At a guess, their "live video" is on a 30 second delay, and the feed was killed by a technician whose sole responsibility during launch is to watch the true live video and push a big red button if he sees anything unusual.
This seems like a reasonable precaution for any business or agency to take. An "anomoly" could possibly reveal proprietary information about the rocket's construction or programming. Stuff that SpaceX wouldn't want to show to its competitors. And of course any business needs to take precautions against inadvertent bad press coverage. The last thing SpaceX needs is for a Hindenburg type of shot going out to the whole world, and an inane "Oh, the humanity" comment echoing through history for 60 years or more.
Looking at the video of their second (?) launch (the successful one), there has obviously been some editing done in the cut-over between the exterior view of the launch and the first view of the rear-facing camera. The audio says "we have cleared the launch tower" while video is showing passage through cloud, at 2,000 feet or higher. I mention this only as an indicator that SpaceX obviously has at least some minimal skills in editing videos (in case anyone had doubts about that).
[I begin to find Mr. Bill apologists as tiring as the astroturfers of a younger day, and I begin to wonder if they are being subsidized in a similar way.]
...with all due respect to his charitable efforts, for which, if for little else, I respect him...
Uh. I'd have more respect for his charitable efforts if he was giving away more money than he was taking in. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation consistently donates about half of its previous year's revenues. So his pile of money is growing only half as fast as it would if he didn't give any away. It isn't shrinking at all. A quick look at the tax law shows the reason: by giving away this little bit every year, B&MGF avoids having to pay a lot more in USA taxes.
Mr. Bill used to dress like a geek, but he was never a geek: however you define geekdom, avarice would never be its dominant quality. Mr. Bill now prefers to wear the vestments of a philanthropist, but again it has all got to do with his outer appearance. His manifest behavior continues to be that of an avaricious pig.
Logic in parent is pretty lame. It requires assuming that the original scribe who made the 90 page copy of Archimede's work was a monk, or otherwise working in the Church. There is no basis for that assumption.
In the 900s, there were still a number of small organizations unaffiliated with the Church who were intent on preserving various aspects of the Old Ways, especially with regard to the core knowledge of technologies like shipbuilding, navigation, and architecture. It is very likely that the original scribe was affiliated with one of these pre-Masonic groups. The folio might well have come into the Church's hands through the normal disbursement of wealth following the burning of a witch (the original text was erased in the early phase of the Burning Times, a few decades before the "official" start of the Medieval Inquisition). Or possibly it came to the Church as a donation made by some pious person who received the folio as part of an inheritance: a book two centuries old full of esoteric diagrams and strange instructions.
In any case, the original 90 pages of parchment was scrubbed and scrubbed again with a mixture of soured milk and oat bran to eradicate the geometry text. Each page was then carefully bisected to create the quartos. Preparing the pages for their new writing was a process that took weeks of careful labor. It was not something done on the spur of the moment: this was most definitely a deliberate destruction of knowledge.
Sliding from a higher orbit (Saturn) to a lower one (Earth) involves an exchange of potential energy for kinetic energy. With appropriate timing and direction of the intial burn (to escape Titan-Saturn gravity wells), our fictional Condoleezza Rice fat sausage ship would only need to make a couple of minor course corrections: it would mostly be free fall. Granted, it would be a long coast, but we've got proven technology for unmanned long term space travel. And we've also got experience in shipping liquified natural gas under far more hazardous conditions than the cold emptiness of interplanetary space: we could scale that up easily. By the time Chevron (or Exxon) is actually able to send its first survey crew out there, we'll have the means to get product back to Earth orbit at a much lower cost than launching organic substrates from Earth into industrial level orbits.
But in context, possession of the means to copy text was discouraged by the Church. Persons who found themselves with supplies of parchment or ink were strongly encouraged to contribute those to the Church. Those who did not do so were publicly admonished by the Church and thus shunned by the general populace. Those who actively engaged in attempting to teach or preserve ancient knowledge faced persecution as witches, and too often ended up forfeiting all their belongings (with the parchments going to the Church for scrubbing out and re-use with acceptable text).
How often is too often? Published estimates since 1947 have varied widely between 40 thousand and 9 million European witches put to death during the 400 years of the Burning Times. Somewhere around 4 million over 400 years over all of western Europe is a good guess based on what acturial research has been done at this point. The witch trial was a great way for a village to rid itself of an irritating loner, especially if he or she had something worth acquiring and was getting too old to contribute to the workforce. It also had the secondary benefits of providing the village with free theater (like an ancient Roman Circus), and serving to keep others who might disturb the order of things in line.
So, yeah, the Church was the only large organization that was preserving the old texts, though more often than not the original text was scrubbed out so the parchment could be used for Church writing. But they had the monopoly mostly because they enforced it, up to the point of endorsing torture and death to anyone trying to compete.
The early Church was very picky about what it chose to preserve, to the point of scrubbing out ancient texts that did not support its orthodoxy and overwriting the recycled parchment with approved text. See, for instance, the Archimedes Palimpsest. Much of the research value of medieval transcriptions is not in the gospels, hymns, and psalms that the Church scribes produced, but in the underwriting of scientific and historic text that the Church had tried to scrub out when it recycled the parchments.
Also, note that a strong theme through the Dark Age of Europe was the Church's efforts to destroy indigenous modes of transmission of knowledge, such as the druidic schools of celtic Europe, and the wiccan-like organizations that worked to preserve agricultural, meteorologic, and medicinal knowledge (and whatever writings from the Empire days they could preserve-- although thanks to The Church, that was a life-threatening activity).
At best, the first "point of order" is contestable. It is most definitely not something that can be simply asserted: it requires a strong argument to back it up.
I tried VBox just recently, to host WinXP for some apps that I still need after migrating to Ubuntu. It works well for everything except some aspects of USB support. (No USB printer, dang it. But the Palm sync'd just fine!)
It seems to be a solid product. When I was researching it, I found that there were concerns about VBox breaking with Linux kernel upgrades, but I didn't see anything that wouldn't be contained by prudent network administration. That is, the guys who were moaning were the ones who rolled out kernel upgrades in production environments without first testing for breakage.
I think you would only need to accelerate out of the gravity well of Titan (plus a little more to boost from Titan's orbital speed to Saturn's escape velocity). The rest of the trip is downhill to a parking orbit around the Earth or Moon.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how it would work.
Big old sausages full of Titan's Finest, with a few oxygen tanks strapped on, some low power rocket engines, and a good guidance system. Biggest energy drain of the whole trip would be the LEDs that light up the ship's name: on the Earth-facing side of the lead sausage, in letters 1,000 feet high, Chevron Condoleezza Rice (visible in amateur telescopes for most of the trip).
Yeah, that's prolly going to happen in a hundred years. Feedstock for the orbital factories, very little of Titan's juices would get to Earth itself.
I read this news yesterday and I was too stunned to reply. I had to go out into the Big Blue Room and do some yard work. Mow the lawn, that kind of thing. Get grounded. Get grass stains on my sandals.
This is exactly the kind of thing that Microsoft needs to start doing if it is going to survive in the post-capitalist economy of FOSS. The changes wrought by FOSS might never have much bearing on the general economy, but they have profoundly changed the economics of information technology. These changes are so fundamental that there is no way software development and marketing is ever going to go back to the way things were when Microsoft was a rising star. The 1980s and 1990s are over: Microsoft has managed to coast on its ballistic momentum for nearly a decade since it hit its peak, but now it needs to either learn to fly on the same invisible substance that supports the FOSS birds, or it is going to come to a sudden ballistic terminal grounding.
I'd hate to see that happen. As much as I dislike Microsoft's leadership and direction, it is a magnificent organization of resources that could produce a lot of great stuff.
However Microsoft has such an incredibly bad history of dishonesty and betrayals of trust, especially with "partners", that I remain skeptical.
How disappointed I get when the "security researchers" write about, not interesting security measures, but just how the security is implemented. Boring,
Hey, that's reality for ya!
Fantasy worlds are great, but you can't live there. You can't even really go there. Not really.
Then the glass is much bigger than it needs to be. And that suggests a social engineering solution to the internet woes: shrink the tubes.
No, really.
I mean it. Put it another way:
There is nothing in the known Universe with more inertia than user habits. There is no way we are ever going to motivate that 40.9% who are putting everybody at risk to get with the program and update on schedule. Not directly.
What can be done is that we could change the internet environment so that using an outdated browser becomes an irritating experience, by treating it as a second class citizen.
I'm suggesting a W3C Recommendation that web sites use browser identification techniques to identify browsers known to put the WWW at risk and serve content to those browsers at a throttled rate, with frequent insertions of a standard W3C message into the web pages that asks the user to update his client, for the sake of the entire internet community.
This is exactly the kind of thing that the W3C could do, that no one else can really do. Participating web sites would be under the aegis of the W3C, since the throttling would be necessary for the site to be standards compliant, so complaints would be deflected from the web sites to the W3C.
Many government web sites are required by law to be in compliance with W3C standards. In addition to these government services, I believe that there are a number of other large NGOs that would see the long term benefits and go along with the program. A number of smaller web sites would certainly follow along. Yet it wouldn't be necessary for all web sites to become compliant to see this one change bring about a measurable reduction of that 40.9%
Caution: above written before first pot of coffee was consumed. The ideas expressed may not have been produced by a fully engaged brain and may not be entirely sensible, yadda yadda yadda.
Okay, I'll feed the troll a bit. Others might enjoy watching.
Why? What magical power do you think web browsers have to transfer your data quickly and accurately from one place to another that other applications cannot implement?
I don't expect that of the browser at all. I expect the browser to do exactly and only what it is intended to do: function as a client.
Meanwhile, the server-side software of GDocs (for one example) will assure that all collaborators are working with the same version of each tool in the toolkit. When a bug fix or new feature is added, all collaborators benefit immediately. Further, the hardware or OS any collaborator is using has no impact on the form or substance of the document. Everyone sees the product of their joint work the same way. Asssuming that they are using a standards compliant browser.
The server-side software also handles versioning issues, assuring that all collaborators are seeing the same revision, and that all have equal access to the history of the document.
There are additional security benefits in using a star topology for collaborative work. The server that sits in the middle of every process can be hardened against various forms of attack with relative ease (compared to hardening all collaborators' individual systems). And in collaborative work, the amount of bandwidth used in updating a document is much smaller for a star topology than for a point to point (which not only reduces exposure to security threats, but improves efficiency of operations and lowers connectivity costs).
Finally, the number of collaborators that a server-side system can handle can increase easily up to the limit of the server's connection bandwidth and is independent of connection limitations of any of the clients. In a point to point, the effective speed of the group is typically reduced by the limitations of the members with the narrowest pipes. This becomes a serious issue when some of the collaborators are using dial-ups in remote locations.
People have been using things like IRC and instant messaging on the Internet for decades, and they are a heck of a lot more efficient at transferring data in real time than anything based on HTTP and browsers.
Uh, yeah, sure. I collaborate on spreadsheets and video scripts using IRC all the time. It's a natural outgrowth of the way we all used to use Post-Its and a community bulletin board to contribute to the group spreadsheet and tweak the dialog of the tv commercials.
I'm afraid parent post is devoid of much thinking, even wishful thinking. For wishful thinking usually starts from a basis in reality. Parent post exhibits an amazing freedom from the constraints of the reality box wrt understanding these here intarweb tubes.
Ultimately, there is nothing you can do with an on-line office suite run by an external service provider that you couldn't also do with a client application with an Internet connection and your own server to host any shared data.
This is true, but it is a tautology devoid of any real meaning. Ultimately, somebody could build up a server and set up mechanisms for keeping all his collaborators current on the latest client-side upgrades of the software, handle the versioning issues, etc, etc. Taken to the extreme, that somebody would end up with a privately owned functional duplicate of what GDocs et al. provide. Basically on this point parent post comes down to the "make or buy" question of Cost Accounting 101, and asserts without proof or evidence that rolling your own is always the best solution. I'm not buying that "argument" since it is an empty one: there is no content here.
Can a corporation do a roll your own replacement of the functions that online office software is moving toward? Of course it can, if it wants to take on the tremendous costs involved in development and maintenance of the beast. Unless it designed this with excess capacity it could sell to othe
But I am very much a concrete thinker, not an abstractionist. So for me, "cloud computing" is what a company is moving toward when it recognizes that putting its data in one of Google's data storage facilities is both more secure and less expensive than continuing to manage security, backups/restores, and so forth, in house. I've got no idea how widespread this practice is as yet, but it seems like a natural and rational extension of co-location practices. Sort of like how businesses in the 1800s began to use banks rather than maintain their own vaults and armed guards.
I think SaaS is also a movement toward cloud computing. It makes sense for colleges to subscribe to a software service that handles job announcements, class scheduling, and so forth, rather than maintaining the software themselves. Software as a Service looks very much like the way a lot of small and mid-size businesses contract with a bookkeeping service to manage the Payroll accounting.
When I'm interacting with a job application at a local community college, I'm not aware of whether I'm talking with the college's computer or with a computer in a bunker in Texas that is handling all the job appications of 1000 different institutions in the USA. That, to me, is the essence of "cloud computing": you simply no longer have any idea of how the data is being handled after it leaves the terminal you are working on. Sort of like not having any clear idea what goes on between using an ATM while visiting a distant city and that transaction showing up on your bank statement. Cloud computing takes the same kind of trust as is needed in using a bank.
The ability to collaborate in a very natural fashion is a strength of GDocs (and I assume the other web-based suites) that is going to be very hard for MS Office, OOo, or any other PC based office suite to match.
OTOH, the local desktop office suite is likely to stay around for a long time. It has strengths with regard to customization of the user interface, macros, templates, boilerplate insertions, and tie-ins to local databases or datastreams that will not be easily duplicated by the online tools.
Performance remains a problem for the online suites. However improving client-side hardware is not going to help that much, for most users. What will help, and has already shown some big improvements, is better implementations of Javascript and DOM management in the browsers: FF v3.0 is noticeably faster with some GDocs than earlier versions. This is likely to improve even more in the next 12 months when Javascript 2.0 debuts. And, of course, fatter pipes will help a lot. Probably the degree to which the average joe uses his online office tools vs his local office tools will be determined by the limitations in online performance. My guess is that a lot of people will have both open concurrently, and do a fair bit of copy/pasting back and forth.
As far as security goes, that's a non-issue. Most companies are content with letting a bank hold their money; they will be just as content with letting one of Google's Fort Knox storage facilities guard their data.
So the online suites and local suites are likely to co-exist since they have complementary strengths. A major factor in determining which specific products emerge as leaders is going to be the ease with which content can be moved between online and local suites. At the moment, that means the products that best implement the ODF standards are going to emerge as the industry leaders.
Um, no. Not at all. I'd have the latest Ubuntu CD around (almost always less than 6 months old), or if all my copies were out on loan, I could prepare another by using WinXP to download a fresh Ubuntu image. That's the seven year old version of WinXP that is duly recognized by WGA, which I keep up to date on all security patches, and which has Microsoft's firewall and antivirus products enabled. Reinstalling Ubuntu and updating its security is a turnkey operation, and fast enough that the risk of getting pwned is minimal. Especially since there are few pieces of malware that are aimed at Linux.
Ubuntu just doesn't have the security issues that Windows has.
XP SP2 was released in August of 2004. Why are we talking about 4 year old software?
For people like me, TFA was highly relevant.
I'm now using Linux (Ubuntu) for more than 95% of my work. But I still have WinXP on dual boot since I've got a couple of image processing workflows in PaintShop Pro that I haven't developed Linux equivalents for as yet, and since my 8 color Canon i9900 only achieves its full potential (13"x17" photorealistic posters) when I use the proprietary Windows driver.
I have not had to do a re-install of WinXP for more than 5 years. Back then, I re-installed from the original disks, got on the internet, and spent hours downloading and installing patches (and weeks reloading software and tweaking configurations). Had I not read TFA, I would have been using the same approach if WinXP crapped out on me today. I probably would not have noticed that WinXP had gotten pwned in the first few minutes, since I have done 0 none nada Windows installs in the last 5 years. I'm letting that skill set rust away.
Now I know that the next time WinXP craps out, I need to use Ubuntu to gather up the latest SP and patches and prepare an update disk, then disconnect the network cable before doing the WinXP reinstall.
So what should I keep in mind as I go scrounging for the latest WinXP SP, etc, from Ubuntu? Remember that I might not need to do this for a couple of years or so (prolly not until the HD that has the WinXP partition dies). Will I run afoul of Genuine Windows Advantage?
BTW, Ubuntu is a pretty slick platform for 3D modeling. I'm getting reasonably fast renders with a 1.6 MHZ CPU and 1 GB of ram. Much better than what I was getting with WinXP. Some of this would be improvements in Blender, but I'm pretty sure most of the improvement is from the lower overhead of the OS.
Base load should be nuclear, since that's all fixed cost.
That's a fallacy rooted in trying to model the nuclear power industry with accounting systems designed for early 20th century factories.
Nuclear power generation is the first large scale system we've encountered where the greatest costs occur after product is delivered. We need new methods of accounting for costs that can reliably handle this. We don't have any. So while we now have good solutions to the engineering problems of nuclear power, we don't have a clue as to how to price the product, or manage the future costs.
So, no, fixed costs do not dominate nuclear power economics. Unknown costs extending for unknown decades into the future are what dominate nuclear power economics.
We should be able to develop an accounting system that will predictably model future costs of current production. It is not rocket science; it would probably be a mix of traditional accounting with games theory and probability assessments. But so far no one is even talking about this need, let alone talking about funding its development.
Then why isn't Alice buying a bulk package of edubuntu from canonical's store? Or getting plain old edubuntu shipped from canonical? It comes in pretty professional packaging, and the web page is really solid from a marketing/presentation standpoint. I get your argument, just really don't think Alice is the right user.
Good questions. I just asked her about them. This is what she told me:
She already has a pristine copy of Ubuntu ordered direct from Canonical. She will be using both it and the Best Buy package when she makes her pitch. But she was concerned that "Canonical" and "Edubuntu" sounded too geeky for the people she has to work with, who mostly think that if it doesn't have an Apple or Microsoft label, then its going to be risky stuff. Best Buy is, however, pure downhome suburban Americana—
It simply reeks of charcoal lighting fluid, blackened hot dogs, and store-bought potato salad —says Alice.
So I guess in a sense she's trying to slide this foreign ubuntu thing under the radar, too.
Thanks for the link to an interesting story. I still plan on looking in a Best Buy store when the opportunity to do so next comes along, but now it will be more of a scoping out of an adversary than a buying trip.
User story: Alice has been trying to get Bob, her department head, interested in developing curricula with FOSS tools. Because she knows her students cannot afford to buy the products that Microsoft gives to her school for essentially no cost. A Best Buy copy of Ubuntu fits her strategy since it is professionally packaged by a big box store. She is deliberately buying the packaging, knowing that the contents are free. She will use it as a prop at meetings that discuss FOSS adoption.
User story: Chris wants his parents to move on from the Windows 98 machine his father bought the year that he retired. He has built up a good looking, plain vanilla DFI white box system that runs Ubuntu, to give them on their 45th anniversary. He buys an Ubuntu disk from Best Buy to add to the package since he knows his parents will be worried if they don't have the ever-important "back up disks" for their new computer. He could burn a copy himself, of course, but he'd rather spend $20 than take the time to compose and print a good looking disk label.
User story: well, you get the idea. Sometimes the packaging alone is worth the cost of the item.
Plus, with this move Best Buy has just managed to penetrate a market segment that is otherwise totally oblivious to its existence. Whether by design or by serendipity, Best Buy has just gotten its name out in front of all the geeks who read Slashdot. Good move, Best Buy! I know I will be popping into one of your stores the next time an opportunity to do so comes along, just to see what you are all about.
I can't imagine it's significantly harder to rig a paper election than an electronic one.
It is a matter of cost and risk.
It costs a lot less to hire one black hat to compromise thousands of voting machines than to print up a lot of counterfeit ballots and get them put into play. With the voting machines in use in 2000 and 2004, the risk of getting caught was minimal since the security of the machines before the elections was inadequate and audit trails were non-existent.
So for that period, there was a strong business case for rigging elections. The cost benefit ratio was very favorable. And risk management was very easy to do— even if the fraud was strongly suspected, there would be no evidence that would stand up in court and zero likelihood that the parties paying for the fraud would be directly implicated. In retrospect, it is obvious that both elections must have been compromised. To assume otherwise would be contrary to the principles of free market capitalism.
What is needed is for elections to go back to procedures that increase the costs and risks involved in rigging an election. Adding audit trails to evoting machines would be a very good first step.
Look for a "reversing" tripod for your digital camera. These allow the post the camera mounts on to be removed and installed upside down, so you can aim the camera straight down between the legs of the tripod. This feature was more common on older tripods: mine is a "Velbon VEF-3" from around 1965. Also, for this work the heavier the tripod is, the better. Ask people who like garage sales to look for something like this for you.
Use a large coffee table (or other low table) for your work area. Use a bubble level to make make it, well, level. Set up the tripod and camera, and level the camera. Now the plane of the CCD is parallel with the plane of the working surface.
You can get a sheet of low reflective glass from a window repair shop or possibly a picture framer for probably 5USD or less. Tell them what you want it for and they'll know what you need. Put some heavy tape around the edges. The sheet works great to hold magazine pages flat, and to straighten wrinkles.
Use a cable trigger for the shutter.
Lighting can be a problem. Flash probably won't work: at least I couldn't get it to. I had good results setting up in a room with lots of north facing windows and white walls, and using fairly long exposures in ambient light (hence the cable trigger). You might also want to adjust the white balance with a blank sheet of white paper at the beginning of the shoot.
Obviously this kind of set-up works best in batch mode, where you can quickly shoot a 100 pages or so in a session. Once the camera is set up, you just position the next page, click the shutter, then go on to the next page... a little boring but pretty fast. I was using PaintShop Pro for clean-up (cropping out the edges of the paper and straightening the image), but if I was to do this again tomorrow, I'm pretty sure that The GIMP would handle it. And I think there are now some good FOSS OCR software available, too. I was working with an early version of OmniPage, and it was a foul beast. Also OmniPage only produced Word documents, which made for several extra steps to moving from hardcopy of old correspondence, etc, to decent HTML.
Oh, I almost forgot. Set up your shots so the image you want is centered with about 10% margins all the way around that you will crop away in post-processing. Use a fairly high resolution to compensate. You'll end up with much better results, especially if you will be using OCR.
people who honestly believe Gates has done more harm than Hitler
Parent post pulls no punches: first sentence jumps right in and accuses anyone in opposition of breaking Godwin's Law. Skirts right close to the edge, it does! I'll not try to compare Bill Gates with Adolf Hitler. Even if that wasn't such a sick idea, it would be silly. Hitler never made all that much money, and his book wasn't all that widely read, either.
I've done some research on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation a year or so ago, using their public financial statements as they are required by law to produce, as they are presented on the Web. B&MGF have indeed given away annually 5% to 10% of its assets as determined by the balance sheet for the prior fiscal year. I went back several years; this is a consistent pattern.
This is a little more than the minimum amount that B&MGF has to donate to retain its status as a charity under US Federal tax law. Since the pattern is so consistent, I'm guessing that there are bean counters who assure that the amount donated stays within a very tightly targeted range.
It means that B&MGF's assets at the start of each fiscal year are only 105% to 113% as large as they were at the start of the prior fiscal year. They've obviously got some good investment managers who are consistently getting 10% to 18% ROIs. This is all very much legal under US tax laws. It is indeed the shrewdest thing that could have been done with a pile of personal wealth that so greatly exceeded the amount anyone else had ever piled up at the time when B&MGF was created. Bill Gates needed a tax shelter, and B&MGF was the best tax shelter money could buy.
B&MGF are a charity: that is how the corporation is legally defined. That does not mean that Bill Gates is a philanthropist. He is in the charity business because it makes good business sense. The amount given away each year is a cost of doing business that in the long run is less expensive than the alternatives (like paying taxes on earnings).
Bill Gates remains a very shrewd businessman who has discovered that running a charity is the best way to manage his assets. He is not a philanthropist giving away his assets. B&MGF gives away a portion of its prior year earnings, never more than that, and almost certainly never more than what the tax laws require.
Slashdot Mirror
At a guess, their "live video" is on a 30 second delay, and the feed was killed by a technician whose sole responsibility during launch is to watch the true live video and push a big red button if he sees anything unusual.
This seems like a reasonable precaution for any business or agency to take. An "anomoly" could possibly reveal proprietary information about the rocket's construction or programming. Stuff that SpaceX wouldn't want to show to its competitors. And of course any business needs to take precautions against inadvertent bad press coverage. The last thing SpaceX needs is for a Hindenburg type of shot going out to the whole world, and an inane "Oh, the humanity" comment echoing through history for 60 years or more.
Looking at the video of their second (?) launch (the successful one), there has obviously been some editing done in the cut-over between the exterior view of the launch and the first view of the rear-facing camera. The audio says "we have cleared the launch tower" while video is showing passage through cloud, at 2,000 feet or higher. I mention this only as an indicator that SpaceX obviously has at least some minimal skills in editing videos (in case anyone had doubts about that).
See post reply to a similar post.
[I begin to find Mr. Bill apologists as tiring as the astroturfers of a younger day, and I begin to wonder if they are being subsidized in a similar way.]
...with all due respect to his charitable efforts, for which, if for little else, I respect him...
Uh. I'd have more respect for his charitable efforts if he was giving away more money than he was taking in. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation consistently donates about half of its previous year's revenues. So his pile of money is growing only half as fast as it would if he didn't give any away. It isn't shrinking at all. A quick look at the tax law shows the reason: by giving away this little bit every year, B&MGF avoids having to pay a lot more in USA taxes.
Mr. Bill used to dress like a geek, but he was never a geek: however you define geekdom, avarice would never be its dominant quality. Mr. Bill now prefers to wear the vestments of a philanthropist, but again it has all got to do with his outer appearance. His manifest behavior continues to be that of an avaricious pig.
Logic in parent is pretty lame. It requires assuming that the original scribe who made the 90 page copy of Archimede's work was a monk, or otherwise working in the Church. There is no basis for that assumption.
In the 900s, there were still a number of small organizations unaffiliated with the Church who were intent on preserving various aspects of the Old Ways, especially with regard to the core knowledge of technologies like shipbuilding, navigation, and architecture. It is very likely that the original scribe was affiliated with one of these pre-Masonic groups. The folio might well have come into the Church's hands through the normal disbursement of wealth following the burning of a witch (the original text was erased in the early phase of the Burning Times, a few decades before the "official" start of the Medieval Inquisition). Or possibly it came to the Church as a donation made by some pious person who received the folio as part of an inheritance: a book two centuries old full of esoteric diagrams and strange instructions.
In any case, the original 90 pages of parchment was scrubbed and scrubbed again with a mixture of soured milk and oat bran to eradicate the geometry text. Each page was then carefully bisected to create the quartos. Preparing the pages for their new writing was a process that took weeks of careful labor. It was not something done on the spur of the moment: this was most definitely a deliberate destruction of knowledge.
Bullshit.
Sliding from a higher orbit (Saturn) to a lower one (Earth) involves an exchange of potential energy for kinetic energy. With appropriate timing and direction of the intial burn (to escape Titan-Saturn gravity wells), our fictional Condoleezza Rice fat sausage ship would only need to make a couple of minor course corrections: it would mostly be free fall. Granted, it would be a long coast, but we've got proven technology for unmanned long term space travel. And we've also got experience in shipping liquified natural gas under far more hazardous conditions than the cold emptiness of interplanetary space: we could scale that up easily. By the time Chevron (or Exxon) is actually able to send its first survey crew out there, we'll have the means to get product back to Earth orbit at a much lower cost than launching organic substrates from Earth into industrial level orbits.
Well, that's true.
But in context, possession of the means to copy text was discouraged by the Church. Persons who found themselves with supplies of parchment or ink were strongly encouraged to contribute those to the Church. Those who did not do so were publicly admonished by the Church and thus shunned by the general populace. Those who actively engaged in attempting to teach or preserve ancient knowledge faced persecution as witches, and too often ended up forfeiting all their belongings (with the parchments going to the Church for scrubbing out and re-use with acceptable text).
How often is too often? Published estimates since 1947 have varied widely between 40 thousand and 9 million European witches put to death during the 400 years of the Burning Times. Somewhere around 4 million over 400 years over all of western Europe is a good guess based on what acturial research has been done at this point. The witch trial was a great way for a village to rid itself of an irritating loner, especially if he or she had something worth acquiring and was getting too old to contribute to the workforce. It also had the secondary benefits of providing the village with free theater (like an ancient Roman Circus), and serving to keep others who might disturb the order of things in line.
So, yeah, the Church was the only large organization that was preserving the old texts, though more often than not the original text was scrubbed out so the parchment could be used for Church writing. But they had the monopoly mostly because they enforced it, up to the point of endorsing torture and death to anyone trying to compete.
Correction to first "point of order":
The early Church was very picky about what it chose to preserve, to the point of scrubbing out ancient texts that did not support its orthodoxy and overwriting the recycled parchment with approved text. See, for instance, the Archimedes Palimpsest. Much of the research value of medieval transcriptions is not in the gospels, hymns, and psalms that the Church scribes produced, but in the underwriting of scientific and historic text that the Church had tried to scrub out when it recycled the parchments.
Also, note that a strong theme through the Dark Age of Europe was the Church's efforts to destroy indigenous modes of transmission of knowledge, such as the druidic schools of celtic Europe, and the wiccan-like organizations that worked to preserve agricultural, meteorologic, and medicinal knowledge (and whatever writings from the Empire days they could preserve-- although thanks to The Church, that was a life-threatening activity).
At best, the first "point of order" is contestable. It is most definitely not something that can be simply asserted: it requires a strong argument to back it up.
I tried VBox just recently, to host WinXP for some apps that I still need after migrating to Ubuntu. It works well for everything except some aspects of USB support. (No USB printer, dang it. But the Palm sync'd just fine!)
It seems to be a solid product. When I was researching it, I found that there were concerns about VBox breaking with Linux kernel upgrades, but I didn't see anything that wouldn't be contained by prudent network administration. That is, the guys who were moaning were the ones who rolled out kernel upgrades in production environments without first testing for breakage.
I think you would only need to accelerate out of the gravity well of Titan (plus a little more to boost from Titan's orbital speed to Saturn's escape velocity). The rest of the trip is downhill to a parking orbit around the Earth or Moon.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's how it would work.
Big old sausages full of Titan's Finest, with a few oxygen tanks strapped on, some low power rocket engines, and a good guidance system. Biggest energy drain of the whole trip would be the LEDs that light up the ship's name: on the Earth-facing side of the lead sausage, in letters 1,000 feet high, Chevron Condoleezza Rice (visible in amateur telescopes for most of the trip).
Yeah, that's prolly going to happen in a hundred years. Feedstock for the orbital factories, very little of Titan's juices would get to Earth itself.
I read this news yesterday and I was too stunned to reply. I had to go out into the Big Blue Room and do some yard work. Mow the lawn, that kind of thing. Get grounded. Get grass stains on my sandals.
This is exactly the kind of thing that Microsoft needs to start doing if it is going to survive in the post-capitalist economy of FOSS. The changes wrought by FOSS might never have much bearing on the general economy, but they have profoundly changed the economics of information technology. These changes are so fundamental that there is no way software development and marketing is ever going to go back to the way things were when Microsoft was a rising star. The 1980s and 1990s are over: Microsoft has managed to coast on its ballistic momentum for nearly a decade since it hit its peak, but now it needs to either learn to fly on the same invisible substance that supports the FOSS birds, or it is going to come to a sudden ballistic terminal grounding.
I'd hate to see that happen. As much as I dislike Microsoft's leadership and direction, it is a magnificent organization of resources that could produce a lot of great stuff.
However Microsoft has such an incredibly bad history of dishonesty and betrayals of trust, especially with "partners", that I remain skeptical.
Hopeful. But skeptical.
Good point. Having probably come a long way to get here, they would probably want to protect their ride back home.
How disappointed I get when the "security researchers" write about, not interesting security measures, but just how the security is implemented. Boring,
Hey, that's reality for ya!
Fantasy worlds are great, but you can't live there. You can't even really go there. Not really.
40.9% of the glass is empty?
Then the glass is much bigger than it needs to be. And that suggests a social engineering solution to the internet woes: shrink the tubes.
No, really.
I mean it. Put it another way:
There is nothing in the known Universe with more inertia than user habits. There is no way we are ever going to motivate that 40.9% who are putting everybody at risk to get with the program and update on schedule. Not directly.
What can be done is that we could change the internet environment so that using an outdated browser becomes an irritating experience, by treating it as a second class citizen.
I'm suggesting a W3C Recommendation that web sites use browser identification techniques to identify browsers known to put the WWW at risk and serve content to those browsers at a throttled rate, with frequent insertions of a standard W3C message into the web pages that asks the user to update his client, for the sake of the entire internet community.
This is exactly the kind of thing that the W3C could do, that no one else can really do. Participating web sites would be under the aegis of the W3C, since the throttling would be necessary for the site to be standards compliant, so complaints would be deflected from the web sites to the W3C.
Many government web sites are required by law to be in compliance with W3C standards. In addition to these government services, I believe that there are a number of other large NGOs that would see the long term benefits and go along with the program. A number of smaller web sites would certainly follow along. Yet it wouldn't be necessary for all web sites to become compliant to see this one change bring about a measurable reduction of that 40.9%
Caution: above written before first pot of coffee was consumed. The ideas expressed may not have been produced by a fully engaged brain and may not be entirely sensible, yadda yadda yadda.
Okay, I'll feed the troll a bit. Others might enjoy watching.
Why? What magical power do you think web browsers have to transfer your data quickly and accurately from one place to another that other applications cannot implement?
I don't expect that of the browser at all. I expect the browser to do exactly and only what it is intended to do: function as a client.
Meanwhile, the server-side software of GDocs (for one example) will assure that all collaborators are working with the same version of each tool in the toolkit. When a bug fix or new feature is added, all collaborators benefit immediately. Further, the hardware or OS any collaborator is using has no impact on the form or substance of the document. Everyone sees the product of their joint work the same way. Asssuming that they are using a standards compliant browser.
The server-side software also handles versioning issues, assuring that all collaborators are seeing the same revision, and that all have equal access to the history of the document.
There are additional security benefits in using a star topology for collaborative work. The server that sits in the middle of every process can be hardened against various forms of attack with relative ease (compared to hardening all collaborators' individual systems). And in collaborative work, the amount of bandwidth used in updating a document is much smaller for a star topology than for a point to point (which not only reduces exposure to security threats, but improves efficiency of operations and lowers connectivity costs).
Finally, the number of collaborators that a server-side system can handle can increase easily up to the limit of the server's connection bandwidth and is independent of connection limitations of any of the clients. In a point to point, the effective speed of the group is typically reduced by the limitations of the members with the narrowest pipes. This becomes a serious issue when some of the collaborators are using dial-ups in remote locations.
People have been using things like IRC and instant messaging on the Internet for decades, and they are a heck of a lot more efficient at transferring data in real time than anything based on HTTP and browsers.
Uh, yeah, sure. I collaborate on spreadsheets and video scripts using IRC all the time. It's a natural outgrowth of the way we all used to use Post-Its and a community bulletin board to contribute to the group spreadsheet and tweak the dialog of the tv commercials.
I'm afraid parent post is devoid of much thinking, even wishful thinking. For wishful thinking usually starts from a basis in reality. Parent post exhibits an amazing freedom from the constraints of the reality box wrt understanding these here intarweb tubes.
Ultimately, there is nothing you can do with an on-line office suite run by an external service provider that you couldn't also do with a client application with an Internet connection and your own server to host any shared data.
This is true, but it is a tautology devoid of any real meaning. Ultimately, somebody could build up a server and set up mechanisms for keeping all his collaborators current on the latest client-side upgrades of the software, handle the versioning issues, etc, etc. Taken to the extreme, that somebody would end up with a privately owned functional duplicate of what GDocs et al. provide. Basically on this point parent post comes down to the "make or buy" question of Cost Accounting 101, and asserts without proof or evidence that rolling your own is always the best solution. I'm not buying that "argument" since it is an empty one: there is no content here.
Can a corporation do a roll your own replacement of the functions that online office software is moving toward? Of course it can, if it wants to take on the tremendous costs involved in development and maintenance of the beast. Unless it designed this with excess capacity it could sell to othe
Interesting concept.
But I am very much a concrete thinker, not an abstractionist. So for me, "cloud computing" is what a company is moving toward when it recognizes that putting its data in one of Google's data storage facilities is both more secure and less expensive than continuing to manage security, backups/restores, and so forth, in house. I've got no idea how widespread this practice is as yet, but it seems like a natural and rational extension of co-location practices. Sort of like how businesses in the 1800s began to use banks rather than maintain their own vaults and armed guards.
I think SaaS is also a movement toward cloud computing. It makes sense for colleges to subscribe to a software service that handles job announcements, class scheduling, and so forth, rather than maintaining the software themselves. Software as a Service looks very much like the way a lot of small and mid-size businesses contract with a bookkeeping service to manage the Payroll accounting.
When I'm interacting with a job application at a local community college, I'm not aware of whether I'm talking with the college's computer or with a computer in a bunker in Texas that is handling all the job appications of 1000 different institutions in the USA. That, to me, is the essence of "cloud computing": you simply no longer have any idea of how the data is being handled after it leaves the terminal you are working on. Sort of like not having any clear idea what goes on between using an ATM while visiting a distant city and that transaction showing up on your bank statement. Cloud computing takes the same kind of trust as is needed in using a bank.
The ability to collaborate in a very natural fashion is a strength of GDocs (and I assume the other web-based suites) that is going to be very hard for MS Office, OOo, or any other PC based office suite to match.
OTOH, the local desktop office suite is likely to stay around for a long time. It has strengths with regard to customization of the user interface, macros, templates, boilerplate insertions, and tie-ins to local databases or datastreams that will not be easily duplicated by the online tools.
Performance remains a problem for the online suites. However improving client-side hardware is not going to help that much, for most users. What will help, and has already shown some big improvements, is better implementations of Javascript and DOM management in the browsers: FF v3.0 is noticeably faster with some GDocs than earlier versions. This is likely to improve even more in the next 12 months when Javascript 2.0 debuts. And, of course, fatter pipes will help a lot. Probably the degree to which the average joe uses his online office tools vs his local office tools will be determined by the limitations in online performance. My guess is that a lot of people will have both open concurrently, and do a fair bit of copy/pasting back and forth.
As far as security goes, that's a non-issue. Most companies are content with letting a bank hold their money; they will be just as content with letting one of Google's Fort Knox storage facilities guard their data.
So the online suites and local suites are likely to co-exist since they have complementary strengths. A major factor in determining which specific products emerge as leaders is going to be the ease with which content can be moved between online and local suites. At the moment, that means the products that best implement the ODF standards are going to emerge as the industry leaders.
If your Ubuntu crashes, you're in the same boat.
Um, no. Not at all. I'd have the latest Ubuntu CD around (almost always less than 6 months old), or if all my copies were out on loan, I could prepare another by using WinXP to download a fresh Ubuntu image. That's the seven year old version of WinXP that is duly recognized by WGA, which I keep up to date on all security patches, and which has Microsoft's firewall and antivirus products enabled. Reinstalling Ubuntu and updating its security is a turnkey operation, and fast enough that the risk of getting pwned is minimal. Especially since there are few pieces of malware that are aimed at Linux.
Ubuntu just doesn't have the security issues that Windows has.
XP SP2 was released in August of 2004. Why are we talking about 4 year old software?
For people like me, TFA was highly relevant.
I'm now using Linux (Ubuntu) for more than 95% of my work. But I still have WinXP on dual boot since I've got a couple of image processing workflows in PaintShop Pro that I haven't developed Linux equivalents for as yet, and since my 8 color Canon i9900 only achieves its full potential (13"x17" photorealistic posters) when I use the proprietary Windows driver.
I have not had to do a re-install of WinXP for more than 5 years. Back then, I re-installed from the original disks, got on the internet, and spent hours downloading and installing patches (and weeks reloading software and tweaking configurations). Had I not read TFA, I would have been using the same approach if WinXP crapped out on me today. I probably would not have noticed that WinXP had gotten pwned in the first few minutes, since I have done 0 none nada Windows installs in the last 5 years. I'm letting that skill set rust away.
Now I know that the next time WinXP craps out, I need to use Ubuntu to gather up the latest SP and patches and prepare an update disk, then disconnect the network cable before doing the WinXP reinstall.
So what should I keep in mind as I go scrounging for the latest WinXP SP, etc, from Ubuntu? Remember that I might not need to do this for a couple of years or so (prolly not until the HD that has the WinXP partition dies). Will I run afoul of Genuine Windows Advantage?
BTW, Ubuntu is a pretty slick platform for 3D modeling. I'm getting reasonably fast renders with a 1.6 MHZ CPU and 1 GB of ram. Much better than what I was getting with WinXP. Some of this would be improvements in Blender, but I'm pretty sure most of the improvement is from the lower overhead of the OS.
Base load should be nuclear, since that's all fixed cost.
That's a fallacy rooted in trying to model the nuclear power industry with accounting systems designed for early 20th century factories.
Nuclear power generation is the first large scale system we've encountered where the greatest costs occur after product is delivered. We need new methods of accounting for costs that can reliably handle this. We don't have any. So while we now have good solutions to the engineering problems of nuclear power, we don't have a clue as to how to price the product, or manage the future costs.
So, no, fixed costs do not dominate nuclear power economics. Unknown costs extending for unknown decades into the future are what dominate nuclear power economics.
We should be able to develop an accounting system that will predictably model future costs of current production. It is not rocket science; it would probably be a mix of traditional accounting with games theory and probability assessments. But so far no one is even talking about this need, let alone talking about funding its development.
Then why isn't Alice buying a bulk package of edubuntu from canonical's store? Or getting plain old edubuntu shipped from canonical? It comes in pretty professional packaging, and the web page is really solid from a marketing/presentation standpoint. I get your argument, just really don't think Alice is the right user.
Good questions. I just asked her about them. This is what she told me:
She already has a pristine copy of Ubuntu ordered direct from Canonical. She will be using both it and the Best Buy package when she makes her pitch. But she was concerned that "Canonical" and "Edubuntu" sounded too geeky for the people she has to work with, who mostly think that if it doesn't have an Apple or Microsoft label, then its going to be risky stuff. Best Buy is, however, pure downhome suburban Americana—
It simply reeks of charcoal lighting fluid, blackened hot dogs, and store-bought potato salad —says Alice.
So I guess in a sense she's trying to slide this foreign ubuntu thing under the radar, too.
Thanks for the link to an interesting story. I still plan on looking in a Best Buy store when the opportunity to do so next comes along, but now it will be more of a scoping out of an adversary than a buying trip.
You speak of the wrong demographic.
User story: Alice has been trying to get Bob, her department head, interested in developing curricula with FOSS tools. Because she knows her students cannot afford to buy the products that Microsoft gives to her school for essentially no cost. A Best Buy copy of Ubuntu fits her strategy since it is professionally packaged by a big box store. She is deliberately buying the packaging, knowing that the contents are free. She will use it as a prop at meetings that discuss FOSS adoption.
User story: Chris wants his parents to move on from the Windows 98 machine his father bought the year that he retired. He has built up a good looking, plain vanilla DFI white box system that runs Ubuntu, to give them on their 45th anniversary. He buys an Ubuntu disk from Best Buy to add to the package since he knows his parents will be worried if they don't have the ever-important "back up disks" for their new computer. He could burn a copy himself, of course, but he'd rather spend $20 than take the time to compose and print a good looking disk label.
User story: well, you get the idea. Sometimes the packaging alone is worth the cost of the item.
Plus, with this move Best Buy has just managed to penetrate a market segment that is otherwise totally oblivious to its existence. Whether by design or by serendipity, Best Buy has just gotten its name out in front of all the geeks who read Slashdot. Good move, Best Buy! I know I will be popping into one of your stores the next time an opportunity to do so comes along, just to see what you are all about.
I can't imagine it's significantly harder to rig a paper election than an electronic one.
It is a matter of cost and risk.
It costs a lot less to hire one black hat to compromise thousands of voting machines than to print up a lot of counterfeit ballots and get them put into play. With the voting machines in use in 2000 and 2004, the risk of getting caught was minimal since the security of the machines before the elections was inadequate and audit trails were non-existent.
So for that period, there was a strong business case for rigging elections. The cost benefit ratio was very favorable. And risk management was very easy to do— even if the fraud was strongly suspected, there would be no evidence that would stand up in court and zero likelihood that the parties paying for the fraud would be directly implicated. In retrospect, it is obvious that both elections must have been compromised. To assume otherwise would be contrary to the principles of free market capitalism.
What is needed is for elections to go back to procedures that increase the costs and risks involved in rigging an election. Adding audit trails to evoting machines would be a very good first step.
Look for a "reversing" tripod for your digital camera. These allow the post the camera mounts on to be removed and installed upside down, so you can aim the camera straight down between the legs of the tripod. This feature was more common on older tripods: mine is a "Velbon VEF-3" from around 1965. Also, for this work the heavier the tripod is, the better. Ask people who like garage sales to look for something like this for you.
Use a large coffee table (or other low table) for your work area. Use a bubble level to make make it, well, level. Set up the tripod and camera, and level the camera. Now the plane of the CCD is parallel with the plane of the working surface.
You can get a sheet of low reflective glass from a window repair shop or possibly a picture framer for probably 5USD or less. Tell them what you want it for and they'll know what you need. Put some heavy tape around the edges. The sheet works great to hold magazine pages flat, and to straighten wrinkles.
Use a cable trigger for the shutter.
Lighting can be a problem. Flash probably won't work: at least I couldn't get it to. I had good results setting up in a room with lots of north facing windows and white walls, and using fairly long exposures in ambient light (hence the cable trigger). You might also want to adjust the white balance with a blank sheet of white paper at the beginning of the shoot.
Obviously this kind of set-up works best in batch mode, where you can quickly shoot a 100 pages or so in a session. Once the camera is set up, you just position the next page, click the shutter, then go on to the next page... a little boring but pretty fast. I was using PaintShop Pro for clean-up (cropping out the edges of the paper and straightening the image), but if I was to do this again tomorrow, I'm pretty sure that The GIMP would handle it. And I think there are now some good FOSS OCR software available, too. I was working with an early version of OmniPage, and it was a foul beast. Also OmniPage only produced Word documents, which made for several extra steps to moving from hardcopy of old correspondence, etc, to decent HTML.
Oh, I almost forgot. Set up your shots so the image you want is centered with about 10% margins all the way around that you will crop away in post-processing. Use a fairly high resolution to compensate. You'll end up with much better results, especially if you will be using OCR.
Parent post pulls no punches: first sentence jumps right in and accuses anyone in opposition of breaking Godwin's Law. Skirts right close to the edge, it does! I'll not try to compare Bill Gates with Adolf Hitler. Even if that wasn't such a sick idea, it would be silly. Hitler never made all that much money, and his book wasn't all that widely read, either.
I've done some research on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation a year or so ago, using their public financial statements as they are required by law to produce, as they are presented on the Web. B&MGF have indeed given away annually 5% to 10% of its assets as determined by the balance sheet for the prior fiscal year. I went back several years; this is a consistent pattern.
This is a little more than the minimum amount that B&MGF has to donate to retain its status as a charity under US Federal tax law. Since the pattern is so consistent, I'm guessing that there are bean counters who assure that the amount donated stays within a very tightly targeted range.
It means that B&MGF's assets at the start of each fiscal year are only 105% to 113% as large as they were at the start of the prior fiscal year. They've obviously got some good investment managers who are consistently getting 10% to 18% ROIs. This is all very much legal under US tax laws. It is indeed the shrewdest thing that could have been done with a pile of personal wealth that so greatly exceeded the amount anyone else had ever piled up at the time when B&MGF was created. Bill Gates needed a tax shelter, and B&MGF was the best tax shelter money could buy.
B&MGF are a charity: that is how the corporation is legally defined. That does not mean that Bill Gates is a philanthropist. He is in the charity business because it makes good business sense. The amount given away each year is a cost of doing business that in the long run is less expensive than the alternatives (like paying taxes on earnings).
Bill Gates remains a very shrewd businessman who has discovered that running a charity is the best way to manage his assets. He is not a philanthropist giving away his assets. B&MGF gives away a portion of its prior year earnings, never more than that, and almost certainly never more than what the tax laws require.