Last I checked that stood for "National American Space Association," so this would be quite a surprise
As many others have already posted, you're right, it would be a surprise, if NASA stood for National American Space Association, but since you got two of the four words wrong and have some pretty sketchy history to go along with it, I think I'll ignore the rest.
Asteroid collisions are a major issue. We've had a few fairly close calls in the last few years, and it's a bit spooky. All it would take is one big one to wipe our race out of existence. It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when, and when could be two weeks from now. Hell, one of the closest approaches in recent history happened just a few months ago, and we didn't even see it until AFTER it had passed, because it was coming from the direction of the sun.
NASA has got to get funded for this, and the U.S. shouldn't have to pick up the entire tab. Other industrial nations should chip in, as it would be saving the entire world's ass, not just our own.
And think about this, it doesn't have to be a global killer. It could simply be a decent sized piece landing in the middle of the atlantic, and kiss good by most of the Eastern US and Western Europe, to a hundred or so miles inland. Think of how many people that would kill. And we're not putting in enough to prevent this thing that we CAN prevent? Why?
Actually, our company has done just that. Everyone in the company (including the president and vice president) have taken a 25% paycut, but we also get one week off a month.
While financially, it's a bit tough, it's actually had some positive side-effects. The main, of course, being that the company has survived some tough times and we're digging ourselves out of the red. Personally, however, I've discovered that I can get by just fine on 75% of my salary, so I now plan on putting 25% of my salary into savings as soon as we go back on full salary.
Of course, I'm single and I rent, so it's not as big a problem for me. Two of the other developers are married and have mortgages. One has a house wife and two kids, so they're really struggling to make ends meet, but they're getting by. We plan to go back to full salary next month.
Our company has handled it pretty well (though with a few mis-steps at times). They've been very open about the finances (expenses and income). I think it's given a lot of us a lot more respect for how much it costs to operate a business.
That said, there are few companies I'd be willing to do this for. Beyond the fact that I'm very good friends with the owner, and the reason that the other developers are staying, is that we have a kick-ass product that's fun to work on, and can make us a great deal of money. We've all taken a longer term view and decided to stay based on that. In return, when the company gets back to profitability, we'll be doing an employee ownership program for those who have stuck it out.
For people interested in a more accurate and complete description of the CIFS/SMB protocol the Samba Team recommends the recently released SNIA CIFS document, which has been developed through a process of industry collaboration.
Years ago, I wrote a number of articles and then a book of Microsoft's undocumented file formats. In one case, there was a graphic file format called the.SHG (Segmented Hyper Graphic, basically a big name for a graphic with link areas).
Anyway, Microsoft had publicly "released" the file format, but it was almost entirely wrong. The funny thing is that not long after my article on the real format appeared, Microsoft actually approached me to document the format for them. Ha ha ha. I guess whoever developped it left them high and dry.
I never did it because we disagreed on two key points. One: I wanted some payment upfront because they were notorious for taking their time paying people, and two: I wanted an agreement in writing that it would be released publicly. They didn't agree to either. Oh well, I released the documentation publicly.
We thought building our own would be cheaper, but the maintenance turned out to be a nightmare and cost us a lot more than the machines themselves. In once case, we had a machine that had a bad motherboard, then a bad replacement. Took almost 3 weeks to get that one machine up and running.
Dell is great. They'll come out and fix your machines for you. After the build our own fiasco, we went with Dell. The only problem we had of all the Dell machines was a bad IDE cable in one machine. Otherwise, things were great.
I bet you'll average more than $400 in labor time, for each machine, in the long run. Also, I think your math is bad. I bet you can get decent Dell P4s for $600 or so. A Dell, 128MB P4@1.7GhZ(without monitor), $500 after rebate.
I have to disagree with the authors viewpoint. As the saying goes, Rome wasn't built in a day, and understanding among peoples who have disagreed for tens of centuries, isn't going to go away in a decade or two.
I read a really interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly Journal, not too long ago. The article discussed how the Muslim world used to be the center of art and science in the world. They were way ahead of the rest of the world. So the article investigated why that changed.
It made a very persuasive argument that openness and freedom of expression were the primary reasons. Though it may be a coincidence, I doubt it. At the time that the Muslim world was leading art and science, it was much freer and open than other nations of the world. As west became more open and allowed more freedoms, and the Muslim nations did the opposite, the balance began to change and has been that way to this day.
Oppression doesn't work. It stifles growth and it breeds hate. Many of these countries are very successful of blaming the west for their lot in life. It's always easier to blame others for your problems than it is to look inside and see what YOU are doing wrong.
Eventually, this open communication, however, will have a positive effect, I believe. I don't expect it to happen overnight, and there will always be periods of years or decades when there will be heated differences (as we're experiencing now), but the overall trend, as seen from the point of view of a century, I believe, in the end, will show that the world will have grown closer and more enlightened because of the growth of free communication.
Why is everyone so paranoid about Carnivore? I don't get it. They need a warrant to use it, and they can't use anything that's not in the warrant against you. Same rules as phone tapping. Why not have a big uproar about phone tapping? Granted, phone taps don't collect everything and sniff through it, but the end-result is the same.
Being a, more or less, law abiding citizen, I have no issues with it at all. I might be a little concerned if I were dealing drugs over the internet, or performing some similar crime, but really, come on. You think the FBI is really concerned with how your day has been? That you just got an 'A' on your exam? Or that you hate your boss?
Sorry, but I think everyone blows this stuff way out of proportion. When I see carnivore being abused, then I'll be concerned, but until then, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
That's just the first step. First you make creating a virus illegal. The next step is to arrest God for creation of the flu virus, ebola, smallpox, the FelV virus, parvo, you name it. Man, we can really nail him on this.
There's already a C# compiler (with source code) available for FreeBSD. You don't think it'll be on Linux before long? I think you might want to cut down on the crack. It's messing with your perception of reality.
Why? Was your book so bad, that anyone who bought it wanted to sell it again straight away?
Some books are written because the authors want to, not to be best sellers. Ours was rated quite highly by the readers, but had a VERY limited market segment. Not that I should have to explain to someone that makes trollish asshole comments like this.
You can check it out on Amazon. As an intelligent person, and maybe even you can see, the book had a very limited market that would be interested. Does that make it a bad book? Not in my opinion.
It depends on the individual deals with the publisher, but in general, the publisher (like a record company), takes the expense of publishing the book, and they're looking to make that money back. You usually get an advance on royalties, but as a first time writer, this usually isn't significant, compared to the amount of work involved.
Then, you get a small percentage that goes towards that advance, until the advance is covered. If you get to that point, then you start making money, but many books don't even get to that point. Many authors never see money beyond their advance.
And it's better for computer book authors. First time authors of non-technical books, usually don't get advances, or if they do, miniscule ones. It takes a lot of sales to make any real money from a book.
Being an author myself, I can sympathize with the Author's Guild. I spent a great deal of time on my book and just barely made any money off of it to begin with. Had Amazon had this at the time my book came out, I may have never made a dime.
Unlike movies and CDs, authors main source of benefit from a book is usually the book itself, and if new copies don't sell, the author doesn't make any money.
With CDs, this isn't really a significant source of income for most musicians. They tend to make most of their money from touring. Movies tend to make most of their money from theatres and selling to video stores (who then rent).
Authors, unfortunately, usually don't have another source of income from their books.
That said, there have been used book stores for years, and there should be. There are certainly a lot of out of print books that are made available through this channel that is invaluable to book collectors. If you allow this, you simply have to allow any book to be bought used.
Then there's Amazon.com. They're a company that is trying to make money. That's their job. They have an obligation to their shareholders to do the best they can to make money. Failure to do that, especially after they've clearly shown that it's a source of income for them, could actually make them liable to stockholders. They'd have to somehow show to their stockholders that the overall benefit would be to remove this feature (such as the Actors Guild putting together a big enough campaign against Amazon to cost them more to implement it than it makes them).
As an author, I'm torn, but when it comes down to it, Amazon is doing the right thing for them. They have to try to make money.
There are many reasons to stop the spammers through legislation. People here have mentioned some good ones: Freeloaders using bandwidth and other people's mail servers. I have a friend who runs a small ISP in Mexico. Some spammer used his mail server (it was set for open relay) to send out a bunch of spam.
This guy didn't want to run an ISP. He had to. He had an internet cafe and the only ISP in town shutdown, so he bought them out so he could keep his internet cafe going, his only source of income. He's not real technical. Enough to run the cafe, but the ISP was a big hurdle for him. I'm just trying to explain the reason for the open relay.
Now, after this spammer used his open relay, his mail server (and all of his clients) suddenly became blacklisted, and he was unable to send ANY e-mail. He fixed the problem, but the incident cost him dearly.
So, there's another reason. Here's another: I have TONS of stuff filtering spam. I still get tons of it every day that doesn't get filtered. So I'm constantly adding new addresses and stuff to my filters. This takes my time, not a lot, but let's say a few minutes a day. My work time. Time I could be using to be more productive at my job. This hurts my company. Multiply that by everyone in the world who has e-mail, and you start to get an idea of the scope of productivity that's lost each day because of this crap.
What right do they have to use up the bandwidth and services we pay for? What right do they have to interefere with my productivity at work? If you can justify this and other issues that others have raised, you might have a case, but I doubt you'll be able to.
The internet has been relatively insecure since day one. It's no one particular company's fault or one particular person's fault. The internet protocols weren't originally designed to prevent massive DDoS attacks. It wasn't designed to be particularly secure on the individual machines because when it was originally created, the network was secure by the fact that every computer on it was known. The number of computers didn't extend into the thousands, probably until the 90s, and even then, it was about 98% educational institutes, DOD, and companies.
Any competent programmer, familiar with several TCP/IP protocols, and TCP/IP programming, could easily bring the internet to a grinding halt. The fact that it hasn't happened in years (1988 with Robert Morris' infamous internet worm) is what astounds me.
He can go back in time, stop his father from smoking, but then he'd come back and his father would still be dead (because his father would have quit in some alternate universe). But then his father has aleady quit in a number of alternate universes, and who's to say that the good professor will even come back to our universe?
I mean, really, you're talking about building a pretty useless machine, as far as time travel goes. You can affect alternate universes that we can only experience by going through a time machine, and even then, it sounds like we won't really have complete control of the alternate universes we go to.
I do like the idea as a way for getting rid fo garbage. Now we can save Yucca Mountain. We don't need to dump our nuclear waste there, let's just send it off to alternate universes. Of course, then you bring out all the hippy "save the alternate timelines" freaks. I guess we could toss them in too, and they could get really involved in saving those alternate timelines.
Most new hires came in to work on projects that had the potential to bring in revenue sooner than NOW...
Um, maybe it's me, but how could it be sooner than now? If these guys have a working time machine, maybe they ought to try to capitalize on that instead of writing an OS.
Hmm, will I use the new encoder to encode the videos with a watermark, that I want to distribute P2P, or will I use the old encoder? Boy, that'll sure stop piracy.
Is anyone distributing movies in DivX, other than pirates? I mean, are the studios releasing stuff in DivX? Am I out to lunch?
There are a number of ways Earth-sized planets could be discovered fairly soon (within the next 5-10 years). There are several planet-finding satellites to be launched. The Hubble would also be capable of detecting an Earth-sized planet passing in front of a star.
The real trick is finding the proper conditions. First, we need to find an extra-solar system in which Earth-sized planets exist. It's now believed that these are fairly few and far between. The reason is that a vast majority of the gas giant systems we've discovered so far have their gas giants in either really close orbits to their stars, or are highly eliptical with passes close to their stars. In these situations, Earth-like planets would likely be tossed into their stars, or more likely, tossed into open space, by the gravitational effect of the giants.
So, what you need is giants that live fairly far out (like Jupiter and Saturn). These appear to be about 1 out of 50+ systems. So, out of this 1-2% of systems, we then need to find ones with orbital planes that are parallel to our angle of view of those systems, and catch the Earth-sized planets passing in front of their stars.
Asking for all those conditions to line up is a pretty tall order, so it's unlikely we'll catch such an event in the next 5 years. My personal opinion. A large breakthrough may change that, and that's possible as well. After all, look at the discovery of extra-solar planets. It was a breakthrough idea that led to a sudden discovery of many of these systems, without a real technilogical breakthrough.
In Microsoft's defense, I'm not really sure how they'd pull IE out of Windows 2000 or Windows XP. It really is fundamental part of the user interface. The desktop is "Explorer", and Explorer is IE, and IE is Explorer, in many ways.
The fact that I can go into IE and type: C:\ and all of a sudden browse my drive, or be in Explorer and type http://slashdot.org and it will take me to Slashdot, all of this, seamlessly, is frankly, a nice feature. The two are entirely integrated, and I don't think it could be separated without a fundamental redesign of the desktop user interface.
That said, I don't defend Microsoft's business practices. They have been predatory, but I think the government came after them at the wrong time and for the wrong things.
Integrating the browser into the OS was a good move and maybe not a "natural" evolutions as Microsoft would say, but it was a good evolution. The justice department should have gone after MS for things like pre-announcing products that hadn't even been started, just to keep people from buying competitors' products, or releasing software for free as loss leaders, just to grab up marketshare and put competition out of business.
For a monopoly, these things are blatently predatory and not what the government went after. I think everyone will agree that the government made a number of mistakes in pursuing this case.
Hell, the original judge even denied the justice department their first victory, saying that they weren't addressing enough of Microsoft's predatory practices. He wanted to see them go after more. What do they do? Drop the case and start over. Idiots.
How JPL will overcome the time delay isn't mentioned but it's an interesting read nonetheless
I'm more interested in how they're going to get two submersible robots under a few kilometers of ice first. Not to mention, to communicate, they'd have to be tethered (water isn't real conducive to radio communications). They've got a lot more than just a time delay to worry about.
I don't see how this could be reliably automated. Maybe with some people drilling it could be done, but I have a feeling that if we dropped a robotic drilling system, something would go wrong. It's just a bit too complex for me to have faith in it.
I haven't seen it, so I can't give an opinion, but I find it interesting that Blade II rates much higher than Blade on IMDB. I tend to find that IMDB ratings, on average, agree with my opinion (though LotR may be great, I'm not sure it qualifies as #3 movie of all time).
I'll probably wait to see it on cable. I just ordered the first one a few days ago, which I really enjoyed. I hope this review is a fluke, though the way it was written leads me to believe I'll probably agree with the author.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I checked that stood for "National American Space Association," so this would be quite a surprise
As many others have already posted, you're right, it would be a surprise, if NASA stood for National American Space Association, but since you got two of the four words wrong and have some pretty sketchy history to go along with it, I think I'll ignore the rest.
Asteroid collisions are a major issue. We've had a few fairly close calls in the last few years, and it's a bit spooky. All it would take is one big one to wipe our race out of existence. It's not a matter of if, but a matter of when, and when could be two weeks from now. Hell, one of the closest approaches in recent history happened just a few months ago, and we didn't even see it until AFTER it had passed, because it was coming from the direction of the sun.
NASA has got to get funded for this, and the U.S. shouldn't have to pick up the entire tab. Other industrial nations should chip in, as it would be saving the entire world's ass, not just our own.
And think about this, it doesn't have to be a global killer. It could simply be a decent sized piece landing in the middle of the atlantic, and kiss good by most of the Eastern US and Western Europe, to a hundred or so miles inland. Think of how many people that would kill. And we're not putting in enough to prevent this thing that we CAN prevent? Why?
Actually, our company has done just that. Everyone in the company (including the president and vice president) have taken a 25% paycut, but we also get one week off a month.
While financially, it's a bit tough, it's actually had some positive side-effects. The main, of course, being that the company has survived some tough times and we're digging ourselves out of the red. Personally, however, I've discovered that I can get by just fine on 75% of my salary, so I now plan on putting 25% of my salary into savings as soon as we go back on full salary.
Of course, I'm single and I rent, so it's not as big a problem for me. Two of the other developers are married and have mortgages. One has a house wife and two kids, so they're really struggling to make ends meet, but they're getting by. We plan to go back to full salary next month.
Our company has handled it pretty well (though with a few mis-steps at times). They've been very open about the finances (expenses and income). I think it's given a lot of us a lot more respect for how much it costs to operate a business.
That said, there are few companies I'd be willing to do this for. Beyond the fact that I'm very good friends with the owner, and the reason that the other developers are staying, is that we have a kick-ass product that's fun to work on, and can make us a great deal of money. We've all taken a longer term view and decided to stay based on that. In return, when the company gets back to profitability, we'll be doing an employee ownership program for those who have stuck it out.
For people interested in a more accurate and complete description of the CIFS/SMB protocol the Samba Team recommends the recently released SNIA CIFS document, which has been developed through a process of industry collaboration.
.SHG (Segmented Hyper Graphic, basically a big name for a graphic with link areas).
Years ago, I wrote a number of articles and then a book of Microsoft's undocumented file formats. In one case, there was a graphic file format called the
Anyway, Microsoft had publicly "released" the file format, but it was almost entirely wrong. The funny thing is that not long after my article on the real format appeared, Microsoft actually approached me to document the format for them. Ha ha ha. I guess whoever developped it left them high and dry.
I never did it because we disagreed on two key points. One: I wanted some payment upfront because they were notorious for taking their time paying people, and two: I wanted an agreement in writing that it would be released publicly. They didn't agree to either. Oh well, I released the documentation publicly.
We thought building our own would be cheaper, but the maintenance turned out to be a nightmare and cost us a lot more than the machines themselves. In once case, we had a machine that had a bad motherboard, then a bad replacement. Took almost 3 weeks to get that one machine up and running.
Dell is great. They'll come out and fix your machines for you. After the build our own fiasco, we went with Dell. The only problem we had of all the Dell machines was a bad IDE cable in one machine. Otherwise, things were great.
I bet you'll average more than $400 in labor time, for each machine, in the long run. Also, I think your math is bad. I bet you can get decent Dell P4s for $600 or so. A Dell, 128MB P4@1.7GhZ(without monitor), $500 after rebate.
Weren't they talking about building the space elevator out of carbon nanotubes? Does that mean it will explode if someone takes flash photo of it?
Few books sell well, and even fewer (mine, for example) make money.
Maybe your books just aren't interesting and therefore don't sell well. Just a theory.
What do you know, they have the entire article online. Enjoy.
I have to disagree with the authors viewpoint. As the saying goes, Rome wasn't built in a day, and understanding among peoples who have disagreed for tens of centuries, isn't going to go away in a decade or two.
I read a really interesting article in the Atlantic Monthly Journal, not too long ago. The article discussed how the Muslim world used to be the center of art and science in the world. They were way ahead of the rest of the world. So the article investigated why that changed.
It made a very persuasive argument that openness and freedom of expression were the primary reasons. Though it may be a coincidence, I doubt it. At the time that the Muslim world was leading art and science, it was much freer and open than other nations of the world. As west became more open and allowed more freedoms, and the Muslim nations did the opposite, the balance began to change and has been that way to this day.
Oppression doesn't work. It stifles growth and it breeds hate. Many of these countries are very successful of blaming the west for their lot in life. It's always easier to blame others for your problems than it is to look inside and see what YOU are doing wrong.
Eventually, this open communication, however, will have a positive effect, I believe. I don't expect it to happen overnight, and there will always be periods of years or decades when there will be heated differences (as we're experiencing now), but the overall trend, as seen from the point of view of a century, I believe, in the end, will show that the world will have grown closer and more enlightened because of the growth of free communication.
Why is everyone so paranoid about Carnivore? I don't get it. They need a warrant to use it, and they can't use anything that's not in the warrant against you. Same rules as phone tapping. Why not have a big uproar about phone tapping? Granted, phone taps don't collect everything and sniff through it, but the end-result is the same.
Being a, more or less, law abiding citizen, I have no issues with it at all. I might be a little concerned if I were dealing drugs over the internet, or performing some similar crime, but really, come on. You think the FBI is really concerned with how your day has been? That you just got an 'A' on your exam? Or that you hate your boss?
Sorry, but I think everyone blows this stuff way out of proportion. When I see carnivore being abused, then I'll be concerned, but until then, I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
That's just the first step. First you make creating a virus illegal. The next step is to arrest God for creation of the flu virus, ebola, smallpox, the FelV virus, parvo, you name it. Man, we can really nail him on this.
There's already a C# compiler (with source code) available for FreeBSD. You don't think it'll be on Linux before long? I think you might want to cut down on the crack. It's messing with your perception of reality.
Why? Was your book so bad, that anyone who bought it wanted to sell it again straight away?
Some books are written because the authors want to, not to be best sellers. Ours was rated quite highly by the readers, but had a VERY limited market segment. Not that I should have to explain to someone that makes trollish asshole comments like this.
You can check it out on Amazon. As an intelligent person, and maybe even you can see, the book had a very limited market that would be interested. Does that make it a bad book? Not in my opinion.
What about all the books you've sold genius?
It depends on the individual deals with the publisher, but in general, the publisher (like a record company), takes the expense of publishing the book, and they're looking to make that money back. You usually get an advance on royalties, but as a first time writer, this usually isn't significant, compared to the amount of work involved.
Then, you get a small percentage that goes towards that advance, until the advance is covered. If you get to that point, then you start making money, but many books don't even get to that point. Many authors never see money beyond their advance.
And it's better for computer book authors. First time authors of non-technical books, usually don't get advances, or if they do, miniscule ones. It takes a lot of sales to make any real money from a book.
Being an author myself, I can sympathize with the Author's Guild. I spent a great deal of time on my book and just barely made any money off of it to begin with. Had Amazon had this at the time my book came out, I may have never made a dime.
Unlike movies and CDs, authors main source of benefit from a book is usually the book itself, and if new copies don't sell, the author doesn't make any money.
With CDs, this isn't really a significant source of income for most musicians. They tend to make most of their money from touring. Movies tend to make most of their money from theatres and selling to video stores (who then rent).
Authors, unfortunately, usually don't have another source of income from their books.
That said, there have been used book stores for years, and there should be. There are certainly a lot of out of print books that are made available through this channel that is invaluable to book collectors. If you allow this, you simply have to allow any book to be bought used.
Then there's Amazon.com. They're a company that is trying to make money. That's their job. They have an obligation to their shareholders to do the best they can to make money. Failure to do that, especially after they've clearly shown that it's a source of income for them, could actually make them liable to stockholders. They'd have to somehow show to their stockholders that the overall benefit would be to remove this feature (such as the Actors Guild putting together a big enough campaign against Amazon to cost them more to implement it than it makes them).
As an author, I'm torn, but when it comes down to it, Amazon is doing the right thing for them. They have to try to make money.
There are many reasons to stop the spammers through legislation. People here have mentioned some good ones: Freeloaders using bandwidth and other people's mail servers. I have a friend who runs a small ISP in Mexico. Some spammer used his mail server (it was set for open relay) to send out a bunch of spam.
This guy didn't want to run an ISP. He had to. He had an internet cafe and the only ISP in town shutdown, so he bought them out so he could keep his internet cafe going, his only source of income. He's not real technical. Enough to run the cafe, but the ISP was a big hurdle for him. I'm just trying to explain the reason for the open relay.
Now, after this spammer used his open relay, his mail server (and all of his clients) suddenly became blacklisted, and he was unable to send ANY e-mail. He fixed the problem, but the incident cost him dearly.
So, there's another reason. Here's another: I have TONS of stuff filtering spam. I still get tons of it every day that doesn't get filtered. So I'm constantly adding new addresses and stuff to my filters. This takes my time, not a lot, but let's say a few minutes a day. My work time. Time I could be using to be more productive at my job. This hurts my company. Multiply that by everyone in the world who has e-mail, and you start to get an idea of the scope of productivity that's lost each day because of this crap.
What right do they have to use up the bandwidth and services we pay for? What right do they have to interefere with my productivity at work? If you can justify this and other issues that others have raised, you might have a case, but I doubt you'll be able to.
The internet has been relatively insecure since day one. It's no one particular company's fault or one particular person's fault. The internet protocols weren't originally designed to prevent massive DDoS attacks. It wasn't designed to be particularly secure on the individual machines because when it was originally created, the network was secure by the fact that every computer on it was known. The number of computers didn't extend into the thousands, probably until the 90s, and even then, it was about 98% educational institutes, DOD, and companies.
Any competent programmer, familiar with several TCP/IP protocols, and TCP/IP programming, could easily bring the internet to a grinding halt. The fact that it hasn't happened in years (1988 with Robert Morris' infamous internet worm) is what astounds me.
He can go back in time, stop his father from smoking, but then he'd come back and his father would still be dead (because his father would have quit in some alternate universe). But then his father has aleady quit in a number of alternate universes, and who's to say that the good professor will even come back to our universe?
I mean, really, you're talking about building a pretty useless machine, as far as time travel goes. You can affect alternate universes that we can only experience by going through a time machine, and even then, it sounds like we won't really have complete control of the alternate universes we go to.
I do like the idea as a way for getting rid fo garbage. Now we can save Yucca Mountain. We don't need to dump our nuclear waste there, let's just send it off to alternate universes. Of course, then you bring out all the hippy "save the alternate timelines" freaks. I guess we could toss them in too, and they could get really involved in saving those alternate timelines.
Most new hires came in to work on projects that had the potential to bring in revenue sooner than NOW...
Um, maybe it's me, but how could it be sooner than now? If these guys have a working time machine, maybe they ought to try to capitalize on that instead of writing an OS.
Hmm, will I use the new encoder to encode the videos with a watermark, that I want to distribute P2P, or will I use the old encoder? Boy, that'll sure stop piracy.
Is anyone distributing movies in DivX, other than pirates? I mean, are the studios releasing stuff in DivX? Am I out to lunch?
There are a number of ways Earth-sized planets could be discovered fairly soon (within the next 5-10 years). There are several planet-finding satellites to be launched. The Hubble would also be capable of detecting an Earth-sized planet passing in front of a star.
The real trick is finding the proper conditions. First, we need to find an extra-solar system in which Earth-sized planets exist. It's now believed that these are fairly few and far between. The reason is that a vast majority of the gas giant systems we've discovered so far have their gas giants in either really close orbits to their stars, or are highly eliptical with passes close to their stars. In these situations, Earth-like planets would likely be tossed into their stars, or more likely, tossed into open space, by the gravitational effect of the giants.
So, what you need is giants that live fairly far out (like Jupiter and Saturn). These appear to be about 1 out of 50+ systems. So, out of this 1-2% of systems, we then need to find ones with orbital planes that are parallel to our angle of view of those systems, and catch the Earth-sized planets passing in front of their stars.
Asking for all those conditions to line up is a pretty tall order, so it's unlikely we'll catch such an event in the next 5 years. My personal opinion. A large breakthrough may change that, and that's possible as well. After all, look at the discovery of extra-solar planets. It was a breakthrough idea that led to a sudden discovery of many of these systems, without a real technilogical breakthrough.
In Microsoft's defense, I'm not really sure how they'd pull IE out of Windows 2000 or Windows XP. It really is fundamental part of the user interface. The desktop is "Explorer", and Explorer is IE, and IE is Explorer, in many ways.
The fact that I can go into IE and type: C:\ and all of a sudden browse my drive, or be in Explorer and type http://slashdot.org and it will take me to Slashdot, all of this, seamlessly, is frankly, a nice feature. The two are entirely integrated, and I don't think it could be separated without a fundamental redesign of the desktop user interface.
That said, I don't defend Microsoft's business practices. They have been predatory, but I think the government came after them at the wrong time and for the wrong things.
Integrating the browser into the OS was a good move and maybe not a "natural" evolutions as Microsoft would say, but it was a good evolution. The justice department should have gone after MS for things like pre-announcing products that hadn't even been started, just to keep people from buying competitors' products, or releasing software for free as loss leaders, just to grab up marketshare and put competition out of business.
For a monopoly, these things are blatently predatory and not what the government went after. I think everyone will agree that the government made a number of mistakes in pursuing this case.
Hell, the original judge even denied the justice department their first victory, saying that they weren't addressing enough of Microsoft's predatory practices. He wanted to see them go after more. What do they do? Drop the case and start over. Idiots.
God appears in court on Monday to sue every medical company for violating his DNA patents.
How JPL will overcome the time delay isn't mentioned but it's an interesting read nonetheless
I'm more interested in how they're going to get two submersible robots under a few kilometers of ice first. Not to mention, to communicate, they'd have to be tethered (water isn't real conducive to radio communications). They've got a lot more than just a time delay to worry about.
I don't see how this could be reliably automated. Maybe with some people drilling it could be done, but I have a feeling that if we dropped a robotic drilling system, something would go wrong. It's just a bit too complex for me to have faith in it.
I haven't seen it, so I can't give an opinion, but I find it interesting that Blade II rates much higher than Blade on IMDB. I tend to find that IMDB ratings, on average, agree with my opinion (though LotR may be great, I'm not sure it qualifies as #3 movie of all time).
I'll probably wait to see it on cable. I just ordered the first one a few days ago, which I really enjoyed. I hope this review is a fluke, though the way it was written leads me to believe I'll probably agree with the author.