The real reason that they are getting rid of everyone at the Jet Propulsion Lab is that they won't need jet propulsion any more with the X-4000 Launch Aparatus. They will be starting up the Spring Tension and Extention of Rope Laboratory, or STERL.
Video games are a North Korean Plot! South Koreans will be so busy playing them that they won't even notice the North rushing across the DMZ and conquering them.
There are people who just love to be seen with a Neiman Marcus, Macy's or other upscale store's shopping bags, and the goodies within. While the markups at such places are excessive to a sensible shopper, they are apparently not so to rich spendthrifts who keep shopping there, and wouldn't be caught dead at Sears or JC Penney. They are buying an image, an illusion. Upscale stores are happy to sell them this, just as they are eager to buy it. I can tell that you have more sense then to fall for that, as do I, but those stores are still in business. They have identified something a certain demographic wants, and are providing it. Their shoppers do see a value in what we would consider being ripped off.
Here is a puzzle: We have the radio, TV, and newspapers telling us every day that avian flu is coming. We have a lab re-constructing the 1918 Spanish Flu. We have an executive order from Bush allowing Posse Comitatus to be thrown out the window in the case of a pandemic that will require quarantines, or other national emergency. Put these pieces together and what do you have? A recipe for a 1984-style police state coming into being using the flu pandemic as a cover story.
What value does it offer the customer? The ability to flaunt wealth, to "keep up with the Joneses". He who dies with the most toys wins. I have more money than you, so I have nicer things than you. To the affluent, shopping at a place where the rest of us can't feels good. Neiman Marcus makes that kind of shopper feel special.
Their needless markups serve a purpose. A lot of rich people think that only expensive things are any good. If it is cheap, it must be garbage. You can create the illusion of high quality for such people just by inflating the price of things. It can be the same shit that Sears sells, but since the average Neiman Marcus shopper has never been in a Sears, they will never know.
The market will never pick one. When there were two competing formats for quadraphonic records, the market became confused, and chose neither. When two digital audio tape formats were offered up, DAT and DCC, the market was confused and chose neither. When there were two competing formats for AM Stereo, the market became confused and chose neither. In DVD-R vs. DVD+R, the market waited until drives did both. It wasn't really the market that decided VHS vs Beta either. Only Sony sold Beta. Everyone under the sun offered a VHS machine. That was what really made VHS the winner.
While Viagra, baldness cures and other profitable lifestyle drugs were developed with private funds, the research and development for most life-saving medicines came from taxpayers through government grants. I have no sympathy when the drug companies cry foul over copies of those in developing nations, or for less fortunate people in wealthy nations.
In the United States, advertising of prescription drugs on television adds a huge amount to their prices. I also think advertising of prescription drugs should be banned. You don't just go to a doctor and order pills. He or she diagnoses you, then will prescribe what you need based on that.
I don't have a problem with drug companies developing placebos for rich hypochondriacs to buy from boutique doctors and lifestyle drugs with their own dollars, but what they develop with public funds and with tax breaks should be for the public good only.
High price or low price, antibiotics are a cure, not a treatment. After ten days a patient doesn't need them anymore. You can sell a treatment and rake in the bucks for the rest of a patient's life. That's why antibiotics are less profitable to the drug cartels, er, um companies. Also, no one ever died because they didn't have Viagra. It is not a life saving medicine.
This is bigger than frivolous entertainment products like teen pop music and Hollywood movies. The strict enforcement of drug company patents will mean that people in developing nations who need inexpensive generic drugs, not outrageously priced name brand ones, are going to die so that rich bloodsucking businessmen can drink their fill. The body count could easily be in the millions.
Donations are not free speech, unless some animals are more equal than others. Free speech is something we all have equally. Ability to donate is something the rich and corporations have almost infinitely more of than the poor. The biggest advocate of donation as free speech in Washington, Senator Mitch McConnell (R) KY, privately admits that this argument is bullshit, and that the Republicans, the party of the rich and corporations, have a vested interest in stopping any meaningful campaign finance reform.
Allowing a free-for-all on donations created the oligarchy we have, and assures that oligarchy will continue. While all attempts at campaign finance reform have failed so far, that doesn't mean campaign finance reform is a bad idea, we just need to eliminate the loopholes, and give the law teeth. That being said, regulating blogs would be a terrible idea. That would be restricting free speech. An absolute dollar limit with no "soft money". "Corporate personhood" means that that one corporation counts as one person, so the individual limit applies. These would be meaningful reforms that would have a fighting chance to work.
Network associates, the makers of McAfee Viruscan, put a line in their EULA that essentially said you couldn't publish a review of the software without their permission. It didn't hold up in court because it violated the first amendment. Network Associates are not the government, and could not force anyone to give up their first amendment rights through contract. That provision was unenforceable, and many things in contracts are unenforceable. A lot of the crap in employment agreements is legalese nonsense that it would take a team of lawyers to interpret, and then they wouldn't all agree what it means. No one can give informed consent to something they do not understand. All they really understand is that if you don't sign, you don't have a job so enjoy living under a bridge when you lose your house! That is not far from holding a gun to your head, and saying, "sign this". An agreement under duress is no agreement at all.
Is there any chance that this is the guy who drinks quite a bit at Redmond area bars, then starts to talk about things like "kill code" to force upgrades and future versions of Windows? Stranger things have been true before.
Yes, he and others like him need to stay anonymous, or they are toast, but it shouldn't be that way. It is high time laws were passed to protect such bloggers' free speech rights no matter what the legal mumbo jumbo they had to sign off on to have a job says. No employment contract should be able to take away free speech.
The workings of any publicly traded company ought to be public knowledge. We should have the right to know about companies, and not just their PR spin, before investing or when contemplating whether to sell stock. It is not good for the economy to let publicly traded firms operate in secrecy, and snooker investors
Even if a company is not publicly traded, prospective customers deserve to know what is going on.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer here is simple. Use a different search engine.
Of course Mars was once a lot like earth. Martians lived on the surface then, but are now underground. Not only have they built underground cities on their planet, they even built a base and a death ray on our moon!
And while we're at it, Wolf! Wolf! WoooooooooooooolF!
The real reason that they are getting rid of everyone at the Jet Propulsion Lab is that they won't need jet propulsion any more with the X-4000 Launch Aparatus. They will be starting up the Spring Tension and Extention of Rope Laboratory, or STERL.
Solar flares may protect astronouts from cosmic rays, but will provide no defense against death rays or destructo-rays!
The whole reason he wants to go back to the moon is so Red China can't control all the green cheese.
Video games are a North Korean Plot! South Koreans will be so busy playing them that they won't even notice the North rushing across the DMZ and conquering them.
There are people who just love to be seen with a Neiman Marcus, Macy's or other upscale store's shopping bags, and the goodies within. While the markups at such places are excessive to a sensible shopper, they are apparently not so to rich spendthrifts who keep shopping there, and wouldn't be caught dead at Sears or JC Penney. They are buying an image, an illusion. Upscale stores are happy to sell them this, just as they are eager to buy it. I can tell that you have more sense then to fall for that, as do I, but those stores are still in business. They have identified something a certain demographic wants, and are providing it. Their shoppers do see a value in what we would consider being ripped off.
Here is a puzzle: We have the radio, TV, and newspapers telling us every day that avian flu is coming. We have a lab re-constructing the 1918 Spanish Flu. We have an executive order from Bush allowing Posse Comitatus to be thrown out the window in the case of a pandemic that will require quarantines, or other national emergency. Put these pieces together and what do you have? A recipe for a 1984-style police state coming into being using the flu pandemic as a cover story.
What value does it offer the customer? The ability to flaunt wealth, to "keep up with the Joneses". He who dies with the most toys wins. I have more money than you, so I have nicer things than you. To the affluent, shopping at a place where the rest of us can't feels good. Neiman Marcus makes that kind of shopper feel special.
Their needless markups serve a purpose. A lot of rich people think that only expensive things are any good. If it is cheap, it must be garbage. You can create the illusion of high quality for such people just by inflating the price of things. It can be the same shit that Sears sells, but since the average Neiman Marcus shopper has never been in a Sears, they will never know.
Human labor producing the power to run computers instead of fossil fuel? That has been suggestd before. Read More.
Do you think they could get a payload to the ISS with this? It would sure be cheaper than the shuttle.
The market will never pick one. When there were two competing formats for quadraphonic records, the market became confused, and chose neither. When two digital audio tape formats were offered up, DAT and DCC, the market was confused and chose neither. When there were two competing formats for AM Stereo, the market became confused and chose neither. In DVD-R vs. DVD+R, the market waited until drives did both. It wasn't really the market that decided VHS vs Beta either. Only Sony sold Beta. Everyone under the sun offered a VHS machine. That was what really made VHS the winner.
In the United States, advertising of prescription drugs on television adds a huge amount to their prices. I also think advertising of prescription drugs should be banned. You don't just go to a doctor and order pills. He or she diagnoses you, then will prescribe what you need based on that.
I don't have a problem with drug companies developing placebos for rich hypochondriacs to buy from boutique doctors and lifestyle drugs with their own dollars, but what they develop with public funds and with tax breaks should be for the public good only.
High price or low price, antibiotics are a cure, not a treatment. After ten days a patient doesn't need them anymore. You can sell a treatment and rake in the bucks for the rest of a patient's life. That's why antibiotics are less profitable to the drug cartels, er, um companies. Also, no one ever died because they didn't have Viagra. It is not a life saving medicine.
This is bigger than frivolous entertainment products like teen pop music and Hollywood movies. The strict enforcement of drug company patents will mean that people in developing nations who need inexpensive generic drugs, not outrageously priced name brand ones, are going to die so that rich bloodsucking businessmen can drink their fill. The body count could easily be in the millions.
Here is another link that n00bs should find informative.
Allowing a free-for-all on donations created the oligarchy we have, and assures that oligarchy will continue. While all attempts at campaign finance reform have failed so far, that doesn't mean campaign finance reform is a bad idea, we just need to eliminate the loopholes, and give the law teeth. That being said, regulating blogs would be a terrible idea. That would be restricting free speech. An absolute dollar limit with no "soft money". "Corporate personhood" means that that one corporation counts as one person, so the individual limit applies. These would be meaningful reforms that would have a fighting chance to work.
Yes, only one has 666 on his head.
The X-4000 Launch Aparatus would be cheaper and easier to build than the Space Elevator. It would also be more likely to actually work.
Network associates, the makers of McAfee Viruscan, put a line in their EULA that essentially said you couldn't publish a review of the software without their permission. It didn't hold up in court because it violated the first amendment. Network Associates are not the government, and could not force anyone to give up their first amendment rights through contract. That provision was unenforceable, and many things in contracts are unenforceable. A lot of the crap in employment agreements is legalese nonsense that it would take a team of lawyers to interpret, and then they wouldn't all agree what it means. No one can give informed consent to something they do not understand. All they really understand is that if you don't sign, you don't have a job so enjoy living under a bridge when you lose your house! That is not far from holding a gun to your head, and saying, "sign this". An agreement under duress is no agreement at all.
Is there any chance that this is the guy who drinks quite a bit at Redmond area bars, then starts to talk about things like "kill code" to force upgrades and future versions of Windows? Stranger things have been true before.
The workings of any publicly traded company ought to be public knowledge. We should have the right to know about companies, and not just their PR spin, before investing or when contemplating whether to sell stock. It is not good for the economy to let publicly traded firms operate in secrecy, and snooker investors
Even if a company is not publicly traded, prospective customers deserve to know what is going on.
Why does Bush want to go back to the moon? Why really? To keep Red China from controlling all the green cheese.