RTS like this are my addiction - I've gotten more fun out of Civilization:Call to Power (under Linux) than just about any other game I have, and was saddened when no more Civ games came out for Linux. I have Civ for the PS3, but it's not quite the same: too video-gamey, not enough strategy.
This looks very interesting, and I plan on sending some money these guy's way when I get home tonight.
NYCL, perhaps you can enlighten us all - it seems to me of late that more judges are going beyond what I understand is the scope of a judge's job (to adjudicate the law) and into "deciding" cases based on matters OUTSIDE the scope of law.
Am I misremembering what I learned back in 6th grade about the role of the judiciary in the legal system, or are these judges indeed going beyond the scope of their position?
Well, you make a couple of assumptions that may or may not be valid:
1) you assume the "transactions" the USPS is doing are equivalent to the scanning FedEx does. We don't know what these "transactions" are - they could be tracking requests, they could be scanning letters, or something else.
2) FedEx can pretty much guarantee that all items start out with a valid barcode, while USPS cannot - they have to be able to handle a large number of envelopes that have nothing but a handwritten address on them: no bar code, no machine printed labels, just hand-printed (or handwritten cursive) labels. That takes quite a bit more processing.
Hear hear on your ActiveX rant, and let me add "What you have said about ActiveX also applies to Javascript."
I see too many sites that will have almost every link be of the form <a href="#" onclick="follow_link(some_damn_link.html)"> - in other words the only way to follow the link is to use Javascript. This is just sloppy and stupid-lazy - such pages are usually machine generated, and there is NO REASON why the tool couldn't have filled in an appropriate href.
Yes, there are good uses for Javascript - but do we really want to be allowing J. Random Website to run code in a Turing-complete[*] language on every potential page load? I don't - and that is why I have NoScript installed, and no web site gets to run Javascript by default on MY browser - and since the Securina exploit against Firefox is Javascript based, that reduces (but does not eliminate) my exposure.
([*] - Javascript is as Turing complete as C/C++/Java or whatnot - the only thing that makes it NOT truly Turing-complete is the absence of infinite storage, just like C/C++/Java or whatnot).
"Of course if you read the article, I know it is a lot to ask...."
Especially since the article is not available to those of us who refuse to sign up for a Times account. Perhaps you should be a bit more cautious before flinging the RTFA flag.
And if the paper knew that the Principal was the one submitting the information and published it anyway, they were also wrong - full stop.
But for this girl to be surprised that her little screed got out, given that she posted it in an online form available to anybody who wants to see it shows she wasn't thinking.
I'm not afraid of having somebody walk up to me in real life and whip out a copy of this post - if I were, I wouldn't post it!
It would be a different thing were her posting somehow meaningfully private - had she written it in a personal email to somebody else, for example. However, you STILL should consider anything you send in an email public - once your recipient gets the email you have NO control over what they will do with it. But at least she could make the case that a confidence was breached.
Come on people - just because "Web 2.0" encourages you to share your every last little "thought", bodily function, or indiscretion doesn't mean it is a good idea.
OK, I've run that through my MS-Marketingspeak-to-English parser (V0.0.1pl1, so be gentle), and here's the gist of what I could glean from the coredump it generated:
The Zune is streaming content over WiFi. That content is 720P. That content is being displayed on an external monitor, connected to the Zune via HDMI.
Thus, the Zune is "streaming" in the commonly used sense of the word. The reason HDMI is mentioned is to address the issue that the Zune's built-in display is nowhere near 720P. The intended use-case would be using the Zune as a media renderer on an external display. Now, why in hell you'd use something like a Zune for that role rather than using something like a Showcenter or other dedicated media renderer box is not clear to me - I guess that IF you were travelling, IF you had a Zune, IF your hotel room had a TV with HDMI input, and IF your hotel had decent WiFi you could stream things to the TV at a reasonable resolution. Of course, you could also show content stored on the Zune (Bow-chicka-wow-wow music optional) and avoid the "stre am ing fr om hote hote hote l WI<connection lost>" issue.
"Belkin was displaying its Gigabit Powerline HD Starter Kit...."
Does this have that wonderfully innovative Belch-kin mis-feature where the device will hijack your connection randomly to show you ads for other Belch-kin products?
Seriously - I would NEVER put Belkin gear any place where it could theoretically modify the communications. Add to that Bletch-kin gear is usually overpriced for what it is....
Kangaroos have a different microbe in their gut that captures the methane and makes that energy available to the 'roo. There had been talk of trying to get this microbe into cattle, which would not only reduce the methane output from the cattle but would also make more food energy available to the cow. What ever happened to that?
You: "OK, so I want the Palm-Pre, with this data contract." Them" "OK, thats $BIGNUM per month, plus any other fees we think we can add on without you catching on. I'll need your SSN...." You: "Why do you need my SSN?" Them: "So we can run a credit check." You: "I'll just be putting the bill through to my credit card, can I just give you that information?" Them (reading from script): "I still need your SSN for the credit check." You: "My credit card already has done the check. You will be getting the money from them. All you should need is to check my ID and make sure it's my card." Them (still reading from script): "I still need your SSN for the credit check." You: "So you are saying this service is so expensive that the average person cannot afford it, and so you have to make sure I can pay?" Them: "Uhhhhhhh" You: "If so, then maybe I don't need this after all. After all, if you cannot just go through my credit card...."
I don't know if that will work, but I do know I have my cell on one of my credit cards, so technically my cell carrier doesn't need to know my credit rating, just that my credit card company is on the level (granted, in this day and age, that may not be a given).
Simple rule: If you don't like the terms they offer, tell them so, and walk out. IF they see enough money walking out the door, they will change their tune. The only issue is the value of "enough money".
(but of course this means exercising self-control and accepting the consequences of one's choices - a virtual impossibility for most people now-a-days....)
"...Why haven't space planes been developed?...Couldn't we just use a Scramjet until it becomes inefficient and then a rocket for the rest of the way?...."
First of all: we really don't have a production ready scramjet yet. There have been a few prototypes, but nothing that is ready to be built and bolted onto an aircraft carrying people. Making an engine that can "burn" fuel while that fuel-air mix is moving at speeds above the speed of sound relative to the engine, without blowing out, is not yet something we have mastered well enough to rely upon.
And that's the biggie right there: making a man-rated craft is HARD. You cannot tolerate any failures that can lead to loss of crew - look at how much crap NASA has taken (and justifiably so, to an extent) over the loss of 2 shuttles. You have to design EVERYTHING so that when it fails ("when", not "if") it fails in a way that allows the crew to make it home. Much of the design decisions on Orion vs. the Shuttle - the decisions that have many people crying "WE ARE GOING BACKWARDS! ORION IS TEH FAIL!" - are because the Shuttle way of doing things is a fail-unsafe and the Orion way is fail-safe.
Now, to address your question of "why not use jets, then scramjets, then rockets" - that is being discussed, but keep in mind that an engine you aren't using RIGHT NOW is just dead weight where cargo could be. There are good reasons to drop of the bits of the craft you aren't going to use anymore - hauling them the rest of the way up is just wasting fuel.
Then there is the problem that getting into "space" is only "hard", but getting into orbit is REALLY HARD. It takes roughly an order of magnitude more delta-V to get to a stable orbit than to just "get into space" like SpaceShip1 did.
That's why the idea of using a reusable vehicle (let alone a MAN RATED reusable vehicle) just to launch cargo is about as stupid as using a Lamborghini to move cattle - IMHO NASA should have built 2 systems: a man-rated shuttle just for moving people and a disposable cargo vehicle that shared many of the components of the shuttle to move freight - yes, you might have been "throwing away" big chunks of your cargo vehicle every launch, but the cost (in terms of "weight-that-isn't-cargo" as well as in terms of money) of re-usability vs. the cost of throwing it away is such that throwing it away makes more sense. I don't try to "re-use" snot-filled facial tissues as it doesn't make fiscal sense - same thing for ships.
Once again the problem is that we are parsing what Microsoft says as though it were English, when it is actually in MMS (Microsoft Marketing Speak), a language that, true to Microsoft form, is almost, but not quite, compatible.
In English, "get the facts" is parsed as "imperative: acquire possession of" "definitive article" "true information about the subject".
However, parsing this in MMS yields "destroy" (as in a mobster saying "This man has disrespected me: get him.") "subset: (inconvenient to us)" "true information about the subject".
Like many/. readers, I have a firewall and local DHCP server, handing out addresses in one of the reserved ranges (e.g. 10.x.x.x) for my home network.
OK, so when my ISP starts handing me real IPv6 route-ability and a real IPv6 address range, how do I configure my DHCP server to take that address range and convey it to my local clients?
Yes, I know that the bottom 48 bits of the address can be the MAC address of the device, but I still need to communicate to the devices what the prefix is.
And I will *still* need that firewall and router because I have many devices that are IPv4 only, and I won't be replacing them anytime soon, so even if IPv4 vanishes from the Internet at large, I will need my firewall to proxy for those older devices.
Tether your iPhone to your work PC via USB or Bluetooth. Create a connection through the iPhone to the Internet. (With T-Mobile phones you can alread do this, but it's so expensive.) With tethering you bypass such filtering restrictions.
In the USA; If I browse adult stuff at work on works PC and Internet connection, work can be held libel. If I browse adult stuff on the iPhone at work using my own Internet connect, it is less likely that work can be held libel.
Be careful. I know of a case where somebody did something like that. While the actual pr0n was going through his local connection, all his DNS look-ups were still going over the company's DNS server, and somebody was watching and wondering why the inDUHvidual in question was looking up "www.chickswithdonkeys.com" and "www.highheelsandenemas.com".
The person got in a bit of hot water over this.
Besides, it doesn't matter whether you were using your work PC or network or not: you were at work, you were doing this, if somebody catches you they can sue your employer for "creating or allowing a hostile workplace", and they will be in trouble, and you WILL be fired.
You want to visit pr0n sites - best to do it at home.
"...that pulls together facts by combing through more than 500 million Web pages."
Correction:
"...that pulls together assertions by combing through more than 500 million Web pages."
Whether those assertions are correct or even reasonable is a completely different issue.
It might be interesting to then take those assertions and have some means to validate or invalidate them, but currently that's going to require meat, not metal.
Now, if you could come up with some form of AI^Walgorithm to do that automatically, then you would have something.
This is very true: consider this: Cessna has this big ponds just south of Wichita Midcontinent Airport. Needless to say there are a BUNCH of Canadian Geese there, RIGHT IN THE FLIGHTPATH OF THE AIRPORT. In fact, given the prevailing winds, most take-offs are to the south.
Heck, I hate even DRIVING past those ponds on K-42, due to the birds flying low over the road.
Another technique I've heard of is painting a big black rectangle in front of the exit doors - like a big pit.
The patients will not cross it, but everybody else will walk right over it.
I've had the misfortune of watching a loved one descend through the hell that is Alzheimer's, and watched what that did to rest of the family. To the various humor-impaired slashbots: it's about as funny as having your testicles sucked out of your scrotum with a shopvac - that is, hilarious in the abstract, until you have to experience it personally.
It's not the altitude that is critical, it's the velocity. Let's say I were to teleport upward 100 miles, but with no other change in my velocity (also let us assume I am wearing a space suit). What happens? I fall down - because I have no where near the velocity to stay in orbit. Even if we keep the same angular velocity with respect to the earth's core I have now, I still fall down - I just miss hitting my house.
OK, I happen to have an unobtainium mine in my basement, so I build a tower a thousand kilometers high in my back yard. So, we hop on the elevator and ride to the top. We are OVER many of the orbits of satellites, so I should be able to just push something away, right? No: it falls down. Only if I can build my tower to 22000 miles (give or take) can I just release things and have them orbit, and that only because in order for my tower to be rigid, the end has to be moving at an angular velocity that matches orbital at 22000 miles (give or take), and that as any object ascends my tower, it will be pushed laterally as it goes up because the tangential velocity of the tower increases as the distance from the center of the earth increases.
So, even if I could build a tower 15km high, it's really not going to help launch things into orbit. Yes, it gets it above the bulk of the atmosphere, but the cost of overcoming atmospheric friction is much less than the simple energy cost of accelerating an object to orbital velocity.
While a 15km tower might make a great weather observatory, and it would be a wonderful transmitting platform (dibs on the 2 meter repeater!) it wouldn't make all that much difference for a space launch.
Think about it: there are numerous folks on places like/. that would never DREAM of visiting a page like this under normal circumstances.
However, let one geek work out what that binary is and post it, and suddenly a large fraction of those folks will thunder over there to confirm it for themselves.
AAAAANNNNNND, those folks will be amused, and thus will be in a more receptive frame of mind to accept the sales pitch.
Slashdot Mirror
RTS like this are my addiction - I've gotten more fun out of Civilization:Call to Power (under Linux) than just about any other game I have, and was saddened when no more Civ games came out for Linux. I have Civ for the PS3, but it's not quite the same: too video-gamey, not enough strategy.
This looks very interesting, and I plan on sending some money these guy's way when I get home tonight.
NYCL, perhaps you can enlighten us all - it seems to me of late that more judges are going beyond what I understand is the scope of a judge's job (to adjudicate the law) and into "deciding" cases based on matters OUTSIDE the scope of law.
Am I misremembering what I learned back in 6th grade about the role of the judiciary in the legal system, or are these judges indeed going beyond the scope of their position?
Well, you make a couple of assumptions that may or may not be valid:
1) you assume the "transactions" the USPS is doing are equivalent to the scanning FedEx does. We don't know what these "transactions" are - they could be tracking requests, they could be scanning letters, or something else.
2) FedEx can pretty much guarantee that all items start out with a valid barcode, while USPS cannot - they have to be able to handle a large number of envelopes that have nothing but a handwritten address on them: no bar code, no machine printed labels, just hand-printed (or handwritten cursive) labels. That takes quite a bit more processing.
Hear hear on your ActiveX rant, and let me add "What you have said about ActiveX also applies to Javascript."
I see too many sites that will have almost every link be of the form <a href="#" onclick="follow_link(some_damn_link.html)"> - in other words the only way to follow the link is to use Javascript. This is just sloppy and stupid-lazy - such pages are usually machine generated, and there is NO REASON why the tool couldn't have filled in an appropriate href.
Yes, there are good uses for Javascript - but do we really want to be allowing J. Random Website to run code in a Turing-complete[*] language on every potential page load? I don't - and that is why I have NoScript installed, and no web site gets to run Javascript by default on MY browser - and since the Securina exploit against Firefox is Javascript based, that reduces (but does not eliminate) my exposure.
([*] - Javascript is as Turing complete as C/C++/Java or whatnot - the only thing that makes it NOT truly Turing-complete is the absence of infinite storage, just like C/C++/Java or whatnot).
"Of course if you read the article, I know it is a lot to ask...."
Especially since the article is not available to those of us who refuse to sign up for a Times account. Perhaps you should be a bit more cautious before flinging the RTFA flag.
And for the alarm, the clock says
"help me! help me! help me!"
OK, what the Principal did was wrong - full stop.
And if the paper knew that the Principal was the one submitting the information and published it anyway, they were also wrong - full stop.
But for this girl to be surprised that her little screed got out, given that she posted it in an online form available to anybody who wants to see it shows she wasn't thinking.
I'm not afraid of having somebody walk up to me in real life and whip out a copy of this post - if I were, I wouldn't post it!
It would be a different thing were her posting somehow meaningfully private - had she written it in a personal email to somebody else, for example. However, you STILL should consider anything you send in an email public - once your recipient gets the email you have NO control over what they will do with it. But at least she could make the case that a confidence was breached.
Come on people - just because "Web 2.0" encourages you to share your every last little "thought", bodily function, or indiscretion doesn't mean it is a good idea.
OK, I've run that through my MS-Marketingspeak-to-English parser (V0.0.1pl1, so be gentle), and here's the gist of what I could glean from the coredump it generated:
The Zune is streaming content over WiFi. That content is 720P. That content is being displayed on an external monitor, connected to the Zune via HDMI.
Thus, the Zune is "streaming" in the commonly used sense of the word. The reason HDMI is mentioned is to address the issue that the Zune's built-in display is nowhere near 720P. The intended use-case would be using the Zune as a media renderer on an external display. Now, why in hell you'd use something like a Zune for that role rather than using something like a Showcenter or other dedicated media renderer box is not clear to me - I guess that IF you were travelling, IF you had a Zune, IF your hotel room had a TV with HDMI input, and IF your hotel had decent WiFi you could stream things to the TV at a reasonable resolution. Of course, you could also show content stored on the Zune (Bow-chicka-wow-wow music optional) and avoid the "stre am ing fr om hote hote hote l WI<connection lost>" issue.
"Belkin was displaying its Gigabit Powerline HD Starter Kit...."
Does this have that wonderfully innovative Belch-kin mis-feature where the device will hijack your connection randomly to show you ads for other Belch-kin products?
Seriously - I would NEVER put Belkin gear any place where it could theoretically modify the communications. Add to that Bletch-kin gear is usually overpriced for what it is....
You sir, are a sick and twisted individual, and I salute you!
If only you could have worked Ed in there somewhere....
"As long as subsequent firmware updates can be applied without applying this one, I'm fine with it."
Sorry, it doesn't work that way. Any future updates will also have this (mis-)feature.
Kangaroos have a different microbe in their gut that captures the methane and makes that energy available to the 'roo. There had been talk of trying to get this microbe into cattle, which would not only reduce the methane output from the cattle but would also make more food energy available to the cow. What ever happened to that?
There are many here who say "It's just a little spam - have some perspective."
OK, so how about this perspective:
Let's just slap his wrist.
Once for every spam reported to Spamcop.net.
Just for one day.
After all, it's just a slap on the wrist - that's not so bad, is it?
You: "OK, so I want the Palm-Pre, with this data contract."
Them" "OK, thats $BIGNUM per month, plus any other fees we think we can add on without you catching on. I'll need your SSN...."
You: "Why do you need my SSN?"
Them: "So we can run a credit check."
You: "I'll just be putting the bill through to my credit card, can I just give you that information?"
Them (reading from script): "I still need your SSN for the credit check."
You: "My credit card already has done the check. You will be getting the money from them. All you should need is to check my ID and make sure it's my card."
Them (still reading from script): "I still need your SSN for the credit check."
You: "So you are saying this service is so expensive that the average person cannot afford it, and so you have to make sure I can pay?"
Them: "Uhhhhhhh"
You: "If so, then maybe I don't need this after all. After all, if you cannot just go through my credit card...."
I don't know if that will work, but I do know I have my cell on one of my credit cards, so technically my cell carrier doesn't need to know my credit rating, just that my credit card company is on the level (granted, in this day and age, that may not be a given).
Simple rule: If you don't like the terms they offer, tell them so, and walk out. IF they see enough money walking out the door, they will change their tune. The only issue is the value of "enough money".
(but of course this means exercising self-control and accepting the consequences of one's choices - a virtual impossibility for most people now-a-days....)
"...Why haven't space planes been developed?...Couldn't we just use a Scramjet until it becomes inefficient and then a rocket for the rest of the way?...."
First of all: we really don't have a production ready scramjet yet. There have been a few prototypes, but nothing that is ready to be built and bolted onto an aircraft carrying people. Making an engine that can "burn" fuel while that fuel-air mix is moving at speeds above the speed of sound relative to the engine, without blowing out, is not yet something we have mastered well enough to rely upon.
And that's the biggie right there: making a man-rated craft is HARD. You cannot tolerate any failures that can lead to loss of crew - look at how much crap NASA has taken (and justifiably so, to an extent) over the loss of 2 shuttles. You have to design EVERYTHING so that when it fails ("when", not "if") it fails in a way that allows the crew to make it home. Much of the design decisions on Orion vs. the Shuttle - the decisions that have many people crying "WE ARE GOING BACKWARDS! ORION IS TEH FAIL!" - are because the Shuttle way of doing things is a fail-unsafe and the Orion way is fail-safe.
Now, to address your question of "why not use jets, then scramjets, then rockets" - that is being discussed, but keep in mind that an engine you aren't using RIGHT NOW is just dead weight where cargo could be. There are good reasons to drop of the bits of the craft you aren't going to use anymore - hauling them the rest of the way up is just wasting fuel.
Then there is the problem that getting into "space" is only "hard", but getting into orbit is REALLY HARD. It takes roughly an order of magnitude more delta-V to get to a stable orbit than to just "get into space" like SpaceShip1 did.
That's why the idea of using a reusable vehicle (let alone a MAN RATED reusable vehicle) just to launch cargo is about as stupid as using a Lamborghini to move cattle - IMHO NASA should have built 2 systems: a man-rated shuttle just for moving people and a disposable cargo vehicle that shared many of the components of the shuttle to move freight - yes, you might have been "throwing away" big chunks of your cargo vehicle every launch, but the cost (in terms of "weight-that-isn't-cargo" as well as in terms of money) of re-usability vs. the cost of throwing it away is such that throwing it away makes more sense. I don't try to "re-use" snot-filled facial tissues as it doesn't make fiscal sense - same thing for ships.
Once again the problem is that we are parsing what Microsoft says as though it were English, when it is actually in MMS (Microsoft Marketing Speak), a language that, true to Microsoft form, is almost, but not quite, compatible.
In English, "get the facts" is parsed as "imperative: acquire possession of" "definitive article" "true information about the subject".
However, parsing this in MMS yields "destroy" (as in a mobster saying "This man has disrespected me: get him.") "subset: (inconvenient to us)" "true information about the subject".
An easy mistake to make.
Like many /. readers, I have a firewall and local DHCP server, handing out addresses in one of the reserved ranges (e.g. 10.x.x.x) for my home network.
OK, so when my ISP starts handing me real IPv6 route-ability and a real IPv6 address range, how do I configure my DHCP server to take that address range and convey it to my local clients?
Yes, I know that the bottom 48 bits of the address can be the MAC address of the device, but I still need to communicate to the devices what the prefix is.
And I will *still* need that firewall and router because I have many devices that are IPv4 only, and I won't be replacing them anytime soon, so even if IPv4 vanishes from the Internet at large, I will need my firewall to proxy for those older devices.
Be careful. I know of a case where somebody did something like that. While the actual pr0n was going through his local connection, all his DNS look-ups were still going over the company's DNS server, and somebody was watching and wondering why the inDUHvidual in question was looking up "www.chickswithdonkeys.com" and "www.highheelsandenemas.com".
The person got in a bit of hot water over this.
Besides, it doesn't matter whether you were using your work PC or network or not: you were at work, you were doing this, if somebody catches you they can sue your employer for "creating or allowing a hostile workplace", and they will be in trouble, and you WILL be fired.
You want to visit pr0n sites - best to do it at home.
"...that pulls together facts by combing through more than 500 million Web pages."
Correction:
"...that pulls together assertions by combing through more than 500 million Web pages."
Whether those assertions are correct or even reasonable is a completely different issue.
It might be interesting to then take those assertions and have some means to validate or invalidate them, but currently that's going to require meat, not metal.
Now, if you could come up with some form of AI^Walgorithm to do that automatically, then you would have something.
This is a very expensive to create, very unstable material. Obviously, it should be called Vistaonium.
The beauty is that we have a natural way to refer to isotopes of it: Vistaonium-home, Vistaonium-business, Vistaonium-premium, Vistaonium-lite, etc.
When we start hitting the island of stability and get stuff that will hang together, we can name it Gnuonium.
This is very true: consider this: Cessna has this big ponds just south of Wichita Midcontinent Airport. Needless to say there are a BUNCH of Canadian Geese there, RIGHT IN THE FLIGHTPATH OF THE AIRPORT. In fact, given the prevailing winds, most take-offs are to the south.
Heck, I hate even DRIVING past those ponds on K-42, due to the birds flying low over the road.
Another technique I've heard of is painting a big black rectangle in front of the exit doors - like a big pit.
The patients will not cross it, but everybody else will walk right over it.
I've had the misfortune of watching a loved one descend through the hell that is Alzheimer's, and watched what that did to rest of the family. To the various humor-impaired slashbots: it's about as funny as having your testicles sucked out of your scrotum with a shopvac - that is, hilarious in the abstract, until you have to experience it personally.
It's not the altitude that is critical, it's the velocity. Let's say I were to teleport upward 100 miles, but with no other change in my velocity (also let us assume I am wearing a space suit). What happens? I fall down - because I have no where near the velocity to stay in orbit. Even if we keep the same angular velocity with respect to the earth's core I have now, I still fall down - I just miss hitting my house.
OK, I happen to have an unobtainium mine in my basement, so I build a tower a thousand kilometers high in my back yard. So, we hop on the elevator and ride to the top. We are OVER many of the orbits of satellites, so I should be able to just push something away, right? No: it falls down. Only if I can build my tower to 22000 miles (give or take) can I just release things and have them orbit, and that only because in order for my tower to be rigid, the end has to be moving at an angular velocity that matches orbital at 22000 miles (give or take), and that as any object ascends my tower, it will be pushed laterally as it goes up because the tangential velocity of the tower increases as the distance from the center of the earth increases.
So, even if I could build a tower 15km high, it's really not going to help launch things into orbit. Yes, it gets it above the bulk of the atmosphere, but the cost of overcoming atmospheric friction is much less than the simple energy cost of accelerating an object to orbital velocity.
While a 15km tower might make a great weather observatory, and it would be a wonderful transmitting platform (dibs on the 2 meter repeater!) it wouldn't make all that much difference for a space launch.
The binary isn't the sales pitch. The binary is the means to get the reluctant to visit their site. Once there, the sales pitch begins.
Think about it: there are numerous folks on places like /. that would never DREAM of visiting a page like this under normal circumstances.
However, let one geek work out what that binary is and post it, and suddenly a large fraction of those folks will thunder over there to confirm it for themselves.
AAAAANNNNNND, those folks will be amused, and thus will be in a more receptive frame of mind to accept the sales pitch.