"Over the next 6 years is it reasonable to add 400 million Windows PCs world wide?"
Yes, but it's highly unreasonable to expect them to be running full-cost, legitimate copies of Windows. To get that kind of increase you'd mostly be selling to China, India and other countries where $100 or more for an OS is far more than most customers would want to pay.
"The cost to develop a single drug, from initial research through final FDA testing, averages slightly under $1 billion."
Mostly because of pointless government regulations, which have killed millions by delaying the introduction of life-saving drugs for years.
And remember, those companies spend a huge amount of effort developing new drugs solely because they can be patented while equally good drugs could be used whose patents have expired. I really don't have much sympathy for them.
Yeah, most of the plug-nozzle designs used excess rocket fuel to cool the plug: I think the DC-X was one of the few that intended to enter nose-first with a conventional heat shield.
"How else do you defend yourself, when someone says: "You broadcast a claim that I fucked a goat, now I'm suing you for the breakup of my family..."?"
You don't have to, because the anglo-saxon legal system is based around this strange idea that people are innocent until proven guilty. This FCC ruling is trying to turn that into broadcasters are guilty until proven innocent.
Of course all such 'offence' laws and regulations are blatantly unconstitutional in the first place, so it should never have been an issue.
"Heat shields on the other hand do a very tough job."
Not really. The Chinese reportedly used thick sheets of (admittedly chemically treated) oak on some of their early unmanned launches.
"The protective tiles on the Space Shuttle, for example, are expensive, and very fragile."
I think it's a safe bet that Rutan won't be using such tiles on SpaceShipTwo.
"Ablative heatshields are a possibility, but they do add to the per flight cost."
A properly designed ablative heatshield is much easier to remove and replace than shuttle tiles are to maintain. You just unbolt the old one, slap on the new one and you're ready to go... with tiles you have to check they're all in place, check they're all secure, and make sure there are no bumps larger than about a millimeter over the entire underside. That's a huge job, and one of the reasons why the shuttle takes so long to turn around.
(Note: ablative shields weren't really an option for the shuttle as designed, but there were a lot of other designs proposed before this one was picked).
"In principle one could sell DVD players with individual signatures that can somehow burn a tag on an individual DVD, which makes it impossible to be read and played by any other player."
Yes, you could probably sell about three of them. One to the MPAA, one to the RIAA, and one to Microsoft. No-one in their right mind would buy DVDs that can only be played on one DVD player.
"Instead of privately owned disks, perhaps there will be businesses that rent online disk space to consumers instead of people buying their own hard disks?"
Why would I want to be unable to use my own data, just because my Internet link went down, or because I was travelling and had no Internet link at the time (or a slow link)?
"They are probably not listing the sites in order to prevent (or minimize) a consumer backlash from consumers againts the sites and then a subsequent backlash from the companies against Microsoft."
And this is a good thing... because? Why the hell shouldn't these companies be exposed as unable to keep their servers secure, and why the hell shouldn't they be angry at Microsoft for their buggy software?
These companies should be forced to take responsibility for infecting their customers' PCs: it's the only way they'll be likely to be more careful in future.
And emulators. I worked on an emulator for Unix some years back, and one reason why it had to run as root on some machines was precisely because it had to be able to disable this 'no-execute' bit in order to generate executable code in data memory... thereby introducing more potential security holes in your OS if we screwed up our setuid processing. In fact, AFAIR on one lesser-known Unix variant, you had to globally disable this 'no-execute' stuff in order to make the emulator run at all.
The whole thing assumes that there's never a good reason to execute code in data space, when there are actually many good reasons to do that.
'Nevertheless, I can't see the justification for this kind of thing while people starve right here on Earth.'
I take it that you donate every single penny of your disposable income to those starving people, rather than waste it on frivolous uses like internet access, beer and vacations?
"I'd never be in someone elses video actually, and I understand why moore wouldn't be in the "anti moore" documentary."
Yet if some 'evil corporate CEO' was to refuse to be in a Moore documentary, that would be proof that they are evil, right?
I've been on TV a few times, but I've made sure to only be on when they want to twist the story the same way I want to twist it... otherwise they're only going to make you look bad whatever you do.
Of course there are other tactics that work: I've heard that when Tony Benn (a British lefty politician) is asked for a TV soundbite-type interview he gives them one quote of precisely the length they want so they can't cut anything out or use it out of context:).
In general, though, anyone who believes that the average TV 'news' and 'documentary' show bears any resemblance to the truth is naive, to say the least. Every single case where I've seen a news report about something where I know the truth about what went on, it's been twisted to produce a good story rather than to report that truth.
"the system is about lobbying(which needs to be outlawed)."
Lobbying wouldn't be a problem if the US government would actually abide by the constitution. There are so few things that the Federal govermment can legally do, that lobbying would be pointless... this law, for one, is obviously and blatantly unconstitutional.
"Ahh... and here I thought there was a "world" outside of the United States of America. My mistake."
In case you hadn't noticed, the crap that gets passed into US law gets forced on the rest of the world soon after... I mean, what's the point of banning VCRs in America if evil furriners (terrorists, even!) can still tape 'Merkin TV shows?
"If the planet has lost about 1 meter worth of material since 1974 then at that rate it would have lost about 937 miles worth of material at a constant rate since its "birth" "4.5 billion" years ago."
I guess it's too much to expect people here to have actually _read_ the article before they start claiming that the authors are idiots?
"Comet Wild 2 probably gathered itself together 4.5 billion years ago, just after the Sun was born, in a region beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt. _In 1974 it had a close encounter with Jupiter and was thrown onto a new orbit that brings it closer to the Sun_."
"The plan is to put off the average consumer who may drag himself/herself into investigating the use of copyrighted content illegally if software and tools are available to *easily* circumvent such content-distrbution-restriction systems."
Did you even read the article? It's utterly pointless to worry about the 'average consumer', when it only takes one person to crack the content and put it up for download.
"To protect your Toy Story Disc from damage by children, you put it in a a safe place, and make them ask you for it before they watch it."
There speaks someone who's never had kids.
"They neglect to mention that both of them were found totally innocent, and in the makers of the garage door openers lost their case."
LOL... yes, because there's no cost to anyone from being jailed for a month, or having a criminal lawsuit hanging over your head for years.
And yes, I for one most certainly do want to copy my DVDs. I've paid for several hundred DVDs, and just like CDs they're a huge pain in the ass to store and catalog... just finding the disk I'm looking for can take five minutes. I want to be able to rip every single one of those disks onto a my hard drive and have them there ready to play any time I want.
Why shouldn't I, when I've already paid for the DVDs? What is so horrid about the idea that a customer might avoid having to spend five minutes faffing around looking for a particular movie? Companies that want my money should be making this kind of convenience easy, not hard.
"I don't think DRM is a silver bullet either, but it is at least slowing the problem until they can figure out a better, long-term solution."
It's not 'slowing the problem', and quite possibly it's making the problem _worse_. Today, if I want some music I can buy a DRM-crapped CD and have to fight to play it on my PC, or I can just download the songs for free from the web. If I want to play a game, I can buy it with some braindead 'copy protection' that will probably screw up my system by installing stupid fake drivers, or I can download a cracked copy from the web.
If free distribution of your products is a problem, you don't solve it by making your products more of a hassle for your paying customers to use, and treating those customers like criminals.
If you know where they are to within a few miles, then finding them from IR emissions is reasonably easy... but if you only know to within a billion miles, finding them is largely down to luck.
Even then, of course, if they know where _you_ are, they can cool down the part of the spacecraft that's facing you, and expel the heat from the far side. That will make finding them even harder.
"According to this NASA page, the fast transit considered is only two months."
Maybe you should read that page more carefully, since it says nothing of the kind: 'the transit time to Mars will be about 180 days', then there's nearly a two year stay waiting for a launch window back to Earth.
"It took Spirit and Opportunity a mere three months to get to Mars."
Spirit: launched June 10 2003, landed January 3rd 2004
Opportunity: launched July 8, 2003, landed January 24th 2004
Slashdot Mirror
"What part of "well regulated" is so hard to understand?"
I don't know. For some reason most anti-gun nutters seem to think it means 'government controlled'.
"Over the next 6 years is it reasonable to add 400 million Windows PCs world wide?"
Yes, but it's highly unreasonable to expect them to be running full-cost, legitimate copies of Windows. To get that kind of increase you'd mostly be selling to China, India and other countries where $100 or more for an OS is far more than most customers would want to pay.
"The cost to develop a single drug, from initial research through final FDA testing, averages slightly under $1 billion."
Mostly because of pointless government regulations, which have killed millions by delaying the introduction of life-saving drugs for years.
And remember, those companies spend a huge amount of effort developing new drugs solely because they can be patented while equally good drugs could be used whose patents have expired. I really don't have much sympathy for them.
Yeah, most of the plug-nozzle designs used excess rocket fuel to cool the plug: I think the DC-X was one of the few that intended to enter nose-first with a conventional heat shield.
"How else do you defend yourself, when someone says: "You broadcast a claim that I fucked a goat, now I'm suing you for the breakup of my family..."?"
You don't have to, because the anglo-saxon legal system is based around this strange idea that people are innocent until proven guilty. This FCC ruling is trying to turn that into broadcasters are guilty until proven innocent.
Of course all such 'offence' laws and regulations are blatantly unconstitutional in the first place, so it should never have been an issue.
"Heat shields on the other hand do a very tough job."
Not really. The Chinese reportedly used thick sheets of (admittedly chemically treated) oak on some of their early unmanned launches.
"The protective tiles on the Space Shuttle, for example, are expensive, and very fragile."
I think it's a safe bet that Rutan won't be using such tiles on SpaceShipTwo.
"Ablative heatshields are a possibility, but they do add to the per flight cost."
A properly designed ablative heatshield is much easier to remove and replace than shuttle tiles are to maintain. You just unbolt the old one, slap on the new one and you're ready to go... with tiles you have to check they're all in place, check they're all secure, and make sure there are no bumps larger than about a millimeter over the entire underside. That's a huge job, and one of the reasons why the shuttle takes so long to turn around.
(Note: ablative shields weren't really an option for the shuttle as designed, but there were a lot of other designs proposed before this one was picked).
"In principle one could sell DVD players with individual signatures that can somehow burn a tag on an individual DVD, which makes it impossible to be read and played by any other player."
Yes, you could probably sell about three of them. One to the MPAA, one to the RIAA, and one to Microsoft. No-one in their right mind would buy DVDs that can only be played on one DVD player.
"The point is that you can lump together 10 transactions from 10 *different* merchants. That is far from trivial."
What sense of the word 'trivial' is that far from?
"Instead of privately owned disks, perhaps there will be businesses that rent online disk space to consumers instead of people buying their own hard disks?"
Why would I want to be unable to use my own data, just because my Internet link went down, or because I was travelling and had no Internet link at the time (or a slow link)?
"They are probably not listing the sites in order to prevent (or minimize) a consumer backlash from consumers againts the sites and then a subsequent backlash from the companies against Microsoft."
And this is a good thing... because? Why the hell shouldn't these companies be exposed as unable to keep their servers secure, and why the hell shouldn't they be angry at Microsoft for their buggy software?
These companies should be forced to take responsibility for infecting their customers' PCs: it's the only way they'll be likely to be more careful in future.
And emulators. I worked on an emulator for Unix some years back, and one reason why it had to run as root on some machines was precisely because it had to be able to disable this 'no-execute' bit in order to generate executable code in data memory... thereby introducing more potential security holes in your OS if we screwed up our setuid processing. In fact, AFAIR on one lesser-known Unix variant, you had to globally disable this 'no-execute' stuff in order to make the emulator run at all.
The whole thing assumes that there's never a good reason to execute code in data space, when there are actually many good reasons to do that.
Which then became OS/2 NT, which was cancelled, and Microsoft released a new OS which, purely coincidentally, was called Windows NT.
Oddly enough, if HAL is one step ahead of IBM, WNT is one step behind VMS.
'Nevertheless, I can't see the justification for this kind of thing while people starve right here on Earth.'
I take it that you donate every single penny of your disposable income to those starving people, rather than waste it on frivolous uses like internet access, beer and vacations?
No, didn't think so.
"it's not a matter of height, it's a matter of speed."
It's both: you won't stay in orbit long at 100km, there's too much drag when you're travelling at 7+ km/s.
"I'd never be in someone elses video actually, and I understand why moore wouldn't be in the "anti moore" documentary."
:).
Yet if some 'evil corporate CEO' was to refuse to be in a Moore documentary, that would be proof that they are evil, right?
I've been on TV a few times, but I've made sure to only be on when they want to twist the story the same way I want to twist it... otherwise they're only going to make you look bad whatever you do.
Of course there are other tactics that work: I've heard that when Tony Benn (a British lefty politician) is asked for a TV soundbite-type interview he gives them one quote of precisely the length they want so they can't cut anything out or use it out of context
In general, though, anyone who believes that the average TV 'news' and 'documentary' show bears any resemblance to the truth is naive, to say the least. Every single case where I've seen a news report about something where I know the truth about what went on, it's been twisted to produce a good story rather than to report that truth.
"How the devil would purchasing a Microsoft Product ever take money out of their pocket?"
Hint: when you sell something for less than it costs to manufacture, you lose money. Every time someone buys an Xbox, Microsoft lose a few bucks.
"the system is about lobbying(which needs to be outlawed)."
Lobbying wouldn't be a problem if the US government would actually abide by the constitution. There are so few things that the Federal govermment can legally do, that lobbying would be pointless... this law, for one, is obviously and blatantly unconstitutional.
"Ahh... and here I thought there was a "world" outside of the United States of America. My mistake."
In case you hadn't noticed, the crap that gets passed into US law gets forced on the rest of the world soon after... I mean, what's the point of banning VCRs in America if evil furriners (terrorists, even!) can still tape 'Merkin TV shows?
"If the planet has lost about 1 meter worth of material since 1974 then at that rate it would have lost about 937 miles worth of material at a constant rate since its "birth" "4.5 billion" years ago."
I guess it's too much to expect people here to have actually _read_ the article before they start claiming that the authors are idiots?
"Comet Wild 2 probably gathered itself together 4.5 billion years ago, just after the Sun was born, in a region beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt. _In 1974 it had a close encounter with Jupiter and was thrown onto a new orbit that brings it closer to the Sun_."
"The plan is to put off the average consumer who may drag himself/herself into investigating the use of copyrighted content illegally if software and tools are available to *easily* circumvent such content-distrbution-restriction systems."
Did you even read the article? It's utterly pointless to worry about the 'average consumer', when it only takes one person to crack the content and put it up for download.
This is snake oil, pure and simple.
"To protect your Toy Story Disc from damage by children, you put it in a a safe place, and make them ask you for it before they watch it."
There speaks someone who's never had kids.
"They neglect to mention that both of them were found totally innocent, and in the makers of the garage door openers lost their case."
LOL... yes, because there's no cost to anyone from being jailed for a month, or having a criminal lawsuit hanging over your head for years.
And yes, I for one most certainly do want to copy my DVDs. I've paid for several hundred DVDs, and just like CDs they're a huge pain in the ass to store and catalog... just finding the disk I'm looking for can take five minutes. I want to be able to rip every single one of those disks onto a my hard drive and have them there ready to play any time I want.
Why shouldn't I, when I've already paid for the DVDs? What is so horrid about the idea that a customer might avoid having to spend five minutes faffing around looking for a particular movie? Companies that want my money should be making this kind of convenience easy, not hard.
"I don't think DRM is a silver bullet either, but it is at least slowing the problem until they can figure out a better, long-term solution."
It's not 'slowing the problem', and quite possibly it's making the problem _worse_. Today, if I want some music I can buy a DRM-crapped CD and have to fight to play it on my PC, or I can just download the songs for free from the web. If I want to play a game, I can buy it with some braindead 'copy protection' that will probably screw up my system by installing stupid fake drivers, or I can download a cracked copy from the web.
If free distribution of your products is a problem, you don't solve it by making your products more of a hassle for your paying customers to use, and treating those customers like criminals.
"Actually, it's not all that hard,"
Yes it is. Do the math sometime...
If you know where they are to within a few miles, then finding them from IR emissions is reasonably easy... but if you only know to within a billion miles, finding them is largely down to luck.
Even then, of course, if they know where _you_ are, they can cool down the part of the spacecraft that's facing you, and expel the heat from the far side. That will make finding them even harder.
"Of course, then you'd have to stay on Mars for the next window if you really wanted to be thrifty."
Exactly, that's why it takes three years for the round trip.
"According to this NASA page, the fast transit considered is only two months."
Maybe you should read that page more carefully, since it says nothing of the kind: 'the transit time to Mars will be about 180 days', then there's nearly a two year stay waiting for a launch window back to Earth.
"It took Spirit and Opportunity a mere three months to get to Mars."
Spirit: launched June 10 2003, landed January 3rd 2004
Opportunity: launched July 8, 2003, landed January 24th 2004
That sure was a long 'mere three months'.