All of the previous manned spacecraft used atmospheric braking and heat shields during re-entry. It is only after having slowed down considerably and reaching lower altitudes that Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Soyeuz deploy (or deployed) parachutes.
Dude, do you make a habit of pointing out the obvious? Dude, that's what "using parachutes for reentry" means (read the links that I pointed to).
Maybe it's time to go back to parachutes for reentry. In fact, there are some modern attempts. Those are the kinds of technologies we need for unmanned planetary probes anyway, and they are by far the most cost effective choice for sample return missions (where it may not be such a big deal if the parachutes fail).
It seems to me that the building of winged reentry vehicles is more driven by a desire for Buck Rogers-style space adventures, not good, cost-effective engineering.
US cyber-warfare units will attempt a DDoS attack on the Iraqi infrastructure through Iraq's remaining 56 kbaud AOL dialup connection. That will surely be successful.
Ever heard of the Earned Income Tax Credit? It does exactly that. Many people who qualify can claim back more than the total amount they paid in.
Yup, and if we want to stimulate the economy further, increasing it may be the way to go.
It is also a disincentive to look for a better job.
Big deal. Most people in this economy are happy to have a job at all, and even if they only make fractionally more for every additional dollar they earn, they will still have enough of an incentive to move up.
As it stands now, the wealthiest 50% of the population bears 96% of the tax burden so it's natural that an across-the-board tax cut would free more dollars up for the top 50% than the bottom 50% in absolute terms
Come on, that's silly politicking: you are defining "the tax" narrowly as income tax and then talk about an "across-the-board tax cut" as if there was something magic about it.
It doesn't matter how you justify it, the fact remains that if you want to stimulate the economy, you want to get money into the pockets of people most likely to spend it. If an across-the-board tax cut on income taxes doesn't achieve that, then an across-the-board tax cut on income taxes is the wrong thing to do and we need to look somewhere else for a solution. And what are those solutions? Payroll tax cuts, increased progressivity, measures that encourage lowering of the sales tax, etc. At the very least, we shouldn't make our budget deficit worse with a tax cut that has no prayer of stimulating the economy.
Your troll is ridiculous and unfounded.
No, what is ridiculous is that a few politicians with an agenda have managed to define the debate in such narrow terms that even fairly intelligent people don't see pretty obvious solutions. Think beyond the propaganda you are being fed.
If merchants like Wal-Mart haven't been charging sales tax on online orders
But merchants have been doing that: if you are in the same state, they have been charging sales tax, otherwise, they haven't. This agreement seems to go beyond what mail order traditionally entailed.
That's a dumbass point of view. Do you really think that someone buying 10 more happy meals helps McDonalds, Inc. more than someone buying 10,000 shares of their stock?
If companies don't have revenue, it doesn't matter how high their stock price goes in the short term because people don't have other places to put their money. So, yes, I think that buying happy meals helps both McDonalds and the economy a whole lot more than spending the same amount of money on McDonalds stock. And economists seem to think the same thing.
It's hard to direct tax breaks at the low end of the economy, since hardly anybody at the low end of the income distribution actually pays income tax to begin with
But they do pay payroll taxes, so you can either give them a break on that, or you can (gasp) rebate more than they paid in.
The Republicans and some Democrats in Congress want to stimulate the economy by giving people a tax break.
No, they don't. If tax breaks were about stimulating the economy, they would be directed at the low end of the income distribution--people likely to spend the extra money.
Instead, the administration gives huge tax breaks to the wealthy and introduces new sales taxes that hurt spending but make some special interests happy.
Internet's sales rising nearly exponentially each year
Of course, Internet sales are rising "exponentially"--your bank account with 0.5% interest also is "rising exponentially". Most things that grow grow exponentially, some just do it faster than others.
I don't get this--what does the Internet have to do with whether out-of-state orders get charged sales tax? Traditionally, when I order something mail-order over the phone or by mailing in an order, I didn't have to pay sales tax if I ordered from out of state. Has that changed as well?
It seems to me that the Internet is being used by brick-and-mortar merchants as a smokescreen to push an agenda they have been trying to push for decades.
As for "not hurting", what are these people thinking? Not having to pay sales tax just barely makes up for the shipping costs and extra hassles of on-line ordering. If I can't even save the sales tax anymore, then I might as well go to my local electronics store. Which is, of course, why state law makers have been lobbied so hard to push this through.
So far, whenever that has happened, the company violating the GPL has quickly settled out of court, usually by coming into compliance or by removing the GPL'ed code from their product. That suggests that the GPL really does have legal teeth.
Generally, the company is responsible for the actions of its employees. And given that, in this case, it is the company, not the individual, that benefitted, by saving licensing costs, it seems unlikely that that is going to fly. The presumption will be that the company somehow directed or forced the employee to do this (e.g., by requiring him to maintain the network and simply refusing to buy the licenses).
The BSA is going to go where the money is, which is with the company.
Sure: get the credit card-sized CD-R/CD-RWs. You can put them into a paper or plastic sleeve to protect them (although they don't usually need it). They end up being smaller and more robust than floppies.
Still, with better support for USB drives, the little flash USB drives would be an even better solution IMO.
Perhaps they would appear to MacOSX machines. Windows and Linux machines, however, wouldn't see it because there are few or no Rendezvous clients for those platforms (no major distribution seems to include Apple's implementation, probably because of its license).
In fact, while Apple makes a big deal out of service discovery through Rendezvous, several technologies fulfilling a similar purpose have been out there for a long time. WINS, in particular, probably, would be the most useful for this thing to support because then Windows machines (and Linux machines, for that matter) could discover it automatically.
The license for Apple's Rendezvous implementation is unacceptable to many people. I wouldn't be surprised if the license alone would keep Sony from using this. Furthemore, no major Linux distribution has packaged it up. So, in effect, there is no usable Linux implementation of Rendezvous. Also, since only a tiny fraction of all machines use Rendezvous yet, there isn't much incentive for Sony to expend any effort on this.
RTFA. There is no nannying by the government or courts. He used to have a supplier, couldn't present enough to demand to stay with them, and is now having a problem with a different company. In fact it has nothing to do with anything but a crappy company. Why people are discussing to death this one small business problem is beyond me.
RTFA yourself: the supplier is pretty clearly afraid of various liability issues.
Even if FMC weren't providing the peroxide out of fear of liability (which seems unlikely, since THAT'S WHAT THEY SELL), it would be a matter of civil litigation and have nothing to do with "nannying".
Ummm... civil litigation is based on laws and the courts.
Go back to your libertarian cubbyhole where you can have your own way with everything. People as dumb as you are the reason the rest of us have to deal with repressive regulation where it DOES exist.
I'm not a libertarian by a long shot. I believe in strong government regulation for lots of things. But I draw the line at trying to protect stupid people from blowing up themselves.
Let people blow themselves up if they like. If an adult orders it, the supplier should not be responsible for this.
Now, there is some minor concern that someone might use this to blow up someone else, but I think that worry is disproportionate. There are lots of cheaper and simpler ways of blowing things up (fertilizer, for example).
With this kind of insane nannying by the government and courts, it's no wonder that people don't go into engineering and the sciences as much anymore. You can still crash on your motorcycle, roll yourself over in your insanely imbalanced SUV, kill yourself rock climbing, or even have yourself blown up in a rocket for billions of dollars courtesy of the US tax payer, but if you want to do something stupid with chemicals at home, the lawsuits start flying and everybody gets very protective.
If you want protection from this, you're going to need to do some serious work on iptables to add tracking of fragments to the connection tracking code and to rewrite the field on outbound packets to some psuedo-random value.
I don't think that's necessary. It's probably sufficient to just encrypt the IPid field using the source and destination as the key (and adding some salt), and decrypt the IPid field for every packet that comes in. Yes, you can get collisions, but you can get collisions already anyway, and they are very unlikely to occur or matter at DSL speeds.
And, frankly, I suspect that's not even a coincidence. What would the industry like more than being able to sell you the same content every few years, like they have for the entire last century? In the past, the media did wear out, or they could be obsoleted. Today, they have to rot in order to accomplish the same goal.
Dell couldn't just have dropped it five years ago: too many people were relying on it for too many things (BIOS updates, software distribution, digital cameras, operating system installs, SmartMedia access, etc.). In fact, many vendors have tried to drop floppy drives many times from their machines over many years and customers would always order them anyway.
Apple is one company, controlling both hardware and software. Of course, they can change course whenever they like and impose whatever corporate strategy they want. That's both a blessing and a curse. Fortunately, we have a choice: an all-Apple world would be just as horrible as an all-PC world.
CD-R(W) really is a pretty good replacement now: a CD-R is nearly as cheap as a floppy, it can be written fast, and just about any machine can reliably boot from it.
What is really missing now is a universal ability to boot from USB drives, including pen drives. And, frankly, Linux installers should be able to work from USB drives, which many of them currently don't.
Because astronauts can check their telemetry, and not bounce off of mars.
For the money we sink into manned space travel, we can afford to lose 90% of our unmanned probes and still come out ahead.
Because humans are _still_ more efficient at direct science.
Again, to get that efficiency you pay a disproportionate amount of money.
Because it inspires the country, and makes space travel worthwhile AT ALL.
Well, people can delude themselves in many ways. Some people seriously believe that they will get resurrected or that aliens will pick them up in a flying saucer. Manned space travel is not all that different. In reality, space travel will not become a mass undertaking for generations using any technology we have available: it will remain dangerous, slow, and hugely expensive. And to develop technology that will make space travel feasible, we shouldn't keep blowing up people, we should invest in engines and technology.
The choice doesn't come down to, as you seem to imply, running a serial console or putting a monitor and keyboard on every machine. X11 is network transparent. Use the serial console for booting, and afterwards run a desktop on that machine and access it over the network, either using X11 directly or using VNC.
I fully agree that we should leave earth orbit to telepresence and robots. But why send astronauts into space at all, anywhere, at this point? There is lots and lots of really useful science that we can do reasonably affordably with unmanned probes right now. Sending lots of probes to the different planets could keep us busy for decades and keep yielding new and interesting results. And, as part of that, our propulsion systems, knowledge of space, and knowledge of planets and asteroids would increase dramatically.
Putting people into space just doesn't seem like the best use of our resources at this point. But with more unmanned experience, manned space travel will eventually become fairly easy. Let's pace ourselves, do the easy stuff first, and not rush out there.
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Dude, do you make a habit of pointing out the obvious? Dude, that's what "using parachutes for reentry" means (read the links that I pointed to).
It seems to me that the building of winged reentry vehicles is more driven by a desire for Buck Rogers-style space adventures, not good, cost-effective engineering.
US cyber-warfare units will attempt a DDoS attack on the Iraqi infrastructure through Iraq's remaining 56 kbaud AOL dialup connection. That will surely be successful.
Yup, and if we want to stimulate the economy further, increasing it may be the way to go.
It is also a disincentive to look for a better job.
Big deal. Most people in this economy are happy to have a job at all, and even if they only make fractionally more for every additional dollar they earn, they will still have enough of an incentive to move up.
Come on, that's silly politicking: you are defining "the tax" narrowly as income tax and then talk about an "across-the-board tax cut" as if there was something magic about it.
It doesn't matter how you justify it, the fact remains that if you want to stimulate the economy, you want to get money into the pockets of people most likely to spend it. If an across-the-board tax cut on income taxes doesn't achieve that, then an across-the-board tax cut on income taxes is the wrong thing to do and we need to look somewhere else for a solution. And what are those solutions? Payroll tax cuts, increased progressivity, measures that encourage lowering of the sales tax, etc. At the very least, we shouldn't make our budget deficit worse with a tax cut that has no prayer of stimulating the economy.
Your troll is ridiculous and unfounded.
No, what is ridiculous is that a few politicians with an agenda have managed to define the debate in such narrow terms that even fairly intelligent people don't see pretty obvious solutions. Think beyond the propaganda you are being fed.
But merchants have been doing that: if you are in the same state, they have been charging sales tax, otherwise, they haven't. This agreement seems to go beyond what mail order traditionally entailed.
If companies don't have revenue, it doesn't matter how high their stock price goes in the short term because people don't have other places to put their money. So, yes, I think that buying happy meals helps both McDonalds and the economy a whole lot more than spending the same amount of money on McDonalds stock. And economists seem to think the same thing.
But they do pay payroll taxes, so you can either give them a break on that, or you can (gasp) rebate more than they paid in.
No, they don't. If tax breaks were about stimulating the economy, they would be directed at the low end of the income distribution--people likely to spend the extra money.
Instead, the administration gives huge tax breaks to the wealthy and introduces new sales taxes that hurt spending but make some special interests happy.
Internet's sales rising nearly exponentially each year
Of course, Internet sales are rising "exponentially"--your bank account with 0.5% interest also is "rising exponentially". Most things that grow grow exponentially, some just do it faster than others.
It seems to me that the Internet is being used by brick-and-mortar merchants as a smokescreen to push an agenda they have been trying to push for decades.
As for "not hurting", what are these people thinking? Not having to pay sales tax just barely makes up for the shipping costs and extra hassles of on-line ordering. If I can't even save the sales tax anymore, then I might as well go to my local electronics store. Which is, of course, why state law makers have been lobbied so hard to push this through.
So far, whenever that has happened, the company violating the GPL has quickly settled out of court, usually by coming into compliance or by removing the GPL'ed code from their product. That suggests that the GPL really does have legal teeth.
The BSA is going to go where the money is, which is with the company.
Still, with better support for USB drives, the little flash USB drives would be an even better solution IMO.
Sure bet for the Darwin award.
In fact, while Apple makes a big deal out of service discovery through Rendezvous, several technologies fulfilling a similar purpose have been out there for a long time. WINS, in particular, probably, would be the most useful for this thing to support because then Windows machines (and Linux machines, for that matter) could discover it automatically.
The license for Apple's Rendezvous implementation is unacceptable to many people. I wouldn't be surprised if the license alone would keep Sony from using this. Furthemore, no major Linux distribution has packaged it up. So, in effect, there is no usable Linux implementation of Rendezvous. Also, since only a tiny fraction of all machines use Rendezvous yet, there isn't much incentive for Sony to expend any effort on this.
RTFA yourself: the supplier is pretty clearly afraid of various liability issues.
Even if FMC weren't providing the peroxide out of fear of liability (which seems unlikely, since THAT'S WHAT THEY SELL), it would be a matter of civil litigation and have nothing to do with "nannying".
Ummm... civil litigation is based on laws and the courts.
Go back to your libertarian cubbyhole where you can have your own way with everything. People as dumb as you are the reason the rest of us have to deal with repressive regulation where it DOES exist.
I'm not a libertarian by a long shot. I believe in strong government regulation for lots of things. But I draw the line at trying to protect stupid people from blowing up themselves.
Now, there is some minor concern that someone might use this to blow up someone else, but I think that worry is disproportionate. There are lots of cheaper and simpler ways of blowing things up (fertilizer, for example).
With this kind of insane nannying by the government and courts, it's no wonder that people don't go into engineering and the sciences as much anymore. You can still crash on your motorcycle, roll yourself over in your insanely imbalanced SUV, kill yourself rock climbing, or even have yourself blown up in a rocket for billions of dollars courtesy of the US tax payer, but if you want to do something stupid with chemicals at home, the lawsuits start flying and everybody gets very protective.
I don't think that's necessary. It's probably sufficient to just encrypt the IPid field using the source and destination as the key (and adding some salt), and decrypt the IPid field for every packet that comes in. Yes, you can get collisions, but you can get collisions already anyway, and they are very unlikely to occur or matter at DSL speeds.
And, frankly, I suspect that's not even a coincidence. What would the industry like more than being able to sell you the same content every few years, like they have for the entire last century? In the past, the media did wear out, or they could be obsoleted. Today, they have to rot in order to accomplish the same goal.
Apple is one company, controlling both hardware and software. Of course, they can change course whenever they like and impose whatever corporate strategy they want. That's both a blessing and a curse. Fortunately, we have a choice: an all-Apple world would be just as horrible as an all-PC world.
What is really missing now is a universal ability to boot from USB drives, including pen drives. And, frankly, Linux installers should be able to work from USB drives, which many of them currently don't.
For the money we sink into manned space travel, we can afford to lose 90% of our unmanned probes and still come out ahead.
Because humans are _still_ more efficient at direct science.
Again, to get that efficiency you pay a disproportionate amount of money.
Because it inspires the country, and makes space travel worthwhile AT ALL.
Well, people can delude themselves in many ways. Some people seriously believe that they will get resurrected or that aliens will pick them up in a flying saucer. Manned space travel is not all that different. In reality, space travel will not become a mass undertaking for generations using any technology we have available: it will remain dangerous, slow, and hugely expensive. And to develop technology that will make space travel feasible, we shouldn't keep blowing up people, we should invest in engines and technology.
The choice doesn't come down to, as you seem to imply, running a serial console or putting a monitor and keyboard on every machine. X11 is network transparent. Use the serial console for booting, and afterwards run a desktop on that machine and access it over the network, either using X11 directly or using VNC.
Putting people into space just doesn't seem like the best use of our resources at this point. But with more unmanned experience, manned space travel will eventually become fairly easy. Let's pace ourselves, do the easy stuff first, and not rush out there.