Pre-WWI European political equilibrium was based on this very premise: that all major powers had so many economic ties one to another that any major conflict would be terminally unwise. It turned out that it was, but that did not prevent it. Thus, economic relations alone may not be enough to prevent future wars...
Exactly. The described mode of operation does not really compute. Transition from wing-lift atmospheric flight to orbit requires A LOT of additional energy, so the plane taking off from a runway and then boosting itself to orbit does not seem physically possible. Launching a smaller orbital vehicle from a large carrier plane is another matter... but this would simply be an airborne ballistic/orbital launch, something much different from X-37B that stays in orbit for months and actually more similar to recent American commercial attempts (cf. the White Knight).
That's because it was taken from afar. Juno's orbit is highly elliptical and the photo was taken as proof-of-concept on the outbound leg. Wait till it starts taking pics around the next nearest approach...
Perhaps in the Land of the Free, but it isn't necessarily so in all of the world. Relatively small labor regulations like in Europe, e.g. forcing a one- or two-month termination period, can do wonders simply by forcing the directors to think in terms longer than the next week to quarter end.
I have worked in several European offices of both US and European software companies and this small thing does wonders to both workplace atmosphere and relative balance of power. And it does not really significantly hamper the company, contrary to what MBA types will keep telling you - it is bullshit that multimillion corporations are today forced to reorient at a day's notice.
Binary deltas do not solve the problem of HAVING TO RECOMPILE everything that uses the fixed library. On the oher hand, when a shared library is updated itself, everything that uses it, including closed-source third-party software, suddenly gets the benefit.
As for updated libraries breaking stuff, I honestly don't remember such case, and I have been using Linux as a sole workstation OS for well over 10 years now. Anyway, there are dynamic linker vars like LD_PRELOAD and LD_LIBRARY_PATH/LIBPATH that can be easily employed in such a case.
Moreover, how do you imagine "fully portable, self-contained binaries" for GUI programs? Statically linking half of X11 and GNOME/KDE/ into each calculator program? Well...
That is... not true, at least for Poland. I happen to live there, you see, and health insurance does not expire with unemployement benefits. It is tied to unemployed *status*, not benefits, and as long as a person is registered as unemployed, they have their health insurance paid by the State, whether they are still eligible for the benefts or not.
A very successful Saturn orbiter mission, Cassini, has been going on for years. Numerous moon flybys, lots of interesting data, pretty pics as well.
Beyond that, the main problem is cost. Uranus is four times farther away from the Sun than Jupiter, Neptune is six times farther away. Travel by direct transfer requires burning lots of fuel in Earth orbit, which makes it very expensive. Using gravity assist requires lots of time, and a long mission requires employing personnel and devoting resources for many years, which is also expensive. Not to mention that the probe must survive ten or twenty years in space and only then perform the actual mission, which makes the design expensive as well.
The singular pair of Voyager missions was only possible thanks to very lucky arrangement of planets at that time. Unfortunately, this won't repeat any time soon.
I tire of repeating myself over and over. Read my other posts in this thread.
Believe me, I have...
I will only give you these hints: advertising has en effect that diminishes with time, so an established party with a huge budget and repeated media recognition (like the current government) will suffer far less then a small party whose tiny budget offered it only a modicum of advertising before the "cooling off" period. By the time the election comes the effect of advertising of smaller players will be nullified.
If that were true, smaller parties would be severely disadvantaged and would gradually disappear. Care to run a reality check for some European countries, where such laws are in effect?
As to the government being disadvantaged it is laughable. Exactly the opposite happens (that is why the laws were made - by the governments in power) as it affords whomever is controlling the process an opportunity to indirectly harass the other players by either accusing them of "breaking the law" or making exceptions for the ruling elite because of "particularly malicious attacks" etc.
I call bullshit. At least in the case of my country, there are no exceptions whatsoever to the radio silence period and all the media refrain from reporting anything even remotely political - which actually looks kinda weird, as for a day or two news program are filled with absolute trivialities.
And then there is the fact that most media these days are owned by affiliates of one of the major parties or even outright by candidates themselves and media are not exempt from "reporting" on the other, usually "upstart" challengers, who of course have no recourse.
Again, please run a reality check. All media are forbidden to report anything that could be considered election-related or politics-related. There have been some highly-publicised early transgressions that ended up with huge fines and universal disapproval, and now the situation is absolutely clean election after election.
Censorship never "helps" democracy. It is in fact the very anathema of it.
Citation needed. There are in fact multiple censorship laws in force around the world, like forbidding publishing Nazi ideology, hate speech etc., and democracy does not seem to suffer as a result. Care to point to some example country where there is no such restrictions and democracy actually flourishes?
If the laws were truly meant to help democracy they would concern themselves with ensuring that smaller players have a level playing field and that all candidates have a chance to make last-second replies. They would ensure that the voters get maximum exposure to information, complete with information kiosks at the polls where all parties could post last minute appeals free of charge so they stay fresh in the voter's minds, etc and so on.
There are multiple ways in which smaller players are being favoured in many countries I know of, including mandatory airtime in public media and state-allotted funds for running both the party and the campaign itself.
If what you claim were true, the discussed laws would grossly favour current political establishment, and the government side in particular. Care to check whet the situation actually looks like in Europe and how often ruling parties change?
Please note that in many countries outside the Rich West current government has an additional advantage in form of direct access to public media. One of the explicit goals of such "blackout periods" is often removing manipulation power from the current government. If you don't think such access could be used for aiding the currently-ruling political option to remain in power, think again.
On the other hand, could you please state the disadvantages of such mandatory silence periods? Yes, I know you call them "censorship", but anything besides that? Any side loses anything? Anybody is manipulated? Anybody gains unfair advantage? Or do you simply believe any restriction on personal freedom at all is always evil and must be opposed?
Nice try. It is not a question of being adults or not, but rather of human beings in general being susceptible to certain psychological tricks. Like the government of the moment launching a massive FUD campaign in public media just before voting commences. Or the same government publishing fabricated polls during the election itself with the aim of swaying undecided people. How would you have them handle the issue afterwards? "Ooops, sorry 'bout that"?
I don't believe telling all interested parties to shut up for a day or two and think the matter - arguably the most important matter for the country - through is not censorship. Furthermore, I believe much of the world agrees, judging by rules of this sort being in place in multiple countries of very diverse backgrounds.
Contrary to what I have heard sometimes, absolute and unrestricted freedom to say anything without any consequences is not the optimum state. Think crying "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. Think libel. And how exactly do you impose consequences after elections won by last-minute false mud-throwing campaign? "Oops, sorry"?
As many have written already, this has very little to do with censorship and much to do with providing elections free from sociological manipulations. Mandating political silence just before and during the actual voting prevents primitive sociological tricks like "party X is doing really poor in the polls and is unlikely to clear the parliament-admission threshold, don't waste your vote on them, vote for similar party Y instead!" where people might get semi-consciously swayed at the last minute.
And, contrary to what many people write, such a ban is actually fairly easy to enforce. Simply monitor such cases, and post-factum declare parts of the overall voting process (in certain regions, circuits, whatever you have) invalid. This forces repeating parts of the election and, provided the society is at least somewhat legalistic, creates strong bias against the offending candidates or parties. (There may be significant financial penalties involved as well). In my country (Poland) this approach works surprisingly well, the ban is universally obeyed and the very rare transgressions are universally looked down at.
Yeah, I know, its not fashionable to actually like office 2003, but its a good product, I've always liked it. Besides, ever tried writing a doctoral thesis in OpenOffice? I have, it's not easy.
I did, in chemistry no less. Worked really OK, and it was the 1.0.x version of OOo then. I also supervised several masters' theses that were written in Word 2k, and they were the reason why I chose OOo.
That said, in Word 2k3 MS corrected many of the most hideous bugs, so it works decently now.
I guess the law is quite different here then - as long as someone is employed, he retains all the rights and duties associated, no matter whether the employment agreement is indefinite-length, defined-period or something else yet. This extends to the very last hour of employment. After all, what is the difference between a person on time-based contract soon to expire and an employee who just turned in a resignation notice???
Welcome to the work-world of the 21st century.
No, welcome to the work-world of the U.S. (circa 1990-200?). Much of the world hasn't adopted these draconian and dehumanizing disemployment procedures. They rely on human decency during severance just as U.S. companies once did.
It is not decency, it is plain common sense. The funny idea of showing a quitter the door immediately overlooks a simple fact: that it is him who found another job and knew in advance that he was going to quit. So, if the person were to wreak any parting havoc to the company, he has had plenty of time to do it already, without anyone other even suspecting.
In my country (Poland), as well as in most of EU, the employee is always entitled to some notice, from 2 weeks up to 3 months in case of long-term employees. See, somehow European companies are not being ravaged in droves by workers during their termination periods. So I think the whole idea stems from "because we can" attitude and nothing else, really.
The thing is and someone else commented on this further up is that developing on Linux is pretty similar to developing with Microsoft's solutions.
Both have point and click build your own GUI programs. It is not only about GUI builders. In Visual Studio you can point-and-click database connections, bind data from individual table columns to your controls etc. There are application types where you don't have to write ANY code for them to work - you point and click only. What is so nice, though, is that you still can dig into such an app and modify by hand the aspects you wish, down to a fairly low level.
So, for all sorts of typical stuff (like connecting to a SQL db) you point and click; stuff that are individual to your program and/or sophisticated you code by hand. This way you don't waste time on well-known, repetitive stuff. Add to that the integrated MS help, a pretty good time saver as well. I don't know of any comparable FOSS dev tools...
It's even better than that. We need to remember that the satellite was intercepted right at the edge of the atmosphere (whatever the "edge" means here).
In effect only the parts that were blown out in the surface tangent to the atmosphere "edge" (i.e. tangent to some imaginary sphere centered in Earth's center) have any chance of surviving more than one or two orbits. Those blown down, i.e. below the surface, towards the Earth, will of course reenter right away. Those thrown up will burn as well, as they will have to pass through deeper atmosphere in order to return to the explosion point after one revolution. (Think about reversing time and observing the pieces' paths after a full revolution; they would go DOWN, into the atmosphere). So only a small fraction of the debris has any chance of remaining "up" for any significant time.
Please note that the safe exposure limit refers to CONTINUOUS exposure, not to one-off contact. Acute toxicity levels are around 500 ppm, according to the same MSDS. Hell, benzene has exposure limits starting from around 1 ppm, and it was used as solvent for many years before being withdrawn due to cancerogenic - not short-term toxic - effects. Double hell, chlorine, the stuff used for disinfecting pool water, has EL of about 1 ppm, and when you smell chlorine bleach, you encounter dozens times more, and yet you live with perhaps watery eyes.
I call bullshit. I have worked with hydrazine quite a lot for my Ph.D. and it is nowhere near what you scare us with. It is toxic, sure, just like most of organic chemistry, but in high concentrations and on prolonged exposure. FYI, LD of 500 ppm is equal to 0,5% concentration. It doesn't smell that bad, compared to other small-molecule nitrogen compounds.
As many have mentioned, during reentry all the material would have completely vaporized and burned (i.e. oxidised) far above ground level. Talk about pretexts.
Gee, you really should dust off that physics handbook... Einstein's General Relativity IS a theory of gravity. It explains its behaviour and, more importantly, origin (spacetime curvature).
Now, GR does not have unlimited scope. It does not explain the Universe just after Big Bang, it also requires corrections for certain extreme sets of conditions that can perhaps occur in today's universe (microscopic small black holes "evaporating" due to semi-classical semi-quantum effects like Hawking radiation, hypernova collapse etc.). All in all, we don't yet know how to unify GR with quantum mechanics, and this is what the theories you mention try to deal with. But saying there is no theory of gravity yet is like saying there was no theory of electromagnetism before Pauli, Dirac and Co.
While I am all for MS bashing where they deserve it, stating that ALL their products are crap is a bit over the top. Vista is a bomb and Office 2k7 won't sell, but what really drives a platform is developer tools -- and here Visual Studio is difficult to take on. Combined with.NET capabilities you get RAPID development with acceptable performance, which in turn causes zounds of new apps to be written every year, strengthening the lock-in. And remembering that XP SP1+ is s decent end-user OS, and now Vista licenses allow for downgrading...
Don't get me wrong: I hate MS and wish they burned in Hell. But ignoring their strengths will only hamper any attempts to beat them.
...is laughable at present. In MS Office recording a macro is usually a good starting point for writting your own procedures, because you get the function calls with all the necessary arguments nicely written down. The OOo recorder uses references to UI elements instead of actual Basic functions, though, so it is more of a UI operations recorder and the resulting code is far less useful...
Slashdot Mirror
Pre-WWI European political equilibrium was based on this very premise: that all major powers had so many economic ties one to another that any major conflict would be terminally unwise. It turned out that it was, but that did not prevent it. Thus, economic relations alone may not be enough to prevent future wars...
Exactly. The described mode of operation does not really compute. Transition from wing-lift atmospheric flight to orbit requires A LOT of additional energy, so the plane taking off from a runway and then boosting itself to orbit does not seem physically possible. Launching a smaller orbital vehicle from a large carrier plane is another matter... but this would simply be an airborne ballistic/orbital launch, something much different from X-37B that stays in orbit for months and actually more similar to recent American commercial attempts (cf. the White Knight).
That's because it was taken from afar. Juno's orbit is highly elliptical and the photo was taken as proof-of-concept on the outbound leg. Wait till it starts taking pics around the next nearest approach...
Perhaps in the Land of the Free, but it isn't necessarily so in all of the world. Relatively small labor regulations like in Europe, e.g. forcing a one- or two-month termination period, can do wonders simply by forcing the directors to think in terms longer than the next week to quarter end.
I have worked in several European offices of both US and European software companies and this small thing does wonders to both workplace atmosphere and relative balance of power. And it does not really significantly hamper the company, contrary to what MBA types will keep telling you - it is bullshit that multimillion corporations are today forced to reorient at a day's notice.
Binary deltas do not solve the problem of HAVING TO RECOMPILE everything that uses the fixed library. On the oher hand, when a shared library is updated itself, everything that uses it, including closed-source third-party software, suddenly gets the benefit.
As for updated libraries breaking stuff, I honestly don't remember such case, and I have been using Linux as a sole workstation OS for well over 10 years now. Anyway, there are dynamic linker vars like LD_PRELOAD and LD_LIBRARY_PATH/LIBPATH that can be easily employed in such a case.
Moreover, how do you imagine "fully portable, self-contained binaries" for GUI programs? Statically linking half of X11 and GNOME/KDE/ into each calculator program? Well...
Give me statically compiled binaries any day (naturally YMMV on embedded platforms).
Oh yes, because having to upgrade half of the system because a bug in some library was finally fixed is sooo much better...
That is... not true, at least for Poland. I happen to live there, you see, and health insurance does not expire with unemployement benefits. It is tied to unemployed *status*, not benefits, and as long as a person is registered as unemployed, they have their health insurance paid by the State, whether they are still eligible for the benefts or not.
A very successful Saturn orbiter mission, Cassini, has been going on for years. Numerous moon flybys, lots of interesting data, pretty pics as well.
Beyond that, the main problem is cost. Uranus is four times farther away from the Sun than Jupiter, Neptune is six times farther away. Travel by direct transfer requires burning lots of fuel in Earth orbit, which makes it very expensive. Using gravity assist requires lots of time, and a long mission requires employing personnel and devoting resources for many years, which is also expensive. Not to mention that the probe must survive ten or twenty years in space and only then perform the actual mission, which makes the design expensive as well.
The singular pair of Voyager missions was only possible thanks to very lucky arrangement of planets at that time. Unfortunately, this won't repeat any time soon.
Oops, I have posted as an AC. Please see my reply above.
I tire of repeating myself over and over. Read my other posts in this thread.
Believe me, I have...
I will only give you these hints: advertising has en effect that diminishes with time, so an established party with a huge budget and repeated media recognition (like the current government) will suffer far less then a small party whose tiny budget offered it only a modicum of advertising before the "cooling off" period. By the time the election comes the effect of advertising of smaller players will be nullified.
If that were true, smaller parties would be severely disadvantaged and would gradually disappear. Care to run a reality check for some European countries, where such laws are in effect?
As to the government being disadvantaged it is laughable. Exactly the opposite happens (that is why the laws were made - by the governments in power) as it affords whomever is controlling the process an opportunity to indirectly harass the other players by either accusing them of "breaking the law" or making exceptions for the ruling elite because of "particularly malicious attacks" etc.
I call bullshit. At least in the case of my country, there are no exceptions whatsoever to the radio silence period and all the media refrain from reporting anything even remotely political - which actually looks kinda weird, as for a day or two news program are filled with absolute trivialities.
And then there is the fact that most media these days are owned by affiliates of one of the major parties or even outright by candidates themselves and media are not exempt from "reporting" on the other, usually "upstart" challengers, who of course have no recourse.
Again, please run a reality check. All media are forbidden to report anything that could be considered election-related or politics-related. There have been some highly-publicised early transgressions that ended up with huge fines and universal disapproval, and now the situation is absolutely clean election after election.
Censorship never "helps" democracy. It is in fact the very anathema of it.
Citation needed. There are in fact multiple censorship laws in force around the world, like forbidding publishing Nazi ideology, hate speech etc., and democracy does not seem to suffer as a result. Care to point to some example country where there is no such restrictions and democracy actually flourishes?
If the laws were truly meant to help democracy they would concern themselves with ensuring that smaller players have a level playing field and that all candidates have a chance to make last-second replies. They would ensure that the voters get maximum exposure to information, complete with information kiosks at the polls where all parties could post last minute appeals free of charge so they stay fresh in the voter's minds, etc and so on.
There are multiple ways in which smaller players are being favoured in many countries I know of, including mandatory airtime in public media and state-allotted funds for running both the party and the campaign itself. If what you claim were true, the discussed laws would grossly favour current political establishment, and the government side in particular. Care to check whet the situation actually looks like in Europe and how often ruling parties change?
Please note that in many countries outside the Rich West current government has an additional advantage in form of direct access to public media. One of the explicit goals of such "blackout periods" is often removing manipulation power from the current government. If you don't think such access could be used for aiding the currently-ruling political option to remain in power, think again.
On the other hand, could you please state the disadvantages of such mandatory silence periods? Yes, I know you call them "censorship", but anything besides that? Any side loses anything? Anybody is manipulated? Anybody gains unfair advantage? Or do you simply believe any restriction on personal freedom at all is always evil and must be opposed?
I don't believe telling all interested parties to shut up for a day or two and think the matter [...] through is censorship, of course...
Nice try. It is not a question of being adults or not, but rather of human beings in general being susceptible to certain psychological tricks. Like the government of the moment launching a massive FUD campaign in public media just before voting commences. Or the same government publishing fabricated polls during the election itself with the aim of swaying undecided people. How would you have them handle the issue afterwards? "Ooops, sorry 'bout that"?
I don't believe telling all interested parties to shut up for a day or two and think the matter - arguably the most important matter for the country - through is not censorship. Furthermore, I believe much of the world agrees, judging by rules of this sort being in place in multiple countries of very diverse backgrounds.
Contrary to what I have heard sometimes, absolute and unrestricted freedom to say anything without any consequences is not the optimum state. Think crying "Fire!" in a crowded theatre. Think libel. And how exactly do you impose consequences after elections won by last-minute false mud-throwing campaign? "Oops, sorry"?
As many have written already, this has very little to do with censorship and much to do with providing elections free from sociological manipulations. Mandating political silence just before and during the actual voting prevents primitive sociological tricks like "party X is doing really poor in the polls and is unlikely to clear the parliament-admission threshold, don't waste your vote on them, vote for similar party Y instead!" where people might get semi-consciously swayed at the last minute.
And, contrary to what many people write, such a ban is actually fairly easy to enforce. Simply monitor such cases, and post-factum declare parts of the overall voting process (in certain regions, circuits, whatever you have) invalid. This forces repeating parts of the election and, provided the society is at least somewhat legalistic, creates strong bias against the offending candidates or parties. (There may be significant financial penalties involved as well). In my country (Poland) this approach works surprisingly well, the ban is universally obeyed and the very rare transgressions are universally looked down at.
Yeah, I know, its not fashionable to actually like office 2003, but its a good product, I've always liked it. Besides, ever tried writing a doctoral thesis in OpenOffice? I have, it's not easy.
I did, in chemistry no less. Worked really OK, and it was the 1.0.x version of OOo then. I also supervised several masters' theses that were written in Word 2k, and they were the reason why I chose OOo.
That said, in Word 2k3 MS corrected many of the most hideous bugs, so it works decently now.
I guess the law is quite different here then - as long as someone is employed, he retains all the rights and duties associated, no matter whether the employment agreement is indefinite-length, defined-period or something else yet. This extends to the very last hour of employment. After all, what is the difference between a person on time-based contract soon to expire and an employee who just turned in a resignation notice???
In my country (Poland), as well as in most of EU, the employee is always entitled to some notice, from 2 weeks up to 3 months in case of long-term employees. See, somehow European companies are not being ravaged in droves by workers during their termination periods. So I think the whole idea stems from "because we can" attitude and nothing else, really.
It's even better than that. We need to remember that the satellite was intercepted right at the edge of the atmosphere (whatever the "edge" means here).
In effect only the parts that were blown out in the surface tangent to the atmosphere "edge" (i.e. tangent to some imaginary sphere centered in Earth's center) have any chance of surviving more than one or two orbits. Those blown down, i.e. below the surface, towards the Earth, will of course reenter right away. Those thrown up will burn as well, as they will have to pass through deeper atmosphere in order to return to the explosion point after one revolution. (Think about reversing time and observing the pieces' paths after a full revolution; they would go DOWN, into the atmosphere). So only a small fraction of the debris has any chance of remaining "up" for any significant time.
Please note that the safe exposure limit refers to CONTINUOUS exposure, not to one-off contact. Acute toxicity levels are around 500 ppm, according to the same MSDS. Hell, benzene has exposure limits starting from around 1 ppm, and it was used as solvent for many years before being withdrawn due to cancerogenic - not short-term toxic - effects. Double hell, chlorine, the stuff used for disinfecting pool water, has EL of about 1 ppm, and when you smell chlorine bleach, you encounter dozens times more, and yet you live with perhaps watery eyes.
...of course; the argument holds, though.
I call bullshit. I have worked with hydrazine quite a lot for my Ph.D. and it is nowhere near what you scare us with. It is toxic, sure, just like most of organic chemistry, but in high concentrations and on prolonged exposure. FYI, LD of 500 ppm is equal to 0,5% concentration. It doesn't smell that bad, compared to other small-molecule nitrogen compounds. As many have mentioned, during reentry all the material would have completely vaporized and burned (i.e. oxidised) far above ground level. Talk about pretexts.
Gee, you really should dust off that physics handbook... Einstein's General Relativity IS a theory of gravity. It explains its behaviour and, more importantly, origin (spacetime curvature). Now, GR does not have unlimited scope. It does not explain the Universe just after Big Bang, it also requires corrections for certain extreme sets of conditions that can perhaps occur in today's universe (microscopic small black holes "evaporating" due to semi-classical semi-quantum effects like Hawking radiation, hypernova collapse etc.). All in all, we don't yet know how to unify GR with quantum mechanics, and this is what the theories you mention try to deal with. But saying there is no theory of gravity yet is like saying there was no theory of electromagnetism before Pauli, Dirac and Co.
While I am all for MS bashing where they deserve it, stating that ALL their products are crap is a bit over the top. Vista is a bomb and Office 2k7 won't sell, but what really drives a platform is developer tools -- and here Visual Studio is difficult to take on. Combined with .NET capabilities you get RAPID development with acceptable performance, which in turn causes zounds of new apps to be written every year, strengthening the lock-in. And remembering that XP SP1+ is s decent end-user OS, and now Vista licenses allow for downgrading...
Don't get me wrong: I hate MS and wish they burned in Hell. But ignoring their strengths will only hamper any attempts to beat them.
...is laughable at present. In MS Office recording a macro is usually a good starting point for writting your own procedures, because you get the function calls with all the necessary arguments nicely written down. The OOo recorder uses references to UI elements instead of actual Basic functions, though, so it is more of a UI operations recorder and the resulting code is far less useful...