With no mod points i'll second the insightful mod, but...
It still came out a little linux zelot-y.
So in summary:? Choose Windows for user friendliness Choose *nix for security (and free speech) Choose OSX for a *nix that has user friendliness, free speech-y-ness and most of the security?
From what I've read, the Russians did almost everthing automated and robotic. Cosmonauts were often just ballast or a cheap sophisticated computer to get the mission done. Now, no disrespect to those people, but that is how the systems were built. That is, to be mostly idiot proof. When they work, they work (Progress, Soyez).
Even the Russian shuttle, Burian, launched, orbited, and landed without onboard people controling it (was it fully automatic or remote controlled anyone?)
A lot of people say that the reliance on getting everything automated was what caused the Russians to fall behind in the space race. Whereas US asutronauts were often pilots, working with computer assistance. This insistance on control by people helped get things in the air/space fast, but in the long run may have hurt safety.
disclaimer: this is probably a little generalised, so take with some salt, lime and tequila...
Well, a decent profit-returning tourism business or not, it is still $20 million dollars they didnt have before...
The demand is there for $20 million dollars. It probably isnt for the actual costs... And they are launching at capacity (1 or 2 a year scheduled, 1 every other year actual...)
I completly agree. (and most reporters that I've met fall into that category)
Having being interviewed a couple of times on (small) science issues, not once has the reporter taken me up on the offer to proof the article before going to press to make sure they havnt stuffed up.
I know it goes through lots of people and editors and subs and everything, but you would think they as a group might be interested in actually reporting reality... Oh sorry, "dont let the truth get in the way of a good story".
Well what are they (the reporters) then? fictional writers or communicators of fact?
I agree in principal, but with limited funds one has to decide where they should be best spent. New Orleans is one of the poorest cities in the US (?). Things like a fancy football stadium are probably a good thing for the masses.
You could have a city with 50ft walls (or even raise the city 50ft, hell even have 20ft walls that dont fall over and 149 pumps that actually work...) if you really wanted to, but would that be regarded as a good investment if Katrina never happend?
How many billions have the dutch spent on the dikes to prevent catastrophy from a 10,000 year storm, that hasnt happend? New Orleans was only built to a 50-100 year storm catagory...
Finger pointing is an (inter)national past time...
That is one interpretation of the legend. Incompetence should not be rewarded, and incompetent risk taking definately not encouraged. But those in "the position" need to act, one way or the other. Those in "the position" are the only ones who are going to get it wrong, becasue it is their job to predict what would be right or wrong. And without the benefit of hindsight (which we have here in the forum) trying to tell which is which is something you can only learn from the mistake having been made/being bleedingly obvious.
I did say the New Orleans was a monumental stuff up. The fact it happened at all is entrenched in decades of debate over what should be done with the area (bigger levies, big dig, whatever).
What happend afterwards is a mix of bad judgment and incompetence. Things like (stories iv'e heard) about turning away help from local industry (ie wallmart and the water), not negotiating with local agencies (cutting phone lines ?!), diverting repair helicopters from a small breech in the levee to rescue operations, makeing the whole situation a lot worse...
The dust (mud?) will settle, heads will be rolled, but i can only hope that everyone learns a valuable lesson (and no, punishing someone is not a lesson, its a waste of time after the fact).
A man working for a large company makes a critical mistake that results in $1 million in losses for the company. In due course he hands in his resignation to the CEO. The CEO refuses to accept his resignation stating that "Im not going to fire you, because i just spent $1 million dollars educating you..."
Sometimes the people that make mistakes are still the best person for the job...
Now, New Orleans was a monumental stuff up (with no disrespect to those who are suffering). But do you expect someone else who has never handeled such a situation (and made the mistakes) to do a better job next time?
The buildings are mostly still standing right now, but even if the flood waters go away tomorrow (and they arnt) the houses are going to be covered in toxic slime, will grow toxic mould and will want to be so severly cleaned that it will be cheaper to just build again.
As for the larger buildings, being underwater for what is going to be weeks is not good for what holds them together. Steel and concrete (and wood!) degrade and many structures wont be sound to stand up even if you wanted to clean the slime off of them.
Even those houses that were raised will have problems with their foundations. Not to mention the services to those houses like power, water, the roads, will all need to be rebuilt.
My bet is on it being cheaper to flatten the whole city, dredge some silt (well a metric giga-ass load) from the lake to build it up to a reasonable level and then maybe rebuild an industrial city to support what actually needs to be there, rather than just living there because its nice. However, people wont like that, so my 2nd guess is that it will just degrade (back?) into a slum waiting for history to repeat itself.
DVD-As won't play at full resolution via the digital out, they only play via the analogue outs.
What kind of insanity is this??? A high resolution (ok, fidelity?!) digital medium, unable to reproduce its content through a digital output...
Almost as good as whatever crap DVD copy protection scheme that tells me a cant play a DVD on a computer with a display out...
What next? "I'm sorry, you cant watch this movie because you dont have a sufficient level of alzheimer's disease and you might remember the content of this feature at some time in the future."
With my weight belt I can do it for slightly more than a minute, but for that minute I am wonderfully relaxed,
and if you passout you will be wonderfully dead. Sorry, not trolling, but if you do that you are asking to become a statistic, or in the running for a Darwin Award...
It's kind of like the sig, "Ever stopped to think, and forgot to start again"
well, thanks i guess. The numbers i gave certainly are not 'accurate' but are in the correct order of magnitude... i think... Apparently the ice has an average thickness of 2km over 80% of the 2.2km^2.
Even so, a 0.5-2 meter increase in the ocean level from *one* comparitively small ice covered continent is really going to put a dampner on coastal living...
Its a funny thing in the english language that most expletives are based on sex, excrement or religion. (i believe) that in Maori and other polenesian cultures there arnt really any swear words, and the biggest insults are along the lines of eating your enemies. (i.e. you would tell someone to "go boil their head" and/or "prepare yourself for me to eat you")
the other funny thing is that Greenland isnt as big as people think, most map projections show it somewhere the size of Australia, but it is only about a quarter of the size.
I do however agree that it does however hold a metric ass load of ice (3 km thick in places) that is predicted might irreversable begin to melt with a temperature rise of only a degree or two...
lesse now, 3km of ice thick... 2 million square kilometers in area is about 6 million million million litres. Hey that is a lot! I leave how much this will increase the level of the ocean as an exercise...
Sure weather cycles, but the point with the current weather is that it (might be) cycling bloody fast...
But then again there doesnt appear to be any really consensus on what is happening with the world... is it global warming, is it cooling, is it pollution-induced or hell, even pollution stabilised!
I remember seeing a documetary that was saying that global warming may have been occuring really fast in the last 50 years, but we havnt seen it or measured it because pollution and pollution induced cloud cover (such as contrails) increase heat rejection so that the heat isnt accumulating when it was expected. They though that reducing particulate polution immediately would be a 'really bad thing'(tm) with the current levels of greenhouse gasses, as this would eliminate the cooling pollution will still letting the heating pollution wreak havok...
IMHO this is the big ticket *around* the DRM. The industry will be forced to forget the license revocation scheme because you just cant do that millions of customers and expect them to bend over again. Maybe once, but not again. Walmart would have to bring a metric ass load of lawyers down on the industry to defend their business, and your wonderful american rights to fair use will return (after some hiatus unfortunately). But i dont like the chance of it happening in advance.
What the revocation of keys will work for is for cracked keys that arnt in real products. But i am guessing as soon as the format is finalised a lot of people will stop running SETI@home and start running HD/BR-DVD cracking.
And remember, keys can only be revoked on new products. so a cracked key will decode all the old products and any future cracked keys will play the newer products. Iterate...
My older-than-me 1976 built TV with a *turning* channel changer (!) finally gave up the other month, and i was thinking that it was now time to go HD.
But given that i knew about all this DRM shite i went with a $250 singer TV (they made sewing machines as far as i knew, right next to the sorny and panaphonics...). I've got nothing against spending $3000 dollars for a premium TV, but not every bloody year!
I also dissuaded my parents from going DVD/Hard disk recorder as most still use analogue tuners, and would have to be thrown out in a few years due to the digital broadast deadline (in Australia). And i wont get one myself as i of course still have a crappy analogue TV...
So several major purchases have been put off because of stupid built in obsolescence and/or format wars.
I dont even have a DVD player that will take burnt disks because i want a DVD recorder (but of course they arnt digital...)
I'm not sure if I'll ever buy anything again at this rate... Not unless i get a big increase in my disposable income, a decrease in my care factor, and a TV unit that can hold the 3 TV's and 12 players required for compatabilty.
My phone company *insisted* on emailing out the bill with my password on it to make it easier... What the f*cking dum shit piss pot system is that???
I politely enquired about the fdspp system and was told is was implimented over the old system that didnt include the password based on user requests... to make it easier.
Their emails went along the lines of 1) go to our billing website here 2) enter your accound code "123456" (without the quotes dumass) 3) enter your password "fluffy"
To make matters worse, the sysadmins or the monkeys i was talking to, didnt seem to understand that email is not secure... and that sending out passwords is a bad idea.
I was going to change providers immediatly, but found out my next best choice was infact re-selling the same product just with 8Mb DSL... now all i need is the cash...
Slashdot Mirror
With no mod points i'll second the insightful mod, but...
It still came out a little linux zelot-y.
So in summary:?
Choose Windows for user friendliness
Choose *nix for security (and free speech)
Choose OSX for a *nix that has user friendliness, free speech-y-ness and most of the security?
From what I've read, the Russians did almost everthing automated and robotic. Cosmonauts were often just ballast or a cheap sophisticated computer to get the mission done. Now, no disrespect to those people, but that is how the systems were built. That is, to be mostly idiot proof. When they work, they work (Progress, Soyez).
Even the Russian shuttle, Burian, launched, orbited, and landed without onboard people controling it (was it fully automatic or remote controlled anyone?)
A lot of people say that the reliance on getting everything automated was what caused the Russians to fall behind in the space race. Whereas US asutronauts were often pilots, working with computer assistance. This insistance on control by people helped get things in the air/space fast, but in the long run may have hurt safety.
disclaimer: this is probably a little generalised, so take with some salt, lime and tequila...
Of course it does not beat using $100 microwave ovens with broken door block to lure $1,000,000 anti radar station missiles...
Kind of obvious in hindsight, but still that is bloody funny!
"Sergi, now is not the time during an airstrike to be making coffee in the microwa..."
Well, a decent profit-returning tourism business or not, it is still $20 million dollars they didnt have before...
The demand is there for $20 million dollars. It probably isnt for the actual costs... And they are launching at capacity (1 or 2 a year scheduled, 1 every other year actual...)
I completly agree. (and most reporters that I've met fall into that category)
Having being interviewed a couple of times on (small) science issues, not once has the reporter taken me up on the offer to proof the article before going to press to make sure they havnt stuffed up.
I know it goes through lots of people and editors and subs and everything, but you would think they as a group might be interested in actually reporting reality... Oh sorry, "dont let the truth get in the way of a good story".
Well what are they (the reporters) then? fictional writers or communicators of fact?
I agree in principal, but with limited funds one has to decide where they should be best spent. New Orleans is one of the poorest cities in the US (?). Things like a fancy football stadium are probably a good thing for the masses.
You could have a city with 50ft walls (or even raise the city 50ft, hell even have 20ft walls that dont fall over and 149 pumps that actually work...) if you really wanted to, but would that be regarded as a good investment if Katrina never happend?
How many billions have the dutch spent on the dikes to prevent catastrophy from a 10,000 year storm, that hasnt happend? New Orleans was only built to a 50-100 year storm catagory...
Finger pointing is an (inter)national past time...
That is one interpretation of the legend. Incompetence should not be rewarded, and incompetent risk taking definately not encouraged. But those in "the position" need to act, one way or the other. Those in "the position" are the only ones who are going to get it wrong, becasue it is their job to predict what would be right or wrong. And without the benefit of hindsight (which we have here in the forum) trying to tell which is which is something you can only learn from the mistake having been made/being bleedingly obvious.
I did say the New Orleans was a monumental stuff up. The fact it happened at all is entrenched in decades of debate over what should be done with the area (bigger levies, big dig, whatever).
What happend afterwards is a mix of bad judgment and incompetence. Things like (stories iv'e heard) about turning away help from local industry (ie wallmart and the water), not negotiating with local agencies (cutting phone lines ?!), diverting repair helicopters from a small breech in the levee to rescue operations, makeing the whole situation a lot worse...
The dust (mud?) will settle, heads will be rolled, but i can only hope that everyone learns a valuable lesson (and no, punishing someone is not a lesson, its a waste of time after the fact).
or 3) the drained water will boil explosively in contact with the hot magma and put New Orleans into a really really big hole in the ground...
Could be fun... noone (should) be there right now, so I'm sure they wont mind if it doesnt quite work out...
old, probably urban legand, story...
A man working for a large company makes a critical mistake that results in $1 million in losses for the company. In due course he hands in his resignation to the CEO. The CEO refuses to accept his resignation stating that "Im not going to fire you, because i just spent $1 million dollars educating you..."
Sometimes the people that make mistakes are still the best person for the job...
Now, New Orleans was a monumental stuff up (with no disrespect to those who are suffering). But do you expect someone else who has never handeled such a situation (and made the mistakes) to do a better job next time?
The buildings are mostly still standing right now, but even if the flood waters go away tomorrow (and they arnt) the houses are going to be covered in toxic slime, will grow toxic mould and will want to be so severly cleaned that it will be cheaper to just build again.
As for the larger buildings, being underwater for what is going to be weeks is not good for what holds them together. Steel and concrete (and wood!) degrade and many structures wont be sound to stand up even if you wanted to clean the slime off of them.
Even those houses that were raised will have problems with their foundations. Not to mention the services to those houses like power, water, the roads, will all need to be rebuilt.
My bet is on it being cheaper to flatten the whole city, dredge some silt (well a metric giga-ass load) from the lake to build it up to a reasonable level and then maybe rebuild an industrial city to support what actually needs to be there, rather than just living there because its nice. However, people wont like that, so my 2nd guess is that it will just degrade (back?) into a slum waiting for history to repeat itself.
DVD-As won't play at full resolution via the digital out, they only play via the analogue outs.
What kind of insanity is this??? A high resolution (ok, fidelity?!) digital medium, unable to reproduce its content through a digital output...
Almost as good as whatever crap DVD copy protection scheme that tells me a cant play a DVD on a computer with a display out...
What next? "I'm sorry, you cant watch this movie because you dont have a sufficient level of alzheimer's disease and you might remember the content of this feature at some time in the future."
I see further problems...
Does the body re-grow a head, or the head re-grow a body? or are we in for a multiplicity scenario?
and if you passout you will be wonderfully dead. Sorry, not trolling, but if you do that you are asking to become a statistic, or in the running for a Darwin Award...
It's kind of like the sig, "Ever stopped to think, and forgot to start again"
thanks for the link.... but i feel kind of ill now playing that for just five minutes...
Drugs are bad, mmmk?
Im gonna go lie down...
you're telling me a can't run Flash on a tylenol?
Thanks Macromedia...
well, thanks i guess. The numbers i gave certainly are not 'accurate' but are in the correct order of magnitude... i think... Apparently the ice has an average thickness of 2km over 80% of the 2.2km^2.
Even so, a 0.5-2 meter increase in the ocean level from *one* comparitively small ice covered continent is really going to put a dampner on coastal living...
Its a funny thing in the english language that most expletives are based on sex, excrement or religion.
(i believe) that in Maori and other polenesian cultures there arnt really any swear words, and the biggest insults are along the lines of eating your enemies. (i.e. you would tell someone to "go boil their head" and/or "prepare yourself for me to eat you")
the other funny thing is that Greenland isnt as big as people think, most map projections show it somewhere the size of Australia, but it is only about a quarter of the size.
I do however agree that it does however hold a metric ass load of ice (3 km thick in places) that is predicted might irreversable begin to melt with a temperature rise of only a degree or two...
lesse now, 3km of ice thick... 2 million square kilometers in area is about 6 million million million litres. Hey that is a lot! I leave how much this will increase the level of the ocean as an exercise...
Sure weather cycles, but the point with the current weather is that it (might be) cycling bloody fast...
But then again there doesnt appear to be any really consensus on what is happening with the world... is it global warming, is it cooling, is it pollution-induced or hell, even pollution stabilised!
I remember seeing a documetary that was saying that global warming may have been occuring really fast in the last 50 years, but we havnt seen it or measured it because pollution and pollution induced cloud cover (such as contrails) increase heat rejection so that the heat isnt accumulating when it was expected. They though that reducing particulate polution immediately would be a 'really bad thing'(tm) with the current levels of greenhouse gasses, as this would eliminate the cooling pollution will still letting the heating pollution wreak havok...
pity i dont have any references...
if i had 4000+ AOL CDs i would think it would be high time to build a rail-gun, or something mechanical/explosive... that would *shoot* the birds.
Perhaps a mythbusters style angle grinder based launcher...
or a sudden lack of MTV...
What was that movie anyway???
Perhaps that's what the frist psot guy was doing?
IMHO this is the big ticket *around* the DRM. The industry will be forced to forget the license revocation scheme because you just cant do that millions of customers and expect them to bend over again. Maybe once, but not again. Walmart would have to bring a metric ass load of lawyers down on the industry to defend their business, and your wonderful american rights to fair use will return (after some hiatus unfortunately). But i dont like the chance of it happening in advance.
What the revocation of keys will work for is for cracked keys that arnt in real products. But i am guessing as soon as the format is finalised a lot of people will stop running SETI@home and start running HD/BR-DVD cracking.
And remember, keys can only be revoked on new products. so a cracked key will decode all the old products and any future cracked keys will play the newer products. Iterate...
My older-than-me 1976 built TV with a *turning* channel changer (!) finally gave up the other month, and i was thinking that it was now time to go HD.
But given that i knew about all this DRM shite i went with a $250 singer TV (they made sewing machines as far as i knew, right next to the sorny and panaphonics...). I've got nothing against spending $3000 dollars for a premium TV, but not every bloody year!
I also dissuaded my parents from going DVD/Hard disk recorder as most still use analogue tuners, and would have to be thrown out in a few years due to the digital broadast deadline (in Australia). And i wont get one myself as i of course still have a crappy analogue TV...
So several major purchases have been put off because of stupid built in obsolescence and/or format wars.
I dont even have a DVD player that will take burnt disks because i want a DVD recorder (but of course they arnt digital...)
I'm not sure if I'll ever buy anything again at this rate... Not unless i get a big increase in my disposable income, a decrease in my care factor, and a TV unit that can hold the 3 TV's and 12 players required for compatabilty.
My phone company *insisted* on emailing out the bill with my password on it to make it easier... What the f*cking dum shit piss pot system is that???
I politely enquired about the fdspp system and was told is was implimented over the old system that didnt include the password based on user requests... to make it easier.
Their emails went along the lines of
1) go to our billing website here
2) enter your accound code "123456" (without the quotes dumass)
3) enter your password "fluffy"
To make matters worse, the sysadmins or the monkeys i was talking to, didnt seem to understand that email is not secure... and that sending out passwords is a bad idea.
I was going to change providers immediatly, but found out my next best choice was infact re-selling the same product just with 8Mb DSL... now all i need is the cash...