Such a civilization might have even traveled right back to the big bang and influenced things so that the physical constants come out as they have and everything comes to pass as it has (as seen from our perspective). You wouldn't be able to tell the difference if they did, so the discussion is moot anyway.
Mining robots would have it much much easier on the moon where you can strip-mine to your heart's content. Anyway, I can see sending some guys up there with the werewithal to bootstrap the operation anyway but a full colony? With a self-sustaining population etc etc? That's just nuts, unnecessary. It's not like the Americas where you just moved a couple-ten thousand people over and they carried on basically just as if they had never left home. It's not the high frontier. It's a shitty hot irradiated desert on one side and a shittier frozen desert on the other with no air to breathe and no soil to grow plants from. Basically, robots are it, forever, or until we're so rich as a species that it doesn't matter anyway anymore.
Why not for profit? There's nothing that would drive a real space program better than profit. Back in the day, the US and the USSR saw it as profitable, politically, socially, economically and, well, survival-wise to compete in the space race. Now, not so much. Bring on the profits, I say!
The moon makes no sense as a stopover. However, it is way cheaper energy-wise and generally simpler because of a lack of atmosphere to lift stuff out of the moon's gravity well. What I'd do is set up a fuel station there which would break the water into hydrogen and oxygen (yay for no atmosphere and solar ovens!), liquefy both (yay for cold dark outer space and miles of ceramic plumbing!), mine the leftovers for metal and throw the resulting cans of rocket fuel into LEO, GEO or to where ever else they are needed (Wanna go to Mars in a reasonable amount of time? Send some of these cans ahead, no need to drag all your reaction mass with you when you leave home!).
Capturing an ice asteroid or three would probably be next on the agenda.
Fair enough. Nor have you any idea about how various people and nations use different spellings of Russian names.
Wikipedia calls him Andrey Markov, which is a "phonetic" version built for English speakers, for instance; you call him "Marcov", simply replacing cyrillic characters with their latin counterparts as any Russian would, but then you write "Andrey" not "Andrei" which means you are going the Wikipedia way also.
Ok. That being said, perhaps you have something of value to add to the discussion?
in Open office it's buried in a tab in a sub menu of a sub menu.
Straw man. I wasn't discussing Open Office as an example of good UI design. It's atrocious, if you ask me.
Want to change page dimensions and orientation? Page layout.
That right there is a sterling example of everything that's wrong with MSWord. Why is changing page layout and orientation a commonly-performed task? Could it be because, oh, I don't know, it comes with piss-poor defaults and no easy and coherent way to define , distribute and use document templates in a collaborative setting?
You should NOT be fiddling with layout. Writing a scientific paper (this seems to be the usage scenario you're coming from)? Faculty (if you're in school) or the journal you write for (if you're not) should provide a template.
Generally speaking, layout and design should be rather strictly separated from text editing. Adobe does a decent job of this with InDesign/InCopy.
Umm. By only exposing a very small, poorly-chosen subset of what the product can do and obscuring everything else through its very existence?
Yes, which is why the ribbon came out and was based on actual UI and usability testing.
Your point being?
That testing was performed mostly on existing MSOffice users. If you've used only rocks to bang on stuff before before and I give you a left-handed hammer, you will use it in that way and like the fact that you can finally hammer stuff as opposed to bashing it with a rock. The loss of flexibility (rocks can be swung with any or both hands) won't bother you as much as if you'd have ever used a normal hammer beforehand.
Usability has very little to do with software design? lolwut?
I'm accustomed to thinking of software design as that discipline which determines how a piece of software must be built to perform its stated job. UI design is a very very small subset of software design and may be missing altogether, in the case of software which is not designed to interact with users - yes, there is a lot of such software around you.
There is zero question on the deliverability of nork nukes. They tested twice (afair) and both tests were too small to be anything else than small Pu implosion-type weapons - those can be made very small indeed. W54 is around 23 kg. Take it for granted that the norks are a lot less sophisticated than that. Assume that they have shit codes, shit electronics, shit for brains and can only build something ten times heavier, round it up to say 250 kg.
You can put one of these not-so-fantasy-warheads on a SCUD-C (aka Hwasong-6), add a full-up decoy just for the heck of it and have 100 kilos left over for a small boost to that 550 km range. How far is Seoul from the border again?
The SCUD-D has almost twice the range, meaning Japan is suddenly on the menu, meaning NK will stand on fall solely based on how strong the regime is internally. With China propping the current NK gov't up so they don't suddenly get a rogue nuke-armed military junta on their border, well, there's not much chance of things ever changing there.
Malicious intent, in other words. They hacked the algo. I can see the courts' argument and I'd agree with it if I didn't know that most trading houses' algos are made in such a way as to fight other houses' algos.
Sorry, what? They manipulated the market by buying and selling stock? How could they be convicted for trading? How can a buy or a sale constitute a "misleading signal"? Misleading whom? In relation to what fundamental truth?
Bullshit. They did no wrong. The whole stock market thing is based on outwitting other investors. If you choose to let George Soros manage your money, I am free to try and outwit him, taking some of that money if I succeed. How is it different if you let a computer manage your money?
They're the FBI which set up offices in East Europe and other places - ostensibly to "deal with carders". Since when the FUCK does the FBI have a mandate to go outside the borders of the USA and pursue criminals, possibly rendering them to OTHER NATIONS' JUSTICE SYSTEMS when found?
They're the CIA which runs a global network of secret prisons set up in third-world countries where it's easy to get local "talent" for torture and rape. Where the FUCK does it say in the Constitution or the laws of the USofA that they have a right or a duty to do that?
They're the NSA that eavesdrops on everyone's communications - including so-called US allies, including US citizens on US soil, talking to other US citizens. Where the FUCK does it say they have a right to do that?
They're your border guards, empowered by unconstitutional laws to arrest anyone and seize any property, foreign or domestic. Your borders are supposed to extend inwards 100 miles from the actual border line, too!
They're your police, empowered by a bundle of unconstitutional laws to perform arbitrary stops, warrantless searches and seizures based on suspicion alone and who feel so threatened by the average citizen that tasering diabetic senior citizens in wheelchairs is standard MO. Papieren, bitte!
They're your President elect, who has the authority and ability, through all of these tools and many others, to disappear anyone off the face of the Earth. Oh, he can delegate this authority to anyone he pleases, too.
It's more opaque, not less. The ribbon hides functionality to coddle morons, that's its main purpose. By contrast, good UI design exposes functionality in such a way that users can actually use it.
Microsoft's solution to "hey! 90% of people use only 10% of our product's features" wasn't "Ok, let's try and expose at least another 10% to these guys in a way that makes sense so maybe they'll use and appreciate it" but rather "Ok, let's hide that 90% so our stupid, stupid users don't get lost picking through the remaining 10%".
Software design, btw, has very little to do with where all the buttons are hidden.
The gov't of the US is outsourcing the military, raping what's left of the already measly public health system you had to create another massive windfall for private healthcare providers, throwing taxpayers' money into banks' coffers, never to be seen again, propping up GM, which would otherwise have gone up to auction...
And from that, you conclude that your government is actually bossing around all these corporations. Hah.
Government would cease to be relevant and most people would be unable to afford basic commodities. Fact is, we're heading that way as we speak. The US of A are leading the stampede to oblivion and the final dissolution of the nation-state.
I, for one, wish to welcome our new corporate overlords.
Thus giving them a very handy way of wagging the dog. How many nuke plants do you expect to afford to lose in this manner? How many allied troops would there be left in country a week after you pulled such a stunt? For that matter, how would the Afghan military that you're trying to train react? How about the Afghan gov't? How about the UN?
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Such a civilization might have even traveled right back to the big bang and influenced things so that the physical constants come out as they have and everything comes to pass as it has (as seen from our perspective). You wouldn't be able to tell the difference if they did, so the discussion is moot anyway.
If we do develop FTL travel, some tree-hugging idiot is bound to jump into the past and try to stop the nukes from ever being launched.
Mining robots would have it much much easier on the moon where you can strip-mine to your heart's content. Anyway, I can see sending some guys up there with the werewithal to bootstrap the operation anyway but a full colony? With a self-sustaining population etc etc? That's just nuts, unnecessary. It's not like the Americas where you just moved a couple-ten thousand people over and they carried on basically just as if they had never left home. It's not the high frontier. It's a shitty hot irradiated desert on one side and a shittier frozen desert on the other with no air to breathe and no soil to grow plants from. Basically, robots are it, forever, or until we're so rich as a species that it doesn't matter anyway anymore.
Why not for profit? There's nothing that would drive a real space program better than profit. Back in the day, the US and the USSR saw it as profitable, politically, socially, economically and, well, survival-wise to compete in the space race. Now, not so much. Bring on the profits, I say!
The moon makes no sense as a stopover. However, it is way cheaper energy-wise and generally simpler because of a lack of atmosphere to lift stuff out of the moon's gravity well. What I'd do is set up a fuel station there which would break the water into hydrogen and oxygen (yay for no atmosphere and solar ovens!), liquefy both (yay for cold dark outer space and miles of ceramic plumbing!), mine the leftovers for metal and throw the resulting cans of rocket fuel into LEO, GEO or to where ever else they are needed (Wanna go to Mars in a reasonable amount of time? Send some of these cans ahead, no need to drag all your reaction mass with you when you leave home!).
Capturing an ice asteroid or three would probably be next on the agenda.
Fair enough. Nor have you any idea about how various people and nations use different spellings of Russian names.
Wikipedia calls him Andrey Markov, which is a "phonetic" version built for English speakers, for instance; you call him "Marcov", simply replacing cyrillic characters with their latin counterparts as any Russian would, but then you write "Andrey" not "Andrei" which means you are going the Wikipedia way also.
Ok. That being said, perhaps you have something of value to add to the discussion?
It was Norman Spinrad actually.
It's quite possible to generate plausible-sounding new stuff given samples of existing artists' work. Markoff chains FTW!
Oh boy. Will you ever be miffed if that 4square ripoff turns out to be the next Facebook :D.
in Open office it's buried in a tab in a sub menu of a sub menu.
Straw man. I wasn't discussing Open Office as an example of good UI design. It's atrocious, if you ask me.
Want to change page dimensions and orientation? Page layout.
That right there is a sterling example of everything that's wrong with MSWord. Why is changing page layout and orientation a commonly-performed task? Could it be because, oh, I don't know, it comes with piss-poor defaults and no easy and coherent way to define , distribute and use document templates in a collaborative setting?
You should NOT be fiddling with layout. Writing a scientific paper (this seems to be the usage scenario you're coming from)? Faculty (if you're in school) or the journal you write for (if you're not) should provide a template.
Generally speaking, layout and design should be rather strictly separated from text editing. Adobe does a decent job of this with InDesign/InCopy.
How does it hide functionality?
Umm. By only exposing a very small, poorly-chosen subset of what the product can do and obscuring everything else through its very existence?
Yes, which is why the ribbon came out and was based on actual UI and usability testing.
Your point being?
That testing was performed mostly on existing MSOffice users. If you've used only rocks to bang on stuff before before and I give you a left-handed hammer, you will use it in that way and like the fact that you can finally hammer stuff as opposed to bashing it with a rock. The loss of flexibility (rocks can be swung with any or both hands) won't bother you as much as if you'd have ever used a normal hammer beforehand.
Usability has very little to do with software design? lolwut?
I'm accustomed to thinking of software design as that discipline which determines how a piece of software must be built to perform its stated job. UI design is a very very small subset of software design and may be missing altogether, in the case of software which is not designed to interact with users - yes, there is a lot of such software around you.
There is zero question on the deliverability of nork nukes. They tested twice (afair) and both tests were too small to be anything else than small Pu implosion-type weapons - those can be made very small indeed. W54 is around 23 kg. Take it for granted that the norks are a lot less sophisticated than that. Assume that they have shit codes, shit electronics, shit for brains and can only build something ten times heavier, round it up to say 250 kg.
You can put one of these not-so-fantasy-warheads on a SCUD-C (aka Hwasong-6), add a full-up decoy just for the heck of it and have 100 kilos left over for a small boost to that 550 km range. How far is Seoul from the border again?
The SCUD-D has almost twice the range, meaning Japan is suddenly on the menu, meaning NK will stand on fall solely based on how strong the regime is internally. With China propping the current NK gov't up so they don't suddenly get a rogue nuke-armed military junta on their border, well, there's not much chance of things ever changing there.
Malicious intent, in other words. They hacked the algo. I can see the courts' argument and I'd agree with it if I didn't know that most trading houses' algos are made in such a way as to fight other houses' algos.
Sorry, what? They manipulated the market by buying and selling stock? How could they be convicted for trading? How can a buy or a sale constitute a "misleading signal"? Misleading whom? In relation to what fundamental truth?
Bullshit. They did no wrong. The whole stock market thing is based on outwitting other investors. If you choose to let George Soros manage your money, I am free to try and outwit him, taking some of that money if I succeed. How is it different if you let a computer manage your money?
Parent post needs much upmodding.
They're the FBI which set up offices in East Europe and other places - ostensibly to "deal with carders". Since when the FUCK does the FBI have a mandate to go outside the borders of the USA and pursue criminals, possibly rendering them to OTHER NATIONS' JUSTICE SYSTEMS when found?
They're the CIA which runs a global network of secret prisons set up in third-world countries where it's easy to get local "talent" for torture and rape. Where the FUCK does it say in the Constitution or the laws of the USofA that they have a right or a duty to do that?
They're the NSA that eavesdrops on everyone's communications - including so-called US allies, including US citizens on US soil, talking to other US citizens. Where the FUCK does it say they have a right to do that?
They're your border guards, empowered by unconstitutional laws to arrest anyone and seize any property, foreign or domestic. Your borders are supposed to extend inwards 100 miles from the actual border line, too!
They're your police, empowered by a bundle of unconstitutional laws to perform arbitrary stops, warrantless searches and seizures based on suspicion alone and who feel so threatened by the average citizen that tasering diabetic senior citizens in wheelchairs is standard MO. Papieren, bitte!
They're your President elect, who has the authority and ability, through all of these tools and many others, to disappear anyone off the face of the Earth. Oh, he can delegate this authority to anyone he pleases, too.
It's more opaque, not less. The ribbon hides functionality to coddle morons, that's its main purpose. By contrast, good UI design exposes functionality in such a way that users can actually use it.
Microsoft's solution to "hey! 90% of people use only 10% of our product's features" wasn't "Ok, let's try and expose at least another 10% to these guys in a way that makes sense so maybe they'll use and appreciate it" but rather "Ok, let's hide that 90% so our stupid, stupid users don't get lost picking through the remaining 10%".
Software design, btw, has very little to do with where all the buttons are hidden.
They might. Of course, the anti-trust inquiry won't happen.
There are significant differences between the Bessemer and Kelly processes. Moreover, steel was being manufactured way before that.
There's always PGPfone. Some assembly required, but I bet you could make it work on any smartphone.
You poor deluded soul.
The gov't of the US is outsourcing the military, raping what's left of the already measly public health system you had to create another massive windfall for private healthcare providers, throwing taxpayers' money into banks' coffers, never to be seen again, propping up GM, which would otherwise have gone up to auction...
And from that, you conclude that your government is actually bossing around all these corporations. Hah.
Government would cease to be relevant and most people would be unable to afford basic commodities. Fact is, we're heading that way as we speak. The US of A are leading the stampede to oblivion and the final dissolution of the nation-state.
I, for one, wish to welcome our new corporate overlords.
There are lots of volcanoes there so IF one could dig for geothermal, things may become much easier. Sure, it would be a large initial investment.
Thus giving them a very handy way of wagging the dog. How many nuke plants do you expect to afford to lose in this manner? How many allied troops would there be left in country a week after you pulled such a stunt? For that matter, how would the Afghan military that you're trying to train react? How about the Afghan gov't? How about the UN?
Moronic.