I believe that any financial transaction between a church and a political official or candidate (from the church, not necessarily to the church) should be barred. Of course, I believe that any funding contribution from any organized group, rather than from private donors, should be illegal. This isn't to say that organizations should be barred from encouraging people so that people themselves make contributions, but it should not be processed in any way through the organization, nor should the organization keep any records of "commits" or the like. They should be free to voice their opinions, but it should stop there. This is supposed to be a country governed by people and for people, not by corporate or organizational puppets for organizations and corporations.
Other countries call this sort of corporate contribution a bribe, and could go so far as to call accepting money like that treason.
Remember, some European countries have deported all of the scientologists who are there for "religious work". I think that Germany was one of said countries.
Religion has typically tried to assimilate as many people as possible, pretty openly, into it's grasp. Scientology's attempts to do this through a corporate mentality should bite it in the ass.
Two things that religions shouldn't be allowed to do, in my opinion, are to engage in politics and to have inaccessible "trade secret" documentation. Even as fiscally based as many churches are in the U.S., it's not impossible to look at pretty much all of their published works and opinions. Organizations that claim spirituality yet violate these two borders should be required to have corporate licenses and be taxed, in my opinion.
What has become very sad is that if male teachers try to enforce dress code against students violating it, they sometimes find sexual harassment charges, or other mishaps, brought against them. Never mind the fact that the student has it out on display for everyone to see...
Re:Building them like they used to
on
Goodbye, Galileo
·
· Score: 1
just a bit? From what I gather, the radiation content makes some of our rectors look like good places to nap. I don't know enough about jovian moon volcanoes to know what effect they have had on Jupiter's near-space environment though, so I am curious as to what physical debris Galileo has been fortunate to avoid...
... does that mean that they're continually exposing themselves to child pornography at will? Wouldn't that make them party to the crime of spreading child porn?
I've met a few on the air, who use large numbers of acronyms, and when asked for clarification, noticeable annoyance is conveyed in an explanation. Since operating on no-code techncian frequencies, I would think that they would expect such and deal accordingly. This hasn't been my whole experience, I have met some nice people, but there are those who don't accept that others aren't up where they are.
-KD7RJC
Re:Building them like they used to
on
Goodbye, Galileo
·
· Score: 1
And they're already planning to end-of-life it. It's only been up since 1990. Galileo is being destroyed only because they don't want it to crash into Europa and possibly corrupt the environment there, if there is life.
Building them like they used to
on
Goodbye, Galileo
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Galileo was not cheap. Neither were the Pioneers or the Voyagers. Look at the return on the investment, though.
NASA has not made a good argument for cheaper = better. The Hubble Space Telescope was flawed when it went up and spent the first three years of its lifespan doing very little compared to its design. We have lost several probes headed Mars. Quality has not been top priority at NASA, and until it is, we're going to continue to see failure after failure, I'm afraid. Galileo wasn't perfect, with deployment problems of its high-gain antenna, but it did not fail entirely, and it did not require humans in suits to go play with it for it to work right. We need that kind of engineering again.
"How would you like it if you were a car manufacturer and suddenly a government would start producing cars and competing with you using taxpayer money?"
There are fundamental flaws in your argument. If one were to build that argument from the ground up:
1) Cars would be made by a company in one country and sold to people of another country who cannot or do not make cars themselves
2) A Free Car design exists and is nearly free to implement (cost of basic parts)
If I'm in the non-car-producing company, and I want a car, I can either pay for that car to be imported, which sends money back to the country that it came from, or I can work with the Free Car design, and build my own. Obviously if I care about the economy of my country, using the Free Car design makes more sense. It doesn't contribute a lot of money to my own country, but it deprives the other country of moneys from my country that probably won't cycle back through my country's economy.
If my government is smart, they'll see that their country's outpouring of money for government cars to another country's company isn't in the best interests of my country, and they'll look for an alternative. Since my country doesn't commercially produce cars, they'll look into the Free Car design, and if they like it and can produce it for the same or less than their importing works with, then they have incentive to do so, because they will both reduce economic dependence on the foreign country, and deny that country it's money.
Microsoft is a large software company with offices all over the world, but they're an American company. Their development costs are readily paid off by the millions of people, and possibly billions of computers that run their software. Worldwide, a lot of money leaves nations and travels through Redmond, Washington back into the economy of the United States. Money that these other countries could probably use internally to bolster their own economies. If they can take a product or implementation, like Linux, BSD, even FreeDOS, and make it do what they need to do, so they break their dependence on a foreign product, it is in their best interest to do so. If any development work is to be paid for, it makes sense to use local developers, whose salaries will allow them to spend locally, thus bolstering their economies.
Linux shows promise of being an anti-globalization step on a very limited scale, but one that is very pronounced. The most amusing part about it is that it can be anti-globalization while it globalizes, since the ownership and rights to use are designed to keep it free. It also promotes compatibility between systems, should such be needed, if it's adopted globally.
The City of Munich's decision to adopt SuSE Linux is an example of this local economic feeding. Granted, IBM is involved, but SuSE is the product that Munich is using, so if they choose to, they could drop the IBM portion of their support at any time, and go with straight SuSE, which would be the local boys. I won't be surprised if they ultimately build their own in-house IT department to handle all of this, and IBM slowly pulls out of the picture there, or has a smaller influence.
If a country can reduce their dependence, it's almost always a good thing.
... if it's ignored on another level. Remember, even if there is DRM capability, if it's not implemented *cough*linux*cough* then it doesn't matter.
Remember, Intel's Processor ID was supposed to do this too, and everyone that I know turned it off. And if this Phoenix BIOS DRM technology prevents large-scale installations from repairing computers by swapping out bad hardware, like motherboards, corporate IT won't buy it.
Re:How does this affect US/Israel relations?
on
Cracking GSM
·
· Score: 1
Well, since the religion card has been played...
"I thought after rarely escaping that, the Jewish people would not want to ever do that to anyone."
Maybe it's the Christians in conspiracy, using the Jewish Israelis without their realization, to get back at the arab world for forcing the Christians into the sea at the end of the Crusades...
Rome has been awfully quiet about the whole affair, after all...
The preceding post is categorized as sarcasm, for the humour impaired
Sales is partial pitch, partial product, and partial pricing. If one is selling CDs at a gig, if they're something convenient, like $5.00, that's easy to justify spending. Most people here probably have five dollar bills in their wallets, so it doesn't take a lot of hassle to buy something for that cost, and it's easy to deal with making change (assuming that not everyone who tries to buy a CD just got a $20 from an ATM). It's also cheap enough that many people spend more than that at lunch, so from a "is this going to impact anything?" perspective it's easy. As far as a live gig goes, the gig itself is the sales pitch, and a recent Ska gig that I was at had the $5.00 items (mostly guys' tee shirts) selling like mad. The product at a live gig is pretty obvious too. So, from that perspective, having 20 people spend $5.00 on a CD, even if it costs a whole dollar to manufacture the CD still beats out selling four CDs at $10 apiece. Trouble is, many people with something to sell don't understand market economics enough to see that a lower price could overcome buyer woes.
As for the music industry, until it as a whole understands why consumers are pirating music, which doesn't have as much to do with intentionally wanting to victimize the RIAA as it does making things more convenient for the purchaser, piracy on the small, end-user scale will continue. Once it is inexpensive enough buying a CD to offset the annoyances of attempting to pirate the music, making the time to download less worthwhile, I think that we'll see a much smaller amount of piracy. Right now, though, getting that one desirable song out of ten on a $15 CD, even if it takes 20 minutes to find it, and an hour to download, is more practical than buying the CD, and with these prices I can't blame people.
"Maybe. I've never heard of such a thing. The whole point of buying a bunch of commodity machines and connect them together is that its cheaper and easier than buying a "real" supercomputer with one or a few boxes."
There's a reason why the phone company runs EVERYTING off of 48V. Converting 48V DC to other voltages DC is easy and inexpensive. Converting 110VAC or 240VAC to DC is not nearly so. I've been looking at converting the bulk of my home computers (which are all rack mounted) to 48V so that I can reduce the heat from the power supply and make things a bit more lean on the energy bill.
Entire concept of how music is licensed is broken at this point anyway. CDs being more than $8.00 for most people is too high.
How many artists see much of anything in the form of royalties? The problem is that we have not just middlemen, but corporate middlemen, companies that have to pay staffs that are not particularly small, as well as satisfy shareholders, pay corporate executive bonuses, and maintain voluminous legal departments, all to distribute this small piece of plastic. How does this work?
It should not cost so incredibly much that even a full dollar per CD should come to be even $12 to sell it. Distribution should not be nearly that expensive.
"Oh nos!1!! The supercomputer will be all loud and stuffs! Whatever shall we do? It will be a pain to play quake on it and ecverything. A monumental failure this."
I nominate tesmako as the first computer operator to have to sit in the 100+ decibel room for the first eight hour shift...
Not to sound like a troll, but isn't the Apple a bad machine to use for this? It's big, the fan configuration will make it extrordinarily loud, and it's built to cater to the end user, not to the embedded machine market. Yes, OSX/Darwin does work fairly well, but I'd think that the entire purpose of this computer originally would make it ill-suited to this task.
Many companies build physically smaller machines that still pack a lot of power, or sell parts to allow someone to design their own layout in a chassis. Remember, individual cases, power supplies, and the like become way overkill in such a large computer, and it would probably be cheaper to convert electricity once for a large section of the computer, supplying 12v, 5v, and 3.3v without each computer converting itself.
This just seems like the wrong way to do something thats hallmark has been in being cheap.
Money could always play a factor though. Say you've been working on a project for the last serveral years. Something designed to be the 'new hotness' of whatever industry you're working in. Now, let's say that your employer decides to downsize 20% of it's staff across the board, including you. The project is still there, but you are being given a paltry severance package that really doesn't amount to much compared to what your retirement would have allowed for.
You suspect upcoming doom, so you back up whatever bits of the project you can, and take them home. You sell them to a competitor in such a way as to not make the transaction obvious. That would allow for espionage to occur, but even if they suspect you, as long as you maintain absolutely no copies for yourself post-sale, and don't put your payment into your bank account, they might not have much success in figuring out what happened.
It doesn't take much to destroy the desire of an employee to remain honest with a company.
" The day I can drive from home to school (~400 miles) without buying gas is the day that I will buy an alternative-fuel car."
It doesn't take an alternative fuel car. A friend of mine has '72 Dodge Monaco station wagon that he's restored. He has a 440 big block that has been bored out to 490 in it, and three fuel tanks. Even with that monster power plant, and 6000lb GVWR, he can go 500 miles without refuelling. Of course, right now, it'll cost him more than $100 to refuel...
I think that if you had a car like that, you wouldn't need a dorm. There's probably more room in the car.
For whatever reason, it looks like Courts of Law in other countries seem to operate with more sanity than American courts do. I've wondered if this is in response to a feeling of a lack of due process when the U.S. was founded, or if we just have gotten to where anyone feels that they're entitled to sue "just because".
Of course, SCO/Caldera being an American company trying to enforce claims in a foreign country that doesn't (yet) have software patents might be partially why.
At one point, the reporter describes the craft has having stubby wings. The thing is, these craft look to have lifting body or partial lifting body designs, so they're essentially _all_ wing (at least the non-capsule ones are). The design at the top left side is especially so.
I hope that one of these designs pans out. It would make a lot of sense to have something cheap and small for human transport. By the look of the Space Shuttle, if it's going to be practical for people, the entire cargo bay would need to be converted a'la bus, which just doesn't seem like a very good idea.
We have 35,000 computers where I work at, and at least 20,000 of them are capable of running a stock distro right now. Our users use email, tn5250 connectivity to a fairly rhobust IBM mini, and serveral applications that are currently MS-DOS based that will be ultimately phased out. We aren't in a position to need Oracle. I don't even know what we would use it for. Our users are actually fairly happy using the IBM machine, but if we were to leave the tn5250 interface for something newer, for financial records, user records, and the like, I still don't see how it would require something so damn expensive as Oracle.
And good people aren't quite as expensive as you might think. There are highly skilled computer professionals who are not working in the computer field right now due to lack of employment in the communities that they work in. Sure, there's a lot of overconfident amateurs in the same boat, but companies like Motorola dumped thousands of oldschool UNIX admins on the market when they were laying people off in 2001 and 2002, and a large number of people haven't gotten back into their careers of choice.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that any financial transaction between a church and a political official or candidate (from the church, not necessarily to the church) should be barred. Of course, I believe that any funding contribution from any organized group, rather than from private donors, should be illegal. This isn't to say that organizations should be barred from encouraging people so that people themselves make contributions, but it should not be processed in any way through the organization, nor should the organization keep any records of "commits" or the like. They should be free to voice their opinions, but it should stop there. This is supposed to be a country governed by people and for people, not by corporate or organizational puppets for organizations and corporations.
Other countries call this sort of corporate contribution a bribe, and could go so far as to call accepting money like that treason.
Remember, some European countries have deported all of the scientologists who are there for "religious work". I think that Germany was one of said countries.
Religion has typically tried to assimilate as many people as possible, pretty openly, into it's grasp. Scientology's attempts to do this through a corporate mentality should bite it in the ass.
Two things that religions shouldn't be allowed to do, in my opinion, are to engage in politics and to have inaccessible "trade secret" documentation. Even as fiscally based as many churches are in the U.S., it's not impossible to look at pretty much all of their published works and opinions. Organizations that claim spirituality yet violate these two borders should be required to have corporate licenses and be taxed, in my opinion.
What has become very sad is that if male teachers try to enforce dress code against students violating it, they sometimes find sexual harassment charges, or other mishaps, brought against them. Never mind the fact that the student has it out on display for everyone to see...
just a bit? From what I gather, the radiation content makes some of our rectors look like good places to nap. I don't know enough about jovian moon volcanoes to know what effect they have had on Jupiter's near-space environment though, so I am curious as to what physical debris Galileo has been fortunate to avoid...
... does that mean that they're continually exposing themselves to child pornography at will? Wouldn't that make them party to the crime of spreading child porn?
I've met a few on the air, who use large numbers of acronyms, and when asked for clarification, noticeable annoyance is conveyed in an explanation. Since operating on no-code techncian frequencies, I would think that they would expect such and deal accordingly. This hasn't been my whole experience, I have met some nice people, but there are those who don't accept that others aren't up where they are.
-KD7RJC
And they're already planning to end-of-life it. It's only been up since 1990. Galileo is being destroyed only because they don't want it to crash into Europa and possibly corrupt the environment there, if there is life.
Galileo was not cheap. Neither were the Pioneers or the Voyagers. Look at the return on the investment, though.
NASA has not made a good argument for cheaper = better. The Hubble Space Telescope was flawed when it went up and spent the first three years of its lifespan doing very little compared to its design. We have lost several probes headed Mars. Quality has not been top priority at NASA, and until it is, we're going to continue to see failure after failure, I'm afraid. Galileo wasn't perfect, with deployment problems of its high-gain antenna, but it did not fail entirely, and it did not require humans in suits to go play with it for it to work right. We need that kind of engineering again.
We need to build them like we used to.
"How would you like it if you were a car manufacturer and suddenly a government would start producing cars and competing with you using taxpayer money?"
There are fundamental flaws in your argument. If one were to build that argument from the ground up:
1) Cars would be made by a company in one country and sold to people of another country who cannot or do not make cars themselves
2) A Free Car design exists and is nearly free to implement (cost of basic parts)
If I'm in the non-car-producing company, and I want a car, I can either pay for that car to be imported, which sends money back to the country that it came from, or I can work with the Free Car design, and build my own. Obviously if I care about the economy of my country, using the Free Car design makes more sense. It doesn't contribute a lot of money to my own country, but it deprives the other country of moneys from my country that probably won't cycle back through my country's economy.
If my government is smart, they'll see that their country's outpouring of money for government cars to another country's company isn't in the best interests of my country, and they'll look for an alternative. Since my country doesn't commercially produce cars, they'll look into the Free Car design, and if they like it and can produce it for the same or less than their importing works with, then they have incentive to do so, because they will both reduce economic dependence on the foreign country, and deny that country it's money.
Microsoft is a large software company with offices all over the world, but they're an American company. Their development costs are readily paid off by the millions of people, and possibly billions of computers that run their software. Worldwide, a lot of money leaves nations and travels through Redmond, Washington back into the economy of the United States. Money that these other countries could probably use internally to bolster their own economies. If they can take a product or implementation, like Linux, BSD, even FreeDOS, and make it do what they need to do, so they break their dependence on a foreign product, it is in their best interest to do so. If any development work is to be paid for, it makes sense to use local developers, whose salaries will allow them to spend locally, thus bolstering their economies.
Linux shows promise of being an anti-globalization step on a very limited scale, but one that is very pronounced. The most amusing part about it is that it can be anti-globalization while it globalizes, since the ownership and rights to use are designed to keep it free. It also promotes compatibility between systems, should such be needed, if it's adopted globally.
The City of Munich's decision to adopt SuSE Linux is an example of this local economic feeding. Granted, IBM is involved, but SuSE is the product that Munich is using, so if they choose to, they could drop the IBM portion of their support at any time, and go with straight SuSE, which would be the local boys. I won't be surprised if they ultimately build their own in-house IT department to handle all of this, and IBM slowly pulls out of the picture there, or has a smaller influence.
If a country can reduce their dependence, it's almost always a good thing.
Scissors, knives, boxcutters, X-acto blades...
... if it's ignored on another level. Remember, even if there is DRM capability, if it's not implemented *cough*linux*cough* then it doesn't matter.
Remember, Intel's Processor ID was supposed to do this too, and everyone that I know turned it off. And if this Phoenix BIOS DRM technology prevents large-scale installations from repairing computers by swapping out bad hardware, like motherboards, corporate IT won't buy it.
Well, since the religion card has been played...
"I thought after rarely escaping that, the Jewish people would not want to ever do that to anyone."
Maybe it's the Christians in conspiracy, using the Jewish Israelis without their realization, to get back at the arab world for forcing the Christians into the sea at the end of the Crusades...
Rome has been awfully quiet about the whole affair, after all...
The preceding post is categorized as sarcasm, for the humour impaired
Sales is partial pitch, partial product, and partial pricing. If one is selling CDs at a gig, if they're something convenient, like $5.00, that's easy to justify spending. Most people here probably have five dollar bills in their wallets, so it doesn't take a lot of hassle to buy something for that cost, and it's easy to deal with making change (assuming that not everyone who tries to buy a CD just got a $20 from an ATM). It's also cheap enough that many people spend more than that at lunch, so from a "is this going to impact anything?" perspective it's easy. As far as a live gig goes, the gig itself is the sales pitch, and a recent Ska gig that I was at had the $5.00 items (mostly guys' tee shirts) selling like mad. The product at a live gig is pretty obvious too. So, from that perspective, having 20 people spend $5.00 on a CD, even if it costs a whole dollar to manufacture the CD still beats out selling four CDs at $10 apiece. Trouble is, many people with something to sell don't understand market economics enough to see that a lower price could overcome buyer woes.
As for the music industry, until it as a whole understands why consumers are pirating music, which doesn't have as much to do with intentionally wanting to victimize the RIAA as it does making things more convenient for the purchaser, piracy on the small, end-user scale will continue. Once it is inexpensive enough buying a CD to offset the annoyances of attempting to pirate the music, making the time to download less worthwhile, I think that we'll see a much smaller amount of piracy. Right now, though, getting that one desirable song out of ten on a $15 CD, even if it takes 20 minutes to find it, and an hour to download, is more practical than buying the CD, and with these prices I can't blame people.
"Maybe. I've never heard of such a thing. The whole point of buying a bunch of commodity machines and connect them together is that its cheaper and easier than buying a "real" supercomputer with one or a few boxes."
There's a reason why the phone company runs EVERYTING off of 48V. Converting 48V DC to other voltages DC is easy and inexpensive. Converting 110VAC or 240VAC to DC is not nearly so. I've been looking at converting the bulk of my home computers (which are all rack mounted) to 48V so that I can reduce the heat from the power supply and make things a bit more lean on the energy bill.
Entire concept of how music is licensed is broken at this point anyway. CDs being more than $8.00 for most people is too high.
How many artists see much of anything in the form of royalties? The problem is that we have not just middlemen, but corporate middlemen, companies that have to pay staffs that are not particularly small, as well as satisfy shareholders, pay corporate executive bonuses, and maintain voluminous legal departments, all to distribute this small piece of plastic. How does this work?
It should not cost so incredibly much that even a full dollar per CD should come to be even $12 to sell it. Distribution should not be nearly that expensive.
"Oh nos!1!! The supercomputer will be all loud and stuffs! Whatever shall we do? It will be a pain to play quake on it and ecverything. A monumental failure this." I nominate tesmako as the first computer operator to have to sit in the 100+ decibel room for the first eight hour shift...
... or else you'll be the victim of a drive-by fruiting!
Not to sound like a troll, but isn't the Apple a bad machine to use for this? It's big, the fan configuration will make it extrordinarily loud, and it's built to cater to the end user, not to the embedded machine market. Yes, OSX/Darwin does work fairly well, but I'd think that the entire purpose of this computer originally would make it ill-suited to this task.
Many companies build physically smaller machines that still pack a lot of power, or sell parts to allow someone to design their own layout in a chassis. Remember, individual cases, power supplies, and the like become way overkill in such a large computer, and it would probably be cheaper to convert electricity once for a large section of the computer, supplying 12v, 5v, and 3.3v without each computer converting itself.
This just seems like the wrong way to do something thats hallmark has been in being cheap.
"Any standard european or japanese car will easily do 400 miles on a tank."
Well, my roommate's '01 Nissan Sentra only gets about 300 miles per tank, so for cars that I am familiar with mileages of, you're 0 for 1...
Money could always play a factor though. Say you've been working on a project for the last serveral years. Something designed to be the 'new hotness' of whatever industry you're working in. Now, let's say that your employer decides to downsize 20% of it's staff across the board, including you. The project is still there, but you are being given a paltry severance package that really doesn't amount to much compared to what your retirement would have allowed for.
You suspect upcoming doom, so you back up whatever bits of the project you can, and take them home. You sell them to a competitor in such a way as to not make the transaction obvious. That would allow for espionage to occur, but even if they suspect you, as long as you maintain absolutely no copies for yourself post-sale, and don't put your payment into your bank account, they might not have much success in figuring out what happened.
It doesn't take much to destroy the desire of an employee to remain honest with a company.
" The day I can drive from home to school (~400 miles) without buying gas is the day that I will buy an alternative-fuel car."
It doesn't take an alternative fuel car. A friend of mine has '72 Dodge Monaco station wagon that he's restored. He has a 440 big block that has been bored out to 490 in it, and three fuel tanks. Even with that monster power plant, and 6000lb GVWR, he can go 500 miles without refuelling. Of course, right now, it'll cost him more than $100 to refuel...
I think that if you had a car like that, you wouldn't need a dorm. There's probably more room in the car.
No, what's scary is that I was able to picture Ellen Feiss saying that. Poor Ellen...
For whatever reason, it looks like Courts of Law in other countries seem to operate with more sanity than American courts do. I've wondered if this is in response to a feeling of a lack of due process when the U.S. was founded, or if we just have gotten to where anyone feels that they're entitled to sue "just because".
Of course, SCO/Caldera being an American company trying to enforce claims in a foreign country that doesn't (yet) have software patents might be partially why.
At one point, the reporter describes the craft has having stubby wings. The thing is, these craft look to have lifting body or partial lifting body designs, so they're essentially _all_ wing (at least the non-capsule ones are). The design at the top left side is especially so.
I hope that one of these designs pans out. It would make a lot of sense to have something cheap and small for human transport. By the look of the Space Shuttle, if it's going to be practical for people, the entire cargo bay would need to be converted a'la bus, which just doesn't seem like a very good idea.
We have 35,000 computers where I work at, and at least 20,000 of them are capable of running a stock distro right now. Our users use email, tn5250 connectivity to a fairly rhobust IBM mini, and serveral applications that are currently MS-DOS based that will be ultimately phased out. We aren't in a position to need Oracle. I don't even know what we would use it for. Our users are actually fairly happy using the IBM machine, but if we were to leave the tn5250 interface for something newer, for financial records, user records, and the like, I still don't see how it would require something so damn expensive as Oracle.
And good people aren't quite as expensive as you might think. There are highly skilled computer professionals who are not working in the computer field right now due to lack of employment in the communities that they work in. Sure, there's a lot of overconfident amateurs in the same boat, but companies like Motorola dumped thousands of oldschool UNIX admins on the market when they were laying people off in 2001 and 2002, and a large number of people haven't gotten back into their careers of choice.