Have you forgotten that we have troops in Afghanistan, and Korea? The former as a direct result of a vow Bush made to go after oppression. Okay, terrorism, but really it is oppression of a different form. The US does not have the abilities to end all the oppression in the world. Maybe Iraq wasn't the best next place to go, but there were plenty of choices, and no good way to decide. Iraq however was not in compliance with UN regulations, brought about after they lost a previous war (you haven't forgotten all of that, have you?) in essence a proven bad guy willing to harm those outside his country, compared to some of the other oppressive countries that better appear to stick to themselves.
Oh, and while you are freeing the Palestinians, tell me what to do with all the Jewish people who are living in the area? The Palestinians don't want them in that area, so we will have to move them elsewhere. where? how can you get them to agree without calling it oppression? How about the people living in the area we move them to?
There are no easy answers to the worlds problems. If there were I would have solved them on my own already. (Not true, because they would have been solved before I was born) The US made Iraq in the cold war, and they turned on us. Perhaps the signs were there, but back then there were bigger enemies. Hindsite is not 20/20, it seems that way because you can see all the results, but you don't see the results of other courses of actions.
Their loss. There is a lot of good music out there. What gets on the main radio stations is junk, but turn away from top-40 and you will have a hard time finding it. (though not impossible) There are still some bands who "Know what rock-and-roll really means", bands out there that know the different between country and western music. Not to mention all the wonderfull music that hasn't (yet?) had its day in the sun.
Engineers are never satisfied. Trust me, 100% satisfaction never happens. Management has to guess from our reports when the risk of failure is low enough to ship.
That said, somethings deserve more attention than others. If the probe had landed correctly and the radios worked, but nothing else that would still be worth more than if it had landed correctly everything else would work. So priority needs to be put on landing and radios. (if nothing else you can get some data just based on signal strength from the radio, nothing useful perhaps, but at least it is something) If half the experimental tools failed to work, but it landed successfully at least you would have a few experiments you could do.
Management needs to better understand how to prioritize things engineers would tell you the above is true. Working on the experiments is more fun than triple checking the landing system, so management needs to make sure that the engineers spend more time on landing. (I'm guess what is fun, not being a rocket engineer)
If they had thought of testing the parachute before they would have considered the idea that it might fail, and planed for time to build one that works. There is no point in doing a test if you can't make use of the results. They wasted time and money pretending to test the system.
Yes I understand there were time pressures. I don't know what they could have done differently to make it work.
Woah, you have to select correctly. In your Carbon Monoxide example, you need to make sure that your sample is all of similar health to start with (if 90% of your sample has asthma you are selecting against that, and not for CO resistance). Now you place them in the room with elevated CO levels, and keep increasing it slowly until a large portion is dead. Breed the rest. Repeat with their offspring over many generations.
With plants you have the advantage that they reproduce every year, unlike humans that need 12 years or more. (and if you start that young you may end up selecting in latter generations for those who can safely breed younger, as much as CO levels) Not to mention there are a lot less ethical problems with poisoning plants, and forcing them to mate.
One of the reasons we are getting drug resistance bacteria is that people do not take the full course of their drugs once they are "cured". A little big escapes, and is allowed to infect others, and it is that few that has some resistance. Toss in a little mutation along the way and gradually (60 years) you get drug resistance.
In plant terms that means you can't spray the recommended dossages of roundup, you need a smaller dose, something you would have to find experimentally. Eventually you get something that survives, now you keep working with that. All much easier in theory than in practice, but if you have 60 years and really want roundup resistant dandelions you can do it.
A lot of mechanical work, but you can convert a car to electric.
Mother Earth News published a few articals on it back in the 1980s or there abouts. Lindsay Sells some books on conversion, with a note that you want modern conversion technology as it is better than what they had a few years ago.
Sure electric motors[1] are more efficient than internal combustion engines. However what about the rest of the system? A good power transmissions system will have 6% line loss between your home and the power plant, with 12% not unheard of. Power plans may be more efficient, but you are still looking at less than 60%, while a good diesel can hit 50% on its own. Your motor is maybe 95% (being generous) efficient, and the batteries have some significant losses. I don't know which comes out better overall, but add in how much easier it is to pour fuel into a tank vs charge a battery and the difference isn't enough to make it worth it. (though admitidly I'm ignoring fuel costs, which can have significant energy losses)
Ahh Schwans. One of the few companies that customers seem to love. A few years back Salmonella was discovered in their ice cream (eventually traced to a carrier who failed to wash his truck correctly), and most of those who got sick refused to sue, they just wanted the investigation to finish sooner so they could get more ice cream.
Junk food yes, but a little won't hurt you. (there are exceptions but those people know who they are) If you haven't tried them yet, I encourage you to get your junk food needs from them.
I know my family only returned unopened boxes when they did the recall, taking the chance that a box we hadn't had trouble with wouldn't give us trouble.
I used to live next door to a farmer. I didn't need my own chickens to get eggs less than an hour old. They wouldn't sell me milk (unpasteurized), but I stayed with a farmer some years back who did get his milk from the tank and I've not been able to drink the store bought stuff since. (Still use it on my cereal though)
So long as you are specifically NOT talking about tomatoes I agree. There are two things money cannot buy:true love and home grown tomatoes. I do without tomatoes except for the last month or two in summer when I get them from my garden.
In general though, if they don't give you a quality/price/convenience sum in your favor don't use them. (Remember that is quality is low that is a negative value, so sums 0 are possible) You have to figure your own values though, some people will accept lower ability than others because of convenience. Cheap guys like me would need a lot in the other two categories to get me to buy from them.
You are only hurting yourself by assuming that Windows is everything. Apple has had several % for years now. IBM sells AS/400, RS/6000, mainframes. Sun sells their Sparc line. HP has their own line of computers. Not to mention all the embedded systems out there, nor the old unsupported systems.
Now windows does have a large % of the market, but it isn't everything. Worse yet for someone who says windows is enough is you are almost right. Almost everyone has windows, so you never notice those sales lost to someone who also cares about that little platform.
The company I work for makes a number of sales because we still support the OS/2 version. Anyone with OS/2 has a plan to get off of it, but that plan is dragging on, and in the mean time they buy our windows version to ensure we will support their OS/2 versions until they are rid of them. (In other words, OS/2 isn't important enough on its own to sell, but it brings enough sales that we can't afford to drop it) We have also lost sales because we don't have a linux version (yet)
That aside, I have a philosophical opposition to homogeneous networks. There should be more than one thing on them, and those different systems should work together.
In every commercial software house I've been in the source has been available for my review, but I wasn't given time to do it, nor was anyone else. In fact while I was allowed to read other's code, I was rarely allowed to change it, and I wasn't encouraged to suggest changes.
In open source I've read a lot of code, not just for fun, but because I'm not limited in the code I can change so I tend to change code in larger parts. That means I have to understand larger parts.
Now I'm not smart enough to have found a security flaw (yet?), but I have at least read it. Despite working 40 hours programing for years, I've found more opportunity to read other code in the open source movement. I've read some kernel code (didn't understand it), and a lot of KDE code (resulted in a few patches). I've also read code for a few other systems, but didn't get around to doing anything.
You must write your own plan, for your own benefit. A business plan when properly written tells you how you can make money. It gets on paper a head of time all the things that can go wrong, so you can avoid them.
If your plan calls for selling to local businesses, you know to lock the doors when a tour bus stops outside! OTOH, if you plan calls for tourists stopping (which means you have made sure they will stop), you know to turn away locals when the tourists stop in. Without the plan you can serve the wrong customer, costing a lot of money. Or worse yet, without the plan you can sink a lot of time and money into something that can never make money. (As a hobby that is okay, but not for putting food on the table)
Sure to be legal you don't need a plan. To succeed you need a good one.
Remember what happened since the 1980s? Not just SUVs, but also environmental laws. A (gas) engine manufactured in the 1980s got better fuel milage than one made today despite better technology. Today we don't' allow the intake and exhaust valves to overlap for as long in the cycle, which is great for emissions, but reduces gas milage significantly. Among other tricks that are now longer allowed.
Re:Lower Population. (A bit OT)
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China's birth rate is crashing? Better check again, China just relaxed their one child per family rule a little bit, in some cases a family is allowed two children. The third generation of the one child per family rule is now having kids. Sure China's birth rate is crashing, but on a per person basis it is actually increasing.
Re:On a related note....
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My Geo Metro laughs at your hybrid. Real world I'm getting 43MPG, better than most hybrids get. Amazing, add a generator motor, batties, and wires in, none of which are 100% efficient, and it takes more energy to work them... (good luck finding a electric motor or generator more than 95% efficient, and in either case you still have a transmission just like my car, so you are just adding losses in).
Of course my engine has just barely enough power to keep my car going at speeds, which is the argument for the hybrids: get a smaller engine... A good driver doesn't need power to accelerate. (Not that I'm a good driver)
I haven't priced trailer homes, but I recall that they are more expensive than you have stated.
Even assuming your numbers though, in 2005: the trailer house was built in 2004, and is now worth $12000 (typically you will pay $300/month rent for the land to put it on). The apartment gets $1025/month in rent, with no value if you move. The house is worth $320000, you have put in $1000 in maintains, $4000 in taxes (you pay this on the others, but they are rolled into rent so you don't know how much), plus your house payment which can be anything from 0 if you have lived there a while, to $2000/month if you just bought it. You decide which makes the most sense for you, if there was a one size fits all answer the other two options wouldn't exist.
Note that a $1000/month studio apartment, and the $300000 house are both in very expensive neighborhoods, while a $25000 trailer house is in a cheap neighborhood. I've seen 2 story ouses go for as little $150000 (fixer uppers), and $190000 would be typical. I live in an area with above average home prices too, though not as extreme as California. Price a similar home in Texas and you might not clear $100000 in a high end neighborhood. My sister pays $850/month for a two bedroom apartment in a rich neighborhood. (downtown rent would be in line with the prices you quoted, but the neighborhood itself wouldn't be as rich, but she is just blocks from a nice lake)
Interesting project, and it might be a good starting point for someone looking into that type of business. However if you are thinking about going into business you must write your own business plan yourself. You might start with this plan, but by the time you are done the result should have so little resemblance that courts will agree that it is not a derivative work and you don't have to abide by whatever license agreements applied to the original. [1]
All the details of your local area need to be filled in. All the details of current technology need to be filled in. You need to be sure that you will the people in.. (And there is a different between foot traffic where location counts, and phone traffic where price and big ads count)
[1]IANAL, consult a lawyer to find out exactly what the limits are. Since you will be consulting a lawyer as part of creating your business plan this shouldn't be a big deal.
Next time you are tempted to buy a lottery ticket, instead send $.50 to the wine foundation, and $.50 to a foundation to end gamboling addiction. If everyone reading slashdot followed this strategy games would run perfectly under wine, and gamboling wouldn't be a solcal problem anymore.
Your odds of winning the lottery about about equal to your ever collecting a social security check, and substantially less than you getting hit by lightning. (Specific to Jeremy White, I know his age close enough to know he won't get a check, someone reading this is old enough that they will get one)
Keep your eyes open, your odds are finding the winning ticket on the sidewalk are about the same as buying the ticket, you never know when it will happen.
I have a better idea: let this fires burn. If the forest service would start fires every year like nature intended they would have tiny fires that any homeowner could easily prevent from burning down their house.
The only exception to that is mountain areas of California where the trees depend on big fires, and nature conspires to cause big fires. Anyone stupid enough to live in those areas deserves to rebuild out of their own pocket every year. Those of us from outside of California tend to agree that stupid describes the mindset of people who live there...:)
Seriously, there are no one size fits all answers, but most areas of the planet would be better off with yearly forest fires.
On Intel chips there is no way to tell the difference between memory that can be read, and memory that can be executed. That means your memory can be executed by any program that ca access it.. The only way around this is to mark the memory as not readable, and trap all accesses to it, and let only the ones that are reading the memory though. It would work, but your gigahertz computer would operate at about the speed of a 286 do to all the checking that needs to be done all the time.
"Great illustrated classics" Burn them all. They got the names of great classics, but they are simplified versions that ruin the whole point. Read the real book, or sit in your cave ignorant, either one is better than something from that series. I'm glad I had already read real versions before I started adding them to my library (hey they are cheap, and I didn't have them...) or I might not have recognized it.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you forgotten that we have troops in Afghanistan, and Korea? The former as a direct result of a vow Bush made to go after oppression. Okay, terrorism, but really it is oppression of a different form. The US does not have the abilities to end all the oppression in the world. Maybe Iraq wasn't the best next place to go, but there were plenty of choices, and no good way to decide. Iraq however was not in compliance with UN regulations, brought about after they lost a previous war (you haven't forgotten all of that, have you?) in essence a proven bad guy willing to harm those outside his country, compared to some of the other oppressive countries that better appear to stick to themselves.
Oh, and while you are freeing the Palestinians, tell me what to do with all the Jewish people who are living in the area? The Palestinians don't want them in that area, so we will have to move them elsewhere. where? how can you get them to agree without calling it oppression? How about the people living in the area we move them to?
There are no easy answers to the worlds problems. If there were I would have solved them on my own already. (Not true, because they would have been solved before I was born) The US made Iraq in the cold war, and they turned on us. Perhaps the signs were there, but back then there were bigger enemies. Hindsite is not 20/20, it seems that way because you can see all the results, but you don't see the results of other courses of actions.
Their loss. There is a lot of good music out there. What gets on the main radio stations is junk, but turn away from top-40 and you will have a hard time finding it. (though not impossible) There are still some bands who "Know what rock-and-roll really means", bands out there that know the different between country and western music. Not to mention all the wonderfull music that hasn't (yet?) had its day in the sun.
Engineers are never satisfied. Trust me, 100% satisfaction never happens. Management has to guess from our reports when the risk of failure is low enough to ship.
That said, somethings deserve more attention than others. If the probe had landed correctly and the radios worked, but nothing else that would still be worth more than if it had landed correctly everything else would work. So priority needs to be put on landing and radios. (if nothing else you can get some data just based on signal strength from the radio, nothing useful perhaps, but at least it is something) If half the experimental tools failed to work, but it landed successfully at least you would have a few experiments you could do.
Management needs to better understand how to prioritize things engineers would tell you the above is true. Working on the experiments is more fun than triple checking the landing system, so management needs to make sure that the engineers spend more time on landing. (I'm guess what is fun, not being a rocket engineer)
If they had thought of testing the parachute before they would have considered the idea that it might fail, and planed for time to build one that works. There is no point in doing a test if you can't make use of the results. They wasted time and money pretending to test the system.
Yes I understand there were time pressures. I don't know what they could have done differently to make it work.
250W costs 3 cents for an hour from the grid. If you have a generator it costs substantially more.
Every hear of the laws of thermodynamics? Even assuming a 100% giblet to motion conversion you won't get 20 miles per giblet.
Woah, you have to select correctly. In your Carbon Monoxide example, you need to make sure that your sample is all of similar health to start with (if 90% of your sample has asthma you are selecting against that, and not for CO resistance). Now you place them in the room with elevated CO levels, and keep increasing it slowly until a large portion is dead. Breed the rest. Repeat with their offspring over many generations.
With plants you have the advantage that they reproduce every year, unlike humans that need 12 years or more. (and if you start that young you may end up selecting in latter generations for those who can safely breed younger, as much as CO levels) Not to mention there are a lot less ethical problems with poisoning plants, and forcing them to mate.
One of the reasons we are getting drug resistance bacteria is that people do not take the full course of their drugs once they are "cured". A little big escapes, and is allowed to infect others, and it is that few that has some resistance. Toss in a little mutation along the way and gradually (60 years) you get drug resistance.
In plant terms that means you can't spray the recommended dossages of roundup, you need a smaller dose, something you would have to find experimentally. Eventually you get something that survives, now you keep working with that. All much easier in theory than in practice, but if you have 60 years and really want roundup resistant dandelions you can do it.
A lot of mechanical work, but you can convert a car to electric.
Mother Earth News published a few articals on it back in the 1980s or there abouts. Lindsay Sells some books on conversion, with a note that you want modern conversion technology as it is better than what they had a few years ago.
Sure electric motors[1] are more efficient than internal combustion engines. However what about the rest of the system? A good power transmissions system will have 6% line loss between your home and the power plant, with 12% not unheard of. Power plans may be more efficient, but you are still looking at less than 60%, while a good diesel can hit 50% on its own. Your motor is maybe 95% (being generous) efficient, and the batteries have some significant losses. I don't know which comes out better overall, but add in how much easier it is to pour fuel into a tank vs charge a battery and the difference isn't enough to make it worth it. (though admitidly I'm ignoring fuel costs, which can have significant energy losses)
[1]An engine is not the same as a motor!
Ahh Schwans. One of the few companies that customers seem to love. A few years back Salmonella was discovered in their ice cream (eventually traced to a carrier who failed to wash his truck correctly), and most of those who got sick refused to sue, they just wanted the investigation to finish sooner so they could get more ice cream.
Junk food yes, but a little won't hurt you. (there are exceptions but those people know who they are) If you haven't tried them yet, I encourage you to get your junk food needs from them.
I know my family only returned unopened boxes when they did the recall, taking the chance that a box we hadn't had trouble with wouldn't give us trouble.
I used to live next door to a farmer. I didn't need my own chickens to get eggs less than an hour old. They wouldn't sell me milk (unpasteurized), but I stayed with a farmer some years back who did get his milk from the tank and I've not been able to drink the store bought stuff since. (Still use it on my cereal though)
So long as you are specifically NOT talking about tomatoes I agree. There are two things money cannot buy:true love and home grown tomatoes. I do without tomatoes except for the last month or two in summer when I get them from my garden.
In general though, if they don't give you a quality/price/convenience sum in your favor don't use them. (Remember that is quality is low that is a negative value, so sums 0 are possible) You have to figure your own values though, some people will accept lower ability than others because of convenience. Cheap guys like me would need a lot in the other two categories to get me to buy from them.
Why blame Bush and cronies when Clinton and cronies did the same thing?
I'm equally mad at both about that situation, but I'm just one vote, and they don't care about it because I vote third parties.
You are only hurting yourself by assuming that Windows is everything. Apple has had several % for years now. IBM sells AS/400, RS/6000, mainframes. Sun sells their Sparc line. HP has their own line of computers. Not to mention all the embedded systems out there, nor the old unsupported systems.
Now windows does have a large % of the market, but it isn't everything. Worse yet for someone who says windows is enough is you are almost right. Almost everyone has windows, so you never notice those sales lost to someone who also cares about that little platform.
The company I work for makes a number of sales because we still support the OS/2 version. Anyone with OS/2 has a plan to get off of it, but that plan is dragging on, and in the mean time they buy our windows version to ensure we will support their OS/2 versions until they are rid of them. (In other words, OS/2 isn't important enough on its own to sell, but it brings enough sales that we can't afford to drop it) We have also lost sales because we don't have a linux version (yet)
That aside, I have a philosophical opposition to homogeneous networks. There should be more than one thing on them, and those different systems should work together.
In every commercial software house I've been in the source has been available for my review, but I wasn't given time to do it, nor was anyone else. In fact while I was allowed to read other's code, I was rarely allowed to change it, and I wasn't encouraged to suggest changes.
In open source I've read a lot of code, not just for fun, but because I'm not limited in the code I can change so I tend to change code in larger parts. That means I have to understand larger parts.
Now I'm not smart enough to have found a security flaw (yet?), but I have at least read it. Despite working 40 hours programing for years, I've found more opportunity to read other code in the open source movement. I've read some kernel code (didn't understand it), and a lot of KDE code (resulted in a few patches). I've also read code for a few other systems, but didn't get around to doing anything.
You must write your own plan, for your own benefit. A business plan when properly written tells you how you can make money. It gets on paper a head of time all the things that can go wrong, so you can avoid them.
If your plan calls for selling to local businesses, you know to lock the doors when a tour bus stops outside! OTOH, if you plan calls for tourists stopping (which means you have made sure they will stop), you know to turn away locals when the tourists stop in. Without the plan you can serve the wrong customer, costing a lot of money. Or worse yet, without the plan you can sink a lot of time and money into something that can never make money. (As a hobby that is okay, but not for putting food on the table)
Sure to be legal you don't need a plan. To succeed you need a good one.
Remember what happened since the 1980s? Not just SUVs, but also environmental laws. A (gas) engine manufactured in the 1980s got better fuel milage than one made today despite better technology. Today we don't' allow the intake and exhaust valves to overlap for as long in the cycle, which is great for emissions, but reduces gas milage significantly. Among other tricks that are now longer allowed.
China's birth rate is crashing? Better check again, China just relaxed their one child per family rule a little bit, in some cases a family is allowed two children. The third generation of the one child per family rule is now having kids. Sure China's birth rate is crashing, but on a per person basis it is actually increasing.
My Geo Metro laughs at your hybrid. Real world I'm getting 43MPG, better than most hybrids get. Amazing, add a generator motor, batties, and wires in, none of which are 100% efficient, and it takes more energy to work them... (good luck finding a electric motor or generator more than 95% efficient, and in either case you still have a transmission just like my car, so you are just adding losses in).
Of course my engine has just barely enough power to keep my car going at speeds, which is the argument for the hybrids: get a smaller engine... A good driver doesn't need power to accelerate. (Not that I'm a good driver)
I haven't priced trailer homes, but I recall that they are more expensive than you have stated.
Even assuming your numbers though, in 2005: the trailer house was built in 2004, and is now worth $12000 (typically you will pay $300/month rent for the land to put it on). The apartment gets $1025/month in rent, with no value if you move. The house is worth $320000, you have put in $1000 in maintains, $4000 in taxes (you pay this on the others, but they are rolled into rent so you don't know how much), plus your house payment which can be anything from 0 if you have lived there a while, to $2000/month if you just bought it. You decide which makes the most sense for you, if there was a one size fits all answer the other two options wouldn't exist.
Note that a $1000/month studio apartment, and the $300000 house are both in very expensive neighborhoods, while a $25000 trailer house is in a cheap neighborhood. I've seen 2 story ouses go for as little $150000 (fixer uppers), and $190000 would be typical. I live in an area with above average home prices too, though not as extreme as California. Price a similar home in Texas and you might not clear $100000 in a high end neighborhood. My sister pays $850/month for a two bedroom apartment in a rich neighborhood. (downtown rent would be in line with the prices you quoted, but the neighborhood itself wouldn't be as rich, but she is just blocks from a nice lake)
I agree, It is a K-Mart thing...
Interesting project, and it might be a good starting point for someone looking into that type of business. However if you are thinking about going into business you must write your own business plan yourself. You might start with this plan, but by the time you are done the result should have so little resemblance that courts will agree that it is not a derivative work and you don't have to abide by whatever license agreements applied to the original. [1]
All the details of your local area need to be filled in. All the details of current technology need to be filled in. You need to be sure that you will the people in.. (And there is a different between foot traffic where location counts, and phone traffic where price and big ads count)
[1]IANAL, consult a lawyer to find out exactly what the limits are. Since you will be consulting a lawyer as part of creating your business plan this shouldn't be a big deal.
Next time you are tempted to buy a lottery ticket, instead send $.50 to the wine foundation, and $.50 to a foundation to end gamboling addiction. If everyone reading slashdot followed this strategy games would run perfectly under wine, and gamboling wouldn't be a solcal problem anymore.
Your odds of winning the lottery about about equal to your ever collecting a social security check, and substantially less than you getting hit by lightning. (Specific to Jeremy White, I know his age close enough to know he won't get a check, someone reading this is old enough that they will get one)
Keep your eyes open, your odds are finding the winning ticket on the sidewalk are about the same as buying the ticket, you never know when it will happen.
I have a better idea: let this fires burn. If the forest service would start fires every year like nature intended they would have tiny fires that any homeowner could easily prevent from burning down their house.
The only exception to that is mountain areas of California where the trees depend on big fires, and nature conspires to cause big fires. Anyone stupid enough to live in those areas deserves to rebuild out of their own pocket every year. Those of us from outside of California tend to agree that stupid describes the mindset of people who live there... :)
Seriously, there are no one size fits all answers, but most areas of the planet would be better off with yearly forest fires.
On Intel chips there is no way to tell the difference between memory that can be read, and memory that can be executed. That means your memory can be executed by any program that ca access it.. The only way around this is to mark the memory as not readable, and trap all accesses to it, and let only the ones that are reading the memory though. It would work, but your gigahertz computer would operate at about the speed of a 286 do to all the checking that needs to be done all the time.
"Great illustrated classics" Burn them all. They got the names of great classics, but they are simplified versions that ruin the whole point. Read the real book, or sit in your cave ignorant, either one is better than something from that series. I'm glad I had already read real versions before I started adding them to my library (hey they are cheap, and I didn't have them...) or I might not have recognized it.