Good point. Required Snark, above, overlooks one detail: for the Apollo program, funding was essentially unlimited, which is far from being the case now.
I don't use a credit card, as I don't see what it brings me. Buying something with a credit card is buying something with money you don't have. That is against all rules of dealing with money responsibly. Credit is something one should only use for the acquisition of capital goods or for investments, e.g. in one's own business. (A mortgage is a form of credit BTW.) I can still use Amazon: the German site offers the option of direct debit from one's bank account. Many, if not most of my transactions I perform with cash.
The only thing that not having a credit card complicates for me, is travel to the USA. One can lead an entirely fulfilling life, however, without visiting Trumpistan.
Although I rarely respond to ACs, here is a thumbs-up. This sounds like the cleverest in-road I personally would consider pursuing in case I were hired to do an investigation.
"Outsourcing partner" in Bangalore must have screwed up. On Indian outsourcing, here's a war story. When working with Fokker, the Dutch aerospace company, I was sent to Bangalore to emit a final judgment on an outsourcing firm there. On the second day, needing to go to the toilet, I lost my way in the building. Trying to find the loo, I walked by an empty cubicle (the cubicles had large glass panes in them). On the table lay a blueprint. Being an engineer, I couldn't refrain from looking at it. The name "Areva" was printed all over it, Areva being a French constructor of nuclear power plants. It soon became clear to me that those st***d Indians had left the blueprint of an import safety valve in a current nuclear reactor design, unsupervised, on a table in an empty cubicle, and that anyone could walk in on it. I took a picture with my cell phone and sent it to Areva - after having stood there, for a test, for about 10 minutes. Nobody turned up. Anyways - some high-up security guy there went ballistic; on the phone, he thanked me and explained to me the kind of mayhem that blueprint falling in the wrong hands could have caused. (Needless to say we at Fokker immediately cut ties with that Bangalore company.)
And I had some initial misgivings, seeing the thing's hosted by Bloomberg and all. Yet turns out to be a well-done piece of video-reporting. Best part, to me, was the rocket part. Hard to find anything that gets my engineer's heart jumping up and down more than the combination of innovation & rocketry.
Couple of friggin' interns built a working rocket. That means a lot of math needing to be done right, a lot of engineering problems to overcome, a lot of thinking to be done, a lot of self-reliance and a spraying of some of the gung-ho proverbial of the rocket industry. I'm taking my hat off and making a large flourish.
Youre sig has jumped to my attention before. Today, I dedided to look it up - and was confronted with a Texture.cs class. There is **so much** wrong with that code, I can't even begin to think of how to fix it. Is that fucking production code ???
Expect spaghetti code, tons of boilerplate code, no design pattern application at all, classes with verbs in their name, brute-forcing every search and every sort, duplicated methods or duplicated method bodies, variables in subclasses hiding variables in superclasses, deadlock and race conditions, and - most of all - having to undo then redo it all by yourself.
for the images sent back by JunoCam. It's actually not one of the scientific instruments; NASA says it is rather there for outreach to the public at large. But still - imagine what eye-wateringly beautiful images of Jupiter's cloud tops we may get. Moreover, think of a "pale blue dot" shot through Jovian wisps. I remember being a teenage boy, much engrossed with astronomy (I had my own telescope, bought on "credit on my pocket money"), when the first Voyager images came in. They were printed in a paper magazine - there was no internet back in those times. The images nailed me down on my seat for many, many hours. And now... Juno. Wow. Glad to be alive in these times!
Assuming much more matter has been concentrated, over the lifetime of the universe, into black holes - then is this a usable attempt to explain what we still designate as "black matter" ?
Q10 user here (got it as a gift, considering buying a BB Passport). I make sure I have the latest updates to the OS. Same arguments as have been advanced already by other BB users in this thread: the OS does true multitasking, physical keyboard (with auto-backlighting), the BB Hub (so much so that any other mobile OS **not** having something the like keeps me away from them), games not desired, Canadian company - plus several more.
1) I've noticed surprise with people on the other side of the world when using Skype on BB OS 10.3 over a flaky connection: "Dude, you in Europe over Skype on BB?! You sound crystal clear!"
2) The camera has an HDR mode, in which 3 images are shot within a very short time, resulting in amazing color depth.
3) A compass app using the phone's magnetometer is installed by default. I've used it to find my way in a place not yet charted by the Maps app and with no signal. Was very glad to have it.
4) The Maps app/feature. Precise, fast, up-to-date. I live in the German-speaking part of Europe, and the (female) voice of the app does a rather good job at pronouncing German street names.
5) OS stability. BB OS 10.3 is rock-solid, and can be configured to be extremely frugal with resources. Android feels like a toy, compared to it.
Summarizing, I don't see a single valid argument to move away from BB until the company has been dead for years, there are no more new batteries to be had and my last BB has breathed its last.
I have been wearing a Seiko wristwatch for years now. It has a solar cell for a dial, and one day in bright daylight is more than enough for it to run all year (together it gets with the exposure from being worn daily). Right now, it still runs on the charge it got from me being in the Sonora desert, last summer. It is very accurate, with a deviation in the order of magnitude of a few seconds per year. When all those dumbos whipping out their cell phones when they want to know the time, I just flick my wrist. And with its large, white dial it just looks good.
OP here. Truly a shame that ESA didn't ask for your opinion before committing to this program, right ? Next time I'm in Darmstadt, Germany, I'll tell them to take any AC opinions on/. into serious account before launching, because, you know, science.
OP here. The same thought occurred to me, while watching the Proton M rocket being launched. As it blasted off, I got that combination of itch and cold shivers I now know, as an experienced engineer, to be the foreboding of something grand. You know - I was a teenager when the Viking landers first visited Mars, and that planet seemed an utterly remote, hostile place then. Not to speak of the gas giants. Then Voyager 1 & 2 began sending their astonishing images of Jupiter; I remember being knocked off my feet by them. Then came Cassini, and its marvelous "pale blue dot" image gently forced us to re-think our situation here on Earth once more. And over the years, Mars seemed to edge ever closer, at least in our perception, up to the point where teams are already simulating long stays in isolation, including communication delays, to prepare for a human visit. Mars, in my mind, is now a bit like the Gobi desert: I'll never go, but it seems close enough, even nearly reachable. But... if life were found on Mars, either past or present, it would cause a revolution in our minds and in our thinking compared to which the one caused by the Vikings and Voyagers would appear very, very minor, however important those were in their own right. Most importantly, such missions do not only tell us about neighbouring worlds: they feed us back information on our selves, on who we are and where we stand. And that is well worth all the tax payers' money - that is invaluable.
What with the usual bragging about a free market, neoliberalism and capitalism. Corporate bias for a candidate ? Neo-liberal version of capitalism. Live with it, or emigrate to Costa Rica, Europe, New Zealand.
...this nightmare had unintended and unforeseen positive side-effects, with researchers setting off in entirely new fields ? Granted, this is just a desperate attempt at seeing at least some positivity in something very, very disheartening.
will bring you both President Trump and this kind of misery. As well as more guns. And more shootings. Home of the brave, land of the free. Amurrica, yeah !
Slashdot Mirror
Good point. Required Snark, above, overlooks one detail: for the Apollo program, funding was essentially unlimited, which is far from being the case now.
I don't use a credit card, as I don't see what it brings me. Buying something with a credit card is buying something with money you don't have. That is against all rules of dealing with money responsibly. Credit is something one should only use for the acquisition of capital goods or for investments, e.g. in one's own business. (A mortgage is a form of credit BTW.) I can still use Amazon: the German site offers the option of direct debit from one's bank account. Many, if not most of my transactions I perform with cash.
The only thing that not having a credit card complicates for me, is travel to the USA. One can lead an entirely fulfilling life, however, without visiting Trumpistan.
Although I rarely respond to ACs, here is a thumbs-up. This sounds like the cleverest in-road I personally would consider pursuing in case I were hired to do an investigation.
They prolly outsourced. See my "Indians/Bangalore" post above.
"Outsourcing partner" in Bangalore must have screwed up.
On Indian outsourcing, here's a war story. When working with Fokker, the Dutch aerospace company, I was sent to Bangalore to emit a final judgment on an outsourcing firm there. On the second day, needing to go to the toilet, I lost my way in the building. Trying to find the loo, I walked by an empty cubicle (the cubicles had large glass panes in them). On the table lay a blueprint. Being an engineer, I couldn't refrain from looking at it. The name "Areva" was printed all over it, Areva being a French constructor of nuclear power plants. It soon became clear to me that those st***d Indians had left the blueprint of an import safety valve in a current nuclear reactor design, unsupervised, on a table in an empty cubicle, and that anyone could walk in on it. I took a picture with my cell phone and sent it to Areva - after having stood there, for a test, for about 10 minutes. Nobody turned up. Anyways - some high-up security guy there went ballistic; on the phone, he thanked me and explained to me the kind of mayhem that blueprint falling in the wrong hands could have caused. (Needless to say we at Fokker immediately cut ties with that Bangalore company.)
And I had some initial misgivings, seeing the thing's hosted by Bloomberg and all. Yet turns out to be a well-done piece of video-reporting. Best part, to me, was the rocket part. Hard to find anything that gets my engineer's heart jumping up and down more than the combination of innovation & rocketry.
Couple of friggin' interns built a working rocket. That means a lot of math needing to be done right, a lot of engineering problems to overcome, a lot of thinking to be done, a lot of self-reliance and a spraying of some of the gung-ho proverbial of the rocket industry. I'm taking my hat off and making a large flourish.
break US law by uttering such a statement ?
person to ever be a candiate for the US presidency now prominently hits the Slashdot front page. Slashdot - how low can you go ?
Youre sig has jumped to my attention before. Today, I dedided to look it up - and was confronted with a Texture.cs class. There is **so much** wrong with that code, I can't even begin to think of how to fix it. Is that fucking production code ???
Surface ? Jupiter does not have a well-defined surface.
Expect spaghetti code, tons of boilerplate code, no design pattern application at all, classes with verbs in their name, brute-forcing every search and every sort, duplicated methods or duplicated method bodies, variables in subclasses hiding variables in superclasses, deadlock and race conditions, and - most of all - having to undo then redo it all by yourself.
does it run Linux ?
for the images sent back by JunoCam. It's actually not one of the scientific instruments; NASA says it is rather there for outreach to the public at large. But still - imagine what eye-wateringly beautiful images of Jupiter's cloud tops we may get. Moreover, think of a "pale blue dot" shot through Jovian wisps. I remember being a teenage boy, much engrossed with astronomy (I had my own telescope, bought on "credit on my pocket money"), when the first Voyager images came in. They were printed in a paper magazine - there was no internet back in those times. The images nailed me down on my seat for many, many hours. And now... Juno. Wow. Glad to be alive in these times!
are not over, yet. By far.
Which is the equivalent of 3996750 square days.
Assuming much more matter has been concentrated, over the lifetime of the universe, into black holes - then is this a usable attempt to explain what we still designate as "black matter" ?
Q10 user here (got it as a gift, considering buying a BB Passport). I make sure I have the latest updates to the OS. Same arguments as have been advanced already by other BB users in this thread: the OS does true multitasking, physical keyboard (with auto-backlighting), the BB Hub (so much so that any other mobile OS **not** having something the like keeps me away from them), games not desired, Canadian company - plus several more.
1) I've noticed surprise with people on the other side of the world when using Skype on BB OS 10.3 over a flaky connection: "Dude, you in Europe over Skype on BB?! You sound crystal clear!"
2) The camera has an HDR mode, in which 3 images are shot within a very short time, resulting in amazing color depth.
3) A compass app using the phone's magnetometer is installed by default. I've used it to find my way in a place not yet charted by the Maps app and with no signal. Was very glad to have it.
4) The Maps app/feature. Precise, fast, up-to-date. I live in the German-speaking part of Europe, and the (female) voice of the app does a rather good job at pronouncing German street names.
5) OS stability. BB OS 10.3 is rock-solid, and can be configured to be extremely frugal with resources. Android feels like a toy, compared to it.
Summarizing, I don't see a single valid argument to move away from BB until the company has been dead for years, there are no more new batteries to be had and my last BB has breathed its last.
I have been wearing a Seiko wristwatch for years now. It has a solar cell for a dial, and one day in bright daylight is more than enough for it to run all year (together it gets with the exposure from being worn daily). Right now, it still runs on the charge it got from me being in the Sonora desert, last summer. It is very accurate, with a deviation in the order of magnitude of a few seconds per year. When all those dumbos whipping out their cell phones when they want to know the time, I just flick my wrist. And with its large, white dial it just looks good.
OP here. Truly a shame that ESA didn't ask for your opinion before committing to this program, right ? Next time I'm in Darmstadt, Germany, I'll tell them to take any AC opinions on /. into serious account before launching, because, you know, science.
OP here. The same thought occurred to me, while watching the Proton M rocket being launched. As it blasted off, I got that combination of itch and cold shivers I now know, as an experienced engineer, to be the foreboding of something grand. You know - I was a teenager when the Viking landers first visited Mars, and that planet seemed an utterly remote, hostile place then. Not to speak of the gas giants. Then Voyager 1 & 2 began sending their astonishing images of Jupiter; I remember being knocked off my feet by them. Then came Cassini, and its marvelous "pale blue dot" image gently forced us to re-think our situation here on Earth once more. And over the years, Mars seemed to edge ever closer, at least in our perception, up to the point where teams are already simulating long stays in isolation, including communication delays, to prepare for a human visit. Mars, in my mind, is now a bit like the Gobi desert: I'll never go, but it seems close enough, even nearly reachable. But... if life were found on Mars, either past or present, it would cause a revolution in our minds and in our thinking compared to which the one caused by the Vikings and Voyagers would appear very, very minor, however important those were in their own right. Most importantly, such missions do not only tell us about neighbouring worlds: they feed us back information on our selves, on who we are and where we stand. And that is well worth all the tax payers' money - that is invaluable.
What with the usual bragging about a free market, neoliberalism and capitalism. Corporate bias for a candidate ? Neo-liberal version of capitalism. Live with it, or emigrate to Costa Rica, Europe, New Zealand.
...this nightmare had unintended and unforeseen positive side-effects, with researchers setting off in entirely new fields ? Granted, this is just a desperate attempt at seeing at least some positivity in something very, very disheartening.
will bring you both President Trump and this kind of misery. As well as more guns. And more shootings. Home of the brave, land of the free. Amurrica, yeah !
European Extremely Large Telescope