Ha! When you said "going the way of AT&T" I thought you meant that most people were going to abandon their home Internet connection in lieu of wireless Internet like they have done for home phones.
knew this was gonna happen eventually when 1 person fights and finds a flaw its not long before more start and the cracks in their "concrete solid" case start to be found and people start hittin on them with the hammers.
And not with their fists. Their penises are the hammers.
I desperately hope someone else has seen Dr. Horrible or this is about to get really awkward.
The oil crisis is pressing but it's a question of effetiveness. The PRESSING crisis can't be corrected by an increase in supply 10 years from now. In 10 years you can whine "If only they hadn't gone on vacation at the appointed time... we would have oil today instead of 2 months from now!" But the honest truth is there isn't anything they can do.
Should they just sit around and commiserate the pain people are suffering or get on with things they can fix.
Congressman need to get back in touch with their communities and see for themselves what is needed from their constituents. That requires actually actively meeting with people. Last I checked my congressman represented me in Seattle WA, not citizens with access to Washington DC.
Honestly I would rather my representative come home and discuss pressing matters that they might actually stand a melting chance in hell of actually solving instead of grandstanding that they feel my pain on oil prices in endless debates over an incurable problem in Washington DC.
Drilling Oil in 10 years != Solving Immediate Problem
So if I find it simple to just sign myself up for slavery the contract should hold?
They'll give me a house, internet and have a cafeteria. In exchange I just have to work every day with 10 days off and I can't leave the compound without permission from my boss at any time of day or night.
You're argueing that is a legally binding contract and should be permitted? The reason we don't let bad contract slide isn't because it is necessarily a bad system... slavery was an effective and equitable system for millenia... the problem is that we've decided as a society that the risk that some could be abused is too great to permit such contracts to stand. By allowing punative damages contracts to exist in the wild and become legally acceptable you've opened up the population to gross abuse of the population.
Killing someone you *know* is a murderer might be a fair and equitable form of justice if they actually commited the crime but allowing people to carry out vigilante justice dilutes public confidence in the fairness of law.
All of that aside we're still looking at an EASY contract to understand. One which most people have with their internet service providers:
You pay X for your monthly fee. You pay Y each month towards the cost of your phone. After 2 years you own the phone. If you quit early you can either pay the rest of the cost of the phone or else sell it back to us for half of the remainder.
That's not a difficult contract to understand. You can even remove the early termination fee and simply rent every person a phone. Pay $40 for 1000 minutes and $5 for a refurbished phone rental.
Now where things start getting tricky is taxes (which they could but won't calculate for you in the price charts. Oh by the way... you have to pay a $4.00 tower zoning charge. a $3.25 911 communications infrastructure charge. A $13 alien language translator research fee. A $5 AT&T store clerk pension tax. A $2.21 gas surcharge for service trucks. A $1.29 painting fee for the remodel of the at&t store on third and madison. An $18.20 TV advertising campaign finance charge. And an adjustable %4-10 charge on top of all of that based on the electricty costs at all towers.
Yep. Nice and easy to understand. Just $45 + extra fees.
Since this whole topic is a consecutive weak analogy followed by another I'm going to tack on my own!:D
Let's pretend you've been sued by the RIAA. Now you're an intelligent fellow. Well regarded by your peers. You didn't actually do it mind you... but as we know once you've been charged you're effectively guilty. What do you do?
Being an intelligent fellow probably the FIRST thing you will do is hire a top notch copyright attorney. You explain to your attorney that you're innocent and that you have this huge trust fund that your great grandfather--inventor of the catalytic convertor-- left you that you are willing to dump into your defense to set a precedent. This attorney has won hundreds of copyright cases in the past. Everyone you've talked to says he is top notch.
He decides he's going to base the defense on a little known but solid precedent case involving a case between a hog farm and the local citizens in a small town in lousiana which as he explained it to you is strangely enough really the same sort over reaching prosecutorial misconduct which you yourself are facing. You read the wikipedia page and sure enough it is about prosecutorial misconduct.
The attorney asks you to approve of the plan and you do so. After all, you hired him on the recomendation of all your friends.
Turns out his whole case was as rickety as a toothpick chickencoop. You're out a million dollars and you're being fined $500,000. And it's your own dumb fault for not understanding the fine details of the lawsuit such that you could forsee that it didn't stand a chance?
The moral of my flimsy and useless analagotory story is that it's hard to fault people for being stupid when the they're given expert advice they're unable to validify for themselves.
---
A better and shorter analogy would be you take your car to the mechanic. You're completely clueless as to the workings of the engine. You understand thermodynamics and compression and the basic ideas behind how the thing works but only the most general of what each part does. The car is sputtering. The mechanic takes one look and says "oohhhhh... this " (he yanks out a piece " is supposed to be silver... you need to replace it and everything will be fine."
Now it's a scam of course but how do you know? You asked for expert advice... you received some. At some point you will get into a point in your life where you simply have to sign the line without understanding every ramification.
I don't understand the inner workings of my 401k. Reading the 25 page fine details aren't going to help me either. Asking my financial advisor what my options are, telling him what I want to do and asking what he thinks the most appropriate course of action is the best I can hope to attain. And who knows maybe all of my money will end up in an account in Portugal.
I would say the larger the settlement the less deterent it is.
If I were charged $50 per time getting caught I would probably be petrified. If I were charged $10,000,000,000 per time I would just view it like dieing "hopefully it won't happen but if it does it's pretty much over."
The lower the fine the more likely they are to be able to pass sweeping legislation which makes it easier to charge people. If downloading were like parking tickets and as easily enforceable then I think you see a much larger drop in piracy than threatening to sue millions of dollars.
It's like "disaster syndrome" your brain can't quantify the damages so it just gives up and ignores it all together. My brain can perfectly understand $50 and its effect on my wallet.
Not to mention users are idiots. They don't know where they want things. What menus they want... etc etc etc... if you ask the users they'll tell you they either "liked it" or "were confused but are sure it wasn't their fault".
The MOST IMPORTANT thing a UI designer needs to work on is FLOW. The specs tell you what the application needs to do. "Color Correct a Photo", "Remove Zits", "Paint: change brush size, paint, change brush shape..." etc etc etc.
If you watch your users and see A) What they do most of time all you have to do is find a way to make that as easy and straightforward as possible.
Personally I love the new Office 2007 layout. Everything is broken up into actions and sub actions. That's how we work. Design the UI by speaking out loud. "OK I'm going to create a new document... where do I click to create a new document... Ohhh there is a big button in the top left that says "New" I bet that does it. Ok I'm wanting to make something bold... what are my options let's see... formating that's what making something bold would fall under... ahhh here it is a Bold B" etc etc etc.
Then once it works. User test, User Test, User Test, User Test, User Test and make sure your users speak out loud while doing it. Stream of consciousness stuff. The longer it takes lots of people to find something the more likely you need to make it more obvious.
Well we are using Platinum in extremely warm car parts as it is. So placing rare earth metals in our exhaust system isn't a far out idea in the automotive industry.;)
Sort of like saying "My bicycle never careens into a wall at 100mph killing everybody riding it".
The Soyuz module with a crew of 3 delivers about 1 ton of cargo. The Shuttle with a crew of 7 can deliver 57 tons of cargo. That means a Soyuz rocket would have to make 57 trips to do what the shuttle does in one. Something tells me even with a 2% failure rate for the shuttle I would say it out performs the soyuz. Unless your metric is number of millionaires launched into LEO.
I've worked with a large aerospace company's Advanced Research Group before. There is a LOT of waste involved. You will have no argument from me on that one. It's largely a question of management though not inspiration. They were all really excited about what they were doing... but completely lacking in focus. The Manhattan project succeeded because it had incredible leadership and a very clear directive. The amazing leadership directed a large number of theoretical scientists to focus their efforts on practical applications.
If you know what you want and you actually work towards it you can save a lot of money. It's vague, objectiveness directives which often result in slow progress. That's the problem with the open source movement now. Designing by committee is spectacularly wasteful because everything gets reinvented 10 times. Ubuntu is bringing focus and progress to desktop linux by actually providing leadership.
If you want to talk pure time/energy/efficiency open source development of a rocket is infinitely more wasteful than a handful of brilliant engineers working while all of those open source contributors sat on bicycles and powered generators.
You spend $4 at starbucks and as a result 5 people are employed.
Unless the cup of coffee actually depleted $4 worth of goods the waste is only the depletable resources expended to deliver it.
You have to remove wages and renewable goods from the cost to determine the actual waste.
If you pay a farmer for beans which will regrow then nothing was actually lost just redistributed. Starbucks is really a subversive organization redistributing disposable income from the wealthy to a little above minimum wage employees and poor south american farmers.
There is suprisingly little waste unless a resource is actually consumed in the process of making it.
Money is not a precise way to measure the cheapness of things in real life.
Try telling that to the grocery store clerk.
If you take the average price and subtract the average raise increase then you have a very very precise way of measuring the cheapness of something.
In this case the cost is +.5 and the wages are +0 (.5-0)= +.5
Unless you live in a fairy land costs adjusted for inflation and wage changes is an excellent means of determinig the cheapness of things in real life. Especially when the currency is practically tied to the cost of energy (Joules).
By your own admission the goverment is causing inflation by printing money. That makes things cost more. Now... if you make $50 a day and the government causes the price of a meal to rise %100 because they're printing more money... but your boss doesn't give you a raise. The prices have risen but you have no more money to spend. I can't fathom any way to explain this except that the price has risen.
To take it further usually MPEG interframe compression only spans about 5-10 frames. In which case you could say... start at the end and beginning and work towards one another.
"Son of Man, Daughter of Eve." Yeah no biblical overtones there.
Royal King with mystical powers who dies in place of a 'sinner' and is resurrected defeating the witch.
No undercurrents of Christianity there.
If Aslan isn't Jesus I don't know who is. Perhaps YOU aren't very well versed in biblical studies and as such aren't seeing the parallels because I can say for sure that I could read an allegory of the Koran and not notice a single similarity.
Slashdot Mirror
Ha! When you said "going the way of AT&T" I thought you meant that most people were going to abandon their home Internet connection in lieu of wireless Internet like they have done for home phones.
And I would have agreed with you too.
knew this was gonna happen eventually when 1 person fights and finds a flaw its not long before more start and the cracks in their "concrete solid" case start to be found and people start hittin on them with the hammers.
And not with their fists. Their penises are the hammers.
I desperately hope someone else has seen Dr. Horrible or this is about to get really awkward.
The oil crisis is pressing but it's a question of effetiveness. The PRESSING crisis can't be corrected by an increase in supply 10 years from now. In 10 years you can whine "If only they hadn't gone on vacation at the appointed time... we would have oil today instead of 2 months from now!" But the honest truth is there isn't anything they can do.
Should they just sit around and commiserate the pain people are suffering or get on with things they can fix.
Congressman need to get back in touch with their communities and see for themselves what is needed from their constituents. That requires actually actively meeting with people. Last I checked my congressman represented me in Seattle WA, not citizens with access to Washington DC.
Honestly I would rather my representative come home and discuss pressing matters that they might actually stand a melting chance in hell of actually solving instead of grandstanding that they feel my pain on oil prices in endless debates over an incurable problem in Washington DC.
Drilling Oil in 10 years != Solving Immediate Problem
So if I find it simple to just sign myself up for slavery the contract should hold?
They'll give me a house, internet and have a cafeteria. In exchange I just have to work every day with 10 days off and I can't leave the compound without permission from my boss at any time of day or night.
You're argueing that is a legally binding contract and should be permitted? The reason we don't let bad contract slide isn't because it is necessarily a bad system... slavery was an effective and equitable system for millenia... the problem is that we've decided as a society that the risk that some could be abused is too great to permit such contracts to stand. By allowing punative damages contracts to exist in the wild and become legally acceptable you've opened up the population to gross abuse of the population.
Killing someone you *know* is a murderer might be a fair and equitable form of justice if they actually commited the crime but allowing people to carry out vigilante justice dilutes public confidence in the fairness of law.
All of that aside we're still looking at an EASY contract to understand. One which most people have with their internet service providers:
You pay X for your monthly fee. You pay Y each month towards the cost of your phone. After 2 years you own the phone. If you quit early you can either pay the rest of the cost of the phone or else sell it back to us for half of the remainder.
That's not a difficult contract to understand. You can even remove the early termination fee and simply rent every person a phone. Pay $40 for 1000 minutes and $5 for a refurbished phone rental.
Now where things start getting tricky is taxes (which they could but won't calculate for you in the price charts. Oh by the way... you have to pay a $4.00 tower zoning charge. a $3.25 911 communications infrastructure charge. A $13 alien language translator research fee. A $5 AT&T store clerk pension tax. A $2.21 gas surcharge for service trucks. A $1.29 painting fee for the remodel of the at&t store on third and madison. An $18.20 TV advertising campaign finance charge. And an adjustable %4-10 charge on top of all of that based on the electricty costs at all towers.
Yep. Nice and easy to understand. Just $45 + extra fees.
Since this whole topic is a consecutive weak analogy followed by another I'm going to tack on my own! :D
Let's pretend you've been sued by the RIAA. Now you're an intelligent fellow. Well regarded by your peers. You didn't actually do it mind you... but as we know once you've been charged you're effectively guilty. What do you do?
Being an intelligent fellow probably the FIRST thing you will do is hire a top notch copyright attorney. You explain to your attorney that you're innocent and that you have this huge trust fund that your great grandfather--inventor of the catalytic convertor-- left you that you are willing to dump into your defense to set a precedent. This attorney has won hundreds of copyright cases in the past. Everyone you've talked to says he is top notch.
He decides he's going to base the defense on a little known but solid precedent case involving a case between a hog farm and the local citizens in a small town in lousiana which as he explained it to you is strangely enough really the same sort over reaching prosecutorial misconduct which you yourself are facing. You read the wikipedia page and sure enough it is about prosecutorial misconduct.
The attorney asks you to approve of the plan and you do so. After all, you hired him on the recomendation of all your friends.
Turns out his whole case was as rickety as a toothpick chickencoop. You're out a million dollars and you're being fined $500,000. And it's your own dumb fault for not understanding the fine details of the lawsuit such that you could forsee that it didn't stand a chance?
The moral of my flimsy and useless analagotory story is that it's hard to fault people for being stupid when the they're given expert advice they're unable to validify for themselves.
---
A better and shorter analogy would be you take your car to the mechanic. You're completely clueless as to the workings of the engine. You understand thermodynamics and compression and the basic ideas behind how the thing works but only the most general of what each part does. The car is sputtering. The mechanic takes one look and says "oohhhhh ... this " (he yanks out a piece " is supposed to be silver... you need to replace it and everything will be fine."
Now it's a scam of course but how do you know? You asked for expert advice... you received some. At some point you will get into a point in your life where you simply have to sign the line without understanding every ramification.
I don't understand the inner workings of my 401k. Reading the 25 page fine details aren't going to help me either. Asking my financial advisor what my options are, telling him what I want to do and asking what he thinks the most appropriate course of action is the best I can hope to attain. And who knows maybe all of my money will end up in an account in Portugal.
I can see one huge advantage however to a laser based system:
1) It can be deployed in heavily populated areas without fear of killing an entire village down range.
If that minigun drops below 45* wouldn't it become a lethal weapon to all parties who happen to be down wind? Those .50 caliber rounds aren't light.
I would say the larger the settlement the less deterent it is.
If I were charged $50 per time getting caught I would probably be petrified. If I were charged $10,000,000,000 per time I would just view it like dieing "hopefully it won't happen but if it does it's pretty much over."
The lower the fine the more likely they are to be able to pass sweeping legislation which makes it easier to charge people. If downloading were like parking tickets and as easily enforceable then I think you see a much larger drop in piracy than threatening to sue millions of dollars.
It's like "disaster syndrome" your brain can't quantify the damages so it just gives up and ignores it all together. My brain can perfectly understand $50 and its effect on my wallet.
Why waste your time pushing the Wii to its limits when Wii Sports has already done it!
*Zing*
Not to mention users are idiots. They don't know where they want things. What menus they want... etc etc etc... if you ask the users they'll tell you they either "liked it" or "were confused but are sure it wasn't their fault".
The MOST IMPORTANT thing a UI designer needs to work on is FLOW. The specs tell you what the application needs to do. "Color Correct a Photo", "Remove Zits", "Paint: change brush size, paint, change brush shape..." etc etc etc.
If you watch your users and see A) What they do most of time all you have to do is find a way to make that as easy and straightforward as possible.
Personally I love the new Office 2007 layout. Everything is broken up into actions and sub actions. That's how we work. Design the UI by speaking out loud. "OK I'm going to create a new document... where do I click to create a new document... Ohhh there is a big button in the top left that says "New" I bet that does it. Ok I'm wanting to make something bold... what are my options let's see... formating that's what making something bold would fall under... ahhh here it is a Bold B" etc etc etc.
Then once it works. User test, User Test, User Test, User Test, User Test and make sure your users speak out loud while doing it. Stream of consciousness stuff. The longer it takes lots of people to find something the more likely you need to make it more obvious.
Not to mention if you do plan on the device being run underwater you can benefit from better thermal properties than air.
Well we are using Platinum in extremely warm car parts as it is. So placing rare earth metals in our exhaust system isn't a far out idea in the automotive industry. ;)
This isn't for gaming, this is for planning how to more cost effectively kill humans.
Let me fix that for ya:
This isn't for gaming, this is for planning how to more cost effectively threaten to kill humans.
"But can it run Crysis?"
*Ducks*
Sorry I'm calling bullshit on myself. It's too late.
Divide Shuttle numbers by 2 I was operating on a nice easy 1000 pounds to a ton.
Shuttle can take about 25 tons into LEO with 7 crew members and the Soyuz can take much less than a ton with 3 crew members.
Nor is their lift capability anywhere near ours.
Sort of like saying "My bicycle never careens into a wall at 100mph killing everybody riding it".
The Soyuz module with a crew of 3 delivers about 1 ton of cargo. The Shuttle with a crew of 7 can deliver 57 tons of cargo. That means a Soyuz rocket would have to make 57 trips to do what the shuttle does in one. Something tells me even with a 2% failure rate for the shuttle I would say it out performs the soyuz. Unless your metric is number of millionaires launched into LEO.
I've worked with a large aerospace company's Advanced Research Group before. There is a LOT of waste involved. You will have no argument from me on that one. It's largely a question of management though not inspiration. They were all really excited about what they were doing... but completely lacking in focus. The Manhattan project succeeded because it had incredible leadership and a very clear directive. The amazing leadership directed a large number of theoretical scientists to focus their efforts on practical applications.
If you know what you want and you actually work towards it you can save a lot of money. It's vague, objectiveness directives which often result in slow progress. That's the problem with the open source movement now. Designing by committee is spectacularly wasteful because everything gets reinvented 10 times. Ubuntu is bringing focus and progress to desktop linux by actually providing leadership.
If you want to talk pure time/energy/efficiency open source development of a rocket is infinitely more wasteful than a handful of brilliant engineers working while all of those open source contributors sat on bicycles and powered generators.
You spend $4 at starbucks and as a result 5 people are employed.
Unless the cup of coffee actually depleted $4 worth of goods the waste is only the depletable resources expended to deliver it.
You have to remove wages and renewable goods from the cost to determine the actual waste.
If you pay a farmer for beans which will regrow then nothing was actually lost just redistributed. Starbucks is really a subversive organization redistributing disposable income from the wealthy to a little above minimum wage employees and poor south american farmers.
There is suprisingly little waste unless a resource is actually consumed in the process of making it.
Woooooosh!
Money is not a precise way to measure the cheapness of things in real life.
Try telling that to the grocery store clerk.
If you take the average price and subtract the average raise increase then you have a very very precise way of measuring the cheapness of something.
In this case the cost is +.5 and the wages are +0 (.5-0)= +.5
Unless you live in a fairy land costs adjusted for inflation and wage changes is an excellent means of determinig the cheapness of things in real life. Especially when the currency is practically tied to the cost of energy (Joules).
By your own admission the goverment is causing inflation by printing money. That makes things cost more. Now... if you make $50 a day and the government causes the price of a meal to rise %100 because they're printing more money... but your boss doesn't give you a raise. The prices have risen but you have no more money to spend. I can't fathom any way to explain this except that the price has risen.
family of four can eat like kings in America for under $200 a month, which is only 11 percent of their annual income (at the povery line, 20,500).
Eat like kings for under $200 a month!?
That's just over $6 a day for 4 people. No. Fucking. Way.
Let's see you live on $1.60 per day for food. Get back to me on how that works out for ya'.
You can barely buy an apple for $1.60.
I would debunk the rest of your crazy ass bullshit but that sentence alone illustrated just how dellusional you truely are.
What's the alternative?
1) Risk licensing lawsuit from codec owners
or
2) Ship without codec support.
If you want your linux to suck. Uninstall.
Yeah seriously! Who wants more sequels of a serial visual story telling medium! Stupid comic book sequels!
I'm always overwhelmed at the irony of comic book readers who complain about the number of 'sequels'.
Were there people chewing out Homer when he wrote the Odyssey "Oh Lords of Olympus not another sequel!"
I can see the Hebrews in the wilderness "Enough already with the Yahweh stories... we get it... we get it... how about something new and original!"
"What a sequel to the Hobbit!? Do we REALLY need more stories about midgets and magic gold rings?"
I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Every day you wake up is a sequel.
To take it further usually MPEG interframe compression only spans about 5-10 frames. In which case you could say... start at the end and beginning and work towards one another.
Now we just need a swarm of automatic choppers which can then be directed by a point and click interface at command and control.
"Suppress "this" area."
or an emergency button for crews on the ground:
"drop water on me."
It would be like the roomba of California.
"Son of Man, Daughter of Eve."
Yeah no biblical overtones there.
Royal King with mystical powers who dies in place of a 'sinner' and is resurrected defeating the witch.
No undercurrents of Christianity there.
If Aslan isn't Jesus I don't know who is. Perhaps YOU aren't very well versed in biblical studies and as such aren't seeing the parallels because I can say for sure that I could read an allegory of the Koran and not notice a single similarity.