Guys, you are all making the same mistake: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Arianespace and all those others did not invest their own money to build its own launchers, they were all paid for by national agencies. Without that investment we wouldn't have _any_ heavy launchers at this time.
When you say that NASA needs to stop wasting money on launchers, what you are saying is that it needs to stop paying those companies for providing launchers. Because that is the _only_ thing that NASA does: it hands out contracts to industry for developing the capabilities that they need.
Letting industry take over, and stopping all money from NASA, as the original poster suggested, will simply result in those companies shrugging and withdrawing from the launcher market. The end result will not be "cheaper launchers", but rather "no launchers at all".
As much of a fan of NASA as I am (and have been, since the mid-70s), I am seriously beginning to doubt the agency's ability to get back into the business of taking big trips. Even if NASA gets us back to the moon, we're likely to be greeted by the Chinese, or some commercial operation's management (welcome to Bigelow at Tranquility!).
It seems almost silly to be developing a return to space program, when commercial space is doing the same thing, for less money, and is closer to actually ACHIEVING it.
How can commercial entities, who have so far demonstrated only toy rockets, possibly be closer to achieving space flight than NASA, who demonstrated that capability decades ago and has since done it countless times? If it were so easy for commercial entities to do this, why aren't the skies bustling with commercial space stations and commercial flights?
You are arguing to stop investing _before_ there is a credible alternative. The only result of that will be the total loss of access to space for your country.
So where are Microsoft and SCO? Both have contributed so much knowledge (in the form of patents) and code, yet they remain completely uncredited. I'm deeply disappointed.
(guidelines for modders: this is supposed to be funny. It is not really that funny, so I'd aim for +2 funny or possibly +3 insightful if you want to give me some karma as well. I'll promise to do better next time when aiming for a funny)
And do you really mean that everything on something fictional should go on the separate site - even the main article for Star Trek, or a work of Shakespeare? What about other expressions of culture such as articles for well known albums or songs? Or if you mean the less notable ones, then you'll just have the arguments over that...
I'd keep a page to indicate facts about Star Trek as it relates to the real world: high-level overview of the show, people involved, cultural impact: those are all facts that relate to the real world. "Star Trek" is real (in the sense of "a real TV show"), after all, so it merits an article.
However, I'd move descriptions of fictional starships, characters, plot synopses, and the fake science behind it to a cultural wiki.
Same for Shakespeare: Wikipedia needs a page about the man, his works, and why he matters (i.e. cultural impact). However, the contents of his writings are an expression of culture, and should be described in the cultural wiki.
Note that being in the cultural wiki is not a value judgement: our culture defines who we are, and as such is as valuable as the stuff in the non-fictional wiki. I just feel that mixing them in one system is a bad idea.
Just... Wow. And that's why I will never visit Dubai - not because I'm a drug smuggler or user, but because I might step on a grain of heroine or something while in the airport and lose years of my life to those idiots.
They pretend to be a normal civilized nation, but in the end they are nothing better than the medieval goatfuckers from which they descended.
I have felt for a long time that Wikipedia really needs to be split into two: one dealing with things that are at least nominally real, and one dealing with expressions of culture (which would include all articles that start with "this article is about a fictional..."). That last one could contain all the Pokemon characters, X-files plot synopses, and Star Trek star ships humanity could think of, while the first could act as an actual encyclopedia.
Mind, I'm not saying to just delete all the fictional stuff, I love being able to look up the dimensions and mileage of the Enterprise-E. Just stop mixing it in with the real knowledge.
That's a damn good point, actually... So why isn't there a constant stream of arrests in that country, given that they are able to detect absolutely minute traces of drugs on a person? There must be plenty of people travelling through there carrying dollar bills.
Microsoft... vs... patent trolls.. who do I hate??
You are perfectly within your rights to hate both. Doing so has the great advantage that you really don't need to aim carefully, should you decide to be sure from orbit...
She needs no other reason, other people can held liable for their own actions.
That principle went out when it was accepted that a single person uploading a file to one other person on the internet is liable for all subsequent damages.
How can that even be called "XML" in the first place? XML has a specific format, described in a standard - and it describes the tags as being in-line with the data. A format that separates them, no matter how useful it might be, is not XML.
What is being stored on disk is not an XML document only in the same sense that foo.xml.gz is not an XML document. Just because you store foo.xml.gz doesn't mean foo.xml stops being XML.
Sorry, but the disk format _does_ matter, since the XML standard specifies what the disk format is supposed to be. Making up your own format and calling that XML because a transformation exists that turns it into XML is disingeneous at best.
If something is XML then it can be used with the large number of XML tools that are out there. Neither the format described here, nor your.gz format, nor for that matter.odf, meets that criterium. And you'll notice that in fact the ODF people are careful to state that ODF is _based on_ XML, not that it _is_ XML.
It's about a somewhat specific way of storing xml for documents in file systems or streams that has gains some efficiency over the conventional XML format. Specifically you write the documents plain text out as raw plain text without any XML tags. Then in separate location you write our all the xml tags. After each tag you write a pointer to the chearacter position in the plain text where the tag needs to go.
How can that even be called "XML" in the first place? XML has a specific format, described in a standard - and it describes the tags as being in-line with the data. A format that separates them, no matter how useful it might be, is not XML.
Ok, fair enough, I can understand that. But the other poster is right: you treat this as it is almost meaningless, while in reality someone who was blind can now at least read a clock. That's a better level of vision than I have without my glasses, btw.
And hey, who knows, maybe you are curing blindness every day, maybe this will _not_ lead to further enhanced cures, maybe the "real" breakthrough is just around the corner. But for now this seems to be a major step, and once in a while it is good to step back and stare in awe at what mankind has achieved thus far.
Now bring on that Mars-colony already, damnit. I was born after the first man walked on the moon, I don't want to die before the first man walks on Mars...
If you like a particular artist, you have to buy that artist's work from their label. It's not like Walmart and Target where if you don't like the price of Coca-Cola at Walmart then you can just buy it at Target. If your favorite artist's work is locked up with DRM, which you want to avoid, your only choice is to violate the DMCA. Or you can violate copyright and download it for free. What other choice do you have? Download YouTube videos of someone doing a bad cover version of the songs you like? There is no other choice.
How about not buying anything at all? Will your life come to a sudden end if you cannot listen to a handful of tunes? Not buying that music, not listening to that music, is a choice as well. And it has the major advantages that (1) it is legal, and (2) it stops putting money in the pocket of the record companies, giving them less power to corrupt laws on a worldwide scale.
You mention copyright violation by an individual. Well. as soon as it hits a P2P sharing program, it is no longer an individual. It is potentially everone on the planet.
The problem with that approach is that it makes a single crime, "spreading music to everyone on the planet", punishable multiple times. In fact, you could punish everyone on the planet for spreading the music to themselves!
It seems a lot like double dipping to me: either that single person committed the crime and can be punished for all subsequent damages, or he is only responsible for spreading to a handful of people, and punishment is recursively allocated to each of those as well.
Of course, the biggest limiting factor is knowledge. iTunes exists because people do not know how to obtain digital goods for free. The folks that know aren't paying any more, so the system is now supported on the backs of the ignorant.
What an incredibly sad view of humanity. iTunes exists because people really don't mind paying artists for their hard work, and because Apple aren't total asshats about DRM and instead make it convenient to download, pay for, and listen to music.
Dr. Evil: You know Goldmember, I don't speak freaky-deaky Dutch. Okay, perv boy?
Yeah, I'm sure you've NEVER heard that one before and all, but, you know, it never gets old.:p
By the way, how do you pronounce "vrij" - is it like "fridge", but with a vee, or what? I'm gonna start using that just to throw people off.
The "ij" sound in Dutch is a vowel, you are not supposed to pronounce the "j" as a separate consonant. I don't think there is an equivalent sound in English, but if you think of it as "i" you are not too far off. It will mark you instantly as an English speaker though;-)
In fact, the value is so enormous that no one can afford it...
If you're a techie, you should use be more accurate in your use of language. Substituting the word 'price' for 'value' is something you should only do in sleazy sales pitches.
The mind boggles at the quality of todays' trolls. If I had substituted the word "price" for "value", I would imagine that my posting would contain the word "price" somewhere. Since it doesn't, I can only conclude that you are full of it.
Besides, yours is a language in which you need qualifiers for "free" to indicate whether you mean "as in beer" or "as in speech". I was merely making a clever play on that by substituting "value" (as in beer) for "value" (as in speech). Meanwhile, a decent language, such as mine, makes the distinction between freedoms naturally through the simple measure of using different words to begin with ("gratis" and "vrij").
We will have this discussion again when you can speak my language, Dutch, as well as I can speak yours...
People are starting to see the value of this. Also of programming in logic based languages like Haskell, ML etc.
People have seen the value of this since the first days of programming. In fact, the value is so enormous that no one can afford it... And they have just finished proving that first few lines of code they wrote. In another five decades they hope to be able to have Notepad proven and ready to run so you can actually get some work done!
The Amiga Hand was the boot screen, not an error screen. You're thinking of the famous Guru Meditation.
Besides, who says that the Amiga kernel did _not_ meet the specifications? Have you read them? Does it mention "crash free" anywhere?
The Haskell code is called a "specfication", but if it is Haskell code, surely it should count as a _program_ already? How can you prove that that program is bug-free? How about conceptual bugs?
Was the toolchain verified? How about the hardware on which it runs?
What overhead does this approach have? Are the benefits worth it?
I'm not saying this is all bullshit, but it looks like me that they are pointing to one program, calling it a "specification", and then demonstrating machine translation / verification to a similar program. I'm not sure if I buy that methodology.
Great choice of museum. Does it have a geography section? If so, try looking up if the specified locations of "US and Canada" might imply a continent in some way.
Slashdot Mirror
Guys, you are all making the same mistake: Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Arianespace and all those others did not invest their own money to build its own launchers, they were all paid for by national agencies. Without that investment we wouldn't have _any_ heavy launchers at this time.
When you say that NASA needs to stop wasting money on launchers, what you are saying is that it needs to stop paying those companies for providing launchers. Because that is the _only_ thing that NASA does: it hands out contracts to industry for developing the capabilities that they need.
Letting industry take over, and stopping all money from NASA, as the original poster suggested, will simply result in those companies shrugging and withdrawing from the launcher market. The end result will not be "cheaper launchers", but rather "no launchers at all".
Which commercial toy rockets do you refer to ? Delta IV, Ariane 5, Atlas V, Zenit or Proton ?
Do you want to compare these toys to spectacular successes of NASA-designed NASP, X-33, X-34, X-38, 2GRLV , Shuttle-II ?
Delta 4, Atlas 5: paid for by US taxpayers.
Ariane 5: paid for by european taxpayers.
Zenit, Proton: paid for by USSR taxpayers.
It is not commercial development if it is the taxpayer footing the bill. Show me a company that invested its own money.
As much of a fan of NASA as I am (and have been, since the mid-70s), I am seriously beginning to doubt the agency's ability to get back into the business of taking big trips. Even if NASA gets us back to the moon, we're likely to be greeted by the Chinese, or some commercial operation's management (welcome to Bigelow at Tranquility!).
It seems almost silly to be developing a return to space program, when commercial space is doing the same thing, for less money, and is closer to actually ACHIEVING it.
How can commercial entities, who have so far demonstrated only toy rockets, possibly be closer to achieving space flight than NASA, who demonstrated that capability decades ago and has since done it countless times? If it were so easy for commercial entities to do this, why aren't the skies bustling with commercial space stations and commercial flights?
You are arguing to stop investing _before_ there is a credible alternative. The only result of that will be the total loss of access to space for your country.
So where are Microsoft and SCO? Both have contributed so much knowledge (in the form of patents) and code, yet they remain completely uncredited. I'm deeply disappointed.
(guidelines for modders: this is supposed to be funny. It is not really that funny, so I'd aim for +2 funny or possibly +3 insightful if you want to give me some karma as well. I'll promise to do better next time when aiming for a funny)
And do you really mean that everything on something fictional should go on the separate site - even the main article for Star Trek, or a work of Shakespeare? What about other expressions of culture such as articles for well known albums or songs? Or if you mean the less notable ones, then you'll just have the arguments over that...
I'd keep a page to indicate facts about Star Trek as it relates to the real world: high-level overview of the show, people involved, cultural impact: those are all facts that relate to the real world. "Star Trek" is real (in the sense of "a real TV show"), after all, so it merits an article.
However, I'd move descriptions of fictional starships, characters, plot synopses, and the fake science behind it to a cultural wiki.
Same for Shakespeare: Wikipedia needs a page about the man, his works, and why he matters (i.e. cultural impact). However, the contents of his writings are an expression of culture, and should be described in the cultural wiki.
Note that being in the cultural wiki is not a value judgement: our culture defines who we are, and as such is as valuable as the stuff in the non-fictional wiki. I just feel that mixing them in one system is a bad idea.
Just... Wow. And that's why I will never visit Dubai - not because I'm a drug smuggler or user, but because I might step on a grain of heroine or something while in the airport and lose years of my life to those idiots.
They pretend to be a normal civilized nation, but in the end they are nothing better than the medieval goatfuckers from which they descended.
I have felt for a long time that Wikipedia really needs to be split into two: one dealing with things that are at least nominally real, and one dealing with expressions of culture (which would include all articles that start with "this article is about a fictional ..."). That last one could contain all the Pokemon characters, X-files plot synopses, and Star Trek star ships humanity could think of, while the first could act as an actual encyclopedia.
Mind, I'm not saying to just delete all the fictional stuff, I love being able to look up the dimensions and mileage of the Enterprise-E. Just stop mixing it in with the real knowledge.
"surface plasmons"
Really? Plasmons? Are they just making words up now?
Yeah. It's stupid: we already had the perfectly functional phrase "plasmid" to describe those.
Personally I'm holding out for them perfecting the electricity plasmid.
Don't get caught with US dollars on you in Dubai.
That's a damn good point, actually... So why isn't there a constant stream of arrests in that country, given that they are able to detect absolutely minute traces of drugs on a person? There must be plenty of people travelling through there carrying dollar bills.
Microsoft... vs... patent trolls.. who do I hate??
You are perfectly within your rights to hate both. Doing so has the great advantage that you really don't need to aim carefully, should you decide to be sure from orbit...
She needs no other reason, other people can held liable for their own actions.
That principle went out when it was accepted that a single person uploading a file to one other person on the internet is liable for all subsequent damages.
How can that even be called "XML" in the first place? XML has a specific format, described in a standard - and it describes the tags as being in-line with the data. A format that separates them, no matter how useful it might be, is not XML.
What is being stored on disk is not an XML document only in the same sense that foo.xml.gz is not an XML document. Just because you store foo.xml.gz doesn't mean foo.xml stops being XML.
Sorry, but the disk format _does_ matter, since the XML standard specifies what the disk format is supposed to be. Making up your own format and calling that XML because a transformation exists that turns it into XML is disingeneous at best.
If something is XML then it can be used with the large number of XML tools that are out there. Neither the format described here, nor your .gz format, nor for that matter .odf, meets that criterium. And you'll notice that in fact the ODF people are careful to state that ODF is _based on_ XML, not that it _is_ XML.
It's about a somewhat specific way of storing xml for documents in file systems or streams that has gains some efficiency over the conventional XML format. Specifically you write the documents plain text out as raw plain text without any XML tags. Then in separate location you write our all the xml tags. After each tag you write a pointer to the chearacter position in the plain text where the tag needs to go.
How can that even be called "XML" in the first place? XML has a specific format, described in a standard - and it describes the tags as being in-line with the data. A format that separates them, no matter how useful it might be, is not XML.
Ok, fair enough, I can understand that. But the other poster is right: you treat this as it is almost meaningless, while in reality someone who was blind can now at least read a clock. That's a better level of vision than I have without my glasses, btw.
And hey, who knows, maybe you are curing blindness every day, maybe this will _not_ lead to further enhanced cures, maybe the "real" breakthrough is just around the corner. But for now this seems to be a major step, and once in a while it is good to step back and stare in awe at what mankind has achieved thus far.
Now bring on that Mars-colony already, damnit. I was born after the first man walked on the moon, I don't want to die before the first man walks on Mars...
If you like a particular artist, you have to buy that artist's work from their label. It's not like Walmart and Target where if you don't like the price of Coca-Cola at Walmart then you can just buy it at Target. If your favorite artist's work is locked up with DRM, which you want to avoid, your only choice is to violate the DMCA. Or you can violate copyright and download it for free. What other choice do you have? Download YouTube videos of someone doing a bad cover version of the songs you like? There is no other choice.
How about not buying anything at all? Will your life come to a sudden end if you cannot listen to a handful of tunes? Not buying that music, not listening to that music, is a choice as well. And it has the major advantages that (1) it is legal, and (2) it stops putting money in the pocket of the record companies, giving them less power to corrupt laws on a worldwide scale.
You mention copyright violation by an individual. Well. as soon as it hits a P2P sharing program, it is no longer an individual. It is potentially everone on the planet.
The problem with that approach is that it makes a single crime, "spreading music to everyone on the planet", punishable multiple times. In fact, you could punish everyone on the planet for spreading the music to themselves!
It seems a lot like double dipping to me: either that single person committed the crime and can be punished for all subsequent damages, or he is only responsible for spreading to a handful of people, and punishment is recursively allocated to each of those as well.
Of course, the biggest limiting factor is knowledge. iTunes exists because people do not know how to obtain digital goods for free. The folks that know aren't paying any more, so the system is now supported on the backs of the ignorant.
What an incredibly sad view of humanity. iTunes exists because people really don't mind paying artists for their hard work, and because Apple aren't total asshats about DRM and instead make it convenient to download, pay for, and listen to music.
There's a vapid slut passed out in your bed... And yet, you can't think of anything better to do than post on Slashdot?
Riiiight...
"Show this experiment to your boss the next time you are selecting a programming language for a project at work."J
What would the boss do? Maybe he'd come to the conclusion that Java and C# are for professionals while Python and Ruby are for hobbyists?
The boss would make you work in Java or C# because if it were fun, it wouldn't be work...
Bloody hell man, we have newly seeing adults now! Who cares if their vision is not quite the same as ours!
Oblig movie quote:
Dr. Evil: You know Goldmember, I don't speak freaky-deaky Dutch. Okay, perv boy?
Yeah, I'm sure you've NEVER heard that one before and all, but, you know, it never gets old. :p
By the way, how do you pronounce "vrij" - is it like "fridge", but with a vee, or what? I'm gonna start using that just to throw people off.
The "ij" sound in Dutch is a vowel, you are not supposed to pronounce the "j" as a separate consonant. I don't think there is an equivalent sound in English, but if you think of it as "i" you are not too far off. It will mark you instantly as an English speaker though ;-)
If you're a techie, you should use be more accurate in your use of language. Substituting the word 'price' for 'value' is something you should only do in sleazy sales pitches.
The mind boggles at the quality of todays' trolls. If I had substituted the word "price" for "value", I would imagine that my posting would contain the word "price" somewhere. Since it doesn't, I can only conclude that you are full of it.
Besides, yours is a language in which you need qualifiers for "free" to indicate whether you mean "as in beer" or "as in speech". I was merely making a clever play on that by substituting "value" (as in beer) for "value" (as in speech). Meanwhile, a decent language, such as mine, makes the distinction between freedoms naturally through the simple measure of using different words to begin with ("gratis" and "vrij").
We will have this discussion again when you can speak my language, Dutch, as well as I can speak yours...
People are starting to see the value of this. Also of programming in logic based languages like Haskell, ML etc.
People have seen the value of this since the first days of programming. In fact, the value is so enormous that no one can afford it... And they have just finished proving that first few lines of code they wrote. In another five decades they hope to be able to have Notepad proven and ready to run so you can actually get some work done!
The Amiga Hand was the boot screen, not an error screen. You're thinking of the famous Guru Meditation.
Besides, who says that the Amiga kernel did _not_ meet the specifications? Have you read them? Does it mention "crash free" anywhere?
The Haskell code is called a "specfication", but if it is Haskell code, surely it should count as a _program_ already? How can you prove that that program is bug-free? How about conceptual bugs?
Was the toolchain verified? How about the hardware on which it runs?
What overhead does this approach have? Are the benefits worth it?
I'm not saying this is all bullshit, but it looks like me that they are pointing to one program, calling it a "specification", and then demonstrating machine translation / verification to a similar program. I'm not sure if I buy that methodology.
I thought the ".de" domain might be a clue that the museum is in Munich, Germany.
Sarcasm really is a lost art.
You didn't specify continent, so:
http://www.deutsches-museum.de/
Great choice of museum. Does it have a geography section? If so, try looking up if the specified locations of "US and Canada" might imply a continent in some way.
Oh wait, maybe you mean Munich, North Dakota?