Here's the reason for the dip in RIAA sales. It's quite simple and obvious and has nothing to do with downloading. It has to do with the two lists shown below:
Styles of new music the RIAA put out and actively promoted during the 80's:
Top-40 pop
Rap
Metal
Punk
Progressive
Styles of new music the RIAA is putting out and actively promoting today:
Top-40 pop
That is the reason people aren't buying as much from the RIAA as they used to. The variety is gone.
Nothing but the bottom line is going to get through to these people.
False. Nothing PERIOD is going to get through to these people, INCLUDING the bottom line. We've already seen evidence that when they lose profits they blame it on file sharing. A boycott is just going to be misinterpeted (or deliberately mislabelled) as more losses to file sharing.
1) you eventually need less launches, so less sites.
Just because you CAN launch a large payload doesn't mean you always need to. A successful vehicle design has to scale down to where it is efficient even when launching a small satellite. (Maybe not with the same physical vehicle, but at least with a smaller version of the same kind of vehicle, like the difference between a 18-wheel truck and a moped, both based on the same kind of engine - internal combustion using gasoline. You can't make an orion that's efficient for small loads.) You can't just batch together a bunch of satellite launches into one orion flight either, since such launches need to establish totally different tragectories from each other, they each need their own seperate vehicle launched on different paths.
An orion would be a great spaceship design for use OUTSIDE an atmosphere, because then you don't get fallout drifting far away, but unfortunately it's here on Earth that we need it's high thrust ratio the most. I agree that it could be possible to find a large enough patch of area that the area demolished by the launch won't contain any inhabitants or anything we mind destroying. But take into account atmosphere (and the water circulation cycle of rain-runoff-ocean-evaporate), and there's nowhere safe to launch from, not even the ice caps. (Imagine how much ice would melt an d end up in the oceans. Even if you discount the radiation danger of that (I don't know the science so I don't know how much of a danger that would really be), there's still the fact that you can't have repeat missions on "ground" that melts away a large part of itself each time you use it. Each launch would have to be in a new location.) Once we reach earth orbit we don't need the orion's massive thrust capacity anymore to get around the solar system. Slow-but-steady drive designs can do that job just fine. So Orions aren't a viable solution to build a space program on. There's nowhere safe to repeatedly launch them from here on Earth. We could handle a small number of launches, but not a regular frequent schedule of them.
History proves that non-Christians fare better under Christian governments than vice versa. Completely secular/atheist governments are often the worst of all.
I didn't realize you thought so poorly of the US, which is goverend by a completely secular government, according to the founding fathers themselves. (Check out the Treaty of Tripoli, the first major diplomatic treaty between the new USA and a foriegn power after the adoption of the Constitution. It is quite clear that the US is in no way a Christain government. Check out the writings of Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin. They were dead-set against ANY ties between religion and government, of any kind. Further, check Article 6 of the Constitution, in which it is expressly forbidden to require religion for any government position. And if you want to claim, as you did, that this was all put there just because Christaianity itself forbids government enforcement, then why in the world didn't any of the previous Christian governments have such a provision back in the Europe? That clause was very novel at the time. It was the first government to have such an exclusion, but it was certainly not the first government run by Christians. (And the type of Christianity practiced by many of the founding fathers was very very loose and bordered on Deism. Jefferson even went so far as to entirely redo the bible, stripping half of it away that he thought wasn't true (do a google search for "Jefferson Bible".))
And you obviously do not understand the Christian doctrines of sin and atonement
To assume that someone who disagrees with your doctrine must be doing so because he doesn't understand it is a great hubris. A common one too, unfortunately.
...believing that Christ forgives sins, promoting personal responsibility.
Let me give some examples of equally logical and sensible phrases as the above: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
Bill Waterson is really miffed about the various Calvin peeing on something logos. It's not a matter of copyright, or payment, but of artistic integrity. He didn't make Calvin and Hobbes in order to see his favorite imaginary six-year-old be used in (literally) a pissing contest between Ford and Chevvy, Harley and Honda, or SCO and Linux. Out of respect for the creator, I would never display such a thing. He was a cool cartoonist - don't use the Calvin image in a way totally against what the artist had in mind when he made it.
Personal responsibility. Don't leave home without it.
I looked at your signature's link, to a anti-freedom -of-religion political party, (which ironically names itself after the constitution), and have to wonder at the above statement. Personal responsiblity is incompatable with the Christian doctrine of "everything is forgiven if you just ask".
The California mentallity is spend and not tax. That's how they got in such a big budget mess. Big spending requires big taxes, You can't get rid of just one without the other. The problem is that through the verious direct refferendum propositions, Californians were given exactly what they asked for - an impossible fantasy of large government programs funded by magic pixie dust.
Low Taxes. Large government programs. Pick one. The California refferendum system allows ignorant buffoons (by which I mean the general population) to attempt to pick both. Blaming Davis for the deficit is dumb. Over half the budget was earmarked and out of his control. The governorship doesn't have the power to override the propositions.
If Californians are looking for someone to blame, they should point the finger at themselves.
An Orion does not make for a cheap space program. Sure, the craft itself is cheap. But then you have to add in the cost of what it does to the launch site and everything in the vacinity.
Casino: "You cheater! How dare you have a really good memory and make use of it! Only people of average or worse memory capacity are allowed to play at this table. You are using your skilled ability to memorize by rote to your advantage and that's not fair."
Player: "So, what, am I supposed to forget that there aren't any more aces left in the deck and bet as if I still believed there were? That would be really dumb."
Casino: "But we only want dumb people to gamble here. Anything else is cheating."
So, a post about deadly electricity, in response to an article about potentially playing with deadly electricity, is now considered "offtopic". What were you smoking, Mr. Moderator???
Three Mile Island is of course the most famous incident and the closest we've come to a real disaster, there have been numerous other smaller incidents.
Three mile island was a completely different situation than Chernobyl. At Three Mile Island, the safety features worked exactly according to plan. The meltdown was halted as soon as it began, by a system that was designed with this negative feedback loop in place for safety. Today you can stand near Three mile island and get no more radiation exposure than you get from watching TV. The Ukranians are going to have to deal with the after-effects of Chernobyl, that the Soviets dumped on them, for generations to come. The plant was designed such that the reaction couldn't stop on it's own once it got started. It needed power to stop itself. Dumb, Dumb, Dumb.
1. Telemetry. Amateur radioheads with a ham radio set could have verified that there were at least transmissions being made from a path that was going near to the moon. No doubt the Soviets were paying careful attention to this as well. The only way to fake that is send an unmanned probe up and broadcast a recording.
And, along those lines, didn't one of the missions leave behind a corner-reflecting mirror that can be used to bounce light off the moon and measure it's distance?
The only reason manned spaceflight is expensive is because ALL spaceflight is terribly expensive. When you have to calculate the cost terms of hundreds of kilodollars per pound of payload, then anything that shaves off payload (like not having to keep a person alive on board) starts to look very attractive. But that approach is the short-sighted one. The real problem to be solved with spaceflight is finding cheaper and faster ways to get up out of the gravity well. After that, everything becomes much cheaper, to the point where manned flight is no longer prohibitively expensive like it is today. This tendancy of some to say that all new research into manned vehicles should be suspended and everything should be done by unmanned missions launched on one-use rockets is very shortsighted. Yes, that's the technology we have to live with TODAY. But that's no reason to stop research into better forms of propulsion which can make manned flight cheaper and worthwhile.
The fact that single-use rockets you throw away after one use are the cheapest way to run the space program is NOT due to the superiority of the one-shot rocket. It's due to the utter lack of good reusable vehicles (the shuttle isn't really a reusable vehicle.) The fact that the cheapest thing available is something you throw away after one use is a sign of how pathetic our launch vehicles really are.
The future of spaceflight is not purely unmanned. It's not purely manned. It's BOTH. And it's things like the X-Prize that will get us there, not sending robotoic probes around getting paltry information and transmitting it back.
Get a better vehicle and the whole manned versus unmanned debate becomes irrelevant, because the extra tonnage you have to carry to support human life won't matter as much.
I've been shocked by a lot more volts than that. All that happened is my hair stuck out and got frizzy and I was able to harmlessly 'zap' people by pointing my finger at them and getting within a few inches. It was on a Van De Graf generator. Granted the AMPS on that thing was a very teeny tiny amount, but hey..
The AMPS are what kills you. The Volts are just what allow the AMPS to reach you. When you were jolted by 110 volt power and nothing happened what really happened was that the current was travelling on the outside surface of your skin (probably being conducted via sweat and oils) instead of through the inside of your body and that's why you aren't dead or horribly burned right now. 220 volt power is more likely to kill you NOT because of the amount of power, but because of the greater likelyhood that some of the power will take a path that hits important parts of your body on the way. The current in just one-half of the house 220 line (a 110 line), is still more than enough to kill you if it takes the right path. It's just a bit less likely to take such a path. Count yourself lucky that you only felt a "tingle" from that house current. That just means it stayed on the outside of your body and didn't hit anything important on the way.
Sure, a melted north pole ice cap wouldn't change water levels (since that exact volume of water is already displaced by the floating ice - that's how floating *works*). But it would royally mess up the ocean currents. Without the blockage that currently exists at the north pole, water could flow freely around the north of Canada and the USSR, and I'm sure that would change ocean currents worldwide since it's such a chaoticly balanced system. That would have a *major* effect of the climate of Europe. Countries in Europe are only warm because the Atlantic current brings up warm water from the south. Change that and England becomes as cold as other countries at the same latitude - like Canada and Russia. Scandanavia starts being like Alaska. The effect that would have on agriculture would be disasterous for such a populous area.
If any non-kernel, non-driver code causes the OS to crash, then that *IS* the fault of the OS. Hands Down. A good OS should be able to survive accidentally bad (or even maliciously bad) application code.
Slashdot Mirror
Styles of new music the RIAA put out and actively promoted during the 80's:
Styles of new music the RIAA is putting out and actively promoting today:
That is the reason people aren't buying as much from the RIAA as they used to. The variety is gone.
your sig about Randi is dead on, he avoids people with real proof of the otherworldly like a plague
True - because you have no choice but to avoid people who don't exist. It's kind of hard to make contact with them.
If you're not in the market and you don't buy then it is not really a boycott is it.
By that definition, NOTHING can be a boycott, since a boycott includes removing yourself (even if temporariliy) from the market.
Nothing but the bottom line is going to get through to these people.
False. Nothing PERIOD is going to get through to these people, INCLUDING the bottom line. We've already seen evidence that when they lose profits they blame it on file sharing. A boycott is just going to be misinterpeted (or deliberately mislabelled) as more losses to file sharing.
1) you eventually need less launches, so less sites.
Just because you CAN launch a large payload doesn't mean you always need to. A successful vehicle design has to scale down to where it is efficient even when launching a small satellite. (Maybe not with the same physical vehicle, but at least with a smaller version of the same kind of vehicle, like the difference between a 18-wheel truck and a moped, both based on the same kind of engine - internal combustion using gasoline. You can't make an orion that's efficient for small loads.) You can't just batch together a bunch of satellite launches into one orion flight either, since such launches need to establish totally different tragectories from each other, they each need their own seperate vehicle launched on different paths.
An orion would be a great spaceship design for use OUTSIDE an atmosphere, because then you don't get fallout drifting far away, but unfortunately it's here on Earth that we need it's high thrust ratio the most. I agree that it could be possible to find a large enough patch of area that the area demolished by the launch won't contain any inhabitants or anything we mind destroying. But take into account atmosphere (and the water circulation cycle of rain-runoff-ocean-evaporate), and there's nowhere safe to launch from, not even the ice caps. (Imagine how much ice would melt an d end up in the oceans. Even if you discount the radiation danger of that (I don't know the science so I don't know how much of a danger that would really be), there's still the fact that you can't have repeat missions on "ground" that melts away a large part of itself each time you use it. Each launch would have to be in a new location.) Once we reach earth orbit we don't need the orion's massive thrust capacity anymore to get around the solar system. Slow-but-steady drive designs can do that job just fine. So Orions aren't a viable solution to build a space program on. There's nowhere safe to repeatedly launch them from here on Earth. We could handle a small number of launches, but not a regular frequent schedule of them.
History proves that non-Christians fare better under Christian governments than vice versa. Completely secular/atheist governments are often the worst of all.
I didn't realize you thought so poorly of the US, which is goverend by a completely secular government, according to the founding fathers themselves. (Check out the Treaty of Tripoli, the first major diplomatic treaty between the new USA and a foriegn power after the adoption of the Constitution. It is quite clear that the US is in no way a Christain government. Check out the writings of Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin. They were dead-set against ANY ties between religion and government, of any kind. Further, check Article 6 of the Constitution, in which it is expressly forbidden to require religion for any government position. And if you want to claim, as you did, that this was all put there just because Christaianity itself forbids government enforcement, then why in the world didn't any of the previous Christian governments have such a provision back in the Europe? That clause was very novel at the time. It was the first government to have such an exclusion, but it was certainly not the first government run by Christians. (And the type of Christianity practiced by many of the founding fathers was very very loose and bordered on Deism. Jefferson even went so far as to entirely redo the bible, stripping half of it away that he thought wasn't true (do a google search for "Jefferson Bible".))
And you obviously do not understand the Christian doctrines of sin and atonement
To assume that someone who disagrees with your doctrine must be doing so because he doesn't understand it is a great hubris. A common one too, unfortunately.
Let me give some examples of equally logical and sensible phrases as the above: War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
Bill Waterson is really miffed about the various Calvin peeing on something logos. It's not a matter of copyright, or payment, but of artistic integrity. He didn't make Calvin and Hobbes in order to see his favorite imaginary six-year-old be used in (literally) a pissing contest between Ford and Chevvy, Harley and Honda, or SCO and Linux. Out of respect for the creator, I would never display such a thing. He was a cool cartoonist - don't use the Calvin image in a way totally against what the artist had in mind when he made it.
Personal responsibility. Don't leave home without it.
I looked at your signature's link, to a anti-freedom -of-religion political party, (which ironically names itself after the constitution), and have to wonder at the above statement. Personal responsiblity is incompatable with the Christian doctrine of "everything is forgiven if you just ask".
The California mentallity is spend and not tax. That's how they got in such a big budget mess. Big spending requires big taxes, You can't get rid of just one without the other. The problem is that through the verious direct refferendum propositions, Californians were given exactly what they asked for - an impossible fantasy of large government programs funded by magic pixie dust.
Low Taxes. Large government programs. Pick one. The California refferendum system allows ignorant buffoons (by which I mean the general population) to attempt to pick both. Blaming Davis for the deficit is dumb. Over half the budget was earmarked and out of his control. The governorship doesn't have the power to override the propositions.
If Californians are looking for someone to blame, they should point the finger at themselves.
An Orion does not make for a cheap space program. Sure, the craft itself is cheap. But then you have to add in the cost of what it does to the launch site and everything in the vacinity.
Casino: "You cheater! How dare you have a really good memory and make use of it! Only people of average or worse memory capacity are allowed to play at this table. You are using your skilled ability to memorize by rote to your advantage and that's not fair."
Player: "So, what, am I supposed to forget that there aren't any more aces left in the deck and bet as if I still believed there were? That would be really dumb."
Casino: "But we only want dumb people to gamble here. Anything else is cheating."
I had an Agenda and I have a Zarus.
It's slashdot. I thought everyone who posts here had an agenda.
So, a post about deadly electricity, in response to an article about potentially playing with deadly electricity, is now considered "offtopic". What were you smoking, Mr. Moderator???
Three Mile Island is of course the most famous incident and the closest we've come to a real disaster, there have been numerous other smaller incidents.
Three mile island was a completely different situation than Chernobyl. At Three Mile Island, the safety features worked exactly according to plan. The meltdown was halted as soon as it began, by a system that was designed with this negative feedback loop in place for safety. Today you can stand near Three mile island and get no more radiation exposure than you get from watching TV. The Ukranians are going to have to deal with the after-effects of Chernobyl, that the Soviets dumped on them, for generations to come. The plant was designed such that the reaction couldn't stop on it's own once it got started. It needed power to stop itself. Dumb, Dumb, Dumb.
1. Telemetry. Amateur radioheads with a ham radio set could have verified that there were at least transmissions being made from a path that was going near to the moon. No doubt the Soviets were paying careful attention to this as well. The only way to fake that is send an unmanned probe up and broadcast a recording.
And, along those lines, didn't one of the missions leave behind a corner-reflecting mirror that can be used to bounce light off the moon and measure it's distance?
The only reason manned spaceflight is expensive is because ALL spaceflight is terribly expensive. When you have to calculate the cost terms of hundreds of kilodollars per pound of payload, then anything that shaves off payload (like not having to keep a person alive on board) starts to look very attractive. But that approach is the short-sighted one. The real problem to be solved with spaceflight is finding cheaper and faster ways to get up out of the gravity well. After that, everything becomes much cheaper, to the point where manned flight is no longer prohibitively expensive like it is today. This tendancy of some to say that all new research into manned vehicles should be suspended and everything should be done by unmanned missions launched on one-use rockets is very shortsighted. Yes, that's the technology we have to live with TODAY. But that's no reason to stop research into better forms of propulsion which can make manned flight cheaper and worthwhile.
The fact that single-use rockets you throw away after one use are the cheapest way to run the space program is NOT due to the superiority of the one-shot rocket. It's due to the utter lack of good reusable vehicles (the shuttle isn't really a reusable vehicle.) The fact that the cheapest thing available is something you throw away after one use is a sign of how pathetic our launch vehicles really are.
The future of spaceflight is not purely unmanned. It's not purely manned. It's BOTH. And it's things like the X-Prize that will get us there, not sending robotoic probes around getting paltry information and transmitting it back.
Get a better vehicle and the whole manned versus unmanned debate becomes irrelevant, because the extra tonnage you have to carry to support human life won't matter as much.
And 60 Hz is too low by orders of magnitude for the current to all pass through your skin rather than your body.
I'm no electrition, but isn't 60 Hz a measure of frequency, which is neither amps nor volts and shouldn't have anything to do with deadliness?
I've been shocked by a lot more volts than that. All that happened is my hair stuck out and got frizzy and I was able to harmlessly 'zap' people by pointing my finger at them and getting within a few inches. It was on a Van De Graf generator. Granted the AMPS on that thing was a very teeny tiny amount, but hey..
The AMPS are what kills you. The Volts are just what allow the AMPS to reach you. When you were jolted by 110 volt power and nothing happened what really happened was that the current was travelling on the outside surface of your skin (probably being conducted via sweat and oils) instead of through the inside of your body and that's why you aren't dead or horribly burned right now. 220 volt power is more likely to kill you NOT because of the amount of power, but because of the greater likelyhood that some of the power will take a path that hits important parts of your body on the way. The current in just one-half of the house 220 line (a 110 line), is still more than enough to kill you if it takes the right path. It's just a bit less likely to take such a path. Count yourself lucky that you only felt a "tingle" from that house current. That just means it stayed on the outside of your body and didn't hit anything important on the way.
Many things in windows run in kernel space, like video drivers.
And those aren't the things the article was talking about.
Sure, a melted north pole ice cap wouldn't change water levels (since that exact volume of water is already displaced by the floating ice - that's how floating *works*). But it would royally mess up the ocean currents. Without the blockage that currently exists at the north pole, water could flow freely around the north of Canada and the USSR, and I'm sure that would change ocean currents worldwide since it's such a chaoticly balanced system. That would have a *major* effect of the climate of Europe. Countries in Europe are only warm because the Atlantic current brings up warm water from the south. Change that and England becomes as cold as other countries at the same latitude - like Canada and Russia. Scandanavia starts being like Alaska. The effect that would have on agriculture would be disasterous for such a populous area.
Of course, this refers to software. NOT, as you may notice, SOURCE CODE.
And, of course, there's the clause "without the permission of the software company" With GPL you clearly *have* that permission, explicitly stated.
they no longer need Sun's overpriced, underperforming hardware.
In the alternate universe where Sun's hardware is underperforming, that argument would make sense.
If any non-kernel, non-driver code causes the OS to crash, then that *IS* the fault of the OS. Hands Down. A good OS should be able to survive accidentally bad (or even maliciously bad) application code.
6. Recognize it for what it is - stupid admins.
leaving out the profanities, this isn't flamebait
Duhhh. "If it wasn't for the flames, this wouldn't be a flame."