Everyone here seems to focus on distribution as a huge cost. It isn't, in relative terms. Certainly for books the action of printing a book and shipping it is cheap - far, far cheaper than the authoring and editorial process. If the objective is to open the floodgates to bring in crap, that is simple. Producing quality books isn't cheap and the costs of quality far outweigh the costs of printing.
I don't have hard numbers, but however many millions it costs to print a newspaper, I am sure the salaries of the people involved in producing a quality newspaper far exceed that of merely printing it. Sure, it might save 10% of the costs in trying to deliver it digitally. But it isn't the most significant oost there is in the newspaper business.
Similarly, if all you want is recycled crap, it would be easy to distribute the output of bloggers bloviating. Cheap, too. But that's not the point.
This idea also ignores the relatively huge problems with digital distribution. Let's say you used the Kindle platform with wireless connectivity. Great - people would not have to "dock" it somehow to pick up the latest edition. But, if you provided a Kindle to every subscriber to a newspaper in New York or Chicago could the cellular infrstructure handle rolling out the morning paper? I have my doubts. And if it took all morning to do this distribution, you have pretty much lost the point of the "morning paper".
No, I don't think digital delivery is any real solution at all.
TV over the Internet might be coming for some few, but not for the masses. Why? Because the capacity doesn't exist and likely as not, will never exist.
My house is served by cable. It is probably one of the most modern systems around with fiber optic runs to the network nodes. The problem is that my node has 494 homes on it. I suspect this is somewhere around average. So let us assome a fully IPTV environment where everyone is consuming at least one video stream over the Internet. What do you think the minimum bandwidth might be? 1Mbit/sec isn't anything great - ordinary DVD is 6Mbit/sec. With high-definition and somewhat better compression you might be able to deliver good service at 5Mbit/sec - but that is per house.
So now the network node has to have incoming capacity of 6Mbit/sec times 500 homes. 3Tb/sec. Ouch. I suppose you could do this with 100 DC3 fiber connections or something like that. Sounds cost prohibitive.
No, I don't think you are going to get over 100Mbit/sec to the network nodes without a lot of changes. Nor do I really think the cable company head end can deliver enough bits to keep hundreds of these nodes supplied with bits. I don't think a regionalized system like cable TV is today is going to work at all - you are going to need to have dedicated fiber from the backbone to the house, all the way. That is pretty much a complete physical plant rework for any system that is going to work in the future. We're a long, long way from that.
Also, there is the supply problem. Check out http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-lie/. Where is all this going to come from? I don't think any of the media companies today that provide the bulk of Internet service are capable of delivering this sort of system. Nor am I convinced that it is needed. Broadcast, rather than individual streaming, uses the same bandwidth for one as it does for a million. Once you lose that multiplier then you have something that is practical and implementable with current technology and current infrastructure. What you have now is something for the leet few and it doesn't scale.
The big problem with allowing individual channel selection is that there are plenty of channels out there that exist because of the way channels have beein funded, selected and supported.
So you want a channel dedicated to science fiction shows, movies, etc. You need to sell it to the cable companies and if a significant number agree to carry it - and pay for it - your job is done. You can get financing based on that and it really doesn't matter what the individual customers think. Some of them will watch and it is a ratings game from there on.
Switch to an ala carte model and this changes quite a bit. First off, any channel that exists today will be immediately taken down unless you have customers signing up for it. Probably within the first couple of months. This isn't like ratings where passive viewing is conidered "viewing" and done by sampling. This will be if you don't opt-in for the channel you don't support it. And without people paying for SciFi channel specifically and intentionally, it and many others will just disappear.
Sounds fair, doesn't it. What about BET? Do you really believe there are enough viewers of the Black Entertainment Network channel to keep it afloat in an ala carte environment? What about the Golf Channel? How about the Food Network? Maybe these cable channels should never have existed in the first place because they don't have a dedicated viewer base. But you can assume that it would not be in Viacom's interest to continue BET when there isn't the revenue to support it - no matter how much Jesse Jackson threatens. SciFi channel is pretty much dead meat as well. Eternal Word TV Network (EWTN) is gone. Same with just about any other channel with a narrow demographic.
Similarly, the rules of the game for starting a new channel will be completely different. Sure, a large media powerhouse might be able to subsidize a new offering for a while to see if it takes off. But nobody else will be able to, because it will take lots of money and a very uncertain future to do it. Lots of risk. Just the sort of thing VC money has been running away from lately.
Absolutely, ala carte channel selection is a solution, but we need to understand what the problem is first. It doesn't solve any of the current problems and just creates a bunch more. It might reduce the average consumer cable bill - in fact it probably will. But it will certainly decrease the number of channels available and make it almost impossible to bring a new (really new) offering to cable networks.
The one possibility would be that this wouldn't affect DirecTV and Dish Network - they could then introduce new channels based on selling it only to their management.
Open Office is free software which respects you as the user so that if you have a problem you can fix it yourself.
Sure most of the computer-using world can. Right after they learn Java. And spend enough time with the codebase to understand what the problem is and the correct way to fix it.
This sort of "respect" is worthless to 99% of the computer-using world that does not have the knowledge or the time to fix anything like this. Nor can they hire someone to (a) learn the codebase and (b) fix the problem because learning the codebase is prohibitively time-consuming. Therefore, expensive. Very expensive.
This has been a free download add-on since the release of 2007 and maybe before that.
It might have been nice if it was released with the product, but if you don't understand how this happens regardless of intentions, you don't understand large products.
How about the site itself? Some large part of the value of the site has to be how it works apart from the fact that they advertise about themselves. There has to be some nugget of goodness about the web site itself.
Which is the differentiation between Slashdot and, say, fark or CNN.
It is a question of series vs. parallel. Any sort of wireless connection is going to be shared by multiple people using it in a serial fashion. This means that Ann can't send while Fred is sending. Period.
OK, if you have Ethernet cables running to both Ann and Fred then they can, absolutely both send at the same time. With switches linked by fiber and where everyone isn't banging on the same server you often acheive parallel communications all the way through the system.
If you are posting on Slashdot or reading email it may not make a big deal. Moving large files around, interacting with some remote graphic intensive application or just doing "office work" with lots of transactions can make this seems like a really silly idea.
Sure, wired connections are expensive to run and they shouldn't be run except for productivity or security. In my company, both of these are considerations and it would be unthinkable to rely on wireless.
I don't think the poster was referring to anything from two thousand years ago. Today, if you know the right people and places to go you can buy all sorts of endangered species "parts" for natural cures. Most of the "right places" are Chinese herbal medicine shops.
This is a very current problem], today. Not two thousand years ago.
The question is, are the treatments requiring genotype specific stem cells?
If so, where exactly do you get them? Stored cord blood is one source. Another is a (very) close relative. But there is another very exciting source - a clone of the person. You don't actually have to let the clone develop very far to get stem cells, but what you do need is a real, developing clone.
The only problem is, in order to exploit this type of treatment, you need to have to be able to make a clone. How much do you think people will pay for real human cloning? Think there might just be enough money in it to make it a reality?
Coupled with the mystique of "stem cell treatement" for all sorts of conditions, you better believe full on human cloning will be around before you know it.
From a public relations standpoint it is impossible to say how many people would have died if there were no vaccinations. There is the sole fact that people died as a result of the vaccinations.
Without that tidbit of information, nobody knows if vaccinations helped or hurt. But you can bet the media and goverment critics were out in force saying how many people died as a result of the government-supported vaccination program. Thus, President Ford killed people. Simple, really.
This is identical to the situation where if it snows and you shovel your walkway anyone falling can sue you because you modified the snow. If you just left the snow there and someone falls it is an act of God and there is nobody to sue. So for a very long time in Chicago few businesses and almost no residences in many areas shoveled snow because it could get them sued.
You can safely assume there will be no government-supported vaccination program, regardless of how badly it seems to be needed. All Mr. Obama needs to do is look at the history and decide if he wants to be known as a murderer, like Gerald Ford was known. I doubt it, heavily. Therefore there will not be any overt government action towards treatement.
And we can't behave in a discriminatory manner, so no closing of borders or stopping flights from Mexico. In Phoenix this is a big deal with something like 19 flights a day coming in. That is like 1900 people a day landing in Phoenix that have a high probability of being exposed.
You can't deny entry to people or quarntine them - that would be DISCRIMINATION. Somehow, the idea of discrmination has crept into the public conciousness such that it is no longer proper to pass judgement in any form. To discrminate therefore is wrong - such as to "discriminate" against people that are sick and will infect others.
So to avoid all this discrmination, we suspect all judgement and wave everyone on through.
Of course it is a suicide pact. How could it be anything else?
OK, so let's assume we have a 100% honest online casino. How does someone go about verifying that? How about a 100% dishonest online casino that pays out to shills and family members only. How would someone find out about that as well?
Do you like the idea of casino operating in the US? If so, they are subject to all sorts of regulation and oversight. Nothing like a completely unregulated online casino. The casino in the US pays lots of taxes, which the online casino does not. Sounds like the brick-and-mortar casino has no chance, no do they?
Short answer is that allowing unregulated online casinos to operate will absolutely drive taxed and regulated casinos out of business, utterly. So of course they are going to fight it because if online casinos are allowed to operate it is the death of the others.
Regulation is equally impossible. how would someone verify an online casino? They could inspect one set of servers never knowing about the "other" set in a different (and indifferent) country. About the only thing that could be done would be to continuously monitor all traffic and transactions. Which still leaves open the "other server" problem. So regulation is likely impossible. Taxation is likely impossible as well, for similar reasons.
Sounds like there is a pretty simple choice. Online unregulated or physical, regulated casinos.
No, I don't know how you shut online casinos down. But I am sure that if you don't prevent people from accessing them in any way the Indian tribes will be back on welfare in 10 years. Las Vegas might survive, but Atlantic City and the riverboats will be gone. Without regulation and heavy taxation the online casinos can (potentially) offer bigger payouts, and that is what people are looking for.
I'd say the physical casinos have a real problem, and there is nothing they can do about it except go out of business. Quickly, while there is still come cash left.
I was assuming some aerobraking, of some sort. Think back to Apollo capsules. They would leave orbit at 25000MPH and start re-entry. Lots of aerobraking. I don't know the deployment speed, but the first chute out of the bag was a ribbon chute which would slow it down enough to deploy the three big chutes. Touchdown was in water, but the impact velocity wasn't enough to submerge the capsule.
Now, take away the ribbon chute and the main chutes. With just the heat shield you are going to get lots of aerobraking just as before. So we have slowed from 25000MPH to maybe 500. Let's be extremely generous and say they are going to jog around in the atmosphere shuttle-style until the speed drops to 200MPH.
The summary said the rockets we going to fire around 800m - meters, I presume. 2500 feet.
Yes, this would be similar to a figher plane catapult launch, maybe a little worse. One thing that I see right off the seating for launch is all wrong for this type of landing. You are laying on your back with a nice, broad supportive seat to hold you and distribte the liftoff acceleration. Same idea with a catapult launch where you are being pushed back into the seat. So what, are you experiencing 9 or 10 G hanging in the straps? Hope those are nice, wide straps.
As a note aside, acceleration is a vector. You can have acceleration in a positive direction or a negative direction. Braking is a negative acceleration. The forces are identical, just the sign is flipped.
Let's see, how fast might the ship being going when the landing system kicks in? Falling from orbit to the ground is going to produce a lot of velocity to bleed off in apparently a very short time. The shuttle uses both atmospheric braking and S-turns to bleed off velocity and still lands pretty darn fast.
It sounds like this just falls without a chute. I'm not going to do the math, but even if it is subsonic at 800m, you are going to have to brake like mad at the end. 10G braking? 20G doesn't sound like it would be outlandish. OK, so it is a short period of time and with solid-fuel rockets it is just one pulse. But it sounds like it would be ohe heck of a pulse.
If the "owner" or "user" of the computer is tricked, bribed or forced to install such malware, what computer is there that will protect itself?
Sorry, but if you have untrained and inexperenced people doing administration on computers, you are going to have problems. No matter what the computer operating system is, if the "administrator" installs malware on it and follows whatever procedures are required to install the software, it is compromised. Period.]
Linux, MVS, VM, Windows, Solaris, OS X, whatever. It doesn't matter. The only thing that has any chance of helping is to get the administration power out of the hands of inexperienced and untrained people. Give them "appliances" that cannot be subverted because nothing can be installed on them.
When was the last time you had to update the anti-virus software on an iPod? How about having to reboot your refrigerator because it locked up?
If all people need is web browsing and email, they need something that will do that and nothing else. No possibility of viruses, worms, trojans or whatever else. Just something that gets the job done without the possibility of anything bad happening.
If you want an ad-driven Internet, this is the sort of arrangement you are going to get.
The idea that a company shouldn't sell advertising that is specifically designed to raid one web sitefor the benefit of another is silly. Advertisers are going to do whatever they can to sell ads. We've gone way beyond selling banner ad space. Now you get advertising that is designed for specific customers at specific times.
I'd guess the next big thing will be something like ISP-inserted ads so if you type www.tigerdirect.com it pops up an ad for Newegg. Or, when you do do a search on a CNN site that you get a popup for an item at Sears related to whatever you were searching for on CNN. Advertising that is "relevent" but has nothing what so ever to do with the web site you were on - just related to what you were typing or clicking on.
How about a system that takes whatever you were doing on the web and has a telemarketer call you about a related product immediately?
We've just begun down the road of an ad-supported society. One where everything seems to be free, except somehow people are paying for all the advertising. Maybe individual people will be able to rent out product referrals, so you get paid every time you say "Coke". Can you imagine a conversation between two people, one getting paid to say "Coke" and the other getting paid to say "Pepsi"? How about displaying your sponsorship with logoware? You know, a hat with a Nike logo and a shirt with a Reebok logo?
Fantasy? I doubt it. The more people think they want stuff for free and keep on showing their desire for free stuff to marketers, the more "free", ad-supported stuff there will be. And the bigger Google grows the more it convinces people that they too can make money by selling ad space.
You do understand that.Net is a library on top of the Win32 API, don't you? There is nothing new about.Net, it is a more complicated MFC with a couple of new languages thrown in on top of it.
Yes, VB.Net is a world of difference from VB 6 and a great improvement. C# isn't a replacement for C++ though, and.Net isn't a "new API", it is a wrapper on top of the real API, Win32.
It will be paid for the same way everything is paid for elsewhere... taxes.
You will see the tax burden in the US raised to 75% or so, but healthcare will be free. And the taxes will be justified based on "now you have free healthcare". And since the taxes will only affect the top earners in the country, nobody in Alabama will notice, much.
Except there will be no more small businesses, because they can't pay the taxes. Big businesses? No problem.
They can't get away from this eventuality. It is really the only way to go, at least short term. And we have seen it coming for a while now.
Take a business that has a very simple requirement. For some reason they need some minor change made to how gawk works that will make it possible for them to perform some business function with it. They have been using gawk for years and years and can't move away from it.
I suppose you could find some consultant to perform this. It really wouldn't take that much.
But nobody ever runs their business using gawk. Sorry, but something like that is very unlikely to be a part of a critical business infrastructure. So let's take something more reasonable. A bug is discovered in OpenOffice that prevents them from formatting invoices the way they want and how they are integrated with a database to automatically produce them. They moved to OpenOffice because Word wasn't working for them either.
They have gone through all the bug-fixing channels they could think of and no fix is coming. It is something obscure enough that maybe it isn't even considered a bug but something that would impact everyone else's use of OpenOffice negatively.
So they want to pay someone to fix the bug. Good luck, I'd say. I would say the first several hundred hours spent on such a project would be learning the code base. Maybe more. Now I know that good open-source consultants that speak English and shower only charge $35 a hour and would never consider charging for time spent learning a new code base, right? So this project should only cost around $140 because it is just a tiny bug and shouldn't take an experienced programmer more than about four hours. Right?
Ha. I would put the cost of some little fix like this more like around $10,000. And there is no assurance that if you were paying hourly that the project couldn't grow to be $20,000 or $80,000. Unless someone is willing to write off their time learning the system, which nobody in their right mind could afford to do.
No matter how "open" you might think OpenOffice is, if the developers working on it aren't going to fix your bug or make your change your chances of getting it done are nearly zero. Unless you want to spend lots and lots of money. Same thing goes for just about anything else of any size in the Open Source world. Apache. MySQL. Perl. PHP. If you need the code changed and you can't do it yourself then it is the same as a closed-source product. Because while Microsoft might not modify Word for you, lots of people will make custom changes to propietary products on a contract basis. And they don't have to first learn the code base.
Open source is freedom for programmers. If you aren't a programmer it is next to meaningless to nearly everyone. Even to a programmer, the fact that OpenOffice is open source is pretty meaningless - your ability to make meaningful changes without spending literally months learning the code base is zero. Your ability to make meaningful changes to the cat command don't count in any real way - things are much bigger now than that. More complex. So complex that the difference between open and close source to an outsider, especially a non-programmer outsider is just about zero.
Would you really deny entry to millions of people that both yearn for a better way of life and are escaping certain death in their country?
Come on, we're better than that, aren't we?
Besides, the resl solution to the immigration problem is when Mexico has a higher standard of living than the USA does. Then they will just have to go back for work.
Slashdot Mirror
Except I seem to remember that 160 characters was also the limit for alpha pagers, predating SMS by about 10 years.
Where was this guy in the alpha pager days?
Except your figures are wrong. Originally, manufactured CDs could hold up to 74 minutes, not 72.
The original CD-ROM specification did hold up to 650MB of data.
Everyone here seems to focus on distribution as a huge cost. It isn't, in relative terms. Certainly for books the action of printing a book and shipping it is cheap - far, far cheaper than the authoring and editorial process. If the objective is to open the floodgates to bring in crap, that is simple. Producing quality books isn't cheap and the costs of quality far outweigh the costs of printing.
I don't have hard numbers, but however many millions it costs to print a newspaper, I am sure the salaries of the people involved in producing a quality newspaper far exceed that of merely printing it. Sure, it might save 10% of the costs in trying to deliver it digitally. But it isn't the most significant oost there is in the newspaper business.
Similarly, if all you want is recycled crap, it would be easy to distribute the output of bloggers bloviating. Cheap, too. But that's not the point.
This idea also ignores the relatively huge problems with digital distribution. Let's say you used the Kindle platform with wireless connectivity. Great - people would not have to "dock" it somehow to pick up the latest edition. But, if you provided a Kindle to every subscriber to a newspaper in New York or Chicago could the cellular infrstructure handle rolling out the morning paper? I have my doubts. And if it took all morning to do this distribution, you have pretty much lost the point of the "morning paper".
No, I don't think digital delivery is any real solution at all.
TV over the Internet might be coming for some few, but not for the masses. Why? Because the capacity doesn't exist and likely as not, will never exist.
My house is served by cable. It is probably one of the most modern systems around with fiber optic runs to the network nodes. The problem is that my node has 494 homes on it. I suspect this is somewhere around average. So let us assome a fully IPTV environment where everyone is consuming at least one video stream over the Internet. What do you think the minimum bandwidth might be? 1Mbit/sec isn't anything great - ordinary DVD is 6Mbit/sec. With high-definition and somewhat better compression you might be able to deliver good service at 5Mbit/sec - but that is per house.
So now the network node has to have incoming capacity of 6Mbit/sec times 500 homes. 3Tb/sec. Ouch. I suppose you could do this with 100 DC3 fiber connections or something like that. Sounds cost prohibitive.
No, I don't think you are going to get over 100Mbit/sec to the network nodes without a lot of changes. Nor do I really think the cable company head end can deliver enough bits to keep hundreds of these nodes supplied with bits. I don't think a regionalized system like cable TV is today is going to work at all - you are going to need to have dedicated fiber from the backbone to the house, all the way. That is pretty much a complete physical plant rework for any system that is going to work in the future. We're a long, long way from that.
Also, there is the supply problem. Check out http://blogmaverick.com/2009/01/27/the-great-internet-video-lie/. Where is all this going to come from? I don't think any of the media companies today that provide the bulk of Internet service are capable of delivering this sort of system. Nor am I convinced that it is needed. Broadcast, rather than individual streaming, uses the same bandwidth for one as it does for a million. Once you lose that multiplier then you have something that is practical and implementable with current technology and current infrastructure. What you have now is something for the leet few and it doesn't scale.
The big problem with allowing individual channel selection is that there are plenty of channels out there that exist because of the way channels have beein funded, selected and supported.
So you want a channel dedicated to science fiction shows, movies, etc. You need to sell it to the cable companies and if a significant number agree to carry it - and pay for it - your job is done. You can get financing based on that and it really doesn't matter what the individual customers think. Some of them will watch and it is a ratings game from there on.
Switch to an ala carte model and this changes quite a bit. First off, any channel that exists today will be immediately taken down unless you have customers signing up for it. Probably within the first couple of months. This isn't like ratings where passive viewing is conidered "viewing" and done by sampling. This will be if you don't opt-in for the channel you don't support it. And without people paying for SciFi channel specifically and intentionally, it and many others will just disappear.
Sounds fair, doesn't it. What about BET? Do you really believe there are enough viewers of the Black Entertainment Network channel to keep it afloat in an ala carte environment? What about the Golf Channel? How about the Food Network? Maybe these cable channels should never have existed in the first place because they don't have a dedicated viewer base. But you can assume that it would not be in Viacom's interest to continue BET when there isn't the revenue to support it - no matter how much Jesse Jackson threatens. SciFi channel is pretty much dead meat as well. Eternal Word TV Network (EWTN) is gone. Same with just about any other channel with a narrow demographic.
Similarly, the rules of the game for starting a new channel will be completely different. Sure, a large media powerhouse might be able to subsidize a new offering for a while to see if it takes off. But nobody else will be able to, because it will take lots of money and a very uncertain future to do it. Lots of risk. Just the sort of thing VC money has been running away from lately.
Absolutely, ala carte channel selection is a solution, but we need to understand what the problem is first. It doesn't solve any of the current problems and just creates a bunch more. It might reduce the average consumer cable bill - in fact it probably will. But it will certainly decrease the number of channels available and make it almost impossible to bring a new (really new) offering to cable networks.
The one possibility would be that this wouldn't affect DirecTV and Dish Network - they could then introduce new channels based on selling it only to their management.
Open Office is free software which respects you as the user so that if you have a problem you can fix it yourself.
Sure most of the computer-using world can. Right after they learn Java. And spend enough time with the codebase to understand what the problem is and the correct way to fix it.
This sort of "respect" is worthless to 99% of the computer-using world that does not have the knowledge or the time to fix anything like this. Nor can they hire someone to (a) learn the codebase and (b) fix the problem because learning the codebase is prohibitively time-consuming. Therefore, expensive. Very expensive.
This has been a free download add-on since the release of 2007 and maybe before that.
It might have been nice if it was released with the product, but if you don't understand how this happens regardless of intentions, you don't understand large products.
How about the site itself? Some large part of the value of the site has to be how it works apart from the fact that they advertise about themselves. There has to be some nugget of goodness about the web site itself.
Which is the differentiation between Slashdot and, say, fark or CNN.
In China most Falun Gong supporters just get harrassed and maybe jailed.
Iran tends to just execute people by rather brutal methods.
It is a question of series vs. parallel. Any sort of wireless connection is going to be shared by multiple people using it in a serial fashion. This means that Ann can't send while Fred is sending. Period.
OK, if you have Ethernet cables running to both Ann and Fred then they can, absolutely both send at the same time. With switches linked by fiber and where everyone isn't banging on the same server you often acheive parallel communications all the way through the system.
If you are posting on Slashdot or reading email it may not make a big deal. Moving large files around, interacting with some remote graphic intensive application or just doing "office work" with lots of transactions can make this seems like a really silly idea.
Sure, wired connections are expensive to run and they shouldn't be run except for productivity or security. In my company, both of these are considerations and it would be unthinkable to rely on wireless.
I don't think the poster was referring to anything from two thousand years ago. Today, if you know the right people and places to go you can buy all sorts of endangered species "parts" for natural cures. Most of the "right places" are Chinese herbal medicine shops.
This is a very current problem], today. Not two thousand years ago.
The question is, are the treatments requiring genotype specific stem cells?
If so, where exactly do you get them? Stored cord blood is one source. Another is a (very) close relative. But there is another very exciting source - a clone of the person. You don't actually have to let the clone develop very far to get stem cells, but what you do need is a real, developing clone.
The only problem is, in order to exploit this type of treatment, you need to have to be able to make a clone. How much do you think people will pay for real human cloning? Think there might just be enough money in it to make it a reality?
Coupled with the mystique of "stem cell treatement" for all sorts of conditions, you better believe full on human cloning will be around before you know it.
From a public relations standpoint it is impossible to say how many people would have died if there were no vaccinations. There is the sole fact that people died as a result of the vaccinations.
Without that tidbit of information, nobody knows if vaccinations helped or hurt. But you can bet the media and goverment critics were out in force saying how many people died as a result of the government-supported vaccination program. Thus, President Ford killed people. Simple, really.
This is identical to the situation where if it snows and you shovel your walkway anyone falling can sue you because you modified the snow. If you just left the snow there and someone falls it is an act of God and there is nobody to sue. So for a very long time in Chicago few businesses and almost no residences in many areas shoveled snow because it could get them sued.
You can safely assume there will be no government-supported vaccination program, regardless of how badly it seems to be needed. All Mr. Obama needs to do is look at the history and decide if he wants to be known as a murderer, like Gerald Ford was known. I doubt it, heavily. Therefore there will not be any overt government action towards treatement.
And we can't behave in a discriminatory manner, so no closing of borders or stopping flights from Mexico. In Phoenix this is a big deal with something like 19 flights a day coming in. That is like 1900 people a day landing in Phoenix that have a high probability of being exposed.
You can't deny entry to people or quarntine them - that would be DISCRIMINATION. Somehow, the idea of discrmination has crept into the public conciousness such that it is no longer proper to pass judgement in any form. To discrminate therefore is wrong - such as to "discriminate" against people that are sick and will infect others.
So to avoid all this discrmination, we suspect all judgement and wave everyone on through.
Of course it is a suicide pact. How could it be anything else?
OK, so let's assume we have a 100% honest online casino. How does someone go about verifying that? How about a 100% dishonest online casino that pays out to shills and family members only. How would someone find out about that as well?
Do you like the idea of casino operating in the US? If so, they are subject to all sorts of regulation and oversight. Nothing like a completely unregulated online casino. The casino in the US pays lots of taxes, which the online casino does not. Sounds like the brick-and-mortar casino has no chance, no do they?
Short answer is that allowing unregulated online casinos to operate will absolutely drive taxed and regulated casinos out of business, utterly. So of course they are going to fight it because if online casinos are allowed to operate it is the death of the others.
Regulation is equally impossible. how would someone verify an online casino? They could inspect one set of servers never knowing about the "other" set in a different (and indifferent) country. About the only thing that could be done would be to continuously monitor all traffic and transactions. Which still leaves open the "other server" problem. So regulation is likely impossible. Taxation is likely impossible as well, for similar reasons.
Sounds like there is a pretty simple choice. Online unregulated or physical, regulated casinos.
No, I don't know how you shut online casinos down. But I am sure that if you don't prevent people from accessing them in any way the Indian tribes will be back on welfare in 10 years. Las Vegas might survive, but Atlantic City and the riverboats will be gone. Without regulation and heavy taxation the online casinos can (potentially) offer bigger payouts, and that is what people are looking for.
I'd say the physical casinos have a real problem, and there is nothing they can do about it except go out of business. Quickly, while there is still come cash left.
I was assuming some aerobraking, of some sort. Think back to Apollo capsules. They would leave orbit at 25000MPH and start re-entry. Lots of aerobraking. I don't know the deployment speed, but the first chute out of the bag was a ribbon chute which would slow it down enough to deploy the three big chutes. Touchdown was in water, but the impact velocity wasn't enough to submerge the capsule.
Now, take away the ribbon chute and the main chutes. With just the heat shield you are going to get lots of aerobraking just as before. So we have slowed from 25000MPH to maybe 500. Let's be extremely generous and say they are going to jog around in the atmosphere shuttle-style until the speed drops to 200MPH.
The summary said the rockets we going to fire around 800m - meters, I presume. 2500 feet.
Yes, this would be similar to a figher plane catapult launch, maybe a little worse. One thing that I see right off the seating for launch is all wrong for this type of landing. You are laying on your back with a nice, broad supportive seat to hold you and distribte the liftoff acceleration. Same idea with a catapult launch where you are being pushed back into the seat. So what, are you experiencing 9 or 10 G hanging in the straps? Hope those are nice, wide straps.
As a note aside, acceleration is a vector. You can have acceleration in a positive direction or a negative direction. Braking is a negative acceleration. The forces are identical, just the sign is flipped.
Let's see, how fast might the ship being going when the landing system kicks in? Falling from orbit to the ground is going to produce a lot of velocity to bleed off in apparently a very short time. The shuttle uses both atmospheric braking and S-turns to bleed off velocity and still lands pretty darn fast.
It sounds like this just falls without a chute. I'm not going to do the math, but even if it is subsonic at 800m, you are going to have to brake like mad at the end. 10G braking? 20G doesn't sound like it would be outlandish. OK, so it is a short period of time and with solid-fuel rockets it is just one pulse. But it sounds like it would be ohe heck of a pulse.
China is pretty awsome - around 3K/year for a software engineer. 4.5K for a manager. This is in USD and is a few years old. Might be higher now.
India is more like 10K I believe.
We have an outsourcing consulting company in Tempe and they do all the work in Mexico. I believe their people make less than 20K/year there.
If the "owner" or "user" of the computer is tricked, bribed or forced to install such malware, what computer is there that will protect itself?
Sorry, but if you have untrained and inexperenced people doing administration on computers, you are going to have problems. No matter what the computer operating system is, if the "administrator" installs malware on it and follows whatever procedures are required to install the software, it is compromised. Period.]
Linux, MVS, VM, Windows, Solaris, OS X, whatever. It doesn't matter. The only thing that has any chance of helping is to get the administration power out of the hands of inexperienced and untrained people. Give them "appliances" that cannot be subverted because nothing can be installed on them.
When was the last time you had to update the anti-virus software on an iPod? How about having to reboot your refrigerator because it locked up?
If all people need is web browsing and email, they need something that will do that and nothing else. No possibility of viruses, worms, trojans or whatever else. Just something that gets the job done without the possibility of anything bad happening.
If you want an ad-driven Internet, this is the sort of arrangement you are going to get.
The idea that a company shouldn't sell advertising that is specifically designed to raid one web sitefor the benefit of another is silly. Advertisers are going to do whatever they can to sell ads. We've gone way beyond selling banner ad space. Now you get advertising that is designed for specific customers at specific times.
I'd guess the next big thing will be something like ISP-inserted ads so if you type www.tigerdirect.com it pops up an ad for Newegg. Or, when you do do a search on a CNN site that you get a popup for an item at Sears related to whatever you were searching for on CNN. Advertising that is "relevent" but has nothing what so ever to do with the web site you were on - just related to what you were typing or clicking on.
How about a system that takes whatever you were doing on the web and has a telemarketer call you about a related product immediately?
We've just begun down the road of an ad-supported society. One where everything seems to be free, except somehow people are paying for all the advertising. Maybe individual people will be able to rent out product referrals, so you get paid every time you say "Coke". Can you imagine a conversation between two people, one getting paid to say "Coke" and the other getting paid to say "Pepsi"? How about displaying your sponsorship with logoware? You know, a hat with a Nike logo and a shirt with a Reebok logo?
Fantasy? I doubt it. The more people think they want stuff for free and keep on showing their desire for free stuff to marketers, the more "free", ad-supported stuff there will be. And the bigger Google grows the more it convinces people that they too can make money by selling ad space.
You do understand that .Net is a library on top of the Win32 API, don't you? There is nothing new about .Net, it is a more complicated MFC with a couple of new languages thrown in on top of it.
Yes, VB.Net is a world of difference from VB 6 and a great improvement. C# isn't a replacement for C++ though, and .Net isn't a "new API", it is a wrapper on top of the real API, Win32.
It will be paid for the same way everything is paid for elsewhere... taxes.
You will see the tax burden in the US raised to 75% or so, but healthcare will be free. And the taxes will be justified based on "now you have free healthcare". And since the taxes will only affect the top earners in the country, nobody in Alabama will notice, much.
Except there will be no more small businesses, because they can't pay the taxes. Big businesses? No problem.
They can't get away from this eventuality. It is really the only way to go, at least short term. And we have seen it coming for a while now.
Take a business that has a very simple requirement. For some reason they need some minor change made to how gawk works that will make it possible for them to perform some business function with it. They have been using gawk for years and years and can't move away from it.
I suppose you could find some consultant to perform this. It really wouldn't take that much.
But nobody ever runs their business using gawk. Sorry, but something like that is very unlikely to be a part of a critical business infrastructure. So let's take something more reasonable. A bug is discovered in OpenOffice that prevents them from formatting invoices the way they want and how they are integrated with a database to automatically produce them. They moved to OpenOffice because Word wasn't working for them either.
They have gone through all the bug-fixing channels they could think of and no fix is coming. It is something obscure enough that maybe it isn't even considered a bug but something that would impact everyone else's use of OpenOffice negatively.
So they want to pay someone to fix the bug. Good luck, I'd say. I would say the first several hundred hours spent on such a project would be learning the code base. Maybe more. Now I know that good open-source consultants that speak English and shower only charge $35 a hour and would never consider charging for time spent learning a new code base, right? So this project should only cost around $140 because it is just a tiny bug and shouldn't take an experienced programmer more than about four hours. Right?
Ha. I would put the cost of some little fix like this more like around $10,000. And there is no assurance that if you were paying hourly that the project couldn't grow to be $20,000 or $80,000. Unless someone is willing to write off their time learning the system, which nobody in their right mind could afford to do.
No matter how "open" you might think OpenOffice is, if the developers working on it aren't going to fix your bug or make your change your chances of getting it done are nearly zero. Unless you want to spend lots and lots of money. Same thing goes for just about anything else of any size in the Open Source world. Apache. MySQL. Perl. PHP. If you need the code changed and you can't do it yourself then it is the same as a closed-source product. Because while Microsoft might not modify Word for you, lots of people will make custom changes to propietary products on a contract basis. And they don't have to first learn the code base.
Open source is freedom for programmers. If you aren't a programmer it is next to meaningless to nearly everyone. Even to a programmer, the fact that OpenOffice is open source is pretty meaningless - your ability to make meaningful changes without spending literally months learning the code base is zero. Your ability to make meaningful changes to the cat command don't count in any real way - things are much bigger now than that. More complex. So complex that the difference between open and close source to an outsider, especially a non-programmer outsider is just about zero.
Would you really deny entry to millions of people that both yearn for a better way of life and are escaping certain death in their country?
Come on, we're better than that, aren't we?
Besides, the resl solution to the immigration problem is when Mexico has a higher standard of living than the USA does. Then they will just have to go back for work.
Sorry, but the more you acknowledge that you don't like the pictures the more some folks are going to send them around.
Would common decency be nice? Sure, but that is so 1980's.