Bullshit. They basically implemented Fisher-Price D&D. "Oh, you never run out of spells, and even if you don't beat the attack roll, you'll still do -some- damage." It's watered down bullshit for the generation where every kid gets a trophy.
That's not that much different from spells still doing at least half damage on a saving throw. It's just the application is reversed. the SAVE DC is now fixed and it's the attackers job to beat it as opposed to the defenders job to roll against the attacker's DC.
Stewart generally does a joke once. He might expand on it a couple of times while the topic is hot, but he generally moves on to newer material that Washington is so adept at providing.
I personally believe that we are witnessing the apex of the rocket-driven space program. Rockets are so expensive, and lift so little of payload, that the cost can be reduced only so much.
Short of an intervention of a physics that doesn't exist yet in practical, macro terms, I believe we've seen the apex of manned flight period. It seems clear that small pocket sized spacecraft that can go to orbit without staging are plain outright fantasy when it comes to impulse thrust. It may well be that space travel is a technology so inherently risky that it can't be done reliably without a NASA and even then won't acheive the reliability of present day air travel.
What's this slavery nonsense? It's the purchase of a service and product by valuation. With Linux, you're going to be paying somebody to get it to work, with commercial software or hardware you're paying for the product and whatever extended warranty you've opted for.
I like Photoshop and Quartz. The "Free" software to measure up to either of these does not exist. There may be a contender for Photoshop but it does NOT meet the professional bar set by Adobe.
Freedom includes the freedom to use the software that fits your needs even if it's not 100 percent GNU approved. Imposition is imposition whether it's from closed source or shouting zealots screaming "Proprietarian Slime!"
It matters that the money that would have to be spent to ressurrect the Saturn and tool it for modern needs might be better spent developing a booster suited to the jobs required or that such boosters may already exist even if they're not American.
That would only happen if the interest is there from the public to invest in such an endeavor. And if the interest is not there, then, so what?
Interest in market terms equates "willing to spend." You think the "public" is going to start chipping in to send a bunch of guys to Mars? The slashdotters certainly won't. Selling ad space on the Mars Rocket is only going to get you so far. and I doubt the rest can be paid for by commercials.
It's more than just blueprints, the expert engineers who built Saturn, who understand those blueprints, are gone and retired, the production facilities would need to be rebuilt and/or retooled. And Saturn was a brute force approach to getting something done quickly, namely boosting 50tons to the Moon, it's not something neccesarily suitable for present day needs.
And how much faster could the private space industry have expanded had the public been able to keep their tax dollars that went to NASA, and chosen instead to invest in private interests? You're basically saying, "look how much faster a monopoly expands!"
Most of the "tax dollars that went to NASA" were spent on contracts to private corporations. Private enterprise has no interest in something that won't turn a profit within a short period of time. The only reason they worked for NASA was the guaranteed profit. Right now the "spaceplane" is nothing more than a stunt, manned flight to orbit and safe return is something several orders of magnitude beyond that. And if you think that private enterprise is going to fork over hundreds of billions of dollars for a manned flight to Mars, I want to have whatever it is you're smoking.
How come they're retiring the fleet 4 years before the next craft is ready? Is is actually more economical to pay the Russians or us Eurotrash to send them to space rather than the cost of maintaining and flying the shuttle?
In a word.... yes. Soyuz flights are done far more cheaply than shuttle missions.
The wikipedia list of most dangerous jobs left off "President of the United States". 9524 out of 100,000 (i.e. 4 of 42) were killed. Another 4 died; one of those was from an illness contracted performing his official duties.
The "official duty" was insisting in standing out in freezing pouring rain for two hours delivering his inaguration speech. Caught pneumonia and was dead within a month. More like death due to stubborn pride and stupidity if you ask me.
When a nation is no longer able to excel in a technology they pioneered, it's very difficult to come back. It started in the 1970s when, instead of continuing on lunar exploration, they decided to cut back on the Apollo program.
Thing is, the purpose of the Apollo program was not to explore the Moon, but to beat the Russians in a manned landing there. There was never any enthuisasm built up on a national level beyond th at particular goal. Within one year of Apollo 11, the public had lost interest save for a tense moment with Apollo 13. A year later the last three moonshots 18-20 had been canceled, the leftover material would then be used in the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz Test Project programs.
Without the Cold War, and a space power we're motivated to beat, there simply is no sustained interest. That and spending fortunes on wars of opportunity, the space program is merely another target for cutbacks.
It is antitrust if I cannot set up a business upgrading Apple hardware and charging a lower fee than they charge without them punishing my customers by voiding the warranty or pursuing me for advertising "Apple Upgrade Services"
I guess that we should tell the folks at http://www.tekserve.com/ or various other Apple certified repair/upgrade places to close up shop then. You can most certainly set up such a buisness, there is even a certification process so that you can do Apple warranty service. It is not Apple's failing nor is it anti-trust for them to insist that you meet thier standards for such certification.
To tell the truth, I'm of mixed views of the priorities that should be attached to the space program. The ISS still looks like an expensive solution still searching for an appropriate mission, and I don't see the value of much of manned flight when unmanned probles at the present point do much more of a job per dollar spent.
I am however a strong supporter of the space program where it benefits Earth science and I have a fairly inclusive view of that.
The implicit assumption is that space exploration just in and of itself will spur technology. This ignores the possibility that any effort of a similar scope would not have the same effect. It can be argued that an "Apollo" scale project aimed at energy conservation and environmental management would not only have it's own share of technological spinoffs, but that a greater percentage of them would actually be of direct benefit.
Nader's not likely to have the opinion you want, but he does have the list of the problems that MUST be attended to whether there is a space program or not, energy efficiency, global warming, global resource management, He's fairly likely to support space tech that is in line with such an end like the LandSat programs but is not likely to be overly enthused with the idea of going to Mars.... "just because it's there."
There are additional critics that have watched NASA burn money furiously
Not any more than any other gov't agency. They've done some amazing things considering that they are a gov't agency.
put lots of expensive equipment into the ocean instead of space
The deep ocean is largely unexplored. Those missions are cheaper than space-shots. You could perhaps argue that such belongs to a different agency, but not that its not a worthy scientific goal. I think the poster was referring to the fact that a number of space missions like Mariner 8 wound up taking unexpected landings into the ocean (and being destroyed) instead of arriving on target, or that miner matter of metrics/english confusion that caused one of our probes to HIT Mars instead of orbiting it.
If you live in New York x amount of days of the year, you're a resident. If you buy something in New York, you pay New York state tax. The use of the Internet to avoid state tax, hurts the states, it hurts local buisness.
If you don't live in New York then this is not an issue to you. Unless Maryland decides to wise up.
Her death was probably the first time a TV show had really shaken my core assumptions about how the world worked. (The idea that you could kill off one of your main characters, and a "goodie" at that, was pretty earth-shaking!) Actually the first series ( to kill off a main character was Hawaii 5-0 which gave Dan Ho the dirt nap when the actor left the show.
The consumer desktop is the iMac. it's got all the capability that a consumer level user is going to need, DVD burning, built in camera, gigabit smart ethernet port, builtin AirPort and bluetooth, firewire and USB ports, and a machine which is definitely NOT desktop based. (as I understand it, the main system board is a deriviative of the XServe box.) With an iMac you don't need 3 PCI slots as the machine is complete for just about any consumer level use you could ask for it. Firewire, USB, and bluetooth can take care of 98 of the expansion needs you could possibly ask for.
Gun Control laws aren't silly any more than the concept of laws themselves. Laws are what define a community standard of behavior. We're a society of laws, not arbitrary decrees from a King or Baron.
You can't arrest someone for a behavior if you don't have a criminal standard for it.
Gun control like driver's licensing is about preventative regulation, setting standards for access to hardware with lethal potential.
Slashdot Mirror
Bullshit. They basically implemented Fisher-Price D&D. "Oh, you never run out of spells, and even if you don't beat the attack roll, you'll still do -some- damage." It's watered down bullshit for the generation where every kid gets a trophy.
That's not that much different from spells still doing at least half damage on a saving throw. It's just the application is reversed. the SAVE DC is now fixed and it's the attackers job to beat it as opposed to the defenders job to roll against the attacker's DC.
Stewart generally does a joke once. He might expand on it a couple of times while the topic is hot, but he generally moves on to newer material that Washington is so adept at providing.
I personally believe that we are witnessing the apex of the rocket-driven space program. Rockets are so expensive, and lift so little of payload, that the cost can be reduced only so much.
Short of an intervention of a physics that doesn't exist yet in practical, macro terms, I believe we've seen the apex of manned flight period. It seems clear that small pocket sized spacecraft that can go to orbit without staging are plain outright fantasy when it comes to impulse thrust. It may well be that space travel is a technology so inherently risky that it can't be done reliably without a NASA and even then won't acheive the reliability of present day air travel.
What's this slavery nonsense? It's the purchase of a service and product by valuation. With Linux, you're going to be paying somebody to get it to work, with commercial software or hardware you're paying for the product and whatever extended warranty you've opted for.
I like Photoshop and Quartz. The "Free" software to measure up to either of these does not exist. There may be a contender for Photoshop but it does NOT meet the professional bar set by Adobe.
Freedom includes the freedom to use the software that fits your needs even if it's not 100 percent GNU approved. Imposition is imposition whether it's from closed source or shouting zealots screaming "Proprietarian Slime!"
It matters that the money that would have to be spent to ressurrect the Saturn and tool it for modern needs might be better spent developing a booster suited to the jobs required or that such boosters may already exist even if they're not American.
That would only happen if the interest is there from the public to invest in such an endeavor. And if the interest is not there, then, so what?
Interest in market terms equates "willing to spend." You think the "public" is going to start chipping in to send a bunch of guys to Mars? The slashdotters certainly won't. Selling ad space on the Mars Rocket is only going to get you so far. and I doubt the rest can be paid for by commercials.
It's more than just blueprints, the expert engineers who built Saturn, who understand those blueprints, are gone and retired, the production facilities would need to be rebuilt and/or retooled. And Saturn was a brute force approach to getting something done quickly, namely boosting 50tons to the Moon, it's not something neccesarily suitable for present day needs.
Most amusing thing about it is that the box lists both PC and Macintosh requirements.
And how much faster could the private space industry have expanded had the public been able to keep their tax dollars that went to NASA, and chosen instead to invest in private interests? You're basically saying, "look how much faster a monopoly expands!"
Most of the "tax dollars that went to NASA" were spent on contracts to private corporations. Private enterprise has no interest in something that won't turn a profit within a short period of time. The only reason they worked for NASA was the guaranteed profit. Right now the "spaceplane" is nothing more than a stunt, manned flight to orbit and safe return is something several orders of magnitude beyond that. And if you think that private enterprise is going to fork over hundreds of billions of dollars for a manned flight to Mars, I want to have whatever it is you're smoking.
How come they're retiring the fleet 4 years before the next craft is ready? Is is actually more economical to pay the Russians or us Eurotrash to send them to space rather than the cost of maintaining and flying the shuttle?
In a word.... yes. Soyuz flights are done far more cheaply than shuttle missions.
Why couldn't the military just use Saturn Vs (or other rockets with payload capacity between that and the Shuttle)?
Because we no longer have the personnel, the engineering, nor the technology to build them.
Or if it was airlines, that would be 667 people dieing in fatal accidents every HOUR.
The wikipedia list of most dangerous jobs left off "President of the United States". 9524 out of 100,000 (i.e. 4 of 42) were killed. Another 4 died; one of those was from an illness contracted performing his official duties.
The "official duty" was insisting in standing out in freezing pouring rain for two hours delivering his inaguration speech. Caught pneumonia and was dead within a month. More like death due to stubborn pride and stupidity if you ask me.
When a nation is no longer able to excel in a technology they pioneered, it's very difficult to come back. It started in the 1970s when, instead of continuing on lunar exploration, they decided to cut back on the Apollo program.
Thing is, the purpose of the Apollo program was not to explore the Moon, but to beat the Russians in a manned landing there. There was never any enthuisasm built up on a national level beyond th at particular goal. Within one year of Apollo 11, the public had lost interest save for a tense moment with Apollo 13. A year later the last three moonshots 18-20 had been canceled, the leftover material would then be used in the Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz Test Project programs.
Without the Cold War, and a space power we're motivated to beat, there simply is no sustained interest. That and spending fortunes on wars of opportunity, the space program is merely another target for cutbacks.
It is antitrust if I cannot set up a business upgrading Apple hardware and charging a lower fee than they charge without them punishing my customers by voiding the warranty or pursuing me for advertising "Apple Upgrade Services"
I guess that we should tell the folks at http://www.tekserve.com/ or various other Apple certified repair/upgrade places to close up shop then. You can most certainly set up such a buisness, there is even a certification process so that you can do Apple warranty service. It is not Apple's failing nor is it anti-trust for them to insist that you meet thier standards for such certification.
what rot.
This is a non story, who the hell got it past the review..
Slashdot Apple Article Review Qualifiers; Does it do any of the following.....
1. Tell people to use Linux.
2. Knock Apple for not using Linux
3. Knock Apple for not giving away OS X
4. Declare the imminent death of Apple after noting another profitable season, or press grabbing innovation by Apple.
5. Knock Apple for not configuring IPods as Ubuntu servers.
6. Knock Apple.
If it meets any one of these criteria the review process passes.
To tell the truth, I'm of mixed views of the priorities that should be attached to the space program. The ISS still looks like an expensive solution still searching for an appropriate mission, and I don't see the value of much of manned flight when unmanned probles at the present point do much more of a job per dollar spent.
I am however a strong supporter of the space program where it benefits Earth science and I have a fairly inclusive view of that.
The implicit assumption is that space exploration just in and of itself will spur technology. This ignores the possibility that any effort of a similar scope would not have the same effect. It can be argued that an "Apollo" scale project aimed at energy conservation and environmental management would not only have it's own share of technological spinoffs, but that a greater percentage of them would actually be of direct benefit.
Nader's not likely to have the opinion you want, but he does have the list of the problems that MUST be attended to whether there is a space program or not, energy efficiency, global warming, global resource management, He's fairly likely to support space tech that is in line with such an end like the LandSat programs but is not likely to be overly enthused with the idea of going to Mars.... "just because it's there."
http://www.votenader.org/issues/
Not any more than any other gov't agency. They've done some amazing things considering that they are a gov't agency.
put lots of expensive equipment into the ocean instead of space
The deep ocean is largely unexplored. Those missions are cheaper than space-shots. You could perhaps argue that such belongs to a different agency, but not that its not a worthy scientific goal. I think the poster was referring to the fact that a number of space missions like Mariner 8 wound up taking unexpected landings into the ocean (and being destroyed) instead of arriving on target, or that miner matter of metrics/english confusion that caused one of our probes to HIT Mars instead of orbiting it.
If you live in New York x amount of days of the year, you're a resident. If you buy something in New York, you pay New York state tax. The use of the Internet to avoid state tax, hurts the states, it hurts local buisness.
If you don't live in New York then this is not an issue to you. Unless Maryland decides to wise up.
The consumer desktop is the iMac. it's got all the capability that a consumer level user is going to need, DVD burning, built in camera, gigabit smart ethernet port, builtin AirPort and bluetooth, firewire and USB ports, and a machine which is definitely NOT desktop based. (as I understand it, the main system board is a deriviative of the XServe box.) With an iMac you don't need 3 PCI slots as the machine is complete for just about any consumer level use you could ask for it. Firewire, USB, and bluetooth can take care of 98 of the expansion needs you could possibly ask for.
Gun Control laws aren't silly any more than the concept of laws themselves. Laws are what define a community standard of behavior. We're a society of laws, not arbitrary decrees from a King or Baron.
You can't arrest someone for a behavior if you don't have a criminal standard for it.
Gun control like driver's licensing is about preventative regulation, setting standards for access to hardware with lethal potential.