Think about the one place where a person is required to have a large amount of very bulky books with them and they need to carry them from place to place.
How about when vacationing? I read quite quickly, which means that I need to carry around a substantial mass of books. A backlight would be dandy when camping or in shared accomodation. A little bit of ruggedizing and waterproofing mean that I could read comfortably in the bathtub, pool, or floating in an inner tube on the lake.
Similarly, a drink machine could contain a reader coil around the inside of the refrigerated box that could poll the contents of the machine and set prices accordingly (today I have 20oz Coke bottles - they're $1. The Red Bulls are $2, etc). The machine could also 'call home' when a particular item runs low. There are lots of reasons to have unique IDs on otherwise identical products.
There are lots of reasons--but these...aren't them.
A pop machine gets filled by a field guy. He notes how many cans of each type of soda he puts in, and can punch that in to the machine.
The pop machine knocks one off of that count each time it sells a can of a given flavour. It may have a cellular link to 'phone home' whenever it runs low, or the company might just know based on past usage how often to send someone to refill it.
RFID is pointless for this application--it's not like cans are coming and going at random, able to walk off the shelf and screw up the inventory. Not only that, but the inside of a pop machine often contains a lot of metal--and so do the cans. Getting clean RF signals might be a tough engineering problem. (Remember the titanium Powerbooks with internal wireless card that had trouble communicating with the outside world?)
In other words, lots of kids will replicate sexual behaviour they see in movies and on TV, but not many will replicate the violent behaviour they observe.
Counterargument:
Kids (and adults) have a biological imperative those raging hormones you mentioned to have sex. It's a healthy and natural desire. One of those things evolution stuck us with.
Kids (and adults) don't generally physically attack someone or something violently unless a) they feel that they are in danger, or b) they think it's something they can eat. Again, a biological imperative. Randomly acts of violence for no 'productive' purpose were mostly weeded out of our psyche, just because there's no survival advantage to it.
Does seeing sex/violence on television increase the incidence of either behaviour? Perhaps. If it does, does the notion that it affects one behaviour but not the other hang together? I doubt it. People have always preferred sex to violent confrontation (except in pathological cases). The fact that more young people have sex than commit random acts of violence is both unsurprising and healthy. Further, it is the pattern of behaviour that was observed prior to the development of television, too.
From a strictly financial perspective, teenage sex is much more costly than violence. That teenage sex results in teenage pregnancies, which gives us welfare mothers, children growing up in single-parent homes (which, incidentally, has been shown in some studies to correlate with juvenile deliquency, i.e. violence, hmmmmm), and so on. The burden on society is enormous.
Really? Teenage sex is more costly than violence? If I shoot someone in cold blood, then the base costs to society are: fifty thousand dollars for the guy to receive medical treatment (assuming that I shot him somewhere reasonably important); fifty to several hundred thousand dollars for my trial and appeals; anywhere up to a hundred thousand dollars per year to incarcerate me...
Teen pregnancy, welfare mom--twelve grand per year (in a generous state) plus maybe eight thousand per year in medical coverage. An abuse of statistics is also worth noting here. Yes, children who come from single-parent homes are significantly more likely to be involved in violent acts when they are older. This neglects the observation that the fraction of those children who actually commit violent acts is still quite small.
Incidentally, the parent is also presuming that teenage sex necessarily leads to teen pregnancy, single parenthood, social degeneracy, and a welfare crack whore mother.
The actual costs of teenage sex are usually closer to: a few hundred dollars (lifetime total, maximum) for condoms; or a few hundred dollars for birth control pills; or two thousand dollars for an abortion; or a child placed for adoption. Healthy children are very much in demand, by infertile couples in so-called good homes.
The only obvious conclusion is that we need to replace the violence on television with more sex. I'd rather have kids fucking than kids shooting.
"Only the one that Microsoft sent me that was a required security upgrade. Come to think of it, that's about when this problem started"
To be fair, we on Slashdot have (rightly) spent many years telling our family, friends, and coworkers that Microsoft products are dreadfully insecure as shipped, and one of the key parts of defending yourself (at least a little bit) is regularly installing patches.
I suppose we should be glad that they're at least getting part of the message....
This is a classic case of "Don't trust the mass media except when there's an article that I agree with, in which case, trust the mass media".
How about don't trust the mass media, or independent bloggers, or Linus freaking Torvalds, or any news source.
Read the article. Test the arguments. Compare with other points of view and other speakers with other axes to grind.
If CNN publishes a well-reasoned article that contains sound arguments, verifiably factual information, and no apparent lies of omission, then yes, in this case the mass media can be trusted--or rather, is worth referring to.
To be homonyms, words must be pronounced in the same way. The 's' sounds are very different in those two words. See also the pronunciation keys for loose and lose. Remember the following two phrases, observe the difference:
You snooze, you lose.
Loose as a goose.
If we were seeing 'lose' and 'loos' (plural of loo) substituted, that would make sense. Those two are homonyms.
Sure, I recognized the ship name, but if a/.'er doesn't recognize the brand name, what households are you thinking of that would?
The important households to Burt Rutan. He's got the world on a string because of SpaceShipOne. If he and Scaled Composites decide they want to build a real spaceship--an orbital craft--the people that are going to make it possible now know he's not just blowing smoke. His company has gone to space, and they were the first to do it.
There are a lot of people who are engineers for NASA contractors or other aerospace companies who--based on this demonstration--are probably significantly more willing to consider an offer from Burt if and when he says he wants to build another spacecraft. He's also bought the attention of all the young, innovative, up-and-coming designers and engineers.
Perhaps more important, people with access to and control of venture capital will be more prepared to sink money into his next project. (Heck, this is partly what the X-Prize is all about--demonstrating feasability.) Sure, Burt Rutan was already pretty respected in both of those circles, but this is the first time he's shown that he can 'walk the walk' with respect to space flight.
Recognition is very nice, but it doesn't pay any bills. Ultimately, you have to have a product.
Scaled Composites sells a number of products and services. If they want to justify charging premium prices for aerospace design, testing, and custom fabrication, then building the world's only privately owned and operated manned spaceship is an excellent marketing stunt.
True, they're not selling spacecraft right now--but I'll wager the rest of their company is making a mint from the publicity. General Motors doesn't build NASCAR engines to make money--they build them for publicity.
Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Washington State) has a lengthy discussion of this here. Sen. Cantwell's efforts to short circuit this nonsense may have paid off, as this subsequent statement seems to indicate.
I'd feel better seeing scientific data from both sides, rather than just the Senator's press releases. I'm skeptical over whether or not she's just making political hay out of the issue.
What if--I know, it's a remote possibility--the waste in question actually is less harmful than previously supposed? What if our understanding is a little better now than it was? Better than it was in 1982, for instance, when the original legislation classifying the waste was passed...?
I'm not prepared to make a statement one way or another. And I'm damn sure I'm not going to pass judgement based on a Senator's press release.
With all of this said, the whole problem is one more of time and effort than danger. The location is really pretty unlikely to see a lot of migration outside Hanford and if it does go into the Columbia River it will be diluted well below any level of concern. The river is not small. At nearly 100,000 CFS flow and shortly diluted to 200,000 CFS average flow, this stuff is gone... gone... gone.
On the other hand, depending on the local geology, you might find areas where there are accumulations. Perhaps a change in the composition of the river bed in one area to a material that binds specific radioisotopes. Specific local species might also bioaccumulate some of the nasty heavy metals, then sink to the riverbed when they die. If erosion undercuts a section of riverbank that's been steadily accumulating toxins, suddenly all that contamination gets dumped in the river at once. For a few minutes or hours, you might have concentrations that are way above the (safe) average.
It's not the sort of thing I would lose sleep over, but assuming that dilution is an open and shut answer is a bit dangerous.
On a dollar-for-dollar basis space research of any kind (manned or unmanned) is pretty much a total waste of money. Some examples will help: the Hubble Space Telescope cost something like 2 billion. That's about 20 times the cost of the Keck Telescope, and it is about neck-and-neck when it comes to scientific output between the two.
Well, there's a nonsense comparison if I've ever seen one. How are we measuring 'scientific output', exactly?
Both instruments can perform measurements that no other telescope is capable of. The Hubble is far and away a winner in that respect, just because it has access to wavelengths (the vacuum ultraviolet and the infrared) that don't penetrate our atmosphere. Because of redshift issues, no earthbound telescope can ever see the stuff we got from the Hubble Deep Field. The Keck kicks ass for light-gathering and resolution because of the tremendous aperture (10 meters(!) for both of Keck I and Keck II)) and its ability to function as an interferometer.
Damn it, some research is just more expensive. On a research-dollars-per-published-paper metric, perhaps Keck comes out as a 'better' investment--but without Hubble, there are whole classes of investigation that are flat-out impossible. Not only that, but neither instrument exists in a (scientific) vacuum--there is a synergistic effect, because results from one instrument can be used to guide studies on others.
It's like saying we should only fund theoretical cosmologists or astrophysicists--they only need one salary, one office, and enough money for pencils and paper. Why do actual measurements in the field? Those would be much more expensive per published paper.
Comparing the cost per publication (or however you choose to measure 'scientific output') is a gross oversimplification. Apples and oranges. It reminds me of when Homer visits the Bentley dealer and asks after the test drive, "What advantages does this motor car have over, say, a train...?" Different purposes, different costs, different science.
My own field is physics (radiation, not astro-). Working next to me are people who work with instruments ranging in price from $2000 to $20 million...there aren't vast differences in 'scientific output', just different costs associated with exploring different aspects of science.
In terms of improving human life, wouldn't the billions spent on un-manned space exploration be better spent curing disease through the NIH? Or a tax-cut. I mean, tax -cuts and de-regulation make more ultra-billionaires; if they want to fund space research privately then they can do that, and the free market will reward it accordingly (if in fact it is worthwhile).
The first argument--the ever popular 'wouldn't the money be better spent on problem X here on earth' refrain--has been addressed many times before. It's a philosophical question. If we wait until all the other problems on Earth are solved, we'll never again do any exploration, or even basic science research that doesn't have immediately obvious applications. Many people believe that it is worthwhile to spend a small amount of public money on projects that--despite having no immediate and obvious economic, military or health benefit--are of interest to the country and its citizens.
The second argument--that the private sector will fund space research if it's worthwhile--is interesting. There are direct, marketable benefits to health research, but the NIH is still disbursing billions from the public purse for that purpose. Why is that? Oh, right. If it can't be made into a patented procedure or drug, the private sector isn't interested. If it won't improve the quarterly results, the private sector isn't interested. We have more than a few billionaires already. Most of them are not funding space or medical research, except in cases where they're trying to buy a positive legacy after years as robber barons.
What if Columbus had said: "You can't sail to India. Everyone knows that."
He really should have said that. He was a flaming idiot. He chose (or was persuaded to choose) the most optimistic estimates for the distance to India in the west. (They already knew the world was round at that time--he didn't prove anything on that score.) Rightly he should have run out of provisions half way across, but he got lucky and ran into the Americas.
He sold Isabella and Ferdinand a load of crap, and should have been hung if he made it back. You can't sail to India that way.
He just got really lucky that there happened to be a couple of continents in the way. If he had said, "I think there might be a continent or two out in that vast expanse of ocean", and if he had acknowledged the correct (and known) size of the Earth, then I might give him some credit. As it stands, he was a lucky idiot.
SpaceShipOne will never deliver a return of investment, primarily because it's useless as anything but a joy ride.
How much would your private aerospace company pay for front-page recognition in all the world's major newspapers for launching the first privately-funded commercial space flight, designed and built by your company?
Because of SpaceShipOne, Scaled Composites is very nearly a household name. Could they have achieved the same level of recognition by pouring a few tens of millions of dollars directly into advertising instead? Maybe...but by going this route, they get all the recognition, plus a fledgeling spacecraft research program with at least one tangible prototype so far.
No return on investment? They're laughing all the way to the bank.
Mercury's orbital speed is about 47.9 km/sec, Earth's is 29.8 km/sec- you've got to get about 20km/sec (~40,000 mph) from somewhere, and chemical rockets aren't feasible.
Oops--you have to watch for gravitational potential energy. Since you're dropping much closer to the sun, you convert a whole bunch of potential energy into kinetic energy. Back of the envelope says about 1.3 GJ per kilogram, but I could have goofed.
If I didn't mess up the numbers, then a probe that departs earth travelling 30 km/s picks up an extra...actually, very nearly another 30 km/s. You actually have to dump some (okay, a lot of) energy.
Ummmmm, yea, Microsoft as a news provider. Just the job for a convicted monopoly. And don't say, "They're just getting news from other sites" because what you choose to cover is the biggest bias in the news industry.
I wish they would get over this illusion that they are a content provider.
What did the MS in MSNBC stand for, again? Microsoft is a content provider, and with respect to MSNBC's offerings not appreciably more or less trustworthy than most others. They seem to cover Microsoft's latest worms and holes with the same thoroughness, accuracy, and detail as the rest of the mainstream media. (That is, their coverage isn't very good--but neither is anybody else's, so I give MS the benefit of the doubt here.)
But in light of a study a few years ago that indicated that they could slash prices across the board by 90% (yes, that is EVERYTHING) and still make money,
De Beers could slash the price of diamonds almost as much be releasing some of their stockpile and ceasing to manipulate the market--and still make a generous amount of money.
But they would rather make a lot of money.
From a business standpoint, it's tough to argue with that....
Sure, they'll probably have to revise their revenue model at some point, but that's still years away. Who's to say that they don't have a group working on Linux ports of their core applications, and a strategy in the wings to deal with a change in the market? For now, they're understandably loathe to a) sell a cheaper version of their flagship cash cow, and b) make it easier for users to dispense with Microsoft's other cash cow.
I'm left with a choice of investing $1,950 or $2,050. +/- $50 is a bigger deal if I'm investing $2,000 than if I'm investing $200,000.
You're kidding, right? That fifty dollar difference you're talking about is 2.5% of the amount you would be investing. The value of your "$2000" worth of stock can easily shift that much up or down in a normal day's trading. (Actually, with higher priced stocks, the intraday changes in price are usually smaller, percentage-wise, than the changes in lower-priced stocks....)
If you're obsessively rebalancing your portfolio to a 2% precision with each stock...you need a saner financial advisor.
...Windows still kicks Linuxs (Linux's? Linuxii?) ass...
You're looking for the possessive form (the ass being kicked belongs to Linux.) Generally, words ending in x take an apostrophe s: Linux's.
The plural form would be Linuxes. Some wags also suggest Linices or Linuces, as a play on index/indices. Linuxen is also popular, based on box/boxen--which is in turn nonstandard English. (It's an application of the German practice of forming the plural of feminine nouns by adding -en, just because some geeks many years ago thought it would be fun, and because boxen sounds cool. The correct plural is boxes.)
Linuxii is a lexicological disaster, and I'm sure the parent was kidding. It presumes that there is a Latin stem, and that the singular form is Linuxius. (This sort of problem also arises with people who believe the plural of virus is virii--it implies a singular form of virius. For those who haven't seen this debate before, the proper plural is viruses.)
Re:The article is almost totally WRONG!
on
Are You Annoying?
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· Score: 1
What if it is the OTHER person's skill that is sub-standard. Well, the easy solution is to say that if the IT person was an even BETTER communicator, then s/he could compensate for the failings of the other person.
From the article: "If I'm dealing with a [nonintuitive] person, I need to put things in concrete language. This person doesn't want abstractions."
Now, the REAL PROBLEM is that it is MUCH MORE DIFFICULT to develop expert skills than it is to develop average skills.
The other side to this, of course, is that when management is hiring individuals for a helpdesk-type position, communication with users is a central part of the job. Strong communication skills should become a hiring criterion.
Management is thinking, "I can hire a couple of tech people that are also excellent communicators...and pay a small premium for them."
Management is not thinking, "Gee, my IT department is struggling to communicate with all my entry level people who just use their computers as tools to get the rest of their jobs done. I should provide several hours of training to the entire workforce on details that usually aren't relevant to their jobs."
Management is sometimes right--it depends a lot on the industry, the number of people involved, the other skills they may have.
In a really proactive IT department, some individuals might even work to prepare some formal documentation--basic introductory material, plus some FAQs about the hardware people use.
Slashdot Mirror
How about when vacationing? I read quite quickly, which means that I need to carry around a substantial mass of books. A backlight would be dandy when camping or in shared accomodation. A little bit of ruggedizing and waterproofing mean that I could read comfortably in the bathtub, pool, or floating in an inner tube on the lake.
There are lots of reasons--but these...aren't them.
A pop machine gets filled by a field guy. He notes how many cans of each type of soda he puts in, and can punch that in to the machine.
The pop machine knocks one off of that count each time it sells a can of a given flavour. It may have a cellular link to 'phone home' whenever it runs low, or the company might just know based on past usage how often to send someone to refill it.
RFID is pointless for this application--it's not like cans are coming and going at random, able to walk off the shelf and screw up the inventory. Not only that, but the inside of a pop machine often contains a lot of metal--and so do the cans. Getting clean RF signals might be a tough engineering problem. (Remember the titanium Powerbooks with internal wireless card that had trouble communicating with the outside world?)
Counterargument:
Kids (and adults) have a biological imperative those raging hormones you mentioned to have sex. It's a healthy and natural desire. One of those things evolution stuck us with.
Kids (and adults) don't generally physically attack someone or something violently unless a) they feel that they are in danger, or b) they think it's something they can eat. Again, a biological imperative. Randomly acts of violence for no 'productive' purpose were mostly weeded out of our psyche, just because there's no survival advantage to it.
Does seeing sex/violence on television increase the incidence of either behaviour? Perhaps. If it does, does the notion that it affects one behaviour but not the other hang together? I doubt it. People have always preferred sex to violent confrontation (except in pathological cases). The fact that more young people have sex than commit random acts of violence is both unsurprising and healthy. Further, it is the pattern of behaviour that was observed prior to the development of television, too.
From a strictly financial perspective, teenage sex is much more costly than violence. That teenage sex results in teenage pregnancies, which gives us welfare mothers, children growing up in single-parent homes (which, incidentally, has been shown in some studies to correlate with juvenile deliquency, i.e. violence, hmmmmm), and so on. The burden on society is enormous.
Really? Teenage sex is more costly than violence? If I shoot someone in cold blood, then the base costs to society are: fifty thousand dollars for the guy to receive medical treatment (assuming that I shot him somewhere reasonably important); fifty to several hundred thousand dollars for my trial and appeals; anywhere up to a hundred thousand dollars per year to incarcerate me...
Teen pregnancy, welfare mom--twelve grand per year (in a generous state) plus maybe eight thousand per year in medical coverage. An abuse of statistics is also worth noting here. Yes, children who come from single-parent homes are significantly more likely to be involved in violent acts when they are older. This neglects the observation that the fraction of those children who actually commit violent acts is still quite small.
Incidentally, the parent is also presuming that teenage sex necessarily leads to teen pregnancy, single parenthood, social degeneracy, and a welfare crack whore mother.
The actual costs of teenage sex are usually closer to: a few hundred dollars (lifetime total, maximum) for condoms; or a few hundred dollars for birth control pills; or two thousand dollars for an abortion; or a child placed for adoption. Healthy children are very much in demand, by infertile couples in so-called good homes.
The only obvious conclusion is that we need to replace the violence on television with more sex. I'd rather have kids fucking than kids shooting.
ATA is also kind of hot swappable;
Words to strike fear in the heart of a tech if I've ever seen them....
To be fair, we on Slashdot have (rightly) spent many years telling our family, friends, and coworkers that Microsoft products are dreadfully insecure as shipped, and one of the key parts of defending yourself (at least a little bit) is regularly installing patches.
I suppose we should be glad that they're at least getting part of the message....
How about don't trust the mass media, or independent bloggers, or Linus freaking Torvalds, or any news source.
Read the article. Test the arguments. Compare with other points of view and other speakers with other axes to grind.
If CNN publishes a well-reasoned article that contains sound arguments, verifiably factual information, and no apparent lies of omission, then yes, in this case the mass media can be trusted--or rather, is worth referring to.
Eh?
To be homonyms, words must be pronounced in the same way. The 's' sounds are very different in those two words. See also the pronunciation keys for loose and lose. Remember the following two phrases, observe the difference:
You snooze, you lose.
Loose as a goose.
If we were seeing 'lose' and 'loos' (plural of loo) substituted, that would make sense. Those two are homonyms.
The important households to Burt Rutan. He's got the world on a string because of SpaceShipOne. If he and Scaled Composites decide they want to build a real spaceship--an orbital craft--the people that are going to make it possible now know he's not just blowing smoke. His company has gone to space, and they were the first to do it.
There are a lot of people who are engineers for NASA contractors or other aerospace companies who--based on this demonstration--are probably significantly more willing to consider an offer from Burt if and when he says he wants to build another spacecraft. He's also bought the attention of all the young, innovative, up-and-coming designers and engineers.
Perhaps more important, people with access to and control of venture capital will be more prepared to sink money into his next project. (Heck, this is partly what the X-Prize is all about--demonstrating feasability.) Sure, Burt Rutan was already pretty respected in both of those circles, but this is the first time he's shown that he can 'walk the walk' with respect to space flight.
Scaled Composites sells a number of products and services. If they want to justify charging premium prices for aerospace design, testing, and custom fabrication, then building the world's only privately owned and operated manned spaceship is an excellent marketing stunt.
True, they're not selling spacecraft right now--but I'll wager the rest of their company is making a mint from the publicity. General Motors doesn't build NASCAR engines to make money--they build them for publicity.
I'd feel better seeing scientific data from both sides, rather than just the Senator's press releases. I'm skeptical over whether or not she's just making political hay out of the issue.
What if--I know, it's a remote possibility--the waste in question actually is less harmful than previously supposed? What if our understanding is a little better now than it was? Better than it was in 1982, for instance, when the original legislation classifying the waste was passed...?
I'm not prepared to make a statement one way or another. And I'm damn sure I'm not going to pass judgement based on a Senator's press release.
On the other hand, depending on the local geology, you might find areas where there are accumulations. Perhaps a change in the composition of the river bed in one area to a material that binds specific radioisotopes. Specific local species might also bioaccumulate some of the nasty heavy metals, then sink to the riverbed when they die. If erosion undercuts a section of riverbank that's been steadily accumulating toxins, suddenly all that contamination gets dumped in the river at once. For a few minutes or hours, you might have concentrations that are way above the (safe) average.
It's not the sort of thing I would lose sleep over, but assuming that dilution is an open and shut answer is a bit dangerous.
Well, there's a nonsense comparison if I've ever seen one. How are we measuring 'scientific output', exactly?
Both instruments can perform measurements that no other telescope is capable of. The Hubble is far and away a winner in that respect, just because it has access to wavelengths (the vacuum ultraviolet and the infrared) that don't penetrate our atmosphere. Because of redshift issues, no earthbound telescope can ever see the stuff we got from the Hubble Deep Field. The Keck kicks ass for light-gathering and resolution because of the tremendous aperture (10 meters(!) for both of Keck I and Keck II)) and its ability to function as an interferometer.
Damn it, some research is just more expensive. On a research-dollars-per-published-paper metric, perhaps Keck comes out as a 'better' investment--but without Hubble, there are whole classes of investigation that are flat-out impossible. Not only that, but neither instrument exists in a (scientific) vacuum--there is a synergistic effect, because results from one instrument can be used to guide studies on others.
It's like saying we should only fund theoretical cosmologists or astrophysicists--they only need one salary, one office, and enough money for pencils and paper. Why do actual measurements in the field? Those would be much more expensive per published paper.
Comparing the cost per publication (or however you choose to measure 'scientific output') is a gross oversimplification. Apples and oranges. It reminds me of when Homer visits the Bentley dealer and asks after the test drive, "What advantages does this motor car have over, say, a train...?" Different purposes, different costs, different science.
My own field is physics (radiation, not astro-). Working next to me are people who work with instruments ranging in price from $2000 to $20 million...there aren't vast differences in 'scientific output', just different costs associated with exploring different aspects of science.
In terms of improving human life, wouldn't the billions spent on un-manned space exploration be better spent curing disease through the NIH? Or a tax-cut. I mean, tax -cuts and de-regulation make more ultra-billionaires; if they want to fund space research privately then they can do that, and the free market will reward it accordingly (if in fact it is worthwhile).
The first argument--the ever popular 'wouldn't the money be better spent on problem X here on earth' refrain--has been addressed many times before. It's a philosophical question. If we wait until all the other problems on Earth are solved, we'll never again do any exploration, or even basic science research that doesn't have immediately obvious applications. Many people believe that it is worthwhile to spend a small amount of public money on projects that--despite having no immediate and obvious economic, military or health benefit--are of interest to the country and its citizens.
The second argument--that the private sector will fund space research if it's worthwhile--is interesting. There are direct, marketable benefits to health research, but the NIH is still disbursing billions from the public purse for that purpose. Why is that? Oh, right. If it can't be made into a patented procedure or drug, the private sector isn't interested. If it won't improve the quarterly results, the private sector isn't interested. We have more than a few billionaires already. Most of them are not funding space or medical research, except in cases where they're trying to buy a positive legacy after years as robber barons.
He really should have said that. He was a flaming idiot. He chose (or was persuaded to choose) the most optimistic estimates for the distance to India in the west. (They already knew the world was round at that time--he didn't prove anything on that score.) Rightly he should have run out of provisions half way across, but he got lucky and ran into the Americas.
He sold Isabella and Ferdinand a load of crap, and should have been hung if he made it back. You can't sail to India that way.
He just got really lucky that there happened to be a couple of continents in the way. If he had said, "I think there might be a continent or two out in that vast expanse of ocean", and if he had acknowledged the correct (and known) size of the Earth, then I might give him some credit. As it stands, he was a lucky idiot.
How much would your private aerospace company pay for front-page recognition in all the world's major newspapers for launching the first privately-funded commercial space flight, designed and built by your company?
Because of SpaceShipOne, Scaled Composites is very nearly a household name. Could they have achieved the same level of recognition by pouring a few tens of millions of dollars directly into advertising instead? Maybe...but by going this route, they get all the recognition, plus a fledgeling spacecraft research program with at least one tangible prototype so far.
No return on investment? They're laughing all the way to the bank.
Oops--you have to watch for gravitational potential energy. Since you're dropping much closer to the sun, you convert a whole bunch of potential energy into kinetic energy. Back of the envelope says about 1.3 GJ per kilogram, but I could have goofed.
If I didn't mess up the numbers, then a probe that departs earth travelling 30 km/s picks up an extra ...actually, very nearly another 30 km/s. You actually have to dump some (okay, a lot of) energy.
Cheers.
Hello, biased news source. A quick search for Linux gives (first five hits, in order):
An article describing the adoption of Linux in China,
News about a television station considering a switch to Linux,
A supermarket chain testing a new Linux-based point-of-sale system,
Seagate and Linspire bringing Linux to South America,
A financial company selecting a Linux-based trading solution, citing 'quality and flexibility'.
Biased indeed....
I wish they would get over this illusion that they are a content provider.
What did the MS in MSNBC stand for, again? Microsoft is a content provider, and with respect to MSNBC's offerings not appreciably more or less trustworthy than most others. They seem to cover Microsoft's latest worms and holes with the same thoroughness, accuracy, and detail as the rest of the mainstream media. (That is, their coverage isn't very good--but neither is anybody else's, so I give MS the benefit of the doubt here.)
De Beers could slash the price of diamonds almost as much be releasing some of their stockpile and ceasing to manipulate the market--and still make a generous amount of money.
But they would rather make a lot of money. From a business standpoint, it's tough to argue with that....
Sure, they'll probably have to revise their revenue model at some point, but that's still years away. Who's to say that they don't have a group working on Linux ports of their core applications, and a strategy in the wings to deal with a change in the market? For now, they're understandably loathe to a) sell a cheaper version of their flagship cash cow, and b) make it easier for users to dispense with Microsoft's other cash cow.
Why pay $70000 for the Porsche? It doesn't sound like it actually DOES anything a $15000 Ford can't do.
Oh--it does it with more style, costs more to repair, is faster, and it makes your dick larger.
You're kidding, right? That fifty dollar difference you're talking about is 2.5% of the amount you would be investing. The value of your "$2000" worth of stock can easily shift that much up or down in a normal day's trading. (Actually, with higher priced stocks, the intraday changes in price are usually smaller, percentage-wise, than the changes in lower-priced stocks....)
If you're obsessively rebalancing your portfolio to a 2% precision with each stock...you need a saner financial advisor.
You're looking for the possessive form (the ass being kicked belongs to Linux.) Generally, words ending in x take an apostrophe s: Linux's.
The plural form would be Linuxes. Some wags also suggest Linices or Linuces, as a play on index/indices. Linuxen is also popular, based on box/boxen--which is in turn nonstandard English. (It's an application of the German practice of forming the plural of feminine nouns by adding -en, just because some geeks many years ago thought it would be fun, and because boxen sounds cool. The correct plural is boxes.)
Linuxii is a lexicological disaster, and I'm sure the parent was kidding. It presumes that there is a Latin stem, and that the singular form is Linuxius. (This sort of problem also arises with people who believe the plural of virus is virii--it implies a singular form of virius. For those who haven't seen this debate before, the proper plural is viruses.)
"A witty saying proves nothing."--Voltaire
RTFA. In bold text, right below the headline:
From the article: "If I'm dealing with a [nonintuitive] person, I need to put things in concrete language. This person doesn't want abstractions."
Now, the REAL PROBLEM is that it is MUCH MORE DIFFICULT to develop expert skills than it is to develop average skills.
The other side to this, of course, is that when management is hiring individuals for a helpdesk-type position, communication with users is a central part of the job. Strong communication skills should become a hiring criterion.
Management is thinking, "I can hire a couple of tech people that are also excellent communicators...and pay a small premium for them."
Management is not thinking, "Gee, my IT department is struggling to communicate with all my entry level people who just use their computers as tools to get the rest of their jobs done. I should provide several hours of training to the entire workforce on details that usually aren't relevant to their jobs."
Management is sometimes right--it depends a lot on the industry, the number of people involved, the other skills they may have.
In a really proactive IT department, some individuals might even work to prepare some formal documentation--basic introductory material, plus some FAQs about the hardware people use.