I agree that there should be an SI base unit of information, but I think it should be the bit, not the byte.
Here is an example of a situation where millibits are meaningful:
Take 80 characters of 8-bit ASCII text. Call this P(0).
For each n from 1 to 999: Retrieve 640 bits from a high quality random source. Call this R(n). XOR each bit of R(n) with P(n-1) and call the result P(n). Securely destroy all copies of P(n-1).
Having executed this process, you are left with the single value P(999) and the 999 values R(1)...R(999). For convenience, let's use a new naming scheme, Q, defined as follows: For 1..999, Q(n)=R(n), and for 1000, Q(1000)=P(999).
To retrieve P(0), use an accumulator, A, which is a variable of 640 bits all initially set to zero. For all n descending from 1000 to 1, XOR each bit of A with Q(n) and store the result in A. At the end of this process, the contents of A will be equal to the original P(0).
Because we can re-create P(0) using Q, the value of P(0) must be contained within Q. All elements of Q are required to retrieve P(0); if any single element of Q were to be lost, then P(0) would not be recoverable. No element of Q is more or less important than any other in the reconstruction of P(0).
How many bits of information from P(0) are contained in any single element of Q? The answer, obviously, is 640 millibits, or 80 millibytes.
The prefix "milli" is here used in the metric sense of 1000. I suppose it would also be possible to say that we had 625 mibibits. However, this presents a problem: With only the letters "mi" to indicate the prefix, how do we know if a mibibit is 1/1024 of a bit (related to "milli") or 1/1048576 of a bit (related to "micro")? Do we have to resort to milbibits and micbibits, or millibibits and microbibits?
They are based off physical things, but not PARTICULAR physical things. If you define a second in terms of the oscillations of a cesium atom, then in principle anyone in any laboratory can create an accurate atomic clock, because in principle anyone can get ahold of a cesium atom.
The kilogram, on the other hand, is defined in terms of the ONE AND ONLY official reference kilogram. You cannot independently verify the weight of a kilogram, unless you can get your hands on the official one, which is unlikely as a practical matter. On the other hand, if the definition were changed to be 10^3 times Avogadro's number times the atomic weight of hydrogen (for example), then anyone in any laboratory could in principle create a "correct" kilogram.
The key word is "particular." Of course it's impossible to define a measurement without referring to categories of objects in the world. The goal is to avoid referring to SPECIFIC objects in the world.
It isn't a loan from one branch of the government to the other.
It is MONEY WE HAVE BEEN PAYING SINCE 1983.
This is real, actual, cash money that gets deducted from paychecks. The system has collected $1.7 TRILLION more than it has paid out since 1983.
This does not have a net value of zero. It has a net value of $1.7 trillion dollars.
What do you want them to use as a storage medium for $1.7 trillion dollars? If they stored it as gold bars, they would weigh 121,500 metric tons. Moving the gold with a Boeing 747 would require two flights every day for two years. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that we're talking about more gold than actually exists in the world. Cash would be even worse.
So they store it as T-bills. Or at least they ought to. In practice, they store it as T-bills plus IOUs from Congress. But spending this money on random pork projects is theft, plain and simple.
I say "Congress has stolen from the trust fund to pay for other programs."
The question is: When the Social Security tax is withheld from your paycheck, what do you think you are paying for? Your or someone else's retirement, or pork projects in Oregon and South Dakota?
Why does nobody understand the social security trust fund?
The increase in payments caused by the retirement of the Baby Boom generation was predicted in the 70s. The Reagan administration got a payroll tax increase enacted, to build up the trust fund and make sure that we could cover the costs.
We have been paying this tax since 1983. We have collectively paid $1.7 TRILLION dollars in extra taxes, to build up the system so that the Boomers can retire. Mostly, these taxes have been paid by the Boomers themselves, during their peak wage-earning years.
Social Security was carefully designed so that nobody leeches off anyone but themselves. You pay in for your entire working life, then you draw during your retirement.
Reducing benefits (which is what "privatization" or "personalization" really means) is nothing more or less than stealing from the $1.7 TRILLION that we have ALREADY PAID in taxes.
Why anyone considers this acceptable is beyond me.
We already have exploding cellphones. But the fast charge phase probably wouldn't occur while the phone was in your pants pockets, because most people don't have an AC outlet there. I don't see much reason to suppose that the fast charge time would make the batteries any more likely to explode while slowly draining.
The hackers/crackers thing died 10 years ago. The problem with it was that "crackers" is a dorky word, so nobody wants to use it. If RMS had invented a better word for it back in 1983, it might have caught on. But the fact is, today, people who break into computer systems are called "hackers." If you want to distinguish between malicious ones and allegedly-nice ones, you now have to say "black hats" and "white hats."
The Galactica is not a naval ship, it is a spacecraft. So we would expect it to be operated by the Air Force. As a result, the officers all have Air Force ranks. Starbuck is an O-2 (Lieutenant); we know she isn't an O-1 because she took over flight operations when Apollo was gone. Apollo is an O-3 (Captain).
It seems very unlikely that Tigh would be an O-5 (Lt. Colonel). He's the XO of a carrier! It's much more likely that both Tigh and Adama are O-6s (Colonels). That's what you would expect to see on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. Given the history of the Galactica, Adama might have gotten his promotion and could already be an O-7 (Brigadier General) - on his way to some sort of fleet or staff command once the decomissioning of the Galactica was complete.
So why doesn't anyone call him "Colonel Adama" or "General Adama?" Because he's the skipper. There's an old naval tradition (not observed, as I understand it, in the U.S. Navy) that the commanding officer of a ship is called "captain" regardless of his rank. However, the CO of a NASA space mission (e.g. a shuttle) is not the "captain" - he's the "mission commander," which you'll hear shortened to "commander" in mission briefings and CAPCOM radio chatter. It's reasonable to think that after hundreds of years of space missions, this tradition might have gained the stature of the naval "captain" tradition. So the CO of the Galactica can be referred to as "commander" regardless of rank.
Particularly if Tigh and Adama are both O-6s, Adama might well encourage his people to refer to him as "commander" in order to highlight his senior status.
Take two cavemen, Og and Ug. The two are equal. If they meet each other at Og's cave, then Ug is weaker, because Og has the support of his many wives and children, as well as the protection of the cave itself. In this circumstance, Og can easily beat Ug to death with a club. If they meet at Ug's cave, the situation is reversed.
Therefore, Og has a "natural property right" to Og's cave, and Ug has a "natural property right" to Ug's cave.
Suppose Og writes some etchings on a stone tablet, and keeps the tablet in the back of his cave. Clearly, he has a "natural property right" to ownership of the tablet and to the secrecy of the information contained thereupon. If Ug attempts to steal the tablet, then Og will beat him to death with a club.
While Og is a great artist, Ur is a mighty hunter. Let's suppose Og goes hungry one winter, so he gives a tablet to Ug, in exchange for half of the carcass of a wooly mammoth. Ug takes it back to his cave. At this point, by "natural property rights," Ug now indisputably owns the tablet. If Og tries to take the tablet back, Ug will beat him to death with a club.
Now that Ug owns the tablet, he can go in the back of his cave with another stone tablet, and make a copy (to the best of his ability) Og's etchings. Og cannot stop him, because if he tries, Ug will beat him to death with a club. Eventually, perhaps Ug will have dozens of copies.
Some time later, Lur, a visitor, arrives from his journeys and meets Og and Ug. Lur brings spears of great and awesome quality, which Og and Ug both want. The only item of interest to Lur is the stone tablet. At this point, Og and Ug have equal ability to supply Lur with a tablet. Being a hunter, Ug can sweeten the deal by offering a tablet and the fresh leg of an antelope. Og, who spends his life in anguished pursuit of the etching art, cannot compete with Ug in the area of antelope procurement, and therefore loses the bidding war for the spears.
Og might wish with all his heart that he could make Ug's tablet crumble to dust by an act of will, but the harsh reality is, Og has no "natural property right" to the etchings once he has given them away. As a result, Og is poor and destitute while Ug prospers and becomes a great chieftan.
Og's eldest son, Tog, has observed all of this and believes his father to be a fool. Why on earth did he allow Ug to take away the fruit of his labors? Tog matches his father in artistic abilities, but a lifetime of poverty has made him shrewd. When he barters with Tug, he does not offer *copies* of his work. Instead, he offers *performances* such as allowing Tug to come into Tog's cave and briefly view the etchings. Thus, Tog retains his "natural property right" to his creations, while still deriving some value from Tug. Over time, Tog and his descendants become great shamans, equal in power and stature to the chieftans of Tug's line.
This is the natural state of affairs and this is precisely how things were from the dawn of humanity through to the 17th century, when "copyright" was invented in the modern sense. Prior to copyright, any valuable works had to be either (a) compensated in full at the time of creation, or (b) hidden away and kept secret. Society was better off once copyright law was established, because it made it possible for more artistic works to be available - artists (or their patrons) no longer needed to keep their best works secret.
So copyright is a good thing, wisely used. But it not, and never has been, a "natural property right."
First of all, RHAT is not "the FOSS sector." Secondly, nice job picking the two year timeframe. In every other time period Yahoo can display, MSFT comes out ahead.
If my personal preferences translated into stock market success, RHAT would be kicking MSFT's hairy ass. But that just isn't what's happening Out There.
Because with most other NIC/switch brands, you can never really, truly disable autonegotiation. When you hard-code the speed and duplex, it's more of a suggestion. They still run the negotiation to find out what the other side is doing. With Cisco gear, if you hard code the settings, then it just ignores any autonegotiation, just like in the dark ages.
I'm not defending Cisco - I think their approach is wrong. But it's at least understandable that they are taking the side of the MCSITW (most conservative sysadmin in the world), who would want to hard-code settings on all sides and ALSO find a way to ensure that autonegotiation could NEVER POSSIBLY happen, even if random electrical noise somehow convinced one device that maybe the other one was trying to negotiate with it.
I'm about to leave work and go home. When I do, I plan to hit the so-called "power button." When I do this, code will execute on the box that flushes cache to disk and then commands the power supply to interrupt most (but not all) of its DC output. At that time, my computer will be in a state commonly referred to as "off."
By your logic, I can claim that my computer is down due to a power failure.
Perhaps you would complain: But power was getting to the computer.
So what about the situation where I accidentally hit the (again, so-called) "off" button on my UPS. In this case the computer will go down due to a lack of power getting to it. However, the power is still on at the wall socket - I have just chosen (unintentionally) to interrupt the supply to the computer. Is this a power failure?
I don't think you can call it a power failure if power is abundantly available, and you just don't choose to make use of it.
He's actually improving. Go back and watch 'Night Court' or anything else he did pre-TNG. It's the same, only worse. It's pretty surprising that he did as good a job as he did with Data, considering that he hasn't done much with anything else he's been given. His turn as Dr. Soong on Enterprise was some of his better recent work.
Good. Instead of screwing around with the clueless networks, let's have a specialist channel that produces SciFi that's actually good.
That way, the next Firefly won't have to show a stupid Western episode first, before the premiere airs (just like the original Star Trek had to, remember?). And two good SciFi shows will never be on back-to-back. And the good SciFi shows will never be pre-empted by inanities like Presidential addresses, natural disasters, or football.
And, most importantly, shows that consistently draw a strong fan base will be able to stay on the air, even if the fan base is much smaller than the vast quantities of drooling mouth-breathers eagerly anticipating 'Survivor: Antarctica.'
SeaLaunch has been operating for five years now, and has launched many commercial satellites for companies like DirecTV, XM Radio, etc.
Scaled Composites is commercial + manned. SeaLaunch is commercial + orbital. So far, there is nobody offering, or even seriously planning, commercial + manned + orbital.
Employees aren't company property. The question is: To what extent, if any, should employees have an expectation of privacy while at the workplace. The fact that it's a computer, rather than a typewriter or a video camera, is irrelevant to the discussion of what constitutes an appropriate level of workplace surveillance.
The act is important, not the instrument.
If someone comes to your house and uses your telephone, it is NOT legal for you to tape their conversation and review it later - even though it's YOUR telephone. It's not legal for you to beat them over the head with a crowbar either, even though it's YOUR crowbar. At some point, your freedom to act is limited by the rule of law.
In the United States, it is completely legal for an employer to monitor their employees in nearly any manner they choose, including installing video cameras in every office - so long as the monitoring is disclosed to the employees. In other countries, maybe the rules are different. What we should be asking ourselves is: what set of rules gives rise to the best society?
If you take this to either of its logical extremes, it doesn't work. In an environment where every action is completely monitored and employees are given no independent freedom to act, the organization loses the power and value of the workers' collective intelligence, which would otherwise have been a substantial asset. Other companies operating in a less rigidly controlled manner will have a major competitive advantage. Note that this is not merely theoretical - the United States' rise to economic prominence was largely due to this very advantage. ("American Ingenuity and Know-How", remember?)
Going the other way, if rules exist that say that bosses are never allowed to look in on employees - or may only follow rigidly controlled supervisory processes - then the company suffers from free riders, lack of ability to implement its decisions, and general organizational chaos. The worst excesses of "union shops" are an example of taking this too far. I don't have anything against unions in general; I'm thinking only of the cases where the union heirarchy effectively supplants management.
So the right answer must be somewhere in between. The really interesting question is where, and why?
It might give us everything YOU want. There are a lot of space cadets who don't really care (though they may claim otherwise) about actual science, but really want to GO THEMSELVES into outer space. (Not, you understand, the actual nausea-inducing, life-threatening environment that real astronauts endure - they want the television experience, with earl grey tea in the resort-class guest quarters.)
Since they will never get this in their lifetimes, the next best thing (sort of) is to believe that SOMEONE is getting it - which requires a somewhat more credible manned spaceflight program than exploding shuttles and a broken-down orbiting utility trailer with no food.
Why do you need to ride SS3 to the orbital facility, since "the only important parts of [your] presence" can also arrive there in milliseconds?
I have a job where I provide IT services in my own building and in another one 800 miles away. Invariably, when I physically go there, I find out about things and get stuff done that would have taken orders of magnitude more effort, and/or never gotten done at all, by phone or even videoconference.
Like it or not, we are great apes, and our capabilities are limited. We are not able to relate to each other "over the phone" in the same way that we can in person, because we posess millions of years worth of evolutionary adaptations geared towards physical presence. As a result, we need to be there when anything genuinely complex or worthwhile is on the line (which includes most significant business negotiations, but does not include, for example, a tech support call).
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I agree that there should be an SI base unit of information, but I think it should be the bit, not the byte.
Here is an example of a situation where millibits are meaningful:
Take 80 characters of 8-bit ASCII text. Call this P(0).
For each n from 1 to 999:
Retrieve 640 bits from a high quality random source. Call this R(n). XOR each bit of R(n) with P(n-1) and call the result P(n). Securely destroy all copies of P(n-1).
Having executed this process, you are left with the single value P(999) and the 999 values R(1)...R(999). For convenience, let's use a new naming scheme, Q, defined as follows: For 1..999, Q(n)=R(n), and for 1000, Q(1000)=P(999).
To retrieve P(0), use an accumulator, A, which is a variable of 640 bits all initially set to zero. For all n descending from 1000 to 1, XOR each bit of A with Q(n) and store the result in A. At the end of this process, the contents of A will be equal to the original P(0).
Because we can re-create P(0) using Q, the value of P(0) must be contained within Q. All elements of Q are required to retrieve P(0); if any single element of Q were to be lost, then P(0) would not be recoverable. No element of Q is more or less important than any other in the reconstruction of P(0).
How many bits of information from P(0) are contained in any single element of Q? The answer, obviously, is 640 millibits, or 80 millibytes.
The prefix "milli" is here used in the metric sense of 1000. I suppose it would also be possible to say that we had 625 mibibits. However, this presents a problem: With only the letters "mi" to indicate the prefix, how do we know if a mibibit is 1/1024 of a bit (related to "milli") or 1/1048576 of a bit (related to "micro")? Do we have to resort to milbibits and micbibits, or millibibits and microbibits?
This message is 1934622720 micbibits in length.
-Graham
They are based off physical things, but not PARTICULAR physical things. If you define a second in terms of the oscillations of a cesium atom, then in principle anyone in any laboratory can create an accurate atomic clock, because in principle anyone can get ahold of a cesium atom.
The kilogram, on the other hand, is defined in terms of the ONE AND ONLY official reference kilogram. You cannot independently verify the weight of a kilogram, unless you can get your hands on the official one, which is unlikely as a practical matter. On the other hand, if the definition were changed to be 10^3 times Avogadro's number times the atomic weight of hydrogen (for example), then anyone in any laboratory could in principle create a "correct" kilogram.
The key word is "particular." Of course it's impossible to define a measurement without referring to categories of objects in the world. The goal is to avoid referring to SPECIFIC objects in the world.
-Graham
Okay, then I'll meet you there in 2.7 x 10^3 seconds.
-Graham
It isn't a loan from one branch of the government to the other.
It is MONEY WE HAVE BEEN PAYING SINCE 1983.
This is real, actual, cash money that gets deducted from paychecks. The system has collected $1.7 TRILLION more than it has paid out since 1983.
This does not have a net value of zero. It has a net value of $1.7 trillion dollars.
What do you want them to use as a storage medium for $1.7 trillion dollars? If they stored it as gold bars, they would weigh 121,500 metric tons. Moving the gold with a Boeing 747 would require two flights every day for two years. I don't know for sure, but I suspect that we're talking about more gold than actually exists in the world. Cash would be even worse.
So they store it as T-bills. Or at least they ought to. In practice, they store it as T-bills plus IOUs from Congress. But spending this money on random pork projects is theft, plain and simple.
-Graham
You say "it isn't actually a trust fund."
I say "Congress has stolen from the trust fund to pay for other programs."
The question is: When the Social Security tax is withheld from your paycheck, what do you think you are paying for? Your or someone else's retirement, or pork projects in Oregon and South Dakota?
-Graham
Why does nobody understand the social security trust fund?
The increase in payments caused by the retirement of the Baby Boom generation was predicted in the 70s. The Reagan administration got a payroll tax increase enacted, to build up the trust fund and make sure that we could cover the costs.
We have been paying this tax since 1983. We have collectively paid $1.7 TRILLION dollars in extra taxes, to build up the system so that the Boomers can retire. Mostly, these taxes have been paid by the Boomers themselves, during their peak wage-earning years.
Social Security was carefully designed so that nobody leeches off anyone but themselves. You pay in for your entire working life, then you draw during your retirement.
Reducing benefits (which is what "privatization" or "personalization" really means) is nothing more or less than stealing from the $1.7 TRILLION that we have ALREADY PAID in taxes.
Why anyone considers this acceptable is beyond me.
-Graham
We already have exploding cellphones. But the fast charge phase probably wouldn't occur while the phone was in your pants pockets, because most people don't have an AC outlet there. I don't see much reason to suppose that the fast charge time would make the batteries any more likely to explode while slowly draining.
-Graham
It depends on whether you are a knight or a knave.
The hackers/crackers thing died 10 years ago. The problem with it was that "crackers" is a dorky word, so nobody wants to use it. If RMS had invented a better word for it back in 1983, it might have caught on. But the fact is, today, people who break into computer systems are called "hackers." If you want to distinguish between malicious ones and allegedly-nice ones, you now have to say "black hats" and "white hats."
Oh come on, you just aren't trying hard enough.
The Galactica is not a naval ship, it is a spacecraft. So we would expect it to be operated by the Air Force. As a result, the officers all have Air Force ranks. Starbuck is an O-2 (Lieutenant); we know she isn't an O-1 because she took over flight operations when Apollo was gone. Apollo is an O-3 (Captain).
It seems very unlikely that Tigh would be an O-5 (Lt. Colonel). He's the XO of a carrier! It's much more likely that both Tigh and Adama are O-6s (Colonels). That's what you would expect to see on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier. Given the history of the Galactica, Adama might have gotten his promotion and could already be an O-7 (Brigadier General) - on his way to some sort of fleet or staff command once the decomissioning of the Galactica was complete.
So why doesn't anyone call him "Colonel Adama" or "General Adama?" Because he's the skipper. There's an old naval tradition (not observed, as I understand it, in the U.S. Navy) that the commanding officer of a ship is called "captain" regardless of his rank. However, the CO of a NASA space mission (e.g. a shuttle) is not the "captain" - he's the "mission commander," which you'll hear shortened to "commander" in mission briefings and CAPCOM radio chatter. It's reasonable to think that after hundreds of years of space missions, this tradition might have gained the stature of the naval "captain" tradition. So the CO of the Galactica can be referred to as "commander" regardless of rank.
Particularly if Tigh and Adama are both O-6s, Adama might well encourage his people to refer to him as "commander" in order to highlight his senior status.
-Graham
Okay, let's talk about "natural property rights."
Take two cavemen, Og and Ug. The two are equal. If they meet each other at Og's cave, then Ug is weaker, because Og has the support of his many wives and children, as well as the protection of the cave itself. In this circumstance, Og can easily beat Ug to death with a club. If they meet at Ug's cave, the situation is reversed.
Therefore, Og has a "natural property right" to Og's cave, and Ug has a "natural property right" to Ug's cave.
Suppose Og writes some etchings on a stone tablet, and keeps the tablet in the back of his cave. Clearly, he has a "natural property right" to ownership of the tablet and to the secrecy of the information contained thereupon. If Ug attempts to steal the tablet, then Og will beat him to death with a club.
While Og is a great artist, Ur is a mighty hunter. Let's suppose Og goes hungry one winter, so he gives a tablet to Ug, in exchange for half of the carcass of a wooly mammoth. Ug takes it back to his cave. At this point, by "natural property rights," Ug now indisputably owns the tablet. If Og tries to take the tablet back, Ug will beat him to death with a club.
Now that Ug owns the tablet, he can go in the back of his cave with another stone tablet, and make a copy (to the best of his ability) Og's etchings. Og cannot stop him, because if he tries, Ug will beat him to death with a club. Eventually, perhaps Ug will have dozens of copies.
Some time later, Lur, a visitor, arrives from his journeys and meets Og and Ug. Lur brings spears of great and awesome quality, which Og and Ug both want. The only item of interest to Lur is the stone tablet. At this point, Og and Ug have equal ability to supply Lur with a tablet. Being a hunter, Ug can sweeten the deal by offering a tablet and the fresh leg of an antelope. Og, who spends his life in anguished pursuit of the etching art, cannot compete with Ug in the area of antelope procurement, and therefore loses the bidding war for the spears.
Og might wish with all his heart that he could make Ug's tablet crumble to dust by an act of will, but the harsh reality is, Og has no "natural property right" to the etchings once he has given them away. As a result, Og is poor and destitute while Ug prospers and becomes a great chieftan.
Og's eldest son, Tog, has observed all of this and believes his father to be a fool. Why on earth did he allow Ug to take away the fruit of his labors? Tog matches his father in artistic abilities, but a lifetime of poverty has made him shrewd. When he barters with Tug, he does not offer *copies* of his work. Instead, he offers *performances* such as allowing Tug to come into Tog's cave and briefly view the etchings. Thus, Tog retains his "natural property right" to his creations, while still deriving some value from Tug. Over time, Tog and his descendants become great shamans, equal in power and stature to the chieftans of Tug's line.
This is the natural state of affairs and this is precisely how things were from the dawn of humanity through to the 17th century, when "copyright" was invented in the modern sense. Prior to copyright, any valuable works had to be either (a) compensated in full at the time of creation, or (b) hidden away and kept secret. Society was better off once copyright law was established, because it made it possible for more artistic works to be available - artists (or their patrons) no longer needed to keep their best works secret.
So copyright is a good thing, wisely used. But it not, and never has been, a "natural property right."
-Graham
First of all, RHAT is not "the FOSS sector." Secondly, nice job picking the two year timeframe. In every other time period Yahoo can display, MSFT comes out ahead.
If my personal preferences translated into stock market success, RHAT would be kicking MSFT's hairy ass. But that just isn't what's happening Out There.
-Graham
So, if you hit the power button on the UPS with your elbow, would it be okay to tell your boss "the systems went down because of a power failure?"
If that's the case, then why would Marvel agree to pay him the 10% in the first place?
Because with most other NIC/switch brands, you can never really, truly disable autonegotiation. When you hard-code the speed and duplex, it's more of a suggestion. They still run the negotiation to find out what the other side is doing. With Cisco gear, if you hard code the settings, then it just ignores any autonegotiation, just like in the dark ages.
I'm not defending Cisco - I think their approach is wrong. But it's at least understandable that they are taking the side of the MCSITW (most conservative sysadmin in the world), who would want to hard-code settings on all sides and ALSO find a way to ensure that autonegotiation could NEVER POSSIBLY happen, even if random electrical noise somehow convinced one device that maybe the other one was trying to negotiate with it.
-Graham
I'm about to leave work and go home. When I do, I plan to hit the so-called "power button." When I do this, code will execute on the box that flushes cache to disk and then commands the power supply to interrupt most (but not all) of its DC output. At that time, my computer will be in a state commonly referred to as "off."
By your logic, I can claim that my computer is down due to a power failure.
Perhaps you would complain: But power was getting to the computer.
So what about the situation where I accidentally hit the (again, so-called) "off" button on my UPS. In this case the computer will go down due to a lack of power getting to it. However, the power is still on at the wall socket - I have just chosen (unintentionally) to interrupt the supply to the computer. Is this a power failure?
I don't think you can call it a power failure if power is abundantly available, and you just don't choose to make use of it.
-Graham
He's actually improving. Go back and watch 'Night Court' or anything else he did pre-TNG. It's the same, only worse. It's pretty surprising that he did as good a job as he did with Data, considering that he hasn't done much with anything else he's been given. His turn as Dr. Soong on Enterprise was some of his better recent work.
Good. Instead of screwing around with the clueless networks, let's have a specialist channel that produces SciFi that's actually good.
That way, the next Firefly won't have to show a stupid Western episode first, before the premiere airs (just like the original Star Trek had to, remember?). And two good SciFi shows will never be on back-to-back. And the good SciFi shows will never be pre-empted by inanities like Presidential addresses, natural disasters, or football.
And, most importantly, shows that consistently draw a strong fan base will be able to stay on the air, even if the fan base is much smaller than the vast quantities of drooling mouth-breathers eagerly anticipating 'Survivor: Antarctica.'
-Graham
I don't know if you realize this, but the tech sector is in recession.
The Nasdaq Computer Index hit a peak around 1/1/00 and has subsequently lost two-thirds of its value. (chart)
Microsoft hit a peak around 1/1/00 and has subsequently lost half its value. (chart)
If you take losses in a recession, but you take smaller losses than everyone else, you are still outperforming the market.
-Graham
SeaLaunch has been operating for five years now, and has launched many commercial satellites for companies like DirecTV, XM Radio, etc.
Scaled Composites is commercial + manned. SeaLaunch is commercial + orbital. So far, there is nobody offering, or even seriously planning, commercial + manned + orbital.
-Graham
Which certainly explains why the woman would want to be invisible.
You could get a TiVo that records HDTV. There are plenty of them available. I saw one at Best Buy just the other day.
Employees aren't company property. The question is: To what extent, if any, should employees have an expectation of privacy while at the workplace. The fact that it's a computer, rather than a typewriter or a video camera, is irrelevant to the discussion of what constitutes an appropriate level of workplace surveillance.
The act is important, not the instrument.
If someone comes to your house and uses your telephone, it is NOT legal for you to tape their conversation and review it later - even though it's YOUR telephone. It's not legal for you to beat them over the head with a crowbar either, even though it's YOUR crowbar. At some point, your freedom to act is limited by the rule of law.
In the United States, it is completely legal for an employer to monitor their employees in nearly any manner they choose, including installing video cameras in every office - so long as the monitoring is disclosed to the employees. In other countries, maybe the rules are different. What we should be asking ourselves is: what set of rules gives rise to the best society?
If you take this to either of its logical extremes, it doesn't work. In an environment where every action is completely monitored and employees are given no independent freedom to act, the organization loses the power and value of the workers' collective intelligence, which would otherwise have been a substantial asset. Other companies operating in a less rigidly controlled manner will have a major competitive advantage. Note that this is not merely theoretical - the United States' rise to economic prominence was largely due to this very advantage. ("American Ingenuity and Know-How", remember?)
Going the other way, if rules exist that say that bosses are never allowed to look in on employees - or may only follow rigidly controlled supervisory processes - then the company suffers from free riders, lack of ability to implement its decisions, and general organizational chaos. The worst excesses of "union shops" are an example of taking this too far. I don't have anything against unions in general; I'm thinking only of the cases where the union heirarchy effectively supplants management.
So the right answer must be somewhere in between. The really interesting question is where, and why?
-Graham
It might give us everything YOU want. There are a lot of space cadets who don't really care (though they may claim otherwise) about actual science, but really want to GO THEMSELVES into outer space. (Not, you understand, the actual nausea-inducing, life-threatening environment that real astronauts endure - they want the television experience, with earl grey tea in the resort-class guest quarters.)
Since they will never get this in their lifetimes, the next best thing (sort of) is to believe that SOMEONE is getting it - which requires a somewhat more credible manned spaceflight program than exploding shuttles and a broken-down orbiting utility trailer with no food.
-Graham
Why do you need to ride SS3 to the orbital facility, since "the only important parts of [your] presence" can also arrive there in milliseconds?
I have a job where I provide IT services in my own building and in another one 800 miles away. Invariably, when I physically go there, I find out about things and get stuff done that would have taken orders of magnitude more effort, and/or never gotten done at all, by phone or even videoconference.
Like it or not, we are great apes, and our capabilities are limited. We are not able to relate to each other "over the phone" in the same way that we can in person, because we posess millions of years worth of evolutionary adaptations geared towards physical presence. As a result, we need to be there when anything genuinely complex or worthwhile is on the line (which includes most significant business negotiations, but does not include, for example, a tech support call).
-Graham