"Somehow, the words "allow" and "illegal" don't seem right in the same sentence."
Well tough, because the U.S. does in fact allow illegal immigration. In fact its a feature that workers are illegal because it makes them much easier for employers to underpay and exploit because they can't complain to anyone.
Obviously the U.S. government allows it there are millions and milllions of them and they are swelling America's population at a very high rate. American agriculture is completely and totally dependent on illegals to do field work, because most Americans wont touch this low paying very hard work. Most janitors and maids are illegal. Obviously you've never driven through farm country in California or stayed in a motel or you would have noticed the obvious.
Most places local police are precluded from arresting illegal immigrants(they don't want illegals to be afraid of police when other crimes occur), only the INS can and they are grossly understaffed for the tidal wave of immigrants in this country. There are employers across the nation employing them openly, and its quite rare for employers to get punished for hiring illegals though there are laws on the books.
There is a steady push in a lot of states to give illegal immigrants drivers licenses, children of illegal's are welcomed with open arms in schools and they are given free medical care.
Fact is the U.S. makes a token effort to try to stop them at the border, just to keep it from turning in to a tidal wave, but once they are in chances they will get deported are very, very low and they have will have NO PROBLEM finding employment as long as they work cheap, keep their mouth shut and stay out of trouble.
"(I hate flaming, but just this once. Forgive me God for I have sinned)"
Well you obviously have no fucking clue what you are talking about on this particular subject so you picked a bad time to start.
You also must not have read enough of my posts or my sig:
Voted for President Bush - No Supported the Iraq War - No Believe in Area 51 - Yea, its in Nevada, probably has nothing to do with Aliens, the extraterrestrial kind - Apollo 11, obviously note though the manned space program since has been a cruel hoax - Read SOLLOG, don't even know what that is and am not goggling it.
I'm refering to salaried employees. Watch out when a high tech company, or any company makes you salaried, because it means you are being setup to work tons of uncompensated overtime. Never been paid overtime for any high tech company I've ever worked for as a salaried employee. Only carrot they dangle in front of you is stock options or bonuses but those tend to be at the whim of your management chain, only coming if the project was a huge success and if there are any left after they take theirs which tend to be vastly larger than the working people get.
Contractors are different you are getting paid hourly so they do have to pay you for overtime. Of course they can also throw you away like used tissue if they don't need or want you unless your contract says otherwise.
"That's just... wrong. By that definition, the government is a cult"
Uh, no. We were talking about religions telling people how to live. You jumping to the fact governments tell people how to live doesn't have any relevence since they aren't normally a religion unless they are strongly tied to a state religion.
"If I stop going to church, noone will call me at work and tell me that I'm going to Hell."
Well my mom stopped going to church and the congregation excommunicated her and pretty much said that and they are a pretty main stream though conservative church who shall remain nameless. That isn't the definition of a cult, its just kind of standard fanatical Christian especially in rural areas where mainstream Christian churches have a high propensity to develop extreme intolerance (doubt its anything like you'll find in urban California if thats where you live).
"Maybe that's a per-ward (isn't that what they call their regional divisions?) thing."
They grew up in rural Utah in the Mormon heartland and are now what is known as Jack Mormons, born Mormon but who have abandoned it because its an especially goofy and controlling religion. Maybe urban Californian Mormons are slackers when it comes to intrusiveness and control. Rural churches in general tend to be a lot more intrusive in peoples lives.
"Of course I am. I'd have a hard time imagining anyone doing differently."
I think you are missing the point. To put it another way, I'm not sure exactly how strongly your congregation is against homosexuality but what would they do if you came to church with your arms around a gay lover and kissed in the pews. Most conservative church congregations would freak and throw you out. They are telling you how to live and chances are you've decided that opposing homosexuality is the right thing to do or you probably wouldn't be a Southern Baptist, you would be in a congregation thats accepts homosexuality. Well maybe somebody else thinks girls wearing makeup is immoral so they ban it. You think that makeup is OK and shouldn't be banned, well you are completely out of line for calling a religion a cult just because they oppose makeup. Neither one of these bans constitutes a cult, they are just two groups of people who want to dictate how there members live and they happen to have different opinions on morality. That is just the root of denominations and religious schisms. It has nothing to do with a cult.
So maybe you argue that cults are the ones that seek to control how people think. Well fact is most churches try to shape how you think whether you admit it or not. That is the basis of religion to impose social and moral guidelines on people from childhood. You just refuse to admit or recognize that your church has shaped your behavior just like the religions you brand as cults. You've probably been raised to conform to your churches views all your life so for you its normal and you deny that they did in fact control you and shape you to accept their views as the norm.
Well I guess by that definition every religion is a cult because they all tell their members how to live. Remember those ten commandment things. Koran tells people in detail how to live, don't eat pork, no alcohol or drugs. Many denominations forbid homosexuality, abortion, divorce, pornogrpahy, etc. Southern Baptist Conference certainly is near forbidding things though they say "oppose". They do have a good antiwar clause though I wonder how many Southern Baptists are in the military, especially officers, and fighting in Iraq with the church's blessing.
Later in your post I think you are branding religions as a cult just because they ban things your denomination doesn't ban. I could easily list the things Southern Baptists seek to ban and say they are cultists for telling their members how to live. Telling people how to live is what most religions do, its how they are defined.
Perhaps you mean instead the lengths to which a denomination seeks to enforce its dictates might indicate a cult.
"I don't think that the Mormon church is a cult"
I assure they exert a massive degree of control over their members. Friends of mine in the Mormon church recount how they seek to know every time they jack off.
"I think they're a cult."
I think you are just setting the standards where you find convenient and where your comfort level is.
True. But what kind of hypocrite are you when you brandish Jesus at everyone in sight and try to recruit people to your religion and are trying to make it the state religion of the U.S. and you you reject everything in his teachings that is inconvenient to your comfy modern life. Though its open to debate I imagine the big ones where most modern Christians fail badly:
- intolerance across many fronts - greed and wealth accumulation - acceptance of and often lust for war, America's military and political elite have no problem brandishing their Christianity and then rushing off to kill innocents the next.
Fact is if America's Christian DID practice what they preach this country might be a whole lot better place. Maybe not go to the extreme of impoverishing yourself though Jesus probably really did mean that(since in lot of ways he was a real communist). Maybe everyone should be able to accumulate the wealth needed to live reasonably well, and make a fair amount for a hard says work, but wouldn't it be great if all the greedy bastards, many of whom are Cx0's, plenty of whom claim to be Christains, who are screwing everyone in sight to maximize their wealth saw the light(think Enron and Halliburton). Wouldn't it be great if instead of persecuting gays, drug users and minorities we all just learned to live and let live and put out a helping hand. And most of all America needs to learn to defend itself only when attacked and against the attackers and stop launching optional wars like Iraq, Vietnam and Panama. The war against Al Qaida is justified. Iraq, Vietnam, Panama and sponsoring one coup after another are not.
The world probably wouldn't despise America as much as it does if it was really a Christian nation.
Relative to China and India rates why yes you are. If you are working for a big corporation chances are the execs at the top of your pyramid are making 100-1000 times what you are, so they are really the ones that are overpaid but again thanks to class warfare they get away with it as long as they keep slashing their labor costs to pay for it. Welcome to class warfare and globalization.
"Take a look at the loss figures and explain to me, please, how the most successful military campaign in the history of warfare can be characterized by the phrase "not enough armor."
I think you made the same mistake your dickhead of a commander in chief made when he declared mission accomplished when the war hadn't even really started.
I think the U.S. is about to cross the 1500 mark in dead, seriously wounded is what 6000 now and total wounded is around 10,000. Correct me if I'm wrong these numbers keep going up everyday, hard to keep track. We are well on our way to Vietnam class causalty figures. If we just had a draft there would be protests in the streets and on the campuses warming up.
There would be a lot more dead except for the one thing the U.S. military is doing very well in Iraq which is getting wounded soldiers to medical treatment so a lot of kids who would have died in earlier wars are wounded in this one. Of course it also means there are a LOT more kids are coming home missing limbs and with devastating burns. Of course if they hadn't been riding around in unarmored vehicles in a place laced with IED's maybe there wouldn't be so many of them either.
And of course there are the Iraqi civilian dead. Its so intriguing that the U.S. military, the CPA and the Iraqi puppet government suppress all reporting of how many Iraqi civilians have actually died. Maybe its not all that many, I just want to know why they suppress all reporting of them unless they were killed by insurgents. In Falluja apparently everyone who died was an "insurgent" whether they were or not. You sure like to rant about "terrorists" are "terrorists" because they kill innocent civilians. Well the U.S. does it all the time and has for most of its history. The American army massacred native American women and children, the American Army massacred women and children in the Phillipines during a brutal occupation after the Spanish American war, the American Army is the only army to use nuclear weapons to massacre women and children in Japan, the Air Force and Navy killed millions of women and children in Vietnam (poisoned lots of them with Agent Orange, a chemical weapon). America has killed at least thousands of civilians in Iraq, who knows how many really. Why is it the American military is not a terrorist organization by your own definition, Twirp?
Just because the U.S. charged through Iraq in a blaze of glory and Iraq's army melted away you really don't need to pat yourself on the back with ridiculous hyperbole like "the most successful military campaign in the history". Maybe it was a successful campaign but campaigns are not wars. It was one successful campaign followed by a disastrous, expensive failure of a war. As is often the case in both wars, and the Bush administration, the 3 people most responsible for this dismal failure were awarded shiny medals, because medals are a way to con the dumb public that a failure was a success. Look they are getting medals they must have been successful.
Fact is most nations under threat from the U.S. learned a lesson from Afghanistan and Iraq 1 and 2. Never stand toe to toe, in the open, with America's trillion dollar arsenal. Put up a token resistance and melt in the mountains and cities. You go toe to toe you will be annihilated. You melt away and fight an insurgency you slowly grind up the American army with sniper attacks and IED's and America vast military superiority is neutralized. Think you need to stop confusing what you think was the short term success of America's strategy with what is in reality probably the long term strategy of the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
I think you should probably use a more recent number than this one which was during a time of peace and under a Democratic President. I'm pretty sure today it is running closer to a half a trillion dollars a year if you factor in the Pentagons public budget, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan which are in separate books and all of the poorly reported funds being dumped in to the CIA, NSA, NRO etc.
On the news today it appears the National Guard is tettering on collapse and are wanting an extra $20 billion to patch up all the equipment wearing out and being blown up in Iraq. I think the number was around $4 billion just to slap armor on every humvee and truck in the theater. The guard is also 10,000 below their recruiting goals because amazingly people don't want to volunteer for weekend warrior duty that really means landing in a shooting gallery in Iraq and that, thanks to stop loss, you may not be able to get out of, ever, unless its in a pine box or when you have a limb blow off.
No we are thinking of a treaty that put an end to another round of escalations in the arms race at staggering cost to both sides, and more importantly a piece of paper that kept one power or the other or maybe both, from coming to the stupid conclusion that if they just build enough defenses they could win a global thermonuclear war. Mutual assured destruction as sick as it was was preferable to two super powers with ever expanding arsenals thinking they could win if they just spent a little more.
What do we have today. America sinking billions in to a system that probably wont work against anything other than maybe a lame rogue missile coming out of North Korea, which probably wont ever come because they know they would be incinerated if they ever launched it.
Can missile defense be defeated, why sure it can and a lot more cheaply than it takes to build this modern day Maginot line.
Method 1 already being pursued by Putin, build maneuvering warheads and load missiles up with lots of decoys.
Method 2 being pursued by every other roque state and terrorist in the world, slip a nuke in a cargo container or a tramp steamer or a fishing boat or..... and slip it in close to an American city.
With missile defense George W. and Condi Rice are just trying to relive Reagan's misguided and probably Alzeihemer's induced delusion that if American just spends more on missile defense it can win a nuclear war, that the rest of the world doesn't even want to fight anymore, and dominate the planet.
"China, as of this moment, seems to be a gentle giant."
I'm always amazed when you right wingers rant about the Soviet Union being an all encompassing evil in one breath and then turn around and say kind things like "gentle giant" about China. They are still most definitely "totalitarian" and pretty much communist. Why is it you you have such kind words for them, because they have thrown open the doors to Western capitalists and given them a vast pool of cheap labor. As long as right wingers are turning a PROFIT some place their high flying ideals of freedom and democracy get flushed down the crapper. The U.S. hated the U.S.S.R, Noriega and Saddam because they had the audacity to challenge American hegemony. That is the one and only thing American's hate. No one is allowed to challenge American's as they seek to rule the world.
The Soviet Union had a lot of short comings but the Communists took a country that was smoldering ruin at the end of World War I, a land of a few wealthy elitists and millions of destitute peasants and turned it in to a global super power, a power that defeated Hitler almost single handedly, and which still has some of the world best educated people. The main thing that went really wrong on the way was Stalin seized power, he wasn't a communist, he was a just a totalitarian despot, not sure communism had anything to do with the Soviet Union after that it was just a dictatorship like a lot of dictatorships and it appears it will be again under Putin.
One question, why exactly would China resort to armed conflict or event the threat of it. They are going to destroy the U.S. economicly, and are already well on their way there. I think you need to give the Chinese credit for having a long view and being able to see that in the long run they are going to win without the messiness of a global war. Contrast that long view with that of most of America's corprate and political leaders who can't think past this quarters numbers and today's stock prices. I know who I'd put my money on.
Uh, yea, and as I said in my post that came about because it was a condition for Utah gaining statehood. I doubt the Mormon church would have outlawed it if they hadn't been forced to.
"By most accounts that shortage no longer exists."
Exactly. It is just one prong of a multipronged fork being used to drive down labor costs in the U.S. It is part of class warfare, and I know half of the readers just freaked when I used those two dirty words, but the fact is class warfare exists, it is happening and the class that is winning the war is doing such a good job most American's refuse to believe there even is such a thing.
The multiple prongs of class warfare:
- Offshoring jobs to China, India or any other place that with cheap labor and no regulation - Allow a flood of illegal immigrants across the border to take all the menial jobs - H1B visas to allow a flood of legal immigrants for all the skilled jobs. H1B visa workers lead the way in racking up huge quantities of uncompensated overtime that helps insure everyone else has to do the same. - Bust unions at every opportunity and strive to drain them of their power and relevance. If you can't bust them, close all the unionized factories and ship the jobs offshore.
The fact is U.S. labor is overpriced and of declining quality(badly educated, badly motivated, etc) so in a globalized economy all of these hammers are seen as necessary by the class that is winning class warfare. Of course the irony is any one were to look closely at the wealthy who are winning class warfare you realize they are badly educated, have bad judgement, are often crooks(think Enron etc.), and are devoid of morales and scuples. They are just as much to blame for America's decline, but since they are rich and powerful they don't get to suffer for it while everyone in the working class does.
" hope your MBA can get you to a boardroom in the next 5 years."
I'm not sure even getting to the boardroom will assure you success. Its a matter of time before all the smart hardworking people in India and China have acquired the expertise, market knowledge, IP, and capital necessary to start going it alone. They will no doubt soon realize they don't need fat cats sitting in New York scraping off all the cream and doing nothing of value except rigging the books.
This will be especially true as consumers in China and India continue their rise to affluence. American companies have an edge at the moment because America is where the most affluent market is. But as more American's are pushed in to unemployment and underemployment, and as trade, budget and credit card debts continue to savage American wealth the lucrative and growth markets are not going to be in America much longer, they are going to be in places like China and India and that will further eliminate the need for American execs and marketing types in the loop.
The one long term saving grace for America is if it is both willing and able to use its military power(something else that is draining the U.S. economy) to maintain control of the world. It seems to be the course the U.S. is choosing, world domination through military might not through economic might.
"Meanwhile there are many "cults" who just differ with mainstream christian beliefs."
I think the only difference between "cult" and "mainstream" is the number of warm bodies in the particular denomination and how much economic and political power they have. Koresh in Waco had followers in the dozens so he was a cult. I'm pretty sure Mormons would be called a cult if you looked at their organization objectively were there not millions of them, if they didn't pretty much own a state and weren't politicly and economicly powerful. Their history and the Book of Mormon is to say the least "interesting". South Park has a pretty good parody of it. Many are still polygamists to this day often with rather young girls, which was a key factor in the persecution of Koresh. I think most Mormons would be polygamists had banning it not been a condition of statehood. If you think about it Joseph Smith set up a pretty nice lifestyle for himself. Mormons have made the jump from cult to mainstream at this point thanks to success.
I'm pretty sure if Jesus were to come back today he would most probably be persecuted as a cultists and if he were to start preaching the same message today he preached 2000 years ago most "mainstream" Christians would probably crucify him one way or another, assuming he didn't start lobbing miracles left and right. Most modern Christians don't seem to really understand or agree with most of the things he actually said and did. The New Testament as nearly as I can tell is just empty text they listen to and maybe even memorize without ever actually taking to heart and without actually practicing the other 6 days of the week.
Why yes I am. Maybe its why they are failing. They needed to dump MIPS because starting soon after Pentium Pro it could no longer compete on most workstation work loads.
But in the process of going to IA32 they ended up competing in PC space and the margins were razor thin. For a company accustomed to the good old days of proprietary Unix workstation profit margins of 30-40% (remember the outrageous markups on RAM and disks) they were doomed.
The only way out:
- Jumped in to GPU space and compete against 3Dlabs, 3Dfx, Nvidia and ATI. But they were to late to the game, didn't get GPU's, the high volume, the low margins, the fast turns etc.
- Try to compete in Apple's space which is kind of that they did in workstations they were just bad at it because MIPS sucked and trying IA32 made them look like a PC vendor. IRIX also eventually sucked compared to OSX and Linux
- Jump in to PC space but they would need to compete on Dell and HP turf, little differentiation, high volume, low margin and SGI sucks at all that.
- Build high end, really unique, really custom systems which is what they are doing, but it only works if you have customers like Uncle Sam with deep pockets willing to pay a lot for special hardware and software. Wont support their old stock multiples or growth though.
"SGI could have fared much better by making Linux its IA32 graphics"
Maybe but the O2 and the Visual Workstation had the same fatal flaw. They had stupendous memory bandwith for video and texture maps but the memory bandwidth to the CPU sucked compared to just about every other competing platform. The O2 was a cellar dweller on just about every benchmark when it shipped and it got nothing but worse with time. That and the feeble MIPS CPU's in them are why ILM saw a 5X performance jump when they dumped them. Octane was better but it was also a lote more expensive and still not competitive with cheap PC's unless you were doing video or otherwise exploiting its I/O architecture
Here is a pretty good link(from google cache) on ILM's Linux transition.
Bottomline the thing gained in dumping SGI was a 5X performance improvement at a much lower cost which shows you how far behind the power curve SGI's workstations are. IA32, Nvidia and ATI have been making giant leaps while SGI has been taking baby steps for years.
I should note a key factor in this saga, as memory serves, was Intel cut an NDA with DEC to evaluate the Alpha architecture for future inclusion in their product line, Alpha being the reigning performance king at the time. As memory serves Intel just stole all the performance jewels out of their documents, incorporated them in Pentium Pro and beyond and told DEC to go to hell. DEC did win a judgement against them over this blatant theft by Intel, but by then the damage was done to RISC, Intel achieved performance parity at a much lower cost and higher volume and the RISC workstation market was doomed.
I should also note one area SGI might still be able to compete at big studios is in storage and networks. They do still have a good story on IO, disk farms and high speed networking. This is crucial to most studios since they store and move tons of images, textures, scenes, etc to workstations, rendering and compositing farms. They do still have a story for specialized hardware intensive applications like Discrete's high end applications. But SGI simply has no story for workstations or rendering farms in today's studio's and hasn't had one for years.
Probably the only thing I agree with in this post but it didn't stop you from pretending like you knew what you were talking about.
""Rocket Rick" Belluzzo saw the shift in the market, but he reacted to it in precisely the wrong way."
Actually Jim Clark saw the same shift coming long before Beluzzo got there. He knew the PC was going to cream SGI on the desktop and he was telling everyone at SGI that, they didn't want to hear it, they drove Clark out and he made a fortune on Netscape, the Internet and the PC.
The writing was on the wall for the SGI desktop the day the Pentium Pro, Windows NT and Glint/Voodoo graphics arrived running Softimage(owned by Microsoft at the time). If they wanted to stay in the graphics market they needed to jump to developing single chip GPU's and mass producing them like 3Dlabs, 3dfx, Nvidia and ATI did. They also needed to dump MIPS for IA32. Unfortunately SGI was clinging to a proprietary OS, CPU, and especially sprawling multi card graphics systems that took a long time to develop, were very expensive, not very reliable and quickly got buried by GPU's which had everything on a chip, were faster, cheap when mass produced, revved much faster and were more reliable. SGI was asleep at the wheel, they didn't make that shift, most of their graphics talent saw it and left and ended up at the companies that did. SGI bet the workstation farm on video processing, which is why the O2 and Octante are like they are, and completely lost the market for people who want fast CPU's and to draw lots of polygons fast which is most of the workstation market.
At this same time SGI started chasing the supercomputing market and that isn't a market that is going to support the high growth and high profitability SGI knew in its glory days.
And then of course Belluzzo tried to build a PC. The problem with playing in the PC market is no one makes money at it except Intel and Microsoft. Everyone else is on razor thin margins and only make a profit with huge volume and ruthless cost cutting. It simply wasn't a market SGI had any chance of winning in. Only chance they had on the desktop was to follow the Apple model and Apple's desktop model hasn't really ever been a break through success.
"Right now, companies like ILM are tearing out SGI workstations and replacing them with ultra-cheap desktops. They're taking advantage of the ability to work with low-resolution proxies in real time and then render jobs overnight on the big iron. That's a good workflow for that environment."
SGI is throwing out their SGI's because they fell dismally behind the curves, the price curve, the performance curve and the price/performance curve. I doubt ILM's work flow is changing in the transition, other than their machines are just a lot faster and they can draw more polygons, so I have no clue why you are rambling about low res proxies and rendering on big iron.
SGI's big iron is really badly suited for rendering. Its geared to supercomputing and applications that need lots of processors working on a shared memory image. Rendering works best on lots of cheap little boxes with a CPU, some RAM and a very fast network. Cheap rack mount PC's running Linux are a perfect fit. SGI's and IRIX are not. Again SGI has no chance of being a player in this market today.
I'm amazed its taken the big studios as long as it has to throw out SGI though the big studios had to wait for Linux/OSX to mature because most big studio pipelines and expertise are completely wedded to Unix. Windows was never a viable option outside of little niches or smaller studios.
I wager the Star War's prequels and much of ILM's recent efforts are as bad as they are partially because their artists were tied to boat anchor O2's and Octanes which are completely dusted by a PC and an Nvidia graphics card at a fraction the price and have been for years. They had to use low end standins on the SGI's just because the graphics and CPU performance on SGI's
OK I stand corrected on CRV. I wasn't following it at the time but if Scaled Composites did it, its A-OK with me. Lets consider the possible reasons for cancelling it:
A. It needed to be designed to launch people in to space too. The one way'ness is the thing that made it look goofy and like a waste of money.
B. Lockheed and Boeing were pissed because they were being threatened by someone bending metal... err... composites on a new spacecraft, something they rarely do any more.
When every anyone carps about the cost of big science and engineering endeavors you only need to point out that the U.S. has squandered nearly $200 billion on the war in Iraq so far and there is no end in sight. The U.S. has also killed 1200 Americans and countless thousands of Iraqi's so losing a few volunteer astronauts in a dangerous space mission seems pretty trivial by comparison. Its unobvious what exactly was accomplished by Iraq either.
If the U.S. put the money it wastes on world domination in to mars and moon missions or an Apollo class push on fusion energy there would be potential huge benefits in many areas. Fusion power harnessed to producing Hydrogen from water for fuel would fix a broad array of Earth's ills, pollution, green house gases and a finite energy source that is soon going to start disappearing. If the energy got cheap enough it would be a boon to the economy too(as long as you aren't in the oil and coal business).
But politicians being insane they would rather squander money on totally optional wars. Go figure.
"Reform only occurs in the face of an externally imposed crisis."
Exactly what do you call the Challenger and Columbia disasters. They were both spectacular failures and both devastated the manned space program. The Shuttle was hobbled after the first and is largely useless thanks to the constraints placed on it after the second.
I agree with your post but you seem to suggest reform would occur if there was an externally imposed crisis and that is obviously not true in the case of NASA. It appears NOTHING will reform NASA other than gutting it and starting fresh (without the same old, same old, contractors who are at least 50% of NASA's problem).
I'm guessing you mean CEV. The CRV (Crew Return Vehicle) was insane and was cancelled. They were going to spend millions and millions to build a new mini Shuttle whose sole reason to exist was to sit on the ISS and serve as a lifeboat in the event of an emergency. Only thing it did was make it possible to get the ISS manning up to 6-7 people so they could actually do research instead of just maintain the bloody mess. Could have been done way cheaper with an extra docking port and a second Soyuz capsule. It was just another sign of the sickness that is NASA's manned space program.
As for the CEV(Crew Exploration Vehicle) it is a better idea than CRV but I am willing to predict Boeing or Lockheed will win the contract, they will spend billions and billions of dollars, on one design after another(like ISS and space planes), the schedule will drag on for ever and the program will be cancelled around the time they have to start bending metal or launch something. The proposed schedule is already ridiculously long. They are just building a glorified new capsule like America and Russia have been building for decades and it will take longer and cost more money than Apollo did before its done.
Again, please, please, just let Burt Rutan build it. He is competing for it through T/Space but its a given a giant consortium lead by either Boeing or Lockheed will get the contract and they will just transfer huge sums from tax payer pockets to their bottomlines and not build anything worth a damn.
True of a stupid round trip stunt like Apollo was. The benefits of establishing a permanent colony on Mars would be enormous. It would be opening a whole new biosphere and Earth is getting so crowded it needs a new biosphere and frontier, create a lifeboat in the event of a cataclysm on Earth(runway greenhouse effect, asteroid strike, nuclear war, or pandemic), and push mankind to start tapping resources other than the dwindling ones on Earth. Chances are high it would push big advances in energy(no fossil fuels there), biology and meteorology(farming and terraforming), and sociology(a culture with a fresh start potentially free of Earth cultural baggage).
I am overjoyed O'Keefe is gone, ding dong the bitch is dead. He was a clueless bean counter devoid of the imagination or engineering background to do that job, you need look not further than the abomination of a Hubble robotic mission. Bush putting them there was mostly an indicator of his antipathy to NASA, science, engineering and big pork barrel bureaucracy. I doubt he will be replaced with anyone any better though.
Burt Rutan is the man to run this endeavor but it would ruin him putting him in charge of NASA in all of its pork filled despair. Again take NASA's manned spaced budget and give it to Rutan's company in a no strings grant, only condition he get in to LEO cheap and then work on to the Moon and Mars with a mandate for a colony on Mars and not a stupid stunt, round trip.
I was refering more to him saying Slashdot would be a better place without Michael rather than being a moderator, sorry for not being explicit. Maybe I was a to little terse to make that clear. More than a few people think Slashdot might improve without Twirp's profane name calling rants at anyone he disagrees with, though his informed Mac posts are sometimes wonderful as long as he doesn't tilt in to the vicious name calling. Not sure if Michael engages in vicious name calling at other posters. I think he mostly just post left leaning stories which obviously drives you people nuts (since you are intent on snuffing out everything left of center and probably the center too).
Personally I think Michael's submissions add color to Slashdot but I could see, and I'd be totally cool with, adding a right wing moderator counterpart to balance him, "Fair and Balanced" ya know. Me I like to hear all sides of things. Don't suppose it occurred to all you right wing ranters, that adding more viewpoints, some which match yours, would be better, and more "American", than trying to snuff out the views that drive you in to an apoplexy.
For all the ranting you guys do about America and its "Freedom" you sure seem to be at the front of the line in trying to snuff it out.
Only danger in adding a right wing moderator is I get the impression that most Slashdot readers are smart, well informed and many from places not as insanely righat as America so if you started pushing a lot of right wing posts Slashdot might lose most of its intelligent audience and be left with right wing ranters. There are sure a lot of them in America but I'm not sure many of them are smart enough to be up to Slashdot, they are a little busy clinging to Creationism over Evolution and not worrying about the Greenhouse effect since Jesus is going to come and take them all to heaven real soon now anyway.
You have to limit them period. A good first step would be to spend 200 billion on alternatives for power generation and transportation. I choose 200 billion because thats about what the U.S. has squandered in Iraq in two years so far to no good end.
You don't need Kyoto caps if enlightened countries and companies just started solving the problem. Kyoto is just there to inflict pain especially on the U.S. so that it either:
A. Doesn't fix the problem and craters its economy with cutbacks to comply B. Make it more desirable to come up with solutions C. Just doesn't comply
Bush chooses C. So exactly what are you accomplishing with a treaty the worlds worst offender is going to ignore.
If you just come up with solutions you don't need the pain inflicting part. How much is Bush spending on his Hydrogen initiative, like a billion dollars. Thats a couple of weeks of Iraq and most of its just going in to subsidies for Detroit and traditional oil, coal, gas and nuclear. You see he is apparently planning on using hydrocarbons to make a lot of the Hydrogen and unfortunately the carbon that is left is carbon dioxide and a green house gas unless they figure out a way to bank it under the ground.
It might be a real boon to some countries economy if they made fusion energy practical and used the electricity from it to create Hydrogen from water to power cars, trucks and tractors. If only the U.S. invested its hundreds of billions in useful stuff in stead of Iraq and missile defense. You would shake your dependence on foreign oil and you wouldn't need to fight wars in the Middle East.
"Will we instead see Chinese industry moving"
Burma, Bangladesh, etc. there are plenty of places to move it up until you reach the point the runaway climate kicks in and at that point it makes no difference. Though a lot of the pollution will tend to gravitate to places that have coal deposits. You can ship it a ways with big ships or rail lines.
Another huge contributor to greenhouse gases is flaring off natural gas from oil fields and those are scattered all over the world and not exactly even within national boundries for a lot of the off shore wells. National Geographic recently had pictures of where all the light is on the face of the earth and an amazing amount of it is natural gas being flared off from oil and gas fields and being completely wasted.
Slashdot Mirror
"Somehow, the words "allow" and "illegal" don't seem right in the same sentence."
Well tough, because the U.S. does in fact allow illegal immigration. In fact its a feature that workers are illegal because it makes them much easier for employers to underpay and exploit because they can't complain to anyone.
Obviously the U.S. government allows it there are millions and milllions of them and they are swelling America's population at a very high rate. American agriculture is completely and totally dependent on illegals to do field work, because most Americans wont touch this low paying very hard work. Most janitors and maids are illegal. Obviously you've never driven through farm country in California or stayed in a motel or you would have noticed the obvious.
Most places local police are precluded from arresting illegal immigrants(they don't want illegals to be afraid of police when other crimes occur), only the INS can and they are grossly understaffed for the tidal wave of immigrants in this country. There are employers across the nation employing them openly, and its quite rare for employers to get punished for hiring illegals though there are laws on the books.
There is a steady push in a lot of states to give illegal immigrants drivers licenses, children of illegal's are welcomed with open arms in schools and they are given free medical care.
Fact is the U.S. makes a token effort to try to stop them at the border, just to keep it from turning in to a tidal wave, but once they are in chances they will get deported are very, very low and they have will have NO PROBLEM finding employment as long as they work cheap, keep their mouth shut and stay out of trouble.
"(I hate flaming, but just this once. Forgive me God for I have sinned)"
Well you obviously have no fucking clue what you are talking about on this particular subject so you picked a bad time to start.
You also must not have read enough of my posts or my sig:
Voted for President Bush - No
Supported the Iraq War - No
Believe in Area 51 - Yea, its in Nevada, probably has nothing to do with Aliens, the extraterrestrial kind
- Apollo 11, obviously note though the manned space program since has been a cruel hoax
- Read SOLLOG, don't even know what that is and am not goggling it.
To quote Twirlip, you are a dumbass.
I'm refering to salaried employees. Watch out when a high tech company, or any company makes you salaried, because it means you are being setup to work tons of uncompensated overtime.
Never been paid overtime for any high tech company I've ever worked for as a salaried employee. Only carrot they dangle in front of you is stock options or bonuses but those tend to be at the whim of your management chain, only coming if the project was a huge success and if there are any left after they take theirs which tend to be vastly larger than the working people get.
Contractors are different you are getting paid hourly so they do have to pay you for overtime. Of course they can also throw you away like used tissue if they don't need or want you unless your contract says otherwise.
"That's just... wrong. By that definition, the government is a cult"
Uh, no. We were talking about religions telling people how to live. You jumping to the fact governments tell people how to live doesn't have any relevence since they aren't normally a religion unless they are strongly tied to a state religion.
"If I stop going to church, noone will call me at work and tell me that I'm going to Hell."
Well my mom stopped going to church and the congregation excommunicated her and pretty much said that and they are a pretty main stream though conservative church who shall remain nameless. That isn't the definition of a cult, its just kind of standard fanatical Christian especially in rural areas where mainstream Christian churches have a high propensity to develop extreme intolerance (doubt its anything like you'll find in urban California if thats where you live).
"Maybe that's a per-ward (isn't that what they call their regional divisions?) thing."
They grew up in rural Utah in the Mormon heartland and are now what is known as Jack Mormons, born Mormon but who have abandoned it because its an especially goofy and controlling religion. Maybe urban Californian Mormons are slackers when it comes to intrusiveness and control. Rural churches in general tend to be a lot more intrusive in peoples lives.
"Of course I am. I'd have a hard time imagining anyone doing differently."
I think you are missing the point. To put it another way, I'm not sure exactly how strongly your congregation is against homosexuality but what would they do if you came to church with your arms around a gay lover and kissed in the pews. Most conservative church congregations would freak and throw you out. They are telling you how to live and chances are you've decided that opposing homosexuality is the right thing to do or you probably wouldn't be a Southern Baptist, you would be in a congregation thats accepts homosexuality. Well maybe somebody else thinks girls wearing makeup is immoral so they ban it. You think that makeup is OK and shouldn't be banned, well you are completely out of line for calling a religion a cult just because they oppose makeup. Neither one of these bans constitutes a cult, they are just two groups of people who want to dictate how there members live and they happen to have different opinions on morality. That is just the root of denominations and religious schisms. It has nothing to do with a cult.
So maybe you argue that cults are the ones that seek to control how people think. Well fact is most churches try to shape how you think whether you admit it or not. That is the basis of religion to impose social and moral guidelines on people from childhood. You just refuse to admit or recognize that your church has shaped your behavior just like the religions you brand as cults. You've probably been raised to conform to your churches views all your life so for you its normal and you deny that they did in fact control you and shape you to accept their views as the norm.
"a group that tells its members how to live"
Well I guess by that definition every religion is a cult because they all tell their members how to live. Remember those ten commandment things. Koran tells people in detail how to live, don't eat pork, no alcohol or drugs. Many denominations forbid homosexuality, abortion, divorce, pornogrpahy, etc. Southern Baptist Conference certainly is near forbidding things though they say "oppose". They do have a good antiwar clause though I wonder how many Southern Baptists are in the military, especially officers, and fighting in Iraq with the church's blessing.
Later in your post I think you are branding religions as a cult just because they ban things your denomination doesn't ban. I could easily list the things Southern Baptists seek to ban and say they are cultists for telling their members how to live. Telling people how to live is what most religions do, its how they are defined.
Perhaps you mean instead the lengths to which a denomination seeks to enforce its dictates might indicate a cult.
"I don't think that the Mormon church is a cult"
I assure they exert a massive degree of control over their members. Friends of mine in the Mormon church recount how they seek to know every time they jack off.
"I think they're a cult."
I think you are just setting the standards where you find convenient and where your comfort level is.
True. But what kind of hypocrite are you when you brandish Jesus at everyone in sight and try to recruit people to your religion and are trying to make it the state religion of the U.S. and you you reject everything in his teachings that is inconvenient to your comfy modern life. Though its open to debate I imagine the big ones where most modern Christians fail badly:
- intolerance across many fronts
- greed and wealth accumulation
- acceptance of and often lust for war, America's military and political elite have no problem brandishing their Christianity and then rushing off to kill innocents the next.
Fact is if America's Christian DID practice what they preach this country might be a whole lot better place. Maybe not go to the extreme of impoverishing yourself though Jesus probably really did mean that(since in lot of ways he was a real communist). Maybe everyone should be able to accumulate the wealth needed to live reasonably well, and make a fair amount for a hard says work, but wouldn't it be great if all the greedy bastards, many of whom are Cx0's, plenty of whom claim to be Christains, who are screwing everyone in sight to maximize their wealth saw the light(think Enron and Halliburton). Wouldn't it be great if instead of persecuting gays, drug users and minorities we all just learned to live and let live and put out a helping hand. And most of all America needs to learn to defend itself only when attacked and against the attackers and stop launching optional wars like Iraq, Vietnam and Panama. The war against Al Qaida is justified. Iraq, Vietnam, Panama and sponsoring one coup after another are not.
The world probably wouldn't despise America as much as it does if it was really a Christian nation.
Relative to China and India rates why yes you are. If you are working for a big corporation chances are the execs at the top of your pyramid are making 100-1000 times what you are, so they are really the ones that are overpaid but again thanks to class warfare they get away with it as long as they keep slashing their labor costs to pay for it. Welcome to class warfare and globalization.
"Take a look at the loss figures and explain to me, please, how the most successful military campaign in the history of warfare can be characterized by the phrase "not enough armor."
I think you made the same mistake your dickhead of a commander in chief made when he declared mission accomplished when the war hadn't even really started.
I think the U.S. is about to cross the 1500 mark in dead, seriously wounded is what 6000 now and total wounded is around 10,000. Correct me if I'm wrong these numbers keep going up everyday, hard to keep track. We are well on our way to Vietnam class causalty figures. If we just had a draft there would be protests in the streets and on the campuses warming up.
There would be a lot more dead except for the one thing the U.S. military is doing very well in Iraq which is getting wounded soldiers to medical treatment so a lot of kids who would have died in earlier wars are wounded in this one. Of course it also means there are a LOT more kids are coming home missing limbs and with devastating burns. Of course if they hadn't been riding around in unarmored vehicles in a place laced with IED's maybe there wouldn't be so many of them either.
And of course there are the Iraqi civilian dead. Its so intriguing that the U.S. military, the CPA and the Iraqi puppet government suppress all reporting of how many Iraqi civilians have actually died. Maybe its not all that many, I just want to know why they suppress all reporting of them unless they were killed by insurgents. In Falluja apparently everyone who died was an "insurgent" whether they were or not. You sure like to rant about "terrorists" are "terrorists" because they kill innocent civilians. Well the U.S. does it all the time and has for most of its history. The American army massacred native American women and children, the American Army massacred women and children in the Phillipines during a brutal occupation after the Spanish American war, the American Army is the only army to use nuclear weapons to massacre women and children in Japan, the Air Force and Navy killed millions of women and children in Vietnam (poisoned lots of them with Agent Orange, a chemical weapon). America has killed at least thousands of civilians in Iraq, who knows how many really. Why is it the American military is not a terrorist organization by your own definition, Twirp?
Just because the U.S. charged through Iraq in a blaze of glory and Iraq's army melted away you really don't need to pat yourself on the back with ridiculous hyperbole like "the most successful military campaign in the history". Maybe it was a successful campaign but campaigns are not wars. It was one successful campaign followed by a disastrous, expensive failure of a war. As is often the case in both wars, and the Bush administration, the 3 people most responsible for this dismal failure were awarded shiny medals, because medals are a way to con the dumb public that a failure was a success. Look they are getting medals they must have been successful.
Fact is most nations under threat from the U.S. learned a lesson from Afghanistan and Iraq 1 and 2. Never stand toe to toe, in the open, with America's trillion dollar arsenal. Put up a token resistance and melt in the mountains and cities. You go toe to toe you will be annihilated. You melt away and fight an insurgency you slowly grind up the American army with sniper attacks and IED's and America vast military superiority is neutralized. Think you need to stop confusing what you think was the short term success of America's strategy with what is in reality probably the long term strategy of the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"at $276.7 billion (1999)."
I think you should probably use a more recent number than this one which was during a time of peace and under a Democratic President. I'm pretty sure today it is running closer to a half a trillion dollars a year if you factor in the Pentagons public budget, the war in Iraq and Afghanistan which are in separate books and all of the poorly reported funds being dumped in to the CIA, NSA, NRO etc.
On the news today it appears the National Guard is tettering on collapse and are wanting an extra $20 billion to patch up all the equipment wearing out and being blown up in Iraq. I think the number was around $4 billion just to slap armor on every humvee and truck in the theater. The guard is also 10,000 below their recruiting goals because amazingly people don't want to volunteer for weekend warrior duty that really means landing in a shooting gallery in Iraq and that, thanks to stop loss, you may not be able to get out of, ever, unless its in a pine box or when you have a limb blow off.
No we are thinking of a treaty that put an end to another round of escalations in the arms race at staggering cost to both sides, and more importantly a piece of paper that kept one power or the other or maybe both, from coming to the stupid conclusion that if they just build enough defenses they could win a global thermonuclear war. Mutual assured destruction as sick as it was was preferable to two super powers with ever expanding arsenals thinking they could win if they just spent a little more.
..... and slip it in close to an American city.
What do we have today. America sinking billions in to a system that probably wont work against anything other than maybe a lame rogue missile coming out of North Korea, which probably wont ever come because they know they would be incinerated if they ever launched it.
Can missile defense be defeated, why sure it can and a lot more cheaply than it takes to build this modern day Maginot line.
Method 1 already being pursued by Putin, build maneuvering warheads and load missiles up with lots of decoys.
Method 2 being pursued by every other roque state and terrorist in the world, slip a nuke in a cargo container or a tramp steamer or a fishing boat or
With missile defense George W. and Condi Rice are just trying to relive Reagan's misguided and probably Alzeihemer's induced delusion that if American just spends more on missile defense it can win a nuclear war, that the rest of the world doesn't even want to fight anymore, and dominate the planet.
"China, as of this moment, seems to be a gentle giant."
I'm always amazed when you right wingers rant about the Soviet Union being an all encompassing evil in one breath and then turn around and say kind things like "gentle giant" about China. They are still most definitely "totalitarian" and pretty much communist. Why is it you you have such kind words for them, because they have thrown open the doors to Western capitalists and given them a vast pool of cheap labor. As long as right wingers are turning a PROFIT some place their high flying ideals of freedom and democracy get flushed down the crapper. The U.S. hated the U.S.S.R, Noriega and Saddam because they had the audacity to challenge American hegemony. That is the one and only thing American's hate. No one is allowed to challenge American's as they seek to rule the world.
The Soviet Union had a lot of short comings but the Communists took a country that was smoldering ruin at the end of World War I, a land of a few wealthy elitists and millions of destitute peasants and turned it in to a global super power, a power that defeated Hitler almost single handedly, and which still has some of the world best educated people. The main thing that went really wrong on the way was Stalin seized power, he wasn't a communist, he was a just a totalitarian despot, not sure communism had anything to do with the Soviet Union after that it was just a dictatorship like a lot of dictatorships and it appears it will be again under Putin.
One question, why exactly would China resort to armed conflict or event the threat of it. They are going to destroy the U.S. economicly, and are already well on their way there. I think you need to give the Chinese credit for having a long view and being able to see that in the long run they are going to win without the messiness of a global war. Contrast that long view with that of most of America's corprate and political leaders who can't think past this quarters numbers and today's stock prices. I know who I'd put my money on.
Uh, yea, and as I said in my post that came about because it was a condition for Utah gaining statehood. I doubt the Mormon church would have outlawed it if they hadn't been forced to.
"By most accounts that shortage no longer exists."
Exactly. It is just one prong of a multipronged fork being used to drive down labor costs in the U.S. It is part of class warfare, and I know half of the readers just freaked when I used those two dirty words, but the fact is class warfare exists, it is happening and the class that is winning the war is doing such a good job most American's refuse to believe there even is such a thing.
The multiple prongs of class warfare:
- Offshoring jobs to China, India or any other place that with cheap labor and no regulation
- Allow a flood of illegal immigrants across the border to take all the menial jobs
- H1B visas to allow a flood of legal immigrants for all the skilled jobs. H1B visa workers lead the way in racking up huge quantities of uncompensated overtime that helps insure everyone else has to do the same.
- Bust unions at every opportunity and strive to drain them of their power and relevance. If you can't bust them, close all the unionized factories and ship the jobs offshore.
The fact is U.S. labor is overpriced and of declining quality(badly educated, badly motivated, etc) so in a globalized economy all of these hammers are seen as necessary by the class that is winning class warfare. Of course the irony is any one were to look closely at the wealthy who are winning class warfare you realize they are badly educated, have bad judgement, are often crooks(think Enron etc.), and are devoid of morales and scuples. They are just as much to blame for America's decline, but since they are rich and powerful they don't get to suffer for it while everyone in the working class does.
" hope your MBA can get you to a boardroom in the next 5 years."
I'm not sure even getting to the boardroom will assure you success. Its a matter of time before all the smart hardworking people in India and China have acquired the expertise, market knowledge, IP, and capital necessary to start going it alone. They will no doubt soon realize they don't need fat cats sitting in New York scraping off all the cream and doing nothing of value except rigging the books.
This will be especially true as consumers in China and India continue their rise to affluence. American companies have an edge at the moment because America is where the most affluent market is. But as more American's are pushed in to unemployment and underemployment, and as trade, budget and credit card debts continue to savage American wealth the lucrative and growth markets are not going to be in America much longer, they are going to be in places like China and India and that will further eliminate the need for American execs and marketing types in the loop.
The one long term saving grace for America is if it is both willing and able to use its military power(something else that is draining the U.S. economy) to maintain control of the world. It seems to be the course the U.S. is choosing, world domination through military might not through economic might.
"Meanwhile there are many "cults" who just differ with mainstream christian beliefs."
I think the only difference between "cult" and "mainstream" is the number of warm bodies in the particular denomination and how much economic and political power they have. Koresh in Waco had followers in the dozens so he was a cult. I'm pretty sure Mormons would be called a cult if you looked at their organization objectively were there not millions of them, if they didn't pretty much own a state and weren't politicly and economicly powerful. Their history and the Book of Mormon is to say the least "interesting". South Park has a pretty good parody of it. Many are still polygamists to this day often with rather young girls, which was a key factor in the persecution of Koresh. I think most Mormons would be polygamists had banning it not been a condition of statehood. If you think about it Joseph Smith set up a pretty nice lifestyle for himself. Mormons have made the jump from cult to mainstream at this point thanks to success.
I'm pretty sure if Jesus were to come back today he would most probably be persecuted as a cultists and if he were to start preaching the same message today he preached 2000 years ago most "mainstream" Christians would probably crucify him one way or another, assuming he didn't start lobbing miracles left and right. Most modern Christians don't seem to really understand or agree with most of the things he actually said and did. The New Testament as nearly as I can tell is just empty text they listen to and maybe even memorize without ever actually taking to heart and without actually practicing the other 6 days of the week.
"You are contradicting yourself in this post."
Why yes I am. Maybe its why they are failing. They needed to dump MIPS because starting soon after Pentium Pro it could no longer compete on most workstation work loads.
But in the process of going to IA32 they ended up competing in PC space and the margins were razor thin. For a company accustomed to the good old days of proprietary Unix workstation profit margins of 30-40% (remember the outrageous markups on RAM and disks) they were doomed.
The only way out:
- Jumped in to GPU space and compete against 3Dlabs, 3Dfx, Nvidia and ATI. But they were to late to the game, didn't get GPU's, the high volume, the low margins, the fast turns etc.
- Try to compete in Apple's space which is kind of that they did in workstations they were just bad at it because MIPS sucked and trying IA32 made them look like a PC vendor. IRIX also eventually sucked compared to OSX and Linux
- Jump in to PC space but they would need to compete on Dell and HP turf, little differentiation, high volume, low margin and SGI sucks at all that.
- Build high end, really unique, really custom systems which is what they are doing, but it only works if you have customers like Uncle Sam with deep pockets willing to pay a lot for special hardware and software. Wont support their old stock multiples or growth though.
"SGI could have fared much better by making Linux its IA32 graphics"
Maybe but the O2 and the Visual Workstation had the same fatal flaw. They had stupendous memory bandwith for video and texture maps but the memory bandwidth to the CPU sucked compared to just about every other competing platform. The O2 was a cellar dweller on just about every benchmark when it shipped and it got nothing but worse with time. That and the feeble MIPS CPU's in them are why ILM saw a 5X performance jump when they dumped them. Octane was better but it was also a lote more expensive and still not competitive with cheap PC's unless you were doing video or otherwise exploiting its I/O architecture
Here is a pretty good link(from google cache) on ILM's Linux transition.
Bottomline the thing gained in dumping SGI was a 5X performance improvement at a much lower cost which shows you how far behind the power curve SGI's workstations are. IA32, Nvidia and ATI have been making giant leaps while SGI has been taking baby steps for years.
I should note a key factor in this saga, as memory serves, was Intel cut an NDA with DEC to evaluate the Alpha architecture for future inclusion in their product line, Alpha being the reigning performance king at the time. As memory serves Intel just stole all the performance jewels out of their documents, incorporated them in Pentium Pro and beyond and told DEC to go to hell. DEC did win a judgement against them over this blatant theft by Intel, but by then the damage was done to RISC, Intel achieved performance parity at a much lower cost and higher volume and the RISC workstation market was doomed.
I should also note one area SGI might still be able to compete at big studios is in storage and networks. They do still have a good story on IO, disk farms and high speed networking. This is crucial to most studios since they store and move tons of images, textures, scenes, etc to workstations, rendering and compositing farms. They do still have a story for specialized hardware intensive applications like Discrete's high end applications. But SGI simply has no story for workstations or rendering farms in today's studio's and hasn't had one for years.
"I'm not a graphics expert."
Probably the only thing I agree with in this post but it didn't stop you from pretending like you knew what you were talking about.
""Rocket Rick" Belluzzo saw the shift in the market, but he reacted to it in precisely the wrong way."
Actually Jim Clark saw the same shift coming long before Beluzzo got there. He knew the PC was going to cream SGI on the desktop and he was telling everyone at SGI that, they didn't want to hear it, they drove Clark out and he made a fortune on Netscape, the Internet and the PC.
The writing was on the wall for the SGI desktop the day the Pentium Pro, Windows NT and Glint/Voodoo graphics arrived running Softimage(owned by Microsoft at the time). If they wanted to stay in the graphics market they needed to jump to developing single chip GPU's and mass producing them like 3Dlabs, 3dfx, Nvidia and ATI did. They also needed to dump MIPS for IA32. Unfortunately SGI was clinging to a proprietary OS, CPU, and especially sprawling multi card graphics systems that took a long time to develop, were very expensive, not very reliable and quickly got buried by GPU's which had everything on a chip, were faster, cheap when mass produced, revved much faster and were more reliable. SGI was asleep at the wheel, they didn't make that shift, most of their graphics talent saw it and left and ended up at the companies that did. SGI bet the workstation farm on video processing, which is why the O2 and Octante are like they are, and completely lost the market for people who want fast CPU's and to draw lots of polygons fast which is most of the workstation market.
At this same time SGI started chasing the supercomputing market and that isn't a market that is going to support the high growth and high profitability SGI knew in its glory days.
And then of course Belluzzo tried to build a PC. The problem with playing in the PC market is no one makes money at it except Intel and Microsoft. Everyone else is on razor thin margins and only make a profit with huge volume and ruthless cost cutting. It simply wasn't a market SGI had any chance of winning in. Only chance they had on the desktop was to follow the Apple model and Apple's desktop model hasn't really ever been a break through success.
"Right now, companies like ILM are tearing out SGI workstations and replacing them with ultra-cheap desktops. They're taking advantage of the ability to work with low-resolution proxies in real time and then render jobs overnight on the big iron. That's a good workflow for that environment."
SGI is throwing out their SGI's because they fell dismally behind the curves, the price curve, the performance curve and the price/performance curve. I doubt ILM's work flow is changing in the transition, other than their machines are just a lot faster and they can draw more polygons, so I have no clue why you are rambling about low res proxies and rendering on big iron.
SGI's big iron is really badly suited for rendering. Its geared to supercomputing and applications that need lots of processors working on a shared memory image. Rendering works best on lots of cheap little boxes with a CPU, some RAM and a very fast network. Cheap rack mount PC's running Linux are a perfect fit. SGI's and IRIX are not. Again SGI has no chance of being a player in this market today.
I'm amazed its taken the big studios as long as it has to throw out SGI though the big studios had to wait for Linux/OSX to mature because most big studio pipelines and expertise are completely wedded to Unix. Windows was never a viable option outside of little niches or smaller studios.
I wager the Star War's prequels and much of ILM's recent efforts are as bad as they are partially because their artists were tied to boat anchor O2's and Octanes which are completely dusted by a PC and an Nvidia graphics card at a fraction the price and have been for years. They had to use low end standins on the SGI's just because the graphics and CPU performance on SGI's
OK I stand corrected on CRV. I wasn't following it at the time but if Scaled Composites did it, its A-OK with me. Lets consider the possible reasons for cancelling it:
... err ... composites on a new spacecraft, something they rarely do any more.
A. It needed to be designed to launch people in to space too. The one way'ness is the thing that made it look goofy and like a waste of money.
B. Lockheed and Boeing were pissed because they were being threatened by someone bending metal
C. It was outside the Shuttle's power structure.
"the trillion dollars mars would take"
When every anyone carps about the cost of big science and engineering endeavors you only need to point out that the U.S. has squandered nearly $200 billion on the war in Iraq so far and there is no end in sight. The U.S. has also killed 1200 Americans and countless thousands of Iraqi's so losing a few volunteer astronauts in a dangerous space mission seems pretty trivial by comparison. Its unobvious what exactly was accomplished by Iraq either.
If the U.S. put the money it wastes on world domination in to mars and moon missions or an Apollo class push on fusion energy there would be potential huge benefits in many areas. Fusion power harnessed to producing Hydrogen from water for fuel would fix a broad array of Earth's ills, pollution, green house gases and a finite energy source that is soon going to start disappearing. If the energy got cheap enough it would be a boon to the economy too(as long as you aren't in the oil and coal business).
But politicians being insane they would rather squander money on totally optional wars. Go figure.
"Reform only occurs in the face of an externally imposed crisis."
Exactly what do you call the Challenger and Columbia disasters. They were both spectacular failures and both devastated the manned space program. The Shuttle was hobbled after the first and is largely useless thanks to the constraints placed on it after the second.
I agree with your post but you seem to suggest reform would occur if there was an externally imposed crisis and that is obviously not true in the case of NASA. It appears NOTHING will reform NASA other than gutting it and starting fresh (without the same old, same old, contractors who are at least 50% of NASA's problem).
"his commitment to the CRV"
I'm guessing you mean CEV. The CRV (Crew Return Vehicle) was insane and was cancelled. They were going to spend millions and millions to build a new mini Shuttle whose sole reason to exist was to sit on the ISS and serve as a lifeboat in the event of an emergency. Only thing it did was make it possible to get the ISS manning up to 6-7 people so they could actually do research instead of just maintain the bloody mess. Could have been done way cheaper with an extra docking port and a second Soyuz capsule. It was just another sign of the sickness that is NASA's manned space program.
As for the CEV(Crew Exploration Vehicle) it is a better idea than CRV but I am willing to predict Boeing or Lockheed will win the contract, they will spend billions and billions of dollars, on one design after another(like ISS and space planes), the schedule will drag on for ever and the program will be cancelled around the time they have to start bending metal or launch something. The proposed schedule is already ridiculously long. They are just building a glorified new capsule like America and Russia have been building for decades and it will take longer and cost more money than Apollo did before its done.
Again, please, please, just let Burt Rutan build it. He is competing for it through T/Space but its a given a giant consortium lead by either Boeing or Lockheed will get the contract and they will just transfer huge sums from tax payer pockets to their bottomlines and not build anything worth a damn.
"Any benefits? Not many."
True of a stupid round trip stunt like Apollo was. The benefits of establishing a permanent colony on Mars would be enormous. It would be opening a whole new biosphere and Earth is getting so crowded it needs a new biosphere and frontier, create a lifeboat in the event of a cataclysm on Earth(runway greenhouse effect, asteroid strike, nuclear war, or pandemic), and push mankind to start tapping resources other than the dwindling ones on Earth. Chances are high it would push big advances in energy(no fossil fuels there), biology and meteorology(farming and terraforming), and sociology(a culture with a fresh start potentially free of Earth cultural baggage).
I am overjoyed O'Keefe is gone, ding dong the bitch is dead. He was a clueless bean counter devoid of the imagination or engineering background to do that job, you need look not further than the abomination of a Hubble robotic mission. Bush putting them there was mostly an indicator of his antipathy to NASA, science, engineering and big pork barrel bureaucracy. I doubt he will be replaced with anyone any better though.
Burt Rutan is the man to run this endeavor but it would ruin him putting him in charge of NASA in all of its pork filled despair. Again take NASA's manned spaced budget and give it to Rutan's company in a no strings grant, only condition he get in to LEO cheap and then work on to the Moon and Mars with a mandate for a colony on Mars and not a stupid stunt, round trip.
I was refering more to him saying Slashdot would be a better place without Michael rather than being a moderator, sorry for not being explicit. Maybe I was a to little terse to make that clear. More than a few people think Slashdot might improve without Twirp's profane name calling rants at anyone he disagrees with, though his informed Mac posts are sometimes wonderful as long as he doesn't tilt in to the vicious name calling. Not sure if Michael engages in vicious name calling at other posters. I think he mostly just post left leaning stories which obviously drives you people nuts (since you are intent on snuffing out everything left of center and probably the center too).
Personally I think Michael's submissions add color to Slashdot but I could see, and I'd be totally cool with, adding a right wing moderator counterpart to balance him, "Fair and Balanced" ya know. Me I like to hear all sides of things. Don't suppose it occurred to all you right wing ranters, that adding more viewpoints, some which match yours, would be better, and more "American", than trying to snuff out the views that drive you in to an apoplexy.
For all the ranting you guys do about America and its "Freedom" you sure seem to be at the front of the line in trying to snuff it out.
Only danger in adding a right wing moderator is I get the impression that most Slashdot readers are smart, well informed and many from places not as insanely righat as America so if you started pushing a lot of right wing posts Slashdot might lose most of its intelligent audience and be left with right wing ranters. There are sure a lot of them in America but I'm not sure many of them are smart enough to be up to Slashdot, they are a little busy clinging to Creationism over Evolution and not worrying about the Greenhouse effect since Jesus is going to come and take them all to heaven real soon now anyway.
So what if it was archaic. Twirp said language changes "very, very slowly" so archaic English should still be "nearly identical" according to Twirp.
"How else would you do it?"
You have to limit them period. A good first step would be to spend 200 billion on alternatives for power generation and transportation. I choose 200 billion because thats about what the U.S. has squandered in Iraq in two years so far to no good end.
You don't need Kyoto caps if enlightened countries and companies just started solving the problem. Kyoto is just there to inflict pain especially on the U.S. so that it either:
A. Doesn't fix the problem and craters its economy with cutbacks to comply
B. Make it more desirable to come up with solutions
C. Just doesn't comply
Bush chooses C. So exactly what are you accomplishing with a treaty the worlds worst offender is going to ignore.
If you just come up with solutions you don't need the pain inflicting part. How much is Bush spending on his Hydrogen initiative, like a billion dollars. Thats a couple of weeks of Iraq and most of its just going in to subsidies for Detroit and traditional oil, coal, gas and nuclear. You see he is apparently planning on using hydrocarbons to make a lot of the Hydrogen and unfortunately the carbon that is left is carbon dioxide and a green house gas unless they figure out a way to bank it under the ground.
It might be a real boon to some countries economy if they made fusion energy practical and used the electricity from it to create Hydrogen from water to power cars, trucks and tractors. If only the U.S. invested its hundreds of billions in useful stuff in stead of Iraq and missile defense. You would shake your dependence on foreign oil and you wouldn't need to fight wars in the Middle East.
"Will we instead see Chinese industry moving"
Burma, Bangladesh, etc. there are plenty of places to move it up until you reach the point the runaway climate kicks in and at that point it makes no difference. Though a lot of the pollution will tend to gravitate to places that have coal deposits. You can ship it a ways with big ships or rail lines.
Another huge contributor to greenhouse gases is flaring off natural gas from oil fields and those are scattered all over the world and not exactly even within national boundries for a lot of the off shore wells. National Geographic recently had pictures of where all the light is on the face of the earth and an amazing amount of it is natural gas being flared off from oil and gas fields and being completely wasted.