The people who are killing the pioneering heritage aren't the scientists at NASA. They want to get out there as much as you and I do. The people who are killing it are the profiteers making billions off of cost-plus accounting. Why develop space systems in house when you can develop them for the government and get paid 110% of your investment?
Want to really see space take off? Eliminate government cost-plus accounting. This will also drastically cut the budget for almost every government program.
It's not just all the funding they need. It's all the cost plus funding for large aerospace companies which contribute millions to political campaigns that NASA can have.
Which wouldn't be so bad if they cancelled the hasn't-worked-yet ballistic missile "defense" system. Or if there was a cap on CEO pay so that most of the money actually went to the workers instead of the CEO shmoozing it up with Hot Tub Tom.
I'm all for space exploration, but not at the cost of deficit spending. Why not cut the fat from the Pentagon's "no audits because it's too big" budget before we go spending more money that I and my children will have to pay back.
Weaseling out of work is one of the most valuable skills in the workplace today. As are successfully estimating and putting forth the minimum effort required of you.
I wouldn't get it either if I wasn't a Mac user. The fact that it syncs my address book and calendars and allows me to keep backups of important files and short text notes on it makes it more like a portable hard drive with an interface than a music player.
Don't worry, some of us Americans are jealous that you guys pay less than $200 a month for health coverage, are world leaders in wind power generation, have nicer cars, and don't have sticks up your asses about booze and boobies.
So it kinda evens out.
Mod me troll and I will become more powerful than you can imagine.
So what you're saying is that Firefox (and Opera and Safari and KHTML) should implement ActiveX just so the "tens of thousands" of websites that use it (which are generally poorly constructed), ignoring security concerns and the fact that ActiveX is Windows only.
I use Firefox as my primary browser, Safari as my secondary, and IE for when people tell me things don't work. I don't visit sites that require IE because I don't want to use it. And when I develop web applications, I make sure things work cross platform. And, no, that doesn't mean coding things twice, it means doing it right the first time.
Netscape was around before IE, and IE added Javascript functions that were incompatible. Was that wrong of Microsoft?
Not to mention the fact that ActiveX is how XMLHttpRequest was implemented in IE, and therefore wouldn't have worked for Mac or Linux.
"There was 'one operating system' back when MS had 95%+ of the desktop market share, and Linus and Apple decided to go on a jihad instead of realizing that the specifics of the operating system aren't that important and a de-facto standard is good enough for most people."
... until every browser does things the same. A lot of the current applications for Google Maps (like this one) don't work in Safari.
Unless standards are complied with fully there can never be "one programming language" for web scripting. Anyone who's had to debug Javascript in IE that works in Firefox knows this.
Last century, there were far fewer upper-middle class people, and their servants and gardeners and the people who allowed them to live as upper-middle class (factory workers and farmers) lived in squalor. Anyone who thinks that the late 19th and early 20th centuries were a picnic for everybody is ignorant of the fact that the majority of the population is and has historically been poor.
However, I find a lot of parallels between the last century and this century. With rapid industrialization a lot of people got extremely wealthy and powerful and widened the gap between them and the rest of the population. At the same time, technological innovations such as the electric motor and light bulb solved the labor crunch that was happening in the service industry.
Now, rapid technological development has widened the wealth and power gap, and with the Roomba and the Internet we're seeing people solving the problems of the high cost of labor.
It's the Gilette principle: Give away the handle and sell the blades at a 200% mark-up. Heck, I got a Mach3 razor (with two blades) for free when I turned 18.
I've seen the same thing with Swiffers. They do the same job as a broom or mop and bucket about as well, but the handle is significantly cheaper than a mediocre broom, and you get a free five pack of cloths. What they don't tell you is that the "special cloth" is only good for about 300 sq. ft. of floor space, and than a large pack of them costs $8 for what is essentially 15 paper towels.
Everything in the global economy is interconnected. Sure, maybe Europe may not be a great place for IBM to be doing business now, but what makes them think that Asia's development isn't connected to Europe?
Europeans buy Asian goods. Well, Europeans with jobs. That's what's fueling the industrialization of China et al. If there are 2,500 people in Europe who don't have jobs, that's 2,500 people who can't buy Asian goods, which means fewer economic activity in Asia, which means fewer orders for IBM.
If there's one thing that should be learned from H2G2, it's "never throw the letter Q into a privet bush."
Re:Reduce expenses by cutting executive salaries?
on
IBM Europe Workers Strike
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· Score: 2, Insightful
So lay off 7,500 employees and three executives. With 2,500 people still getting paid, you have 2,500 people to create demand instead of three, which means an economic downturn doesn't last as long.
Economically, it makes more sense to lay off as few people as possible. However, humans rarely make logical economic decisions.
It makes perfect sense. Advertising is using something of interest (TV show, radio programming, written material) to get people to look at or listen to something and then selling space in between the bits of stuff people want to see. So you're taking the attention and time of the content consumer and selling it to someone else so they can show someone something they don't want to see.
I'm amazed. I thought security meant not eating mercury laden fish and having money for retirement when all it really means is the ability to blow other people up before they blow us up.
And I'm doubly amazed that someone would claim that lack of oversight is a good thing when they're spending our fucking money on stuff that we don't know about.
I'm a Democrat and I opposed the war. And I would rather we spent more money on space exploration, but when someone saying "we should develop a better one" is like Bush's No Child Left Behind: an unfunded mandate.
And we can both agree that cost-plus has got to go; for every government agency..
Slashdot Mirror
All of the energy is generated by the gasoline engine.
How the hell are there still people who think you plug hybrids in?
Am I the only one who thinks this might be a new Apple handheld computer based on ARM?
I know for a fact that both Viking Landers used retrorockets.
Turtles all the way down indeed.
Want to really see space take off? Eliminate government cost-plus accounting. This will also drastically cut the budget for almost every government program.
Which wouldn't be so bad if they cancelled the hasn't-worked-yet ballistic missile "defense" system. Or if there was a cap on CEO pay so that most of the money actually went to the workers instead of the CEO shmoozing it up with Hot Tub Tom.
I'm all for space exploration, but not at the cost of deficit spending. Why not cut the fat from the Pentagon's "no audits because it's too big" budget before we go spending more money that I and my children will have to pay back.
Weaseling out of work is one of the most valuable skills in the workplace today. As are successfully estimating and putting forth the minimum effort required of you.
You can't "aid evolution." You can merely introduce different types of selection. Don't anthropomorphize non-human things. They don't like it.
Everybody who runs Mac OS X already has a transparent PNG capable browser installed. Just tell them to use Safari.
I wouldn't get it either if I wasn't a Mac user. The fact that it syncs my address book and calendars and allows me to keep backups of important files and short text notes on it makes it more like a portable hard drive with an interface than a music player.
So it kinda evens out.
Mod me troll and I will become more powerful than you can imagine.
I use Firefox as my primary browser, Safari as my secondary, and IE for when people tell me things don't work. I don't visit sites that require IE because I don't want to use it. And when I develop web applications, I make sure things work cross platform. And, no, that doesn't mean coding things twice, it means doing it right the first time.
Not to mention the fact that ActiveX is how XMLHttpRequest was implemented in IE, and therefore wouldn't have worked for Mac or Linux.
"There was 'one operating system' back when MS had 95%+ of the desktop market share, and Linus and Apple decided to go on a jihad instead of realizing that the specifics of the operating system aren't that important and a de-facto standard is good enough for most people."
Unless standards are complied with fully there can never be "one programming language" for web scripting. Anyone who's had to debug Javascript in IE that works in Firefox knows this.
However, I find a lot of parallels between the last century and this century. With rapid industrialization a lot of people got extremely wealthy and powerful and widened the gap between them and the rest of the population. At the same time, technological innovations such as the electric motor and light bulb solved the labor crunch that was happening in the service industry.
Now, rapid technological development has widened the wealth and power gap, and with the Roomba and the Internet we're seeing people solving the problems of the high cost of labor.
I've seen the same thing with Swiffers. They do the same job as a broom or mop and bucket about as well, but the handle is significantly cheaper than a mediocre broom, and you get a free five pack of cloths. What they don't tell you is that the "special cloth" is only good for about 300 sq. ft. of floor space, and than a large pack of them costs $8 for what is essentially 15 paper towels.
Europeans buy Asian goods. Well, Europeans with jobs. That's what's fueling the industrialization of China et al. If there are 2,500 people in Europe who don't have jobs, that's 2,500 people who can't buy Asian goods, which means fewer economic activity in Asia, which means fewer orders for IBM.
If there's one thing that should be learned from H2G2, it's "never throw the letter Q into a privet bush."
Economically, it makes more sense to lay off as few people as possible. However, humans rarely make logical economic decisions.
For the Rush loathers out there, Air America has commercial-free podcasts available.
It makes perfect sense. Advertising is using something of interest (TV show, radio programming, written material) to get people to look at or listen to something and then selling space in between the bits of stuff people want to see. So you're taking the attention and time of the content consumer and selling it to someone else so they can show someone something they don't want to see.
I run a blog. I don't have ads on it. I'll never have ads on it. Why? Because the attention and time of my readers is not mine to sell.
And I'm doubly amazed that someone would claim that lack of oversight is a good thing when they're spending our fucking money on stuff that we don't know about.
Just one more reason a pacifist environmentalist secular humanist like me feels like a foreigner in his own country.
And we can both agree that cost-plus has got to go; for every government agency..
Didn't think so.