never have been developed. The drug companies have been stupid however with their patents and tried to enforce them in third world countries where no one can afford the AIDS drugs anyway.
Anyway, I'm not really trying to defend the drug companies, merely the idea of patents. The drug companies are probbably one of the most evil industries in the world right now. They spend most of their money on advertising ineffective drugs towards everyday consumers, not on developing new drugs. That, however is not a result of the patent system.
Drug companies shouldn't be allowed to advertise at all, really. Doctors should be deciding what drugs to prescribe to patients, not patients influenced by marketroid speak. Even doctors have a hard time getting objective information about what drugs are effective, and which aren't. Most of the information about a drugs effectiveness comes from the drug companies themselves.
I always wondered how these places stay in business. Do you really think the vendor's actually put a lot of thought into finding the perfect tomatoes, freshest eggs and milk, and softest loaves of bread?
The biggest costs are probbably the warehouses, trucks, and employees to deliver the stuff. Cutting corners on quality of the product is only going to give you a terrible reputation and lose customers.
The market for this kind of business is people without cars, or people with more money than time to shop. I know two people without cars that are attracted to this service. One has actually used it, the other can't because they won't deliver to apartments. I'm sure the service is quite popular in cities like New York where most people don't have cars to haul around a weeks worth of groceries.
Also, no one is forcing you to buy all your food through the online groceries. Buy all the packaged stuff you know you like and don't need to look at through them. Buy produce and the like through a local market.
Patents are necessary to protect the investment that gets put into a product. A very good example where patents work is the pharmaceutical industry (the problems with that industry stem from causes other than patents). Without patents to protect drug makers they'd never want to spend the hundreds of millions needed to develop a drug. Producing the drug is cheap, so anyone can come along and make a generic and destroy your ability to pay back the R&D expenses.
One of the big problems is that patents last for too long in the IT industry 17 or 20 years might as well be forever since everything moves so quickly. The other big problem is that patents are given out willy-nilly with the expectation that bad patents will just lose if a lawsuit is ever filed.
As a Christian I find the idea that humans invent knowledge to be ludicrous and offensive
And this is one time that I'm glad there's seperation of church and state. I think you're going a bit far in calling a patent to be knowledge. It's an invention, not knowledge. It's not really property either since you can freely discuss, explore, etc the subject of patents. You just can't sell or distribute infringing material. I'm a little unclear on the specifics of this, but it seems like writing code that uses patented technologies is OK (like XvId and the Mpeg4 patents), but compiled code isn't.
SCO, Patriot Scientific, and now All Computers. It's the last cry of a dying company. Fire off the intellectual property missiles and hope they hit something before you get squashed by the counter-suits that're sure to be filed.
Ok, I'll take my cell phone, and you can rub against a wool seat a few times. Then we'll walk near some heavy gas fumes one at a time. My guess is you're FAR more likely to become a crispy-critter than I am.
Is that the fire chief is so adamant about blaming cell phones rather than simple static electricity.
1. Cell phones emit minimum amount of power (no microwave heating of the fumes). 2. AFAIK there's no documented cases of cell phones starting a gasoline fire. 3. Electric sparks obviously can start gasoline fumes on fire. How do you think a spark plug works? 4. We all know how easily static electricity can build up from simply walking across a rug on a dry day.
Kinda makes you wonder just how much training the fire chiefs have. I'm sure they know how to fight fires, but at least this guy seems to have limited knowledge and analytical skills about how fires start.
You refer to the lie that some of the eco-freaks like to believe in. That is that we're "saving the planet". As George Carlin put it, "That planet is fine, the people are fucked".
You're right that the earths eco-system is very robust. It's survived meteor collisions, massive climate changes, etc. Human society isn't particularly robust though. While you may be fine with the eco-system taking a few thousand years to adjust to a new climate, most people aren't. I think mass famine because of crop failure and flooding of the coasts is a Bad Thing (for us humans that is). That's the real reason people should be concerned about climate change, and not this altruistic bull that a small minority wants to shove down our throats.
Yes, but my point is exactly that Slashdot shouldn't have posted this, not that people are dumb and should have noticed tiny little details. There's an expectation that something that's linked to on a news site is actual news. Taking this press release out of context makes it into more than it is.
Linus has the perfect response to it of course. He doesn't ignore it, but he doesn't give it any serious attention at the same time. Brilliant.
Actually no, this is NOT a yahoo news story. It's listed among the press releases which you can see if you look carefully. There's a BIG distinction between actual stories posted on yahoo, and random press releases directly from whoever is releasing the propadanda. It's like your news being buried on page 120 and printed in 5 point font with a "press release" headline surrounding it.
The yahoo press releases are essentially just paid advertisements masquerading as news. You pay a fee, you get your press release published online. It truly is a propoganda machine that is best just ignored. If you read through other press releases, it's obvious that they're all just marketing releases.
Possibly, but even investment bankers want loan payments eventually. Spam has been around for years, and doesn't seem like the spammers are running out of money. It's also pretty clear that some spamming is done by a few with large operations, and some is done by small time criminals.
I don't know if your argument is paranoid or stupid, but it's very weak, and completely unsupported by any evidence.
If a madman goes around telling people you're from mars do you feel the need to go around correcting him? There's such a thing as feeding the fire with publicity, and if Linus decided to sue, that's all he'd be doing at this point.
If fools continue to dignify this trash by linking to it, it might end up at that. Slashdot should be embarresed to even link to this garbage.
I didn't watch much of the OJ trial, but I've heard from others that one of the things that OJs lawyers did was eliminate any juror that might vote for conviction from the jury and get them replaced with alternates. There were many jurors eliminated, and they almost ran out of alternates.
That's the part that's about "buying freedom". I don't think anyone should be able engineer a jury like that. The problem isn't that everyone can't do this, it's that if you have enough $$ you can.
Corporate cases like this are a bit different of course since the judge is going to be (hopefully) un-engineerable. Microsoft got off scot free by just stalling until the administration changed and the new justice dept dropped the whole matter.
This kind of pseudoscientific articles are one of the worst things on the internet!
Heh, actually in this case it may not be pseudo-science. The problem with theoretical physics at this level is that it's hard to seperate the kooks from the non-kooks. Zero-point energy guys are kooks, but multiple universe guys might be wrong, but that aren't kooks. The same goes for string theory guys.
Uhh.. it was the Arabs who preserved the knowledge of the ancient world through the dark ages. The Cathlolic church was too busy persecuting people like Galileo for finding truth to preserve much of anything.
As another poster pointed out, they were pretty much the only game in town. The Cathlic church hardly deserves credit for doing the little they did. Also, it's hardly the invention of Christianity to believe the world is understandable. The Cathlolics can't lay claim to that any more than we can.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a lot of wasted tax payers money.
$50 millions US dollars might as well be pennies. It's very sad that the mission failed, but this is just not a waste of any substantial amount of money. Hopefully the UK space program has learned a few things and can try again based on what they've learned. I bet it costs more than 50 million to introduce a new food product (and I bet most of those fail too).
The cost is probbably more in moral and PR for the UK space program. NASA suffered from this a few years ago. I really hope the UK tries again and is successful next time.
I think some increased quality control would be quite usefull.
And I'm sure the engineers who designed it would agree with you 100%. The root problem as another poster pointed out was there wasn't enough money to do that. The budget was shoestring $50 million. You can't go to mars for less than it costs to make a movie about going to mars.
The entire way the movie is done? There's not a lot of dialogue, it's not a conventional means of storytelling, etc. It's also far from a ripoff of 1984, though there's obvious similarities.
You don't have to like it, that's fine. But at least be critical on what's actually in the movie.
You are lost in words.
You make it sound like a bad movie. I think it's a movie that's definately not for everyone. If you don't like slow, philosophical movies stay far far away from THX-1138. If you like movies where you might think a bit and aren't entirely straightforward, you'd probbably like this movie.
I liked Stalker a lot more (also Tarkovsky). I didn't like the plot of Solaris very much, there just wasn't enough their.
For those of you who haven't seen it, it's a totalitarian society in which:
A drug violation means being under-medicated.
Most identity is removed, people don't have names, only prefix-suffix designations.
Sex is illegal
You confess your sins in booths to a recording of a Jesus-like picture of Ohm
It's weirer than can be described.
It's a definite must see for sci-fi fans.
I've gotta disagree with you here. While Schizophrenia may be "more common than you think" that's a pretty lame reason to include it as an "ask slashdot". AIDS is probbably more common than you think, is that the next Ask Slashdot? The point is that Slashdot is a techno-geek news site, and this just doesn't relate to techno-geekdom. You could have an article about "new treatment for schizo", or "what causes schizo", or even "schizo on the rise in US, computers to blame". But an article discussing everyones experiences is NOT techno-geekdom. That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with it, this just isn't the place to discuss it.
I'm almost positive there are FAR better places to ask this question than a techno-geek news site. There certainly must be blogs specific to this disease. I'm sure there's been many books written, and medical professionals can be found in better places.
And to those moderators who modded this as insightful?.......Shame on you.
Shame on them? What's wrong with modding something up that probbably 9/10 people thought of when they first read the article? Oh yes, we're never supposed to question the motives of someone who's suffered. Now you "shame" them because they haven't played the appropriate social game. I find that extremely manipulative.
Louis Pasture came up with the first vaccine for anthrax well over a century ago, and yet Bayer is sitting on the Cipro patent like it was something new.
Cipro is a powerfull antibiotic that was not developed to treat anthrax, but as an antibiotic to treat diseases that had become resistant to other antibiotics. The fact that there's a vaccine (with suspect dangers) for anthrax, a very rare and non-contagious disease unless you happen to be a grazing animal doesn't negate the fact that you need to treat it if someone is exposed to anthrax. People aren't vaccinated against anthrax routinely because there's more risk for the vaccine than there is that you'll actually be exposed to anthrax.
You're right that the drug companies aren't all they're cracked up to be. But you're wrong that drug companies haven't come up with usefull products that help some people. The AIDS drugs are a good example of this. You can survive AIDS now because of drugs developed by the pharmeceutical industry (well, if you live in a developed country). Without patents, these drugs would likely never have been developed. The drug companies have been stupid however with their patents and tried to enforce them in third world countries where no one can afford the AIDS drugs anyway.
Anyway, I'm not really trying to defend the drug companies, merely the idea of patents. The drug companies are probbably one of the most evil industries in the world right now. They spend most of their money on advertising ineffective drugs towards everyday consumers, not on developing new drugs. That, however is not a result of the patent system.
Drug companies shouldn't be allowed to advertise at all, really. Doctors should be deciding what drugs to prescribe to patients, not patients influenced by marketroid speak. Even doctors have a hard time getting objective information about what drugs are effective, and which aren't. Most of the information about a drugs effectiveness comes from the drug companies themselves.
I always wondered how these places stay in business. Do you really think the vendor's actually put a lot of thought into finding the perfect tomatoes, freshest eggs and milk, and softest loaves of bread?
The biggest costs are probbably the warehouses, trucks, and employees to deliver the stuff. Cutting corners on quality of the product is only going to give you a terrible reputation and lose customers.
The market for this kind of business is people without cars, or people with more money than time to shop. I know two people without cars that are attracted to this service. One has actually used it, the other can't because they won't deliver to apartments. I'm sure the service is quite popular in cities like New York where most people don't have cars to haul around a weeks worth of groceries.
Also, no one is forcing you to buy all your food through the online groceries. Buy all the packaged stuff you know you like and don't need to look at through them. Buy produce and the like through a local market.
Patents are necessary to protect the investment that gets put into a product. A very good example where patents work is the pharmaceutical industry (the problems with that industry stem from causes other than patents). Without patents to protect drug makers they'd never want to spend the hundreds of millions needed to develop a drug. Producing the drug is cheap, so anyone can come along and make a generic and destroy your ability to pay back the R&D expenses.
One of the big problems is that patents last for too long in the IT industry 17 or 20 years might as well be forever since everything moves so quickly. The other big problem is that patents are given out willy-nilly with the expectation that bad patents will just lose if a lawsuit is ever filed.
As a Christian I find the idea that humans invent knowledge to be ludicrous and offensive
And this is one time that I'm glad there's seperation of church and state. I think you're going a bit far in calling a patent to be knowledge. It's an invention, not knowledge. It's not really property either since you can freely discuss, explore, etc the subject of patents. You just can't sell or distribute infringing material. I'm a little unclear on the specifics of this, but it seems like writing code that uses patented technologies is OK (like XvId and the Mpeg4 patents), but compiled code isn't.
SCO, Patriot Scientific, and now All Computers. It's the last cry of a dying company. Fire off the intellectual property missiles and hope they hit something before you get squashed by the counter-suits that're sure to be filed.
Or they just have a mass of different servers, and all of them haven't been updated yet.
Ok, I'll take my cell phone, and you can rub against a wool seat a few times. Then we'll walk near some heavy gas fumes one at a time. My guess is you're FAR more likely to become a crispy-critter than I am.
Is that the fire chief is so adamant about blaming cell phones rather than simple static electricity.
1. Cell phones emit minimum amount of power (no microwave heating of the fumes).
2. AFAIK there's no documented cases of cell phones starting a gasoline fire.
3. Electric sparks obviously can start gasoline fumes on fire. How do you think a spark plug works?
4. We all know how easily static electricity can build up from simply walking across a rug on a dry day.
Kinda makes you wonder just how much training the fire chiefs have. I'm sure they know how to fight fires, but at least this guy seems to have limited knowledge and analytical skills about how fires start.
You refer to the lie that some of the eco-freaks like to believe in. That is that we're "saving the planet". As George Carlin put it, "That planet is fine, the people are fucked".
You're right that the earths eco-system is very robust. It's survived meteor collisions, massive climate changes, etc. Human society isn't particularly robust though. While you may be fine with the eco-system taking a few thousand years to adjust to a new climate, most people aren't. I think mass famine because of crop failure and flooding of the coasts is a Bad Thing (for us humans that is). That's the real reason people should be concerned about climate change, and not this altruistic bull that a small minority wants to shove down our throats.
Yes, but my point is exactly that Slashdot shouldn't have posted this, not that people are dumb and should have noticed tiny little details. There's an expectation that something that's linked to on a news site is actual news. Taking this press release out of context makes it into more than it is.
Linus has the perfect response to it of course. He doesn't ignore it, but he doesn't give it any serious attention at the same time. Brilliant.
Actually no, this is NOT a yahoo news story. It's listed among the press releases which you can see if you look carefully. There's a BIG distinction between actual stories posted on yahoo, and random press releases directly from whoever is releasing the propadanda. It's like your news being buried on page 120 and printed in 5 point font with a "press release" headline surrounding it.
The yahoo press releases are essentially just paid advertisements masquerading as news. You pay a fee, you get your press release published online. It truly is a propoganda machine that is best just ignored. If you read through other press releases, it's obvious that they're all just marketing releases.
Possibly, but even investment bankers want loan payments eventually. Spam has been around for years, and doesn't seem like the spammers are running out of money. It's also pretty clear that some spamming is done by a few with large operations, and some is done by small time criminals.
I don't know if your argument is paranoid or stupid, but it's very weak, and completely unsupported by any evidence.
If a madman goes around telling people you're from mars do you feel the need to go around correcting him? There's such a thing as feeding the fire with publicity, and if Linus decided to sue, that's all he'd be doing at this point.
If fools continue to dignify this trash by linking to it, it might end up at that. Slashdot should be embarresed to even link to this garbage.
I didn't watch much of the OJ trial, but I've heard from others that one of the things that OJs lawyers did was eliminate any juror that might vote for conviction from the jury and get them replaced with alternates. There were many jurors eliminated, and they almost ran out of alternates.
That's the part that's about "buying freedom". I don't think anyone should be able engineer a jury like that. The problem isn't that everyone can't do this, it's that if you have enough $$ you can.
Corporate cases like this are a bit different of course since the judge is going to be (hopefully) un-engineerable. Microsoft got off scot free by just stalling until the administration changed and the new justice dept dropped the whole matter.
Yah, the Arabs had something good going and screwed it all up. I don't know how or why, but that's what happened.
This kind of pseudoscientific articles are one of the worst things on the internet!
Heh, actually in this case it may not be pseudo-science. The problem with theoretical physics at this level is that it's hard to seperate the kooks from the non-kooks. Zero-point energy guys are kooks, but multiple universe guys might be wrong, but that aren't kooks. The same goes for string theory guys.
Hmm.. Roseville isn't too far away. Let's go, bitch. Def Leopard sux0rs.
Uhh.. it was the Arabs who preserved the knowledge of the ancient world through the dark ages. The Cathlolic church was too busy persecuting people like Galileo for finding truth to preserve much of anything.
As another poster pointed out, they were pretty much the only game in town. The Cathlic church hardly deserves credit for doing the little they did. Also, it's hardly the invention of Christianity to believe the world is understandable. The Cathlolics can't lay claim to that any more than we can.