NASA, which is and always has been nothing more than a civilian-esque slushfund on top of military appropriation and R&D budgets, accomplishes nothing for science or national defense that just directly funding science or defense wouldn't accomplish. The single usable accomplishment of the space program qua space program (as opposed to space program qua billion dollar R&D fund) is that we can now launch satellites cheaply in the private sector, and have no more need to do it through NASA.
I am deeply sorry so many astronauts have perished in the pursuit of the space program's mission, but their sacrifices do not add value to the space program. Indeed, one would normally assume that losing distinguished individuals as a "cost of doing business" would be a reason to cancel the business.
For your reference, here are the science projects Challenger was carrying when it had its accident. I challenge you to articulate a single reason why any of these were worth the sacrifice of a life:
1) Deploying the Tracking Data Relay-2 satellite, a process which is accomplished dozens of times per year without needing to send humans into space.
2) "Shuttle-Pointed Tool for Astronomy (SPARTAN-203)/Halley's Comet Experiment Deployable, a free-flying module designed to observe tail and coma of Halleys comet with two ultraviolet spectrometers and two cameras." This was a nail developed because we already had a hammer and needed something to bang on -- it could just have easily been done with an unmanned craft (and even if it couldn't, "Pictures of the tail of Halley's Comet" is something mankind can do perfectly fine without).
3) FDE Fluid Dynamics Experiment. No need for a human, and no real need for the experiment either.
4) Comet Halley Active Monitoring Program CHAMP (see #2, also 100% accomplishable from the ground).
5) Phase Partitioning Experiment (PPE)
6) three Shuttle Student Involvement Program (SSIP) experiments. These are essentially high-school science fair projects with low gravity added (i.e. the purpose is PR, not science as most of us would understand the term).
7) a set of lessons for Teacher In Space. This is another program which has no existence other than providing PR to justify continued funding for NASA. Plus for the price of one Teacher In Space we could afford a couple of hundred of Teacher In Inner City Classroom, where they would be at less risk (quiet, you, that isn't funny) and in a much better position to measurably improve education in this country.
... its a freaking sweet deal. I pay for the stuff I want to watch (Heroes, 24), and everybody else gets to pay for "We Put Twenty Attention-Starved Coeds On an Island and Drama Happened".
[quote]The US Dollar isn't based on anything other than trust now - fiat money. What makes second life, or any other currency, any different?[/quote]
There is no structural difference between getting an IOU from a meth addict and buying a T-bill, but that doesn't mean they're exactly the same. Evaluating the true worth of fiat money* requires evaluating how much you trust the fiating body. There is also the wrinkle that dollars are widely distributed across the globe and often backed by a physical artifact. Linden dollars, on the other hand, are concentrated in a single data center and if it were to get hit by a meteor tomorrow, well, I hope they were better at running offsite backups than they were at guarding their assembled credit card information. You also can't crash the real world and make it impossible for people to spend dollars by writing a grey goo script, and that is, what, a monthly occurrence in Second Life?
* Incidentally, to all folks who think returning to the gold standard is the answer to all our problems: as long as you have a government, all money will be fiat money, whether it is backed by a promised equivalence to a commodity or no. The reason? Governments can *break* their promises, and when they do guess who has the guns. And if you posit a worldwide catastrophic financial crash like a lot of survivalists do, promises wouldn't be worth a fig anyway. After a certain point you have to take things on faith. That knocking on your door doesn't have a gun hidden behind him ready to blow your head off. The bank down the street isn't going to collapse in the morning. The government is not going to suddenly start dishonoring T-bills. The United States will not break up in civil war. Could they all happen? Yeah, but if you act under the assumption they're going to happen you'll lead a fairly poor life.
Snicker all you want, Slashdot, this is certainly the way to bet. The number of installed computers in the world is increasing far faster than Mac and Linux's market share is. If it isn't Mac and it isn't Linux in 6 years it will run Vista.
...and if there is only one browser used, well, you're compatiblity woes were just eased quite a bit.
Microsoft has made significant efforts to make Windows/Office/etc responsive to the needs of Korean developers and users, just like they do everywhere else. I don't know many of the specifics about the Korean effort, but the Office Japan team did some serious surgery because typical Japanese documents are structured differently than typical American documents (to make a long story short, think tables. LOTS of tables), and as a result Office is a big player in Japan (along with a few Japanese competitors) and many foreign developed programs like, oh, that "OpenWhatever" thingee are not. (My boss, who is in charge of OSS promotion at my technology incubator, calls it OpenWhatever. He tried it once, and uninstalled it within 15 minutes because he couldn't coerce it into writing a travel report in the form our employer requires.)
What have the other browsers/OSes decided to do for Korea, other than saying "Well, we'll provide the tools and the Koreans can build themselves usable software to compete with the Microsoft ones that already work"? Browse on over to Apple Korea's website and you can tell that they really value that market... click on "Switch" and you're taken to a wonderful presentation on the benefits of Mac, written entirely in English. Whoopsie! Well, at least you can use all the wonderful Made4Mac software... oh, English again..Mac?.English And those are just half the examples from clicking one single click down on their topmost interface.
Well, maybe OSS is doing a better job? Depends a lot on the distribution. I prefer Ubuntu personally, but good luck using it with an Asian language. After you've installed it you've got about 15 minutes worth of configuration to do (using a command line, naturally) to enable non-critical features like, oh, typing in non-Western scripts. I rather doubt you'll have to hexedit any config files in Vista Home Premium (Korean edition) to be able to type in hangul.
Korea might not be compatible with Mac/OSS... what has Mac/OSS done to be compatible with Korea?
>> Shows how much Microsoft's monopoly is silently accepted when it's news that someone sells computers without Windows. >>
So THATS how Apple keeps generating the feeding frenzies with every press release. "Hey guys, we launched a new product today! Prepare to be amazed... no Windows!" "Wow! Innovative! No Windows! Although, come to think of it, the interface sort of looks like Windows... are you sure you didn't copy it?" Then millions of rabid Mac fans beat the reporter to a bloody pulp, and Slashdot publishes an article saying "Windows causes death of tech reporter" and the dupe "Linux has not killed a reporter this week".;)
What is my assurance that a "trusted partner" doesn't gain access to "Aggregate search queries with no personally identifying information involved" five years down the line and run grep/[0-9]{3}\-[0-9]{2}\-[0-9]{4}/ against it? Anything that goes into the search hopper is retained, forever, so that Google can use it to tweak their algorithms. Google *has* my credit card number on file (AdWords) and can even access my bank account (Checkout) but these are risks that I can tolerate because presumably they have procedures in place to protect information they KNOW is sensitive and even if they don't my bank has ultimate liability for unauthorized charges. I'm not NEARLY so convinced that they have adequate procedures in place to protect search queries, which most people would assume are probably pretty harmless. (I know they bounced a Justice Department demand to turn over a million random queries once. Bully for their lawyers yesterday, what about their most clueless employee *tomorrow*? AOL posted their queries out of a desire to do good and genuine ignorance about the downside potential, too.)
Every time I accessed a credit card number on a customer account at an old place of employment there was an audit trail generated and what numbers I was accessing was periodically reviewed against what accounts I had legitimate business servicing. Does Google keep similarly in-depth records about internal/external use of their query data? I don't have confidence that this is the case.
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure I'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes. In the meantime, you'll continue to have lights on and sufficient power to write "Viva la revolution!" on that wonderful piece of modern technology you are using, which was doubtless developed and constructed by a worker's cooperative and not a gigantic multinational that I probably own a tiny part of.
(Sidenote: I really, really wish I had enough invested to do "nothing at all". *sigh*)
>> All you have done is pre-paid your electricity for the next 5-10 years >>
60 months worth of your electric bill, call it an average of $100 a month, is $6,000. If you "pre-pay" that by rolling it into your home loan ("Build me a house and make sure it has a pool and solar power!"), it will end up costing you more (rough guesstimate is $7,300). If instead of buying photovoltaic cells you buy shares in your local electric company, you'll get about $120 to $240 a year in dividends (power companies often have a 2-4% yield), and your while your photovoltaic cells depreciate every year and require maintenance, your shares will probably appreciate and you'll never have to patch them up. (You'll have to pay the electric company for those 10 months of the year that dividends don't... then again, you get the security of knowing you'll never have to pay them extra just because its cloudy.) When you move in 15 years, rather than uninstalling or replacing them at your expense, you can just sell them and take your profits.
>> In the end, I think the choice is whether you want to help make the world greener, or you just plain don't give a rats >>
I don't give a rat's hindquarters for Green theology but don't mind conservation. Thats why I buy shares in companies which own nuclear power plants. Its cleaner than solar and has economies of scale. Yes, I said cleaner than scale: the energy cost from constructing solar panels keeps them net-energy-negative for about a decade (!) and when they die out after just over a decade (!) you have to dispose of them, and per megawatt hour generated you'll have to dispose of a heck of a lot more solar panels than radioactive waste. I don't invest in solar companies because at the moment they still haven't licked the whole "Making our products net energy producers" problem and until they do my only hope to profit from that investment would be hoping solar's massive government subsidies continue and expand. While I think that is certainly possible, I feel that if the current or a future administration wants to dump a couple billion into the solar industry, my nukes will get a similar largesse.
Sidenote: If you have an aversion to nuclear power, I understand and accept that. I don't eat meat on Fridays in Lent and we can both agree that our separate faiths are mutually harmless. One piece of advice though. Spend your money on a decent job of insulating your house -- you'll require less kwh from the grid, and on a per-dollar basis you'll save more kwh spending on insulation (and installation) than you will on buying solar power.
Google wants to own the Internet advertising game. Currently, their CPC (cost per click) offering is dominant but they have to continue expanding, and that means offering new products that fix the flaws with CPC, such as click fraud. The one totally fraud-proof advertising method is CPA: Cost Per Action/Aquisition. Basically, if you buy Bingo Card Creator (my little software program) after you click on my AdWords ad, I pay Google, say, $5. I don't pay them $.05 every time someone clicks on the ad anymore.
What does this have to do with Checkout? Without Checkout, Google has no way to know if I consumated the sale or not. "Uh, no, Google, sorry... my sales this month were only 2 units. Here's a check for $10. A pleasure as always, please show my ads next month." But my sales were actually 100 units, so I just screwed them out of $490 in revenue... and there is no way they can know. But if Google gets me to use Checkout, then they can roll out a CPA program at their leisure, and force me to use Checkout to offer the program. If I'm already using Checkout, this isn't a problem -- just like Analytics paves the way for AdWords, Checkout paves the way for gCPA. Thats a chicken and egg problem, so they're working on artificial egg production: getting customers to sign up for Checkout by offering $10 off a purchase for opening an account, getting sellers to sign up for Checkout by offering free payment processing through the end of 2007, etc.
Is it working? Anecdotally, not yet. I started offering Checkout a week ago and *all* of my customers who have used it opened their account specifically to buy my software (Google's fraud prevention system will list how long an account has been opened when the order is placed -- mine were all "0 days"). I guess Google could count that as a win though, considering I'm now in the system ready to start using CPA when it becomes available, and they've now got another dozen users with their credit cards on file at the Googleplex, who are now available to buy from any other Checkout-enabled merchant without putting up with the overly long checkout process again.
Incidentally, if you want to see my little slice of e-commerce, http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ . I integrate both the Paypal and Google options into my shopping cart. I guarantee you, if my users (elementary schoolteachers) can get through the Google UI, anybody can. I personally feel that its far inferior to Paypal but offer both as an option because a) some people hate Paypal and won't use them and b) hey, if I can save a couple hundred a year on Paypal fees, that money goes directly into my pocket.
Kevlar just makes the sniper take a wee bit more time aiming (hey, he's got all the time in the world) to hit the part of you which not covered by Kevlar, or alternatively just kill a child in your vicinity and watch the fun start. OMNIPRESENT DEATH ROBOTS, on the other hand, make poorly educated irregulars consider better career options. At the very least the exaggerated fear of the OMNIPRESENT DEATH ROBOT will make them reposition after every shot, and the more of their time they spend crawling from hidey-hole to hidey-hole the less time they're shooting friendlies. (Doesn't do much for their ability to deny us access to an area but, hey, you can't have everything.)
Speaking of OMNIPRESENT DEATH ROBOTS: in the first Gulf War the Navy did some field trials with UAVs (a pretty new thing at the time, as I recall). The UAV would overfly a coastal battery, and then the battleships would obliterate it. It eventually got to the point that if the Iraqi Army saw a UAV overfly their position they would break and run. Just as effective tactically (thats one battery that won't be hitting a boat full of Marines), but less dead Iraqi conscripts who we've got no particular reason to kill when they don't present a direct threat to our forces. I think I can get behind that. Similarly, us having the reputation (bah, who needs actual facts, just the reputation) of instantaneously snuffing out enemy snipers will make some of those unemployed guys who hear the "Hey, fight for Allah and we'll pay you $50!" say "No thanks! I'd be happy to fight for Allah but I don't want to be meeting him just yet!"
I never, and I mean *never*, get spam from legitimate companies anymore (on my US accounts, anyhow. I get all kinds on my Japan accounts). Whereas previously they or their hired marketing firms would be sort of lax about responding to requests to remove, and maybe do something to trick me into opening up the message, nowadays if I get mail on behalf of a Fortune500 company its because a) I requested it or b) someone is phishing me. This makes life vastly easier for my spam filters and my brain, because it requires much less effort for me to mentally evaluate "Pump and dump scam = discard" then it does "Reputable company sends me letter about my account status... read read read... wait a second, this is a solicitation".
No, its not microtransactions. There are six tiers of Vista, similar to the tiering you already see in most name MS products: Home User, Professional, Business, yadda yadda. Each comes with a different feature set and price point. If you want a feature that your version doesn't support (example: you're Home User Basic but you really want the Aero look&feel), you say "Alright, upgrade me to Home Premium!" and pay $LOTS rather than saying "Alright, unlock Aero!" and pay $LITTLE.
Aerobraking does not scale well, which is why the space shuttle (100 tons) has to put a heck of a lot more effort into it than the Mercury capsules (1.5 tons) did. (Incidentally, about a third of that weight is heat shielding, because otherwise the metal portions would catastrophically deform on reentry.) I don't doubt that you can use the space shuttle to retrieve whatever the heck you want -- for $7,000 a kg. "All those technological advances" which are *required* to get a body down in one piece from outside the atmosphere just can not be done for $10 a pound of payload.
I'm voting for "some other crap", where "some other crap" is technology which is contrary to the laws of physics. Even if the slug has NO velocity relative to the earth when it starts to get pulled down by gravity (which would be a nice trick, considering its not powered and there is nothing between the moon and our outer atmosphere to slow it down), its going to start accelerating quickly. All a parachute does is increase your air resistance. Ah, slight problem -- for a lot of the descent there is no air! By the time there is air, you're AT REENTRY SPEEDS! I sure hope your parachute likes things hot, hot, hot, because if it gets reduced to a crisp you now have the world's largest bullet approaching the earth at about 13 kilometers a second! (Sidenote: parachute surface area needs to be proportional to mass.
Guidance fins?! Great idea. You've now got a big metal bullet with plasma eating at the edges... with guidance fins. Of course, its still not powered, so it comes in at whatever angle of attack it comes in on. That is going to generate blowtorch-hot plasma at an arbitrary point on the surface of the slug, which may or may not be hot enough to liquify your titanium. For comparison, the space shuttle sees 1650C at points, and it has the luxury of picking its angle of entry and firing thrusters to act as a partial brake before having to bleed off the rest through air friction and lift. The melting point of titanium is about 1660C (citations vary -- I've seen as high as 1800. Either way, you're going to have some interesting deformation of the metal at those temperatures. Hope you have those guidance fins securely attached at a point that doesn't deform or liquify.)
100 tons of titanium a day sounds great... but what are you going to do with it once its in Earth orbit? Look up in the sky and say "Its a bird, its a plane, no, its a big rock of titanium?" You then have to send a craft up to actually GET the freaking stuff, and the cost of getting the vehicle up there and back is more than the value of the titanium! NASA mission costs run, what is the number, $7,000 per kg of payload? The price of *milled* titanium is about $10 a pound! What are you going to do with the $3,165 loss per pound, make it up on your market-flooding, price-cratering volume? And that is assuming your Magical Moonbase generates processed and milled titanium for free!
(Please, spare me "Well, we'll do it for almost free with our space elevator!" There is no free lunch in physics. The potential energy of an object in earth orbit is high, and if you don't want that potential to be kinetic when you bring it down, you're paying an energy cost. What are you going to pay it with, fusion? Great, then we only require *three* sci-fi technologies to make our Magical Moonbase profitable.)
India and China didn't have to sacrifice anything. Russia might have technically, but since they got to compare against the pre-collapse Soviet baseline they would have made the "sacrifice" without any special effort. Europe signed up for modest reduction targets and, well, is going to totally miss them (with the exception, at the moment, of the UK and Sweden -- they're on target). Japan blew its target, too. It was the US who everyone was asking to spend trillions ("Not trillions! Merely tens or possibly hundreds of billions! And besides, you're rich, you can afford it!", said the Kyoto fans) to "take the first step to solving this problem".
Oh, did I mention this was the first step? The plan was to shave off about 5%. Some of the environmental doomsayers say we really need to get down to about 50% by 2050. Industrialized countries would have to cut 80%.
He was right until he signed (technically, directed the United States to sign) the stupid thing (http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/12/11/kyoto/) , knowing that he wouldn't be there when the Senate said "Hah, this is crazy, no way we're ratifying this" (Gore actually put pen to paper on the document in 1997, after the Senate had passed a 95-0 resolution saying "Notice: we won't ratify anything that harms American competitiveness versus developing nations.") Dubya did the right thing and said "This is inimical to our interests and both parties in the Senate have said they will not ratify it. Accordingly, I'm not going to support it." He was roundly criticized both at home (by Democrats who had no intention of screwing over their own union workers by destroying US industry to make the targets) and abroad (largely by Europeans who proceeded to miss the quotas they had agreed to anyhow).
Kyoto was one of the most cynical maneuvers in the history of environmental politics, which has no shortage of them to compare to. The main supporters either were not affected by it (China, India), would have felt no effects (Russia, because they got to compare their emissions against the old Soviet Union prior to the collapse of the economy -- economic collapse being the ONLY way to make the targets set out!), or just plain lied through their teeth on their intention to go through with the cuts (you know how many European nations hit their targets after four years? Well, there was that economic stalwart Romania. Everyone else said "Uhh... Well... You were going to actually MEASURE pollution? Umm.... DUBYA MADE US DO IT!")
Two pre-teen males abducted by same kidnapper? I rather doubt he was aiming at starting his own gaming group. I won't speculate on why the kid didn't call home the first chance he got, but I rather doubt "paradise" is an accurate description of where he has been kept for the last couple of years.
If you wanted me to adlib Japanese which sounds like that spoken by a foreigner who got a C- in their one semester of study, it would be something like: Subete anata no beisu ha watashitachi no mono desu.
As long as we're talking about human languages on Slashdot for a change, let me give you my pitch: STUDY A LANGUAGE. I'm a native speaker of English who also speaks passable Japanese and can program. There aren't exactly tens of thousands of people with that skillset. There are more than a few positions that require it (including my current job), and every time I hear of a new one the hiring official practically begs me to introduce him to anyone I know who would fit the bill. I'm not exactly hot stuff as a programmer -- in fact, I bet you could find dozens of people who are my equal or better at any graduating class in India. None of them can do my job. This gives me job security and a variety of employment options in a quite lucrative little niche which has a nice, deep moat around it that keeps out competitors.
If you're planning on a career in IT, get yourself an answer to the question "What can you do that I can't do with two and a half Indians for the same price?" "I speak a foreign language" is an easy and sufficient answer to that question.
I'd rank languages in terms of priority by a quick mental guesstimate of our trade with the appropriate countries divided by the number of Americans who speak the language. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are going to be high on the list. Arabic is an up-and-comer, particularly if you desire to work for the federal government. Spanish is not a great choice because we have plenty of American bilinguals. I wouldn't personally recommend the European languages because the market sizes are smaller but, hey, there is money to be made in facilitating communication and commerce with Italy or Poland and SOMEBODY is making it.
>> You have our administration to thank for this state of affairs, where foreigners the world over who otherwise couldn't care less about us--I mean, except for the Palestine thing--now consider us their mortal enemies. >>
What, you mean they were peachy keen with us the FIRST time they tried to blow up the World Trade Center? And when they blew up two of our embassies in Africa, that was sort of like "Luv you guys, but please work on the Palestine thing"? And they hit the USS Cole with a missile named Studied Indifference? But then suddenly Dubya got elected and within 9 months it was "OH GREAT, THAT TEARS IT. EAT JIHAD, SATAN".
Reality check: they hate us, they've hated us for quite some time, and if Dubya died tomorrow of choking on popcorn they would celebrate and go right on hating the next guy (and if the next guy was a gal, they'd try to hate her even harder). And appeasing them is worth approximately nothing. Take a look at France or Germany -- they bend over backwards most of the time (and are bent over, forwards, on a distrubingly regular basis). Have you heard of the big waves of love coming from the Middle East or Muslims towards France, that stalwartly anti-American anti-Israel we're-not-Christian-like-Dubya-don't-make-us-laugh nation? I can't say I have, although its difficult to hear over the crackling of the 100 cars which are being burnt *every night*.
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Search for "toothing".
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NASA, which is and always has been nothing more than a civilian-esque slushfund on top of military appropriation and R&D budgets, accomplishes nothing for science or national defense that just directly funding science or defense wouldn't accomplish. The single usable accomplishment of the space program qua space program (as opposed to space program qua billion dollar R&D fund) is that we can now launch satellites cheaply in the private sector, and have no more need to do it through NASA.
I am deeply sorry so many astronauts have perished in the pursuit of the space program's mission, but their sacrifices do not add value to the space program. Indeed, one would normally assume that losing distinguished individuals as a "cost of doing business" would be a reason to cancel the business.
For your reference, here are the science projects Challenger was carrying when it had its accident. I challenge you to articulate a single reason why any of these were worth the sacrifice of a life:
1) Deploying the Tracking Data Relay-2 satellite, a process which is accomplished dozens of times per year without needing to send humans into space.
2) "Shuttle-Pointed Tool for Astronomy (SPARTAN-203)/Halley's Comet Experiment Deployable, a free-flying module designed to observe tail and coma of Halleys comet with two ultraviolet spectrometers and two cameras." This was a nail developed because we already had a hammer and needed something to bang on -- it could just have easily been done with an unmanned craft (and even if it couldn't, "Pictures of the tail of Halley's Comet" is something mankind can do perfectly fine without).
3) FDE Fluid Dynamics Experiment. No need for a human, and no real need for the experiment either.
4) Comet Halley Active Monitoring Program CHAMP (see #2, also 100% accomplishable from the ground).
5) Phase Partitioning Experiment (PPE)
6) three Shuttle Student Involvement Program (SSIP) experiments. These are essentially high-school science fair projects with low gravity added (i.e. the purpose is PR, not science as most of us would understand the term).
7) a set of lessons for Teacher In Space. This is another program which has no existence other than providing PR to justify continued funding for NASA. Plus for the price of one Teacher In Space we could afford a couple of hundred of Teacher In Inner City Classroom, where they would be at less risk (quiet, you, that isn't funny) and in a much better position to measurably improve education in this country.
... its a freaking sweet deal. I pay for the stuff I want to watch (Heroes, 24), and everybody else gets to pay for "We Put Twenty Attention-Starved Coeds On an Island and Drama Happened".
[quote]The US Dollar isn't based on anything other than trust now - fiat money. What makes second life, or any other currency, any different?[/quote]
There is no structural difference between getting an IOU from a meth addict and buying a T-bill, but that doesn't mean they're exactly the same. Evaluating the true worth of fiat money* requires evaluating how much you trust the fiating body. There is also the wrinkle that dollars are widely distributed across the globe and often backed by a physical artifact. Linden dollars, on the other hand, are concentrated in a single data center and if it were to get hit by a meteor tomorrow, well, I hope they were better at running offsite backups than they were at guarding their assembled credit card information. You also can't crash the real world and make it impossible for people to spend dollars by writing a grey goo script, and that is, what, a monthly occurrence in Second Life?
* Incidentally, to all folks who think returning to the gold standard is the answer to all our problems: as long as you have a government, all money will be fiat money, whether it is backed by a promised equivalence to a commodity or no. The reason? Governments can *break* their promises, and when they do guess who has the guns. And if you posit a worldwide catastrophic financial crash like a lot of survivalists do, promises wouldn't be worth a fig anyway. After a certain point you have to take things on faith. That knocking on your door doesn't have a gun hidden behind him ready to blow your head off. The bank down the street isn't going to collapse in the morning. The government is not going to suddenly start dishonoring T-bills. The United States will not break up in civil war. Could they all happen? Yeah, but if you act under the assumption they're going to happen you'll lead a fairly poor life.
Snicker all you want, Slashdot, this is certainly the way to bet. The number of installed computers in the world is increasing far faster than Mac and Linux's market share is. If it isn't Mac and it isn't Linux in 6 years it will run Vista.
...and if there is only one browser used, well, you're compatiblity woes were just eased quite a bit.
.Mac? .English And those are just half the examples from clicking one single click down on their topmost interface.
Microsoft has made significant efforts to make Windows/Office/etc responsive to the needs of Korean developers and users, just like they do everywhere else. I don't know many of the specifics about the Korean effort, but the Office Japan team did some serious surgery because typical Japanese documents are structured differently than typical American documents (to make a long story short, think tables. LOTS of tables), and as a result Office is a big player in Japan (along with a few Japanese competitors) and many foreign developed programs like, oh, that "OpenWhatever" thingee are not. (My boss, who is in charge of OSS promotion at my technology incubator, calls it OpenWhatever. He tried it once, and uninstalled it within 15 minutes because he couldn't coerce it into writing a travel report in the form our employer requires.)
What have the other browsers/OSes decided to do for Korea, other than saying "Well, we'll provide the tools and the Koreans can build themselves usable software to compete with the Microsoft ones that already work"? Browse on over to Apple Korea's website and you can tell that they really value that market... click on "Switch" and you're taken to a wonderful presentation on the benefits of Mac, written entirely in English. Whoopsie! Well, at least you can use all the wonderful Made4Mac software... oh, English again.
Well, maybe OSS is doing a better job? Depends a lot on the distribution. I prefer Ubuntu personally, but good luck using it with an Asian language. After you've installed it you've got about 15 minutes worth of configuration to do (using a command line, naturally) to enable non-critical features like, oh, typing in non-Western scripts. I rather doubt you'll have to hexedit any config files in Vista Home Premium (Korean edition) to be able to type in hangul.
Korea might not be compatible with Mac/OSS... what has Mac/OSS done to be compatible with Korea?
>>
;)
Shows how much Microsoft's monopoly is silently accepted when it's news that someone sells computers without Windows.
>>
So THATS how Apple keeps generating the feeding frenzies with every press release. "Hey guys, we launched a new product today! Prepare to be amazed... no Windows!" "Wow! Innovative! No Windows! Although, come to think of it, the interface sort of looks like Windows... are you sure you didn't copy it?" Then millions of rabid Mac fans beat the reporter to a bloody pulp, and Slashdot publishes an article saying "Windows causes death of tech reporter" and the dupe "Linux has not killed a reporter this week".
What is my assurance that a "trusted partner" doesn't gain access to "Aggregate search queries with no personally identifying information involved" five years down the line and run grep /[0-9]{3}\-[0-9]{2}\-[0-9]{4}/ against it? Anything that goes into the search hopper is retained, forever, so that Google can use it to tweak their algorithms. Google *has* my credit card number on file (AdWords) and can even access my bank account (Checkout) but these are risks that I can tolerate because presumably they have procedures in place to protect information they KNOW is sensitive and even if they don't my bank has ultimate liability for unauthorized charges. I'm not NEARLY so convinced that they have adequate procedures in place to protect search queries, which most people would assume are probably pretty harmless. (I know they bounced a Justice Department demand to turn over a million random queries once. Bully for their lawyers yesterday, what about their most clueless employee *tomorrow*? AOL posted their queries out of a desire to do good and genuine ignorance about the downside potential, too.)
Every time I accessed a credit card number on a customer account at an old place of employment there was an audit trail generated and what numbers I was accessing was periodically reviewed against what accounts I had legitimate business servicing. Does Google keep similarly in-depth records about internal/external use of their query data? I don't have confidence that this is the case.
Yeah, yeah, I'm sure I'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes. In the meantime, you'll continue to have lights on and sufficient power to write "Viva la revolution!" on that wonderful piece of modern technology you are using, which was doubtless developed and constructed by a worker's cooperative and not a gigantic multinational that I probably own a tiny part of.
(Sidenote: I really, really wish I had enough invested to do "nothing at all". *sigh*)
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All you have done is pre-paid your electricity for the next 5-10 years
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60 months worth of your electric bill, call it an average of $100 a month, is $6,000. If you "pre-pay" that by rolling it into your home loan ("Build me a house and make sure it has a pool and solar power!"), it will end up costing you more (rough guesstimate is $7,300). If instead of buying photovoltaic cells you buy shares in your local electric company, you'll get about $120 to $240 a year in dividends (power companies often have a 2-4% yield), and your while your photovoltaic cells depreciate every year and require maintenance, your shares will probably appreciate and you'll never have to patch them up. (You'll have to pay the electric company for those 10 months of the year that dividends don't... then again, you get the security of knowing you'll never have to pay them extra just because its cloudy.) When you move in 15 years, rather than uninstalling or replacing them at your expense, you can just sell them and take your profits.
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In the end, I think the choice is whether you want to help make the world greener, or you just plain don't give a rats
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I don't give a rat's hindquarters for Green theology but don't mind conservation. Thats why I buy shares in companies which own nuclear power plants. Its cleaner than solar and has economies of scale. Yes, I said cleaner than scale: the energy cost from constructing solar panels keeps them net-energy-negative for about a decade (!) and when they die out after just over a decade (!) you have to dispose of them, and per megawatt hour generated you'll have to dispose of a heck of a lot more solar panels than radioactive waste. I don't invest in solar companies because at the moment they still haven't licked the whole "Making our products net energy producers" problem and until they do my only hope to profit from that investment would be hoping solar's massive government subsidies continue and expand. While I think that is certainly possible, I feel that if the current or a future administration wants to dump a couple billion into the solar industry, my nukes will get a similar largesse.
Sidenote: If you have an aversion to nuclear power, I understand and accept that. I don't eat meat on Fridays in Lent and we can both agree that our separate faiths are mutually harmless. One piece of advice though. Spend your money on a decent job of insulating your house -- you'll require less kwh from the grid, and on a per-dollar basis you'll save more kwh spending on insulation (and installation) than you will on buying solar power.
Google wants to own the Internet advertising game. Currently, their CPC (cost per click) offering is dominant but they have to continue expanding, and that means offering new products that fix the flaws with CPC, such as click fraud. The one totally fraud-proof advertising method is CPA: Cost Per Action/Aquisition. Basically, if you buy Bingo Card Creator (my little software program) after you click on my AdWords ad, I pay Google, say, $5. I don't pay them $.05 every time someone clicks on the ad anymore.
What does this have to do with Checkout? Without Checkout, Google has no way to know if I consumated the sale or not. "Uh, no, Google, sorry... my sales this month were only 2 units. Here's a check for $10. A pleasure as always, please show my ads next month." But my sales were actually 100 units, so I just screwed them out of $490 in revenue... and there is no way they can know. But if Google gets me to use Checkout, then they can roll out a CPA program at their leisure, and force me to use Checkout to offer the program. If I'm already using Checkout, this isn't a problem -- just like Analytics paves the way for AdWords, Checkout paves the way for gCPA. Thats a chicken and egg problem, so they're working on artificial egg production: getting customers to sign up for Checkout by offering $10 off a purchase for opening an account, getting sellers to sign up for Checkout by offering free payment processing through the end of 2007, etc.
Is it working? Anecdotally, not yet. I started offering Checkout a week ago and *all* of my customers who have used it opened their account specifically to buy my software (Google's fraud prevention system will list how long an account has been opened when the order is placed -- mine were all "0 days"). I guess Google could count that as a win though, considering I'm now in the system ready to start using CPA when it becomes available, and they've now got another dozen users with their credit cards on file at the Googleplex, who are now available to buy from any other Checkout-enabled merchant without putting up with the overly long checkout process again.
Incidentally, if you want to see my little slice of e-commerce, http://www.bingocardcreator.com/ . I integrate both the Paypal and Google options into my shopping cart. I guarantee you, if my users (elementary schoolteachers) can get through the Google UI, anybody can. I personally feel that its far inferior to Paypal but offer both as an option because a) some people hate Paypal and won't use them and b) hey, if I can save a couple hundred a year on Paypal fees, that money goes directly into my pocket.
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I mean, was interested in how you would do it in Perl, for curiosity's sake....
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There's more than one way to do it.
Kevlar just makes the sniper take a wee bit more time aiming (hey, he's got all the time in the world) to hit the part of you which not covered by Kevlar, or alternatively just kill a child in your vicinity and watch the fun start. OMNIPRESENT DEATH ROBOTS, on the other hand, make poorly educated irregulars consider better career options. At the very least the exaggerated fear of the OMNIPRESENT DEATH ROBOT will make them reposition after every shot, and the more of their time they spend crawling from hidey-hole to hidey-hole the less time they're shooting friendlies. (Doesn't do much for their ability to deny us access to an area but, hey, you can't have everything.)
Speaking of OMNIPRESENT DEATH ROBOTS: in the first Gulf War the Navy did some field trials with UAVs (a pretty new thing at the time, as I recall). The UAV would overfly a coastal battery, and then the battleships would obliterate it. It eventually got to the point that if the Iraqi Army saw a UAV overfly their position they would break and run. Just as effective tactically (thats one battery that won't be hitting a boat full of Marines), but less dead Iraqi conscripts who we've got no particular reason to kill when they don't present a direct threat to our forces. I think I can get behind that. Similarly, us having the reputation (bah, who needs actual facts, just the reputation) of instantaneously snuffing out enemy snipers will make some of those unemployed guys who hear the "Hey, fight for Allah and we'll pay you $50!" say "No thanks! I'd be happy to fight for Allah but I don't want to be meeting him just yet!"
I never, and I mean *never*, get spam from legitimate companies anymore (on my US accounts, anyhow. I get all kinds on my Japan accounts). Whereas previously they or their hired marketing firms would be sort of lax about responding to requests to remove, and maybe do something to trick me into opening up the message, nowadays if I get mail on behalf of a Fortune500 company its because a) I requested it or b) someone is phishing me. This makes life vastly easier for my spam filters and my brain, because it requires much less effort for me to mentally evaluate "Pump and dump scam = discard" then it does "Reputable company sends me letter about my account status... read read read... wait a second, this is a solicitation".
No, its not microtransactions. There are six tiers of Vista, similar to the tiering you already see in most name MS products: Home User, Professional, Business, yadda yadda. Each comes with a different feature set and price point. If you want a feature that your version doesn't support (example: you're Home User Basic but you really want the Aero look&feel), you say "Alright, upgrade me to Home Premium!" and pay $LOTS rather than saying "Alright, unlock Aero!" and pay $LITTLE.
0 6/02-26WinVistaProductsPR.mspx They probably have a product chart somewhere.
You can see the general sketch of the system here: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2006/feb
Aerobraking does not scale well, which is why the space shuttle (100 tons) has to put a heck of a lot more effort into it than the Mercury capsules (1.5 tons) did. (Incidentally, about a third of that weight is heat shielding, because otherwise the metal portions would catastrophically deform on reentry.) I don't doubt that you can use the space shuttle to retrieve whatever the heck you want -- for $7,000 a kg. "All those technological advances" which are *required* to get a body down in one piece from outside the atmosphere just can not be done for $10 a pound of payload.
I'm voting for "some other crap", where "some other crap" is technology which is contrary to the laws of physics. Even if the slug has NO velocity relative to the earth when it starts to get pulled down by gravity (which would be a nice trick, considering its not powered and there is nothing between the moon and our outer atmosphere to slow it down), its going to start accelerating quickly. All a parachute does is increase your air resistance. Ah, slight problem -- for a lot of the descent there is no air! By the time there is air, you're AT REENTRY SPEEDS! I sure hope your parachute likes things hot, hot, hot, because if it gets reduced to a crisp you now have the world's largest bullet approaching the earth at about 13 kilometers a second! (Sidenote: parachute surface area needs to be proportional to mass.
Guidance fins?! Great idea. You've now got a big metal bullet with plasma eating at the edges... with guidance fins. Of course, its still not powered, so it comes in at whatever angle of attack it comes in on. That is going to generate blowtorch-hot plasma at an arbitrary point on the surface of the slug, which may or may not be hot enough to liquify your titanium. For comparison, the space shuttle sees 1650C at points, and it has the luxury of picking its angle of entry and firing thrusters to act as a partial brake before having to bleed off the rest through air friction and lift. The melting point of titanium is about 1660C (citations vary -- I've seen as high as 1800. Either way, you're going to have some interesting deformation of the metal at those temperatures. Hope you have those guidance fins securely attached at a point that doesn't deform or liquify.)
And that is why "MC Escher is my favorite MC". (A lyric from White and Nerdy which is slightly more obscure than most.)
100 tons of titanium a day sounds great... but what are you going to do with it once its in Earth orbit? Look up in the sky and say "Its a bird, its a plane, no, its a big rock of titanium?" You then have to send a craft up to actually GET the freaking stuff, and the cost of getting the vehicle up there and back is more than the value of the titanium! NASA mission costs run, what is the number, $7,000 per kg of payload? The price of *milled* titanium is about $10 a pound! What are you going to do with the $3,165 loss per pound, make it up on your market-flooding, price-cratering volume? And that is assuming your Magical Moonbase generates processed and milled titanium for free!
(Please, spare me "Well, we'll do it for almost free with our space elevator!" There is no free lunch in physics. The potential energy of an object in earth orbit is high, and if you don't want that potential to be kinetic when you bring it down, you're paying an energy cost. What are you going to pay it with, fusion? Great, then we only require *three* sci-fi technologies to make our Magical Moonbase profitable.)
India and China didn't have to sacrifice anything. Russia might have technically, but since they got to compare against the pre-collapse Soviet baseline they would have made the "sacrifice" without any special effort. Europe signed up for modest reduction targets and, well, is going to totally miss them (with the exception, at the moment, of the UK and Sweden -- they're on target). Japan blew its target, too. It was the US who everyone was asking to spend trillions ("Not trillions! Merely tens or possibly hundreds of billions! And besides, you're rich, you can afford it!", said the Kyoto fans) to "take the first step to solving this problem".
Oh, did I mention this was the first step? The plan was to shave off about 5%. Some of the environmental doomsayers say we really need to get down to about 50% by 2050. Industrialized countries would have to cut 80%.
He was right until he signed (technically, directed the United States to sign) the stupid thing (http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1997/12/11/kyoto/) , knowing that he wouldn't be there when the Senate said "Hah, this is crazy, no way we're ratifying this" (Gore actually put pen to paper on the document in 1997, after the Senate had passed a 95-0 resolution saying "Notice: we won't ratify anything that harms American competitiveness versus developing nations.") Dubya did the right thing and said "This is inimical to our interests and both parties in the Senate have said they will not ratify it. Accordingly, I'm not going to support it." He was roundly criticized both at home (by Democrats who had no intention of screwing over their own union workers by destroying US industry to make the targets) and abroad (largely by Europeans who proceeded to miss the quotas they had agreed to anyhow).
Kyoto was one of the most cynical maneuvers in the history of environmental politics, which has no shortage of them to compare to. The main supporters either were not affected by it (China, India), would have felt no effects (Russia, because they got to compare their emissions against the old Soviet Union prior to the collapse of the economy -- economic collapse being the ONLY way to make the targets set out!), or just plain lied through their teeth on their intention to go through with the cuts (you know how many European nations hit their targets after four years? Well, there was that economic stalwart Romania. Everyone else said "Uhh... Well... You were going to actually MEASURE pollution? Umm.... DUBYA MADE US DO IT!")
Two pre-teen males abducted by same kidnapper? I rather doubt he was aiming at starting his own gaming group. I won't speculate on why the kid didn't call home the first chance he got, but I rather doubt "paradise" is an accurate description of where he has been kept for the last couple of years.
The original was: ...Kimitachi no kichi ha subete CATS ga itadaita. ("CATS has taken all of your military bases.") Hat tip: Wiki, of course. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_Wing_(translatio ns)
If you wanted me to adlib Japanese which sounds like that spoken by a foreigner who got a C- in their one semester of study, it would be something like: Subete anata no beisu ha watashitachi no mono desu.
As long as we're talking about human languages on Slashdot for a change, let me give you my pitch: STUDY A LANGUAGE. I'm a native speaker of English who also speaks passable Japanese and can program. There aren't exactly tens of thousands of people with that skillset. There are more than a few positions that require it (including my current job), and every time I hear of a new one the hiring official practically begs me to introduce him to anyone I know who would fit the bill. I'm not exactly hot stuff as a programmer -- in fact, I bet you could find dozens of people who are my equal or better at any graduating class in India. None of them can do my job. This gives me job security and a variety of employment options in a quite lucrative little niche which has a nice, deep moat around it that keeps out competitors.
If you're planning on a career in IT, get yourself an answer to the question "What can you do that I can't do with two and a half Indians for the same price?" "I speak a foreign language" is an easy and sufficient answer to that question.
I'd rank languages in terms of priority by a quick mental guesstimate of our trade with the appropriate countries divided by the number of Americans who speak the language. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are going to be high on the list. Arabic is an up-and-comer, particularly if you desire to work for the federal government. Spanish is not a great choice because we have plenty of American bilinguals. I wouldn't personally recommend the European languages because the market sizes are smaller but, hey, there is money to be made in facilitating communication and commerce with Italy or Poland and SOMEBODY is making it.
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h nation? I can't say I have, although its difficult to hear over the crackling of the 100 cars which are being burnt *every night*.
You have our administration to thank for this state of affairs, where foreigners the world over who otherwise couldn't care less about us--I mean, except for the Palestine thing--now consider us their mortal enemies.
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What, you mean they were peachy keen with us the FIRST time they tried to blow up the World Trade Center? And when they blew up two of our embassies in Africa, that was sort of like "Luv you guys, but please work on the Palestine thing"? And they hit the USS Cole with a missile named Studied Indifference? But then suddenly Dubya got elected and within 9 months it was "OH GREAT, THAT TEARS IT. EAT JIHAD, SATAN".
Reality check: they hate us, they've hated us for quite some time, and if Dubya died tomorrow of choking on popcorn they would celebrate and go right on hating the next guy (and if the next guy was a gal, they'd try to hate her even harder). And appeasing them is worth approximately nothing. Take a look at France or Germany -- they bend over backwards most of the time (and are bent over, forwards, on a distrubingly regular basis). Have you heard of the big waves of love coming from the Middle East or Muslims towards France, that stalwartly anti-American anti-Israel we're-not-Christian-like-Dubya-don't-make-us-laug