Peer review seemed like a good idea at the time, but these days it increasingly seems to be a way for the most powerful clique to ensure their papers get published and no-one else does.
Ultimately consensus is worthless in science because it's so often been wrong.
They stopped doing this awhile back because from the very beginning, it was clear that comparing the two are like comparing ride-on lawnmowers with Ferrari's.
My netbook boots twice as fast after installing an SSD as it did with the old hard drive. I don't think there are many lawnmowers that go half as fast as a Ferrari.
I installed it in there because I wanted to improve boot times, so that's fine, but the only place where the average user sees a benefit from SSDs are bootup and starting applications; if they don't do that much then the benchmark numbers are irrelevant to them.
The whole thing reminds me of when I used to develop video drivers and we were judged on whether we could render an Excel spreadsheet three thousand times a second or only two thousand times a second. Very few people care because most would never do that.
No, the question is how one company manage to have something fail twice in a row when other launchers seem to have been able to do it thousands of times with no major problems.
Weren't there some other problems before the launch too? I remember skimming through an article about problems with this launcher last night and thinking 'well, I wouldn't want my satellite on that one'.
what company wouldn't want to insure a giant metal can full of rocket fuel with a multi-million dollar, fragile device on the end. I bet that little Gecko would all over it..
If I remember correctly, Lloyds do or did launch insurance, even if no-one else does; I'm sure I read a story about them celebrating when the space shuttle recovered a couple of satellites which failed to reach their intended orbit in the 90s.
Ultimately it shouldn't be much harder than any other field of insurance, except that launch rates are so low that you need to err on the side of caution when estimating the chance of a failure.
The real world can't do this, because some Republican who hates smart people moans about costs being too high.
When was the last time that anyone else lost a satellite due to failure to separate the fairing, let alone two in a row? I remember the Agena docking target on one of the Gemini missions in the 60s and one other failure in the last few years (which may have been the other Taurus launch mentiohed).
As rocket science goes it really seems to be a solved problem that's been done successfully thousands of times before.
The ruling party on Wikipedia is not "the administrators", it's "the people of the community who are willing to contribute (and who don't piss everyone off and flaunt the established guidelines while trying to get their way or effect change)".
The problem is that one asshat can easily make a thousand 'good-faith contributors' decide that they have more useful things to do with their time than argue about whether some random Wikipedia article is really notable or not. So you run out of 'good-faith contributors' well before you run out of asshats.
In this instance, if the content was unverified / unsourced, then the individual who deleted the article should have "contributed" by providing sources (via wayback.org, if need be); but, the deletionists have no interest in contributing, and so they delete the content and then hide behind WP rules in defence of their laziness.
Indeed, this is the real problem: people who would rather delete things than fix them. What's worse are the bots which go around posting deletion notices based purely on whether the page has some tags missing, when the bot has absolutely no idea whether the page is actually within Wikipedia policies.
IMHO rampant deletionism has caused far more harm and driven away far more editors from Wikipedia than poorly referenced articles ever will.
The other half would be trying to figure out how they can speed up the process, unless you tell *them* that it's actually going to be the Mark of the Beast or something.
The fundies I used to know already considered 'national ID' proposals to be the 'Mark of the Beast'. Some of them opposed it on that basis while others supported it because it means the End Times are coming and they're about to be Raptured.
I don't understand why people panic over a national ID system.
Because they've studied some history?
As you say, there's no legitimate need for a 'national ID' system and there are a bazillion ways to abuse it to harm people. So everyone should panic when their government is trying to force it through.
No more violent or dishonest crime, huge efficiencies in scientific research, decentralised planetary government.
LOL.
Back in the real world, the groups which have come closest to eliminating invididualism have generally been the most violent on the planet, and generally scientifically and technologically backward.
So what happens then if a particular "open" standard is abandoned and the existing viewers for the content grow insecure?
The same thing that happens when a proprietary standard is abandoned, except that the source code is freely available so the government can hire someone to maintain it.
Yes, and I'm actually looking forward to it, at least in a way. Hopefully it will help people understand each other and cooperate on a level previously not seen.
Everyone who does understand people is laughing at this comment.
As opposed to HDDs, which aside from being comparatively slow, supposedly allow recovering information after it's been overwritten multiple times?
If you're still using a 20MB hard drive from 1993, perhaps.
Given how hard current drives have to work to recover information that _hasn't_ been overwritten, you can be pretty sure that no-one's going to be recovering information which has.
But let me tell you how that number of viruses got onto your friend's Windows machine - he put them there. Or you're exaggerating. Or a bit of both.
They complained their PC was running slow, we asked whether they'd run a virus scan and when they did it claimed to find forty-eight viruses.
And no, they're just an average user who does some web browsing, they don't download dodgy software or visit porn sites. Their kid does have an ipod, so we're guessing it may have got infected and spread viruses to the computer when plugged into the USB port.
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes
That's still faster than a Core 2 running Vista:).
There seems to be this delusion that the USA is a dictatorship, where the President can simply enact or repeal any law he desires.
Contrast that with reality -- it is Congress that makes the laws, and the President can, at best, ask them to make laws he likes, or veto newly passed laws that he doesn't like.
Indeed. And Obama was elected as a Democrat President with a Democrat Congress... you think he couldn't have got these laws repealed if he really wanted to?
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I'd say perhaps no times, but I'm sure someone will point out an exception.
Bob?
I don't remember any other company doing anything similar before or since.
Peer review seemed like a good idea at the time, but these days it increasingly seems to be a way for the most powerful clique to ensure their papers get published and no-one else does.
Ultimately consensus is worthless in science because it's so often been wrong.
Personally I'd rather watch Phantom Menace again than whatever the third one is called. But I definitely won't be rushing out to watch it in 3D.
They stopped doing this awhile back because from the very beginning, it was clear that comparing the two are like comparing ride-on lawnmowers with Ferrari's.
My netbook boots twice as fast after installing an SSD as it did with the old hard drive. I don't think there are many lawnmowers that go half as fast as a Ferrari.
I installed it in there because I wanted to improve boot times, so that's fine, but the only place where the average user sees a benefit from SSDs are bootup and starting applications; if they don't do that much then the benchmark numbers are irrelevant to them.
The whole thing reminds me of when I used to develop video drivers and we were judged on whether we could render an Excel spreadsheet three thousand times a second or only two thousand times a second. Very few people care because most would never do that.
No, the question is how one company manage to have something fail twice in a row when other launchers seem to have been able to do it thousands of times with no major problems.
Weren't there some other problems before the launch too? I remember skimming through an article about problems with this launcher last night and thinking 'well, I wouldn't want my satellite on that one'.
what company wouldn't want to insure a giant metal can full of rocket fuel with a multi-million dollar, fragile device on the end. I bet that little Gecko would all over it..
If I remember correctly, Lloyds do or did launch insurance, even if no-one else does; I'm sure I read a story about them celebrating when the space shuttle recovered a couple of satellites which failed to reach their intended orbit in the 90s.
Ultimately it shouldn't be much harder than any other field of insurance, except that launch rates are so low that you need to err on the side of caution when estimating the chance of a failure.
The real world can't do this, because some Republican who hates smart people moans about costs being too high.
When was the last time that anyone else lost a satellite due to failure to separate the fairing, let alone two in a row? I remember the Agena docking target on one of the Gemini missions in the 60s and one other failure in the last few years (which may have been the other Taurus launch mentiohed).
As rocket science goes it really seems to be a solved problem that's been done successfully thousands of times before.
They could also just ditch Orbital and go with SpaceX for all of COTS.
To be fair, you'd have to be quite brave to put an expensive satellite on top of a Falcon with so few launches so far.
You don't launch a satellite without insurance against that sort of thing.
The US government does. I'm pretty sure they don't insure any of their satellites, they just ask Congress to fund them to build another one.
And Delta and Atlas have a 95+% success rate.
Automatics are often as or more economical than manuals these days.
There really is no way to argue with or convince them short of flying them up there for a personal look-see, and of course that would never happen.
Why would that convince them? They'll claim that you flew them to the Arizona desert and are just pretending it's the moon.
The ruling party on Wikipedia is not "the administrators", it's "the people of the community who are willing to contribute (and who don't piss everyone off and flaunt the established guidelines while trying to get their way or effect change)".
The problem is that one asshat can easily make a thousand 'good-faith contributors' decide that they have more useful things to do with their time than argue about whether some random Wikipedia article is really notable or not. So you run out of 'good-faith contributors' well before you run out of asshats.
In this instance, if the content was unverified / unsourced, then the individual who deleted the article should have "contributed" by providing sources (via wayback.org, if need be); but, the deletionists have no interest in contributing, and so they delete the content and then hide behind WP rules in defence of their laziness.
Indeed, this is the real problem: people who would rather delete things than fix them. What's worse are the bots which go around posting deletion notices based purely on whether the page has some tags missing, when the bot has absolutely no idea whether the page is actually within Wikipedia policies.
IMHO rampant deletionism has caused far more harm and driven away far more editors from Wikipedia than poorly referenced articles ever will.
I miss when a 266 MHz CPU and 64 MB of RAM was enough to do serious work under Linux.
I built my original web site on a 486-66 with 8MB; that was enough to run Linux, Apache and Netscape... admittedly with a fair amount of swapping.
Go to home depot and buy a pair of ear plugs.
Nah, get a proper set of ear protectors; mine are probably the best $25 I ever spent.
The other half would be trying to figure out how they can speed up the process, unless you tell *them* that it's actually going to be the Mark of the Beast or something.
The fundies I used to know already considered 'national ID' proposals to be the 'Mark of the Beast'. Some of them opposed it on that basis while others supported it because it means the End Times are coming and they're about to be Raptured.
I don't understand why people panic over a national ID system.
Because they've studied some history?
As you say, there's no legitimate need for a 'national ID' system and there are a bazillion ways to abuse it to harm people. So everyone should panic when their government is trying to force it through.
No more violent or dishonest crime, huge efficiencies in scientific research, decentralised planetary government.
LOL.
Back in the real world, the groups which have come closest to eliminating invididualism have generally been the most violent on the planet, and generally scientifically and technologically backward.
So what happens then if a particular "open" standard is abandoned and the existing viewers for the content grow insecure?
The same thing that happens when a proprietary standard is abandoned, except that the source code is freely available so the government can hire someone to maintain it.
Yes, and I'm actually looking forward to it, at least in a way. Hopefully it will help people understand each other and cooperate on a level previously not seen.
Everyone who does understand people is laughing at this comment.
As opposed to HDDs, which aside from being comparatively slow, supposedly allow recovering information after it's been overwritten multiple times?
If you're still using a 20MB hard drive from 1993, perhaps.
Given how hard current drives have to work to recover information that _hasn't_ been overwritten, you can be pretty sure that no-one's going to be recovering information which has.
But let me tell you how that number of viruses got onto your friend's Windows machine - he put them there. Or you're exaggerating. Or a bit of both.
They complained their PC was running slow, we asked whether they'd run a virus scan and when they did it claimed to find forty-eight viruses.
And no, they're just an average user who does some web browsing, they don't download dodgy software or visit porn sites. Their kid does have an ipod, so we're guessing it may have got infected and spread viruses to the computer when plugged into the USB port.
People persecuting MS for poor security are living in the past. Windows is now a fine secure OS
I would write a longer response, but I'm trying to help a friend get forty-eight viruses off their Vista machine without reinstalling the OS.
I've been sitting here at my freelance gig in front of a Mac (a 8600/300 w/64 Megs of RAM) for about 20 minutes now while it attempts to copy a 17 Meg file from one folder on the hard drive to another folder. 20 minutes
That's still faster than a Core 2 running Vista :).
There seems to be this delusion that the USA is a dictatorship, where the President can simply enact or repeal any law he desires.
Contrast that with reality -- it is Congress that makes the laws, and the President can, at best, ask them to make laws he likes, or veto newly passed laws that he doesn't like.
Indeed. And Obama was elected as a Democrat President with a Democrat Congress... you think he couldn't have got these laws repealed if he really wanted to?