Go back and read my post. The wiki article says poor people in the US have more material wealth - VCRs, TVs, washing machines, etc, than poor people in other countries. Not more money. More material wealth. So your argument, which basically boils down to an explaination of cost of living differences, doesn't hold water. Yes, the cost of living is more in the US. So what? Even with cost of living taken into account, people below the poverty line in the US have more square footage of living space than all European countries save four (see this for lots of other relevant statistics).
Uneven wealth distribution is a political problem, not an economic one. The study I linked above shows some pretty eye-popping statistics about the wealth of poor people in the US. Their material standard of living exceeds the average of wealthy (Western European) countries, let alone all countries.
Now, you could make the argument that material wealth isn't the complete measure of standard of living. I agree with you there (those long vacations would be nice, although I don't think the European model is sustainable). But my point was the wiki article was self-debunking, as its arguments either refute or don't support the point.
I read the article you linked. Basically it said the US has more people (on a percentage basis) below the poverty line, then scuttles the point by admitting the definition of "poverty line" is different between countries.
It goes on to say even though Americans are wealthier than people of other countries, somehow people with more wealth in America have a lower standard of living than people with less wealth in other countries because the distribution of wealth in the US is more uneven. That argument doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, does it?
I'm not saying Americans have a higher standard of living, but the wikipedia article you're referencing doesn't provide any support for its assertions.
I have a friend living in a veritable shoebox in Tokyo who is widely envied by his local acquaintances for the luxury of so much space. Here in the US your neighbors would call animal control if your doghouse was that small.
I have a friend in Canada who came to the US for a week so he could get his ACL fixed when the wait up North would be up to ten years. I wouldn't consider that to be an acceptable wait for knee reconstruction.
The point is "standard of living" is impossible to measure across societies, since different societies have different ideas of what's important.
As I understand it Sun has been willing to take a hit at universities, since they figure you'll get used to their machines and request Sun hardware when you get into the business world. I know at my company comparable hardware from Dell was about 25% of the Sun price until this year. So we've been moving from Sun to Linux for new projects.
A couple months ago the Sun guy showed up with this desparate look on his face and said "just tell us what we need to charge to beat Dell and we'll make it happen." This is a welcome change in attitude, but I don't see how they can possibly compete with Dell on price. Dell has just about the most efficient business in the entire world and is used to razor-thin margins. Whatever - that's their problem.
We used to put up with overpriced hardware because moving to Windows just seemed too painfull, but Linux seems to be a reasonable alternative to Solaris I don't see any reason to pay more. My suspicion is we'll run Solaris when Sun can undercut Dell and Linux otherwise.
I know it's never to soon to plan for the future, but we have a little time before we worry too much about the sun engulfing the earth. In that time frame our technology will seem god-like by today's standards, even if we don't have a space program at all. Maybe we'll just surround the earth with some kind of energy sheild to maintain the current environment.
First sheild tech to another: "Do you smell something burning?"
The result is you have to be on the same LAN or it is worthless
Oh, it's true you can't deal with much latency in dynamic views. When I have to use a WAN connection I'll normally telnet into a machine at work and use gvim instead of my normal IDE. But I'm not out of the office much, so it might be more of an inconvenience for you.
Why is it hosed? It could be becaused your bug is intermittant or someone has gone and changed some other files that affect what you're looking at You might even discover your view is thoroughly broken because someone has checked in something on their view and gone home.
It doesn't sound like your team is taking advantage of the strengths of the tool. You really shouldn't be having this problem if you've set your branches up properly. I think IBM ships a "best practices" book which you might want to take a look at.
We've used dynamic views in clearcase for a decade, and we love it. I'm not sure why you're having so much trouble. Our lead developer might spend an hour a month administering the server, which is an obsolete SunOS box.
The biggest problem we've had recently is being stuck on the 2.4 kernal until IBM supports 2.6.
The excitement is generated by the prospect of the technology being there in the near future. So it's quite reasonable to have a conference to discuss what needs to be in place before it can happen.
not to mention the fact that the actual research and implementation of such a device would require hundreds of billions of dollars, if not a number in the trillions, even before getting into zoning issues.
It's not clear how much it would cost to build. Why do you assume such big numbers? Some engineering problems are trickier than rocketry (like building a cable that long that can support itself), and some are easier (like not having anything that needs to withstand enormous heat loads). It may end up costing considerably less than ISS.
Not to mention the fact that such an object might change earth's rotational velocity!
That's ridiculous. Something this small wouldn't have any effect on the planet at all.
Now, let's think. Who actually has the resources to pull off such a venture, besides the government? 1.... 2.... 3.... You guessed it! Microsoft.
Certainly the government will need to get involved. So what? The payoff is enormous. And why would a software company want to get involved with something like this?
You should read up on the concept a little. It's not ridiculous because you can't come up with obvious solutions to obvious problems. By this kind of logic the Panama canal is impossible.
There are quite a lot of space applications that remain impractical because of cost, and this technology could bring it down by a couple of orders of magnitude.
For one thing, if you were able to make this happen for the $10 bn they quote, you could build huge solar-power satellites in orbit and never burn another drop of oil. That seem like a "practical use"?
That means that we really need to build this sucker from the middle out: extend equal masses out and in (or up and down, if you prefer) from geosynchronous orbit. That's a very expensive proposition. Whether it's cheaper to ship carbon for nanotubes up or go and fetch some carbonaceous asteroids down to our orbit I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.
The current idea is to use rockets to send up a thread which can only support itself and a super-small climber. Then you send climbers up with additional cable which gets bonded to the fisrt one. You "grow" the cable until it's big enough to use for cargo. It would end up looking like a tape which is widest in the middle and tapered at both ends.
It's going to end up in some place where technology and resources are accessible: Brazil, Equador, Congo, Somalia, The Maldives, Indonesia, Malaysia, or some Pacific Island are all candidates, my money is on a spot just south of Singapore -- there's enough high-tech industrial nations close enough to justify it there. Brazil is my second guess.
Actually what they want to do is anchor it to a movable platform, like an oil derick. One of the dangers to the cable is weather, so you want something that normally stays in a weather "dead spot", but you can move it if the odd storm blows through. What countries are around is pretty irrelevant as long as you've found a spot in international waters.
A poster above was concerned about the terrorist target of something like this.
The really cool thing about elevators is after you build the first one you can build more by just running them up to orbit on a climber (the counterweight would go up first in several trips). The first one might cost $10 bn, but the second and subsequent cables would be less than a billion. So after you get the first one up you wouldn't have a single target for terrorists. Losing one of them would be far less expensive (in dollars and human cost) than the WTC attack. Also they would be easier to defend, since you'd have a pretty extensive restricted airspace around the cable and could see attackers coming with enough time to react.
Was it even fucking necessary to handcuff this guy? i thought cuffs were only for uncooperative people and maybe transporting?
Nope. Cops can cuff you while they're trying to figure out what's going on, and that's what they get trained to do. Every once in awhile they get involved with some minor thing and get attacked because, unbeknownst to them, the guy they're dealing with has felony warrants.
Not that I'm for it. It does make them a little safer in the same way they'd be safer cuffing everyone they talk to, or making all guns illegal. However, a certain amount of risk comes with the job, and law-abiding citizens don't appreciate being treated like criminals.
NASA is timid in losing those few lives because we are talking about astronauts here. There are not very many people who have the physical prowess, intelligence, and overall ability to handle extreme situations in space in this world as they do. I'm not saying their lives are worth more than soldiers, or that anyone can become a soldier, but it's vastly more likely someone can be a soldier than an astronaut.
This is just plain wrong. Astronauts aren't really much more than passengers in the same way you and I are when we ride a 747. The initial designs for the shuttle didn't even have windows - the windows were added later because they didn't want the public to realize the astronauts aren't "flying" it. The computers fly the shuttle. They need to have people on board to land it, but that's because it was deliberately designed that way. Once on a landing they allowed the pilot to take control to see if he could do it if a computer failed, and computer control was immediately reestablished when it was clear he couldn't.
The reason NASA can afford to be so picky is a simple manifestation of supply and demand - lots of people want to be astronauts and there aren't many positions, so NASA can require perfect health and multiple doctoral degrees. But those "extreme environments" are pretty much immediately deadly if something goes wrong - look at both shuttle disasters (where they didn't have time to do anything), and consider there has never been a life-threatening shuttle problem the crew could deal with. The reality is they could get by with a couple of reasonably competant blue-collar types, but NASA doesn't have to. The funny thing is everything an astronaut does in space is preplanned, pre-rehearsed, and tripple-checked with ground controllers, so it's not like he's gonna get to use his brain much anyway.
As far as physical conditioning goes, remember these guys (they are mostly men) are in their mid-to-late middle ages, so while they aren't fat or anything they wouldn't be able to keep up with with a squad of marines. The reason US spacesuits are so unreliable is they use a high O2-low pressure mix which allows our older astronauts to accomplish about as much work as the younger Russians working with stiffer 1 atmosphere suits.
So now we arrive at the real reason NASA went crazy when the Russians took money to shuttle up a geriatric rich guy so he could play astronaut. They were afraid the public would realize you don't have to be Buck Rogers to go into space. NASA's funding is dependent on the voter's romantic idea of manned space flight, and anything that lets air out of that balloon might affect next years budget.
Look, those guys don't have much to do up there - they aren't working toward any concrete goal or anything, and they aren't doing any research that couldn't be done far more cheaply with machines. You could argue the effects of LEO on human physiology are worth studying, but the Russians did far more in-depth research on that subject than NASA will ever do.
Do some research on today's military (this is a good place to start). These are people who have demanding jobs, both physically and mentally. They're dealing with a human adversary, which is much trickier than any natural phenomenon, and they have to balance military and political pressures in every decision they make.
You're probably right in that it's easier to become a soldier than an astronaut. But I think it's far easier to be an astronaut, and I think experienced soldiers are far harder to replace.
As I understand it she had to pass through some minor post of German bureaucracy before bording the flight to Frankfurt - either it was customs or she thought it was. In any event, that small distance was the part of France she apparently didn't have authorization to be in.
We were at a loss, since we'd sent over a team to support our product and she was the entire technical part of the team (which mostly consisted of useless syncophants). They were threatening to send her back to the US, where our management was going to put her on a direct flight to Frankfurt (what is that, 40 straight hours of flying?).
You know, it's funny you should say that. Years ago a friend of mine was flying from the US to Frankfurt by way of Paris. When she got to Paris they wouldn't let her go the couple hundred yards to German customs.
"You see," he told her, "you're going through France. You're not allowed to be in France."
After making her waste the whole day in France they finally let her through (I think they were waiting for a bribe, actually). I guess they didn't know what else to do with her.
Yup. What people don't realize about McCain Feingold (and let's not forget Russ Feingold here), is the real purpose of the bill was to shift power back to established media after years of PACs being able to get the message out through paid advertising. How would people know what to think if big media's message gets diluted with all that paid stuff?
The blogs present a new problem, since the little people are now able to say what they think and get the message out to as many people as they can convince to read the blog. Look for more and more regulation of blogs in the future, since piling on restrictions and forms will discourage people from legitimate political speech, even if they are allowed to make it technically.
I know this is true for most of the contractors that I work with. This is not by any means a question of greed. I know most of the people that signed the sheet and they did it because the law was clearly broken.
What law? Were you independent, or were you, like the article implies, working for a contracting company? If you weren't independent you can't very well be considered employees of two companies, can you?
It's immaterial anyway. We're not talking about grunt-work here - if you can't find a higher paying job with your skills, perhaps you're making what you should make. I don't see why the government should be involved.
Actually, considering what the Internet was like at that time, it really is impressive. Were you even around when the Web was young? (To be fair, I wasn't exactly there at the start, either... but I was close...) It was pretty revolutionary, so anyone putting up a web site at the time was doing pioneering work.
Heh. I was around when the internet was young. That was revolutionary. The web was nroff with hyperlinks.
Because chalk and blackboards are so expensive.
People are what cost the money. These guys aren't making minimum wage, and they do have expenses. True, it's not like building a supercollider, but I wouldn't call it cheap either.
But since we don't know what might become possible due to basic research, the most efficient use of basic research money really is a scattergun approach to follow as many paths as possible.
But how do we build a rational spending policy from that? How do we determine the right amount of money to spend when we have no way to know what the payoff could be? The other point I'd make is sometimes you get basic science when you're building practical things (like rockets and semiconductors).
And the payoff of blowing people up is?
That's overly simplistic. For one thing, the payoff for blowing people up could be better than the next thirty years of basic research. I wish we had blown up OBL after the Cole bombing. If somebody sneaks a nuke into NYC you'll wish we had blown him up beforehand.
If we can make better weapons to ensure more of our soldiers come back (from this conflict or the next) I'm all for it. Even if you don't agree with the current administration's foreign policy, would you at least be willing to concede a capable military is worth having?
Granted, we still might not choose to make that investment, but the argument that every dollar spent on blowing people up is a dollar lost to spending on more worthwhile causes including basic research is certainly valid.
If you're postulating a fixed budget, that's true. But that's not how it works - if the taxpayers think it's worthwhile, it'll get funded. If they don't taxes will get cut.
I can't be an expert on everything. I just don't think it's unreasonable for people who make assertions to back them up. If I did fact checking for every post on slashdot I wouldn't be able to do anything else.
Some of the stuff you pointed out was cool, some of it was pretty weak (the third website? Please. And server farms are a staightforward concept that was/is being developed at lots of different places). Not much there to do with super-theoretical physics. I'm all for spending money on medicine, superconductors (although I'm not sure the practical applications go much beyond MRIs in the near term), etc. But I question the value of spending lots of money on developing "brane" theory and trying to figure out why the universe is too massive.
I'm not a luddite - I do see value in basic research. But it's not a religion for me - as a taxpayer (and I do pay a hell of a lot of taxes) I want to be sure my tax dollars are spent efficiently. Even in physics there are lots of places to put research dollars (ITER, for example).
Also, the idea every dollar that goes to the military is a dollar lost to science is a logical falacy. We can afford to fund both if the payoff is clear. The scientific community has been doing a really lousy job selling the benefits of its research to the people that matter, and I can't figure out if the problem is the sales job or the product.
As for my assertion that money devoted to basic research is dropping at a alarming rate, I will leave this as an exercise for the reader. The results of your studies will be quite enlightening, and quite possibly, terrifying
That's what I thought - you're talking out your ass. Let me know when you can back it up. I'm not saying it isn't true, but it's clear you don't know any more about the overall budget than anybody else on slashdot.
In fact, spending on basic research is dropping at an alarming rate through all the national laboratories.
Do you have any real numbers to attach to this, or are you using the phrase "dropping at an alarming rate" to try to cover your lack of solid information? And don't tell me to use Google - you made the assertion; do your own research.
This does not bode well for our future.
I know this will be heresy here on slashdot, but perhaps you can explain why this is so. I've noticed a pretty distinct lack of "bang-for-the-buck" in this kind of research. Sure, there was nuclear power, but that was, what, 60 years ago? Fusion power seems to be permanently ensconced "30 years away". So tell me, what are my tax dollars doing for me at Fermilab, and how will this affect my life over the next 30 years (as I'm unlikely to live much longer than that)? I'm as curious as the next guy, but not "billions and billions" of dollars worth of curious.
If businesses switch to the 'thin client' model, or anything similar, then this will be a step backwards, technologically speaking, and it will be a decision which is based entirely on financial motives. Those who appreciate technology will have little reason to follow this lead, and therefore will not.
Of course it's a financial decision. All decisions companies make regarding legal actions are financial decisions. Why is this a problem?
As for 'thin clients' in the office, then I say, sure, they will take off there - it's a cost thing.
The lion's share of the cost for PCs is the maintennence. If by "cost thing" you mean cutting down on the amount of PC support they have to do, you are correct.
In any event, with the proliferation of trojans and viruses most companies have the PC locked down to such an extent it's essentially a thin client anyway. Where I work we can't install anything, change any system settings, or write files to local drives. Thank God I have a Linux box to do work on - the PCs are crippled to the point you can't do anything but read email and edit MS Office documents.
Another way of saying employee that I don't pay health insurance or taxes on.
Companies are under no obligation to provide health insurance. As far as taxes go, that's why contractors make more money. When I was contracting I made $30/hour more money than the employees did.
Why do people think the company owes them anything extra? You work for what was agreed upon. I wonder what the reaction would be if HP agreed to pay a certain rate and then didn't pay the full amount after the hours were delivered because other companies were paying their contractors less. This really isn't any different.
In this specific case these people weren't independents - they worked for an agency which was providing benefits, which HP was paying for through the contract rate.
I know it is easy to say that nobody is making them take the contract but you do what you have to do to survive.
Bullshit. These people weren't getting paid anywhere near the low end of national wage spectrum. It's more a question of greed than survival.
Yeah, that's how I feel. Where I work (a big telecom firm) I used to be a contractor. I was well paid and happy. Then I was forced to be an employee because my company was worried about getting sued. So now I have extra meetings to go to, I don't get paid for extra hours I work, and I make less money. All for the illusion of job security.
Those greedy bastards ruined it for the rest of us. I can see some sense in limiting companies use of 1099 contractors (maybe have a minimum rate or something to keep McDonalds from hiring "independent contractors" to sling burgers). But when these people are actually employed by a company, as far as I'm concerned they can live with the terms of their employment.
The cold war is OVER. The best way to achieve nuclear disarmament or even come CLOSE is to give the impression at least, to other countries that you aren't preparing for an oncoming nuclear attack.
Sure, I follow your logic. Countries will stop trying to acquire the bomb when they're sure it will get through, but will surely pay the political price for acquisition if it might not be effective.
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Uneven wealth distribution is a political problem, not an economic one. The study I linked above shows some pretty eye-popping statistics about the wealth of poor people in the US. Their material standard of living exceeds the average of wealthy (Western European) countries, let alone all countries.
Now, you could make the argument that material wealth isn't the complete measure of standard of living. I agree with you there (those long vacations would be nice, although I don't think the European model is sustainable). But my point was the wiki article was self-debunking, as its arguments either refute or don't support the point.
It goes on to say even though Americans are wealthier than people of other countries, somehow people with more wealth in America have a lower standard of living than people with less wealth in other countries because the distribution of wealth in the US is more uneven. That argument doesn't stand up to much scrutiny, does it?
I'm not saying Americans have a higher standard of living, but the wikipedia article you're referencing doesn't provide any support for its assertions.
I have a friend living in a veritable shoebox in Tokyo who is widely envied by his local acquaintances for the luxury of so much space. Here in the US your neighbors would call animal control if your doghouse was that small.
I have a friend in Canada who came to the US for a week so he could get his ACL fixed when the wait up North would be up to ten years. I wouldn't consider that to be an acceptable wait for knee reconstruction.
The point is "standard of living" is impossible to measure across societies, since different societies have different ideas of what's important.
A couple months ago the Sun guy showed up with this desparate look on his face and said "just tell us what we need to charge to beat Dell and we'll make it happen." This is a welcome change in attitude, but I don't see how they can possibly compete with Dell on price. Dell has just about the most efficient business in the entire world and is used to razor-thin margins. Whatever - that's their problem.
We used to put up with overpriced hardware because moving to Windows just seemed too painfull, but Linux seems to be a reasonable alternative to Solaris I don't see any reason to pay more. My suspicion is we'll run Solaris when Sun can undercut Dell and Linux otherwise.
First sheild tech to another: "Do you smell something burning?"
Oh, it's true you can't deal with much latency in dynamic views. When I have to use a WAN connection I'll normally telnet into a machine at work and use gvim instead of my normal IDE. But I'm not out of the office much, so it might be more of an inconvenience for you.
Why is it hosed? It could be becaused your bug is intermittant or someone has gone and changed some other files that affect what you're looking at You might even discover your view is thoroughly broken because someone has checked in something on their view and gone home.
It doesn't sound like your team is taking advantage of the strengths of the tool. You really shouldn't be having this problem if you've set your branches up properly. I think IBM ships a "best practices" book which you might want to take a look at.
The biggest problem we've had recently is being stuck on the 2.4 kernal until IBM supports 2.6.
The technology is not there
The excitement is generated by the prospect of the technology being there in the near future. So it's quite reasonable to have a conference to discuss what needs to be in place before it can happen.
not to mention the fact that the actual research and implementation of such a device would require hundreds of billions of dollars, if not a number in the trillions, even before getting into zoning issues.
It's not clear how much it would cost to build. Why do you assume such big numbers? Some engineering problems are trickier than rocketry (like building a cable that long that can support itself), and some are easier (like not having anything that needs to withstand enormous heat loads). It may end up costing considerably less than ISS.
Not to mention the fact that such an object might change earth's rotational velocity!
That's ridiculous. Something this small wouldn't have any effect on the planet at all.
Now, let's think. Who actually has the resources to pull off such a venture, besides the government? 1.... 2.... 3.... You guessed it! Microsoft.
Certainly the government will need to get involved. So what? The payoff is enormous. And why would a software company want to get involved with something like this?
You should read up on the concept a little. It's not ridiculous because you can't come up with obvious solutions to obvious problems. By this kind of logic the Panama canal is impossible.
For one thing, if you were able to make this happen for the $10 bn they quote, you could build huge solar-power satellites in orbit and never burn another drop of oil. That seem like a "practical use"?
The current idea is to use rockets to send up a thread which can only support itself and a super-small climber. Then you send climbers up with additional cable which gets bonded to the fisrt one. You "grow" the cable until it's big enough to use for cargo. It would end up looking like a tape which is widest in the middle and tapered at both ends.
It's going to end up in some place where technology and resources are accessible: Brazil, Equador, Congo, Somalia, The Maldives, Indonesia, Malaysia, or some Pacific Island are all candidates, my money is on a spot just south of Singapore -- there's enough high-tech industrial nations close enough to justify it there. Brazil is my second guess.
Actually what they want to do is anchor it to a movable platform, like an oil derick. One of the dangers to the cable is weather, so you want something that normally stays in a weather "dead spot", but you can move it if the odd storm blows through. What countries are around is pretty irrelevant as long as you've found a spot in international waters.
A poster above was concerned about the terrorist target of something like this.
The really cool thing about elevators is after you build the first one you can build more by just running them up to orbit on a climber (the counterweight would go up first in several trips). The first one might cost $10 bn, but the second and subsequent cables would be less than a billion. So after you get the first one up you wouldn't have a single target for terrorists. Losing one of them would be far less expensive (in dollars and human cost) than the WTC attack. Also they would be easier to defend, since you'd have a pretty extensive restricted airspace around the cable and could see attackers coming with enough time to react.
I don't know, perhaps Kreugerands?
Nope. Cops can cuff you while they're trying to figure out what's going on, and that's what they get trained to do. Every once in awhile they get involved with some minor thing and get attacked because, unbeknownst to them, the guy they're dealing with has felony warrants.
Not that I'm for it. It does make them a little safer in the same way they'd be safer cuffing everyone they talk to, or making all guns illegal. However, a certain amount of risk comes with the job, and law-abiding citizens don't appreciate being treated like criminals.
This is just plain wrong. Astronauts aren't really much more than passengers in the same way you and I are when we ride a 747. The initial designs for the shuttle didn't even have windows - the windows were added later because they didn't want the public to realize the astronauts aren't "flying" it. The computers fly the shuttle. They need to have people on board to land it, but that's because it was deliberately designed that way. Once on a landing they allowed the pilot to take control to see if he could do it if a computer failed, and computer control was immediately reestablished when it was clear he couldn't.
The reason NASA can afford to be so picky is a simple manifestation of supply and demand - lots of people want to be astronauts and there aren't many positions, so NASA can require perfect health and multiple doctoral degrees. But those "extreme environments" are pretty much immediately deadly if something goes wrong - look at both shuttle disasters (where they didn't have time to do anything), and consider there has never been a life-threatening shuttle problem the crew could deal with. The reality is they could get by with a couple of reasonably competant blue-collar types, but NASA doesn't have to. The funny thing is everything an astronaut does in space is preplanned, pre-rehearsed, and tripple-checked with ground controllers, so it's not like he's gonna get to use his brain much anyway.
As far as physical conditioning goes, remember these guys (they are mostly men) are in their mid-to-late middle ages, so while they aren't fat or anything they wouldn't be able to keep up with with a squad of marines. The reason US spacesuits are so unreliable is they use a high O2-low pressure mix which allows our older astronauts to accomplish about as much work as the younger Russians working with stiffer 1 atmosphere suits.
So now we arrive at the real reason NASA went crazy when the Russians took money to shuttle up a geriatric rich guy so he could play astronaut. They were afraid the public would realize you don't have to be Buck Rogers to go into space. NASA's funding is dependent on the voter's romantic idea of manned space flight, and anything that lets air out of that balloon might affect next years budget.
Look, those guys don't have much to do up there - they aren't working toward any concrete goal or anything, and they aren't doing any research that couldn't be done far more cheaply with machines. You could argue the effects of LEO on human physiology are worth studying, but the Russians did far more in-depth research on that subject than NASA will ever do.
Do some research on today's military (this is a good place to start). These are people who have demanding jobs, both physically and mentally. They're dealing with a human adversary, which is much trickier than any natural phenomenon, and they have to balance military and political pressures in every decision they make.
You're probably right in that it's easier to become a soldier than an astronaut. But I think it's far easier to be an astronaut, and I think experienced soldiers are far harder to replace.
We were at a loss, since we'd sent over a team to support our product and she was the entire technical part of the team (which mostly consisted of useless syncophants). They were threatening to send her back to the US, where our management was going to put her on a direct flight to Frankfurt (what is that, 40 straight hours of flying?).
"You see," he told her, "you're going through France. You're not allowed to be in France."
After making her waste the whole day in France they finally let her through (I think they were waiting for a bribe, actually). I guess they didn't know what else to do with her.
There was project Daedelus, but that's been shut down for years.
The blogs present a new problem, since the little people are now able to say what they think and get the message out to as many people as they can convince to read the blog. Look for more and more regulation of blogs in the future, since piling on restrictions and forms will discourage people from legitimate political speech, even if they are allowed to make it technically.
What law? Were you independent, or were you, like the article implies, working for a contracting company? If you weren't independent you can't very well be considered employees of two companies, can you?
It's immaterial anyway. We're not talking about grunt-work here - if you can't find a higher paying job with your skills, perhaps you're making what you should make. I don't see why the government should be involved.
Heh. I was around when the internet was young. That was revolutionary. The web was nroff with hyperlinks.
Because chalk and blackboards are so expensive.
People are what cost the money. These guys aren't making minimum wage, and they do have expenses. True, it's not like building a supercollider, but I wouldn't call it cheap either.
But since we don't know what might become possible due to basic research, the most efficient use of basic research money really is a scattergun approach to follow as many paths as possible.
But how do we build a rational spending policy from that? How do we determine the right amount of money to spend when we have no way to know what the payoff could be? The other point I'd make is sometimes you get basic science when you're building practical things (like rockets and semiconductors).
And the payoff of blowing people up is?
That's overly simplistic. For one thing, the payoff for blowing people up could be better than the next thirty years of basic research. I wish we had blown up OBL after the Cole bombing. If somebody sneaks a nuke into NYC you'll wish we had blown him up beforehand.
If we can make better weapons to ensure more of our soldiers come back (from this conflict or the next) I'm all for it. Even if you don't agree with the current administration's foreign policy, would you at least be willing to concede a capable military is worth having?
Granted, we still might not choose to make that investment, but the argument that every dollar spent on blowing people up is a dollar lost to spending on more worthwhile causes including basic research is certainly valid.
If you're postulating a fixed budget, that's true. But that's not how it works - if the taxpayers think it's worthwhile, it'll get funded. If they don't taxes will get cut.
I can't be an expert on everything. I just don't think it's unreasonable for people who make assertions to back them up. If I did fact checking for every post on slashdot I wouldn't be able to do anything else.
Was that supposed to be a link you posted?
I'm not a luddite - I do see value in basic research. But it's not a religion for me - as a taxpayer (and I do pay a hell of a lot of taxes) I want to be sure my tax dollars are spent efficiently. Even in physics there are lots of places to put research dollars (ITER, for example).
Also, the idea every dollar that goes to the military is a dollar lost to science is a logical falacy. We can afford to fund both if the payoff is clear. The scientific community has been doing a really lousy job selling the benefits of its research to the people that matter, and I can't figure out if the problem is the sales job or the product.
As for my assertion that money devoted to basic research is dropping at a alarming rate, I will leave this as an exercise for the reader. The results of your studies will be quite enlightening, and quite possibly, terrifying
That's what I thought - you're talking out your ass. Let me know when you can back it up. I'm not saying it isn't true, but it's clear you don't know any more about the overall budget than anybody else on slashdot.
Do you have any real numbers to attach to this, or are you using the phrase "dropping at an alarming rate" to try to cover your lack of solid information? And don't tell me to use Google - you made the assertion; do your own research.
This does not bode well for our future.
I know this will be heresy here on slashdot, but perhaps you can explain why this is so. I've noticed a pretty distinct lack of "bang-for-the-buck" in this kind of research. Sure, there was nuclear power, but that was, what, 60 years ago? Fusion power seems to be permanently ensconced "30 years away". So tell me, what are my tax dollars doing for me at Fermilab, and how will this affect my life over the next 30 years (as I'm unlikely to live much longer than that)? I'm as curious as the next guy, but not "billions and billions" of dollars worth of curious.
Of course it's a financial decision. All decisions companies make regarding legal actions are financial decisions. Why is this a problem?
As for 'thin clients' in the office, then I say, sure, they will take off there - it's a cost thing.
The lion's share of the cost for PCs is the maintennence. If by "cost thing" you mean cutting down on the amount of PC support they have to do, you are correct.
In any event, with the proliferation of trojans and viruses most companies have the PC locked down to such an extent it's essentially a thin client anyway. Where I work we can't install anything, change any system settings, or write files to local drives. Thank God I have a Linux box to do work on - the PCs are crippled to the point you can't do anything but read email and edit MS Office documents.
Companies are under no obligation to provide health insurance. As far as taxes go, that's why contractors make more money. When I was contracting I made $30/hour more money than the employees did.
Why do people think the company owes them anything extra? You work for what was agreed upon. I wonder what the reaction would be if HP agreed to pay a certain rate and then didn't pay the full amount after the hours were delivered because other companies were paying their contractors less. This really isn't any different.
In this specific case these people weren't independents - they worked for an agency which was providing benefits, which HP was paying for through the contract rate.
I know it is easy to say that nobody is making them take the contract but you do what you have to do to survive.
Bullshit. These people weren't getting paid anywhere near the low end of national wage spectrum. It's more a question of greed than survival.
Those greedy bastards ruined it for the rest of us. I can see some sense in limiting companies use of 1099 contractors (maybe have a minimum rate or something to keep McDonalds from hiring "independent contractors" to sling burgers). But when these people are actually employed by a company, as far as I'm concerned they can live with the terms of their employment.
Sure, I follow your logic. Countries will stop trying to acquire the bomb when they're sure it will get through, but will surely pay the political price for acquisition if it might not be effective.
Oh, wait, could you go over that again?