is one addressed by Jack Williamson fifty-plus years ago: how aggressive can a robot be in the pursuit of the Second Law. In Williamson's The Humanoids, they become a worse dictatorship than any human one. "You can't drive that car, you might loose control and have an accident", "You can't use real tools like that circular saw, you might cut your hand off"...and on and on, until humans are treated like 5-year-olds.
Asimov was thinking of a robot *not* saying for example, "don't touch that, it's high voltage" - that is, active prevention of hurt, not, to use the current buzzword, "proactive".
Gee, and here I thought that the British Labour Party was, at base, socialist; the socialists won in Spain, the socialists look like they might take back France; Chavez beats US-backed recall in Argentina...while the US "free market capitalism" won...which is why our deregulated, monopolistic economy is down the tubes.
While we're on those lines, let me say "Dick Cheney" and "Halliburton no-bid contracts", and then quote a favorite explanation of someone who speaks with some authority on the subject, Benito Mussolini: "fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power."
Tell me again what social system "won", and explain how the current world situation doesn't resemble 1932, with the US starring as Germany?
And if Mah Fellow Amurcans don't like the comparison, try looking at the news from around the world, and you might note that about three-quarters of the world's population is *terrified* of this administration, and what America will be, if Bush is elected this time.
An alternative? If the generation that fought WWII was "the Greatest Generation", then it's time for us to be the children and grandchildren they deserve, and stand up to be counted, to stop neofascism here at home.
No, we *don't* need AI. What my late wife and I came up with that we need is an Artificial Stupid (c, Roth-Whitworth, 1996, and I *mean* this): you *don't * want the M$ idea of "I know how to do this *so* much better than *you* do...."
Rather, what you want is for it to do a lot of what you want it to do, without tons of configuration and without needing expert advice to configure it, and do it neatly and efficiently...and when it finds something it doesn't know how to handle, it *knows* when to bother you, and when not to.
You want a *good* secretary in this case, not a Gentleman's gentleman....
...and announce to the world how great a job they'd been doing. After all, that's what they did in NASA after Columbia, and that's what Bush did with the FBI after Agent Christina Rowley testified before Congress, and thats what Bush did for Tenet of the CIA and Rummy....
If it's good enough for those at the top, to not be fired and go to jail, it's good enough for the rest of us, too.
One component of poor user interface is a frequent lack of easy ways to set utterly common items.
Case in point: I've recently switched from kmail to Thunderbird...and I have yet to find a way to get Thunderbird to open a URL in Firefox. There is *no* way, in options, to tell it to interact with the other half of the same package!
The reverse is true with Firefox: I have to d/l an extension, rather than having one built in, with setups for the half a dozen most common mailtools.
This is *ludicrous*. This will turn off Joe User in an instant.
mark "then there's OpenOffice.slow.as.a.dog"
unsafe laws was done, long ago...by JackWilliamson
on
I, Robot Hits the Theaters
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Who did it in "The Humanoids".
Robot who can't let you be harmed by inaction...lessee, master, you can't use that circular saw, and driving is *dangerous*, and... so we'll just treat you like five-year-olds....
Theft, maybe, or "overthrow of the government by subversion", yes, but not a mere "train wreck".
I, personally, d/l the Diebold code about a yer and a half ago, from NZ, and inside of a couple of hours, found code that would be fine in development, or testing...but this seemed to be *production* code, and had a function "use this to install results from another machine", which I read as "to install the premade results you want....
They're looking into criminal prosecution in California, but here in Jeb Bush's state, "it's just small glitches", and "no, we're not going to replace them, or require paper trail". In fact, they'd *literally* decided that they don't *need* recounts with these boxes.
Treason, anyone?
The only asnser, other than lawyers, is to get the fsck out and vote the GOP out, *overwhelmingly*, to the point where there's no question.
Let me see if I have this straight: the auther thinks that a spray of smallpox is scary? While major pieces of entire *CITIES* and their 'burbs by 10 or 20 megaton H-bombs, with radiation strong enough to sicken or kill outright over hundreds of miles, killing millions in an instant, or over the next month, he thinks "a spray of smallpox" is horrifying?
Does he think that nuclear bombs are only videogames, while smallpox is real?
Most likely, the reality of war, much less nuclear war, is so incomprehensible that he's irrationally terrified of stubbing his toe.
mark "and plastic and duct tape won't
help, either"
Go google on images from Vietnam, that were played on the six o'clock news. Try the famous picture of the girl on fire with napalm, that was plastered everywhere.
This is what war *IS*. Blood and death and shattered bodies: this is the real world, not some video game or "action movie". You are, as the citizen of a democracy, *SUPPOSED* to vote on things - and I refer to Bush, Cheney, Rummy et al, as "things" - that affect the real world. If you voted for them, you voted for *this*.
Too real for you? Want to live in a fantasy, and keep your kids in a fantasy?
Without a *single* exception, every user, and *esp* every secretary/admin assist/whatever, who knew both swore *by* WordPerfect 5.2. It did everything, and Dirt, er, Word was trying to play catchup. WP was overwhelmingly the word processor of choice, to the point it was written into government contracts that documents be delivered in that format.
And one thing that WP 5.2/6.0 did, that neither Word *not* OpenOffice.dog do, is -F3, reveal *all* codes...so you could *always* make it do what you wanted, not what it thought it knew better how to do than you did.
A number of years ago, while I was working for a Baby Bell, we were building a system, and integrating it with BEA's Tuxedo. One day a couple of the consultants came to me, to tell me that it was crashing, and they couldn't figure out why.
I pulled it up in the debugger (a Sun box), and stepped through the code...and, when I found it was crashing in Tuxedo, I did something the consultants (young guys) had no clue you could do...I stepi'd *into* the binary.
Now, I didn't know Sun assembly language, but that was irrelevant. I nexti'd and stepi'd my way through, and found the name of the function it was crashing in, which will *always* be there, even in a stripped binary, and where it was doing it in the function.
I could then call BEA (I was senior technical, and Rank Hath Its Privileges), and get info from their developers.
Turned out to be the environment, not a bug, but the point is, once in a while, *knowing* what how things work Down There will save your butt, and maybe even lead you to better code.
mark "and I pushed my kids to know what
happens under the hood of the car, too"
I tried fvwm2, and I think windowmaker, and Xfce, but wound up happiest with IceWM. Half a meg for the whole damn binary.
I just wish that the control panels for it all didn't gag over a python error that I've not been able to trace (not a python programmer, though).
People keep talking eye candy and "integration". SCREW IT! As long as it looks ok, and I *really* don't see the difference between KDE and Ice, so I have no clue what they're talking about, it's fine, and how many folks out there use a fraction of the "integrated" garbage?
I use Mozilla, though I'm still using kmail because it works the way I want it to, and OpenOffice.dog, and that takes care of most everything but work (sysadmin, programming), and that gets done over ssh.
I *would* like to see one of the lightweight window managers gain a *lot* more acceptability - that would help linux on the desktop a *lot*. I mean, be *real*, most folks are buying for home, and a *lot* of companies are *not* going to upgrade hardware for everyone every year, so it better run *fast* on older hardware.
My home system is an "overclocked" 233->250 K6-II, and I'm running a recent 2.4 kernel, and it runs just find (except, as I suggested above, OpenOffice.dog, and I can't understand why that takes more than half a minute to get up blank, and another 15 seconds to give me a file menu, when AbiWord comes up all the way on the same box in about 10 seconds...of course, Abiword 2.0 wants aspell, and that breaks apache....).
Fine, so I may buy a 400 or 500 MHz m/b soon, so OO.O and maybe a game or two will run faster...but as for KDE/Gnome, no thanks, you can go park those semi-trailers down the block.
Once upon a time, X Windows was the definition of bloat. Then came Lose95, et al. Every. Single. New. Flavor. of M$ o/s almost *requires* new hardware.
Now, this isn't a big surprise to me, since I read an interview with Gates in the early 90's, where he admitted to being a hardware junky.
The rest of us, though, who can't afford the latest machines every six month, and want to do something other than gloat over how hot our systems are....
Then there's the incredibly poor design of WinBlows: it *could* have been good - hell, I was hanging onto DOS for a *long* time. The real mistake was that they should have put virtual memory and at *least* foreground/background multitasking where it belonged: in *DOS*, and that by the mid-eighties. Windows could have sat on top of that, as X does on *nix, and things would have been fine.
Instead, they put the GUI *into* the o/s, so if the GUI craps out, the system craps out.
While shoving all the GUI into the o/s, they then set themselves up for all the bugs that they propagate, and that grow with each release. They added to it by rushing release dates - marketing trumps engineering, and EULAs that say "you bought it, but, no, we still own it, and we're *STILL* not responsible for anything".
Meanwhile, although I'm *not* happy with OpenOffice.dog (that's intended), everything runs reasonably well under Linux on my (slightly overclocked) 250MHz AMD K6-II, with the latest Linux 2.4 kernel, and I haven't been forced to upgrade my hardware by o/s upgrades.
Enron, S&L (late 80s), Halliburton, the AMA, the insurance industry....
Show me *anywhere* that "self-regulation" works. Those regulations were set up, not because legislators sat around thinking of things to do, but because of public outcries over egregious abuses.
Go start your own unregulated country. My parents and grandparents fought and voted to control business.
On the other hand, certain regulations of the FCC ought to be written as *law*, not rules that they can change. Number one, of course, would be to bring Equal Time back, with a vengence, including on cable.
mark "Faux News: fair and balanced, as
determined by Tom DeLay...."
"Browser wars"? So, when will we see the efforts to create micro-browsers, suitable for viewing slashdot or news.google.com on the 1.5"x2" screen on my cell phone...and when will the manufacturers give us a magnifying glass, so we can read more than 12 letters at a time....
mark "and the market-droids who decided I
wanted a Web browser on my cell phone
will make a great telescope - a lens
in either ear, and hard vacuum in
between, just like Bush & co...."
As much as I appreciate Mr. Lovelock, I think he's wrong on power sources. For one, I'd like to ask him, or anyone here, if they'd care to host a nuclear waste facility in their county...and if they believe that they could convince a majority of their fellow citizens to do so.
I think biodiesel is a good interim solution for fuel shortages, but even that has to be superceded, and soon.
He is right, though, on global warming. Other than the reactionary right in power in the US, and the few paid scientists they keep, and the "Christian" scientists (not to be confused with Christian Science, the sect), *NO* *ONE* doubts that global warming is real, and a very serious threat.
*sigh*
And we should have started building solar power satellites 20 years ago, but noooooo, all those US oilmen, and their agents, like Bush Sr.....
mark "should have built the first real
space station by expanding Skylab, too"
James T. "it's 20 of the hour, and I haven't violated the Prime Directive or gotten laid yet" Kirk?
*NO* one could believe someone who got that many people under his command killed would keep his career. For that matter, how could *anyone* believe that Starfleet would put him in charge of a multi-gigabuck starship, and there were never 300 people on it.
Years ago, I figured out what it *really* was: Kirk was a buddy of McHale (as in McHale's Navy), and it was a spacegoing PT boat, with about 15 or 30 people on it....
Based on what I was seeing in Chicago, up to about a year and a quarter ago, and down in central Florida since then, anywhere from $22,500/yr to $27,500/yr.
Before the bubble crashed, and the Bush Depression started, you could have added $10k/yr to both numbers.
I know that I'm better and more experienced than maybe 75% of the folks out there...but I'm not foolish enough to think that there aren't folks who are better than me at some things, nor do I doubt that some of them live in the FSU, or China, or, for that matter, Mexico.
Why keep the jobs here? For one thing, get management and HR past the idiocy of thinking that experience isn't worth paying for. For another, get them to think - if they have two brain cells to rub together (as opposed, for example, to "CEO" Bush), that having someone in India or whereever do the jobs of local workers means that
1) the now-unemployed local workers won't
be able to afford their products;
2) that if there are problems, they are the
ones who will have to deal with them
long distance, and possibly with
language barriers (American managers
speaking furrin' languages? Perish th'
thought!)
3) let's not forget the time differential,
as well.
Finally, the folks who said "vote" have it right. Consider that *EVERY* *OTHER* *COUNTRY* (except maybe India - I just don't know) that the US worker is competing with has *national* healthcare, so the employers don't have to pay that, or Workmen's Comp....
But no, no one here writes or emails or calls their reps, they won't do anything, they're all owned by the insurance companies, just keep your noses to the grindstone...as long as you've got one, and it isn't offshored...
My name is mark, and according to what I was told 40 years ago, I'd be on the wheel-shaped space station several years ago. Since I am out of work in the Bush Depression, I am asking for donations to take myself and my SO to the ISS by Russian launch vehicle (since I don't know how to contact the facility that launched Pitr of UserFriendly...).
This, of course, will require $40M US, and so it is imperative that you contact me soon, with whatever size donation you can afford.
If you are a conservative, you get the extra benefit of two left-wingers leaving the planet, while for liberals, we can make this an issue that we can't spend the money to do this in our own country, but have to offshore it.
I look forward to hearing from you, Dear Friends and Donors.
As a Philadelphian expatriate, we *invented* the Hugos at the Philly Worldcon in 1953, and we gave Alfred Bester the Best Novel for "The Demolished Man".
It's absolutely illegitimate for Boston to try to revoke or supercede that, and I've just emailed them to that effect.
mark, Philadelphian expatriate, PSFS member, 21 years
to real space battles. None of that *STUPID* banking in vacuum...
On the other hand, a real battle would look more like the command room in Empire Strikes Back. NO big dogfights...they don't happen anymore, and you cannot see them, in RL. Modern fighter jets use automatic targetting, because you aim when you're 50 miles away, and by the time you've fired, you're 50 mi. past them.
There is *NO* *WAY* that you'll have more than one wing "visible" to anyone's eye. They'll take place at the range of hundreds, or thousands, of *MILES*. And mostly, a hit will mean that it's radioactive debris in space.
Survivors? Miracles only. Consider the movie I just watched, "K-19, the Widowmaker" - and *that's* only a reactor leak.
mark "in space, you don't ever have to
look in the eye of the person you're
about to kill"
Whereas the diagrams that show relationships between fields, sorry, "columns" in RDBMs look so much like ants that had been chased through spilled ink that *no* *one* can make head or tail of 'em.
This younger gen'ration just don't understand multi=level flow charts.
Aside: Do meddle in the affaird...? Y'know, if they're crunchier, some like to roll 'em in powdered sugar, which is bad for their fangs.
Slashdot Mirror
is one addressed by Jack Williamson fifty-plus years ago: how aggressive can a robot be in the pursuit of the Second Law. In Williamson's The Humanoids, they become a worse dictatorship than any human one. "You can't drive that car, you might loose control and have an accident", "You can't use real tools like that circular saw, you might cut your hand off"...and on and on, until humans are treated like 5-year-olds.
Asimov was thinking of a robot *not* saying for example, "don't touch that, it's high voltage" - that is, active prevention of hurt, not, to use the current buzzword, "proactive".
mark
Lessee, "communism failed" == socialism "failed".
Gee, and here I thought that the British Labour Party was, at base, socialist; the socialists won in Spain, the socialists look like they might take back France; Chavez beats US-backed recall in Argentina...while the US "free market capitalism" won...which is why our deregulated, monopolistic economy is down the tubes.
While we're on those lines, let me say "Dick Cheney" and "Halliburton no-bid contracts", and then quote a favorite explanation of someone who speaks with some authority on the subject, Benito Mussolini: "fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power."
Tell me again what social system "won", and explain how the current world situation doesn't resemble 1932, with the US starring as Germany?
And if Mah Fellow Amurcans don't like the comparison, try looking at the news from around the world, and you might note that about three-quarters of the world's population is *terrified* of this administration, and what America will be, if Bush is elected this time.
An alternative? If the generation that fought WWII was "the Greatest Generation", then it's time for us to be the children and grandchildren they deserve, and stand up to be counted, to stop neofascism here at home.
mark
No, we *don't* need AI. What my late wife and I came up with that we need is an Artificial Stupid (c, Roth-Whitworth, 1996, and I *mean* this): you *don't * want the M$ idea of "I know how to do this *so* much better than *you* do...."
Rather, what you want is for it to do a lot of what you want it to do, without tons of configuration and without needing expert advice to configure it, and do it neatly and efficiently...and when it finds something it doesn't know how to handle, it *knows* when to bother you, and when not to.
You want a *good* secretary in this case, not a Gentleman's gentleman....
mark
...and announce to the world how great a job they'd been doing. After all, that's what they did in NASA after Columbia, and that's what Bush did with the FBI after Agent Christina Rowley testified before Congress, and thats what Bush did for Tenet of the CIA and Rummy....
If it's good enough for those at the top, to not be fired and go to jail, it's good enough for the rest of us, too.
mark
One component of poor user interface is a frequent lack of easy ways to set utterly common items.
Case in point: I've recently switched from kmail to Thunderbird...and I have yet to find a way to get Thunderbird to open a URL in Firefox. There is *no* way, in options, to tell it to interact with the other half of the same package!
The reverse is true with Firefox: I have to d/l an extension, rather than having one built in, with setups for the half a dozen most common mailtools.
This is *ludicrous*. This will turn off Joe User in an instant.
mark "then there's OpenOffice.slow.as.a.dog"
Who did it in "The Humanoids".
Robot who can't let you be harmed by inaction...lessee, master, you can't use that circular saw, and driving is *dangerous*, and... so we'll just treat you like five-year-olds....
mark
Theft, maybe, or "overthrow of the government by subversion", yes, but not a mere "train wreck".
I, personally, d/l the Diebold code about a yer and a half ago, from NZ, and inside of a couple of hours, found code that would be fine in development, or testing...but this seemed to be *production* code, and had a function "use this to install results from another machine", which I read as "to install the premade results you want....
They're looking into criminal prosecution in California, but here in Jeb Bush's state, "it's just small glitches", and "no, we're not going to replace them, or require paper trail". In fact, they'd *literally* decided that they don't *need* recounts with these boxes.
Treason, anyone?
The only asnser, other than lawyers, is to get the fsck out and vote the GOP out, *overwhelmingly*, to the point where there's no question.
mark
"a spray dispenser of smallpox"?
Let me see if I have this straight: the auther thinks that a spray of smallpox is scary? While major pieces of entire *CITIES* and their 'burbs by 10 or 20 megaton H-bombs, with radiation strong enough to sicken or kill outright over hundreds of miles, killing millions in an instant, or over the next month, he thinks "a spray of smallpox" is horrifying?
Does he think that nuclear bombs are only videogames, while smallpox is real?
Most likely, the reality of war, much less nuclear war, is so incomprehensible that he's irrationally terrified of stubbing his toe.
mark "and plastic and duct tape won't
help, either"
Go google on images from Vietnam, that were played on the six o'clock news. Try the famous picture of the girl on fire with napalm, that was plastered everywhere.
This is what war *IS*. Blood and death and shattered bodies: this is the real world, not some video game or "action movie". You are, as the citizen of a democracy, *SUPPOSED* to vote on things - and I refer to Bush, Cheney, Rummy et al, as "things" - that affect the real world. If you voted for them, you voted for *this*.
Too real for you? Want to live in a fantasy, and keep your kids in a fantasy?
My kids have to live in the real world, as I do.
No 'R' rating.
mark
Without a *single* exception, every user, and *esp* every secretary/admin assist/whatever, who knew both swore *by* WordPerfect 5.2. It did everything, and Dirt, er, Word was trying to play catchup. WP was overwhelmingly the word processor of choice, to the point it was written into government contracts that documents be delivered in that format.
And one thing that WP 5.2/6.0 did, that neither Word *not* OpenOffice.dog do, is -F3, reveal *all* codes...so you could *always* make it do what you wanted, not what it thought it knew better how to do than you did.
mark
A number of years ago, while I was working for a Baby Bell, we were building a system, and integrating it with BEA's Tuxedo. One day a couple of the consultants came to me, to tell me that it was crashing, and they couldn't figure out why.
I pulled it up in the debugger (a Sun box), and stepped through the code...and, when I found it was crashing in Tuxedo, I did something the consultants (young guys) had no clue you could do...I stepi'd *into* the binary.
Now, I didn't know Sun assembly language, but that was irrelevant. I nexti'd and stepi'd my way through, and found the name of the function it was crashing in, which will *always* be there, even in a stripped binary, and where it was doing it in the function.
I could then call BEA (I was senior technical, and Rank Hath Its Privileges), and get info from their developers.
Turned out to be the environment, not a bug, but the point is, once in a while, *knowing* what how things work Down There will save your butt, and maybe even lead you to better code.
mark "and I pushed my kids to know what
happens under the hood of the car, too"
I tried fvwm2, and I think windowmaker, and Xfce, but wound up happiest with IceWM. Half a meg for the whole damn binary.
I just wish that the control panels for it all didn't gag over a python error that I've not been able to trace (not a python programmer, though).
People keep talking eye candy and "integration". SCREW IT! As long as it looks ok, and I *really* don't see the difference between KDE and Ice, so I have no clue what they're talking about, it's fine, and how many folks out there use a fraction of the "integrated" garbage?
I use Mozilla, though I'm still using kmail because it works the way I want it to, and OpenOffice.dog, and that takes care of most everything but work (sysadmin, programming), and that gets done over ssh.
I *would* like to see one of the lightweight window managers gain a *lot* more acceptability - that would help linux on the desktop a *lot*. I mean, be *real*, most folks are buying for home, and a *lot* of companies are *not* going to upgrade hardware for everyone every year, so it better run *fast* on older hardware.
My home system is an "overclocked" 233->250 K6-II, and I'm running a recent 2.4 kernel, and it runs just find (except, as I suggested above, OpenOffice.dog, and I can't understand why that takes more than half a minute to get up blank, and another 15 seconds to give me a file menu, when AbiWord comes up all the way on the same box in about 10 seconds...of course, Abiword 2.0 wants aspell, and that breaks apache....).
Fine, so I may buy a 400 or 500 MHz m/b soon, so OO.O and maybe a game or two will run faster...but as for KDE/Gnome, no thanks, you can go park those semi-trailers down the block.
mark
Oh, my!
Once upon a time, X Windows was the definition of bloat. Then came Lose95, et al. Every. Single. New. Flavor. of M$ o/s almost *requires* new hardware.
Now, this isn't a big surprise to me, since I read an interview with Gates in the early 90's, where he admitted to being a hardware junky.
The rest of us, though, who can't afford the latest machines every six month, and want to do something other than gloat over how hot our systems are....
Then there's the incredibly poor design of WinBlows: it *could* have been good - hell, I was hanging onto DOS for a *long* time. The real mistake was that they should have put virtual memory and at *least* foreground/background multitasking where it belonged: in *DOS*, and that by the mid-eighties. Windows could have sat on top of that, as X does on *nix, and things would have been fine.
Instead, they put the GUI *into* the o/s, so if the GUI craps out, the system craps out.
While shoving all the GUI into the o/s, they then set themselves up for all the bugs that they propagate, and that grow with each release. They added to it by rushing release dates - marketing trumps engineering, and EULAs that say "you bought it, but, no, we still own it, and we're *STILL* not responsible for anything".
Meanwhile, although I'm *not* happy with OpenOffice.dog (that's intended), everything runs reasonably well under Linux on my (slightly overclocked) 250MHz AMD K6-II, with the latest Linux 2.4 kernel, and I haven't been forced to upgrade my hardware by o/s upgrades.
mark "if only abiword2 didn't break Apache"
"Can industry regulate itself?"
Enron, S&L (late 80s), Halliburton, the AMA, the insurance industry....
Show me *anywhere* that "self-regulation" works. Those regulations were set up, not because legislators sat around thinking of things to do, but because of public outcries over egregious abuses.
Go start your own unregulated country. My parents and grandparents fought and voted to control business.
On the other hand, certain regulations of the FCC ought to be written as *law*, not rules that they can change. Number one, of course, would be to bring Equal Time back, with a vengence, including on cable.
mark "Faux News: fair and balanced, as
determined by Tom DeLay...."
When the world was younger, and my ...late... wife was alive, I'd have been very interested. These days, I'll pass.
Note: there comes a time when you get tired of dealing with the world. Like Bilbo and Frodo, you come to look forward to a very long rest.
mark
"Browser wars"? So, when will we see the efforts to create micro-browsers, suitable for viewing slashdot or news.google.com on the 1.5"x2" screen on my cell phone...and when will the manufacturers give us a magnifying glass, so we can read more than 12 letters at a time....
mark "and the market-droids who decided I
wanted a Web browser on my cell phone
will make a great telescope - a lens
in either ear, and hard vacuum in
between, just like Bush & co...."
As much as I appreciate Mr. Lovelock, I think he's wrong on power sources. For one, I'd like to ask him, or anyone here, if they'd care to host a nuclear waste facility in their county...and if they believe that they could convince a majority of their fellow citizens to do so.
I think biodiesel is a good interim solution for fuel shortages, but even that has to be superceded, and soon.
He is right, though, on global warming. Other than the reactionary right in power in the US, and the few paid scientists they keep, and the "Christian" scientists (not to be confused with Christian Science, the sect), *NO* *ONE* doubts that global warming is real, and a very serious threat.
*sigh*
And we should have started building solar power satellites 20 years ago, but noooooo, all those US oilmen, and their agents, like Bush Sr.....
mark "should have built the first real
space station by expanding Skylab, too"
Kirk the Jerk, on the bridge again?
James T. "it's 20 of the hour, and I haven't violated the Prime Directive or gotten laid yet" Kirk?
*NO* one could believe someone who got that many people under his command killed would keep his career. For that matter, how could *anyone* believe that Starfleet would put him in charge of a multi-gigabuck starship, and there were never 300 people on it.
Years ago, I figured out what it *really* was: Kirk was a buddy of McHale (as in McHale's Navy), and it was a spacegoing PT boat, with about 15 or 30 people on it....
mark "that I could believe"
Based on what I was seeing in Chicago, up to about a year and a quarter ago, and down in central Florida since then, anywhere from $22,500/yr to $27,500/yr.
Before the bubble crashed, and the Bush Depression started, you could have added $10k/yr to both numbers.
This is for a BS degree.
Oh, and they'd love an MSCE, etc....
mark
I know that I'm better and more experienced than maybe 75% of the folks out there...but I'm not foolish enough to think that there aren't folks who are better than me at some things, nor do I doubt that some of them live in the FSU, or China, or, for that matter, Mexico.
Why keep the jobs here? For one thing, get management and HR past the idiocy of thinking that experience isn't worth paying for. For another, get them to think - if they have two brain cells to rub together (as opposed, for example, to "CEO" Bush), that having someone in India or whereever do the jobs of local workers means that
1) the now-unemployed local workers won't
be able to afford their products;
2) that if there are problems, they are the
ones who will have to deal with them
long distance, and possibly with
language barriers (American managers
speaking furrin' languages? Perish th'
thought!)
3) let's not forget the time differential,
as well.
Finally, the folks who said "vote" have it right. Consider that *EVERY* *OTHER* *COUNTRY* (except maybe India - I just don't know) that the US worker is competing with has *national* healthcare, so the employers don't have to pay that, or Workmen's Comp....
But no, no one here writes or emails or calls their reps, they won't do anything, they're all owned by the insurance companies, just keep your noses to the grindstone...as long as you've got one, and it isn't offshored...
mark "wait till management is offshored"
Dear slashdotters,
My name is mark, and according to what I was told 40 years ago, I'd be on the wheel-shaped space station several years ago. Since I am out of work in the Bush Depression, I am asking for donations to take myself and my SO to the ISS by Russian launch vehicle (since I don't know how to contact the facility that launched Pitr of UserFriendly...).
This, of course, will require $40M US, and so it is imperative that you contact me soon, with whatever size donation you can afford.
If you are a conservative, you get the extra benefit of two left-wingers leaving the planet, while for liberals, we can make this an issue that we can't spend the money to do this in our own country, but have to offshore it.
I look forward to hearing from you, Dear Friends and Donors.
mark
As a Philadelphian expatriate, we *invented* the Hugos at the Philly Worldcon in 1953, and we gave Alfred Bester the Best Novel for "The Demolished Man".
It's absolutely illegitimate for Boston to try to revoke or supercede that, and I've just emailed them to that effect.
mark, Philadelphian expatriate, PSFS member, 21 years
to real space battles. None of that *STUPID* banking in vacuum...
On the other hand, a real battle would look more like the command room in Empire Strikes Back. NO big dogfights...they don't happen anymore, and you cannot see them, in RL. Modern fighter jets use automatic targetting, because you aim when you're 50 miles away, and by the time you've fired, you're 50 mi. past them.
There is *NO* *WAY* that you'll have more than one wing "visible" to anyone's eye. They'll take place at the range of hundreds, or thousands, of *MILES*. And mostly, a hit will mean that it's radioactive debris in space.
Survivors? Miracles only. Consider the movie I just watched, "K-19, the Widowmaker" - and *that's* only a reactor leak.
mark "in space, you don't ever have to
look in the eye of the person you're
about to kill"
Whereas the diagrams that show relationships between fields, sorry, "columns" in RDBMs look so much like ants that had been chased through spilled ink that *no* *one* can make head or tail of 'em.
This younger gen'ration just don't understand multi=level flow charts.
Aside: Do meddle in the affaird...? Y'know, if they're crunchier, some like to roll 'em in powdered sugar, which is bad for their fangs.
y Ddraig Goch, eh? Cymry?
mark, y Ariandrake, cymrophile
Before you post this kind of garbage, ask yourself the following question: how *much* nuclear material was in the satellite? A kg? Half a Kg?
So whatever isn't leaked into space will spread *how* much radioactive material over *how* *much* area? Will it even be enough to light a watch dial?
mark