Are you selling hard drives to consumers? Will people be physically injured by HDD viruses? Does each disk serve hundreds of people? No? Well then I guess your analogy is very very poor.
How will the "We Have To Get Off This Rock wackjobs react to this? a) they will realize they are utterly out to lunch and give up, or b) they will now stridently insist that not only must humanity magically leave earth, but leave the galaxy as well!
Our intrepid explorer stands in the middle of the block on a dark evening in a strange part of town. He scans his surroundings with his cell phne until he sees the small red letters "GFE" hovering over the door of an apartment in a building across the street. Bingo.
Except it won't be run exclusively by family-friendly institutions. There will be a lot of other content in out of the way places. Some of it will be encoded with euphemisms, slang terms, steganography, encryption, etc., and will be cross-referenced to more detailed information on the net.
Don't worry, there will be something for everyone.
Spare us the sententious bullshit. The cost is so high that it is in practice impossible. Yours is just a magical-religious superstition that it can or should be done. As to living on Titan, you are very obviously talking out of your ass.
How clever of you to subtly change the subject. The parent refers to manned space exploration, which is truly a waste of money and resources. Space explorationper se is certainly a technology driver. History has shown many many times that unmanned space exploration can do everything worth doing in space that manned exploration can do for far less money, in far less time, and on a vastly greater scale.
I agree completely. Unfortunately, a large and highly vocal portion of the illustrious slashdot community believes science fiction stories are true predictors of real events, especially those with huge spaceships and space colonies throughout the galaxy. They are sci fi fundamentalists, or maybe sci fi evangelicals.
Cheaper in fact than fixing this world, by a several orders of magnitude.
Not even remotely true. I challenge you to show how much time and money it would take to get a significant number of people "getting us off this ball of rock and inhabiting other ones." Their destination would need to be demonstrably able to allow them to survive and reproduce indefinitely, not some suicide "colonization" mission. By significant I mean on the order of at least millions of people.
Manned space exploration is, for the next several decades at least, a complete waste of money. It has no useful or interesting purpose. Everything can be best and most efficiently done via unmanned robotic missions. Exploration, space science, remote sensing, attempts at resource recovery, etc. are vastly cheaper and greater in scope and duration if you remove the presence of humans. The space travel dreams you harbor may not be possible for centuries, if at all. The only thing unmanned exploration cannot do well is the dubious and self-referential "researching the effects of space travel on the human body."
The notion of "getting us off this ball of rock and inhabiting other ones" is a children's story. A beautiful enticing dream in which you must suspend disbelief, practical reality, and even the very laws of nature and mass/energy balance. It is a modern version of religious myths about a celestial afterlife awaiting the pious after the cruelty and suffering of earthly life. It does not exist. It is a spiritual balm devised to give hope to the hopeless and inspiration to those in horrible life situations.
The extremely optimistic fable presented in Red/Green/Blue Mars is, at the moment, impossible from a budgetary standpoint, among many others. You can claim that the money and resources exist. In some sense they sort of do. But to use them on such a project would divert them from the daily activities of hundreds of millions of people. In that sense the resources do not exist. You would have to sacrifice the livelihoods and economic futures of a great many people to make the dreams of a chosen few come true.
On a more physical level, simply transporting enough gases to bulk up the Martian atmosphere is a project so staggering in scope and cost as to be practically impossible. I could go on, but I'm at work...
This isn't really a troll. It may well be an excellent idea to just say fuck it and start coding without caring whether you are doing it wrong or whatever. Just throw some code together that roughly does the first or next few things it needs to do, compile it (if necessary), and debug it just barely enough for it to produce more or less desirable results. Then forget about it until the next day.
Next day, either refactor what you did the day before, or just keep moving crazily forward. Eventually you will refactor it into something reasonable, and you will have achieved forward movement.
I've done both many times, and $300 is way too much. I have rarely had to muck with the GNU/Linux video configuration files in the past 3 or 4 years, and when I did it did not take me 6 hr. The last windows license I bought (I stopped pirating years ago) was XP for $150, which was a significant fraction of the hardware cost even then, about 3 or 4 years ago. I have only used GNU/Linux since then, usually Ubuntu. Wine is starting to be a seriously viable alternative to Windows, IMHO.
The pricing is far too high. Windows 7 Professional should cost $50 or less. You are not getting more value than that. This isn't 1985. They have been making OSs for nearly 30 years, it is absurd to expect customers to believe that there is that much additional value in it when the hardware cost is so low.
On the plus side, this will add yet another small impulse to the slow relentless move towards GNU/Linux. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, but the days of $300 consumer operating systems are coming to a close.
We live in a country whose government is run by mobsters. Federal, state, and local, mobsters run the show. What kinds? In no particular order:
Finance industry
Defense and weapons industry
Petroleum and enegry industries, foreign and domestic
Drug traffickers, legal and illegal
Large-scale engineering firms
These are the main groups that receive fantastic favors from the government. The rest of us just pay for it all.
You may think I'm full of shit, a conspiracy-theorizing lunatic, or just some slashdot crank. Maybe so. Check your data before you get too smug about it, though.
I'm so cool! I'm so fashionable! I'm so hip! I'm so tech savvy! I don't buy those overpriced stone age CDs. Who needs to have their music on a permanent physical backup that can potentially last for decades and that can be ripped as many times as I need to as many devices as I buy? That's for Luddites and old farts.
I prefer the ultracoolness of buying everything online with proprietary DRM that limits how many times I can download and to what devices, and that can disappear at any moment leaving me with megabytes of encrypted junk.
Not so fast. The Iranian authorities are shutting off as many of these tools as possible, as well as using the good old fashioned technique of simply imprisoning the sources. For example Amir Sadeghi, the brave photojournalist who runs the http://tehranlive.org/ blog, has gone missing. Also, just plain shooting protesters down in the street has evidently not lost its appeal. The net provides new and revolutionary tools of communication, but brutal dictatorships are still able to leverage their tried and true techniques.
The "Islamic Republic" has lasted longer than the Shah, and has clearly shown that religious oligarchies are every bit as corrupt, barbaric, and secretive as secular ones.
I hope the people of Iran are able to free themselves of dictatorship soon.
Your comments are uninformed. The code you write at work is covered by both copyright and trade secrets laws. You may not be worried, but your company certainly is. Those worries may not be evident unless litigation comes into play, but without a shadow of a doubt, they are there. If your company is big enough to have a legal department, even if it is just one person or outside counsel, I suggest you have a chat with them about it. You are in dire need of the information.
It isn't a better analogy. If your employer doesn't pay you, you have legal recourse. If you violate copyright, the copyright owner has legal recourse. The "showing up uninvited" analogy to placing digital goods for sale, while a popular one, is ridiculous. A store is a store, a product is a product. Likewise, the "abundant good with zero cost of copying" is equally specious. There is no great divide in abundance or copyability between online digital goods and more traditional items. Photocopiers and tape or wire recorders have been around for half a century. Photography for a century and a half. The printing press for centuries. All have been used for piracy, it is hardly a new phenomenon.
Do you photocopy textbooks to avoid paying for them? Did your parents pirate music on cassettes? If the answer is yes, that still doesn't make it legal, moral, or otherwise acceptable. In today's market, digital goods exist. They are as legitimate as any other.
Slashdot Mirror
Are you selling hard drives to consumers? Will people be physically injured by HDD viruses? Does each disk serve hundreds of people? No? Well then I guess your analogy is very very poor.
How will the "We Have To Get Off This Rock wackjobs react to this? a) they will realize they are utterly out to lunch and give up, or b) they will now stridently insist that not only must humanity magically leave earth, but leave the galaxy as well!
You know which one they'll choose...
That's where the term "intrepid explorer" comes into play.
Here's one:
Our intrepid explorer stands in the middle of the block on a dark evening in a strange part of town. He scans his surroundings with his cell phne until he sees the small red letters "GFE" hovering over the door of an apartment in a building across the street. Bingo.
Except it won't be run exclusively by family-friendly institutions. There will be a lot of other content in out of the way places. Some of it will be encoded with euphemisms, slang terms, steganography, encryption, etc., and will be cross-referenced to more detailed information on the net.
Don't worry, there will be something for everyone.
Spare us the sententious bullshit. The cost is so high that it is in practice impossible. Yours is just a magical-religious superstition that it can or should be done. As to living on Titan, you are very obviously talking out of your ass.
How clever of you to subtly change the subject. The parent refers to manned space exploration, which is truly a waste of money and resources. Space exploration per se is certainly a technology driver. History has shown many many times that unmanned space exploration can do everything worth doing in space that manned exploration can do for far less money, in far less time, and on a vastly greater scale.
How does that even address the question?
I agree completely. Unfortunately, a large and highly vocal portion of the illustrious slashdot community believes science fiction stories are true predictors of real events, especially those with huge spaceships and space colonies throughout the galaxy. They are sci fi fundamentalists, or maybe sci fi evangelicals.
Cheaper in fact than fixing this world, by a several orders of magnitude.
Not even remotely true. I challenge you to show how much time and money it would take to get a significant number of people "getting us off this ball of rock and inhabiting other ones." Their destination would need to be demonstrably able to allow them to survive and reproduce indefinitely, not some suicide "colonization" mission. By significant I mean on the order of at least millions of people.
Manned space exploration is, for the next several decades at least, a complete waste of money. It has no useful or interesting purpose. Everything can be best and most efficiently done via unmanned robotic missions. Exploration, space science, remote sensing, attempts at resource recovery, etc. are vastly cheaper and greater in scope and duration if you remove the presence of humans. The space travel dreams you harbor may not be possible for centuries, if at all. The only thing unmanned exploration cannot do well is the dubious and self-referential "researching the effects of space travel on the human body."
The notion of "getting us off this ball of rock and inhabiting other ones" is a children's story. A beautiful enticing dream in which you must suspend disbelief, practical reality, and even the very laws of nature and mass/energy balance. It is a modern version of religious myths about a celestial afterlife awaiting the pious after the cruelty and suffering of earthly life. It does not exist. It is a spiritual balm devised to give hope to the hopeless and inspiration to those in horrible life situations.
The extremely optimistic fable presented in Red/Green/Blue Mars is, at the moment, impossible from a budgetary standpoint, among many others. You can claim that the money and resources exist. In some sense they sort of do. But to use them on such a project would divert them from the daily activities of hundreds of millions of people. In that sense the resources do not exist. You would have to sacrifice the livelihoods and economic futures of a great many people to make the dreams of a chosen few come true.
On a more physical level, simply transporting enough gases to bulk up the Martian atmosphere is a project so staggering in scope and cost as to be practically impossible. I could go on, but I'm at work...
We all got the sarcasm. We preferred to focus on the kernel of truth it had inside. ;-)
I let the tree grow first, then I prune it. That's the way nature works, four billion years of evolution can't be all wrong.
I see your point, but the greatest risk is to end up with something as impenetrable and baffling as a biological genome.
You mean curly braces
This isn't really a troll. It may well be an excellent idea to just say fuck it and start coding without caring whether you are doing it wrong or whatever. Just throw some code together that roughly does the first or next few things it needs to do, compile it (if necessary), and debug it just barely enough for it to produce more or less desirable results. Then forget about it until the next day.
Next day, either refactor what you did the day before, or just keep moving crazily forward. Eventually you will refactor it into something reasonable, and you will have achieved forward movement.
Don't worry, nobody's watching. Like the man said:
Plan to throw one away. You will anyway.
Hear hear! It is exploitative marketing bullshit, pure and simple.
I've done both many times, and $300 is way too much. I have rarely had to muck with the GNU/Linux video configuration files in the past 3 or 4 years, and when I did it did not take me 6 hr. The last windows license I bought (I stopped pirating years ago) was XP for $150, which was a significant fraction of the hardware cost even then, about 3 or 4 years ago. I have only used GNU/Linux since then, usually Ubuntu. Wine is starting to be a seriously viable alternative to Windows, IMHO.
The pricing is far too high. Windows 7 Professional should cost $50 or less. You are not getting more value than that. This isn't 1985. They have been making OSs for nearly 30 years, it is absurd to expect customers to believe that there is that much additional value in it when the hardware cost is so low.
On the plus side, this will add yet another small impulse to the slow relentless move towards GNU/Linux. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next year, but the days of $300 consumer operating systems are coming to a close.
These are the main groups that receive fantastic favors from the government. The rest of us just pay for it all.
You may think I'm full of shit, a conspiracy-theorizing lunatic, or just some slashdot crank. Maybe so. Check your data before you get too smug about it, though.
Welcome, Comrades!
Welcome to the Union of Soviet Capitalist Republics!
Keep on believing.
as well as many actual experts not getting a single penny.
Name three, and not just some random talking head. Some "actual experts."
This is absolutely horrifying! Will it be granted? It was filed by the poster child of ruthless corruption.
I think people have been modding this "funny" because they think you made it up.
I'm so cool! I'm so fashionable! I'm so hip! I'm so tech savvy! I don't buy those overpriced stone age CDs. Who needs to have their music on a permanent physical backup that can potentially last for decades and that can be ripped as many times as I need to as many devices as I buy? That's for Luddites and old farts.
I prefer the ultracoolness of buying everything online with proprietary DRM that limits how many times I can download and to what devices, and that can disappear at any moment leaving me with megabytes of encrypted junk.
Wanna see my cool tatts?
Not so fast. The Iranian authorities are shutting off as many of these tools as possible, as well as using the good old fashioned technique of simply imprisoning the sources. For example Amir Sadeghi, the brave photojournalist who runs the http://tehranlive.org/ blog, has gone missing. Also, just plain shooting protesters down in the street has evidently not lost its appeal. The net provides new and revolutionary tools of communication, but brutal dictatorships are still able to leverage their tried and true techniques.
The "Islamic Republic" has lasted longer than the Shah, and has clearly shown that religious oligarchies are every bit as corrupt, barbaric, and secretive as secular ones.
I hope the people of Iran are able to free themselves of dictatorship soon.
Your comments are uninformed. The code you write at work is covered by both copyright and trade secrets laws. You may not be worried, but your company certainly is. Those worries may not be evident unless litigation comes into play, but without a shadow of a doubt, they are there. If your company is big enough to have a legal department, even if it is just one person or outside counsel, I suggest you have a chat with them about it. You are in dire need of the information.
Armchair psychology? Wow.
It isn't a better analogy. If your employer doesn't pay you, you have legal recourse. If you violate copyright, the copyright owner has legal recourse. The "showing up uninvited" analogy to placing digital goods for sale, while a popular one, is ridiculous. A store is a store, a product is a product. Likewise, the "abundant good with zero cost of copying" is equally specious. There is no great divide in abundance or copyability between online digital goods and more traditional items. Photocopiers and tape or wire recorders have been around for half a century. Photography for a century and a half. The printing press for centuries. All have been used for piracy, it is hardly a new phenomenon.
Do you photocopy textbooks to avoid paying for them? Did your parents pirate music on cassettes? If the answer is yes, that still doesn't make it legal, moral, or otherwise acceptable. In today's market, digital goods exist. They are as legitimate as any other.