My Mother-in-law was diagnosed with esophageal cancer 10 months ago. She had recently lost her job, and with it her insurance. We immediately applied for FMIP–put in place by the ACA as a stop-gap before the exchanges become available. She was denied on the grounds that the government "could not verify her citizenship through publicly available records". They had copies of her birth certificate, passport, and Oregon Driver's License. When we pressed FMIP on the denial, they replied that the problem wasn't with her application, or that her citizenship wasn't _verifiable_, but merely that they hadn't gotten around to verifying it.
Her cancer treatment was 100% covered by a local hospital charity. Donations to that charity have dried up in the wake of Obamacare, because who needs charity when you can count on the government to care of everybody?
Robert Goddard developed liquid fueled rocket engines with private capital. And all but two of the great telescopes of the 19th and early 20th centuries were built with private money. SpaceX, of course, was seeded with private money. Though I think we'd agree that Elon Musk couldn't have raised enough capital to get SpaceX to where it is now without NASA's help, we might disagree as to why such capital is so hard to come by.
I also agree with you that NASA (the agency) effectively lacks the will to explore. And I would argue, as Robert Zubrin does, that it's because they prioritize safety above mission success. Safety is critically important. But if safety is your primary goal, it's always safer not to fly the mission.
But back to why I think private companies can't raise enough capital for risky endeavors. Feel free to label me a Paul-bot, but in my opinion the root problem is that the federal reserve fixes the price of money, depreciates the currency, and allows a small group of banker cronies to skim the difference between the market rate for money and the artificial fed rate. It's hardly a market economy if the market for money is rigged by the government. The banks have now siphoned a majority share of our economy's free capital. And since they didn't earn it anyway, they gamble with it. But if you look historically at the U.S. when private citizens controlled most of the capital, they did in fact make risky investments and achieve great things. I don't think capitalism is our problem, I think it's the solution to our corporate welfare-ism. But we can't have effective capitalism until we have sound money.
Methanol is the obvious solution (which is why everyone ignores it). We need to destroy the oil cartel that is looting our country--we can't do that when we only control a few percent of the fuel market.
But we have lots of coal and natural gas from which we can easily produce lots of methanol. Adapting new cars to run on any combination of gasoline and methanol is trivial, you just have to reprogram the ECU and make sure the fuel lines are up to snuff. And to be clear, a flex-fuel car can run on BOTH methanol and gasoline, you have a choice.
Methanol can also be made from any source of biomass, so it can be renewable and global-warming neutral too. Unfortunately, the car companies are owned by people who have even larger stakes in the oil industry, so they will never voluntarily make all their cars flex-fueled. Congress needs to mandate that all new cars sold in the U.S. be flex-fueled. It's as simple as that to get out of this mess. No "alternative fuel research" required.
How would Mozilla developers fix a crash in closed-source Adobe code?
They may not be able to fix the problem, but at the very least they should be able to prevent Flash from crashing Firefox.
The problem of preventing Flash from crashing Firefox and fixing the closed-source Adobe code are one in the same. If, for example, the Flash plugin dereferences an invalid pointer, there is nothing Firefox can do to prevent itself segfaulting short of running the Flash plugin in a separate process--which would cause all sorts of other problems.
In a related martian breakthrough, apparently an asteroid hit Mars with an energy of "1029 joules, which is equivalent to 100 billion gigatons of TNT."
I assume they meant 10^29 J. But still, the inability of most scientific journalist's to even check the plausibility of their figures is astounding.
We live in three twice-subdivided, spherically extruded gyroelognated pentagonal dipyramids built in 1972. Two of them are stuccoed and one is shingled. They don't leak.
They're each a single room, one with a pentagonal downstairs. I can't begin to explain how wonderful it is to live in a sphere. I love the geometry and the womb-like feeling. But I hate domes that are mangled and partitioned off like a normal house. You have to let the dome be what it is, if you do it works. And if you can't do that then you need to go with something else.
When it comes to traffic I've always said that it's throughput that matters, not position. If a car pulls in front of you and sets you back 10 meters, then all you lose is 10 meters. And only you lose it. If someone DOESN'T let you in and you have to slow down 10 m/s for 10 second and then accelerate up to speed again, you and many people behind you lose 100+ meters.
I've always found it ironic that the people who seem in the biggest hurry--the ones who don't let others in--are actually the ones that slow everybody down. So when someone has their signal on, JUST LET THEM IN! Your order in traffic is insignificant (grannies and talkies excepted).
Do you know multiple people some of whom learned Windows first and some of whom learned Linux first so that you can objectively state which is inherently easier to learn? I do. And the evidence I have seen is in Linux's favor when no predisposition to Windows is involved.
But neither I nor you can discern the truth about the matter until a sufficient body of people have learned each way and we can compare the ease of their progress. Just because it may be hard for you to adapt your biased skills to Linux doesn't mean it's inherently more difficult to learn Linux outright.
My father-in-law and now some of his older friends are set up with Ubuntu and they have a way easier time than their friends who use Windows. And all of these people are new to computers. I set up my FIL with Ubuntu initially and gave him some lessons over VNC. He has now installed Ubuntu on several people's computers at a retirement home in Portland all on his own. And even being a nontechincal guy he was able to get them on a better foot than they were using Windows. So there. Ubuntu is easier for your grandma when you're not there to clean out her spyware. And old people love the Beryl Cube effect.
While Windows development starts over with a complete rewrite every couple of years, open source will just keep steadily building on itself and get better and better and better with each passing year. It's quite fun to watch (and even more fun to participate in).
Actually, you want Haskell. Haskell offers arbitrary infix operators. Just enclose any two-argument function in backquotes (`) and it becomes an infix operator. You can also define new operators using any combination of legal symbols.
For example, if you had a function concat a b that concatenated the strings a and b, you could write:
concat 'Hello ' 'World' -- The usual way to call concat
Or you could write:
'Hello ' `concat` 'World' -- the backquotes make concat an infix operator
But best of all you can define the exact operator you want like so:
(.=):: String -> String -> String a.= b = concat a b
Stop killing pigs! Seriously. It is unnecessary, it is bad for the environment, it is bad for your health, and there are delicious alternatives. Not even to mention the horrendous conditions in which these pigs live.
P.S. Please don't mod me down just because you like meat. I am trying to make a rational argument.
Standards are what must be designed to last for decades, not the software that conforms to the standards. Things like XML, RDF and POSIX will be supported for decades, if not centuries. Who cares if it is Linux running your POSIX apps, or FreeBSD, or HURD? I don't think it matters if software uses libxml2 to parse your XML data, or some yet-unconceived API--as long as it understands XML!
If it is stability and reliable infrastructure that is desired, it is standards that must remain constant and software that must evolve to make the standards work with new technology.
I hope that OpenZaurus/OpenEmbedded get their act together soon and release a new version that supports the SL-5600/SL-6000. The current version of OpenZaurus is unstable on my SL-5600 and the Sharp ROM is crap. I am thinking about trying Gentoo for Zaurus.
Are there any other free Zaurus distros out there?
At the rate that Microsoft is applying for patents, I can imagine Microsoft being in a position like SCO--except with evidence on Microsoft's side.
It seems like a lose/lose situation for GNU/Linux. If Mono doesn't catch on then it will be tough for the free desktop to compete with Longhorn. If, however, Mono does catch on and becomes a major development backbone for GNU/Linux, then we risk having Microsoft Intellectual Property embedded deep within a lot of free software projects.
That doesn't matter when the issue you're having is surviving takeoff or landing.
Exactly. The launch inclination to the ISS takes the Shuttle over the north atlantic where an abort would drop the astronauts in freezing, arctic water. A launch to the Hubble, on the other hand, takes the Shuttle over warmer, equatorial waters where the chances of surviving an abort are better. There is also less micrometeor danger in the Hubble's orbit.
How are we supposed to send humans to the Moon and Mars if we are afraid to send them into Low Earth Orbit?
There is evidence that it is actually safer to send astronauts to the Hubble than it is to send them to the International Space Station.
I am sure a robot could do the job, but where does it leave humans in the long run if we don't take risks ourselves. Will we leave exploration of the universe to the Von Neumann Machines and maroon ourselves on Earth?
Slashdot Mirror
My Mother-in-law was diagnosed with esophageal cancer 10 months ago. She had recently lost her job, and with it her insurance. We immediately applied for FMIP–put in place by the ACA as a stop-gap before the exchanges become available. She was denied on the grounds that the government "could not verify her citizenship through publicly available records". They had copies of her birth certificate, passport, and Oregon Driver's License. When we pressed FMIP on the denial, they replied that the problem wasn't with her application, or that her citizenship wasn't _verifiable_, but merely that they hadn't gotten around to verifying it.
Her cancer treatment was 100% covered by a local hospital charity. Donations to that charity have dried up in the wake of Obamacare, because who needs charity when you can count on the government to care of everybody?
Robert Goddard developed liquid fueled rocket engines with private capital. And all but two of the great telescopes of the 19th and early 20th centuries were built with private money. SpaceX, of course, was seeded with private money. Though I think we'd agree that Elon Musk couldn't have raised enough capital to get SpaceX to where it is now without NASA's help, we might disagree as to why such capital is so hard to come by.
I also agree with you that NASA (the agency) effectively lacks the will to explore. And I would argue, as Robert Zubrin does, that it's because they prioritize safety above mission success. Safety is critically important. But if safety is your primary goal, it's always safer not to fly the mission.
But back to why I think private companies can't raise enough capital for risky endeavors. Feel free to label me a Paul-bot, but in my opinion the root problem is that the federal reserve fixes the price of money, depreciates the currency, and allows a small group of banker cronies to skim the difference between the market rate for money and the artificial fed rate. It's hardly a market economy if the market for money is rigged by the government. The banks have now siphoned a majority share of our economy's free capital. And since they didn't earn it anyway, they gamble with it. But if you look historically at the U.S. when private citizens controlled most of the capital, they did in fact make risky investments and achieve great things. I don't think capitalism is our problem, I think it's the solution to our corporate welfare-ism. But we can't have effective capitalism until we have sound money.
This video contains some interesting history about commercial space development:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLAg5Y0kZVc
Nitrous oxide fuel blend is a mixed mono propellent that's non-toxic and has 320-340s ISP. Max Vozoff, formerly of SpaceX, talks about NOFB in this episode of The Space Show. He think's it's a game changer.
Methanol is the obvious solution (which is why everyone ignores it). We need to destroy the oil cartel that is looting our country--we can't do that when we only control a few percent of the fuel market.
But we have lots of coal and natural gas from which we can easily produce lots of methanol. Adapting new cars to run on any combination of gasoline and methanol is trivial, you just have to reprogram the ECU and make sure the fuel lines are up to snuff. And to be clear, a flex-fuel car can run on BOTH methanol and gasoline, you have a choice.
Methanol can also be made from any source of biomass, so it can be renewable and global-warming neutral too. Unfortunately, the car companies are owned by people who have even larger stakes in the oil industry, so they will never voluntarily make all their cars flex-fueled. Congress needs to mandate that all new cars sold in the U.S. be flex-fueled. It's as simple as that to get out of this mess. No "alternative fuel research" required.
How would Mozilla developers fix a crash in closed-source Adobe code?
They may not be able to fix the problem, but at the very least they should be able to prevent Flash from crashing Firefox.
The problem of preventing Flash from crashing Firefox and fixing the closed-source Adobe code are one in the same. If, for example, the Flash plugin dereferences an invalid pointer, there is nothing Firefox can do to prevent itself segfaulting short of running the Flash plugin in a separate process--which would cause all sorts of other problems.
In a related martian breakthrough, apparently an asteroid hit Mars with an energy of "1029 joules, which is equivalent to 100 billion gigatons of TNT."
I assume they meant 10^29 J. But still, the inability of most scientific journalist's to even check the plausibility of their figures is astounding.
We live in three twice-subdivided, spherically extruded gyroelognated pentagonal dipyramids built in 1972. Two of them are stuccoed and one is shingled. They don't leak.
They're each a single room, one with a pentagonal downstairs. I can't begin to explain how wonderful it is to live in a sphere. I love the geometry and the womb-like feeling. But I hate domes that are mangled and partitioned off like a normal house. You have to let the dome be what it is, if you do it works. And if you can't do that then you need to go with something else.
I guess these "Scientists" have never heard of a molotov cocktail. Or an ethanol powered car or rocket. Or anything.
CH3CH2OH(l) + 3O2(g) -> 2CO2(g) + 3H20(g)
What would be unlikely is if they didn't produce water from alcohol. What a stupid summary. TIS, right? (This Is Slashdot).
When it comes to traffic I've always said that it's throughput that matters, not position. If a car pulls in front of you and sets you back 10 meters, then all you lose is 10 meters. And only you lose it. If someone DOESN'T let you in and you have to slow down 10 m/s for 10 second and then accelerate up to speed again, you and many people behind you lose 100+ meters.
I've always found it ironic that the people who seem in the biggest hurry--the ones who don't let others in--are actually the ones that slow everybody down. So when someone has their signal on, JUST LET THEM IN! Your order in traffic is insignificant (grannies and talkies excepted).
Do you know multiple people some of whom learned Windows first and some of whom learned Linux first so that you can objectively state which is inherently easier to learn? I do. And the evidence I have seen is in Linux's favor when no predisposition to Windows is involved.
But neither I nor you can discern the truth about the matter until a sufficient body of people have learned each way and we can compare the ease of their progress. Just because it may be hard for you to adapt your biased skills to Linux doesn't mean it's inherently more difficult to learn Linux outright.
My father-in-law and now some of his older friends are set up with Ubuntu and they have a way easier time than their friends who use Windows. And all of these people are new to computers. I set up my FIL with Ubuntu initially and gave him some lessons over VNC. He has now installed Ubuntu on several people's computers at a retirement home in Portland all on his own. And even being a nontechincal guy he was able to get them on a better foot than they were using Windows. So there. Ubuntu is easier for your grandma when you're not there to clean out her spyware. And old people love the Beryl Cube effect.
While Windows development starts over with a complete rewrite every couple of years, open source will just keep steadily building on itself and get better and better and better with each passing year. It's quite fun to watch (and even more fun to participate in).
Actually, you want Haskell. Haskell offers arbitrary infix operators. Just enclose any two-argument function in backquotes (`) and it becomes an infix operator. You can also define new operators using any combination of legal symbols.
For example, if you had a function concat a b that concatenated the strings a and b, you could write:
concat 'Hello ' 'World' -- The usual way to call concat
Or you could write:
'Hello ' `concat` 'World' -- the backquotes make concat an infix operator
But best of all you can define the exact operator you want like so:
(.=) :: String -> String -> String .= b = concat a b
a
Now you can write:
'Hello ' .= 'World' -- Voila!
"If we can reinvent the car, imagine the jobs we can create."
Imagine what it'd do for the economy if they reinvented the wheel!
Who needs Google Maps when we have PIGWAD?
Stop killing pigs! Seriously. It is unnecessary, it is bad for the environment, it is bad for your health, and there are delicious alternatives. Not even to mention the horrendous conditions in which these pigs live.
P.S. Please don't mod me down just because you like meat. I am trying to make a rational argument.
Standards are what must be designed to last for decades, not the software that conforms to the standards. Things like XML, RDF and POSIX will be supported for decades, if not centuries. Who cares if it is Linux running your POSIX apps, or FreeBSD, or HURD? I don't think it matters if software uses libxml2 to parse your XML data, or some yet-unconceived API--as long as it understands XML!
If it is stability and reliable infrastructure that is desired, it is standards that must remain constant and software that must evolve to make the standards work with new technology.
Did anyone notice that the sample RSS feed on the Safari RSS page shows a Slashdot story?
Even Google's Cache is slashdotted. Can no web server survive the wrath of Slashdot?
was small, that is.
280 hotspots cover 2/3 of the country? I knew Estonia was, but sheesh.
I hope that OpenZaurus/OpenEmbedded get their act together soon and release a new version that supports the SL-5600/SL-6000. The current version of OpenZaurus is unstable on my SL-5600 and the Sharp ROM is crap. I am thinking about trying Gentoo for Zaurus.
Are there any other free Zaurus distros out there?
At the rate that Microsoft is applying for patents, I can imagine Microsoft being in a position like SCO--except with evidence on Microsoft's side.
It seems like a lose/lose situation for GNU/Linux. If Mono doesn't catch on then it will be tough for the free desktop to compete with Longhorn. If, however, Mono does catch on and becomes a major development backbone for GNU/Linux, then we risk having Microsoft Intellectual Property embedded deep within a lot of free software projects.Exactly. The launch inclination to the ISS takes the Shuttle over the north atlantic where an abort would drop the astronauts in freezing, arctic water. A launch to the Hubble, on the other hand, takes the Shuttle over warmer, equatorial waters where the chances of surviving an abort are better. There is also less micrometeor danger in the Hubble's orbit.
How are we supposed to send humans to the Moon and Mars if we are afraid to send them into Low Earth Orbit?
There is evidence that it is actually safer to send astronauts to the Hubble than it is to send them to the International Space Station.
I am sure a robot could do the job, but where does it leave humans in the long run if we don't take risks ourselves. Will we leave exploration of the universe to the Von Neumann Machines and maroon ourselves on Earth?
What an encouraging way to end the interview.
The next phase of development is for the Navy to control this ship from an iPod running Linux.