Well, it does have to fly up to 60,000 feet, and then back down again, during which time it will be in thicker air. You're right in that any unexpected hydrogen combustion or explosion is much more likely to happen during critical maneuvering than during station-keeping, but that was already true.
I might go to the same purchase site 40 times in an hour to get information and decide what product to buy, then disappear because I now have to spend three weeks fighting the internal purchase order process at my company. If I come back with a signed PO and find that my IP address has been banned (or whatever), I'm likely to tear it up and go shop at the next-best competitor.
And their engineers have two arms, two legs, and are generally a light pinkish-brown color. And they all wear shirts with buttons in front! They're obviously copying us!
Oh, I dunno. Yeah, Wil's a blogger, "one of us" etc - but some of his early scenes on TNG were even more unwatchable than those of the other characters, and that's saying something. He got a *lot* better in the last couple seasons - again, even more so than the other characters, and that's also saying something. But to claim that Wil had a vast acting talent that somehow went unrecognized - well, I just don't see it.
Just to check, I loaded up an old Turbo Pascal 2.0 project that I happen to have kicking around. It's not a trivial project - it's a utility to help with the mechanical aspects of designing a vehicle for Steve Jackson Games "Car Wars" system. Basically, from a full screen text window, you pick and choose items for your car, and the system calculates weight, cost and space. Once you finish, you can print a vehicle sheet just like the one from the Car Wars rule book.
It was developed on a CP/M system in 1983, in Turbo Pascal 2.0. A few years ago, for reasons of nostalgia, I had it transferred from the (miraculously still readable) 8" floppies on which it had been saved.
Because my CP/M system had a weird ASCII terminal with proprietary control codes, I never used any of the built-in terminal control - I just used functions of my own, with a boolean that specified whether to use my-weird-terminal or VT100 code sets. Back when I converted it, I switched it over to use the Borland CRT unit, which was trivially easy.
I just tried it in Delphi 2005. I hit a couple compiler errors because of bad coding in my original source (I had a habit of mixing signed and unsigned integers as if they were the same thing, which type checking in the modern compiler now catches). And the CRT unit doesn't exist any more, so I had to download some random replacement from a third party. Total elapsed time: 45 minutes.
So the net damage over 20+ years is: I have to fix my broken integers (which I admit is my own fault in the first place), and I have to find a tty control unit because people don't really use ttys any more (but the exact unit I need is the first hit on my first Google search).
Show me a C application with that good a track record through 20 years and two platform switches (CP/M-->DOS-->Windows, or three if you count Win95/98 and Win2k/XP separately).
If you were writing in C in 1983, you were doing it on Unix and using "classic" K&R syntax. There's no way that code will run with just a tweak or two under, say, Visual C++.
-Graham
Re:amazing programing in 74k, and no serious bugs
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 1
Note that an access time of 11.7 microseconds is the same thing as saying that the memory runs at 85 kHz. Which is 0.08 MHz. Modern desktop computers have memory buses that run at up to 800 Mhz. This is a factor of ten thousand.
In what other area of human endeavor have we seen a ten-thousand-fold improvement over 40 years?
-Graham
Re:amazing programing in 256k, and no serious bugs
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 1
The people doing the soldering presumably knew that astronauts' lives depended on getting it right. Would you rather trust your life to someone correctly soldering a board (followed by, no doubt, dozens of inspections and certifications), or to 1960s-era automated manufacturing? Remember, this was before Demming and the "zero defect" revolution.
Then you aren't running current patches, and are vulnerable to various exploits. In order not to be vulnerable, you'll have to run Windows Update, which will require you to reboot for several of the current critical updates.
Don't you mean antidisestablishmentarianistic? I'm not sure you can get away with the "istic" since antidisestablishmentarian is already an adjective. Either way, "raistic" is not a common English suffix.
Well, sure - let's grant that precedent. Would it not then be Taiwan who has a right to retake mainland China? After all, the current Taiwanese government is the antecedent of the original (pre-1949) Republic of China. The People's Republic is the portion that seceded. It just happens to be much larger, and if unaided, Taiwan would not be able to win a war - but in terms of precedent (if accepted), it's still Taiwan that has the right to reinvade China, not the other way around.
No kidding. It took them until about 1998-99 to figure out that a server operating system needed a credible Web server platform. Don't blame Microsoft, Novell did it to themselves.
It runs widgets that tell you a stock price or the power left in your battery, not in windows but integreated borderlessly into the desktop.
So, basically, what we're saying is: Some company wrote Active Desktop for Mac(*), and now they're porting it to Windows.
But, didn't all(**) the Windows users turn off Active Desktop back in 1998/99 or thereabouts? And if they wanted to turn it back on, wouldn't they just do that, rather than paying good money for some third-party program?
I don't get this idea.
-Graham
(*) I am well aware that whatever-the-hell for Mac probably came out well before Active Desktop ever did. However, before you flame me on this point, please understand that I don't give a crap.
(**) Everyone who works in tech support knows at least one (l)user who still has Active Desktop enabled. However, it's a mistake, and even that (l)user's co-workers all know it.
They aren't a 4th branch, they're the executive branch. They all report up (eventually) through to the President. The way it's supposed to work is that Congress lays down the rules under which they operate, and then the President and his subordinates implement the programs in accordance with the acts of Congress. The way it actually works is that the President does as much as he possibly can without ever consulting anyone, until someone in Congress or the courts squawks loudly enough to stop him.
But this isn't a 4th branch - it's how our 3 branches work.
1. We aren't likely to destroy a planet. At most, we're going to change its atmospheric composition and climate to the point where it is no longer a viable environment for many of its current species, including ours. However, more than likely we will continue to thrive as a species, and will merely be forced to operate at a lower level of technology, and/or in a different geographic range.
2. Most people who are concerned about global warming are also concerned about the global dominance of America, oil companies, and so forth. These interests vitally depend the current geographic range of the human species, and its current social behaviors including the use of technology.
3. Problem solved. Just wait.
Now, if you are concerned about your own prospects as a competitive individual within the species, you should consider what the change in range and/or climate is likely to do to you, and plan appropriately (since you, uniquely or at least ultimately among species, have that capacity).
In what conceivable economic circumstance could it be worthwhile to ship cows from one planet to another by putting them in the cargo hold of a spaceship?
No one is disputing the point that in a future universe, there will be poor people who still herd cattle. The issue is that the poor people who herd cattle inherently don't have enough money to pay Captain Mal and crew to operate Serenity. The fuel cost of achieving escape velocity must surely be higher than the total value of all the cows you can fit in the hold.
Except - even when they were near-broke, did we ever really the Serenity crew complain about a planetary landing and takeoff? For that matter, did we see them refueling more than once in a dozen or so planetary landings? Whatever their propulsion system, it was clearly not subject to the same constraints as the ones we're used to in our 20th/21st-century world.
So, look at it this way. Nobody's complaining that Serenity stopped to pick up passengers. But these passengers clearly weren't paying outrageously expensive fares. In today's terms, we're talking no more than $1000 each. So if it's worth making a stop (and flying all the way to a destination) to earn maybe $5000 in passenger fares, then it's definitely worth making a few landings (etc) to transport 10 or 20 cows worth maybe $1000 to $2000 each. Particularly if the premium on food value in the outer worlds means that they're actually worth much more.
Basically, this ship just plain don't fit the profile of a NASA man-rated chemical rocket. Getting to orbit just isn't that big a deal in their world.
It's very interesting, actually. From a US perspective we see China as a supplicant, who has to do things our way to be allowed to participate in the "developed" economic world that we created, and therefore own and control. This means that we get to charge an admission fee (e.g. license our "intellectual property" to them), and they are morally in the wrong if they don't pay it.
China sees us as warlords holding temporary advantage due to the outcome of WWII. Chinese warlords have always extorted horrific tribute/taxation from their subjects, but wrapped it in a framework of celestial-academic (or, more recently, communist-rhetorical) self-justification. This is what they think we're doing to them when we say "you have to pay us billions of dollars because (mumble software patent mumble genome license mumble royalty blah blah)".
China has made numerous moves lately that indicate they no longer consider us to be an unstoppable force. They haven't done anything drastically provocative, but they will. The Taiwan question is intolerable for the Chinese government. Sooner or later, if China stays on its current path, they will arrive at the point where they think they can get away with an invasion. And all I can say is, I sure as hell hope there's a moderate in the White House on that particular day.
Yes, you're absolutely right. I was in a very minor "911" type incident, where nobody died or was even seriously hurt, and it was absolutly shocking the extent to which I was totally unprepared for the real life situation - even though it was not much different, and far less serious, than things I've seen a million times in video games and on "When Fox Executives Attack".
Well, yes. You're absolutely right. Absent external oversight, if corporations are the only entity capable of exercising authority, then they become a de facto government. That's really pretty obvious.
The question is, would that be good government? Would that be a government you want to live under?
These 'all government is bad so dismantle everything' types always seem to forget that whatever you dismantle will be replaced by something else, and if you aren't paying attention then the something else will be worse.
Instead, what about working to establish good government?
Behind Door Number One there is $50 billion dollars in cash.
Behind Door Number Two there is also $50 billion dollars in cash, but there are also fifty thousand full-time employees who make and sell hundreds of different products in dozens of different countries, producing $30+ billion in sales revenues, every year. In addition there's God alone knows how many buildings, computers, vehicles, and for all we know maybe secret alien technology borrowed from the Grays. The collective opinion of Wall Street - which doesn't even know about the UFOs - is that the whole thing is worth maybe $250 billion.
Bill Gates doesn't own 10% of what's behind Door Number One, he owns 10% of what's behind Door Number Two. And he also owns a bunch of other less spectacular stuff. Put it all together and it sort of makes sense, although his personal net worth is still frequently overstated.
One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of his net worth is in unrealized gains. It's taken him many years and a great deal of regulatory effort to get his holdings down from 20% to 10%, and it was probably only possible because he was doing it to fund charitable efforts and other investments. The difference between Bill's net worth and Microsoft's cash is that Bill can't buy a Nimitz-class carrier task group and invade Panama, but Microsoft (at least in theory) could.
Right, it just gets sucked into the big government void. And if this hadn't happened, it would otherwise have been sucked into the big Bill Gates / Microsoft void. Why is one better than the other?
They did an allegedly controlled study on a train, where phone calls are at least somewhat expected and tolerated. The parent is discussing his experience in a theater, which is a very different situation. If he works in the theater, then his sample size is likely large enough to make reasonably accurate experiential generalizations.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it does have to fly up to 60,000 feet, and then back down again, during which time it will be in thicker air. You're right in that any unexpected hydrogen combustion or explosion is much more likely to happen during critical maneuvering than during station-keeping, but that was already true.
-Graham
No, that isn't how Slashdot people think. It really goes more like this:
1. Profit
2. ?
3. Natalie Portman!
I might go to the same purchase site 40 times in an hour to get information and decide what product to buy, then disappear because I now have to spend three weeks fighting the internal purchase order process at my company. If I come back with a signed PO and find that my IP address has been banned (or whatever), I'm likely to tear it up and go shop at the next-best competitor.
-Graham
And their engineers have two arms, two legs, and are generally a light pinkish-brown color. And they all wear shirts with buttons in front! They're obviously copying us!
Just like if your brother's a plumber and you have a clogged toilet.
Why should your family pay you to do what you can do? They already did what they could for you, or you wouldn't be here.
Friends and acquaintances are a different story. However, the story's not much different whether a plumber or a computer guy tells it.
-Graham
Oh, I dunno. Yeah, Wil's a blogger, "one of us" etc - but some of his early scenes on TNG were even more unwatchable than those of the other characters, and that's saying something. He got a *lot* better in the last couple seasons - again, even more so than the other characters, and that's also saying something. But to claim that Wil had a vast acting talent that somehow went unrecognized - well, I just don't see it.
-Graham
Just to check, I loaded up an old Turbo Pascal 2.0 project that I happen to have kicking around. It's not a trivial project - it's a utility to help with the mechanical aspects of designing a vehicle for Steve Jackson Games "Car Wars" system. Basically, from a full screen text window, you pick and choose items for your car, and the system calculates weight, cost and space. Once you finish, you can print a vehicle sheet just like the one from the Car Wars rule book.
It was developed on a CP/M system in 1983, in Turbo Pascal 2.0. A few years ago, for reasons of nostalgia, I had it transferred from the (miraculously still readable) 8" floppies on which it had been saved.
Because my CP/M system had a weird ASCII terminal with proprietary control codes, I never used any of the built-in terminal control - I just used functions of my own, with a boolean that specified whether to use my-weird-terminal or VT100 code sets. Back when I converted it, I switched it over to use the Borland CRT unit, which was trivially easy.
I just tried it in Delphi 2005. I hit a couple compiler errors because of bad coding in my original source (I had a habit of mixing signed and unsigned integers as if they were the same thing, which type checking in the modern compiler now catches). And the CRT unit doesn't exist any more, so I had to download some random replacement from a third party. Total elapsed time: 45 minutes.
So the net damage over 20+ years is: I have to fix my broken integers (which I admit is my own fault in the first place), and I have to find a tty control unit because people don't really use ttys any more (but the exact unit I need is the first hit on my first Google search).
Show me a C application with that good a track record through 20 years and two platform switches (CP/M-->DOS-->Windows, or three if you count Win95/98 and Win2k/XP separately).
If you were writing in C in 1983, you were doing it on Unix and using "classic" K&R syntax. There's no way that code will run with just a tweak or two under, say, Visual C++.
-Graham
Note that an access time of 11.7 microseconds is the same thing as saying that the memory runs at 85 kHz. Which is 0.08 MHz. Modern desktop computers have memory buses that run at up to 800 Mhz. This is a factor of ten thousand.
In what other area of human endeavor have we seen a ten-thousand-fold improvement over 40 years?
-Graham
The people doing the soldering presumably knew that astronauts' lives depended on getting it right. Would you rather trust your life to someone correctly soldering a board (followed by, no doubt, dozens of inspections and certifications), or to 1960s-era automated manufacturing? Remember, this was before Demming and the "zero defect" revolution.
-Graham
Then you aren't running current patches, and are vulnerable to various exploits. In order not to be vulnerable, you'll have to run Windows Update, which will require you to reboot for several of the current critical updates.
Don't you mean antidisestablishmentarianistic? I'm not sure you can get away with the "istic" since antidisestablishmentarian is already an adjective. Either way, "raistic" is not a common English suffix.
-Graham
Well, sure - let's grant that precedent. Would it not then be Taiwan who has a right to retake mainland China? After all, the current Taiwanese government is the antecedent of the original (pre-1949) Republic of China. The People's Republic is the portion that seceded. It just happens to be much larger, and if unaided, Taiwan would not be able to win a war - but in terms of precedent (if accepted), it's still Taiwan that has the right to reinvade China, not the other way around.
-Graham
No kidding. It took them until about 1998-99 to figure out that a server operating system needed a credible Web server platform. Don't blame Microsoft, Novell did it to themselves.
It runs widgets that tell you a stock price or the power left in your battery, not in windows but integreated borderlessly into the desktop.
So, basically, what we're saying is: Some company wrote Active Desktop for Mac(*), and now they're porting it to Windows.
But, didn't all(**) the Windows users turn off Active Desktop back in 1998/99 or thereabouts? And if they wanted to turn it back on, wouldn't they just do that, rather than paying good money for some third-party program?
I don't get this idea.
-Graham
(*) I am well aware that whatever-the-hell for Mac probably came out well before Active Desktop ever did. However, before you flame me on this point, please understand that I don't give a crap.
(**) Everyone who works in tech support knows at least one (l)user who still has Active Desktop enabled. However, it's a mistake, and even that (l)user's co-workers all know it.
They aren't a 4th branch, they're the executive branch. They all report up (eventually) through to the President. The way it's supposed to work is that Congress lays down the rules under which they operate, and then the President and his subordinates implement the programs in accordance with the acts of Congress. The way it actually works is that the President does as much as he possibly can without ever consulting anyone, until someone in Congress or the courts squawks loudly enough to stop him.
But this isn't a 4th branch - it's how our 3 branches work.
-Graham
1. We aren't likely to destroy a planet. At most, we're going to change its atmospheric composition and climate to the point where it is no longer a viable environment for many of its current species, including ours. However, more than likely we will continue to thrive as a species, and will merely be forced to operate at a lower level of technology, and/or in a different geographic range.
2. Most people who are concerned about global warming are also concerned about the global dominance of America, oil companies, and so forth. These interests vitally depend the current geographic range of the human species, and its current social behaviors including the use of technology.
3. Problem solved. Just wait.
Now, if you are concerned about your own prospects as a competitive individual within the species, you should consider what the change in range and/or climate is likely to do to you, and plan appropriately (since you, uniquely or at least ultimately among species, have that capacity).
-Graham
SpaceShipOne carries three people, of which one must be the pilot. Discuss.
I think the question is this:
In what conceivable economic circumstance could it be worthwhile to ship cows from one planet to another by putting them in the cargo hold of a spaceship?
No one is disputing the point that in a future universe, there will be poor people who still herd cattle. The issue is that the poor people who herd cattle inherently don't have enough money to pay Captain Mal and crew to operate Serenity. The fuel cost of achieving escape velocity must surely be higher than the total value of all the cows you can fit in the hold.
Except - even when they were near-broke, did we ever really the Serenity crew complain about a planetary landing and takeoff? For that matter, did we see them refueling more than once in a dozen or so planetary landings? Whatever their propulsion system, it was clearly not subject to the same constraints as the ones we're used to in our 20th/21st-century world.
So, look at it this way. Nobody's complaining that Serenity stopped to pick up passengers. But these passengers clearly weren't paying outrageously expensive fares. In today's terms, we're talking no more than $1000 each. So if it's worth making a stop (and flying all the way to a destination) to earn maybe $5000 in passenger fares, then it's definitely worth making a few landings (etc) to transport 10 or 20 cows worth maybe $1000 to $2000 each. Particularly if the premium on food value in the outer worlds means that they're actually worth much more.
Basically, this ship just plain don't fit the profile of a NASA man-rated chemical rocket. Getting to orbit just isn't that big a deal in their world.
-Graham
It's very interesting, actually. From a US perspective we see China as a supplicant, who has to do things our way to be allowed to participate in the "developed" economic world that we created, and therefore own and control. This means that we get to charge an admission fee (e.g. license our "intellectual property" to them), and they are morally in the wrong if they don't pay it.
China sees us as warlords holding temporary advantage due to the outcome of WWII. Chinese warlords have always extorted horrific tribute/taxation from their subjects, but wrapped it in a framework of celestial-academic (or, more recently, communist-rhetorical) self-justification. This is what they think we're doing to them when we say "you have to pay us billions of dollars because (mumble software patent mumble genome license mumble royalty blah blah)".
China has made numerous moves lately that indicate they no longer consider us to be an unstoppable force. They haven't done anything drastically provocative, but they will. The Taiwan question is intolerable for the Chinese government. Sooner or later, if China stays on its current path, they will arrive at the point where they think they can get away with an invasion. And all I can say is, I sure as hell hope there's a moderate in the White House on that particular day.
-Graham
Nooooooo!
Don't wish that on SNL. It was actually good for a while. Although it's started to suck again now.
-Graham
Yes, you're absolutely right. I was in a very minor "911" type incident, where nobody died or was even seriously hurt, and it was absolutly shocking the extent to which I was totally unprepared for the real life situation - even though it was not much different, and far less serious, than things I've seen a million times in video games and on "When Fox Executives Attack".
It's different when it's real.
-Graham
Well, yes. You're absolutely right. Absent external oversight, if corporations are the only entity capable of exercising authority, then they become a de facto government. That's really pretty obvious.
The question is, would that be good government? Would that be a government you want to live under?
These 'all government is bad so dismantle everything' types always seem to forget that whatever you dismantle will be replaced by something else, and if you aren't paying attention then the something else will be worse.
Instead, what about working to establish good government?
-Graham
It's really simple.
Behind Door Number One there is $50 billion dollars in cash.
Behind Door Number Two there is also $50 billion dollars in cash, but there are also fifty thousand full-time employees who make and sell hundreds of different products in dozens of different countries, producing $30+ billion in sales revenues, every year. In addition there's God alone knows how many buildings, computers, vehicles, and for all we know maybe secret alien technology borrowed from the Grays. The collective opinion of Wall Street - which doesn't even know about the UFOs - is that the whole thing is worth maybe $250 billion.
Bill Gates doesn't own 10% of what's behind Door Number One, he owns 10% of what's behind Door Number Two. And he also owns a bunch of other less spectacular stuff. Put it all together and it sort of makes sense, although his personal net worth is still frequently overstated.
One thing to keep in mind is that a lot of his net worth is in unrealized gains. It's taken him many years and a great deal of regulatory effort to get his holdings down from 20% to 10%, and it was probably only possible because he was doing it to fund charitable efforts and other investments. The difference between Bill's net worth and Microsoft's cash is that Bill can't buy a Nimitz-class carrier task group and invade Panama, but Microsoft (at least in theory) could.
-Graham
Right, it just gets sucked into the big government void. And if this hadn't happened, it would otherwise have been sucked into the big Bill Gates / Microsoft void. Why is one better than the other?
They did an allegedly controlled study on a train, where phone calls are at least somewhat expected and tolerated. The parent is discussing his experience in a theater, which is a very different situation. If he works in the theater, then his sample size is likely large enough to make reasonably accurate experiential generalizations.
-Graham