"In other words, nothing in the system inherently encourages corrupt centralization.."
Of course it does. You can vote for big-government Republicans or big-government Democrats... or you can vote for someone who'll lose.
The people who pick the people you get to vote for are the ones who win in a democracy. That's why so many big corporations give money to _both_ Republican and Democrat candidates in US elections.
Democracy is the theory that the opinion of two idiots is worth more than the opinion of one genius. No wonder it's broken.
How many versions of Windows are there now? I have no freaking clue which of the six or so versions of Vista I'm supposed to buy even if I wanted to, then there's XP32, XP64, Pro versions, Home versions, cut-down foreign versions, Windows 2003 or whatever it is.
"not to keep West German illegal immigrants _out_ of West Germany."
Obviously that should be 'not to keep West German illegal immigrants _out_ of East Germany.'
There's a huge difference between building a wall to keep people in a country they don't want to be in (i.e. enslaving them) and building a wall to keep people out of a country that they're not supposed to be in (i.e. protecting your citizens against foreign invasion... one of the few legitimate uses for government and one that the US government has totally and utterly failed to do).
Because only real nerds have a problem with 1KB being 1024 bytes rather than 1000 bytes, and kibibytes or whatever you want to call them is a really stupid name. Who wants to have to deal with buying 1.073741 gigabyte DIMMs for their PC when we can just agree instead that a gigabyte is a power of two, not a power of ten?
As for why it's different for disks to RAM, disk manufacturers discovered a long time ago that they could make more money by using SI rather than binary measures for disk size, because it artificially inflated their size. Hence people now complain that they buy a 'one terabyte' drive and it actually only holds 900 gigabytes and change.
"What's interesting though is that the FAA seems to think that the costs associated with training will in the end be cheaper than an upgrade to Vista."
Don't forget that they'll need to retrain people for Vista and Office-whatever anyway. So it's not like one option is free and the other costs money.
"I also read that the movie studios are considering delaying the release of movies in Canada to reduce the incidences of movies hitting BitTorrent before they hit the theaters."
So they think that preventing Canadians from paying to see the movies in a theater will encourage them not to download those movies instead?
Oh, sorry, I forgot we're talking about movie studio logic here.
"unless this is what you mean with a locked bolt, which i assume it is,"
Um, yes.
"but in that case, you'd have to reload after each shot.."
Well, you have to manually cycle the action to load the next round. But if you're using that kind of gun you're probably expecting to kill your target with one shot anyway.
But with subsonic ammunition, even the silenced MP5 firing full auto isn't horribly loud. You'd hear it from a reasonable distance away, but probably wouldn't even realise it was a gun until you saw bullet-holes appearing in people. With supersonic ammunition the sonic boom from the bullets would certainly make it obvious, but the low noise from the gun would still make it difficult to spot.
"Nobody cared about people enforcing copyright 20 years ago."
20 years ago we had dual-deck cassette recorders, recorded movies off the TV with our VCRs and then gave them to our friends, and few games had 'copy protection'. It's only recently that companies have started trying to 'enforce copyright' when technology makes copying trivial.
At least here in the UK, I believe this would be a criminal offense. Of course the pirates might not want to report his crime, but he's still breaking the law.
There have been proposals to use jet engines in the first stage as reusable boosters. The problem is that a rocket wants to get out of the atmosphere as fast as possible to minimise drag, which is fundamentally incompatible with using the air to reduce the amount of oxygen you need to carry.
Every design I'm aware of which tried to use air-breathing engines eventually concluded that they'd be better off with pure rockets for that reason... air may be 'free', but drag really hurts when you're travelling twelve times the speed of sound (or whatever).
Indeed. I used to play EQ1 and EQ2, so when Vanguard was released I decided I might as well pay for the station access pass and be able to play all three... so that's $25 a month that Sony wouldn't have got without Vanguard.
Equally, now I'm paying that there's no way I'll be paying more to play any pay-per-month MMOG that isn't SoE, unless I cancel all three games.
Which is a shame given how many bad SoE experiences I've had in the past. Unfortunately they own all the games I've tried that I actually wanted to play.
"Can somebody better acquainted with the mechanics of sending a vehicle to the Moon and back please explain why Buzz Aldrin recommends taking a sextant?"
Because Aldrin previously demonstrated that you could maneuver in orbit using a sextant if your computer failed? On one Gemini flight he used the sextant to perform the rendevouz rather than the computer and radar, if I remember correctly.
"Yes, it's on the drawing board. So is JIMO. So is Medusa. So are tens if not hundreds of thousands of other spacecraft."
And how many of those 'hundreds of thousands' are on the drawing board of companies who've put people into space (even if only suborbital) and with a company interested in funding them if their next step is successful?
I believe you'll find that will reduce your list to one... or, at most, a tiny handful.
"Skylab which fell to the ground was done well and was in the right orbit"
Skylab successfully completed its planned mission despite some huge screwups in the launch. Then it dropped out of orbit years later because the shuttle, which was supposed to reboost it to a safe altitude, was way, way behind schedule.
The astronauts on Skylab at least spent most of their time doing research. As I understand it, the astronauts on ISS spend most of their time trying to keep it working.
"If someone can give me even one good reason to keep the ISS, I'd run out there and help them rally for funding."
ISS was built to funnel money to the Russians to discourage their rocket scientists from moving abroad to design missiles for people America doesn't like. I suspect that justification is a bit out of date now.
Last night I was capturing a camcorder video from a talk I went to by some astronauts, who were talking about how they were about to start building Space Station Freedom, and then President Bush had promised them a manned landing on Mars by 2019. Nearly fifteen years ago now.
I just thought it was kind of funny that now we still haven't finished building the International Space Station and while the next President Bush has promised them a manned landing on Mars at some point in the distant future, it's looking less and less likely that even the new 'spam in a can' launcher will reach orbit by 2019, let alone that anyone will be going to Mars.
At this rate, I guess NASA astronauts will be landing on Mars in the year 2300. At least private companies will already have hotels and crazy golf courses set up there for them so they won't need to build huge rockets to get there.
"It makes no reasonable sense that an end-user should modify the operating system when installing a software package (exceptions for servers but that's iffy, too)."
That'll be great for companies that sell hard disks. Every person using the PC who wants to play 'Fancy New 3D Shooter II' needs to install their own 20GB copy of the game in their own home directory.
Well, that's good to know. I'm sure people won't care about paying $10,000 for 750GB of flash memory than $300 for a 750GB hard disk.
"(pretty much anywhere it is 'big enough' and power matters)."
Indeed. Solid state storage makes sense anywhere that it makes sense... as it always has done. But when even games are taking 15+GB of space these days, most people aren't going to manage long with a small flash drive on their PC.
The problem you're facing as an advocate of expensive, limited but fast flash memory is that most people will find a way to full up however much disk space you give them... the more space available, the more junk people will find to stuff in there. I remember when my first PC had 500MB of disk space and it seemed huge, now I have two terabytes and even that is looking a bit cramped.
"Remove the speed distinction between RAM and disk, and all of a sudden virtual memory schemes lose many of their disadvantages."
Why would 'solid state storage' remove the speed distinction between RAM and 'disk'? If the 'solid state storage' is as fast as RAM, why would you bother with the RAM in the first place?
In reality, we'd still have a limited amount of fast RAM and much more but slower solid-state 'disk' storage. The difference is that 'disk' accesses might be only 1000x slower than RAM accesses rather than 100000x slower (or whatever the difference is today)... even if the physical 'disk' hardware isn't much slower than RAM there'll still be a ton of operating system code to go through in order to access it.
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"In other words, nothing in the system inherently encourages corrupt centralization.."
Of course it does. You can vote for big-government Republicans or big-government Democrats... or you can vote for someone who'll lose.
The people who pick the people you get to vote for are the ones who win in a democracy. That's why so many big corporations give money to _both_ Republican and Democrat candidates in US elections.
Democracy is the theory that the opinion of two idiots is worth more than the opinion of one genius. No wonder it's broken.
Surely they could just have outsourced the job to India for $2,000?
"All versions of Vista install the same way. Some just have more extra features than others."
And? Which version am I supposed to buy? How is my mother supposed to know which version of Windows she should be buying?
"The negative effects of having multiple distros"
How many versions of Windows are there now? I have no freaking clue which of the six or so versions of Vista I'm supposed to buy even if I wanted to, then there's XP32, XP64, Pro versions, Home versions, cut-down foreign versions, Windows 2003 or whatever it is.
"not to keep West German illegal immigrants _out_ of West Germany."
Obviously that should be 'not to keep West German illegal immigrants _out_ of East Germany.'
There's a huge difference between building a wall to keep people in a country they don't want to be in (i.e. enslaving them) and building a wall to keep people out of a country that they're not supposed to be in (i.e. protecting your citizens against foreign invasion... one of the few legitimate uses for government and one that the US government has totally and utterly failed to do).
"The Berlin wall ?"
The Berlin Wall was to keep people in East Germany, not to keep West German illegal immigrants _out_ of West Germany.
Why should Americans have to allow their country to be invaded by millions of foreign criminals? It's absurd.
Because only real nerds have a problem with 1KB being 1024 bytes rather than 1000 bytes, and kibibytes or whatever you want to call them is a really stupid name. Who wants to have to deal with buying 1.073741 gigabyte DIMMs for their PC when we can just agree instead that a gigabyte is a power of two, not a power of ten?
As for why it's different for disks to RAM, disk manufacturers discovered a long time ago that they could make more money by using SI rather than binary measures for disk size, because it artificially inflated their size. Hence people now complain that they buy a 'one terabyte' drive and it actually only holds 900 gigabytes and change.
"What's interesting though is that the FAA seems to think that the costs associated with training will in the end be cheaper than an upgrade to Vista."
Don't forget that they'll need to retrain people for Vista and Office-whatever anyway. So it's not like one option is free and the other costs money.
"I also read that the movie studios are considering delaying the release of movies in Canada to reduce the incidences of movies hitting BitTorrent before they hit the theaters."
So they think that preventing Canadians from paying to see the movies in a theater will encourage them not to download those movies instead?
Oh, sorry, I forgot we're talking about movie studio logic here.
"unless this is what you mean with a locked bolt, which i assume it is,"
Um, yes.
"but in that case, you'd have to reload after each shot.."
Well, you have to manually cycle the action to load the next round. But if you're using that kind of gun you're probably expecting to kill your target with one shot anyway.
But with subsonic ammunition, even the silenced MP5 firing full auto isn't horribly loud. You'd hear it from a reasonable distance away, but probably wouldn't even realise it was a gun until you saw bullet-holes appearing in people. With supersonic ammunition the sonic boom from the bullets would certainly make it obvious, but the low noise from the gun would still make it difficult to spot.
"In fact, the emergent noise can still be heard from a fairly large distance."
Depends on the gun, suppressor and ammunition. With a locked bolt and subsonic ammunition, it can produce as little noise as a faint click.
Certainly there are plenty of things wrong with the portrayal of 'silencers' in movies, but those comments aren't exactly correct either.
"Um, he majored in economics. At Harvard."
So it's no wonder he doesn't understand that 'if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys'.
I'm constantly amazed at how little 'economists' know about economics, and how poorly their predictions turn out.
"NASA do not fly the space shuttle during 31 Dec -> 1 Jan"
:).
But they fly over the international date-line every 90 minutes or so with no problems
"Nobody cared about people enforcing copyright 20 years ago."
20 years ago we had dual-deck cassette recorders, recorded movies off the TV with our VCRs and then gave them to our friends, and few games had 'copy protection'. It's only recently that companies have started trying to 'enforce copyright' when technology makes copying trivial.
At least here in the UK, I believe this would be a criminal offense. Of course the pirates might not want to report his crime, but he's still breaking the law.
There have been proposals to use jet engines in the first stage as reusable boosters. The problem is that a rocket wants to get out of the atmosphere as fast as possible to minimise drag, which is fundamentally incompatible with using the air to reduce the amount of oxygen you need to carry.
Every design I'm aware of which tried to use air-breathing engines eventually concluded that they'd be better off with pure rockets for that reason... air may be 'free', but drag really hurts when you're travelling twelve times the speed of sound (or whatever).
Indeed. I used to play EQ1 and EQ2, so when Vanguard was released I decided I might as well pay for the station access pass and be able to play all three... so that's $25 a month that Sony wouldn't have got without Vanguard.
Equally, now I'm paying that there's no way I'll be paying more to play any pay-per-month MMOG that isn't SoE, unless I cancel all three games.
Which is a shame given how many bad SoE experiences I've had in the past. Unfortunately they own all the games I've tried that I actually wanted to play.
"Can somebody better acquainted with the mechanics of sending a vehicle to the Moon and back please explain why Buzz Aldrin recommends taking a sextant?"
Because Aldrin previously demonstrated that you could maneuver in orbit using a sextant if your computer failed? On one Gemini flight he used the sextant to perform the rendevouz rather than the computer and radar, if I remember correctly.
"Yes, it's on the drawing board. So is JIMO. So is Medusa. So are tens if not hundreds of thousands of other spacecraft."
And how many of those 'hundreds of thousands' are on the drawing board of companies who've put people into space (even if only suborbital) and with a company interested in funding them if their next step is successful?
I believe you'll find that will reduce your list to one... or, at most, a tiny handful.
"Skylab which fell to the ground was done well and was in the right orbit"
Skylab successfully completed its planned mission despite some huge screwups in the launch. Then it dropped out of orbit years later because the shuttle, which was supposed to reboost it to a safe altitude, was way, way behind schedule.
The astronauts on Skylab at least spent most of their time doing research. As I understand it, the astronauts on ISS spend most of their time trying to keep it working.
"If someone can give me even one good reason to keep the ISS, I'd run out there and help them rally for funding."
ISS was built to funnel money to the Russians to discourage their rocket scientists from moving abroad to design missiles for people America doesn't like. I suspect that justification is a bit out of date now.
Last night I was capturing a camcorder video from a talk I went to by some astronauts, who were talking about how they were about to start building Space Station Freedom, and then President Bush had promised them a manned landing on Mars by 2019. Nearly fifteen years ago now.
I just thought it was kind of funny that now we still haven't finished building the International Space Station and while the next President Bush has promised them a manned landing on Mars at some point in the distant future, it's looking less and less likely that even the new 'spam in a can' launcher will reach orbit by 2019, let alone that anyone will be going to Mars.
At this rate, I guess NASA astronauts will be landing on Mars in the year 2300. At least private companies will already have hotels and crazy golf courses set up there for them so they won't need to build huge rockets to get there.
"It makes no reasonable sense that an end-user should modify the operating system when installing a software package (exceptions for servers but that's iffy, too)."
That'll be great for companies that sell hard disks. Every person using the PC who wants to play 'Fancy New 3D Shooter II' needs to install their own 20GB copy of the game in their own home directory.
Great plan.
"The price difference doesn't matter very much."
Well, that's good to know. I'm sure people won't care about paying $10,000 for 750GB of flash memory than $300 for a 750GB hard disk.
"(pretty much anywhere it is 'big enough' and power matters)."
Indeed. Solid state storage makes sense anywhere that it makes sense... as it always has done. But when even games are taking 15+GB of space these days, most people aren't going to manage long with a small flash drive on their PC.
The problem you're facing as an advocate of expensive, limited but fast flash memory is that most people will find a way to full up however much disk space you give them... the more space available, the more junk people will find to stuff in there. I remember when my first PC had 500MB of disk space and it seemed huge, now I have two terabytes and even that is looking a bit cramped.
"Remove the speed distinction between RAM and disk, and all of a sudden virtual memory schemes lose many of their disadvantages."
Why would 'solid state storage' remove the speed distinction between RAM and 'disk'? If the 'solid state storage' is as fast as RAM, why would you bother with the RAM in the first place?
In reality, we'd still have a limited amount of fast RAM and much more but slower solid-state 'disk' storage. The difference is that 'disk' accesses might be only 1000x slower than RAM accesses rather than 100000x slower (or whatever the difference is today)... even if the physical 'disk' hardware isn't much slower than RAM there'll still be a ton of operating system code to go through in order to access it.