Research doesn't require exploration - or war, for that matter. A space shuttle launch costs about half a billion dollars. To put that in perspective, my PhD was funded from a grant for, at the exchange rate of the time, about one million dollars. That funded three PhD students, two research assistants, and 20% of the time of four lecturers, over three years. Even just counting the PhDs in that, a single shuttle launch will completely fund (including all overheads, like lab space, travel to conferences, and so on) 300 PhDs. Or, to put it another way, it will fund 500 three-year research projects. And that's money that NASA spends on top of the money that they spend doing research. Now, to be fair, the shuttle is decommissioned, and a launch of a rocket only costs around half as much, so you can only fund around 250 3-year research projects for each launch. Or about 100 for each human you put into space for a few weeks...
Space exploration may produce some advances, but if you took that money and invested it directly in research, rather than in something that you hope will produce research as a byproduct, then you're going to get a far bigger return on investment.
But, again, what's the advantage? Microgravity manufacturing is the only one that really springs to mind. Even if you've got a fully self-sufficient space station outside LEO, there's very little that you can do with it, and the energy cost of getting people up to it is insane without a functioning space elevator (then it's just horrendously expensive).
That was one of the plot devices in The Man Who Sold the Moon, by RAH. In the end, in the true spirit of American Capitalism, he got people to pay more for him not to wire a big advertising logo on the moon than anyone was willing to pay for their logo...
There is a specific clause in the treaty allowing extradition to be refused in cases where capital punishment is considered likely. I believe that this is required due to other treaty obligations (e.g. the ECHR), which prohibit UK citizens from being subject to the death penalty while under British jurisdiction (sending them off to another country to be killed counts). A more balanced treaty would also allow extradition to be refused if the crime were not illegal under UK law (we have this in most extradition treaties) and would have more symmetrical evidence requirements - currently, the standard of evidence required to extradite from the UK to USA is a lot lower than vice versa.
I've written to ministers acting in their ministerial capacity before, and got a form reply saying that I should direct my questions or comments to my own MPs. I am supposed to write to my MP, who will then submit a written question to the relevant department. This is almost always, in my experience, answered by a civil servant and not by the minister. As the CoM has a different bureaucracy to Westminister, this means that questions relevant to the EU are usually never seen by the appropriate person if sent by anyone other than one of their constituents. In contrast, I do get personal replies to letters I write to two of my five MEPs.
Did you read my post? It's not that I didn't vote for the person who won - the person in my constituency who does represent me (even though I didn't vote for me, he is accountable to me and the other people in my constituency) has no say in selecting the people who go to the Council of Ministers. They are selected by the government (a coalition at this point, more commonly a single party with a majority) from the pool of their MPs.
These ministers are not allowed to communicate directly with other the constituents of other MPs. This means that the people who is supposedly representing me at the CoM are not allowed to communicate with me. I am not supposed to write letters to them, and they are not supposed to reply. In contrast, I have 5 MEPs who represent me and even though I only voted for two of them (I think - one definitely, I can't remember about the others) they are all supposed to be available for direct communication with me.
Not really. If a user opts in, installs their toolbar, and says 'use my data to improve search results' then they will use the relationship between pages in their search algorithm. They just won't explicitly exclude pages that happen to be Google from this.
It's not like Microsoft is passing searches to google.com and then using the results. If a user with the Bing toolbar installed types a term into Google and then visits a page, then that page will be captured, but it would also be captured if they followed the link from a Slashdot post.
The Council of Ministers doesn't contain anyone I voted for. It contains people selected by the leader of the political party that won the national election. Neither the candidate MP I voted for nor the one who was elected to represent me is a member of this party, so my MP does not have any say in their selection. MPs are not supposed to respond to comments or questions from people in other constituencies, so the people who 'represent' me in the CoM are not actually supposed to communicate with me at all, and I have no influence on their reelection.
I am much better represented in the Parliament. I have 5 MEPs, one of whom does a very good job (although when the Welsh Nationalist is the sane one, you start to worry about the system), but at least there is one MEP who represents my views and is accountable to me there.
Unfortunately, every time we try to push more power to the Parliament, the Eurosceptics manage to get it overturned...
Although repeated infringements can quite easily ruin a company, and that is the intent of the law: companies should never be in the situation of deciding that ignoring a law and regularly paying the fines is just the cost of doing business.
Why do you need to do that? I have an Android phone, and the only thing connected to Google on it that I use is the Market (and there are ones like the Amazon Market that I could use instead, so even that's optional). Everything else was pretty easy to replace.
In that case, I'd recommend getting a better search engine. That was the top hit on DuckDuckGo for 'printcrime'. Not being able to spell Cory might have caused you to get bad results, but DDG still manages to have it in the top for your query. Amusingly, this page is now the third link...
What is this, Slashdot for the illiterates? How about a link to the story, instead of some weird robot thing reading it for you? Still, at least we now have evidence that illiteracy actually is a job requirement for working at Slashdot...
I visited the USA several times, for a total of about 4-5 months between 2005 and 2007, and I haven't been back since. The TSA craziness was just starting when I was last there. I have no intention of returning until it is over. Over the course of my previous trips, including accommodation, internal flights, food, and everything else, I easily spent $10,000. Since then, I have spent $0. Given the state of the US economy, I'd have thought that they'd want to be encouraging people from abroad to spend money there...
Take them to see them performed well first. The thing about Shakespeare is that it's popular trash. He was the J. K. Rowling of his day. Most modern performances try to turn it into great art, and so end up with something that is just not entertaining, but lets a load of pretentious gits say things like 'oh, such a moving performance!' without admitting that they only understood every third word.
There's a small group of touring players that puts on a couple of Shakespeare plays here every year. The cast is 4-5 people (so lots of quick costume changes), all male, and they make them fun. I've taken people for whom English is a second language to see them, and they've enjoyed them.
Getting them to perform them is hard. The difference between good and bad Shakespeare performance is often in the tone of voice used in the delivery and the rhythm of the speech. Trying to read it aloud is not really any easier than trying to read it in your head...
The problem is that the things that make these environments good for developing commercial applications do not make them good for teaching. Logo and BBC BASIC were great environments for teaching, because a single line of code gave immediate feedback. Something like Squeak eToys is even better, because everything in the system (from pixels on upwards) is available for introspection - you can take a running program, inspect anything in it, modify the code, and let it continue.
If I was employed with manual labor, as I assume is the case of the majority of planet Earth's total workforce, my programming skills would be reduced to a hobby with no practical value.
The world is a red herring there. Ask about the EU or USA, and you'll find that the vast majority are not employed doing manual labour. It's increasingly cheaper to replace manual workers with machines - they make fewer errors, don't need to eat or sleep, and can work around the clock. With machines like concrete extruders, even builders (which hung on for a while because of the large amount of individual decision making required) are likely to see a reduction in workforce. People always say that plumbing is a safe occupation because it can't be outsourced, but how much of a plumber's work could be done by a small robot that crawled through the pipes and had a glue gun for repairing damage and a drill for removing blockages?
A large part of the general population has absolutely nothing to gain by knowing how to program
Really? I'll give you a counter-example. My stepfather is the head greenskeeper on a golf course. Hardly a job that requires programming, right? Well, except for the fact that the irrigation system that they installed a few years back is completely computer controlled. It comes with a little domain-specific language that lets you write simple programs that set the conditions that will trigger each of the sprinklers. But, of course, he's just doing a low-skill job, he doesn't need to know any programming...
For more general usage, try watching pretty much any office worker at his or her computer for ten minutes. You'll find it a painful experience: so many things that are trivial to automate are done by hand on a daily basis. A basic understanding of programming and half an hour with the VBA documentation in Word would save huge amounts of time every day. But, of course, they're just doing administrative work, they don't need to know any programming...
What language? Unless you decide to keep up in programming languages whatever you learn is going to be completely and uterly useless.
The fact that you even ask this question shows that you have completely missed the point. Programming teaches two very important things:
Breaking down a set of instructions into a form so simple that something with no intelligence can follow them.
Understanding the limitations and capabilities of computers (which, in case you haven't noticed, are now embedded everywhere).
The language is entirely irrelevant here. I was taught BBC BASIC and Logo at school (aged 7). I've not used either language for at least a decade, except for a couple of times when I fired up an emulator for nostalgia. Does this mean that what I learned was 'completely and uterly [sic] useless?' Of course not!
The companies that own the IP could have easily set up a useful digital service but they instead decide to sit on old games and do nothing with them
Sometimes. For games from the '80s and even the '90s, often no one actually knows who owns the copyright. Games written by a single person will be owned by that person - if he died, then the copyright will be owned by whoever received the residual of his estate. This person may not even be aware that they own the copyright on an old game. Something similar happens if a company goes bust - the receiver will own its assets and some company may buy all of the intellectual property without especially caring about the game (e.g. pay for the patents, get some copyrights that you don't care about). There will be a record somewhere, but if management has changed a couple of times since then no one in the company may actually be aware of exactly what they own unless they happen to refer to an old asset sheet...
$37k for a car that can travel *up to* 150 miles on a full charge? My diesel fiat cost less than half that, can go *up to* 400 miles on a tank of the dirty stuff and when I put my foot down it goes like a scalded cat (gotta love turbos).
150 miles means that most commuters never need to charge it anywhere except at home. They just park it in the charging spot each night and it's ready to go in the morning. No more visits to petrol stations to fill up the car, except when you're making a long trip.
Still not seeing the market viability for full electric cars amongst the real road warriors (30k+ miles p.a.) who, let's face it, are the group of drivers that pollute most.
Per capita? Sure. In total? I doubt it. The people doing their daily 30 mile commute each way outnumber the road warriors by a huge amount. Get them all into electric cars, and you can easily switch the energy source to nuclear, solar, or whatever.
Usually I'd be happy to jump on the anticompetitive bandwagon (which has knives on the wheels to damage any other bandwagons it passes), but the Google search engine does not really enjoy a monopoly. As of last September, Google had about 64% of the search engine market in the USA (less elsewhere) but, more importantly, they have no lock in. It's trivial to switch to using one of their competitors. I switched to DuckDuckGo over a year ago, and I have not seen any reason to want to switch back. I just got an Android phone, and it now has a DDG search box on the home screen instead of a Google one.
Slashdot Mirror
Research doesn't require exploration - or war, for that matter. A space shuttle launch costs about half a billion dollars. To put that in perspective, my PhD was funded from a grant for, at the exchange rate of the time, about one million dollars. That funded three PhD students, two research assistants, and 20% of the time of four lecturers, over three years. Even just counting the PhDs in that, a single shuttle launch will completely fund (including all overheads, like lab space, travel to conferences, and so on) 300 PhDs. Or, to put it another way, it will fund 500 three-year research projects. And that's money that NASA spends on top of the money that they spend doing research. Now, to be fair, the shuttle is decommissioned, and a launch of a rocket only costs around half as much, so you can only fund around 250 3-year research projects for each launch. Or about 100 for each human you put into space for a few weeks...
Space exploration may produce some advances, but if you took that money and invested it directly in research, rather than in something that you hope will produce research as a byproduct, then you're going to get a far bigger return on investment.
But, again, what's the advantage? Microgravity manufacturing is the only one that really springs to mind. Even if you've got a fully self-sufficient space station outside LEO, there's very little that you can do with it, and the energy cost of getting people up to it is insane without a functioning space elevator (then it's just horrendously expensive).
That was one of the plot devices in The Man Who Sold the Moon, by RAH. In the end, in the true spirit of American Capitalism, he got people to pay more for him not to wire a big advertising logo on the moon than anyone was willing to pay for their logo...
There is a specific clause in the treaty allowing extradition to be refused in cases where capital punishment is considered likely. I believe that this is required due to other treaty obligations (e.g. the ECHR), which prohibit UK citizens from being subject to the death penalty while under British jurisdiction (sending them off to another country to be killed counts). A more balanced treaty would also allow extradition to be refused if the crime were not illegal under UK law (we have this in most extradition treaties) and would have more symmetrical evidence requirements - currently, the standard of evidence required to extradite from the UK to USA is a lot lower than vice versa.
I've written to ministers acting in their ministerial capacity before, and got a form reply saying that I should direct my questions or comments to my own MPs. I am supposed to write to my MP, who will then submit a written question to the relevant department. This is almost always, in my experience, answered by a civil servant and not by the minister. As the CoM has a different bureaucracy to Westminister, this means that questions relevant to the EU are usually never seen by the appropriate person if sent by anyone other than one of their constituents. In contrast, I do get personal replies to letters I write to two of my five MEPs.
Did you read my post? It's not that I didn't vote for the person who won - the person in my constituency who does represent me (even though I didn't vote for me, he is accountable to me and the other people in my constituency) has no say in selecting the people who go to the Council of Ministers. They are selected by the government (a coalition at this point, more commonly a single party with a majority) from the pool of their MPs.
These ministers are not allowed to communicate directly with other the constituents of other MPs. This means that the people who is supposedly representing me at the CoM are not allowed to communicate with me. I am not supposed to write letters to them, and they are not supposed to reply. In contrast, I have 5 MEPs who represent me and even though I only voted for two of them (I think - one definitely, I can't remember about the others) they are all supposed to be available for direct communication with me.
Interestingly enough, Windows XP and Android 2 also don't support HTTP 2.0, so they're largely irrelevant in this context...
Not really. If a user opts in, installs their toolbar, and says 'use my data to improve search results' then they will use the relationship between pages in their search algorithm. They just won't explicitly exclude pages that happen to be Google from this.
It's not like Microsoft is passing searches to google.com and then using the results. If a user with the Bing toolbar installed types a term into Google and then visits a page, then that page will be captured, but it would also be captured if they followed the link from a Slashdot post.
The Council of Ministers doesn't contain anyone I voted for. It contains people selected by the leader of the political party that won the national election. Neither the candidate MP I voted for nor the one who was elected to represent me is a member of this party, so my MP does not have any say in their selection. MPs are not supposed to respond to comments or questions from people in other constituencies, so the people who 'represent' me in the CoM are not actually supposed to communicate with me at all, and I have no influence on their reelection.
I am much better represented in the Parliament. I have 5 MEPs, one of whom does a very good job (although when the Welsh Nationalist is the sane one, you start to worry about the system), but at least there is one MEP who represents my views and is accountable to me there.
Unfortunately, every time we try to push more power to the Parliament, the Eurosceptics manage to get it overturned...
Although repeated infringements can quite easily ruin a company, and that is the intent of the law: companies should never be in the situation of deciding that ignoring a law and regularly paying the fines is just the cost of doing business.
Why do you need to do that? I have an Android phone, and the only thing connected to Google on it that I use is the Market (and there are ones like the Amazon Market that I could use instead, so even that's optional). Everything else was pretty easy to replace.
And did it delay the release of any competitors' products? Being first to market, even by a week, can be worth a huge amount of money...
It's free if you have OS X 10.7. I think XCode 4.x is $4 if you have 10.6, but XCdoe 3.x is free.
In that case, I'd recommend getting a better search engine. That was the top hit on DuckDuckGo for 'printcrime'. Not being able to spell Cory might have caused you to get bad results, but DDG still manages to have it in the top for your query. Amusingly, this page is now the third link...
Do you mean bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish?
That's not the appropriate solution to that problem and it's hardly desirable to have random applications being killed
They say it's a random application. In my experience, it's the application with the most unsaved data...
What is this, Slashdot for the illiterates? How about a link to the story, instead of some weird robot thing reading it for you? Still, at least we now have evidence that illiteracy actually is a job requirement for working at Slashdot...
I visited the USA several times, for a total of about 4-5 months between 2005 and 2007, and I haven't been back since. The TSA craziness was just starting when I was last there. I have no intention of returning until it is over. Over the course of my previous trips, including accommodation, internal flights, food, and everything else, I easily spent $10,000. Since then, I have spent $0. Given the state of the US economy, I'd have thought that they'd want to be encouraging people from abroad to spend money there...
Take them to see them performed well first. The thing about Shakespeare is that it's popular trash. He was the J. K. Rowling of his day. Most modern performances try to turn it into great art, and so end up with something that is just not entertaining, but lets a load of pretentious gits say things like 'oh, such a moving performance!' without admitting that they only understood every third word.
There's a small group of touring players that puts on a couple of Shakespeare plays here every year. The cast is 4-5 people (so lots of quick costume changes), all male, and they make them fun. I've taken people for whom English is a second language to see them, and they've enjoyed them.
Getting them to perform them is hard. The difference between good and bad Shakespeare performance is often in the tone of voice used in the delivery and the rhythm of the speech. Trying to read it aloud is not really any easier than trying to read it in your head...
The problem is that the things that make these environments good for developing commercial applications do not make them good for teaching. Logo and BBC BASIC were great environments for teaching, because a single line of code gave immediate feedback. Something like Squeak eToys is even better, because everything in the system (from pixels on upwards) is available for introspection - you can take a running program, inspect anything in it, modify the code, and let it continue.
If I was employed with manual labor, as I assume is the case of the majority of planet Earth's total workforce, my programming skills would be reduced to a hobby with no practical value.
The world is a red herring there. Ask about the EU or USA, and you'll find that the vast majority are not employed doing manual labour. It's increasingly cheaper to replace manual workers with machines - they make fewer errors, don't need to eat or sleep, and can work around the clock. With machines like concrete extruders, even builders (which hung on for a while because of the large amount of individual decision making required) are likely to see a reduction in workforce. People always say that plumbing is a safe occupation because it can't be outsourced, but how much of a plumber's work could be done by a small robot that crawled through the pipes and had a glue gun for repairing damage and a drill for removing blockages?
A large part of the general population has absolutely nothing to gain by knowing how to program
Really? I'll give you a counter-example. My stepfather is the head greenskeeper on a golf course. Hardly a job that requires programming, right? Well, except for the fact that the irrigation system that they installed a few years back is completely computer controlled. It comes with a little domain-specific language that lets you write simple programs that set the conditions that will trigger each of the sprinklers. But, of course, he's just doing a low-skill job, he doesn't need to know any programming...
For more general usage, try watching pretty much any office worker at his or her computer for ten minutes. You'll find it a painful experience: so many things that are trivial to automate are done by hand on a daily basis. A basic understanding of programming and half an hour with the VBA documentation in Word would save huge amounts of time every day. But, of course, they're just doing administrative work, they don't need to know any programming...
What language? Unless you decide to keep up in programming languages whatever you learn is going to be completely and uterly useless.
The fact that you even ask this question shows that you have completely missed the point. Programming teaches two very important things:
The language is entirely irrelevant here. I was taught BBC BASIC and Logo at school (aged 7). I've not used either language for at least a decade, except for a couple of times when I fired up an emulator for nostalgia. Does this mean that what I learned was 'completely and uterly [sic] useless?' Of course not!
The companies that own the IP could have easily set up a useful digital service but they instead decide to sit on old games and do nothing with them
Sometimes. For games from the '80s and even the '90s, often no one actually knows who owns the copyright. Games written by a single person will be owned by that person - if he died, then the copyright will be owned by whoever received the residual of his estate. This person may not even be aware that they own the copyright on an old game. Something similar happens if a company goes bust - the receiver will own its assets and some company may buy all of the intellectual property without especially caring about the game (e.g. pay for the patents, get some copyrights that you don't care about). There will be a record somewhere, but if management has changed a couple of times since then no one in the company may actually be aware of exactly what they own unless they happen to refer to an old asset sheet...
$37k for a car that can travel *up to* 150 miles on a full charge? My diesel fiat cost less than half that, can go *up to* 400 miles on a tank of the dirty stuff and when I put my foot down it goes like a scalded cat (gotta love turbos).
150 miles means that most commuters never need to charge it anywhere except at home. They just park it in the charging spot each night and it's ready to go in the morning. No more visits to petrol stations to fill up the car, except when you're making a long trip.
Still not seeing the market viability for full electric cars amongst the real road warriors (30k+ miles p.a.) who, let's face it, are the group of drivers that pollute most.
Per capita? Sure. In total? I doubt it. The people doing their daily 30 mile commute each way outnumber the road warriors by a huge amount. Get them all into electric cars, and you can easily switch the energy source to nuclear, solar, or whatever.
Usually I'd be happy to jump on the anticompetitive bandwagon (which has knives on the wheels to damage any other bandwagons it passes), but the Google search engine does not really enjoy a monopoly. As of last September, Google had about 64% of the search engine market in the USA (less elsewhere) but, more importantly, they have no lock in. It's trivial to switch to using one of their competitors. I switched to DuckDuckGo over a year ago, and I have not seen any reason to want to switch back. I just got an Android phone, and it now has a DDG search box on the home screen instead of a Google one.