The current per-UNIT cost of a cruise missile is $500K - The TOTAL cost of the Tomahawk cruise missile program is $11.2 BILLION...
The UNIT cost of America's Army is nil....
Given the US stockpile of around 3500 Tomahawks, that means that the TOTAL COST of just one cruise missile is still around the same price as the ENTIRE cost of AA and I think AA is still slightly cheaper if you take everything into account.
Keeping in mind that a LOT of people did stupid things when they were younger and never got caught or had their name linked with what they did.
I find that the people who hold onto blame the longest are the same people who were the ones that "Didn't get caught" and they almost feel compelled to point the finger to move attention away from their own activities.
Anyway, sad to say but life's like that... Most people are bigoted to some extent and you can't change that... Move from job to job and prove your worth. Do the opposite to what you were linked with. Give people a reason to believe you've changed and use them as a reference.
Actually, I think it's just because they see it as another revenue stream ( ie, Why should google make all that money from using our services, without paying us for the privilege. How can we charge them?)
I don't think the average telco exec is bright enough to see the myriad of ways that they can abuse the situation until they actually manifest. After all, being truly machiavellian is an art rarely practiced outside of government.
No need. Steampunk is it's own genre now. The problem isn't with a lack of ideas or inspiration - it's been caused by many publisher's lack of willingness to publish new and innovative new stories and ideas.
Now that the Science Fiction sub-genre of Speculative Fiction is so popular, publishers are looking for more of the same of formula that sells well - not new and untested ideas that may or may not sell ( ie, Just like the Science Fiction of old...)
That tends to lead them away from new, unpublished writers with ideas that don't fit the pattern established by the predecessors.
If you want to gain a glimpse into what is leading edge for science fiction, visit somewhere like critters.org and offer to criticise a few recent stories... Four out of five you get are somewhat average but then you'll read something by an unheard of writer who is creating great science fiction and has new ideas.
Not only will you get to read some great science fiction by brilliant writers, much of which will probably never be published, but you can contribute to the future of fiction by providing worthwhile feedback to the writer.
After all, good science fiction was never mainstream... And nothing as changed.
You are, of course, entitled to your own opinions on what is canon for the series but it doesn't change the fact that the Estate is authorative to decide for itself which stories are canon and which are not. That extends even to the authors original works.
Actually, there is a canon and the estate would control that, but otherwise I agree entirely - It's a fanfic in nature and there's nothing wrong with that.
Readers can decide what they like and what they don't.
I did get out of IT entirely for a while. I had been a journalist for about 6 years as a part-time job and found myself suddenly needing to stay at home to help with family problems. About that time a friend knew I was available and asked me to take over a magazine for a few months...
Well months turned into nearly two years.
The pay was very poor - About a third of what I had been earning as an R&D engineer.I lived on instant noodles and even small purchases like $20 items had to be budgeted - some months I didn't even have that!
But I loved the work. I got to meet people and do things I would never have had a chance to otherwise.
But it was only a temporary position and all good things come to an end. About a week after that job finished, another friend heard I was available and asked me if I would consider working part time working for a large ISP as a presales engineer and I got drawn back into IT.
It doesn't matter if it's IT or not - the main thing is enjoy the work your doing. You only get one life. Don't wait until it's too late.
Living like a pauper for two years hurt me financially but I took away the memories of a lifetime. And I got to spend two years working from home and watching my kids grow up... That's something money can't buy.
How hard would it be for some enterprising radio station to only play GPL/Free/Whatever-isn't-commercial music that the PRS had no jurisdiction over...
They would quickly be the ONLY radio station that business could listen to ( freely ) and they could sue the PRS if they damaged their business by telling people they couldn't listen to the radio without a license... Since it wouldn't be true of that station. ( Better still the PRS might start to include advertising in their notices... eg, Can't listen to stations, other than Radio-GPL )
A captive market and a litigious company doing them free PR work - It doesn't get much better than that...
I wonder how long the PRS would last before the artists realized they were the real enemy...
Actually, if you teach a man to fish, his knowledge exceeds the point where the tools are critical to the task. About the only thing that's going to cause him to starve to death is overfishing caused by commercial operations... And they tend to waste a lot of the food that would feed starving people too because there's a belief that if you give your product away to anyone, you can't sell it to anyone.
Greed is always bad. It leads to wars, conflict and many other problems. It's not wanting a better life, it's when you want more more than you're entitled to based on your efforts.
It would be too easy to say that it drives people to create things. A lot of people are driven by other motivation too. They're usually the ones who bring us the greatest innovations and life-improving technologies.
Theoretically, the companies that win these contracts will have it in their best interests not to provide the best services, but whatever cheap services they can while maximizing profits.
Actually, the weird ones tend to be your best developers... Whatever makes them weird usually works well for their ability to code.
I just figure that if they weren't weird, then with their natural ability and intelligence, there's no way they'd work the crappy IT jobs that they do.
No... If the Internet gets bigger, the legacy US hardware suppliers are more likely to lose.
Their real value-added stuff is corporate not carrier. Smart boxes that do more with less bandwidth... People need to get QOS and traffic conditioning just to make their VOIP work over internet connections without issues. If bandwidth is scarce, it becomes a valuable resource. Managing it becomes a market.
But the Chinese companies ( Huawei, ZTE etc ) are doing more and more in the high bandwidth area and it's cheap equipment, so you can afford to spend more on fiber rollouts. Some of that stuff is beginning to displace US manufacturers now.
And then when you have masses of un-restricted bandwidth and you don't need special routers anymore... Voip just works because you have lots of capacity and nearly no jitter. You don't need complex setups anymore - just cheap equipment.
So the legacy manufacturers lose out in both markets...
They could compete I'm sure, but that takes innovation and progress. It's much easier to deal with the status quo. Especially when you dumped all your best developers to concentrate on selling existing product a year ago... Damn that pesky R&D.
Or maybe just a simple display that tells you the amount of radiation exposure that the machine is currently set for?
Then the radiologist could take responsibility for noting it.
This is simple and things like this often exist in development versions but are taken out later by marketting. Why?
I once worked for an international company that had a billing system. It wasn't very user friendly and was often wrong.
On the other hand, we had a local billing system that was accurate and helpful. At some point, bills were issued centrally and needless to say, were all wrong ( usually overbilling the customer - This was a now-disgraced US company... ) When we started to complain internally that the bills were wrong, they investigated and found we had a duplicate system that worked correctly. We were instructed to decommission it.
The reason? Because the company didn't want the legal hassle if someone sued them for grossly inaccurate invoices and used our records against them.
To his credit, my manager stood by us and insisted they fix the billing and said we weren't going to take down our system even when they threatened to fire him over the issue. It was a standoff for months and in the end we agreed we wouldn't monitor any other company clients that didn't know about our billing local system and we would bill legacy clients locally. Not really a satisfactory solution. The corporation won, the consumer lost and they never even knew we had a battle.
But if you have a little radiation readout that tells you something that might highlight bugs or errors in a multimillion dollar piece of medical equipment, then wouldn't you ask the developers to remove it? After all, it's just going to be used against you if someone is killed or injured while using the equipment.
Working with a small firewalled service provider that is reasonably large in terms of IP Allocation (Over half a million addresses) I'm constantly amazed that none of the design engineers I encounter seem to envision the number of sessions a firewall has to cope with.
It's frustrating that we keep encountering firewalls with 10 Gbps + claimed throughput that fall over at barely more than 100 Mbps due to resource exhaustion and then the vendor engineers try to tell us that's because we aren't bonding the NICs.
It seems that no matter how often I explain it to them, they just can't get their heads around the idea that our problem isn't bandwidth, it's number of sessions.
The scale of the Internet isn't just measured in X x bits per second. There are other dimensions to it as well.
How can you forget this most basic of requirements. Don't you know most children will spend the rest of their lives breathing? Some do it professionally, but others do it socially.
Given how important this is for the rest of their lives, let's have a 2 semester course on breathing!
Did I mention eating? How about Viewing?
Typing's the same... It's a subset of communications...
You don't need to teach people how to type. You need to teach them what to type... They'll figure out how to do it themselves and if touch-typing is so important, they'll pursue that independantly.
No, they are actually referring to the radiation causing sound inside the bat's heads...
They figured this out decades ago when they heard sound coming from radar systems that were appropriately modulated.
Then a bunch of nerds (they called them "Air Control Tower Operators" back then) figured they could modulate voice into a radar dish, point it at someone walking over the other side of the field and they would suddenly hear voices in their head... Which I'm sure was really funny for a while.
It's even patented. Microwave induced audio.
But it causes sound by heating, so basically, regardless of the level of radiation, heat generation is needed to induce sound. Consider that for a moment and also that it's microwave radiation.
No matter how small the radiation level is, it's like microwaving the bats.
Fortunately, Bat's can't sue people for exposing them to potentially dangerous levels of radiation, so it's probably just fine.
Their marketing department didn't even notice that they made an unauthorized reproduction and depiction of a well known anime character in their video...
So I would guess that they don't even understand the meaning of the word irony.
Accepting abuses of human rights in other countries is still a bad thing, even if your own government is abusing those very same rights.
If you don't stand against it openly, even if it is hypocritical to do so patriotically, then there's no reason for those within your own country to desist from their own actions.
After all, ignoring another country's abuses just because your own country does likewise is even worse than hypocrisy. It's complicity.
Yes, and I'm well aware of this requirement, more than most people.
However it's one thing to meet this requirement within the required laws of the host country and another thing entirely to provide and market software and devices that actively enhance human rights abuse through these laws.
The latter might be something the "client" government desires, but that doesn't excuse the actions of the corporations who chase this business through provision of such systems.
If Nokia and others persist in creating Brazen Bulls then perhaps it is only fitting that they too receive the same reward as did Perillos.
As far as I'm concerned, multinational corporations deserve this and have done so for a long time.
They are crying foul that by selling the tools of oppression to one government, they jeopardize their chances to sell their wares to another.
That's not hypocrisy on behalf of the governments. That's just politics.
And they do have a choice to avoid this - by staying out of that market.
No one forced them to sell systems to allow oppressive regimes to track and crack down on dissidents. They came up with that product all by themselves. And they most certainly would have been aware of what their product was going to be used for.
If all they sold was phones and phone systems, they wouldn't be in this mess, so I really don't see a problem with the US Government deciding that if Nokia supports it's political enemies, that it shouldn't benefit from US government contracts.
Corporate pariahs's deserve to be treated as such.
I don't like what the US government is doing itself in the area of human rights abuse, but I have to admit that I support it on this matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite...
The current per-UNIT cost of a cruise missile is $500K - The TOTAL cost of the Tomahawk cruise missile program is $11.2 BILLION...
The UNIT cost of America's Army is nil....
Given the US stockpile of around 3500 Tomahawks, that means that the TOTAL COST of just one cruise missile is still around the same price as the ENTIRE cost of AA and I think AA is still slightly cheaper if you take everything into account.
GrpA
Keeping in mind that a LOT of people did stupid things when they were younger and never got caught or had their name linked with what they did.
I find that the people who hold onto blame the longest are the same people who were the ones that "Didn't get caught" and they almost feel compelled to point the finger to move attention away from their own activities.
Anyway, sad to say but life's like that... Most people are bigoted to some extent and you can't change that... Move from job to job and prove your worth. Do the opposite to what you were linked with. Give people a reason to believe you've changed and use them as a reference.
GrpA.
Three games in total on the budget of a startup... That's pretty good.
This would have to be one of the army's most cost-effective projects ever then, wouldn't it?
GrpA
Actually, I think it's just because they see it as another revenue stream ( ie, Why should google make all that money from using our services, without paying us for the privilege. How can we charge them?)
I don't think the average telco exec is bright enough to see the myriad of ways that they can abuse the situation until they actually manifest. After all, being truly machiavellian is an art rarely practiced outside of government.
GrpA
No need. Steampunk is it's own genre now. The problem isn't with a lack of ideas or inspiration - it's been caused by many publisher's lack of willingness to publish new and innovative new stories and ideas.
Now that the Science Fiction sub-genre of Speculative Fiction is so popular, publishers are looking for more of the same of formula that sells well - not new and untested ideas that may or may not sell ( ie, Just like the Science Fiction of old...)
That tends to lead them away from new, unpublished writers with ideas that don't fit the pattern established by the predecessors.
If you want to gain a glimpse into what is leading edge for science fiction, visit somewhere like critters.org and offer to criticise a few recent stories... Four out of five you get are somewhat average but then you'll read something by an unheard of writer who is creating great science fiction and has new ideas.
Not only will you get to read some great science fiction by brilliant writers, much of which will probably never be published, but you can contribute to the future of fiction by providing worthwhile feedback to the writer.
After all, good science fiction was never mainstream... And nothing as changed.
GrpA
The funniest part of your post is the (Score:0, Funny)
GrpA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_(fiction)
Because their canon is "Official".
You are, of course, entitled to your own opinions on what is canon for the series but it doesn't change the fact that the Estate is authorative to decide for itself which stories are canon and which are not. That extends even to the authors original works.
GrpA
Actually, there is a canon and the estate would control that, but otherwise I agree entirely - It's a fanfic in nature and there's nothing wrong with that.
Readers can decide what they like and what they don't.
GrpA
I did get out of IT entirely for a while. I had been a journalist for about 6 years as a part-time job and found myself suddenly needing to stay at home to help with family problems. About that time a friend knew I was available and asked me to take over a magazine for a few months...
Well months turned into nearly two years.
The pay was very poor - About a third of what I had been earning as an R&D engineer.I lived on instant noodles and even small purchases like $20 items had to be budgeted - some months I didn't even have that!
But I loved the work. I got to meet people and do things I would never have had a chance to otherwise.
But it was only a temporary position and all good things come to an end. About a week after that job finished, another friend heard I was available and asked me if I would consider working part time working for a large ISP as a presales engineer and I got drawn back into IT.
It doesn't matter if it's IT or not - the main thing is enjoy the work your doing. You only get one life. Don't wait until it's too late.
Living like a pauper for two years hurt me financially but I took away the memories of a lifetime. And I got to spend two years working from home and watching my kids grow up... That's something money can't buy.
GrpA
How hard would it be for some enterprising radio station to only play GPL/Free/Whatever-isn't-commercial music that the PRS had no jurisdiction over...
They would quickly be the ONLY radio station that business could listen to ( freely ) and they could sue the PRS if they damaged their business by telling people they couldn't listen to the radio without a license... Since it wouldn't be true of that station. ( Better still the PRS might start to include advertising in their notices... eg, Can't listen to stations, other than Radio-GPL )
A captive market and a litigious company doing them free PR work - It doesn't get much better than that...
I wonder how long the PRS would last before the artists realized they were the real enemy...
GrpA
Actually, if you teach a man to fish, his knowledge exceeds the point where the tools are critical to the task. About the only thing that's going to cause him to starve to death is overfishing caused by commercial operations... And they tend to waste a lot of the food that would feed starving people too because there's a belief that if you give your product away to anyone, you can't sell it to anyone.
Greed is always bad. It leads to wars, conflict and many other problems. It's not wanting a better life, it's when you want more more than you're entitled to based on your efforts.
It would be too easy to say that it drives people to create things. A lot of people are driven by other motivation too. They're usually the ones who bring us the greatest innovations and life-improving technologies.
GrpA
Theoretically, the companies that win these contracts will have it in their best interests not to provide the best services, but whatever cheap services they can while maximizing profits.
That's usually what happens in practice too.
GrpA
Actually, the weird ones tend to be your best developers... Whatever makes them weird usually works well for their ability to code.
I just figure that if they weren't weird, then with their natural ability and intelligence, there's no way they'd work the crappy IT jobs that they do.
GrpA
No... If the Internet gets bigger, the legacy US hardware suppliers are more likely to lose.
Their real value-added stuff is corporate not carrier. Smart boxes that do more with less bandwidth... People need to get QOS and traffic conditioning just to make their VOIP work over internet connections without issues. If bandwidth is scarce, it becomes a valuable resource. Managing it becomes a market.
But the Chinese companies ( Huawei, ZTE etc ) are doing more and more in the high bandwidth area and it's cheap equipment, so you can afford to spend more on fiber rollouts. Some of that stuff is beginning to displace US manufacturers now.
And then when you have masses of un-restricted bandwidth and you don't need special routers anymore... Voip just works because you have lots of capacity and nearly no jitter. You don't need complex setups anymore - just cheap equipment.
So the legacy manufacturers lose out in both markets...
They could compete I'm sure, but that takes innovation and progress. It's much easier to deal with the status quo. Especially when you dumped all your best developers to concentrate on selling existing product a year ago... Damn that pesky R&D.
GrpA
Or maybe just a simple display that tells you the amount of radiation exposure that the machine is currently set for?
Then the radiologist could take responsibility for noting it.
This is simple and things like this often exist in development versions but are taken out later by marketting. Why?
I once worked for an international company that had a billing system. It wasn't very user friendly and was often wrong.
On the other hand, we had a local billing system that was accurate and helpful. At some point, bills were issued centrally and needless to say, were all wrong ( usually overbilling the customer - This was a now-disgraced US company... ) When we started to complain internally that the bills were wrong, they investigated and found we had a duplicate system that worked correctly. We were instructed to decommission it.
The reason? Because the company didn't want the legal hassle if someone sued them for grossly inaccurate invoices and used our records against them.
To his credit, my manager stood by us and insisted they fix the billing and said we weren't going to take down our system even when they threatened to fire him over the issue. It was a standoff for months and in the end we agreed we wouldn't monitor any other company clients that didn't know about our billing local system and we would bill legacy clients locally. Not really a satisfactory solution. The corporation won, the consumer lost and they never even knew we had a battle.
But if you have a little radiation readout that tells you something that might highlight bugs or errors in a multimillion dollar piece of medical equipment, then wouldn't you ask the developers to remove it? After all, it's just going to be used against you if someone is killed or injured while using the equipment.
GrpA
Working with a small firewalled service provider that is reasonably large in terms of IP Allocation (Over half a million addresses) I'm constantly amazed that none of the design engineers I encounter seem to envision the number of sessions a firewall has to cope with.
It's frustrating that we keep encountering firewalls with 10 Gbps + claimed throughput that fall over at barely more than 100 Mbps due to resource exhaustion and then the vendor engineers try to tell us that's because we aren't bonding the NICs.
It seems that no matter how often I explain it to them, they just can't get their heads around the idea that our problem isn't bandwidth, it's number of sessions.
The scale of the Internet isn't just measured in X x bits per second. There are other dimensions to it as well.
GrpA
How can you forget this most basic of requirements. Don't you know most children will spend the rest of their lives breathing? Some do it professionally, but others do it socially.
Given how important this is for the rest of their lives, let's have a 2 semester course on breathing!
Did I mention eating? How about Viewing?
Typing's the same... It's a subset of communications...
You don't need to teach people how to type. You need to teach them what to type... They'll figure out how to do it themselves and if touch-typing is so important, they'll pursue that independantly.
GrpA
No, they are actually referring to the radiation causing sound inside the bat's heads...
They figured this out decades ago when they heard sound coming from radar systems that were appropriately modulated.
Then a bunch of nerds (they called them "Air Control Tower Operators" back then) figured they could modulate voice into a radar dish, point it at someone walking over the other side of the field and they would suddenly hear voices in their head... Which I'm sure was really funny for a while.
It's even patented. Microwave induced audio.
But it causes sound by heating, so basically, regardless of the level of radiation, heat generation is needed to induce sound. Consider that for a moment and also that it's microwave radiation.
No matter how small the radiation level is, it's like microwaving the bats.
Fortunately, Bat's can't sue people for exposing them to potentially dangerous levels of radiation, so it's probably just fine.
GrpA
Are you kidding?
Their marketing department didn't even notice that they made an unauthorized reproduction and depiction of a well known anime character in their video...
So I would guess that they don't even understand the meaning of the word irony.
On several levels.
GrpA
Accepting abuses of human rights in other countries is still a bad thing, even if your own government is abusing those very same rights.
If you don't stand against it openly, even if it is hypocritical to do so patriotically, then there's no reason for those within your own country to desist from their own actions.
After all, ignoring another country's abuses just because your own country does likewise is even worse than hypocrisy. It's complicity.
GrpA
Yes, and I'm well aware of this requirement, more than most people.
However it's one thing to meet this requirement within the required laws of the host country and another thing entirely to provide and market software and devices that actively enhance human rights abuse through these laws.
The latter might be something the "client" government desires, but that doesn't excuse the actions of the corporations who chase this business through provision of such systems.
If Nokia and others persist in creating Brazen Bulls then perhaps it is only fitting that they too receive the same reward as did Perillos.
I don't have much sympathy for them.
GrpA
As far as I'm concerned, multinational corporations deserve this and have done so for a long time.
They are crying foul that by selling the tools of oppression to one government, they jeopardize their chances to sell their wares to another.
That's not hypocrisy on behalf of the governments. That's just politics.
And they do have a choice to avoid this - by staying out of that market.
No one forced them to sell systems to allow oppressive regimes to track and crack down on dissidents. They came up with that product all by themselves. And they most certainly would have been aware of what their product was going to be used for.
If all they sold was phones and phone systems, they wouldn't be in this mess, so I really don't see a problem with the US Government deciding that if Nokia supports it's political enemies, that it shouldn't benefit from US government contracts.
Corporate pariahs's deserve to be treated as such.
I don't like what the US government is doing itself in the area of human rights abuse, but I have to admit that I support it on this matter.
GrpA
Yeah, a one-way ticket to colonise some other place...
We believed you the first time, when you said we were all "Criminals" and needed to be sent to Australia.
We're going to be a bit more suspicious when you start sending us to Mars though for the same reason...
And it won't be for stealing bread this time I bet... Probably for downloading music or similar.
GrpA
What about the LOMAK?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOMAK
GrpA
I believe this Wikipedia article covers that final statistic...
Or there's this explanation to cover the period up until then.
GrpA