Why are you surprised that big companies would do stupid things? Particularly one who thought that installing rootkits on peoples' computers when they played a CD was a pretty darn cool idea?
Do you seriously think that Microsoft have a good reason to release a 'new OS' rather than patches to the current one, other than to try to convince people to pay the Upgrade Tax?
I am sure that for a lot of people the benefit of getting the latest OS was one of the reasons for upgrading their computer.
My experience is that most people only upgrade their Windows PC when the old one is so infested with malware that they can't get it to do anything useful anymore. They don't really care what version of Windows is on there so long as it's not Vista or ME.
Non-human payloads do not require the safety (nor life support) of a human rated vehicle. This makes them significantly cheaper.
Except the 'human-rated' shuttle has not proven to be significantly safer than a typical not-human-rated launcher (i.e. around a 95-98% chance of not catastropically failing).
'Human rating' is a mostly bogus concept, though I'd agree that if you're just launching fuel then you might be willing to live with a less reliable launcher if that significantly reduced costs. If you're launching a billion dollar comsat, you don't want to put it on something that you wouldn't risk putting NASA astronauts on.
Is it actually cheaper to send up a bunch of smaller rockets with fuel as payload than it is to simply send a bigger rocket with enough fuel on it?
Yes.
Flight rate is generally more important to launch costs than size. A small rocket you can fly a thousand times a year will cost you far less than a big one you fly once a year simply because you can mass produce them and reuse them several times before you throw them away, rather than custom-building a new one every time you launch it.
If I remember correctly, the plans for reusing Saturn V stages made no financial sense until it was flying about once a month, for example; at NASA's actual launch rates the savings from reusing them would be less than the costs of developing the technology to do so.
A further issue is that by splitting your hardware and fuel across multiple launches, one exploding rocket doesn't lose your entire multi-billion dollar Mars mission. A near guarantee of losing one payload out of a hundred launches is likely to be better than a 1% chance of losing the entire thing.
A hundred years from now your space fantasies will look as outdated and ridiculous as 19th century visions of bigger railroads do today.
A hundred years from now, your 'back to the land' peak oil fantasies will be looking as outdated as the Victorians who were worried that by 1950 there would be so many horses in London that the accumulated horse crap would fill the streets thirty feet deep.
Oh, and if the human race does run out of cheap energy, you won't be raising horses on a farm, you'll be fighting in the streets over tins of dog food.
Sunshades and a refrigeration plant should work. I believe that's what the Apollo-derived Mars mission plans were going to do so that they could use the LOX/LH2 S-IVB stage for Mars orbit entry.
A) How many trips are we planning to take along the same route anytime soon? This doesn't seem as though it would be practical at all until there was a plan for an established travel lane.
If you're going to the moon on a regular basis, then carrying enough fuel to get to a Lagrange point and refuelling there may well make sense. Particularly if you can launch fuel there from the moon instead of Earth (e.g. extracted from lunar water).
One possibility would be to fly to the Lagrange point, pick up fuel for landing, then refuel again from lunar water and offload the fuel you don't need at the Lagrange point on the way back. The downside is that if you get to the depot from Earth and can't refuel for some reason, then you die unless someone can rescue you quickly.
And why would you want a hardware raid? If you controller dies you will have to get a compatable replacement to rebuild the array.
Battery backed cache. And with mirroring you should be able to mount the drives directly if you can't find a replacement controller... with RAID5 you're probably screwed, but if you're using RAID5 you presumably don't much care about your data anyway.
Sorry to rain on your psuedo-libertarianism parade but the government is exactly the right entity to help sort this out. This is a simple property issue.
If you lend your car to Joe Bob Inc and then the company goes bust, what do you think will happen? Hint: they won't drive it back to your house and give you the keys.
I remember when a company I worked for years ago in London went bust with large debts, the bailiffs took away all kinds of hardware that was on loan from various companies and they then had to try to get their property back. Why do you expect data to be any different?
That's pretty much the very core of what governments are there to deal with.
Why should the government be interfering with contracts betwen individuals, except in very specific cases where those contracts violate other laws (slavery, dumping toxic waste, etc)?
There is nothing here that individuals cannot freely negotiate themselves. That's pretty much the very core of what governments should not be involved with.
IF we knew nothing about quatum effects (assuming transistors and what not are based on them) then we couldnt make any of those part you speak of to install now could we.
Uh, quantum effects are only now really becoming significant as transistors get to sizes where they're only a few hundred atoms across. We could have managed for decades building electronics without knowing the details of quantum mechanics, until we started noticing strange things happening that someone would then be paid to figure out.
Mass transit or whatnot is clearly superior to an infinite number of monkeys driving cars at the same time.
Uh, no.
Mass transit sucks and always will so long as I have to go from where I don't want to start to where I don't want to get to at a time when I don't want to go and share it with people I don't want to sit next to.
The ideal would be a vehicle that would just carry me, and go from where I am at a time of my choosing to the destination of my choosing without stopping at numerous places along the way.
So they are building in a "collision detection system" that I can hack and get the car next to me to drive off the road. Cool.
Indeed. Anything that relies on other cars telling your 'smart car' where they are is a disaster waiting to happen. Not to mention those little details like bikes, pedestrians and moose in the roads, none of which are likely to be part of the glorious 'mesh'.
The collision and delay reporting mechanism will be cool too, because we'll be able to feed fake reports into the system and ensure we get to work on empty roads.
You think financial services aren't important? We're a market economy. Money is the grease in that engine. Who else would you want to handle financing?
'Money' today is just made-up numbers in a computer. Why should people get rich for taking a number from one account, transferring part of that number to another account and taking a few bits as a fee along the way?
Wall Street would collapse if we had a real free market economy.
I used to live in a commuter town outside London full of people who worked in finance in the City. I can totally confirm that they drive like asshats; either they're 'I'm super-important and must get somewhere and everyone else must get out of my way' or they're driving their Ferrari at 40mph in a 60 limit.
Oh I'm not saying you can't do it, it just seems like a hell of a lot of work for very little gain.
Like... putting the CD in the drive, booting up and selecting 'install'?
I know there are problems with recent Nvidia chips which require undocumented hacks due to their video switching between the integrated crap and the Nvidia GPU, but when I installed Ubuntu on my Toshiba last year it all just worked.
Yes, a 38 police special will do a dandy job on any computer!
Not true. I remember about ten years ago someone talking about a demo they saw of a fault-tolerant computer where the salesman emptied a.45 automatic into the computer while it was running and it continued working happily despite the damage.
Surely Microsoft have conclusively proven that most people value convenience far more than security?
The big problem is that companies add these 'convenience' features with no warning and no easy way to remove them. Having to manually strip exif data from every image is painful, to say the least.
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This seems like an amateur mistake. Who are these companies hiring lately?
The lowest bidder?
Why are you surprised that big companies would do stupid things? Particularly one who thought that installing rootkits on peoples' computers when they played a CD was a pretty darn cool idea?
Do you seriously think that Microsoft have a good reason to release a 'new OS' rather than patches to the current one, other than to try to convince people to pay the Upgrade Tax?
I am sure that for a lot of people the benefit of getting the latest OS was one of the reasons for upgrading their computer.
My experience is that most people only upgrade their Windows PC when the old one is so infested with malware that they can't get it to do anything useful anymore. They don't really care what version of Windows is on there so long as it's not Vista or ME.
Non-human payloads do not require the safety (nor life support) of a human rated vehicle. This makes them significantly cheaper.
Except the 'human-rated' shuttle has not proven to be significantly safer than a typical not-human-rated launcher (i.e. around a 95-98% chance of not catastropically failing).
'Human rating' is a mostly bogus concept, though I'd agree that if you're just launching fuel then you might be willing to live with a less reliable launcher if that significantly reduced costs. If you're launching a billion dollar comsat, you don't want to put it on something that you wouldn't risk putting NASA astronauts on.
Why are they still thinking about chemical fuel? They should be thinking about Ion propulsion with a fission reactor as the power source.
They should, but a fission reactor uses EVIL ATOMS, which might cause cancer in space aliens.
Is it actually cheaper to send up a bunch of smaller rockets with fuel as payload than it is to simply send a bigger rocket with enough fuel on it?
Yes.
Flight rate is generally more important to launch costs than size. A small rocket you can fly a thousand times a year will cost you far less than a big one you fly once a year simply because you can mass produce them and reuse them several times before you throw them away, rather than custom-building a new one every time you launch it.
If I remember correctly, the plans for reusing Saturn V stages made no financial sense until it was flying about once a month, for example; at NASA's actual launch rates the savings from reusing them would be less than the costs of developing the technology to do so.
A further issue is that by splitting your hardware and fuel across multiple launches, one exploding rocket doesn't lose your entire multi-billion dollar Mars mission. A near guarantee of losing one payload out of a hundred launches is likely to be better than a 1% chance of losing the entire thing.
A hundred years from now your space fantasies will look as outdated and ridiculous as 19th century visions of bigger railroads do today.
A hundred years from now, your 'back to the land' peak oil fantasies will be looking as outdated as the Victorians who were worried that by 1950 there would be so many horses in London that the accumulated horse crap would fill the streets thirty feet deep.
Oh, and if the human race does run out of cheap energy, you won't be raising horses on a farm, you'll be fighting in the streets over tins of dog food.
That's the hard part. Keeping it liquid.
Sunshades and a refrigeration plant should work. I believe that's what the Apollo-derived Mars mission plans were going to do so that they could use the LOX/LH2 S-IVB stage for Mars orbit entry.
A) How many trips are we planning to take along the same route anytime soon? This doesn't seem as though it would be practical at all until there was a plan for an established travel lane.
If you're going to the moon on a regular basis, then carrying enough fuel to get to a Lagrange point and refuelling there may well make sense.
Particularly if you can launch fuel there from the moon instead of Earth (e.g. extracted from lunar water).
One possibility would be to fly to the Lagrange point, pick up fuel for landing, then refuel again from lunar water and offload the fuel you don't need at the Lagrange point on the way back. The downside is that if you get to the depot from Earth and can't refuel for some reason, then you die unless someone can rescue you quickly.
And why would you want a hardware raid? If you controller dies you will have to get a compatable replacement to rebuild the array.
Battery backed cache. And with mirroring you should be able to mount the drives directly if you can't find a replacement controller... with RAID5 you're probably screwed, but if you're using RAID5 you presumably don't much care about your data anyway.
Sorry to rain on your psuedo-libertarianism parade but the government is exactly the right entity to help sort this out. This is a simple property issue.
If you lend your car to Joe Bob Inc and then the company goes bust, what do you think will happen? Hint: they won't drive it back to your house and give you the keys.
I remember when a company I worked for years ago in London went bust with large debts, the bailiffs took away all kinds of hardware that was on loan from various companies and they then had to try to get their property back. Why do you expect data to be any different?
This is a personal property and contract issue.
That's pretty much the very core of what governments are there to deal with.
Why should the government be interfering with contracts betwen individuals, except in very specific cases where those contracts violate other laws (slavery, dumping toxic waste, etc)?
There is nothing here that individuals cannot freely negotiate themselves. That's pretty much the very core of what governments should not be involved with.
IF we knew nothing about quatum effects (assuming transistors and what not are based on them) then we couldnt make any of those part you speak of to install now could we.
Uh, quantum effects are only now really becoming significant as transistors get to sizes where they're only a few hundred atoms across. We could have managed for decades building electronics without knowing the details of quantum mechanics, until we started noticing strange things happening that someone would then be paid to figure out.
In a world of automated cars, do you think any of those things would exist?
No. Because the automated cars would run them all over within a week.
Mass transit or whatnot is clearly superior to an infinite number of monkeys driving cars at the same time.
Uh, no.
Mass transit sucks and always will so long as I have to go from where I don't want to start to where I don't want to get to at a time when I don't want to go and share it with people I don't want to sit next to.
The ideal would be a vehicle that would just carry me, and go from where I am at a time of my choosing to the destination of my choosing without stopping at numerous places along the way.
Oh, but we already have that. It's called a car.
So they are building in a "collision detection system" that I can hack and get the car next to me to drive off the road. Cool.
Indeed. Anything that relies on other cars telling your 'smart car' where they are is a disaster waiting to happen. Not to mention those little details like bikes, pedestrians and moose in the roads, none of which are likely to be part of the glorious 'mesh'.
The collision and delay reporting mechanism will be cool too, because we'll be able to feed fake reports into the system and ensure we get to work on empty roads.
You think financial services aren't important? We're a market economy. Money is the grease in that engine. Who else would you want to handle financing?
'Money' today is just made-up numbers in a computer. Why should people get rich for taking a number from one account, transferring part of that number to another account and taking a few bits as a fee along the way?
Wall Street would collapse if we had a real free market economy.
I used to live in a commuter town outside London full of people who worked in finance in the City. I can totally confirm that they drive like asshats; either they're 'I'm super-important and must get somewhere and everyone else must get out of my way' or they're driving their Ferrari at 40mph in a 60 limit.
Because finance jobs could never, ever be outsourced to a country where they don't expect multi-million dollar bonuses every year.
Oh I'm not saying you can't do it, it just seems like a hell of a lot of work for very little gain.
Like... putting the CD in the drive, booting up and selecting 'install'?
I know there are problems with recent Nvidia chips which require undocumented hacks due to their video switching between the integrated crap and the Nvidia GPU, but when I installed Ubuntu on my Toshiba last year it all just worked.
Yes, a 38 police special will do a dandy job on any computer!
Not true. I remember about ten years ago someone talking about a demo they saw of a fault-tolerant computer where the salesman emptied a .45 automatic into the computer while it was running and it continued working happily despite the damage.
Surely Microsoft have conclusively proven that most people value convenience far more than security?
The big problem is that companies add these 'convenience' features with no warning and no easy way to remove them. Having to manually strip exif data from every image is painful, to say the least.
It's just you. The patent is on garbage collecting a hashtable/linked list combination while it is in use.
That sounds so immensely innovative that I'm not at all surprised that a patent was granted for it.
I'm not trying to troll you here, but I don't understand what's bad about the video game rating system that it would need to be eliminated?
Would you support mandatory age-ratings on books? If not, why do you support it on video games?