Ion thrusters are no use in getting out of Earth's gravity well, which is what the GP is talking about. Getting every ton of *anything* into orbit is expensive and complicated. Building stuff in orbit is even more impractical - simply building it on the ground and then launching it from there is much more efficient.
I'm learning German, and I find the biggest issue (besides the gender of nouns) is simply that grammar is not really taught in English schools any more - at least the wishy-washy PC schools of New Zealand. So nearly all grammatical concepts, which German uses a great deal to modify nouns and verbs, are new to me - even though, of course, I subsconsciously "know" them to write good English.
It was a typical annoying survey too, many dozens of questions on incredibly vague topics like "Would you rate our site [that I visited once for 2 minutes] as one of the most trustworthy on the web for information about IT?"
Naturally I clicked through it randomly, except for answering that I'm responsible for "More than $1 billion in IT purchases"....
Not necessarily. You can launch from anywhere, it just costs you more to accelerate (slightly less starting speed than at the equator) and possibly more to get into the orbit you want.
Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome is further north than most of the UK and they certainly launch lots of stuff from there - though they prefer Baikonur, its politically more difficult....
I think you need to get your facts straight. Email is text-only. There's no great need to lay it out and format it like a bloody well polished journal article. Originally, yes, email was text only, but like everything else it evolves as the users and developers want. In particular, business usage of email has diverged very far from the original ideals.
HTML is pretty much the standard in most corporate mail systems, as far as I can see, and I do myself use it for basic formatting and inline images. The most common usage I see is for quoting and inline replies with multiple colours. While this is partly generated by the limitations of Outlook, I actually find it easier to read as well because each quote is identifiable by color, rather than just the level of indent. In fact there is a TBird plugin to do the same thing automatically...
It's OK to not accept mail, but your system should do it at the initial SMTP exchange, not accept it and then decide to bounce. Otherwise you just transfer all the spam onto innocent third parties. (Backscatter)
Damages for possibly identity theft and access to your bank account? Hm... lets pick a figure out of the air of (say) the value of any actual losses plus compensation of (say) $5000... triple that as punitive... so all they have to do is pay up 15 billion dollars and they can continue! No problem.
The original scrapping of the Netscape code was a big part of killing Netscape and allowing IE to take the whole market away. Most likely a strong refactoring would have produced results quicker; of course all the egos... I mean programmers involved wouldn't have been able to indulge their "this code is crap lets throw it away" attitude.
Firefox succeeded DESPITE throwing a huge set of functioning code away, not because of it.
All inexperienced developers think that it will be a "necessary first step in clearing out years of cruft", until they actually try it. Then they realise that the "years of cruft" often had good reasons for being there and solving the problems the "cruft" solved is actually extremely hard and not always elegant.
This is especially true if the people doing the rewrite are not the same people who wrote it the first time. In Netscapes case some of the originals were around but the majority seems to have been new.
That's right, thanks to Netscape and AOL. Mozilla/Firefox has never existed as a purely non-commercial, grassroots effort. It has always had massive funding and resourcing from companies.
Whodda thunk? Massive funding and resourcing can produce a successful product?
Because many, many studies have been done on many variations of radio waves and their effect on humans and have all concluded there is no danger so long as the safety limits already set, are adhered too.
You can't have been paying much attention if you "resent" it.
Many ocean fish stocks are running low, many species are endangered, most agriculture is reliant on risky monocultures, water is running low, power is reaching limits, oil is reaching limits. Even thousands of years ago people turned huge areas into deserts from overfarming. (like parts of the middle east). There are no new frontiers to plunder. Of course, we can become more efficient, find new ways to use and extract resources. But clearly we are at the point where many resources become strained.
So adding more people to this is obviously not a good thing, and greatly REDUCING the number of people would ease or solve many of these problems. But religion and instincts tell people to breed and to hell with the long term.
Why should it be a right? if it will result in wiping out the Earth's ecosystem and killing us all, how can it be a right? You have to think a bit more beyond what your instincts tell you.
IMDB already require authentication - typically a mobile phone SMS - to post on their forums. Or at least they were planning to and do have the option available.
Perhaps since they have a very large existing userbase they can afford to do it, where others can't. But I haven't noticed a big drop in participation.
Regarding row hover, I agree in general, but there is a problem: that creates an expectation that the row should DO something. On the web, highlighting something when moused over usually indicates a link (for those designers who don't think links should be obvious all the time).
It's true. Basically it's a niche, and driven more by accounting and marketing than practicality and security. No vendor can afford to meet all the requirements including security, a nice easy user interface, rigorous testing, all the promotions ideas marketing can think of, the interface-du-jour to head office systems etc. So everybody just makes do with (barely) adequate systems.
I should know, I work on one;)
Also, even now there are benefits to using hardware designed for the job rather than PC model #9276. It will generally last a lot longer and be more fit to the purpose (cashiers banging on keys at high speed). The flexibility of PCs is somewhat irrelevant day-to-day, indeed you don't want people installing Office and SolitairePlus2000 (now with extra malware).
Well actually most high end games have stopped supporting Windows 2000. Not for technical reasons, just that the market is too small to make it worth their while testing and supporting it.
There were relatively few such posts/discussions. I'm afraid you've just demonstrated the article's point: you see bias where there isn't any (or relatively little).
actually I think there are plenty of people who still swim happily in the Microsoft sea of developer tools, conferences, marketing and blogs.
But slashdot is so famously anti Microsoft (on balance) that most of them don't post here, wouldn't think of bothering with what they see as a little cesspool if irrational hatred. In other words, Slashdot has a self-selecting audience.
He didn't compare the situations, but he compared people's pyschology, and the fact is we all like to have a tribe to rally around and see others as the enemy. A bit of maturity is hopefully learning when you're doing that and try to avoid it.
I am *amazed* at the level of blindness exhibited by certain people on the article comments (and too a lesser extent here). Things like "You Windows users are not only paranoid, but so anti-Apple that your comments are hysterical". From a fairly neutral position, it's pretty obvious that Apple is doing just the same dodgy thing as others have done before, and there is no reason to excuse them. Are we seriously expected to believe, in this age of bundled spyware and rootkits on audio cds that someone "accidentally" slipped an entire web browser into the "updates" for the world's most popular music player?
If Firefox is the best browser out there, it will continue to gain market share, despite what Microsoft and Apple do. This is a very naive thing to think. Microsoft would probably like to kill Firefox but doesn't want the extra legal heat anything blatant would involve. The fact is that bundling makes quality a secondary factor. So long as a bundled app is "good enough" it doesn't matter that there's something better enough out there.
Slashdot Mirror
Ion thrusters are no use in getting out of Earth's gravity well, which is what the GP is talking about. Getting every ton of *anything* into orbit is expensive and complicated. Building stuff in orbit is even more impractical - simply building it on the ground and then launching it from there is much more efficient.
I'm learning German, and I find the biggest issue (besides the gender of nouns) is simply that grammar is not really taught in English schools any more - at least the wishy-washy PC schools of New Zealand. So nearly all grammatical concepts, which German uses a great deal to modify nouns and verbs, are new to me - even though, of course, I subsconsciously "know" them to write good English.
It was a typical annoying survey too, many dozens of questions on incredibly vague topics like "Would you rate our site [that I visited once for 2 minutes] as one of the most trustworthy on the web for information about IT?"
Naturally I clicked through it randomly, except for answering that I'm responsible for "More than $1 billion in IT purchases"....
Not necessarily. You can launch from anywhere, it just costs you more to accelerate (slightly less starting speed than at the equator) and possibly more to get into the orbit you want.
Russia's Plesetsk Cosmodrome is further north than most of the UK and they certainly launch lots of stuff from there - though they prefer Baikonur, its politically more difficult....
Please vote:
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=243468
So how are things at Chernobyl these days? Have they started building the new shield for #4 yet? :)
Must be an interesting place to work
HTML is pretty much the standard in most corporate mail systems, as far as I can see, and I do myself use it for basic formatting and inline images. The most common usage I see is for quoting and inline replies with multiple colours. While this is partly generated by the limitations of Outlook, I actually find it easier to read as well because each quote is identifiable by color, rather than just the level of indent. In fact there is a TBird plugin to do the same thing automatically...
It's OK to not accept mail, but your system should do it at the initial SMTP exchange, not accept it and then decide to bounce. Otherwise you just transfer all the spam onto innocent third parties. (Backscatter)
Damages for possibly identity theft and access to your bank account? Hm ... lets pick a figure out of the air of (say) the value of any actual losses plus compensation of (say) $5000 ... triple that as punitive ... so all they have to do is pay up 15 billion dollars and they can continue! No problem.
Indeed.
With some honesty, we could truly say: Thanks, AOL, for helping to save the internet!
The original scrapping of the Netscape code was a big part of killing Netscape and allowing IE to take the whole market away. Most likely a strong refactoring would have produced results quicker; of course all the egos... I mean programmers involved wouldn't have been able to indulge their "this code is crap lets throw it away" attitude.
Firefox succeeded DESPITE throwing a huge set of functioning code away, not because of it.
All inexperienced developers think that it will be a "necessary first step in clearing out years of cruft", until they actually try it. Then they realise that the "years of cruft" often had good reasons for being there and solving the problems the "cruft" solved is actually extremely hard and not always elegant.
This is especially true if the people doing the rewrite are not the same people who wrote it the first time. In Netscapes case some of the originals were around but the majority seems to have been new.
That's right, thanks to Netscape and AOL.
Mozilla/Firefox has never existed as a purely non-commercial, grassroots effort. It has always had massive funding and resourcing from companies.
Whodda thunk? Massive funding and resourcing can produce a successful product?
Because many, many studies have been done on many variations of radio waves and their effect on humans and have all concluded there is no danger so long as the safety limits already set, are adhered too.
You can't have been paying much attention if you "resent" it.
Many ocean fish stocks are running low, many species are endangered, most agriculture is reliant on risky monocultures, water is running low, power is reaching limits, oil is reaching limits. Even thousands of years ago people turned huge areas into deserts from overfarming. (like parts of the middle east). There are no new frontiers to plunder. Of course, we can become more efficient, find new ways to use and extract resources. But clearly we are at the point where many resources become strained.
So adding more people to this is obviously not a good thing, and greatly REDUCING the number of people would ease or solve many of these problems. But religion and instincts tell people to breed and to hell with the long term.
Why should it be a right? if it will result in wiping out the Earth's ecosystem and killing us all, how can it be a right? You have to think a bit more beyond what your instincts tell you.
IMDB already require authentication - typically a mobile phone SMS - to post on their forums.
Or at least they were planning to and do have the option available.
Perhaps since they have a very large existing userbase they can afford to do it, where others can't. But I haven't noticed a big drop in participation.
Regarding row hover, I agree in general, but there is a problem: that creates an expectation that the row should DO something. On the web, highlighting something when moused over usually indicates a link (for those designers who don't think links should be obvious all the time).
These standards are mostly about POS peripherals. Useful, but hardly a working solution.
It's true. Basically it's a niche, and driven more by accounting and marketing than practicality and security. No vendor can afford to meet all the requirements including security, a nice easy user interface, rigorous testing, all the promotions ideas marketing can think of, the interface-du-jour to head office systems etc. So everybody just makes do with (barely) adequate systems.
;)
I should know, I work on one
Also, even now there are benefits to using hardware designed for the job rather than PC model #9276. It will generally last a lot longer and be more fit to the purpose (cashiers banging on keys at high speed). The flexibility of PCs is somewhat irrelevant day-to-day, indeed you don't want people installing Office and SolitairePlus2000 (now with extra malware).
Well actually most high end games have stopped supporting Windows 2000. Not for technical reasons, just that the market is too small to make it worth their while testing and supporting it.
There were relatively few such posts/discussions. I'm afraid you've just demonstrated the article's point: you see bias where there isn't any (or relatively little).
actually I think there are plenty of people who still swim happily in the Microsoft sea of developer tools, conferences, marketing and blogs.
But slashdot is so famously anti Microsoft (on balance) that most of them don't post here, wouldn't think of bothering with what they see as a little cesspool if irrational hatred. In other words, Slashdot has a self-selecting audience.
He didn't compare the situations, but he compared people's pyschology, and the fact is we all like to have a tribe to rally around and see others as the enemy. A bit of maturity is hopefully learning when you're doing that and try to avoid it.
I am *amazed* at the level of blindness exhibited by certain people on the article comments (and too a lesser extent here). Things like "You Windows users are not only paranoid, but so anti-Apple that your comments are hysterical". From a fairly neutral position, it's pretty obvious that Apple is doing just the same dodgy thing as others have done before, and there is no reason to excuse them. Are we seriously expected to believe, in this age of bundled spyware and rootkits on audio cds that someone "accidentally" slipped an entire web browser into the "updates" for the world's most popular music player?