I don't really agree with your last point, and that's because I lived through that era. When I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, it seems every smart kid wanted to grow up to be a scientist-astronaut or design nuclear-powered starships. There was a huge push in the schools, from elementary on up, on physics and math, with a direct eye on the "Space Age" careers of tomorrow. Maybe you will have a job on Mars....better learn calculus and quantum mechanics! Nobody every said anything about learning PL/I or how to grow bacteria in a petri dish. Take a look at your iconic geek TV shows and movies from the period. What kind of job does the generic yellowshirt on Star Trek do? Something to do with physics, you can be sure. Did you ever see a programmer or biologist glamourized in 1960s or 1970s TV or movies?
These things matter. They influence the career choices young people make, and where capital flows, and we most definitely do have a finite supply of both brilliant young people and capital.
You know, at least I only claimed to deduce the goals of the Chinese government, based on the preferences revealed by their actual policy choices over the past 20 years. I'm impressed that by contrast you claim to have direct insight into what the average Chinese individual thinks. (And in that context your request for a citation for my observation is hilariously ironic.)
Don't you find reading the minds of 1 billion people distracting? How do you sort out their feelings about their space program from whether they have to take a dump at the moment? Inquiring minds want to know.
OK. We're just going to have to disagree on that. All that you say about Constellation is true, but I haven't heard anybody who knows something about the aerospace business claim this is the result of void in technical know-how. Everybody says it's a management failure, or insane project goals from Congress, or both. Which has absolutely nothing to do with technical skill.
Going back to my Magic Johnson analogy -- it would be as if Johnson was asked to sink baskets, but then the baskets were randomly moved to differet locations, the ball was deflated at random intervals, the lights were suddenly turned out in the arena, or his manager told him the wrong time to show up to play. No surprise that under those conditions he finds it hard to hit the basket.
And if you think the issue is genuinely technical know-how -- then why is it SpaceX is achieving things faster than Constellation, and for amazing less money? Are they importing technicians from China? I think not. They're working with the exact same technical base (people and industries) as NASA. They're just managing it far better, and have a perfectly clear and logically consistent blueprint from the top. NASA doesn't. And, IMHO, that's all there is to it.
Let's recall Hayabusa was a very complex robotic mission, and that the Japanese are phenomenal at such things. The Chinese...not so much. China specializes in heavy industry and cheap assembly. It's the Japanese that specialize in complex programming and technical perfection of expensive products. I think it's very likely Hayabusa was beyond the capabilities of the PRC, then and now.
I think you're wrong about the second, however. The Chinese appear to have the same general interest in space stunts that the Soviets did: to convince their own population that progress is amazing, that the future is Chinese, and that all those peculiar rumors about brutality and privation in the countryside, or crashing real estate prices on the coast, or high-speed rail roadbeds cracking because of shoddy and corrupt construction, or the wild male/female imbalance in 20-year-olds are just...the mutterings of wreckers, evil propaganda from jealous foreign devils, et cetera.
I would like to say the retreat of the United States in the 1970s from building Pyramids -- big showy Ozymandias looky look projects -- was a sign of social health, and perhaps it was. It may have been that Nixon and Reagan (ignoring the brief and futile interludes of Ford and Carter) rationally turned away from gargantua, and thereby turned loose American ingenuity, technological talent and tech-oriented capital to give us the computing revolution of the 80s and 90s. If I had to choose, I would take the Internet, Unix, and GPS-enabled smartphones over a base on the Moon supplied, at enormous cost, by an aging fleet of Saturn Vs. And it is possible that we did have to choose -- that there was only so much technological talent and capital available in 1976, and if it went into a robust rockets to the Moon program it would not have been available elsewhere.
Depends what you mean by "no longer capable." No longer capable in the sense of lacking the technical know-how? Of course not. No longer capable in the sense of not having the assembly lines actually set up this moment, not having the raw aluminum and ceramics already sitting on the loading docks, not having the techs already hired and trained in operating the special lathes and die presses? Sure.
I don't see why this is a very interesting definition, however. If you hire a programmer and say he's "not capable" of generating a nice SQL program, you probably don't mean he isn't capable of generating one instantly, on the spot -- that it would take a few hours, say, to write it and debug it. You probably mean he lacks the know-how -- he's got to read books, do a little experimentation. So saying the US isn't "capable" of landing on the Moon, should it decide to do so, seems a peculiar if not deliberately inflammatory use of the phrase. It's a little like saying Magic Johnson can't sink a basket any more, because he is presently retired, probably a little out of shape, and let us say at the moment asleep or at Disneyland with his granddaughter. I mean, yeah, technically, right at the moment, sure, but let's be serious.
Or interest? You're spending an extra $5000 right now, and getting it back over 10 or more years (unless you drive a huge number of miles per year). If you want to make a fair comparison, you need to factor in a reasonable rate of inflation or equivalently interest. The $1 you save in gas costs in year 8 is worth significantly less than the $1 you forked out today to buy the car. (And this is even more true for the younger people that tend to be hybrid buyers, who will have steadily rising wages over the next decade or so, as their careers mature. For these people, the labor required to afford $1 in hybrid car purchase now is quite a bit more than the labor they're spared as a result of $1 in gas cost saved in year 8.)
Anyone who can convince himself that a hybrid makes economic sense in any but very unusual circumstances should not be allowed to manage his own 401(k) funds.
It always puzzles me why folks imagine saying a given piece of tech is old is axiomatically equivalent to saying it's been mightily improved upon since then.
Has the pencil been improved on yet? How about the wheel? Are we still burning gasoline in cylinders with pistons to power cars, like we started doing in the 1880s? Do we still use propellors to make boats move? Et cetera.
I'm not suggesting it's not possible to improve the Shuttle -- but that case has to be made in detail, not tossed off with an assumption that because it was designed in the 60s and built in the 70s there must be a far better idea. After all, the biggest advances since the 70s have mostly been in stuff like electronics or avionics, and besides the fact that this doesn't do squat for things like thermal protection and reliability of very high energy rocket systems under very heavy load (the two weaknesses that killed Columbia and Challenger, respectively) the best of these advances in electronics have in many cases been retrofitted into the Shuttle anyway.
Point me to a genuine major advance in airframe materials, thermal protection systems, or rocket engine design since the 1970s and maybe this contempt might be better supported by actual evidence.
The only difficulty with this attitude is that it's only going to work for the Russian and Dance Departments. If you try it in Physics or Chemistry or Engineering, where a generic professor can be responsible for $1 to $2 million a year in no strings attached research overhead that goes straight into the university's hungry coffers, you will be quickly educated in the different levels of deference applied to cost centers (like IT) and profit centers (like research departments).
I might add that it's possible a place as prestigious in these fields as Cornell might be able to get away with it, because they think, not unreasonably, that for any professor pissed enough to start looking at moving they can find 10 eager replacements, but few universities further down the academic pecking order will be able to do the same.
I think it's worth noting that this is kind of exactly the reason there was a surge of folks, as I recall, getting their ticket in the mid-80s, when 2m repeaters really took off. Quite a lot of guys used the thing as more or less a cell phone, or really car phone, since HTs were still pretty bulky. Not only to set up meetings and stuff with other hams, but also to put a call through the patch to say he'd be home late or what else was he supposed to get at the store?
I think there's room for people who at least start off thinking they'd like a "cell phone" that works even when the power and phones lines are all out from a hurricane. After all, they're doing no harm, they're paying their dues to keep the bands ours, and -- who knows? -- it's entirely possible at some point they might drift into something more technical. This is to even leave out the possibility they might get involved in some RACES or ARES work and put their skills to use for the community.
I don't think the guy should be discouraged for social reasons. Sure, he should know about the technical limitations, but otherwise, go for it and welcome.
You're quite right. I've got an FT-817, and I take it camping. I've got a slingshot and some twine, plus 120 feet of thin wire hooked up to make an inverted-L antenna. A year or so ago I was camping up moderate-high in the Sierra Nevada, in a valley where cell-phone or 2m/440 reception would be out of the question. I used my slingshot to hoist the high end of the antenna up about 35 feet and made contact with a guy in Texas on my 2.5 watts, no problem. I was working him CW, but I'm sure he would have heard me on SSB, too.
You can also buy a little solar panel for the FT-817, amusingly enough. But it's probably a better idea just to pack along some extra AAs.
For my money if you really want to guarantee emergency communication, I would get one of those tiny QRP rigs that Elecraft sells, with built-in paddles, then pack along a slingshot, twine, and a few hundred feet of wire to make a 40m inverted-L. That gives you solid regional day and night coverage at a cost of less than a pound or so. Of course, in this case you do need to learn code, but it's not like that's actually hard.
Sorry, but actual experience and history shows that you have it exactly backwards. It's people in really awful situations that tend to think long and hard about the morality of what they do -- who do the most to help each other out, do the least to exploit and brutalize each other.
The concept of dispensing with morality and taking a Look Out For Number One attitude is the luxury -- because you can only take that attitude if your life is so sheltered that you don't realize how much you really do depend on others. If you're the kind of person who assumes that just because you have a lot of pieces of green paper in your pocket, you can do anything you want, and you don't need another soul, then yes you could have this kind of amoral every man for himself attitude.
But when civilization breaks down, and you realize that all the money and social status in the world won't get you a drink of water from the rainbarrel your dirt-poor neighbor happens to have, well, then you start to realize rather well how interdependent people are. And when you start to realize that the only thing you have to gain trusted access to group resources is your word, your honor, your reliability -- well, then, you gain a new appreciation for the very practical value of social ethics.
Oh come now. Think of it as natural selection, weeding out the less competent network security policies and practitioners. Those that remain will be stronger, faster, and smell better between showers.
If Google can fend off the People's Army, then your Gmail account is probably pretty proof against plain old identity thief hackers from Chicago. So this is good news!
You've got to love the innumeracy of the reporter on this article:
by Wednesday, the contamination had jumped to 17,000 parts per liter.
Ah yes, parts per liter. One of those quaint old-fashioned units of concentration, I guess, like horsepower per cubit. I wish someone could remind me how we convert to a more familiar unit like grams per liter, moles per liter, parts per million.
Unless people whose brain fails to rewire itself get killed off before they can reproduce, then, no, evolution isn't going to change a damn thing.
You're falling prey to the Lamarck mistake, thinking that characteristics acquired during life are somehow passed on to offspring. They're not. The only way evolution proceeds is by the differential reproductive success of different genetic patterns.
In other words, if you make the usual assertions, you're safe in predicting that humanity will evolve to be puzzled and uninterested in/., since the usual belief is that being interested in/. implies reproductive nonsuccess.
It's different because what Amazon blocked, if his post is the full story, is purchases IN THE FUTURE of NEW content for his Kindle. How is that some evil taking back of things he thought he'd already paid for? It's not. He can still read all the books and content he's already purchased -- he just can't read anything new.
If you want to make a comparison to Home Depot, it's as if you bought a lawn mower, then returned it fifty times for this or that warranty repair, and they got pissed off at you, thought you were a whiner and a parasite, and banned you from buying accessories for the mower from their store.
Now, to make the analogy complete, we have to imagine that the mower is made by Home Depot, and you *can't* buy accessories elsewhere, so your mower will be a lot less useful in the future than you thought it would be. The action by Home Depot hurts more.
But I'm not seeing how any of your imagined property rights on your mower have been violated. You can still do what you damn well please with the mower. HD isn't restrictign your use of what you already own in any way at all. They're just declining to sell you additional parts that would make your mower still more useful, and I don't see what's wrong with that. Requiring them to make business transactions with you forever just because they did so once is obnoxious. Imagine if it worked the other way around -- if the law said that, once you bought a mower from Home Depot, YOU were required to buy all your future accessories from them. Suck much? But that's the forced-marriage deal you want to force on Home Depot. It fails the Golden Rule test.
I don't doubt that this guy is unhappy because he counted on being able to buy content from Amazon in the future for his Kindle. But...well, maybe he should have thought about that before returning SEVERAL $1000 pieces of big electronics. I mean, if doing business deals with him ends up costing Amazon money on the whole, instead of earning them money, what the hell did he expect? Why would they want to continue doing business with him? In essence, he's a "defective" customer, not working as they thought, and they're "returning" him. If, as he says, it's Amazon's fault, because they keep sending him defective merchandise, well, then he ought to be just as happy as Amazon that they're severing their business relationship.
Now, when you find the alien species, supremely smart and ultra powerful, who can find that global optimization and impose it on all those individuals (like every living human being) who would prefer his own local optimization (or more precisely is convinced that his "local" optimization is actually -- ha ha! such a coincidence! -- the global optimum) you let me know, and I'll sign up to have the compliance chip installed in my brain, too.
I saw NewsTrust when it first came out, and was one of the "founding" user-editors. I spent quite a lot of time seriously reading stories and rating them, particularly focussing on stories in my area of professional expertise (physical sciences). But I gave up in disgust after a few months, as it became clear the community (or at least that segment of it fanatical enough to spend the time necessary to push its agenda) could have been imported whole from digg.com. A crowd of folks apparently amazingly shallow, with a microscopic attention span, a taste for the sensational and paranoid, and whose moral viewpoint is so unimaginative and monolithic that it would make any totalitarian dictator sob with envy oh! if only I could get my subjects to march together in such perfect lockstep groupthink.
I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that the concept of the "community-driven" news site is an abject failure. Allowing a free-wheeling democracy to pick your top stories is basically just a method for discovering the lowest common denominator in taste, discovering what an electronic edition of the National Enquirer would publish, more or less. It's most definitely not what the inventors thought they'd get, which is the better discovery of unusual, underreported, or controversial stories. You get the very opposite of intellectual diversity, ironically enough.
I don't know why anyone would be surprised that an organization the goal of which is to maximize profits would do its best to cut costs (paying for your medical care) and maximize income (acquiring the money of you, your employer and the government i.e. other taxpayers as health-care premiums). You'd have to fail Logic 101 to think things would be otherwise.
On the other hand, what the Washington Post will suggest is the "solution" to this nonsense is even more illogical: you should give all your health-care money to another organization, Congress, which is also most interested in something other than your health -- namely, keeping political power. What do you suppose will influence Congressmen when they decide what to do with your health-care money, and how to provide you with health-care? Altruism? Your actual happiness? Using your money most efficiently? Hmmm. Is that how it works now, when Congress debates how copyright should work in the Digital Age, or whether it makes sense to subsidize turning corn into ethanol (instead of food)?
Once again, we're confronted with the nasty little fact o' life that the only agent that will ever have only your interests at heart is you. Given that, which of these three options makes sense?
(A) Give your money to a big insurance company, run by strangers with Harvard MBAs seeking to maximize profits for shareholders, then ask for some of it back when you want some health care.
(B) Give your money to Congress, run by smooth-talking lawyers seeking to maximize their terms in office through maintaining access to the massive amounts of cash necessary for perennial re-election, then ask for some of it back when you want some health care.
(C) Keep your money, and spend it on health care when and where you choose.
Strangely enough, people keep choosing (A) and (B), under the amazing delusion that somehow if you make all the transactions really complicated -- shuffle the dollar bills around fast enough -- we can receive more value in health care than we pay out in actual money. Proof that the bitter lesson of TANSTAAFL has not been learned by most adults.
You're forgetting that California has the largest and most entrenched public servant power structure in the nation, nay perhaps the world, excepting France and the former Soviet Union. An interlocking system of unions enjoying sweetheart deals and special protected legal status, dispensed by a legislature beholden to their fundraising and vote-organizing prowess, gerrymandering, the weak coherence of the state in general and its unusually transient population, all lead to this hideous cancerous mockery of government. In this case, the Controller is a partisan elected position, and the Governor has no power to fire him. Practically speaking, the Controllership is a parking spot for future candidates for higher office (like governor) who have lost election to lower office, or are termed out of it, to stay in the public eye, typically by picking fights with the current governor, which of course is exactly what's going on here. Nice that we, the taxpayers of California, get to pay for all this political theater disguised as governing, huh? Blech.
Believe me, we've tried to cut the monster down to size. There's a reason for the periodic citizen revolts, including Prop 13 (property tax reform), term limits (evaded now by a weird revolving flow of public "servants" from local to state level and back), and, most recently, by recalling Gray Davis and installing the Governator, who we foolishly imagined could take a machete to the tumor that is Sacramento and get it off our backs, or at least chastize it into actually doing some useful work in return for the huge amounts of cash it loots from our wallets.
This budget crisis is just the latest round of the perennial budget circus brought about by California's insanely "progressive" tax code, under which the majority of citizens pay zero, and the budget rests on the prosperity of the top 150,000 California earners. When they have a mildly bad year, income-wise, the state's revenues plummet, and when they do a little better, the state's revenues soar. Not surprisingly, California swings wildly between huge surpluses, when they generously endow billion-dollar research institutes and pass out generous pay raises to prison guards and teachers -- the average California teacher earns over $70,000 -- and awful deficits, during which you get, well, this nonsense.
Personally, I'd sign a petitition to simply abolish California's state government, which is utterly beyond hope, and subdivide the state into two (or more) polities, each of which could hold constitutional conventions and try again.
It's a reasonable statement. Anyone in the business (chemical engineering) would be likely to make it. Supercritical CO2 is much more advanced tech than supercritical H2O. Arguably it's more useful, too, since you probably get better interaction with nonpolar substances, the critical pressure for CO2 is a lot lower than for H2O, and the critical temperature is near room temperature (as opposed to nearly 300 C for water). Supercritical H2O undoubtably has applications, but so far as I know supercritical CO2 has many more applications at present.
I think the same thing is happening to e-mail, at least e-mail over public mail servers. With the advent of new communications methods, it's just getting less and less worth the energy required to cope with the parasites (spam and such). People can still exchange interesting stuff via YouTube, but I bet that gets destroyed by spam soon enough, too.
It's probably some rule of evolutionary biology: if you create a pool of low entropy, a cloud of parasites will spontaneously arive, like maggots to meat, to eat it and destroy it. Then I guess you move on to the next thing, huh?
Pity we don't simply hunt down and destroy the parasites in our own midst, so that we can spend less time and cleverness keeping ahead of them.
If you guys need something to do, start reading more science and engineering sites and less game and sysadmin sites
Not to mention fewer "Your Rights Online" trolls by plaintiff lawyers trying to astroturf their way into having a free hand to sue $billions out of whatever industry (telecoms? studios?) they think has deep enough pockets to pay for their retirement to the Riviera and the kids' education at Harvard Law.
My out of the ass estimate is that fewer than 50% of the front-page stories on/. have anything to do with what I'd call "nerd" subjects, like cutting-edge science and technology.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't really agree with your last point, and that's because I lived through that era. When I was a kid in the 60s and 70s, it seems every smart kid wanted to grow up to be a scientist-astronaut or design nuclear-powered starships. There was a huge push in the schools, from elementary on up, on physics and math, with a direct eye on the "Space Age" careers of tomorrow. Maybe you will have a job on Mars....better learn calculus and quantum mechanics! Nobody every said anything about learning PL/I or how to grow bacteria in a petri dish. Take a look at your iconic geek TV shows and movies from the period. What kind of job does the generic yellowshirt on Star Trek do? Something to do with physics, you can be sure. Did you ever see a programmer or biologist glamourized in 1960s or 1970s TV or movies?
These things matter. They influence the career choices young people make, and where capital flows, and we most definitely do have a finite supply of both brilliant young people and capital.
You know, at least I only claimed to deduce the goals of the Chinese government, based on the preferences revealed by their actual policy choices over the past 20 years. I'm impressed that by contrast you claim to have direct insight into what the average Chinese individual thinks. (And in that context your request for a citation for my observation is hilariously ironic.)
Don't you find reading the minds of 1 billion people distracting? How do you sort out their feelings about their space program from whether they have to take a dump at the moment? Inquiring minds want to know.
OK. We're just going to have to disagree on that. All that you say about Constellation is true, but I haven't heard anybody who knows something about the aerospace business claim this is the result of void in technical know-how. Everybody says it's a management failure, or insane project goals from Congress, or both. Which has absolutely nothing to do with technical skill.
Going back to my Magic Johnson analogy -- it would be as if Johnson was asked to sink baskets, but then the baskets were randomly moved to differet locations, the ball was deflated at random intervals, the lights were suddenly turned out in the arena, or his manager told him the wrong time to show up to play. No surprise that under those conditions he finds it hard to hit the basket.
And if you think the issue is genuinely technical know-how -- then why is it SpaceX is achieving things faster than Constellation, and for amazing less money? Are they importing technicians from China? I think not. They're working with the exact same technical base (people and industries) as NASA. They're just managing it far better, and have a perfectly clear and logically consistent blueprint from the top. NASA doesn't. And, IMHO, that's all there is to it.
Let's recall Hayabusa was a very complex robotic mission, and that the Japanese are phenomenal at such things. The Chinese...not so much. China specializes in heavy industry and cheap assembly. It's the Japanese that specialize in complex programming and technical perfection of expensive products. I think it's very likely Hayabusa was beyond the capabilities of the PRC, then and now.
Your first point is well put.
I think you're wrong about the second, however. The Chinese appear to have the same general interest in space stunts that the Soviets did: to convince their own population that progress is amazing, that the future is Chinese, and that all those peculiar rumors about brutality and privation in the countryside, or crashing real estate prices on the coast, or high-speed rail roadbeds cracking because of shoddy and corrupt construction, or the wild male/female imbalance in 20-year-olds are just...the mutterings of wreckers, evil propaganda from jealous foreign devils, et cetera.
I would like to say the retreat of the United States in the 1970s from building Pyramids -- big showy Ozymandias looky look projects -- was a sign of social health, and perhaps it was. It may have been that Nixon and Reagan (ignoring the brief and futile interludes of Ford and Carter) rationally turned away from gargantua, and thereby turned loose American ingenuity, technological talent and tech-oriented capital to give us the computing revolution of the 80s and 90s. If I had to choose, I would take the Internet, Unix, and GPS-enabled smartphones over a base on the Moon supplied, at enormous cost, by an aging fleet of Saturn Vs. And it is possible that we did have to choose -- that there was only so much technological talent and capital available in 1976, and if it went into a robust rockets to the Moon program it would not have been available elsewhere.
Depends what you mean by "no longer capable." No longer capable in the sense of lacking the technical know-how? Of course not. No longer capable in the sense of not having the assembly lines actually set up this moment, not having the raw aluminum and ceramics already sitting on the loading docks, not having the techs already hired and trained in operating the special lathes and die presses? Sure.
I don't see why this is a very interesting definition, however. If you hire a programmer and say he's "not capable" of generating a nice SQL program, you probably don't mean he isn't capable of generating one instantly, on the spot -- that it would take a few hours, say, to write it and debug it. You probably mean he lacks the know-how -- he's got to read books, do a little experimentation. So saying the US isn't "capable" of landing on the Moon, should it decide to do so, seems a peculiar if not deliberately inflammatory use of the phrase. It's a little like saying Magic Johnson can't sink a basket any more, because he is presently retired, probably a little out of shape, and let us say at the moment asleep or at Disneyland with his granddaughter. I mean, yeah, technically, right at the moment, sure, but let's be serious.
Or interest? You're spending an extra $5000 right now, and getting it back over 10 or more years (unless you drive a huge number of miles per year). If you want to make a fair comparison, you need to factor in a reasonable rate of inflation or equivalently interest. The $1 you save in gas costs in year 8 is worth significantly less than the $1 you forked out today to buy the car. (And this is even more true for the younger people that tend to be hybrid buyers, who will have steadily rising wages over the next decade or so, as their careers mature. For these people, the labor required to afford $1 in hybrid car purchase now is quite a bit more than the labor they're spared as a result of $1 in gas cost saved in year 8.)
Anyone who can convince himself that a hybrid makes economic sense in any but very unusual circumstances should not be allowed to manage his own 401(k) funds.
It always puzzles me why folks imagine saying a given piece of tech is old is axiomatically equivalent to saying it's been mightily improved upon since then.
Has the pencil been improved on yet? How about the wheel? Are we still burning gasoline in cylinders with pistons to power cars, like we started doing in the 1880s? Do we still use propellors to make boats move? Et cetera.
I'm not suggesting it's not possible to improve the Shuttle -- but that case has to be made in detail, not tossed off with an assumption that because it was designed in the 60s and built in the 70s there must be a far better idea. After all, the biggest advances since the 70s have mostly been in stuff like electronics or avionics, and besides the fact that this doesn't do squat for things like thermal protection and reliability of very high energy rocket systems under very heavy load (the two weaknesses that killed Columbia and Challenger, respectively) the best of these advances in electronics have in many cases been retrofitted into the Shuttle anyway.
Point me to a genuine major advance in airframe materials, thermal protection systems, or rocket engine design since the 1970s and maybe this contempt might be better supported by actual evidence.
The only difficulty with this attitude is that it's only going to work for the Russian and Dance Departments. If you try it in Physics or Chemistry or Engineering, where a generic professor can be responsible for $1 to $2 million a year in no strings attached research overhead that goes straight into the university's hungry coffers, you will be quickly educated in the different levels of deference applied to cost centers (like IT) and profit centers (like research departments).
I might add that it's possible a place as prestigious in these fields as Cornell might be able to get away with it, because they think, not unreasonably, that for any professor pissed enough to start looking at moving they can find 10 eager replacements, but few universities further down the academic pecking order will be able to do the same.
I think it's worth noting that this is kind of exactly the reason there was a surge of folks, as I recall, getting their ticket in the mid-80s, when 2m repeaters really took off. Quite a lot of guys used the thing as more or less a cell phone, or really car phone, since HTs were still pretty bulky. Not only to set up meetings and stuff with other hams, but also to put a call through the patch to say he'd be home late or what else was he supposed to get at the store?
I think there's room for people who at least start off thinking they'd like a "cell phone" that works even when the power and phones lines are all out from a hurricane. After all, they're doing no harm, they're paying their dues to keep the bands ours, and -- who knows? -- it's entirely possible at some point they might drift into something more technical. This is to even leave out the possibility they might get involved in some RACES or ARES work and put their skills to use for the community.
I don't think the guy should be discouraged for social reasons. Sure, he should know about the technical limitations, but otherwise, go for it and welcome.
You're quite right. I've got an FT-817, and I take it camping. I've got a slingshot and some twine, plus 120 feet of thin wire hooked up to make an inverted-L antenna. A year or so ago I was camping up moderate-high in the Sierra Nevada, in a valley where cell-phone or 2m/440 reception would be out of the question. I used my slingshot to hoist the high end of the antenna up about 35 feet and made contact with a guy in Texas on my 2.5 watts, no problem. I was working him CW, but I'm sure he would have heard me on SSB, too.
You can also buy a little solar panel for the FT-817, amusingly enough. But it's probably a better idea just to pack along some extra AAs.
For my money if you really want to guarantee emergency communication, I would get one of those tiny QRP rigs that Elecraft sells, with built-in paddles, then pack along a slingshot, twine, and a few hundred feet of wire to make a 40m inverted-L. That gives you solid regional day and night coverage at a cost of less than a pound or so. Of course, in this case you do need to learn code, but it's not like that's actually hard.
Sorry, but actual experience and history shows that you have it exactly backwards. It's people in really awful situations that tend to think long and hard about the morality of what they do -- who do the most to help each other out, do the least to exploit and brutalize each other.
The concept of dispensing with morality and taking a Look Out For Number One attitude is the luxury -- because you can only take that attitude if your life is so sheltered that you don't realize how much you really do depend on others. If you're the kind of person who assumes that just because you have a lot of pieces of green paper in your pocket, you can do anything you want, and you don't need another soul, then yes you could have this kind of amoral every man for himself attitude.
But when civilization breaks down, and you realize that all the money and social status in the world won't get you a drink of water from the rainbarrel your dirt-poor neighbor happens to have, well, then you start to realize rather well how interdependent people are. And when you start to realize that the only thing you have to gain trusted access to group resources is your word, your honor, your reliability -- well, then, you gain a new appreciation for the very practical value of social ethics.
Oh come now. Think of it as natural selection, weeding out the less competent network security policies and practitioners. Those that remain will be stronger, faster, and smell better between showers.
If Google can fend off the People's Army, then your Gmail account is probably pretty proof against plain old identity thief hackers from Chicago. So this is good news!
You've got to love the innumeracy of the reporter on this article:
by Wednesday, the contamination had jumped to 17,000 parts per liter.
Ah yes, parts per liter. One of those quaint old-fashioned units of concentration, I guess, like horsepower per cubit. I wish someone could remind me how we convert to a more familiar unit like grams per liter, moles per liter, parts per million.
Unless people whose brain fails to rewire itself get killed off before they can reproduce, then, no, evolution isn't going to change a damn thing.
You're falling prey to the Lamarck mistake, thinking that characteristics acquired during life are somehow passed on to offspring. They're not. The only way evolution proceeds is by the differential reproductive success of different genetic patterns.
In other words, if you make the usual assertions, you're safe in predicting that humanity will evolve to be puzzled and uninterested in /., since the usual belief is that being interested in /. implies reproductive nonsuccess.
It's different because what Amazon blocked, if his post is the full story, is purchases IN THE FUTURE of NEW content for his Kindle. How is that some evil taking back of things he thought he'd already paid for? It's not. He can still read all the books and content he's already purchased -- he just can't read anything new.
If you want to make a comparison to Home Depot, it's as if you bought a lawn mower, then returned it fifty times for this or that warranty repair, and they got pissed off at you, thought you were a whiner and a parasite, and banned you from buying accessories for the mower from their store.
Now, to make the analogy complete, we have to imagine that the mower is made by Home Depot, and you *can't* buy accessories elsewhere, so your mower will be a lot less useful in the future than you thought it would be. The action by Home Depot hurts more.
But I'm not seeing how any of your imagined property rights on your mower have been violated. You can still do what you damn well please with the mower. HD isn't restrictign your use of what you already own in any way at all. They're just declining to sell you additional parts that would make your mower still more useful, and I don't see what's wrong with that. Requiring them to make business transactions with you forever just because they did so once is obnoxious. Imagine if it worked the other way around -- if the law said that, once you bought a mower from Home Depot, YOU were required to buy all your future accessories from them. Suck much? But that's the forced-marriage deal you want to force on Home Depot. It fails the Golden Rule test.
I don't doubt that this guy is unhappy because he counted on being able to buy content from Amazon in the future for his Kindle. But...well, maybe he should have thought about that before returning SEVERAL $1000 pieces of big electronics. I mean, if doing business deals with him ends up costing Amazon money on the whole, instead of earning them money, what the hell did he expect? Why would they want to continue doing business with him? In essence, he's a "defective" customer, not working as they thought, and they're "returning" him. If, as he says, it's Amazon's fault, because they keep sending him defective merchandise, well, then he ought to be just as happy as Amazon that they're severing their business relationship.
So, just out of curiousity, what government policies and rules are you nominating as those which keep the price artificially high?
Or are you just saying the taxpayers should subsidize your online habit?
Global optimization! Sounds great!
Now, when you find the alien species, supremely smart and ultra powerful, who can find that global optimization and impose it on all those individuals (like every living human being) who would prefer his own local optimization (or more precisely is convinced that his "local" optimization is actually -- ha ha! such a coincidence! -- the global optimum) you let me know, and I'll sign up to have the compliance chip installed in my brain, too.
I saw NewsTrust when it first came out, and was one of the "founding" user-editors. I spent quite a lot of time seriously reading stories and rating them, particularly focussing on stories in my area of professional expertise (physical sciences). But I gave up in disgust after a few months, as it became clear the community (or at least that segment of it fanatical enough to spend the time necessary to push its agenda) could have been imported whole from digg.com. A crowd of folks apparently amazingly shallow, with a microscopic attention span, a taste for the sensational and paranoid, and whose moral viewpoint is so unimaginative and monolithic that it would make any totalitarian dictator sob with envy oh! if only I could get my subjects to march together in such perfect lockstep groupthink.
I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that the concept of the "community-driven" news site is an abject failure. Allowing a free-wheeling democracy to pick your top stories is basically just a method for discovering the lowest common denominator in taste, discovering what an electronic edition of the National Enquirer would publish, more or less. It's most definitely not what the inventors thought they'd get, which is the better discovery of unusual, underreported, or controversial stories. You get the very opposite of intellectual diversity, ironically enough.
I don't know why anyone would be surprised that an organization the goal of which is to maximize profits would do its best to cut costs (paying for your medical care) and maximize income (acquiring the money of you, your employer and the government i.e. other taxpayers as health-care premiums). You'd have to fail Logic 101 to think things would be otherwise.
On the other hand, what the Washington Post will suggest is the "solution" to this nonsense is even more illogical: you should give all your health-care money to another organization, Congress, which is also most interested in something other than your health -- namely, keeping political power. What do you suppose will influence Congressmen when they decide what to do with your health-care money, and how to provide you with health-care? Altruism? Your actual happiness? Using your money most efficiently? Hmmm. Is that how it works now, when Congress debates how copyright should work in the Digital Age, or whether it makes sense to subsidize turning corn into ethanol (instead of food)?
Once again, we're confronted with the nasty little fact o' life that the only agent that will ever have only your interests at heart is you. Given that, which of these three options makes sense?
(A) Give your money to a big insurance company, run by strangers with Harvard MBAs seeking to maximize profits for shareholders, then ask for some of it back when you want some health care.
(B) Give your money to Congress, run by smooth-talking lawyers seeking to maximize their terms in office through maintaining access to the massive amounts of cash necessary for perennial re-election, then ask for some of it back when you want some health care.
(C) Keep your money, and spend it on health care when and where you choose.
Strangely enough, people keep choosing (A) and (B), under the amazing delusion that somehow if you make all the transactions really complicated -- shuffle the dollar bills around fast enough -- we can receive more value in health care than we pay out in actual money. Proof that the bitter lesson of TANSTAAFL has not been learned by most adults.
You're forgetting that California has the largest and most entrenched public servant power structure in the nation, nay perhaps the world, excepting France and the former Soviet Union. An interlocking system of unions enjoying sweetheart deals and special protected legal status, dispensed by a legislature beholden to their fundraising and vote-organizing prowess, gerrymandering, the weak coherence of the state in general and its unusually transient population, all lead to this hideous cancerous mockery of government. In this case, the Controller is a partisan elected position, and the Governor has no power to fire him. Practically speaking, the Controllership is a parking spot for future candidates for higher office (like governor) who have lost election to lower office, or are termed out of it, to stay in the public eye, typically by picking fights with the current governor, which of course is exactly what's going on here. Nice that we, the taxpayers of California, get to pay for all this political theater disguised as governing, huh? Blech.
Believe me, we've tried to cut the monster down to size. There's a reason for the periodic citizen revolts, including Prop 13 (property tax reform), term limits (evaded now by a weird revolving flow of public "servants" from local to state level and back), and, most recently, by recalling Gray Davis and installing the Governator, who we foolishly imagined could take a machete to the tumor that is Sacramento and get it off our backs, or at least chastize it into actually doing some useful work in return for the huge amounts of cash it loots from our wallets.
This budget crisis is just the latest round of the perennial budget circus brought about by California's insanely "progressive" tax code, under which the majority of citizens pay zero, and the budget rests on the prosperity of the top 150,000 California earners. When they have a mildly bad year, income-wise, the state's revenues plummet, and when they do a little better, the state's revenues soar. Not surprisingly, California swings wildly between huge surpluses, when they generously endow billion-dollar research institutes and pass out generous pay raises to prison guards and teachers -- the average California teacher earns over $70,000 -- and awful deficits, during which you get, well, this nonsense.
Personally, I'd sign a petitition to simply abolish California's state government, which is utterly beyond hope, and subdivide the state into two (or more) polities, each of which could hold constitutional conventions and try again.
It's a reasonable statement. Anyone in the business (chemical engineering) would be likely to make it. Supercritical CO2 is much more advanced tech than supercritical H2O. Arguably it's more useful, too, since you probably get better interaction with nonpolar substances, the critical pressure for CO2 is a lot lower than for H2O, and the critical temperature is near room temperature (as opposed to nearly 300 C for water). Supercritical H2O undoubtably has applications, but so far as I know supercritical CO2 has many more applications at present.
I think the same thing is happening to e-mail, at least e-mail over public mail servers. With the advent of new communications methods, it's just getting less and less worth the energy required to cope with the parasites (spam and such). People can still exchange interesting stuff via YouTube, but I bet that gets destroyed by spam soon enough, too.
It's probably some rule of evolutionary biology: if you create a pool of low entropy, a cloud of parasites will spontaneously arive, like maggots to meat, to eat it and destroy it. Then I guess you move on to the next thing, huh?
Pity we don't simply hunt down and destroy the parasites in our own midst, so that we can spend less time and cleverness keeping ahead of them.
way back in the late 1980s, my parents bought an AT or XT clone
Geez, I used an XT in the late 80s. Now I feel old.
If you guys need something to do, start reading more science and engineering sites and less game and sysadmin sites
Not to mention fewer "Your Rights Online" trolls by plaintiff lawyers trying to astroturf their way into having a free hand to sue $billions out of whatever industry (telecoms? studios?) they think has deep enough pockets to pay for their retirement to the Riviera and the kids' education at Harvard Law.
My out of the ass estimate is that fewer than 50% of the front-page stories on /. have anything to do with what I'd call "nerd" subjects, like cutting-edge science and technology.