"Western capitalist markets are based on continuous long term growth. Yet it is plain obvious that the markets cannot grow forever"
Plainly obvious to who, exactly?
"This means that system is fundamentally flawed and will have to be modified in the future towards conservation of resources, controlled markets and zero-growth economies."
"In what circumstances would you WANT disparate remote applications, from potentially multiple remote machines, integrating invisibly in your current desktop ?"
Any time you have multiple Unix machines on a network.
Seriously, if you'd spent a few years working in a Unix shop where you're often compiling and running from a different machine to the one you're displaying on, which may well be running a different OS on different hardware, you'd understand why this is A Good Thing(tm)... and the more that Unix adopts GUI-based tools like Windows, the more useful it is. Why, for example, would you want to actually go to the remote machine (which might even be at a site on the other side of the world) to run the GUI-based admin tool if you can run it remotely to your workstation?
Why would I want to join a union? I have skills that companies are willing to pay a premium for, so what possible reason would I have to want to group myself with a bunch of losers who don't?
Unions make some sense for industries where skills are low and workers are interchangable, but no sense in a skill-based industry like IT.
"It deprives the Indian Society of the benefit of their most capable people and it drives otherwise capable workers of out a job here in the US."
And who gave you the right to force Indians to stay in India if they would prefer to work in another country and that country is willing to let them work there?
"Doctors are numerous all over the world. Why don't they come here and charge half? Because of the AMA."
Why do you think medical care is so expensive in America? In a large part, because the AMA deliberately restricts the supply of doctors in this way.
Now, I'm not sure about you, but I certainly have no desire to support an organisation that deliberately works to prevent the poor from getting good medical care at a decent price.
" The TDI is quiet and smooth, odorless and relatively powerful."
Now wait until it's three years old and belching out carcinogenic clouds of black smoke whenever it accelerates.
Maybe VWs are better than the average diesel, but I see a lot of three-year-old diesels in the UK doing just that. It's no wonder that our air is so polluted compared to most US cities I've visited when the government has been pushing people to drive 'green' diesels for so long.
"All of these people could and should be donating to something like Folding or some other distributed effort that actually will probably help humanity by finding a cure for cancer or some other disease."
Of course if there actually _are_ aliens out there and they're close enough for us to communicate with in a reasonable timescale, they might be able to tell us how to solve all those problems and many more. Not to mention that finding a sentient alien species would have a far greater impact on humanity than curing a few diseases.
Why sit in a forest trying to figure out why apples fall from trees, when by walking a few miles to the nearest town you might find someone who'd explain relativity to you?
Indeed. Government was, after all, created to waste tons of our money passing stupid laws that would have no effect on criminals but allow the relatively moral and law-abiding majority to be hassled for trivial violations. It does that job well.
However, you have to wonder whether it's a job that needs doing.
"After all, the only reason why it costs billions to replace it is because it's made as safe as possible"
No, the reason why it costs billions to replace is that it's an extremely complex vehicle made in tiny quantities, that costs billions to build; most of the safety issues are in the main engines, SRBs and ET, which are not even part of that cost.
747s would also cost billions to build if you made four of them, stopped production for years, and then wanted to build another. It's little to do with safety.
"For comparison, the Russian Proton-M rocket can hurl a comparable amount to orbit as the Shuttle, and costs only $100 million for vehicle and launch."
And is much cheaper and much safer than the shuttle, thereby rather disproving your argument. If the Soyuz capsule on top was replaced with a shuttle, it would still cost billions to build.
But if you were actually interested in researching heart attacks and bone mass loss, you could do it here on Earth for vastly less than the tens of billions of dollars spent on manned spaceflight; just think how many lives could have been saved if the estimated $100,000,000,000+ lifetime cost of ISS was spent on medical research instead?
I have one of those cards sitting around at home, though I've forgotten who made it; basically just some kind of TV-out chip on an ISA card. Wasn't bad back in the days when 1GB of data was most of your hard drive, but it would be pretty useless today.
Let's be brutally frank here: astronauts are easily replaced, but shuttles cannot be replaced in any politically viable manner... if seven astronauts had been run over by a bus it would be sad, but NASA would have continued pretty much as before, whereas if Columbia had been on the back of the 747 carrier aircraft and that had crashed, the space program would be in almost as much trouble as it is today. Lose another shuttle and NASA is screwed.
So regardless of whether there are people on board, the shuttles _have_ to be made as safe as possible because you can't afford to lose a vehicle that would cost billions of dollars to replace. This is where the whole 'man-rating' argument falls down.
Re:Priorities, News for Nerds?, Rant
on
Collecting Stardust
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
"Our President is talking about invading Iran,"
I'm sure Saddam Hussein will be relieved to discover that Bush has changed targets yet again.
Not to mention that we've already had an RTG hit the atmosphere at 25,000 mph when the Apollo 13 LEM re-entered, resulting in millions of deaths and global radioactive contamination. Oh sorry, I forgot, it didn't, did it?
Uh, PS1.1 and 1.4 are part of DX9; they just happen to be available on DX8 cards too. There's no reason why you _have_ to use PS2.0 on DX9 cards if earlier versions will work just as well... and it's likely that game developers will use the earlier versions where possible, for best backward compatibility with older cards.
Just imagine if every test had required DX9: people would be whining that their DX7 and DX8 cards couldn't run anything.
"NASA, the agency that brought you the space shuttle that costs 500 million to a billion dollars a mission so astronauts can ride bicycles in zero G"
To be fair, the basic cost of a shuttle flight is around $150,000,000. It's the fixed costs of maintaining KSC and various other NASA facilities that make up the vast majority of the shuttle budget; this is why NASA has come to be considered by some as a welfare program, not a space program.
"OSP would suffer from many of the Shuttles' problems if we had built it in 1975 and stacked it on top of Saturn Vs. We'd now instead be discussing when we were going to replace the expensive and risky OSP."
Except that sticking it on top of a Saturn booster would have eliminated many of the shuttle risks and allowed numerous new intact abort scenarios. No Challenger loss because there'd be no solids and a malfunctioning liquid stage could be shut down (even if it exploded unexpectedly the odds are fair that a shuttle mounted on top of it could survive), and (assuming the foam hit was the cause) no Columbia loss since those delicate tiles wouldn't be anywhere near anything that could fall off and hit them.
It's likely that there would be new issues (e.g. a shutdown of two or more liquid engines within a few seconds of launch would almost always be unsurvivable, but I'm not sure it's survivable with the current shuttle either), but many of the risks designed into the current shuttle would be gone.
"Suppose a search turns up that the same credit card has been buying large blocks of seats or buying seats on multiple flights the same day"
Gosh! With all those "apply now for your pre-approved card" junk mails I get I'm sure it will be really, really hard for a future terrorist group to get more than one credit card to buy their tickets with next time.
"99.9% of the time it turns out to be nothing but that 0.1% turns out to be the time the planes are flown into skyscrapers."
And a check that's wrong 99.9% of the time will probably be treated as just another misidentification the other 0.1%. It's basically worthless, other than to provide welfare for government burrowcrats.
"Infact according to the gartner group a coffee maker can cost an office over 30k a year. Because people chat at the coffee maker instead of working at their desk"
Meanwhile, a five-minute chat about a software issue with one of the other programmers at the coffee maker can easily be more productive than a two-hour meeting with a dozen programmers and a couple of managers.
Installing more coffee makers and eliminating meetings could save an office many tens or hundreds thousands of dollars a year... particularly as you could probably sack half the managers who spend all their time in meetings and very little time hanging around the coffee maker where all the important software decisions are made.
I played the Sims briefly when it first came out, but it was probably the most boring 'game' I've ever played; uninstalled it after a few days and wished I hadn't wasted my money...
No, it's totally bogus. That's not the wing, it's the inside of the payload bay, and those aren't cracks, they're wires and creases in the payload bay insulation.
Slashdot Mirror
"Western capitalist markets are based on continuous long term growth. Yet it is plain obvious that the markets cannot grow forever"
Plainly obvious to who, exactly?
"This means that system is fundamentally flawed and will have to be modified in the future towards conservation of resources, controlled markets and zero-growth economies."
Ah, commies. I see.
"In what circumstances would you WANT disparate remote applications, from potentially multiple remote machines, integrating invisibly in your current desktop ?"
Any time you have multiple Unix machines on a network.
Seriously, if you'd spent a few years working in a Unix shop where you're often compiling and running from a different machine to the one you're displaying on, which may well be running a different OS on different hardware, you'd understand why this is A Good Thing(tm)... and the more that Unix adopts GUI-based tools like Windows, the more useful it is. Why, for example, would you want to actually go to the remote machine (which might even be at a site on the other side of the world) to run the GUI-based admin tool if you can run it remotely to your workstation?
Why would I want to join a union? I have skills that companies are willing to pay a premium for, so what possible reason would I have to want to group myself with a bunch of losers who don't?
Unions make some sense for industries where skills are low and workers are interchangable, but no sense in a skill-based industry like IT.
"It deprives the Indian Society of the benefit of their most capable people and it drives otherwise capable workers of out a job here in the US."
And who gave you the right to force Indians to stay in India if they would prefer to work in another country and that country is willing to let them work there?
"Doctors are numerous all over the world. Why don't they come here and charge half? Because of the AMA."
Why do you think medical care is so expensive in America? In a large part, because the AMA deliberately restricts the supply of doctors in this way.
Now, I'm not sure about you, but I certainly have no desire to support an organisation that deliberately works to prevent the poor from getting good medical care at a decent price.
" The TDI is quiet and smooth, odorless and relatively powerful."
Now wait until it's three years old and belching out carcinogenic clouds of black smoke whenever it accelerates.
Maybe VWs are better than the average diesel, but I see a lot of three-year-old diesels in the UK doing just that. It's no wonder that our air is so polluted compared to most US cities I've visited when the government has been pushing people to drive 'green' diesels for so long.
"All of these people could and should be donating to something like Folding or some other distributed effort that actually will probably help humanity by finding a cure for cancer or some other disease."
Of course if there actually _are_ aliens out there and they're close enough for us to communicate with in a reasonable timescale, they might be able to tell us how to solve all those problems and many more. Not to mention that finding a sentient alien species would have a far greater impact on humanity than curing a few diseases.
Why sit in a forest trying to figure out why apples fall from trees, when by walking a few miles to the nearest town you might find someone who'd explain relativity to you?
Indeed. Government was, after all, created to waste tons of our money passing stupid laws that would have no effect on criminals but allow the relatively moral and law-abiding majority to be hassled for trivial violations. It does that job well.
However, you have to wonder whether it's a job that needs doing.
"After all, the only reason why it costs billions to replace it is because it's made as safe as possible"
No, the reason why it costs billions to replace is that it's an extremely complex vehicle made in tiny quantities, that costs billions to build; most of the safety issues are in the main engines, SRBs and ET, which are not even part of that cost.
747s would also cost billions to build if you made four of them, stopped production for years, and then wanted to build another. It's little to do with safety.
"For comparison, the Russian Proton-M rocket can hurl a comparable amount to orbit as the Shuttle, and costs only $100 million for vehicle and launch."
And is much cheaper and much safer than the shuttle, thereby rather disproving your argument. If the Soyuz capsule on top was replaced with a shuttle, it would still cost billions to build.
But if you were actually interested in researching heart attacks and bone mass loss, you could do it here on Earth for vastly less than the tens of billions of dollars spent on manned spaceflight; just think how many lives could have been saved if the estimated $100,000,000,000+ lifetime cost of ISS was spent on medical research instead?
http://www.viscountvideo.com/danmere.htm
I have one of those cards sitting around at home, though I've forgotten who made it; basically just some kind of TV-out chip on an ISA card. Wasn't bad back in the days when 1GB of data was most of your hard drive, but it would be pretty useless today.
But note that future space observatory plans do not include manned servicing.
Let's be brutally frank here: astronauts are easily replaced, but shuttles cannot be replaced in any politically viable manner... if seven astronauts had been run over by a bus it would be sad, but NASA would have continued pretty much as before, whereas if Columbia had been on the back of the 747 carrier aircraft and that had crashed, the space program would be in almost as much trouble as it is today. Lose another shuttle and NASA is screwed.
So regardless of whether there are people on board, the shuttles _have_ to be made as safe as possible because you can't afford to lose a vehicle that would cost billions of dollars to replace. This is where the whole 'man-rating' argument falls down.
"Our President is talking about invading Iran,"
I'm sure Saddam Hussein will be relieved to discover that Bush has changed targets yet again.
Not to mention that we've already had an RTG hit the atmosphere at 25,000 mph when the Apollo 13 LEM re-entered, resulting in millions of deaths and global radioactive contamination. Oh sorry, I forgot, it didn't, did it?
Uh, PS1.1 and 1.4 are part of DX9; they just happen to be available on DX8 cards too. There's no reason why you _have_ to use PS2.0 on DX9 cards if earlier versions will work just as well... and it's likely that game developers will use the earlier versions where possible, for best backward compatibility with older cards.
Just imagine if every test had required DX9: people would be whining that their DX7 and DX8 cards couldn't run anything.
"NASA, the agency that brought you the space shuttle that costs 500 million to a billion dollars a mission so astronauts can ride bicycles in zero G" To be fair, the basic cost of a shuttle flight is around $150,000,000. It's the fixed costs of maintaining KSC and various other NASA facilities that make up the vast majority of the shuttle budget; this is why NASA has come to be considered by some as a welfare program, not a space program.
"OSP would suffer from many of the Shuttles' problems if we had built it in 1975 and stacked it on top of Saturn Vs. We'd now instead be discussing when we were going to replace the expensive and risky OSP."
Except that sticking it on top of a Saturn booster would have eliminated many of the shuttle risks and allowed numerous new intact abort scenarios. No Challenger loss because there'd be no solids and a malfunctioning liquid stage could be shut down (even if it exploded unexpectedly the odds are fair that a shuttle mounted on top of it could survive), and (assuming the foam hit was the cause) no Columbia loss since those delicate tiles wouldn't be anywhere near anything that could fall off and hit them.
It's likely that there would be new issues (e.g. a shutdown of two or more liquid engines within a few seconds of launch would almost always be unsurvivable, but I'm not sure it's survivable with the current shuttle either), but many of the risks designed into the current shuttle would be gone.
"Not because someone spent 6 months getting it physics-correct."
I think you underestimate the flight sim fans... it's not as though MS Flight Sim is known for its great graphics and gameplay.
"Suppose a search turns up that the same credit card has been buying large blocks of seats or buying seats on multiple flights the same day"
Gosh! With all those "apply now for your pre-approved card" junk mails I get I'm sure it will be really, really hard for a future terrorist group to get more than one credit card to buy their tickets with next time.
"99.9% of the time it turns out to be nothing but that 0.1% turns out to be the time the planes are flown into skyscrapers."
And a check that's wrong 99.9% of the time will probably be treated as just another misidentification the other 0.1%. It's basically worthless, other than to provide welfare for government burrowcrats.
"Infact according to the gartner group a coffee maker can cost an office over 30k a year. Because people chat at the coffee maker instead of working at their desk"
Meanwhile, a five-minute chat about a software issue with one of the other programmers at the coffee maker can easily be more productive than a two-hour meeting with a dozen programmers and a couple of managers.
Installing more coffee makers and eliminating meetings could save an office many tens or hundreds thousands of dollars a year... particularly as you could probably sack half the managers who spend all their time in meetings and very little time hanging around the coffee maker where all the important software decisions are made.
"Anyone has more info on it?"
Yes. It's not the wing and it's not a crack.
I played the Sims briefly when it first came out, but it was probably the most boring 'game' I've ever played; uninstalled it after a few days and wished I hadn't wasted my money...
No, it's totally bogus. That's not the wing, it's the inside of the payload bay, and those aren't cracks, they're wires and creases in the payload bay insulation.