It's created by an advanced, custom-built browser which, for certain input, correctly renders a perfectly standards-compliant reference image. Just don't ask to use the browser on any other input.
Seriously, I'm not being hostile with this question. Is your life better for knowing the precise mass of a galaxy which no human will ever visit? I could go out and mass a stone in my back yard rather precisely with a calibrated instrument right now -- that would advance The Sum Of Human Knowledge, insofar as nobody had ever determined the approximate mass of that particular rock before -- but is that knowledge *useful*?
If that was the cost, what was the benefit?
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FTC Offput by Offsets
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· Score: 2, Insightful
How many folks in the area are able to feed their families because of the coal mines? How many folks in the area did not freeze to death this December because their houses had access to cheap energy? How many hospitals in the area did not see a sudden loss of all folks on ventilators because they had uninterrupted access to electricity regardless of the weather conditions?
Human action doesn't *just* damage the environment -- it also enriches our lives. For example, there never would have been Burr Oak Lake in the first place without the *enormously* consequential decision to dam the river.
I tend to fall in with the Catholic view of things (unsuprising, being Catholic): usury is what happens to "interest" after it reaches the point where it could no longer be called just. Catholic thought recognizes that it is possible to lend, and to profit by lending, in a just manner, because there are times when it is advantageous to be a borrower. Thus I really don't worry much about most mortgages and think that payday loan places are, ahem, very close to the scum of the earth.
Here's the deal: in the real world, it takes money to make money. Unless you are already blessed by having wealthy parents, you start with no money or significant property. You have essentially three options to get a career which will allow you to lead a middle-class or better existence: get a college degree, open a business, or be one of the extraordinarily lucky souls in a profession based on natural talent which happens to pay well (football star, etc). Option #3 isn't viable for most people, and option #1 and #2 cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Now, you could try to get your way to the $20,000 worth of seed capital you'd need to get a four year education at a state school by working long nights at low-skilled labor. And, hey, people have done that and if you choose to do it more power to you. However, that throws away years of your life which you will never get back. You could have money donated to you by someone and, hey, if that is an option more power to both of you. Or you could take a loan for the money.
Work with me on the math here: as unskilled labor, the value of your time is approximately $20,000 a year. Let's say you're dead set that you want to major in Women's Studies and graduate with no job skills -- this will still increase your salary to $30,000 a year, give or take, just for having the BA credential. Now, you can either work 2 years at McDonalds to get the $20,000 saved up for college, or you can talk to the bank (realistically, the financial aid office, but it wouldn't change the analysis if you were getting private loans, just bump up the interest).
What does the bank give you in return for your interest payments over the next years? *Two years of your life back*. Instead of going through indentured servitude @ 20k to pay for college, you get to graduate two years earlier and immediately start earning a $10,000 a year premium. Next to that, the ~$3,000 you will pay on interest in your first year (assumption is 15% interest, which is on the high end of private lenders for educational loans) is peanuts. The amount of interest you pay every year decreases, and the value of your degree compounds every year with salary raises. You'd be a fool not to sign up for this.
Education is my canonical example of something you should really be happy to be pay interest for. Other income producing assets, like a building or non-residential real estate, are good choices. After that, the case becomes marginally less clear, and it comes down to how much you want that object of your desires *today*. For example, many men in my situation (mid-twenties, stable professional income, modest savings) are thinking of marrying a bonny lass and buying a house within the next 5 years. That is not a realistic goal without borrowing money to do so. I could do things the Japanese way and save money from my paycheck for the next ~20 years, then shock the bejeesus out of some agent and buy a house in cash, right about when my kids were getting into college. OR, I could sign a home loan with my wife, and have my kids grow up in a house as opposed to a tiny shoebox apartment. There might very well be some value to that that I am willing to pay for. And clearly its right to pay for putting a roof over my childrens' heads: I would do it to my landlord, why not do it to the bank that is fronting me several hundred thousand dollars so that we can live in a slightly better manner.
(and $350 million in operating costs per year), I'm betting you I could have developed that technology without having had to blast anything into orbit. This is the problem with all of the "NASA once had a worthwhile spinoff, therefore it is worthwhile" -- just fund the spinoffs directly and you could do it for a thousandth the price.
I like Tang as much as the next guy, but you don't ever need to blast someone into orbit to produce Tang.
What, besides launching satellites (which, thankfully, can be done without public funding), has NASA ever produced which provides its benefit *because* it is not on earth, not *in spite* of it not being on earth?
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I swear, I burn more karma on NASA than any other reason. And given that I voted for Dubya twice, am browsing in IE7 right now, *and* run Vista at home, that is really saying something.
I don't agree that pointing to the billions being wasted elsewhere is necessarily more effective. You know what will the defenders of those projects will say? "Don't look at at my hobbyhorse, look over there at NASA, they're practically setting billions afire." And you're both right, but if I take you at face value, then the budget just continues to balloon outwards. Similarly, keeping the Hubble alive because we've already sunk billions is just trying to justify sunk costs despite the fact that we aren't getting a positive marginal return on our investments. The hole just keeps getting deeper, because we won't stop digging.
>> Really it's one of the most cost effective missions that NASA can do from a science per dollar perspective >>
The relevent question, though, is whether its one of the most cost effective things *we* can do from a science-per-dollar perspective. And it's not. $1.5 billion to launch. $350 million a year to keep operational. And for what? Pretty pictures of far away balls of gas and, maybe, if we're lucky, a hint of a large rock orbiting the balls of gas.
Let's bust out the government's $135 billion yearly R&D budget. What could we do with an extra $350 million? Well, let me present you with a variety of options. We could double our R&D spending on malaria and TB, working to save several hundred thousand children a year who die from one of the two. Maybe they're not as photogenic as stars many light years away, though. OK, forget the kids.
We could spend the $350 million paying for open source software to be developed. That would pay for, conservatively, hundreds of projects, or a few flagships with the impact of Apache or Firefox. One of them could even develop stunning vistas from distant galaxies, since apparently people think that is an important use of the taxpayer's dollars.
I'm personally skeptical about solar power but, hey, for $350 million you could fund about a dozen projects a year looking into both radical new materials to use and iterations on the existing stuff, trying to make it cost-competitive with cheap coal.
If exploring new frontiers makes you misty, you could just about double our oceanographic research budget with a cool $350 million. We've pissed away billions trying to get a closer look at a dead environment which is terribly hostile to human life and which might include a few drops of water here and there. Instead, for a few million we could do in-depth study of unique organisms who robust, exciting environment and which most certainly includes water. And if you're the "well we've got to find a way off this rock!" Slashdot contingent who has read one too many sci-fi novels, your $350 billion would also count against improving our ability to survive in hostile environments.
Speaking of ecosystems, want to see if an off-world colony is EVER going to be viable? For $350 million you could restart the BioDome project. If you can solve that issue here, you can always worry about launch vehicles later, but if you can't, then all space research in the world won't get you what you want.
Yeah yeah, I know, I know -- "Space isn't the biggest waste of money in the budget!" I'm sure it isn't, but being less-than-maximally-wasteful is not a ringing endorsement of your favorite program.
First, we create a special legal entity to actually do the building of the solar panels (or whatever else the capital-intensive process is, because this works for just about anything). Then, that legal entity creates a bunch of special pieces of paper, called "shares". (For the ecologically conscious, they don't *have* to be paper anymore -- most are just entries in a database.) These shares are sold to the general public, although in practice buying shares from a new legal entity is sort of risky so only extraordinarily large members of the general public, who can pay for large staffs to evaluate risk, participate.
We tried having shares split up ownership of the outputs of the legal entity, but that was just a whole lot of work and ended up with weird rounding issues, so instead we settled on having the legal entity sell its products to the public and then divvy up profits to the shareholders, pro-rated based on the number of shares they hold. And if you decide you don't care for your shares anymore? You can sell them to somebody else. In principle, this right persists in perpetuity (although in practice, sometimes the business fails). Indeed, some of the legal entities organized like this have been in continuous operation for hundreds of years, and on a day to day basis you deal with hundreds of younguns who are only a few decades old.
It's a great system. Distribution of risk, great efficiencies of scale, minimal inefficiencies to transaction costs.
(Now, personally, I like buying bits of nuclear power plants rather than bits of solar power panels but, hey, I won't quibble with how you spend your money.)
Something I always wonder when folks say that Ruby isn't competitive with, e.g., C with respect to speed is what the context for the competition is. In my professional career I worked on precisely one application which was capable of pegging a modern processor. The bottleneck is almost never the CPU these days -- in fact, rarely enough is it ANYTHING technological! Disk space, memory, bandwidth, CPU time, I/O on the bus, all of the things which I learned how to optimize at engineering school are available in huge quantities for unbelievable prices. The bottlenecks that I find myself worrying about these days are a) insufficient number of hours in the day (it seems stuck at 24 and Moore's Law isn't helping -- bugfix, plz) and insufficient customers using my systems to cause resource issues.
I run one web application which is essentially an advertising brochure for software that I created. The software is in Java (which I suppose is slow in the abstract, but none of my users can tell the difference) and the website is Ruby on Rails. ($10k in income in 2007, 10k uniques in the average month, to get a rough idea of scale.) Is Ruby on Rails a slow/poor scaling/resource hogging framework? Maybe. My $20 a month VPS account hosts my application fast enough to take 20k page views in an hour. The economic value per pageview for that site is about 5 cents. Please, God, send me resource issues! Make me regret my choice of a productive but slow framework, as the spigot gets up to $1k an hour and then just resists improvement until I go to the $40 a month server!
Your mileage may vary, if your business model involves sending nation-state scales of traffic at sites and picking for pennies in advertising. If it does, could I humbly suggest spending half as much time worrying about the business model as you do about your technology choices?
But the cursing you get for free. And, bonus points, if you write it out in newspaper style it will execute. "Who the $_|&%.$# decided they were too cool to use lettes in the names of their variables in a 6,000 line program?"
(Yep, I really did hit an executing program on the first try. I think it evaluates to null for all input strings but $_|&%.$# if I'm going to try to parse Perl code without getting paid money for it.)
Leave a white shirt out in the sun all day, and you know what you get? A hot white shirt. It's the same story on arrow versus armor that it has been for more than a thousand years: given equal technology, the arrow wins. (And the US Air Force is categorically not planning to "fight fair" when it comes to comparing technology bases. Hello, Mr. Third World Tinpot Dictator. Do your Revolutionary Guards have access to MIT's materials engineering department? No? Oh, what a pity... because their physics department works for us.)
When in doubt, the arrow scales more-or-less linearly (bump up the juice on the laser, problem solved), the armor ceases to scale very rapidly (try adding another 9 to the string of 99.999% reflectivity index).
I'd be much more worried, for the first few iterations of the system, of it being compromised by less-than-ideal environmental conditions (smoke, dust, smog, haze, clouds, intervening terrain in an urban situation, etc) than by enemy preparations. Besides, if the enemy has decided to put on his Armor of Laser Resistance +1, you can always just go back to Plan A and drop a really big bomb on his head.
... your jar is probably a little too big. And you're a vicious bastard -- do you have any idea how hard I'm looking to find one for retail price right now, to say nothing of two?
The goal is to please environmentalists. And environmentalists hate nukes with a passion which makes an uncontrolled fission reaction look like a popcorn kettle.
While Rails might not be my first framework of choice to implement Digg in, I prefer to build sites which actually, you know, make money by solving problems for paying customers. When you do that, you don't really have to worry about scaling to infinity and beyond, but you do have to worry about expressiveness, maintainability, and time to market. (If you have too many customers relative to servers, heck, easy solution there -- the engineer in me says "just throw up more boxes", but the businessman in me says "pay somebody to worry about it so I can go back to counting my benjamins".)
I have a Rails site, my first (hopefully of many) for my small business, which plugs along at about 20 requests a second in tests. If I could saturate those 20 requests a second, I would quit my day job on the spot. Scaling? Eh, who cares.
(P.S. Day job is writing enterprise level crud apps for Japanese universities on the J2EE stack. They worry a bit about, e.g., getting hit with 8k users signing in simultaneously during class registration. You know what we do? Exactly what I'd do for a Rails app in the same situation ("don't do anything stupid like an n+1 queries loop, cache the important stuff, and buy enough hardware for the job"). Only difference in Rails is I have never wanted to poke my eye out with a spoon while writing it.
>> Free software will outlive Sun's program and Sun itself because people who need code will always be better off with free software. >>
"People who need code" overwhelmingly choose my (commercial, closed source -- http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ ) hobby project over my OSS competitor (bingo-cards, feel free to look it up on Sourceforge) because mine actually works. Without a monetary incentive (and $10,000 in 2007 was a nice monetary incentive, and likely far more than Sun will be paying out to key developers on projects of much more importance) geeks don't just magically materialize and start solving problems like "3rd grade ESL teachers in the United States don't have enough software written for them yet" (picked one of my customer groups at random).
Its a picture of arbitrary impact sites on a rock, distinguished from a universe of rocks only by the fact that this rock happens to be bigger than most of the rocks in convenient proximity to the only wet rock we've found yet. What is the scientific significance here?
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses (X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks (X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it (X) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once (X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it (X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses ( ) Asshats ( ) Jurisdictional problems (X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money (X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes (X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) Extreme profitability of spam (X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians ( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers ( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually (X) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses [hey, it's Microsoft... they've probably already submitted the patent...] ( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email ( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
90%+ of the projects on Sourceforge over a year old haven't seen a commit in a year. One of them happens to be a competitor of my software business (bingo-cards, feel free to look it up), and for my customers the fact that they theoretically *could* revive the codebase does not get them anywhere near the codebase actually being revived.
... is supposed to add what, exactly, to the homemade game industry? Homemade games are not successful on any recognizable scale even when they are made in free development environments for hardware which the entire Western world owns -- after you get past the level of simple Flash game you run SMACK into the content creation barrier and start having to have professional programmers and artists to make a stab at anything. Who is going to write the textures and skeletons, to say nothing of 3D engine (eh, minor detail, that), for those motion capture shots you are taking with your newly commoditized hardware?
Even the semi-pro games are not much to write home about: I used to contribute to the highest activity game on Sourceforge, which at any given time probably had a dozen professional programmers working on it, and it would suffer in comparison to most games from four console generations ago (!) in terms of anything but gameplay. (And that was only fun because we were slavishly implementing a fun boardgame as an online game.)
... might not be the best reason to jump on the Linux bandwagon, sparky. Ubuntu (lovely stuff, I run my business off of it), out of the box will not play DVDs, MP3s, or whatever it is you get from iTunes. Vista will, on the other hand, not generally force you to hack around their licensing regime to play DVDs.
You can use free software, enjoy media in the common formats, and respect the law: pick any two.
... He is clearly back in Old Testament "smite the unbelievers!" mode. Except apparently now the Egyptians run Windows and God has gotten bored with sending plagues manually and instead He has inserted them into a cron job. Pharoah's security consultants tried to root Moses' SnakeWare distro -- bad call.
We can further see that He is abandoning the New Testament by noting that God sent his only son to earth, and the SlashGod would have sent twins on the first day and then maybe two to three more in the next week, with another coming a year later in case you missed the Savior the first time. This would probably have required duping the Resurrection, but hey, omnipotence means never having to say you're sorry.
a) Want my fingerprints? Sure, have at them. I leave them on everything I touch, after all.
b) Fingerprints could be used to identify me, if there were an American database of fingerprints I was in. I suppose the shadowy database could connect me to all sorts of private info that I wouldn't want the Japanese government having access to... of course, why would you query the shadowy American database by fingerprint when you could do it by a unique identifying number, name, birthdate, and place of birth. Good thing that the Japanese government doesn't ask me for those at immigration -- they just get to see my passport. Oh waaaaait.
Seriously, if Japan and America decide to conspire to screw me, I'm screwed. That is true with or without fingerprints. Thus, all this matters to me is that I lose another 5 minutes on top of a 16 hour commute.
Previously, you could go through at the Japanese citizen's counter on any status of residence provided your residence was in Japan and you had your foreigner registration card with you (i.e. not your first trip through, but presumably all your subsequent trips through unless your residency lapsed). I've done it on, let's see, International Relations (kokusai gyoumu, what the heck was that called again?), Engineer, and Cultural Activities visas before.
Ahh well. At worst, this is a minor nuisance which we'll be incurring a few times a year. The Japanese government already has given the both of us the nth degree, what is fingerprints added to that? And it will probably be as perfunctory as the "inspection" I am given at customs every time. (Full transcript of my most recent inspection: "Where is your company?" "Nagoya" "Have a nice day.")
Slashdot Mirror
It's created by an advanced, custom-built browser which, for certain input, correctly renders a perfectly standards-compliant reference image. Just don't ask to use the browser on any other input.
Seriously, I'm not being hostile with this question. Is your life better for knowing the precise mass of a galaxy which no human will ever visit? I could go out and mass a stone in my back yard rather precisely with a calibrated instrument right now -- that would advance The Sum Of Human Knowledge, insofar as nobody had ever determined the approximate mass of that particular rock before -- but is that knowledge *useful*?
I don't live in Glouster, Ohio so I'll just take your claim that the water doesn't taste good anymore at face value. (Although it appears the fish don't mind: http://www.dnr.state.oh.us/Home/FishingSubhomePage/LakeMapLandingPage/BurrOakLakeFishingMap/tabid/19488/Default.aspx) So that was the cost -- what was the benefit?
How many folks in the area are able to feed their families because of the coal mines? How many folks in the area did not freeze to death this December because their houses had access to cheap energy? How many hospitals in the area did not see a sudden loss of all folks on ventilators because they had uninterrupted access to electricity regardless of the weather conditions?
Human action doesn't *just* damage the environment -- it also enriches our lives. For example, there never would have been Burr Oak Lake in the first place without the *enormously* consequential decision to dam the river.
I tend to fall in with the Catholic view of things (unsuprising, being Catholic): usury is what happens to "interest" after it reaches the point where it could no longer be called just. Catholic thought recognizes that it is possible to lend, and to profit by lending, in a just manner, because there are times when it is advantageous to be a borrower. Thus I really don't worry much about most mortgages and think that payday loan places are, ahem, very close to the scum of the earth.
Here's the deal: in the real world, it takes money to make money. Unless you are already blessed by having wealthy parents, you start with no money or significant property. You have essentially three options to get a career which will allow you to lead a middle-class or better existence: get a college degree, open a business, or be one of the extraordinarily lucky souls in a profession based on natural talent which happens to pay well (football star, etc). Option #3 isn't viable for most people, and option #1 and #2 cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Now, you could try to get your way to the $20,000 worth of seed capital you'd need to get a four year education at a state school by working long nights at low-skilled labor. And, hey, people have done that and if you choose to do it more power to you. However, that throws away years of your life which you will never get back. You could have money donated to you by someone and, hey, if that is an option more power to both of you. Or you could take a loan for the money.
Work with me on the math here: as unskilled labor, the value of your time is approximately $20,000 a year. Let's say you're dead set that you want to major in Women's Studies and graduate with no job skills -- this will still increase your salary to $30,000 a year, give or take, just for having the BA credential. Now, you can either work 2 years at McDonalds to get the $20,000 saved up for college, or you can talk to the bank (realistically, the financial aid office, but it wouldn't change the analysis if you were getting private loans, just bump up the interest).
What does the bank give you in return for your interest payments over the next years? *Two years of your life back*. Instead of going through indentured servitude @ 20k to pay for college, you get to graduate two years earlier and immediately start earning a $10,000 a year premium. Next to that, the ~$3,000 you will pay on interest in your first year (assumption is 15% interest, which is on the high end of private lenders for educational loans) is peanuts. The amount of interest you pay every year decreases, and the value of your degree compounds every year with salary raises. You'd be a fool not to sign up for this.
Education is my canonical example of something you should really be happy to be pay interest for. Other income producing assets, like a building or non-residential real estate, are good choices. After that, the case becomes marginally less clear, and it comes down to how much you want that object of your desires *today*. For example, many men in my situation (mid-twenties, stable professional income, modest savings) are thinking of marrying a bonny lass and buying a house within the next 5 years. That is not a realistic goal without borrowing money to do so. I could do things the Japanese way and save money from my paycheck for the next ~20 years, then shock the bejeesus out of some agent and buy a house in cash, right about when my kids were getting into college. OR, I could sign a home loan with my wife, and have my kids grow up in a house as opposed to a tiny shoebox apartment. There might very well be some value to that that I am willing to pay for. And clearly its right to pay for putting a roof over my childrens' heads: I would do it to my landlord, why not do it to the bank that is fronting me several hundred thousand dollars so that we can live in a slightly better manner.
In Soviet America, the Whistle phished Crays! (I don't know, maybe he was a phone phreak turned spammer. What do you want from me.)
(and $350 million in operating costs per year), I'm betting you I could have developed that technology without having had to blast anything into orbit. This is the problem with all of the "NASA once had a worthwhile spinoff, therefore it is worthwhile" -- just fund the spinoffs directly and you could do it for a thousandth the price.
I like Tang as much as the next guy, but you don't ever need to blast someone into orbit to produce Tang.
What, besides launching satellites (which, thankfully, can be done without public funding), has NASA ever produced which provides its benefit *because* it is not on earth, not *in spite* of it not being on earth?
Thanks for the vote of confidence. I swear, I burn more karma on NASA than any other reason. And given that I voted for Dubya twice, am browsing in IE7 right now, *and* run Vista at home, that is really saying something.
I don't agree that pointing to the billions being wasted elsewhere is necessarily more effective. You know what will the defenders of those projects will say? "Don't look at at my hobbyhorse, look over there at NASA, they're practically setting billions afire." And you're both right, but if I take you at face value, then the budget just continues to balloon outwards. Similarly, keeping the Hubble alive because we've already sunk billions is just trying to justify sunk costs despite the fact that we aren't getting a positive marginal return on our investments. The hole just keeps getting deeper, because we won't stop digging.
>>
Really it's one of the most cost effective missions that NASA can do from a science per dollar perspective
>>
The relevent question, though, is whether its one of the most cost effective things *we* can do from a science-per-dollar perspective. And it's not. $1.5 billion to launch. $350 million a year to keep operational. And for what? Pretty pictures of far away balls of gas and, maybe, if we're lucky, a hint of a large rock orbiting the balls of gas.
Let's bust out the government's $135 billion yearly R&D budget. What could we do with an extra $350 million? Well, let me present you with a variety of options. We could double our R&D spending on malaria and TB, working to save several hundred thousand children a year who die from one of the two. Maybe they're not as photogenic as stars many light years away, though. OK, forget the kids.
We could spend the $350 million paying for open source software to be developed. That would pay for, conservatively, hundreds of projects, or a few flagships with the impact of Apache or Firefox. One of them could even develop stunning vistas from distant galaxies, since apparently people think that is an important use of the taxpayer's dollars.
I'm personally skeptical about solar power but, hey, for $350 million you could fund about a dozen projects a year looking into both radical new materials to use and iterations on the existing stuff, trying to make it cost-competitive with cheap coal.
If exploring new frontiers makes you misty, you could just about double our oceanographic research budget with a cool $350 million. We've pissed away billions trying to get a closer look at a dead environment which is terribly hostile to human life and which might include a few drops of water here and there. Instead, for a few million we could do in-depth study of unique organisms who robust, exciting environment and which most certainly includes water. And if you're the "well we've got to find a way off this rock!" Slashdot contingent who has read one too many sci-fi novels, your $350 billion would also count against improving our ability to survive in hostile environments.
Speaking of ecosystems, want to see if an off-world colony is EVER going to be viable? For $350 million you could restart the BioDome project. If you can solve that issue here, you can always worry about launch vehicles later, but if you can't, then all space research in the world won't get you what you want.
Yeah yeah, I know, I know -- "Space isn't the biggest waste of money in the budget!" I'm sure it isn't, but being less-than-maximally-wasteful is not a ringing endorsement of your favorite program.
First, we create a special legal entity to actually do the building of the solar panels (or whatever else the capital-intensive process is, because this works for just about anything). Then, that legal entity creates a bunch of special pieces of paper, called "shares". (For the ecologically conscious, they don't *have* to be paper anymore -- most are just entries in a database.) These shares are sold to the general public, although in practice buying shares from a new legal entity is sort of risky so only extraordinarily large members of the general public, who can pay for large staffs to evaluate risk, participate.
We tried having shares split up ownership of the outputs of the legal entity, but that was just a whole lot of work and ended up with weird rounding issues, so instead we settled on having the legal entity sell its products to the public and then divvy up profits to the shareholders, pro-rated based on the number of shares they hold. And if you decide you don't care for your shares anymore? You can sell them to somebody else. In principle, this right persists in perpetuity (although in practice, sometimes the business fails). Indeed, some of the legal entities organized like this have been in continuous operation for hundreds of years, and on a day to day basis you deal with hundreds of younguns who are only a few decades old.
It's a great system. Distribution of risk, great efficiencies of scale, minimal inefficiencies to transaction costs.
(Now, personally, I like buying bits of nuclear power plants rather than bits of solar power panels but, hey, I won't quibble with how you spend your money.)
Something I always wonder when folks say that Ruby isn't competitive with, e.g., C with respect to speed is what the context for the competition is. In my professional career I worked on precisely one application which was capable of pegging a modern processor. The bottleneck is almost never the CPU these days -- in fact, rarely enough is it ANYTHING technological! Disk space, memory, bandwidth, CPU time, I/O on the bus, all of the things which I learned how to optimize at engineering school are available in huge quantities for unbelievable prices. The bottlenecks that I find myself worrying about these days are a) insufficient number of hours in the day (it seems stuck at 24 and Moore's Law isn't helping -- bugfix, plz) and insufficient customers using my systems to cause resource issues.
I run one web application which is essentially an advertising brochure for software that I created. The software is in Java (which I suppose is slow in the abstract, but none of my users can tell the difference) and the website is Ruby on Rails. ($10k in income in 2007, 10k uniques in the average month, to get a rough idea of scale.) Is Ruby on Rails a slow/poor scaling/resource hogging framework? Maybe. My $20 a month VPS account hosts my application fast enough to take 20k page views in an hour. The economic value per pageview for that site is about 5 cents. Please, God, send me resource issues! Make me regret my choice of a productive but slow framework, as the spigot gets up to $1k an hour and then just resists improvement until I go to the $40 a month server!
Your mileage may vary, if your business model involves sending nation-state scales of traffic at sites and picking for pennies in advertising. If it does, could I humbly suggest spending half as much time worrying about the business model as you do about your technology choices?
But the cursing you get for free. And, bonus points, if you write it out in newspaper style it will execute. "Who the $_|&%.$# decided they were too cool to use lettes in the names of their variables in a 6,000 line program?"
(Yep, I really did hit an executing program on the first try. I think it evaluates to null for all input strings but $_|&%.$# if I'm going to try to parse Perl code without getting paid money for it.)
Leave a white shirt out in the sun all day, and you know what you get? A hot white shirt. It's the same story on arrow versus armor that it has been for more than a thousand years: given equal technology, the arrow wins. (And the US Air Force is categorically not planning to "fight fair" when it comes to comparing technology bases. Hello, Mr. Third World Tinpot Dictator. Do your Revolutionary Guards have access to MIT's materials engineering department? No? Oh, what a pity... because their physics department works for us.)
When in doubt, the arrow scales more-or-less linearly (bump up the juice on the laser, problem solved), the armor ceases to scale very rapidly (try adding another 9 to the string of 99.999% reflectivity index).
I'd be much more worried, for the first few iterations of the system, of it being compromised by less-than-ideal environmental conditions (smoke, dust, smog, haze, clouds, intervening terrain in an urban situation, etc) than by enemy preparations. Besides, if the enemy has decided to put on his Armor of Laser Resistance +1, you can always just go back to Plan A and drop a really big bomb on his head.
... your jar is probably a little too big. And you're a vicious bastard -- do you have any idea how hard I'm looking to find one for retail price right now, to say nothing of two?
The goal is to please environmentalists. And environmentalists hate nukes with a passion which makes an uncontrolled fission reaction look like a popcorn kettle.
While Rails might not be my first framework of choice to implement Digg in, I prefer to build sites which actually, you know, make money by solving problems for paying customers. When you do that, you don't really have to worry about scaling to infinity and beyond, but you do have to worry about expressiveness, maintainability, and time to market. (If you have too many customers relative to servers, heck, easy solution there -- the engineer in me says "just throw up more boxes", but the businessman in me says "pay somebody to worry about it so I can go back to counting my benjamins".)
I have a Rails site, my first (hopefully of many) for my small business, which plugs along at about 20 requests a second in tests. If I could saturate those 20 requests a second, I would quit my day job on the spot. Scaling? Eh, who cares.
(P.S. Day job is writing enterprise level crud apps for Japanese universities on the J2EE stack. They worry a bit about, e.g., getting hit with 8k users signing in simultaneously during class registration. You know what we do? Exactly what I'd do for a Rails app in the same situation ("don't do anything stupid like an n+1 queries loop, cache the important stuff, and buy enough hardware for the job"). Only difference in Rails is I have never wanted to poke my eye out with a spoon while writing it.
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Free software will outlive Sun's program and Sun itself because people who need code will always be better off with free software.
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"People who need code" overwhelmingly choose my (commercial, closed source -- http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ ) hobby project over my OSS competitor (bingo-cards, feel free to look it up on Sourceforge) because mine actually works. Without a monetary incentive (and $10,000 in 2007 was a nice monetary incentive, and likely far more than Sun will be paying out to key developers on projects of much more importance) geeks don't just magically materialize and start solving problems like "3rd grade ESL teachers in the United States don't have enough software written for them yet" (picked one of my customer groups at random).
Its a picture of arbitrary impact sites on a rock, distinguished from a universe of rocks only by the fact that this rock happens to be bigger than most of the rocks in convenient proximity to the only wet rock we've found yet. What is the scientific significance here?
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(X) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
(X) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(X) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
(X) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(X) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
(X) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(X) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(X) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
(X) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(X) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(X) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses [hey, it's Microsoft... they've probably already submitted the patent...]
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!
90%+ of the projects on Sourceforge over a year old haven't seen a commit in a year. One of them happens to be a competitor of my software business (bingo-cards, feel free to look it up), and for my customers the fact that they theoretically *could* revive the codebase does not get them anywhere near the codebase actually being revived.
... is supposed to add what, exactly, to the homemade game industry? Homemade games are not successful on any recognizable scale even when they are made in free development environments for hardware which the entire Western world owns -- after you get past the level of simple Flash game you run SMACK into the content creation barrier and start having to have professional programmers and artists to make a stab at anything. Who is going to write the textures and skeletons, to say nothing of 3D engine (eh, minor detail, that), for those motion capture shots you are taking with your newly commoditized hardware?
Even the semi-pro games are not much to write home about: I used to contribute to the highest activity game on Sourceforge, which at any given time probably had a dozen professional programmers working on it, and it would suffer in comparison to most games from four console generations ago (!) in terms of anything but gameplay. (And that was only fun because we were slavishly implementing a fun boardgame as an online game.)
... might not be the best reason to jump on the Linux bandwagon, sparky. Ubuntu (lovely stuff, I run my business off of it), out of the box will not play DVDs, MP3s, or whatever it is you get from iTunes. Vista will, on the other hand, not generally force you to hack around their licensing regime to play DVDs.
You can use free software, enjoy media in the common formats, and respect the law: pick any two.
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All we need is the media to hype it up and people will be observing how it used to be windier years ago.
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"I knew it! Must be America's fault." -- the usual suspects
... He is clearly back in Old Testament "smite the unbelievers!" mode. Except apparently now the Egyptians run Windows and God has gotten bored with sending plagues manually and instead He has inserted them into a cron job. Pharoah's security consultants tried to root Moses' SnakeWare distro -- bad call.
We can further see that He is abandoning the New Testament by noting that God sent his only son to earth, and the SlashGod would have sent twins on the first day and then maybe two to three more in the next week, with another coming a year later in case you missed the Savior the first time. This would probably have required duping the Resurrection, but hey, omnipotence means never having to say you're sorry.
Really, think about it.
a) Want my fingerprints? Sure, have at them. I leave them on everything I touch, after all.
b) Fingerprints could be used to identify me, if there were an American database of fingerprints I was in. I suppose the shadowy database could connect me to all sorts of private info that I wouldn't want the Japanese government having access to... of course, why would you query the shadowy American database by fingerprint when you could do it by a unique identifying number, name, birthdate, and place of birth. Good thing that the Japanese government doesn't ask me for those at immigration -- they just get to see my passport. Oh waaaaait.
Seriously, if Japan and America decide to conspire to screw me, I'm screwed. That is true with or without fingerprints. Thus, all this matters to me is that I lose another 5 minutes on top of a 16 hour commute.
Previously, you could go through at the Japanese citizen's counter on any status of residence provided your residence was in Japan and you had your foreigner registration card with you (i.e. not your first trip through, but presumably all your subsequent trips through unless your residency lapsed). I've done it on, let's see, International Relations (kokusai gyoumu, what the heck was that called again?), Engineer, and Cultural Activities visas before.
Ahh well. At worst, this is a minor nuisance which we'll be incurring a few times a year. The Japanese government already has given the both of us the nth degree, what is fingerprints added to that? And it will probably be as perfunctory as the "inspection" I am given at customs every time. (Full transcript of my most recent inspection: "Where is your company?" "Nagoya" "Have a nice day.")