I doubt you'll have to wait that long for China. The only reason things aren't already more expensive is the massive currency manipulation in which they've been engaged. They won't be able to do it for more than another year or two, so look for the RMB to go significantly higher against the dollar. Then presto! Too darn expensive to make things in China. We went through the same thing with Japan in the '80s.
That's my problem with patents in general. The system is supposed to make everyone better off by giving you exclusive rights to your invention, but what it really does is encourage companies to file patents and discourages them from making products they can be sued over.
If making decisions about whether or not to trade with different countries is imperialism, then all countries are empires. I'm not thrilled about this legislation, but you're just crying wolf here.
When you risk that they get tired of the game with the demo/preview, the game ain't worth a dime anyway.
That's true, and that's my point. I purchased several games over the last year that I wouldn't have purchased if I was able to play four hours beforehand. In some cases the game just sucked. In others the first few hours were fun but it was clear the fun wouldn't last. In each case I paid $30 to $50, so a $15 four hour demo would have cost the publisher $15 to $35.
I don't think it's a fantastic idea at all. The whole point of a demo is to give people a taste of the game so they buy it. But you always risk giving them so much they have time to get tired of it. When it's free you can just give them enough to get hooked, but people paying fifteen bucks for a demo are going to expect something a bit more substantial. I think this is going to cost them sales if it does anything.
Well, sure. But I wasn't trying to say Phalanx would be better than splashing the shooter or intercepting the missile 50 miles away. But assuming you're down to CIWS, would you rather have phalanx or RAM? When I was in that business we pretty much took it for granted you couldn't intercept a missile with a slower missile, and I think Brahmos is faster than RAM. If not Brahmos then certainly Brahmos II. At that closing speed you're only gonna get one shot (or one burst) with either system. I was just thinking I'd rather take my shot with Phalanx.
From the standpoint of planning for defense against streakers, the fact that they're relatively short range means you put your resources into destroying the launch platform. Unfortunately you don't necessarily get to chose where you'll be when people start shooting at you. A ship in the Med could very easily end up relying on CIWS to stop the first wave because of ROE.
It's not a failure among programmers at all - it's a business decision. The main reason software is less efficient is the costs are so heavily tilted toward software development instead of hardware. For the vast majority of business applications companies are using generalized frameworks to trade CPU cycles and memory for development time.
Even in terms of development style, it just isn't worth it to optimize your code if it's going to substantially increase development time. People are expensive. Time is expensive. Hardware is not.
Now, if you're Microsoft, or Blizzard, or Google, then the equation changes, since your code is running on millions of CPUs. But that's not the normal case. If I'm writing a web service so the accounting software at headquarters can tell how many widgets are in my company's warehouse, it really doesn't matter how inefficient the code is (within reason) as long as it works reliably and is easy to maintain. What my boss really wants is for me to finish as quickly as possible and move on to the next task.
This is nonsensical. For one thing, The Chinese already have ballistic nuclear missiles. If they actually decided to uncork the nukes there's no need to use something like this. Ballistic missiles are much harder to stop than cruise missiles.
Most cruise missiles are designed to be really hard to detect once they've been launched (the Stark, for example, saw incoming Iraqi aircraft but didn't pick up the Exocet missiles they launched). The Brahmos (and earlier versions like the Russian P-800 Onyx) have a different strategy - it's a lot easier to pick up on radar and IR, but you don't have a lot of time to knock it down.
The advantage of a flat trajectory over ballistic is two-fold: 1) cruise missiles are easier to make than ballistic missiles. Your problems with heat, guidance, and vibration are magnified in a ballistic trajectory. And 2) cruise missiles tend to be much smaller. A ballistic missile with the same size warhead is almost ten times as large.
And yeah, the relatively short range is a big drawback.
The phalanx has been going away for decades. In fact, it was conceived as a stop-gap system that was only supposed to be around a few years because the Rolling Airframe Missile was (badly) late.
Personally, I don't see why something like Phalanx wouldn't be the right system to use against really fast missiles. The energy released when a DU bullet hits a missile coming in at mach 2.8 (or mach 5.2 for Brahmos II) must be absolutely enormous. Sure, you'll get crap all over the deck, but that's not the end of the world.
Nonsense. Basic Medicare doesn't cover hearing aids, but you can choose a Medicare HMO that does. If you doctor certifies you've lost enough of your hearing that you can't "function well in society", the hearing aid is covered. I'll bet the percentage of people who pay for their own hearing aids is tiny. Minuscule. The OP is right. Hearing aids are expensive for the same reason everything medical is expensive in the US - the most of the people who are using the services aren't paying.
Yes, and they'll still be scratching their heads trying to figure out if it isn't working because they need a nullmodem cable, or maybe they were supposed to ground CTS...
Computer-science legend Edsger W. Dijkstra famously wrote: 'It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration'
Like all eminently quotable people, Dijkstra tended to hyperbole and oversimplification.
Novell was under systemic attack by Microsoft for decades. It worked, too.
I think the word you're looking for is "systematic". In any event, what you characterize as an "attack" was just normal business competition. Microsoft had the better product and charged less for it. By the time Novell jumped on the Linux bandwagon the writing was already on the wall.
Maybe she can decide at this point "hey, we should have stopped fighting here and just put him in hospice care", because she knows when he finally succumbed. But sometimes people beat cancer (rarely or often, depending on the cancer). Let's say early on they decided to go the hospice route, and he died. What is she going to think when she opens up the paper and find a story about a guy with the same cancer who lasted another 20 years?
It's really easy to draw a line on a chart and say "anybody on the right side of this line has such a bad prognosis it's just not worth the money to treat them. It's a lot harder when it's your mom.
That's a side effect of web programming. I worked for about five years on a pure java application. The only other language I used in all that time was a little bit of xml to set up the ant build. The end users loved it and it was easy to maintain.
My current project is a web application, and I have to know three or four different languages to get anything to work (depending on what you consider a language). There's no hope for any kind of end-to-end debugging or performance analysis. There are a lot more places for things to go wrong than the pure java environment and the final product isn't as smooth.
It all seems like a big step backward to me. But what the hell. They pay me by the hour.
First, I am a Libertarian. It is was you neo-cons that applied it yourselves. Basically, the reagan and W type of politicians that we can no longer afford. And you neo-cons/teabaggers are the ones that killed the fiscal conservatives.
This is delusional. First off, the Libertarian party is run by truthers and John Birch-style cranks. It has no coherent platform beyond "cut my taxes and your services". It will never, ever be a serious party in the US without a wholesale change in both charter and leadership. The Tea Party people are the ones who are the actual fiscal conservatives these days, and the fact that you label them "teabaggers" and lump them in with neocons displays a shocking ignorance. You call yourself a Libertarian but your political outlook is bog-standard dorm room Marxist.
Because the more that you launch the lower the fixed costs. That was the idea of the shuttle that Nixon pushed. Sadly reagan killed that.
Because it's not true in practice. Launching the Shuttle a bunch of times only makes each flight marginally cheaper because it was designed for performance instead of operations - there's simply too much that has to be done between flights. So great, instead of paying a billion a flight you have the cost down to $500m (and here I'm being generous), but to do it you need to quadruple the NASA budget so you can fly every couple days. Not that you could do that anyway with only four shuttles.
Doesn't make sense. We will never, ever have practical access to space with the shuttle, no matter how aggressive the launch schedule is. And what are you going to do with all those flights to LEO now that you have no money for anything but launching?
Later the neo-con congress of 2000 forced NASA to not develop VASIMR or transhab. Thankfully, a patriot pushed transhab into BA, while an astronaut/engineer/physicist with the help of NASA created a new rocket engine.
There was never a neocon congress. Is that your definition - "a neocon is someone who does something I don't like"? No wonder your world is full of them.
VASIMR isn't the holy grail of rocketry, it's just a new twist on ion engines. It will never be powerful enough to be used as a primary stage booster. In other words, it does nothing to get us out of the blind alley we went down forty years ago. I have a lot of respect for Chang-Diaz for not giving up, but even if everything works out the way he wants it won't have much effect on the overall picture.
You guys on the left have so over-used the word neocon that it doesn't mean anything at all anymore. The neocons were never fiscal conservatives - they were leftists who became militarists because of external threats (real and imagined). They have almost no influence left in the Republican party and never had any with the Tea Party people. Just because a guy wants to fund useless crap to generate jobs in his district doesn't mean he's a neocon. That just makes him a member of Congress.
The shuttle never delivered on its primary mission, which was cheap access to space. It should have been killed as soon as that was clear in the mid '80s. We should not be funding a project that "moves us out of LEO". If we ever want to have a hope of doing anything useful in space we need to retrace our steps and build a cost effective system to get people and material into LEO.
Right now there isn't anything worth doing in space beyond spy and communications satellites, and the reason is it's too damn expensive to get there. If we don't lower the $/kg cost to orbit any manned space efforts will be the sorts of vanity projects we've been seeing in the last 30 years. Hey, let's spend a billion dollars going to orbit and start some high school student's microgravity ant hill experiment! Those kinds of projects can't be justified in economic terms, so they'll never be funded evenly.
There's no particular scientific challenge to cheaper space travel, either. Rocket fuel is relatively cheap - the fuel with the energy it takes to put a 747 in orbit is about the same amount of fuel it takes to fly that same jet from Los Angeles to Sydney. It's an operations cost engineering challenge, and not one well suited to a bloated government bureaucracy like NASA.
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I doubt you'll have to wait that long for China. The only reason things aren't already more expensive is the massive currency manipulation in which they've been engaged. They won't be able to do it for more than another year or two, so look for the RMB to go significantly higher against the dollar. Then presto! Too darn expensive to make things in China. We went through the same thing with Japan in the '80s.
Fortunately she's a girl, so you haven't doomed her to a life without sex.
That's my problem with patents in general. The system is supposed to make everyone better off by giving you exclusive rights to your invention, but what it really does is encourage companies to file patents and discourages them from making products they can be sued over.
If making decisions about whether or not to trade with different countries is imperialism, then all countries are empires. I'm not thrilled about this legislation, but you're just crying wolf here.
A lot of people out there aren't capable of normal social interaction, for one reason or another.
That's true, and that's my point. I purchased several games over the last year that I wouldn't have purchased if I was able to play four hours beforehand. In some cases the game just sucked. In others the first few hours were fun but it was clear the fun wouldn't last. In each case I paid $30 to $50, so a $15 four hour demo would have cost the publisher $15 to $35.
Insightful? Jeez, you guys, that was supposed to be a joke.
The take-away from this is Germans are never happy.
I don't think it's a fantastic idea at all. The whole point of a demo is to give people a taste of the game so they buy it. But you always risk giving them so much they have time to get tired of it. When it's free you can just give them enough to get hooked, but people paying fifteen bucks for a demo are going to expect something a bit more substantial. I think this is going to cost them sales if it does anything.
Well, sure. But I wasn't trying to say Phalanx would be better than splashing the shooter or intercepting the missile 50 miles away. But assuming you're down to CIWS, would you rather have phalanx or RAM? When I was in that business we pretty much took it for granted you couldn't intercept a missile with a slower missile, and I think Brahmos is faster than RAM. If not Brahmos then certainly Brahmos II. At that closing speed you're only gonna get one shot (or one burst) with either system. I was just thinking I'd rather take my shot with Phalanx.
From the standpoint of planning for defense against streakers, the fact that they're relatively short range means you put your resources into destroying the launch platform. Unfortunately you don't necessarily get to chose where you'll be when people start shooting at you. A ship in the Med could very easily end up relying on CIWS to stop the first wave because of ROE.
It's not a failure among programmers at all - it's a business decision. The main reason software is less efficient is the costs are so heavily tilted toward software development instead of hardware. For the vast majority of business applications companies are using generalized frameworks to trade CPU cycles and memory for development time.
Even in terms of development style, it just isn't worth it to optimize your code if it's going to substantially increase development time. People are expensive. Time is expensive. Hardware is not.
Now, if you're Microsoft, or Blizzard, or Google, then the equation changes, since your code is running on millions of CPUs. But that's not the normal case. If I'm writing a web service so the accounting software at headquarters can tell how many widgets are in my company's warehouse, it really doesn't matter how inefficient the code is (within reason) as long as it works reliably and is easy to maintain. What my boss really wants is for me to finish as quickly as possible and move on to the next task.
This is nonsensical. For one thing, The Chinese already have ballistic nuclear missiles. If they actually decided to uncork the nukes there's no need to use something like this. Ballistic missiles are much harder to stop than cruise missiles.
Most cruise missiles are designed to be really hard to detect once they've been launched (the Stark, for example, saw incoming Iraqi aircraft but didn't pick up the Exocet missiles they launched). The Brahmos (and earlier versions like the Russian P-800 Onyx) have a different strategy - it's a lot easier to pick up on radar and IR, but you don't have a lot of time to knock it down.
The advantage of a flat trajectory over ballistic is two-fold: 1) cruise missiles are easier to make than ballistic missiles. Your problems with heat, guidance, and vibration are magnified in a ballistic trajectory. And 2) cruise missiles tend to be much smaller. A ballistic missile with the same size warhead is almost ten times as large.
And yeah, the relatively short range is a big drawback.
The phalanx has been going away for decades. In fact, it was conceived as a stop-gap system that was only supposed to be around a few years because the Rolling Airframe Missile was (badly) late.
Personally, I don't see why something like Phalanx wouldn't be the right system to use against really fast missiles. The energy released when a DU bullet hits a missile coming in at mach 2.8 (or mach 5.2 for Brahmos II) must be absolutely enormous. Sure, you'll get crap all over the deck, but that's not the end of the world.
This particular missile is actually a tarted-up Russian P-800 Onyx.
That's the problem with free speech. About half the people wasted theirs trying to get someone else's curtailed.
Nonsense. Basic Medicare doesn't cover hearing aids, but you can choose a Medicare HMO that does. If you doctor certifies you've lost enough of your hearing that you can't "function well in society", the hearing aid is covered. I'll bet the percentage of people who pay for their own hearing aids is tiny. Minuscule. The OP is right. Hearing aids are expensive for the same reason everything medical is expensive in the US - the most of the people who are using the services aren't paying.
Yes, and they'll still be scratching their heads trying to figure out if it isn't working because they need a nullmodem cable, or maybe they were supposed to ground CTS...
Like all eminently quotable people, Dijkstra tended to hyperbole and oversimplification.
In my experience if your application fails a DRM check it's probably legit.
I think the word you're looking for is "systematic". In any event, what you characterize as an "attack" was just normal business competition. Microsoft had the better product and charged less for it. By the time Novell jumped on the Linux bandwagon the writing was already on the wall.
Maybe she can decide at this point "hey, we should have stopped fighting here and just put him in hospice care", because she knows when he finally succumbed. But sometimes people beat cancer (rarely or often, depending on the cancer). Let's say early on they decided to go the hospice route, and he died. What is she going to think when she opens up the paper and find a story about a guy with the same cancer who lasted another 20 years?
It's really easy to draw a line on a chart and say "anybody on the right side of this line has such a bad prognosis it's just not worth the money to treat them. It's a lot harder when it's your mom.
That's a side effect of web programming. I worked for about five years on a pure java application. The only other language I used in all that time was a little bit of xml to set up the ant build. The end users loved it and it was easy to maintain.
My current project is a web application, and I have to know three or four different languages to get anything to work (depending on what you consider a language). There's no hope for any kind of end-to-end debugging or performance analysis. There are a lot more places for things to go wrong than the pure java environment and the final product isn't as smooth.
It all seems like a big step backward to me. But what the hell. They pay me by the hour.
This is delusional. First off, the Libertarian party is run by truthers and John Birch-style cranks. It has no coherent platform beyond "cut my taxes and your services". It will never, ever be a serious party in the US without a wholesale change in both charter and leadership. The Tea Party people are the ones who are the actual fiscal conservatives these days, and the fact that you label them "teabaggers" and lump them in with neocons displays a shocking ignorance. You call yourself a Libertarian but your political outlook is bog-standard dorm room Marxist.
Because it's not true in practice. Launching the Shuttle a bunch of times only makes each flight marginally cheaper because it was designed for performance instead of operations - there's simply too much that has to be done between flights. So great, instead of paying a billion a flight you have the cost down to $500m (and here I'm being generous), but to do it you need to quadruple the NASA budget so you can fly every couple days. Not that you could do that anyway with only four shuttles.
Doesn't make sense. We will never, ever have practical access to space with the shuttle, no matter how aggressive the launch schedule is. And what are you going to do with all those flights to LEO now that you have no money for anything but launching?
There was never a neocon congress. Is that your definition - "a neocon is someone who does something I don't like"? No wonder your world is full of them.
VASIMR isn't the holy grail of rocketry, it's just a new twist on ion engines. It will never be powerful enough to be used as a primary stage booster. In other words, it does nothing to get us out of the blind alley we went down forty years ago. I have a lot of respect for Chang-Diaz for not giving up, but even if everything works out the way he wants it won't have much effect on the overall picture.
You guys on the left have so over-used the word neocon that it doesn't mean anything at all anymore. The neocons were never fiscal conservatives - they were leftists who became militarists because of external threats (real and imagined). They have almost no influence left in the Republican party and never had any with the Tea Party people. Just because a guy wants to fund useless crap to generate jobs in his district doesn't mean he's a neocon. That just makes him a member of Congress.
The shuttle never delivered on its primary mission, which was cheap access to space. It should have been killed as soon as that was clear in the mid '80s. We should not be funding a project that "moves us out of LEO". If we ever want to have a hope of doing anything useful in space we need to retrace our steps and build a cost effective system to get people and material into LEO.
Right now there isn't anything worth doing in space beyond spy and communications satellites, and the reason is it's too damn expensive to get there. If we don't lower the $/kg cost to orbit any manned space efforts will be the sorts of vanity projects we've been seeing in the last 30 years. Hey, let's spend a billion dollars going to orbit and start some high school student's microgravity ant hill experiment! Those kinds of projects can't be justified in economic terms, so they'll never be funded evenly.
There's no particular scientific challenge to cheaper space travel, either. Rocket fuel is relatively cheap - the fuel with the energy it takes to put a 747 in orbit is about the same amount of fuel it takes to fly that same jet from Los Angeles to Sydney. It's an operations cost engineering challenge, and not one well suited to a bloated government bureaucracy like NASA.