I HAVE cable and I find indecent programming and nearly every channel except ABC, CBS and NBC !!!
Why can't I get cable with just those three channels???? (plus maybe PBS... but I'm undecided cause they sometimes have shows with 'foreigners' in them, very indecent...).
I wouldn't say the executives are in control... more like, they decide between the many innovations that the engineers provide as future directions.
This is how it should be. Engineers don't want to make those decisions... they just want to make sure that the options are the best versions of the options they can be.
So to sum up a summary; Executives execute decisions based on the available options given to them by producers, in this case software engineers, whom decide which solutions or innovations they will champion and make viable (when they are given the power to do so). Executives get to balance business opportunities with what technology is mature enough to take to the market in a real way. Engineers get to balance technology opportunities with what is viable as a mature business solution they can bring to market.
This is how it should be. Very rarely is this a reality... Google seems to do well with trying out potential technologies and discovering viable business opportunities along the way.
Long live executives who are smart enough to let engineers develop solutions in search of a problem and then discover a way to market them... Long live engineers smart enough to propose products in search of a user and then discover a way to realize them.
Dude, that's from 2001. It's been 4 years and improvements have been made. Plus he's talking about corn, not rape seed (Canola) or mustard seed or soybeans or cotton seed where the yields are much better for biodiesel than for ethanol (which isn't what this is talking about anyways).
Repeat after me: "Ethanol is not biodiesel" "Ethanol is not biodiesel" "Ethanol is not biodiesel"
This post is pure FUD and the guys study was probably financed by entrenched petroleum industry advocates anyways....
I'm sorry but my talkman only translates the TOP couple of languages.... "you seem to have written in an unsupported language... ERROR 404 language not found."
If you're not concerned with focus... then wouldn't a simple thumbnail of the photo be sufficient to provide feedback 'on camera'? Have a separate low quality or small sized image captured in a more 'traditional' digital method and use that as the preview.... while storing the final image as raw, which is what you really want anyways.
"The Chinese government has already said it plans to restrict gamers to three hours of consecutive play, using a "fatigue technique" in games. After three hours of play, the online game would lose some player power, and after five hours, the player would lose most power. After that, there would be a delay of five hours before the game could be accessed to its full capacity."
I'd be curious to find out if this proposal might actually enhance gameplay. This could be the first good thing to come out of China's Government... you'd be forced to spend the time you have to play doing worthwhile things that are fun instead of being able to 'grind' players up the rankings...
On the other hand if this was forced on the Game Developers and Distributors legally, ie. they have to build it in to their system... it would set a very bad precedent for all products of all types.... think cars and driving, or cellphones or TV viewing. Imagine a curfew system for using anything electronic, where you can only use it during preset times and for pre-approved purposes (well I guess you don't have to imagine it, just move to China and try using the internet). China's attempt to regulate the people's behavior is going to backlash in a major way soon, IMHO. They want all the benefits of a free market but all the control of a closed market... can't have it both ways...
Or rather, what is the license for repurposing the art on those book covers? The article doesn't mention it... does anyone on/. happen to have a copy of O'Reilly's Learning the VI Editor????
On a sidenote... shouldn't he have chosen EMacs instead?
Also if the art is not CC or Copy Left or some other open license, is this a good example of fair use rights, as long as it's for your own personal use?
Re:Thank you, no really, thank you.
on
Drink Decaf and Die
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Parent is totally off topic... and I'll continue it... I've always wondered whether the stats showing increased risk of heart disease for smokers may be corrupted by the fact that many smokers also live overly sedentary lifestyles, ie: they don't go jogging in the morning, don't play b-ball after work or raquetball or any of the other things non-smokers do to distract themselves while smokers sit back and enjoy a cup of coffee and a newspaper. Similarly do smokers also 'breathe shallow' as a result of smoking... ie: taking deep breaths really isn't common for a smoker, also due to sedentary lifestyle plus the fact that smoking typically involves a shallower inhale in general... so the lungs aren't regularly fully inflated...
These may be moot points as they go hand in hand with the smoking habit... but is it accounted for? Could a person live an otherwise very healthy lifestyle, exercising, yoga, eating well... and still smoke.. and enjoy a life without emphesema and heart disease and lung cancer?
I smoke a pack a day but when I go for checkups the nurses think I'm an athlete and have never told me that I have symptoms of anything detrimental. When I tell them I smoke they don't believe it. I eat very well, excercise regularly and in general keep my body in good shape. I also take Taurine, a fish based enzyme that helps to avoid arterial hardening by improving elasticity of blood vessels (vitamin C does the same in large doses). I wouldn't say I do more preventative healthcare than a non-smoker however... just a few things differently.
I mention heart-disease and emphesema because they are a much larger percentage of smoking related illlnesses than lung cancer which I believe is nearly as prevalent in non-smokers as in smokers, though when smokers get it it's all, 'must be from smoking' (my grandfather had lung cancer, smoked from age 14 to 40s but was also in the Navy, stationed on the first nuclear subs... hmmm.. was it smoking that did him in or exposure to radiation).
To sum up, is it really smoking that increases disease or is it the lifestyle that many smokers live???? moreso than non-smokers.
If by commodity hardware you mean the equivalent of the most standardized hardware configuration you can imagine across multiple lines of PCs with very tightly integrated components from suppliers who have proven the quality of their product and manufacturing processes (excepting a very few snafus every two years, iPod Nano *cough*)...
then by all means, it will be 'commodity hardware'.
Oh I've had 2 new drives... started with 14Gb/4200 and now have 60Gb/5400 and I've got 1Gb RAM which helps A LOT. My only gripe is that I'm stuck with 8MB VRAM, so no Quatrz Extreme to further speed up the GUI;-(
I've had my Powerbook for 5 years and it's just now starting to show it's age... OS X keeps getting faster and more streamlined... the apps get faster and better... I'm planning to buy an iMac soon and I can't wait to get a new Powerbook next year.
I lived in the country when I was a kid... we had the same view about locking doors, until we were robbed. We lost all electronics, a bunch of vintage cameras my father had collected, a truck load of vintage model kits he'd also collected (don't ask why - he was a packrat for that stuff)... all total, probably a goood 10-15 grand of stuff depending where you sold it. The PD never caught the guys cause it was the country and the perps could sell it to anyone without them questioning where you got it... and the buyer wouldn't admit to buying stolen goods.
I say lock your doors. You never know when someone from a town nearby will get the idea to go through and steal you blind...
AND the true pirates of media will just make their own bluetooth devices with audio out, video out or whatever and continue along their merry way defrauding us all.
But that's okay apparently... it's much more important to stop regular paying consumers from enjoying the media they paid for.
Eat something like a whole grain breakfast bar between meals if you're concerned about 'fading' energy levels. Whole grains take a while to break down and provide good metabolic energy. Stay away from anything with sugar, you'll just burn out even more 20 minutes later. Caffeine is okay but stay sugar free. If you must have something sweet, eat an apple. The fiber and pectin will help offset the fructose sugars in overall calorie count but you'll get a relative quick boost to your blood sugar.
Little Snitch (which unfortunately is only OS X) is the most usable security type of application I've ever used.
It's essentially a network monitor app similar to Zone Alarm for the PC but IMHO 1000% more usable.
When a request is made either by an app on your machine or from a remote machine to access a port, Snitch pops up a dialogue that asks you whether you want to allow or deny it, for that port or all ports, until the app quits or forever.
This simple selection is enough to cover 99% of all cases. ie: if you're not sure what the app is doing, you can deny it temporarily (game server X on ports 6003 7002 27010 27015 27025 ) and look up what it's trying to do, then restart the app and allow it for the duration of your session; if you know you want it to continue you can set it to allow/forever/ports (browser X on port 80 forever); if you know you don't want it to continue or ever work again (warez app x on port that tells anti-warez company x that you've got warez) then deny forever.
This is the best firewall you can ask for. You don't have to know all the ports you want open precognitively but you still have control over your apps and your ports.
If you mess up, there is a simple control panel that lets you edit or delete your preferences per app.
It's beautiful... it only gets in the way when it's needed and it's easy to understand, in fact I started it up without even looking at a readme file much less a manual of documentation.
That's usability AND security.
What it won't do is filter traffic on a port, so a good net filter or anti-virus is still useful (granted it's OS X so maybe not that useful) but worms, unwanted intrusions and various types of phone-home spyware won't be causing any problems (ie a key logger you didn't know about). Also, you become much more aware of what/who your computer is talking to in the background, very enlightening.
I think the real incentive isn't the cash but the business the publicity will bring to the winner of the contest. An individual or small team could make a name for themselves this way or an existing business solutions company could gain a bonus reputation as an experienced developer in the specific area of interest.
BTW I don't think it's a big assumption that teams already spend lots of time working on projects that are open source without guaranteed remuneration. On the other hand I can imagine many teams being funded by corporations or other financed interests to compete in such a contest as well. Most competitions of this sort X-prize or other examples aren't really about the money... it's the accomplishment, the money is a nice way to offset some expenses but mostly serves to excite people about the project and makes a really great media focal point for press coverage. You don't think Scaled Composites only spent as much money as the prize would pay back do you??? I'm not sure how much they spent but it was probably closer to 3 times the prize amount if not more. They've been paid back many times over with the contract from Virgin and other ancillary contracts that the exposure has given them.
In any case it would be a great way to get positive media exposure to Open Source projects everywhere and would help define some much needed projects that have been passed over for lack of 'sexiness'. Things like accessibility for instance.
Other projects I'd recommend would be:
) language translation ) medical records ) voting ) public school intranet/extranets ) anything else that is a public tax payed service... like tax information submission.. or patent submission... where even if a solution exists, a better one could be created... and freely available to be administered by government employees easily and efficiently due to good design and idiot proofing;-p
Maybe the OS community should take a page from the X contests... you know, create a fund as a prize for the first team to meet certain objectives that are needed for adopting open source software in various areas of use.
This is a perfect example. Gather up $100,000 and give it to the first team to develop a working screen reader for Open Office.. one that meets the same capabilities as what is currently available for MS Office.
Call it an OS-Prize contest or something. It could be an annual contest or set of contests.
Do you happen to be one of the few, select, who've actually seen an atom? Much less masses of them swirling about inside people's heads... anyways, that sounded like a flame so I'll just tell you why science is still just a method of trying to explain things we really won't ever understand:
1) you've described it beautifully... we anthropomorphize everything... it's all in relation to our own experience and the capability of our pathetic minds (which really aren't all that compared to the complexities of what they attempt however ineptly to grasp).
2) our universe is too vast with too many potentialities to ever fit into a model that we can describe with any form of abstraction such as language or even math, we end up doing vague shorthand with things like 'mass' or 'gravity' or 'pi' or some elegant equation that looks like it covers all the possibilities until you add in the things it doesn't explain.
3) science as a method was never meant to explain everything, it was meant to be a tool to help explain the things we needed to explain in order to get shit done.
So the closer we get to realizing that we don't know jack (as you've clearly explained, as a dedicated specialist in your field, who describes intelligence in the brain as atoms moving around, I'm assuming making connections and communicating various states of EM to each other) the more people who clearly realize that we don't know jack even after discovering sooooo much more than our ancestors even in the last 20 years... well, they're starting to think "can we ever understand it all?" is it even possible? (Yes this has happened before and it will happen again, history shows many cycles of logic versus intuition.)
Think about it. You're a specialist in your field. Admit that you really don't know 1% of what you know you should be able to know to do anything useful.... then realize that you are 1 in several billion people out there who has a clue about that 1%.
Doesn't that make you something like the Pope? You say it is so because you've seen it, or proved it or whatever but 99.999999% of people have never, will never even get it. They have to take your word for it. Which gets me back to the original question... are you one of the few who've seen an atom? Even indirectly? To know that they aren't just a clever device to get people to believe in the scientific method because it explains things in more detail than religion.
Sorry this has been so rambling, it's late and I had a lot of material to get through. I'm not even sure if I've made any conclusions, it's more of a dialogue I guess... oh well, life goes on, people will be born, people will die and the fact that I haven't made a conclusive point here won't really change a thing, which is the arguement for something like ID... it's not about the conclusion, it's about the dialogue - "stop looking for answers to questions we aren't asking" - that's what they're saying... that they don't really care about evolution, just don't use it to support the justification for abortion
This is the correct response to not getting your way, at least in commerce. When the consumer doesn't like the product as it is and demands that it change before they buy it, the distributor or manufacturer has every right to say "fine, then we won't sell it to you."
S. Korea should invest heavily in Apple and then buy Apple PCs for desktops and use Linux for Servers... that will show Microsoft they aren't the only player on the block. They may have a lot of Marbles, but Apples are perttier and don't break as often when used.... Linux has great Smashers.... they're not pretty but they do the job really well.
Actually this is a perfect example of where government funding is BEST used... pure science. If this had been a contest, most likely you'd get exactly what you described, all the goals accomplished, but nothing more. The contest would have been over with, money spent and goals accomplished, then it'd be over.
The way it is, a 3 month project turned into 2 years of good science.
Make a contest out of the next Rover design though with some functionality goals, as opposed to mission goals and you'd be right on.
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I HAVE cable and I find indecent programming and nearly every channel except ABC, CBS and NBC !!!
Why can't I get cable with just those three channels???? (plus maybe PBS... but I'm undecided cause they sometimes have shows with 'foreigners' in them, very indecent...).
I wouldn't say the executives are in control... more like, they decide between the many innovations that the engineers provide as future directions.
This is how it should be. Engineers don't want to make those decisions... they just want to make sure that the options are the best versions of the options they can be.
So to sum up a summary; Executives execute decisions based on the available options given to them by producers, in this case software engineers, whom decide which solutions or innovations they will champion and make viable (when they are given the power to do so). Executives get to balance business opportunities with what technology is mature enough to take to the market in a real way. Engineers get to balance technology opportunities with what is viable as a mature business solution they can bring to market.
This is how it should be. Very rarely is this a reality... Google seems to do well with trying out potential technologies and discovering viable business opportunities along the way.
Long live executives who are smart enough to let engineers develop solutions in search of a problem and then discover a way to market them... Long live engineers smart enough to propose products in search of a user and then discover a way to realize them.
Dude, that's from 2001. It's been 4 years and improvements have been made. Plus he's talking about corn, not rape seed (Canola) or mustard seed or soybeans or cotton seed where the yields are much better for biodiesel than for ethanol (which isn't what this is talking about anyways).
Repeat after me: "Ethanol is not biodiesel" "Ethanol is not biodiesel" "Ethanol is not biodiesel"
This post is pure FUD and the guys study was probably financed by entrenched petroleum industry advocates anyways....
In Brazil..... where you have to de-forest to plant anything else.
I'm sorry but my talkman only translates the TOP couple of languages.... "you seem to have written in an unsupported language... ERROR 404 language not found."
or going back further.... and still related, does watching too much TV "rot your brain"????
If you're not concerned with focus... then wouldn't a simple thumbnail of the photo be sufficient to provide feedback 'on camera'? Have a separate low quality or small sized image captured in a more 'traditional' digital method and use that as the preview.... while storing the final image as raw, which is what you really want anyways.
From TFA:
"The Chinese government has already said it plans to restrict gamers to three hours of consecutive play, using a "fatigue technique" in games. After three hours of play, the online game would lose some player power, and after five hours, the player would lose most power. After that, there would be a delay of five hours before the game could be accessed to its full capacity."
I'd be curious to find out if this proposal might actually enhance gameplay. This could be the first good thing to come out of China's Government... you'd be forced to spend the time you have to play doing worthwhile things that are fun instead of being able to 'grind' players up the rankings...
On the other hand if this was forced on the Game Developers and Distributors legally, ie. they have to build it in to their system... it would set a very bad precedent for all products of all types.... think cars and driving, or cellphones or TV viewing. Imagine a curfew system for using anything electronic, where you can only use it during preset times and for pre-approved purposes (well I guess you don't have to imagine it, just move to China and try using the internet). China's attempt to regulate the people's behavior is going to backlash in a major way soon, IMHO. They want all the benefits of a free market but all the control of a closed market... can't have it both ways...
Or rather, what is the license for repurposing the art on those book covers? The article doesn't mention it... does anyone on /. happen to have a copy of O'Reilly's Learning the VI Editor????
On a sidenote... shouldn't he have chosen EMacs instead?
Also if the art is not CC or Copy Left or some other open license, is this a good example of fair use rights, as long as it's for your own personal use?
Parent is totally off topic... and I'll continue it... I've always wondered whether the stats showing increased risk of heart disease for smokers may be corrupted by the fact that many smokers also live overly sedentary lifestyles, ie: they don't go jogging in the morning, don't play b-ball after work or raquetball or any of the other things non-smokers do to distract themselves while smokers sit back and enjoy a cup of coffee and a newspaper. Similarly do smokers also 'breathe shallow' as a result of smoking... ie: taking deep breaths really isn't common for a smoker, also due to sedentary lifestyle plus the fact that smoking typically involves a shallower inhale in general... so the lungs aren't regularly fully inflated...
These may be moot points as they go hand in hand with the smoking habit... but is it accounted for? Could a person live an otherwise very healthy lifestyle, exercising, yoga, eating well... and still smoke.. and enjoy a life without emphesema and heart disease and lung cancer?
I smoke a pack a day but when I go for checkups the nurses think I'm an athlete and have never told me that I have symptoms of anything detrimental. When I tell them I smoke they don't believe it. I eat very well, excercise regularly and in general keep my body in good shape. I also take Taurine, a fish based enzyme that helps to avoid arterial hardening by improving elasticity of blood vessels (vitamin C does the same in large doses). I wouldn't say I do more preventative healthcare than a non-smoker however... just a few things differently.
I mention heart-disease and emphesema because they are a much larger percentage of smoking related illlnesses than lung cancer which I believe is nearly as prevalent in non-smokers as in smokers, though when smokers get it it's all, 'must be from smoking' (my grandfather had lung cancer, smoked from age 14 to 40s but was also in the Navy, stationed on the first nuclear subs... hmmm.. was it smoking that did him in or exposure to radiation).
To sum up, is it really smoking that increases disease or is it the lifestyle that many smokers live???? moreso than non-smokers.
If by commodity hardware you mean the equivalent of the most standardized hardware configuration you can imagine across multiple lines of PCs with very tightly integrated components from suppliers who have proven the quality of their product and manufacturing processes (excepting a very few snafus every two years, iPod Nano *cough*)...
then by all means, it will be 'commodity hardware'.
Oh I've had 2 new drives... started with 14Gb/4200 and now have 60Gb/5400 and I've got 1Gb RAM which helps A LOT. My only gripe is that I'm stuck with 8MB VRAM, so no Quatrz Extreme to further speed up the GUI ;-(
I've had my Powerbook for 5 years and it's just now starting to show it's age... OS X keeps getting faster and more streamlined... the apps get faster and better... I'm planning to buy an iMac soon and I can't wait to get a new Powerbook next year.
So how do you explain the reality distortion effect of Steve Jobs?????
I lived in the country when I was a kid... we had the same view about locking doors, until we were robbed. We lost all electronics, a bunch of vintage cameras my father had collected, a truck load of vintage model kits he'd also collected (don't ask why - he was a packrat for that stuff)... all total, probably a goood 10-15 grand of stuff depending where you sold it. The PD never caught the guys cause it was the country and the perps could sell it to anyone without them questioning where you got it... and the buyer wouldn't admit to buying stolen goods.
I say lock your doors. You never know when someone from a town nearby will get the idea to go through and steal you blind...
AND the true pirates of media will just make their own bluetooth devices with audio out, video out or whatever and continue along their merry way defrauding us all.
But that's okay apparently... it's much more important to stop regular paying consumers from enjoying the media they paid for.
Eat something like a whole grain breakfast bar between meals if you're concerned about 'fading' energy levels. Whole grains take a while to break down and provide good metabolic energy. Stay away from anything with sugar, you'll just burn out even more 20 minutes later. Caffeine is okay but stay sugar free. If you must have something sweet, eat an apple. The fiber and pectin will help offset the fructose sugars in overall calorie count but you'll get a relative quick boost to your blood sugar.
Little Snitch (which unfortunately is only OS X) is the most usable security type of application I've ever used.
It's essentially a network monitor app similar to Zone Alarm for the PC but IMHO 1000% more usable.
When a request is made either by an app on your machine or from a remote machine to access a port, Snitch pops up a dialogue that asks you whether you want to allow or deny it, for that port or all ports, until the app quits or forever.
This simple selection is enough to cover 99% of all cases. ie: if you're not sure what the app is doing, you can deny it temporarily (game server X on ports 6003 7002 27010 27015 27025 ) and look up what it's trying to do, then restart the app and allow it for the duration of your session; if you know you want it to continue you can set it to allow/forever/ports (browser X on port 80 forever); if you know you don't want it to continue or ever work again (warez app x on port that tells anti-warez company x that you've got warez) then deny forever.
This is the best firewall you can ask for. You don't have to know all the ports you want open precognitively but you still have control over your apps and your ports.
If you mess up, there is a simple control panel that lets you edit or delete your preferences per app.
It's beautiful... it only gets in the way when it's needed and it's easy to understand, in fact I started it up without even looking at a readme file much less a manual of documentation.
That's usability AND security.
What it won't do is filter traffic on a port, so a good net filter or anti-virus is still useful (granted it's OS X so maybe not that useful) but worms, unwanted intrusions and various types of phone-home spyware won't be causing any problems (ie a key logger you didn't know about). Also, you become much more aware of what/who your computer is talking to in the background, very enlightening.
I would say more or less, that for small men sitting in the dark watching Star Trek, women are in fact "Aliens wearing short skirts" ;-p
I think the real incentive isn't the cash but the business the publicity will bring to the winner of the contest. An individual or small team could make a name for themselves this way or an existing business solutions company could gain a bonus reputation as an experienced developer in the specific area of interest.
;-p
BTW I don't think it's a big assumption that teams already spend lots of time working on projects that are open source without guaranteed remuneration. On the other hand I can imagine many teams being funded by corporations or other financed interests to compete in such a contest as well. Most competitions of this sort X-prize or other examples aren't really about the money... it's the accomplishment, the money is a nice way to offset some expenses but mostly serves to excite people about the project and makes a really great media focal point for press coverage. You don't think Scaled Composites only spent as much money as the prize would pay back do you??? I'm not sure how much they spent but it was probably closer to 3 times the prize amount if not more. They've been paid back many times over with the contract from Virgin and other ancillary contracts that the exposure has given them.
In any case it would be a great way to get positive media exposure to Open Source projects everywhere and would help define some much needed projects that have been passed over for lack of 'sexiness'. Things like accessibility for instance.
Other projects I'd recommend would be:
) language translation
) medical records
) voting
) public school intranet/extranets
) anything else that is a public tax payed service... like tax information submission.. or patent submission... where even if a solution exists, a better one could be created... and freely available to be administered by government employees easily and efficiently due to good design and idiot proofing
Maybe the OS community should take a page from the X contests... you know, create a fund as a prize for the first team to meet certain objectives that are needed for adopting open source software in various areas of use.
This is a perfect example. Gather up $100,000 and give it to the first team to develop a working screen reader for Open Office.. one that meets the same capabilities as what is currently available for MS Office.
Call it an OS-Prize contest or something. It could be an annual contest or set of contests.
Do you happen to be one of the few, select, who've actually seen an atom? Much less masses of them swirling about inside people's heads... anyways, that sounded like a flame so I'll just tell you why science is still just a method of trying to explain things we really won't ever understand:
1) you've described it beautifully... we anthropomorphize everything... it's all in relation to our own experience and the capability of our pathetic minds (which really aren't all that compared to the complexities of what they attempt however ineptly to grasp).
2) our universe is too vast with too many potentialities to ever fit into a model that we can describe with any form of abstraction such as language or even math, we end up doing vague shorthand with things like 'mass' or 'gravity' or 'pi' or some elegant equation that looks like it covers all the possibilities until you add in the things it doesn't explain.
3) science as a method was never meant to explain everything, it was meant to be a tool to help explain the things we needed to explain in order to get shit done.
So the closer we get to realizing that we don't know jack (as you've clearly explained, as a dedicated specialist in your field, who describes intelligence in the brain as atoms moving around, I'm assuming making connections and communicating various states of EM to each other) the more people who clearly realize that we don't know jack even after discovering sooooo much more than our ancestors even in the last 20 years... well, they're starting to think "can we ever understand it all?" is it even possible? (Yes this has happened before and it will happen again, history shows many cycles of logic versus intuition.)
Think about it. You're a specialist in your field. Admit that you really don't know 1% of what you know you should be able to know to do anything useful.... then realize that you are 1 in several billion people out there who has a clue about that 1%.
Doesn't that make you something like the Pope? You say it is so because you've seen it, or proved it or whatever but 99.999999% of people have never, will never even get it. They have to take your word for it. Which gets me back to the original question... are you one of the few who've seen an atom? Even indirectly? To know that they aren't just a clever device to get people to believe in the scientific method because it explains things in more detail than religion.
Sorry this has been so rambling, it's late and I had a lot of material to get through. I'm not even sure if I've made any conclusions, it's more of a dialogue I guess... oh well, life goes on, people will be born, people will die and the fact that I haven't made a conclusive point here won't really change a thing, which is the arguement for something like ID... it's not about the conclusion, it's about the dialogue - "stop looking for answers to questions we aren't asking" - that's what they're saying... that they don't really care about evolution, just don't use it to support the justification for abortion
ramble done....
This is the correct response to not getting your way, at least in commerce. When the consumer doesn't like the product as it is and demands that it change before they buy it, the distributor or manufacturer has every right to say "fine, then we won't sell it to you."
S. Korea should invest heavily in Apple and then buy Apple PCs for desktops and use Linux for Servers... that will show Microsoft they aren't the only player on the block. They may have a lot of Marbles, but Apples are perttier and don't break as often when used.... Linux has great Smashers.... they're not pretty but they do the job really well.
Always always, Under Promise - Over Deliver.
Actually this is a perfect example of where government funding is BEST used... pure science. If this had been a contest, most likely you'd get exactly what you described, all the goals accomplished, but nothing more. The contest would have been over with, money spent and goals accomplished, then it'd be over.
The way it is, a 3 month project turned into 2 years of good science.
Make a contest out of the next Rover design though with some functionality goals, as opposed to mission goals and you'd be right on.