Being prepared for war is expensive and dangerous. However the cost of not being prepared is much higher.
True. Because if it wasn't for spending more on the military than the entire rest of the world who knows what country might declare war on America next week. The Bolivians could be in Washington by Thursday if America didn't have fifty aircraft carriers to stop them.
On an airliner, don't you need the control surfaces to fly, and the landing gear to take off ?
You could just stick it on a rocket booster and launch it on a ballistic trajectory to where you're going. Heck, that way you could remove the wings too.
The point is that if you really want to get the costs down, you need to fly a lot; and the best way to fly a lot is to build something you just refuel and fly again with minimal maintenance. The shuttle tried to take a big step toward that goal, but it was a dismal failure.
The shuttle was a incredible show of stupidity. Why hoist all of the control surfaces, landing gear, associated control equipment into space just so it can land on a runway.
That's like asking why you put all the control surfaces and landing gear on an airliner just so it can land on a runway rather than have the passengers parachute out at the end of the flight and crash it into the ground? The shuttle made sense so long as it could fly every couple of weeks as NASA originally claimed; it made no sense when it only few once a year... the fixed costs killed it, not the cost of a single flight.
If we ever get space hotels, I guess I can just go there with my flying car instead.
Bigelow already has two 'space hotel' modules in orbit for long-term testing and Falcon/Dragon could fly tourists there for significantly less than the cost of a trip to ISS. You'll almost certainly see a space hotel before you see a commercially-viable flying car.
Post-Constellation, we're not. The current NASA plan is to develop a heavy lift launcher capable of manned missions to unspecified targets such as the moon/mars/asteroids.
Unspecified missions to unspecified targets that will never happen so long as most of NASA's budget is being wasted on a jobs program... sorry, heavy lift launcher.
Atlas is a fine ride to LEO but you need something larger to go farther.
That's like saying you need a bigger spacecraft than the shuttle to build a space station because Skylab was launched on a Saturn V. In reality you split the payload into smaller sized chunks and launch them on something far more cost-effective than a NASA boondoggle that will cost billions of dollars every time it flies because it only does so once a year and needs 10,000 people to prepare it for launch. Most of the mass you need to put into orbit for a long-range spacecraft is fuel, which can easily be split across multiple launches.
Actually, the bots are worse. I largely stopped editing Wikipedia when I discovered that a bot had tagged about a dozen images I uploaded as not having fair use explanations when those images had perfectly good fair use explanations but they were in human-readable text rather than some specific tag format that it was looking for. I couldn't be assed to change the pages to please a stupid bot, so the images were deleted even though they met all the actual, real requirements to be on Wikipedia.
I believe that particular bot was later stopped because it was so retarded and caused so many deletions of things that were perfectly legitimate.
hydrogen: takes that same amount of energy the volt pulled out of the wall, but first uses it to somehow produce hydrogen from another source, then puts it in the vehicle, attempting to do the same net work. it's already at a disadvantage unless the hydrogen-to-work path is significantly more efficient than the electricity-work path.
Hint: hydrogen is mostly produced from natural gas. Though that does raise the question of why you'd want a hydrogen car when you could just burn the gas instead.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but at least part of the goal is, in fact, to give the utility some control.
Why would anyone other than the power company want that?
Here's an idea: if you can't produce enough power you could... build more power stations. This is all about increasing profits for power companies by screwing over their customers rather than increasing the amount of power they can generate.
Does it bother anyone else that many are proposing that we allow utilities the right to tell us when we can and can not use certain appliances within our own house?
But it's Green, dude.
The odd thing is that most industries want to sell you more stuff, whereas the energy industry keeps trying to sell less stuff and raise prices. Pretty soon we'll be better off running our own generators instead of buying grid power.
I thought you were talking about Linus not Bill Gates?
There are far more Linux systems in the world than Windows systems. I can see seven from my sofa, and only four of them are PCs of some description.
As for Linux vs Minix, one of them runs hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of systems around the world, the other runs a handful. There are probably good reasons for that.
The other day I shut down my laptop and went to pack my lunch before going to work. I came back to find Gnome telling me that 'Program Unknown has not shut down, do you want to close it?'
Aaaagh! For fsck's sake. If I wanted that kind of crap I'd be using Windows, not Linux. If I didn't want it to shut down I wouldn't have told it to shut down.
Gnome has spent the last couple of years adopting most of the dumber ideas from Windows and with Gnome 3 they seem to be adopting the dumber ideas from MacOS and tablet operating systems.
Yeah let's just have everything stagnate and stay the same forever because poor lusers can't figure out the button moved 100 pixels and has a different icon. Wah wah wah.
Yeah, let's add silly animations and flashy icons that make the desktop dramatically less useful just so we can show everyone how cool we are.
Hopefully with a few more famous users switching to xfce it can progress to something as good as Gnome 2 was before they started Windowizing it.
Maybe Search needs a Problem shake up. Innovation is great, but when I search now, more than ever, I quickly find what I am looking for.
I don't. The harder Google and co try to do 'smart' searching the more problems I have finding the things I'm searching for.
All I want it to do is actually, you know, search for the thing I entered in the search bar, and not try adding or removing 's', picking similar words, picking words that mean the same as the words I'm typing in.
Google's smart searching may be fine if you're looking for the latest Nataly Portmun hut grit pictures, but for technical queries with acronyms it's increasingly becoming a fscking disaster.
How is that possible? Windows XP SP2 came with.NET 2.0. Vista includes 3.0, and Windows 7 includes 3.5.
So which of the various Frameworks do you build for?
And note that anything.Net won't run on my XP PC because at some point in the past I installed a.Net Framework service pack which screwed it up so badly that it can't install and can't uninstall and even the 'brute force uninstaller' from Microsoft won't fix the damn thing.
Running all random applications as root died with Windows XP, at least once Windows XP realizes that it's dead.
Yeah, now users have to click 'OK' when they see the box that says 'Hello Kitty Screensaver wants to: Access Hard Disk' before it can install its malware payload.
It's pocket change for Microsoft, but high enough to attract real interest. And $200,000 is just the beginning. Microsoft will make a very lucrative offer to whomever innovates at that level.
Surely a better idea would be to patent your innovative technology and then ask Microsoft for $200,000,000 to license it?
There is no 255 byte limit - when length exceeds that value, you just go to 2 bytes of length, etc.
So you have a 255 byte string. You append one byte to it. What do you do now?
Are you really suggesting that people should have to move all the bytes of the string one further along so they can increase the length field to two bytes, and then append the new character, and that programmers who can't remember to put a 0 at the end of a string can do that without screwing up?
Sure, you can force everyone to use library calls for all their string operations, but C was intended to be cheap, dirty and fast, which is why there is so much direct string access in C code. If you told them they'd have to use library calls they'd just write their own code instead for better performance, and get it wrong anyway.
Oh what's that? The entire history of hacking is one of ever more elaborate and clever security precautions being overcome by ever more elaborate and clever hackers?
You forgot the part where they just wrap their malware in a 'Free B00b1es' screensaver and people download and install it for them.
I don't understand this. Cant it do both? Can't it be both a cloud end point for some types of data and a data processor for others?
Yes. And unicorns will fly out of its butt while doing so.
I would rather we design tablets with great peripheral integration, and the ability to become desktop/laptop with accessories.
But you just said that laptops suck. Now you're trying to build a kludgy pseudo-laptop out of a tablet with a ton of accessories, which will cost twice as much as a more capable laptop.
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That is, essentially, what the whole education system is about anyway.
No, it's about providing cushy, well-paid jobs for Marxists who would never get a job in the real world.
Being prepared for war is expensive and dangerous. However the cost of not being prepared is much higher.
True. Because if it wasn't for spending more on the military than the entire rest of the world who knows what country might declare war on America next week. The Bolivians could be in Washington by Thursday if America didn't have fifty aircraft carriers to stop them.
You have support troops in the convoy anyway.
So why not, uh, have them drive the vehicles and save some money?
On an airliner, don't you need the control surfaces to fly, and the landing gear to take off ?
You could just stick it on a rocket booster and launch it on a ballistic trajectory to where you're going. Heck, that way you could remove the wings too.
The point is that if you really want to get the costs down, you need to fly a lot; and the best way to fly a lot is to build something you just refuel and fly again with minimal maintenance. The shuttle tried to take a big step toward that goal, but it was a dismal failure.
The shuttle was a incredible show of stupidity. Why hoist all of the control surfaces, landing gear, associated control equipment into space just so it can land on a runway.
That's like asking why you put all the control surfaces and landing gear on an airliner just so it can land on a runway rather than have the passengers parachute out at the end of the flight and crash it into the ground? The shuttle made sense so long as it could fly every couple of weeks as NASA originally claimed; it made no sense when it only few once a year... the fixed costs killed it, not the cost of a single flight.
If we ever get space hotels, I guess I can just go there with my flying car instead.
Bigelow already has two 'space hotel' modules in orbit for long-term testing and Falcon/Dragon could fly tourists there for significantly less than the cost of a trip to ISS. You'll almost certainly see a space hotel before you see a commercially-viable flying car.
Post-Constellation, we're not. The current NASA plan is to develop a heavy lift launcher capable of manned missions to unspecified targets such as the moon/mars/asteroids.
Unspecified missions to unspecified targets that will never happen so long as most of NASA's budget is being wasted on a jobs program... sorry, heavy lift launcher.
Atlas is a fine ride to LEO but you need something larger to go farther.
That's like saying you need a bigger spacecraft than the shuttle to build a space station because Skylab was launched on a Saturn V. In reality you split the payload into smaller sized chunks and launch them on something far more cost-effective than a NASA boondoggle that will cost billions of dollars every time it flies because it only does so once a year and needs 10,000 people to prepare it for launch. Most of the mass you need to put into orbit for a long-range spacecraft is fuel, which can easily be split across multiple launches.
The US, ever since the Republicans turned the country into a bunch of scared, thumb-sucking wusses after 9-11.
Hadn't the Democrats taken over Congress by the time they started demanding fingerprints to enter America?
Actually, the bots are worse. I largely stopped editing Wikipedia when I discovered that a bot had tagged about a dozen images I uploaded as not having fair use explanations when those images had perfectly good fair use explanations but they were in human-readable text rather than some specific tag format that it was looking for. I couldn't be assed to change the pages to please a stupid bot, so the images were deleted even though they met all the actual, real requirements to be on Wikipedia.
I believe that particular bot was later stopped because it was so retarded and caused so many deletions of things that were perfectly legitimate.
hydrogen: takes that same amount of energy the volt pulled out of the wall, but first uses it to somehow produce hydrogen from another source, then puts it in the vehicle, attempting to do the same net work. it's already at a disadvantage unless the hydrogen-to-work path is significantly more efficient than the electricity-work path.
Hint: hydrogen is mostly produced from natural gas. Though that does raise the question of why you'd want a hydrogen car when you could just burn the gas instead.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but at least part of the goal is, in fact, to give the utility some control.
Why would anyone other than the power company want that?
Here's an idea: if you can't produce enough power you could... build more power stations. This is all about increasing profits for power companies by screwing over their customers rather than increasing the amount of power they can generate.
Does it bother anyone else that many are proposing that we allow utilities the right to tell us when we can and can not use certain appliances within our own house?
But it's Green, dude.
The odd thing is that most industries want to sell you more stuff, whereas the energy industry keeps trying to sell less stuff and raise prices. Pretty soon we'll be better off running our own generators instead of buying grid power.
Given how well the "write once run anywhere" marketing aspect of Java has basically failed, its no more a migration path than .Net is these days.
What things won't Java run on? We routinely run the same Java code on Windows and Linux.
I thought you were talking about Linus not Bill Gates?
There are far more Linux systems in the world than Windows systems. I can see seven from my sofa, and only four of them are PCs of some description.
As for Linux vs Minix, one of them runs hundreds of millions or perhaps billions of systems around the world, the other runs a handful. There are probably good reasons for that.
The other day I shut down my laptop and went to pack my lunch before going to work. I came back to find Gnome telling me that 'Program Unknown has not shut down, do you want to close it?'
Aaaagh! For fsck's sake. If I wanted that kind of crap I'd be using Windows, not Linux. If I didn't want it to shut down I wouldn't have told it to shut down.
Gnome has spent the last couple of years adopting most of the dumber ideas from Windows and with Gnome 3 they seem to be adopting the dumber ideas from MacOS and tablet operating systems.
Why do people care what Linus' opinion is with regard to window managers?
Good question. Why do people care what the guy who created one of the world's most successful operating systems thinks about GUIs that run on it?
Be careful what you wish for. The whole abomination that is GNOME Shell came about as the result of usability studies.
Presumably they were studying how to make it as unusable as possible?
Yeah let's just have everything stagnate and stay the same forever because poor lusers can't figure out the button moved 100 pixels and has a different icon. Wah wah wah.
Yeah, let's add silly animations and flashy icons that make the desktop dramatically less useful just so we can show everyone how cool we are.
Hopefully with a few more famous users switching to xfce it can progress to something as good as Gnome 2 was before they started Windowizing it.
Maybe Search needs a Problem shake up. Innovation is great, but when I search now, more than ever, I quickly find what I am looking for.
I don't. The harder Google and co try to do 'smart' searching the more problems I have finding the things I'm searching for.
All I want it to do is actually, you know, search for the thing I entered in the search bar, and not try adding or removing 's', picking similar words, picking words that mean the same as the words I'm typing in.
Google's smart searching may be fine if you're looking for the latest Nataly Portmun hut grit pictures, but for technical queries with acronyms it's increasingly becoming a fscking disaster.
How is that possible? Windows XP SP2 came with .NET 2.0. Vista includes 3.0, and Windows 7 includes 3.5.
So which of the various Frameworks do you build for?
And note that anything .Net won't run on my XP PC because at some point in the past I installed a .Net Framework service pack which screwed it up so badly that it can't install and can't uninstall and even the 'brute force uninstaller' from Microsoft won't fix the damn thing.
Running all random applications as root died with Windows XP, at least once Windows XP realizes that it's dead.
Yeah, now users have to click 'OK' when they see the box that says 'Hello Kitty Screensaver wants to: Access Hard Disk' before it can install its malware payload.
It's pocket change for Microsoft, but high enough to attract real interest. And $200,000 is just the beginning. Microsoft will make a very lucrative offer to whomever innovates at that level.
Surely a better idea would be to patent your innovative technology and then ask Microsoft for $200,000,000 to license it?
There is no 255 byte limit - when length exceeds that value, you just go to 2 bytes of length, etc.
So you have a 255 byte string. You append one byte to it. What do you do now?
Are you really suggesting that people should have to move all the bytes of the string one further along so they can increase the length field to two bytes, and then append the new character, and that programmers who can't remember to put a 0 at the end of a string can do that without screwing up?
Sure, you can force everyone to use library calls for all their string operations, but C was intended to be cheap, dirty and fast, which is why there is so much direct string access in C code. If you told them they'd have to use library calls they'd just write their own code instead for better performance, and get it wrong anyway.
Oh what's that? The entire history of hacking is one of ever more elaborate and clever security precautions being overcome by ever more elaborate and clever hackers?
You forgot the part where they just wrap their malware in a 'Free B00b1es' screensaver and people download and install it for them.
I don't understand this. Cant it do both? Can't it be both a cloud end point for some types of data and a data processor for others?
Yes. And unicorns will fly out of its butt while doing so.
I would rather we design tablets with great peripheral integration, and the ability to become desktop/laptop with accessories.
But you just said that laptops suck. Now you're trying to build a kludgy pseudo-laptop out of a tablet with a ton of accessories, which will cost twice as much as a more capable laptop.