Your maths is correct, but it's unlikely that they worked 365 days per year.
People who've done the economic calculations claim it's unlikely that ancient Egypt could have supported enough 'slaves' to build the pyramids. However, if they were 'free men' paying their 'taxes' by working a few months per year, you can make the figures add up.
Of course, if that's how they did it, you'd have to factor in a few months break per year break while the workers attended to their planting, harvest, etc.
Notice that you displayed your own prejudice by starting your prefered timeline at the Colossus
I did nothing of the kind. Colossus was one of several I listed, from a variety of nations. My intent was to counter the usual USA drivel about ENIAC being the first computer.
You can tell, as they start their timeline at 1945, thus allowing them to start with Eniac, and leave out the earlier british computer (Colossus?) used to break the german codes during WW2. And some interesting polish work from the 30's. And that french beasty, and.......
It's kind of like the 'space museum' that didn't mention Sputnik or Yuri Gagarin, childish really.
But seriously, those of us who don't live in the USA, and who use products from USA and elsewhere on a daily basis, find the whole notion of an Americans-only closed-shop in the software industry rather liducrous.
Personally, my long term plan is to have a nice house and a satellite dish in some sunny third-world nation with nice beaches, and tele-commute. I don't much care if the client I'm working for is in the USA, India, or wherever.
I think that legislation might be the only way. Hey, Mr Gates, if you want to use this country to stay rich, then you have to pay it back, your workforce has to be a certain percentage American
Great idea. Now lets get India, Canada, UK, Germany, and all the other countries who buy Microsoft products to do the same.
Honestly, you guys are amazing.
You're talking about a global industry, where the physical location of the provider is unimportant. How can you expect to keep a USA closed-shop going? And do you really think it would be fair to do so?
Lots of good universities in India. The indian middle class have a firm committment to education, and go to great effort to ensure their children get a good education (usually in something practical, engineering, medicine, etc)
In fact, if not for the Indian educated doctors and engineers, the UK health and technology sectors would have imploded years ago.
It's quite a while since I worked for the government, but when I did, I found it very annoying that some people automatically assumed we sat around all day playing cards and pouring champagne down the sink because we enjoyed wasting taxpayers money.
The result of this sort of attitude is that politicians think they can order arbitrary % reductions in budgets, and these will have no effect on efficiency or service delivery because we'll just stop 'wasting' so much money.
The truth is that government departments are typically starved of funds. Most of the 'inefficiency' (and I've seen plenty) is caused by under-investment, people spending 4 hours a week doing some task that could be done in 10 minutes if they were allowed to buy up-to-date gear.
Your assumption that bureaucrats will go for the more expensive solution to cover their arses is light-years from anything I've seen in real life.
Of course, these days the quote would be a station wagon full of DVDs.
Lets try doing the calculation using cheap(ish) consumer-level DVD writers.
At x4, you can write 4G to a DVD in around 15 minutes, and read it back in about the same time. That's 8G per hour, or around 2 1/4 M per second, a fair bit faster than a consumer-level net connection.
And if the station-wagon was full of disks, the drive home would work out to well under a minute per disk.
pray they let you keep all of this stuff in your cage at Guantanamo
Let's not forget, this crappy system will be used to identify 'terrorists', who will then be arrested, held incommunicado for months, and then possibly sentenced to death in secret military tribunals, without ever having a private meeting with a lawyer, or even being told the evidence against them.
Thank you for so clearly demonstrating your anti-government bigotry.
As I said, I've seen this tendering madness happen.
It's incredibly annoying to be forced to give the tender to a bunch of incompetents, who've fscked-up every previous job you've given them, because their bid is 3% lower than the good, professional bunch you want to hire. And yet, the word very clearly enunciated from on-high (ie from the politicians) is that we always take the lowest bid.
The reason for so much government inefficiency is not bureaucratic indifference to the waste of money, it's politicians passing on 'cost saving' edicts from on-high, with no real concept of the waste it causes at the coal-face.
It's easy for a politician to order a 10% cut in the stationary budget, and pat himself on the back for how much taxpayers money he's saved. He doesn't have to sit in the office for the last month of the financial year watching people wander from desk to desk trying to scrounge basic supplies that let them get their job done.
Government departments are pretty-much obliged to go with the lowest tender, even if the people running the tender know that the winning bidders are a bunch of incompetents who couldn't organize a fsck in a brothel.
So, the lowest bid wins, and then even if they actually are well-meaning and try to do the right thing, they have such limited resourses that they usually have to resort to working too few staff too many hours.
Um, from my reading of the paper, the same 'logic' should prove that solar cells can't work once they've achieved thermal equilibrium with their environment.
I have a few gadgets around the house that prove otherwise.
I think his mistake is in assuming that everything is a 'heat engine'. There are non heat-engine processes going on here which he's not accounting for.
[I]but it seems pretty logical to me that there's no such thing as a rescue mission in space[/I]
I suspect, if they'd known, they could have organised something. Even if there was no other shuttle available, the Russians could probably have organised something. Even if they couldn't get a man-carrying beastie up there before supplies ran out, they could have diverted a military launch to re-supply while they got their act together.
People make mistakes, the problem with manned space travel is that those mistakes are much more likely to prove fatal.
The impact on mars was, FSCKin' HUGE (to use the technical term).
Big enough, in fact, that a photo of Mars taken from the right angle shows the planet being a little bit 'out of round', which makes the crater about a metric kazzillion times bigger than any crater on Earth.
If we'd taken a hit that big, it wouldn't just have wiped out the dinosaurs, it would probably have sterilized the entire planet.
On the one hand, I think that anyone who wants to publish a 'Star Trek' or 'Star Wars' book should be required to ok it first with the owners of those franchises.
BUT....
If I want to write a sci-fi which takes place in a future 'confederation' with an egotistical Captain 'Church', and a navigation officer called 'Prok' who is annoyingly logical, well that should be ok. No-one is going to mistake it for the original, but by using some of the same background, I ease the readers immersion into the story, and possibly extend the original in interesting ways.
Note: This is what the Potter books already do, they're based on any number of Boys Own Adventure stories, where 3 or so schoolfriends have all sorts of adventures while dodging crotchety old school-masters, etc.
Those of us who live in the pacific region remember the French terrorist bombing of the Rainbow Warrior (a Greenpeace protest vessel) in a New Zealand harbour.
The terrorists were French Secret Service agents, and were caught, convicted, and sentenced to prison terms in NZ. The French government made a deal with the NZ government where they would serve their terms in French prisons, and once they were back in France they broke this agreement and set them free.
So, Weapons of Mass Destruction (which actually exist) and proven terrorist links, but no oil. Sadly the conditions for war are not met.
Slashdot Mirror
Your maths is correct, but it's unlikely that they worked 365 days per year.
People who've done the economic calculations claim it's unlikely that ancient Egypt could have supported enough 'slaves' to build the pyramids. However, if they were 'free men' paying their 'taxes' by working a few months per year, you can make the figures add up.
Of course, if that's how they did it, you'd have to factor in a few months break per year break while the workers attended to their planting, harvest, etc.
Notice that you displayed your own prejudice by starting your prefered timeline at the Colossus
I did nothing of the kind.
Colossus was one of several I listed, from a variety of nations. My intent was to counter the usual USA drivel about ENIAC being the first computer.
Couldn't get past the opening page of the web site. My comment was clearly based on their web site, which starts it's timeline at 1945.
You can tell, as they start their timeline at 1945, thus allowing them to start with Eniac, and leave out the earlier british computer (Colossus?) used to break the german codes during WW2. And some interesting polish work from the 30's. And that french beasty, and .......
It's kind of like the 'space museum' that didn't mention Sputnik or Yuri Gagarin, childish really.
Iraq?
Isn't /. america-centric these days?
But seriously, those of us who don't live in the USA, and who use products from USA and elsewhere on a daily basis, find the whole notion of an Americans-only closed-shop in the software industry rather liducrous.
Personally, my long term plan is to have a nice house and a satellite dish in some sunny third-world nation with nice beaches, and tele-commute. I don't much care if the client I'm working for is in the USA, India, or wherever.
I think that legislation might be the only way. Hey, Mr Gates, if you want to use this country to stay rich, then you have to pay it back, your workforce has to be a certain percentage American
Great idea.
Now lets get India, Canada, UK, Germany, and all the other countries who buy Microsoft products to do the same.
Honestly, you guys are amazing.
You're talking about a global industry, where the physical location of the provider is unimportant. How can you expect to keep a USA closed-shop going? And do you really think it would be fair to do so?
Lots of good universities in India. The indian middle class have a firm committment to education, and go to great effort to ensure their children get a good education (usually in something practical, engineering, medicine, etc)
In fact, if not for the Indian educated doctors and engineers, the UK health and technology sectors would have imploded years ago.
It's quite a while since I worked for the government, but when I did, I found it very annoying that some people automatically assumed we sat around all day playing cards and pouring champagne down the sink because we enjoyed wasting taxpayers money.
The result of this sort of attitude is that politicians think they can order arbitrary % reductions in budgets, and these will have no effect on efficiency or service delivery because we'll just stop 'wasting' so much money.
The truth is that government departments are typically starved of funds. Most of the 'inefficiency' (and I've seen plenty) is caused by under-investment, people spending 4 hours a week doing some task that could be done in 10 minutes if they were allowed to buy up-to-date gear.
Your assumption that bureaucrats will go for the more expensive solution to cover their arses is light-years from anything I've seen in real life.
Of course, these days the quote would be a station wagon full of DVDs.
Lets try doing the calculation using cheap(ish) consumer-level DVD writers.
At x4, you can write 4G to a DVD in around 15 minutes, and read it back in about the same time. That's 8G per hour, or around 2 1/4 M per second, a fair bit faster than a consumer-level net connection.
And if the station-wagon was full of disks, the drive home would work out to well under a minute per disk.
You forgot one important point ....
pray they let you keep all of this stuff in your cage at Guantanamo
Let's not forget, this crappy system will be used to identify 'terrorists', who will then be arrested, held incommunicado for months, and then possibly sentenced to death in secret military tribunals, without ever having a private meeting with a lawyer, or even being told the evidence against them.
Thank you for so clearly demonstrating your anti-government bigotry.
As I said, I've seen this tendering madness happen.
It's incredibly annoying to be forced to give the tender to a bunch of incompetents, who've fscked-up every previous job you've given them, because their bid is 3% lower than the good, professional bunch you want to hire. And yet, the word very clearly enunciated from on-high (ie from the politicians) is that we always take the lowest bid.
The reason for so much government inefficiency is not bureaucratic indifference to the waste of money, it's politicians passing on 'cost saving' edicts from on-high, with no real concept of the waste it causes at the coal-face.
It's easy for a politician to order a 10% cut in the stationary budget, and pat himself on the back for how much taxpayers money he's saved. He doesn't have to sit in the office for the last month of the financial year watching people wander from desk to desk trying to scrounge basic supplies that let them get their job done.
Again, I've seen it happen.
right on 2 out of 3 points
/
\
- -
|
-=-
V
unless, of course, the buggy software reports that I am Osama bin-Laden's brother-in-law.
I've seen this sort of thing happen before.
Government departments are pretty-much obliged to go with the lowest tender, even if the people running the tender know that the winning bidders are a bunch of incompetents who couldn't organize a fsck in a brothel.
So, the lowest bid wins, and then even if they actually are well-meaning and try to do the right thing, they have such limited resourses that they usually have to resort to working too few staff too many hours.
The result will not be quality code.
Um, from my reading of the paper, the same 'logic' should prove that solar cells can't work once they've achieved thermal equilibrium with their environment.
I have a few gadgets around the house that prove otherwise.
I think his mistake is in assuming that everything is a 'heat engine'. There are non heat-engine processes going on here which he's not accounting for.
Or because its time has passed?
Was it called 'Buffy' becasue it 'slays' the competition?
Or was it because it's easy on the eye, but depressing, annoying and erratic ?
I'd suggest 'yoosian', as in yoosless.
[I]but it seems pretty logical to me that there's no such thing as a rescue mission in space[/I]
I suspect, if they'd known, they could have organised something. Even if there was no other shuttle available, the Russians could probably have organised something. Even if they couldn't get a man-carrying beastie up there before supplies ran out, they could have diverted a military launch to re-supply while they got their act together.
People make mistakes, the problem with manned space travel is that those mistakes are much more likely to prove fatal.
The impact on mars was, FSCKin' HUGE (to use the technical term).
Big enough, in fact, that a photo of Mars taken from the right angle shows the planet being a little bit 'out of round', which makes the crater about a metric kazzillion times bigger than any crater on Earth.
If we'd taken a hit that big, it wouldn't just have wiped out the dinosaurs, it would probably have sterilized the entire planet.
Actually, in science, a 'no result' can sometimes be just as interesting as a 'result'.
The complete failure of early 20th Century scienmtists to measure the 'ether' is a case in point. Turns out it wasn't there, a nice thing to know.
On the one hand, I think that anyone who wants to publish a 'Star Trek' or 'Star Wars' book should be required to ok it first with the owners of those franchises.
BUT....
If I want to write a sci-fi which takes place in a future 'confederation' with an egotistical Captain 'Church', and a navigation officer called 'Prok' who is annoyingly logical, well that should be ok.
No-one is going to mistake it for the original, but by using some of the same background, I ease the readers immersion into the story, and possibly extend the original in interesting ways.
Note: This is what the Potter books already do, they're based on any number of Boys Own Adventure stories, where 3 or so schoolfriends have all sorts of adventures while dodging crotchety old school-masters, etc.
Those of us who live in the pacific region remember the French terrorist bombing of the Rainbow Warrior (a Greenpeace protest vessel) in a New Zealand harbour.
The terrorists were French Secret Service agents, and were caught, convicted, and sentenced to prison terms in NZ. The French government made a deal with the NZ government where they would serve their terms in French prisons, and once they were back in France they broke this agreement and set them free.
So, Weapons of Mass Destruction (which actually exist) and proven terrorist links, but no oil. Sadly the conditions for war are not met.
Um, I think you'll find that most of the Pacific Ocean is outside the USA, and that's where most of the early US astronauts came down.