Well I read your whole post and I don't see an answer. Regardless, accessibility should have been one of the first things looked at. Proper research and testing should have gone into OO to determine that it would meet the needs of users with disabilities. Seeing as how this came up after the fact one would be lead to believe that Massachusetts did not do this. Thats a bad move. It shows that there was not really any oversight when the decision was made. You can hate MS all you want but you cant blame the blind.
Do you know any blind people??? I know 3. Sure the one whos into tech uses Linux and OO but the other two dont. They dont use Linux or OO cause all they want to do it simple things and its easier to do those simple things on Windows and Office. Linux is great for programming or doing complex tasks because of the command line. That holds true for both normal and visually impaired persons. However, for simple tasks, MS Office is easier. Even the guy who uses OO will admit to that. Judging by your post I dont think you know any visually impaired individuals. Grow up, this isnt about MS being the devil. These people just want to be able to read these documents without having to buy new equipment or beg some programmer to make drivers or a program that will work with what they have. Sure some of the stuff already works with OO but that doesnt mean that all of it does. What might be free to you may cost some of these people a lot of money. Freedom is only truly free when is it free for everyone not just you.
Open source still has to work regardless. If it is causing problems for people with disabilities then Massachusetts should do some serious testing and think about integrating it slowly rather then just jumping in headfirst. Governments really needs to think of these things ahead of time. A slow integration would allow blind users to continue to use MS office while OO was brought up to par. It would also give users time to learn OO and get comfortable using it. Think before you act otherwise shit like this comes up. If Massachusetts had been smart this would have never been an issue. The one to blame is Massachusetts for failing to do extensive testing, not the blind people who had no say in the matter. Making the visually impaired out to be the devils (MS) right hand doesnt make you any more correct. I believe we have history to prove that to us; i.e. The Church vs. Science. You cannot be serious when making the claims that you do. This problem could have been avoided so rather then demonizing people you should be looking at this as a lesson for the future. You can say MS is paying them but what proof do you have?
By the way, the point of history is to learn from it. Just because we made mistakes in the past doesnt mean we should make the same mistakes today. Yes, old trains did have stairs; they dont anymore because we realized we made a mistake. So we redesigned it to accommodate as many as possible. Maybe OO needs a little redesign before it goes prime time. In fact Sun is trying to do that but they seem to be doing it all alone. So relax, it will happen but this problem is an indication that things need to change and be improved.
I don't know but as of this moment I count six postings in this thread alone. Its can't have been cracked because then all his posts would be gnaa.us rules the world or something of that sort. Maybe he just got a hard on for D&D and is running around slashdot posting weird comments. I've seen people get really violent over D&D so this could just be his reaction. Its also very likely that he could have gone to the Wizards website and saw all those pics of scantly glad chain mail armored Drow. Maybe he likes those dominant dark skinned girls, who knows. Being a nerd I could see how he would go crazy after seeing pictures like that. Some guys just dont get to see enough women.
Umm, sorry, I wasn't talking about the UK. I was more referring to mainland countries. You do know youre like one of the few British that thinks themselves actually European. Every British guy I know does not consider Britain to be part of Europe. By the way I'm not American. I just find it odd that so many Europeans use human rights against America when it can be used against them as well. I agree with you in that human rights are not really a valid argument to be used in this circumstance but yet both sides bring it up time and time again. The politicians are just using human rights issues as an excuse to gain support of their citizens. In truth, its utter bullshit because in no way can the EU, USA or China claim human rights as a valid argument when each are guilty. I have a feeling the reasons behind this are not so clean cut. Whether it is censorship, taxation, or some trading agreement. You must remember that the EU was late to the game on this one so its kind of odd that the EU would choose to back up China, Iran, Egypt and North Korea for no reason. The EU didnt even want to get involved originally, save France. Sounds kind of fishy to me.
I think your missing a huge point. The UN does not seem to care about what China does but yet the Americans drop a bomb on the wrong house and the world freaks out. There are some serious double standards when it comes to America.
-Iraq commits genocide, barely makes the news.
-US soldier kills innocent people by accident; whole world hears about it and screams at the US.
-China censors its Internet; UN does nothing nor says anything.
-US invades a country for invalid reasons and people flip out; they have good reason too.
- However, France has hundreds to thousands of troops in the Middle East for even less reasons then the US; barely even heard about.
-France was almost charged with genocide, and is the reason why they stopped their nuclear testing; barely makes the news.
- Women stoned to death in Iran because it is believed she cheated on her husband; not a single word of it reaches anybody.
- US troops die in a bombing and the whole world tells the US, "hey thats what you get"
- China imprisons/kills someone who attempts free speech on the Internet; no one even knows his name.
No country in innocent. Countries all across Europe and Asia do evil things everyday. The difference is that those countries will imprison reporters who say anything about it. In America, the government doesn't do that and when they do the public freak out on them. See the difference. Europe has done just as many horrific things as the US you just never hear about them. Socialism is a wonderful thing no?? Your country could be killing hundreds of innocents right now and no one would no. The US does it and the whole world knows. That seems a bit unfair, no?
Well I'm not American but I'll put in a good word for them. One the UN does want control. Not the EU the UN. The EU was a latecomer to the game. Meaning they originally didnt care about this issue at all. The ones who wanted it were smaller countries in Asia and Southern Europe. Countries Like Chine, North Korea, Syria, Egypt, Vietnam, South Africa, France, and Spain. The EU was not involved and did not want to be involved. It got involved when France started complaining that they werent backing them up. Thats when the EU got involved. In fact, EU wasnt even involved in the initial push for UN control. China was leading it. The UN endorsed the idea before the EU did. So I dont know where you are getting your info but a lot of what your saying doesnt add up.
Secondly, it will not be a company that runs it if the UN takes control. What China wants is to have a body consisting of members of the UN to have control. That would almost guarantee that China would be on the board. Thus giving them near unlimited power over their citizens. Countries like Spain want to have control over all Internet activity in their country so they can trace whatever you do and read whatever you type. France wants similar power to Spain and its pretty obvious why Syria, Egypt and North Korea want more power. If China gets what they want it will not be technical people making decisions. It will be politics and that is and has always been a bad thing for the net. Im sorry to say but I agree with the U.S. on this one.
"Focus entirely on making the best AMD64-based servers money can buy"
Ya cause you know selling low-end servers is where the money is at, especially with all the competitors. Just to let you know, there are a lot of companies that are laughing at you right now cause they wouldn't even bother touching a AMD based server.
"Become the new high end of the Linux server market."
That's actually really hard if all they are selling is AMD based servers cause AMD based servers are rarely if ever considered high end.
"Forget about OpenSolaris - salvage what little is still worth anything in Solaris, GPL it and help integrate it into Linux."
Cause we all must bow down to the penguin. That's the only cool thing to do. This is sun and well them and BSD go back a while and I don't think they are going to bow down to the penguin. Especially when you are selling high-end servers that need an optimized OS. Os's that are good for optimization would be BSD or Solaris. Linux is generally not as good for optimization but rather good all around. See the problem that might cause. Having a generically good OS decreases performance when the task at hand needs to be optimized.
I'm no expert, in fact I don't really know that much, but clearly you do not understand the scope of the products Sun sells and the customers they sell too. Sun's customer's need a high-end stable server with an OS that can be optimized and fine-tuned above and beyond any AMD based server running Linux could achieve. Penguins are good but they are not at the top of the food chain, especially in conditions like specialized high-end servers.
Actually to be correct Mickey Mouse gets more votes then the liberals but for some dumb reason they have this rule which doesn't allow you to draw in your own box and check it off. Alas, Mickey Mouse will never get voted in. I keep saying its unfair but its the Liberals who make all the laws now. I mean its not like we really have anybody to vote for who would actually listen to the people besides Mickey Mouse. I also believe Wayne Gretzky is in second place. He'd be pretty good too. But again, that damn rule is holding us back.
You posted this to get modded +5 funny right? You can't be serious. This is a joke. What NASA needs to do is drop the human space travel and focus on the robotics. Let the private companies get all the space tourists and let them build space stations and moon bases. NASA should really stop wasting its time with low orbital flight and shoot for the stars. Robitis missions can do science today that humans will most likely not be able to do for the next hundred years. It also takes a technical skill that few to no companies have. Getting to and from orbit and the moon should be left for companies. NASA however should be sending probes to distant planets, searching for life, testing new physics and going places that haven't been gone to before. Instead its wasting all its money and knowledge on things that any company with enough money and some good engineers could do.
I do believe that NASA should still do some human exploration of space but they should be to distant planets which requires the most sophisticated technology but only after robots have scouted the planets/moons out first. What are they gonna do, send more people to orbit for another 30 years just like they did for the last 30 years and before Apollo? Thats a waste. Robots are good so let private companies put people into orbit and get NASA to move on.
So who do you trust??? China??? Russia??? EU??? Its not the American government that controls it, its a company that has had a great deal of success. Too much power spread out over to great a distance is nothing. Especially when that means giving power to countries that like to filter and sensor things. I personally would rather have it in the hands of a US company then some country with a political agenda. For example, Spain would love to have complete control. Then they could track and filter everything that their citizens do. Do the Spanish really want such a thing? Hell, I dont even trust my government to watch over it and I live in Canada. With our politics they would probably have some sort of scandal resulting in billions of dollars in taxes to go to some porn king. No offence but the EU and alot of European counttries are just as corupt as the US so your point is pretty mute. Hell even Canada is just as corrupt as the US.
However, it would be a good idea for each country to have a back up ready to take control just in case something did ever happen. Though I do believe that most countries already have something in place just in case.
Think about what you just said. The music industry is resorting to trickery. The problem is that indie music has its roots and mainstream pop music has its own roots. Thus bands are often made to produce different sounds under a big label, which really does cut out the quality and uniqueness of the music. So indie fans reject that commercialized music cause thats all it is; a commercial.
As for the harm part, well considering these bands are predestined to drop the indie record label you could be looking at a loss to the indie label. Most artists have a big underground record before going mainstream. These bands are actually going mainstream and then releasing their big album and hoping the underground followers will make it big. Thus the indie labels are loosing out in a share of the money that they would get from a true indie band.
What they are doing is not illegal or wrong but it really does betray the whole indie mindset and atmosphere. There is nothing wrong with a band going mainstream, but if all they want is to use the indie scene and the people for the big record labels then they really arent indie, they are bastards. Look at it this way. This is the musical equivalent of MS using some small companies source code in their product and not paying that company their rightful amount of royalties. In this case the indie fans are the source code, the royalties are the money the indie label should have gotten from the bands big album and the band in MSs product.
You pretty much said everything I was thinking. These are by far some of the worst ideas I've seen in mobile technology. Fortunately they are just designs and will never make it to the market. In fact Im left wondering how some of these things even relate to mobile phones and devices. Its like they got together and had some weird conversation.
Nokia Exec : Hey you designers over there, you go design us some futurist concepts for mobile devices.
Designer 1: Sure thing, ok so what are we going to do???
Designer 2: Hey lets make things like electronic necklaces and talking robot heads.
Designer 1: Are you sure thats what Nokia wants? I thought they were into mobile phones
Designer 2: Ya ok, so we will throw in some ridiculous fragile looking thing, cause all futuristic crap must look fragile, and then we design my talking head.
Designer 1: Whats up with you and this talking head???
Designer 2: Just think, phone sex will never be the same again hehehe.
Designer 1: OHHH DAMN, thats good. Every nerd will buy one. Your brilliant.
Designer 2: Ya, we will even have it so that it will recharge while the user does a stroking motion. And with most nerds I would imagine that would be a lot.
Well though you shouldn't be moded flaimbaite you clearly don't understand Firefly or Serenity.
"I never feel convinced that any of the effort by the 'good side' or the 'bad side' is significantly important to those characters."
Thats kind of the point. Its not about the good and the bad. These guys are frickin mercenaries. They kill people for money. Who is suppose to be the good guys???? Its about surviving. Its about life. Not some holy war where they uphold only the most noble of virtues. The characters are more then one-dimensional. They arent good, they arent bad, they are people. They have flaws and they face problems and dilemmas. They over come them but sometimes they dont. Should everything be so perfect and nice where even the smallest of actions changes the balance of the never-ending war of good vs. evil? No, because thats not how life works. This isnt star wars, where the good triumphs. This is something more and the characters are unique. Its not a monolithic story line like most Sci-Fis are, so I can see why you have a hard time understanding the story and characters.
Well actually I would like to introduce you to pulse detonation. Here is the wiki article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_detonation_engi ne. There is actually a lot of research going on in this field and will most likely be the next big thing in aeronautical technology. If all goes well this technology will give us mach 5 or faster civilian travel and could, for military needs, send planes near speeds of mach 18.
Pulse Detonation (PD) basically uses explosives. Not like the fuel in regular rockets or jets. The fuel in regular rockets are burned, as in a large stream of fire, these fuels will be more like a mini bomb. So think more along the lines of a stick of TNT going off in the engine. The difference is that rockets use propellants that travel slower then the speed of sound. PD will use propellants that travel faster then the speed of sound creating a much more powerful thrust.
Actually there are a ton of reasons for such a surface.
1) Its by Saturn which has a massive gravitational pull. This causes Saturn to pull in a lot of comets, asteroids, and dust. Thus Saturn gets hit with a lot more debris then the planets in the inner solar system. This would also increase the risk of the moons getting hit with this debris as well and therefore will have more impacts then that of the planets and moons in which we know. 2) Saturn has rings filled with debris. So if the moon ever happened to swing into these rings it would go through hundreds if not thousands of impacts. That could have very well created the surface that you see. This could have happened at any time in the moons history and so is a very likely cause. 3) The moon could have some sort geological processes that are responsible for such a surface, however thats very unlikely.
Personally I would put my bet on number 2 cause it makes the most sense. If the moon went through on of Saturns rings especially when the rings might have just formed there would have been a lot of collisions leaving the surface scarred like you see in the picture.
Training, you call what they give new people training? Most training is horrible these days and a lot of companies expect you to be able to start work with minimal training. For example, have you ever had to learn how to use a totally new AutoCAD system over a weekend??? Well I have and its not very nice. Oh sure I got it in about a week but about 4 months in I was still learning new things as they cropped up cause I received only 2 official hours of training on it. Thank god it was only a summer job.
It's the same with IT. Your company may be different but most companies have a bunch of inexperienced guys giving poor training to even more inexperienced college grads. Good training went out with the 80s and I don't foresee it coming back anytime soon
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Well I read your whole post and I don't see an answer. Regardless, accessibility should have been one of the first things looked at. Proper research and testing should have gone into OO to determine that it would meet the needs of users with disabilities. Seeing as how this came up after the fact one would be lead to believe that Massachusetts did not do this. Thats a bad move. It shows that there was not really any oversight when the decision was made. You can hate MS all you want but you cant blame the blind.
Do you know any blind people??? I know 3. Sure the one whos into tech uses Linux and OO but the other two dont. They dont use Linux or OO cause all they want to do it simple things and its easier to do those simple things on Windows and Office. Linux is great for programming or doing complex tasks because of the command line. That holds true for both normal and visually impaired persons. However, for simple tasks, MS Office is easier. Even the guy who uses OO will admit to that. Judging by your post I dont think you know any visually impaired individuals. Grow up, this isnt about MS being the devil. These people just want to be able to read these documents without having to buy new equipment or beg some programmer to make drivers or a program that will work with what they have. Sure some of the stuff already works with OO but that doesnt mean that all of it does. What might be free to you may cost some of these people a lot of money. Freedom is only truly free when is it free for everyone not just you.
Open source still has to work regardless. If it is causing problems for people with disabilities then Massachusetts should do some serious testing and think about integrating it slowly rather then just jumping in headfirst. Governments really needs to think of these things ahead of time. A slow integration would allow blind users to continue to use MS office while OO was brought up to par. It would also give users time to learn OO and get comfortable using it. Think before you act otherwise shit like this comes up. If Massachusetts had been smart this would have never been an issue. The one to blame is Massachusetts for failing to do extensive testing, not the blind people who had no say in the matter. Making the visually impaired out to be the devils (MS) right hand doesnt make you any more correct. I believe we have history to prove that to us; i.e. The Church vs. Science. You cannot be serious when making the claims that you do. This problem could have been avoided so rather then demonizing people you should be looking at this as a lesson for the future. You can say MS is paying them but what proof do you have?
By the way, the point of history is to learn from it. Just because we made mistakes in the past doesnt mean we should make the same mistakes today. Yes, old trains did have stairs; they dont anymore because we realized we made a mistake. So we redesigned it to accommodate as many as possible. Maybe OO needs a little redesign before it goes prime time. In fact Sun is trying to do that but they seem to be doing it all alone. So relax, it will happen but this problem is an indication that things need to change and be improved.
I don't know but as of this moment I count six postings in this thread alone. Its can't have been cracked because then all his posts would be gnaa.us rules the world or something of that sort. Maybe he just got a hard on for D&D and is running around slashdot posting weird comments. I've seen people get really violent over D&D so this could just be his reaction. Its also very likely that he could have gone to the Wizards website and saw all those pics of scantly glad chain mail armored Drow. Maybe he likes those dominant dark skinned girls, who knows. Being a nerd I could see how he would go crazy after seeing pictures like that. Some guys just dont get to see enough women.
Umm, sorry, I wasn't talking about the UK. I was more referring to mainland countries. You do know youre like one of the few British that thinks themselves actually European. Every British guy I know does not consider Britain to be part of Europe. By the way I'm not American. I just find it odd that so many Europeans use human rights against America when it can be used against them as well. I agree with you in that human rights are not really a valid argument to be used in this circumstance but yet both sides bring it up time and time again. The politicians are just using human rights issues as an excuse to gain support of their citizens. In truth, its utter bullshit because in no way can the EU, USA or China claim human rights as a valid argument when each are guilty. I have a feeling the reasons behind this are not so clean cut. Whether it is censorship, taxation, or some trading agreement. You must remember that the EU was late to the game on this one so its kind of odd that the EU would choose to back up China, Iran, Egypt and North Korea for no reason. The EU didnt even want to get involved originally, save France. Sounds kind of fishy to me.
I think your missing a huge point. The UN does not seem to care about what China does but yet the Americans drop a bomb on the wrong house and the world freaks out. There are some serious double standards when it comes to America.
-Iraq commits genocide, barely makes the news.
-US soldier kills innocent people by accident; whole world hears about it and screams at the US.
-China censors its Internet; UN does nothing nor says anything.
-US invades a country for invalid reasons and people flip out; they have good reason too.
- However, France has hundreds to thousands of troops in the Middle East for even less reasons then the US; barely even heard about.
-France was almost charged with genocide, and is the reason why they stopped their nuclear testing; barely makes the news.
- Women stoned to death in Iran because it is believed she cheated on her husband; not a single word of it reaches anybody.
- US troops die in a bombing and the whole world tells the US, "hey thats what you get"
- China imprisons/kills someone who attempts free speech on the Internet; no one even knows his name.
No country in innocent. Countries all across Europe and Asia do evil things everyday. The difference is that those countries will imprison reporters who say anything about it. In America, the government doesn't do that and when they do the public freak out on them. See the difference. Europe has done just as many horrific things as the US you just never hear about them. Socialism is a wonderful thing no?? Your country could be killing hundreds of innocents right now and no one would no. The US does it and the whole world knows. That seems a bit unfair, no?
Well I'm not American but I'll put in a good word for them. One the UN does want control. Not the EU the UN. The EU was a latecomer to the game. Meaning they originally didnt care about this issue at all. The ones who wanted it were smaller countries in Asia and Southern Europe. Countries Like Chine, North Korea, Syria, Egypt, Vietnam, South Africa, France, and Spain. The EU was not involved and did not want to be involved. It got involved when France started complaining that they werent backing them up. Thats when the EU got involved. In fact, EU wasnt even involved in the initial push for UN control. China was leading it. The UN endorsed the idea before the EU did. So I dont know where you are getting your info but a lot of what your saying doesnt add up.
Secondly, it will not be a company that runs it if the UN takes control. What China wants is to have a body consisting of members of the UN to have control. That would almost guarantee that China would be on the board. Thus giving them near unlimited power over their citizens. Countries like Spain want to have control over all Internet activity in their country so they can trace whatever you do and read whatever you type. France wants similar power to Spain and its pretty obvious why Syria, Egypt and North Korea want more power. If China gets what they want it will not be technical people making decisions. It will be politics and that is and has always been a bad thing for the net. Im sorry to say but I agree with the U.S. on this one.
"Focus entirely on making the best AMD64-based servers money can buy"
Ya cause you know selling low-end servers is where the money is at, especially with all the competitors. Just to let you know, there are a lot of companies that are laughing at you right now cause they wouldn't even bother touching a AMD based server.
"Become the new high end of the Linux server market."
That's actually really hard if all they are selling is AMD based servers cause AMD based servers are rarely if ever considered high end.
"Forget about OpenSolaris - salvage what little is still worth anything in Solaris, GPL it and help integrate it into Linux."
Cause we all must bow down to the penguin. That's the only cool thing to do. This is sun and well them and BSD go back a while and I don't think they are going to bow down to the penguin. Especially when you are selling high-end servers that need an optimized OS. Os's that are good for optimization would be BSD or Solaris. Linux is generally not as good for optimization but rather good all around. See the problem that might cause. Having a generically good OS decreases performance when the task at hand needs to be optimized.
I'm no expert, in fact I don't really know that much, but clearly you do not understand the scope of the products Sun sells and the customers they sell too. Sun's customer's need a high-end stable server with an OS that can be optimized and fine-tuned above and beyond any AMD based server running Linux could achieve. Penguins are good but they are not at the top of the food chain, especially in conditions like specialized high-end servers.
Actually to be correct Mickey Mouse gets more votes then the liberals but for some dumb reason they have this rule which doesn't allow you to draw in your own box and check it off. Alas, Mickey Mouse will never get voted in. I keep saying its unfair but its the Liberals who make all the laws now. I mean its not like we really have anybody to vote for who would actually listen to the people besides Mickey Mouse. I also believe Wayne Gretzky is in second place. He'd be pretty good too. But again, that damn rule is holding us back.
You posted this to get modded +5 funny right? You can't be serious. This is a joke. What NASA needs to do is drop the human space travel and focus on the robotics. Let the private companies get all the space tourists and let them build space stations and moon bases. NASA should really stop wasting its time with low orbital flight and shoot for the stars. Robitis missions can do science today that humans will most likely not be able to do for the next hundred years. It also takes a technical skill that few to no companies have. Getting to and from orbit and the moon should be left for companies. NASA however should be sending probes to distant planets, searching for life, testing new physics and going places that haven't been gone to before. Instead its wasting all its money and knowledge on things that any company with enough money and some good engineers could do.
I do believe that NASA should still do some human exploration of space but they should be to distant planets which requires the most sophisticated technology but only after robots have scouted the planets/moons out first. What are they gonna do, send more people to orbit for another 30 years just like they did for the last 30 years and before Apollo? Thats a waste. Robots are good so let private companies put people into orbit and get NASA to move on.
So who do you trust??? China??? Russia??? EU??? Its not the American government that controls it, its a company that has had a great deal of success. Too much power spread out over to great a distance is nothing. Especially when that means giving power to countries that like to filter and sensor things. I personally would rather have it in the hands of a US company then some country with a political agenda. For example, Spain would love to have complete control. Then they could track and filter everything that their citizens do. Do the Spanish really want such a thing? Hell, I dont even trust my government to watch over it and I live in Canada. With our politics they would probably have some sort of scandal resulting in billions of dollars in taxes to go to some porn king. No offence but the EU and alot of European counttries are just as corupt as the US so your point is pretty mute. Hell even Canada is just as corrupt as the US.
However, it would be a good idea for each country to have a back up ready to take control just in case something did ever happen. Though I do believe that most countries already have something in place just in case.
Think about what you just said. The music industry is resorting to trickery. The problem is that indie music has its roots and mainstream pop music has its own roots. Thus bands are often made to produce different sounds under a big label, which really does cut out the quality and uniqueness of the music. So indie fans reject that commercialized music cause thats all it is; a commercial.
As for the harm part, well considering these bands are predestined to drop the indie record label you could be looking at a loss to the indie label. Most artists have a big underground record before going mainstream. These bands are actually going mainstream and then releasing their big album and hoping the underground followers will make it big. Thus the indie labels are loosing out in a share of the money that they would get from a true indie band.
What they are doing is not illegal or wrong but it really does betray the whole indie mindset and atmosphere. There is nothing wrong with a band going mainstream, but if all they want is to use the indie scene and the people for the big record labels then they really arent indie, they are bastards. Look at it this way. This is the musical equivalent of MS using some small companies source code in their product and not paying that company their rightful amount of royalties. In this case the indie fans are the source code, the royalties are the money the indie label should have gotten from the bands big album and the band in MSs product.
You pretty much said everything I was thinking. These are by far some of the worst ideas I've seen in mobile technology. Fortunately they are just designs and will never make it to the market. In fact Im left wondering how some of these things even relate to mobile phones and devices. Its like they got together and had some weird conversation.
Nokia Exec : Hey you designers over there, you go design us some futurist concepts for mobile devices.
Designer 1: Sure thing, ok so what are we going to do???
Designer 2: Hey lets make things like electronic necklaces and talking robot heads.
Designer 1: Are you sure thats what Nokia wants? I thought they were into mobile phones
Designer 2: Ya ok, so we will throw in some ridiculous fragile looking thing, cause all futuristic crap must look fragile, and then we design my talking head.
Designer 1: Whats up with you and this talking head???
Designer 2: Just think, phone sex will never be the same again hehehe.
Designer 1: OHHH DAMN, thats good. Every nerd will buy one. Your brilliant.
Designer 2: Ya, we will even have it so that it will recharge while the user does a stroking motion. And with most nerds I would imagine that would be a lot.
Designer 1: HOLY CRAP, Im sold.
Nokia Exec: Me too.
Well though you shouldn't be moded flaimbaite you clearly don't understand Firefly or Serenity.
"I never feel convinced that any of the effort by the 'good side' or the 'bad side' is significantly important to those characters."
Thats kind of the point. Its not about the good and the bad. These guys are frickin mercenaries. They kill people for money. Who is suppose to be the good guys???? Its about surviving. Its about life. Not some holy war where they uphold only the most noble of virtues. The characters are more then one-dimensional. They arent good, they arent bad, they are people. They have flaws and they face problems and dilemmas. They over come them but sometimes they dont. Should everything be so perfect and nice where even the smallest of actions changes the balance of the never-ending war of good vs. evil? No, because thats not how life works. This isnt star wars, where the good triumphs. This is something more and the characters are unique. Its not a monolithic story line like most Sci-Fis are, so I can see why you have a hard time understanding the story and characters.
Well actually I would like to introduce you to pulse detonation. Here is the wiki article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse_detonation_engi ne. There is actually a lot of research going on in this field and will most likely be the next big thing in aeronautical technology. If all goes well this technology will give us mach 5 or faster civilian travel and could, for military needs, send planes near speeds of mach 18.
Pulse Detonation (PD) basically uses explosives. Not like the fuel in regular rockets or jets. The fuel in regular rockets are burned, as in a large stream of fire, these fuels will be more like a mini bomb. So think more along the lines of a stick of TNT going off in the engine. The difference is that rockets use propellants that travel slower then the speed of sound. PD will use propellants that travel faster then the speed of sound creating a much more powerful thrust.
Actually there are a ton of reasons for such a surface.
1) Its by Saturn which has a massive gravitational pull. This causes Saturn to pull in a lot of comets, asteroids, and dust. Thus Saturn gets hit with a lot more debris then the planets in the inner solar system. This would also increase the risk of the moons getting hit with this debris as well and therefore will have more impacts then that of the planets and moons in which we know.
2) Saturn has rings filled with debris. So if the moon ever happened to swing into these rings it would go through hundreds if not thousands of impacts. That could have very well created the surface that you see. This could have happened at any time in the moons history and so is a very likely cause.
3) The moon could have some sort geological processes that are responsible for such a surface, however thats very unlikely.
Personally I would put my bet on number 2 cause it makes the most sense. If the moon went through on of Saturns rings especially when the rings might have just formed there would have been a lot of collisions leaving the surface scarred like you see in the picture.
Training, you call what they give new people training? Most training is horrible these days and a lot of companies expect you to be able to start work with minimal training. For example, have you ever had to learn how to use a totally new AutoCAD system over a weekend??? Well I have and its not very nice. Oh sure I got it in about a week but about 4 months in I was still learning new things as they cropped up cause I received only 2 official hours of training on it. Thank god it was only a summer job.
It's the same with IT. Your company may be different but most companies have a bunch of inexperienced guys giving poor training to even more inexperienced college grads. Good training went out with the 80s and I don't foresee it coming back anytime soon