Anything can be addictive. Someone already said it, some people have addictive personalities.
That is why we need to hold this up against a baseline of some sort. I say we use alcoholism as a baseline.
Face it, porn is more available then alcohol. You just try getting a 6 pack delivered to your computer terminal at 4am on a Monday morning in less then 30 seconds without having to put your pants back on. Can't be done. Porn is more available to minors then alcohol ever will be.
No reason the two can't be compared.
But they don't. Alcoholics have all kinds of problems. Livers that go bad, hangovers, missing work, abuse of all kinds, killing people. Alcohol also tends to make some people violent.
Porn pretty much makes you horny. I suppose I can come up with some sort of list of negative things. But I can't think of one thing that porn is responsible for that is as bad as DUI's. Don't say rape. People that rape are effed in the head LONG before the porn. I argue that if we could take all porn from our society rape statistics would not change much. Hell, when you talk 'date rape' then alcohol is a contributing factor.
I don't know much about skylab but how you describe it sounds like it would be an attractive option.
Certainly sounds like the costs would be much more reasonable then the current fiasco.
I suppose if NASA wanted to do something like that I could live with it not relating to Mars. But that spacestation we have is sucking the resources out of NASA.
I don't look at Apollo 13 as any sort of failure. Look at what those people did in order to survive. The story (no matter where you find it) is just awe inspiring, what the people did on the ground and what the astronauts did in space.
The fact that they returned alive is a success of a magnitude that everyone should be happy with.
What would be a failure is if NASA and intellectuals didn't go over the incident with a fine tooth comb and learn everything they could.
The first time I saw a picture of Spaceship One and White Night my mind got stuck on just one concept. That concept was that everything one needs to know about why private business trumps government projects can be found right HERE.
And I'll tell you, when I got to see it in action for the first time I felt justified. When I looked at the numbers (read MONEY) I really felt justified.
NASA needs to die. That doesn't mean we need to stay out of space, quite the opposite actually. I just feel that NASA is holding us back.
Bush's idea for MARS is a good one. The only type of government project that can be justified is one that private business cannot or will not accomplish. Going to MARS is an excellent example of that. It would be nice to see Bush take a hard line approach on NASA and get them out of the sattelite launching business.
Someone needs to take a cold hard look at the space station. That thing is a mess and it is sucking up money like an intergalactic Hoover. Neat idea, glad we tried it (hey if we didn't give it the good Ol' College try then we would not have known.) but at some point we have to call it a day and say that it doesn't make financial sense anymore.
The only way I would be willing to let the Space Station live is if it was proved to me that the space station beneffited the Mars mission in a way that is unique and nothing cheaper could accomplish. The exact same look has to be taken at the space shuttle.
What happens when an out of state driver fills up in Oregon? They don't get taxed.
The circumvention to this system is a joke. Just cover up the antennas and don't worry about it. If anyone asks you about it just say you are out of state. If they look at your plates then just punch them in the face. See problem solved.
You have demonstrated my point. In order for me to qualify what you are saying I have to get a hold of a book, a book that may in fact be incorrect. I mean, how do I know this book isn't some PC anti-Christopher Columbus thing? For that matter I have no proof that you didn't make it all up.
The point is this, we are telling our kids that the internet is a fine place to get information. The internet is not a fine place to get information. Is Wikpedia an interesting project? Hell yeah. But the reliability of the information is no better then the reliability of the information you posted about the world being round.
Do you believe what you wrote here? I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and say you do. So what is stopping you from signing onto Wikpedia and doing some massive editing of the Christopher Columbus section?
Just because a large group of people believes something does not make it true.
I understand your point. But there is a great big distinction between Linux and Wikpedia. Releases. (forgive my ignorance I am not a follower of the cult of Linux) As a user I can go out on the net and get the latest release of the kernal. I can assume (well actually this is in respect to where I find the kernal release, I would start my search at Sourceforge.net) that because it is the latest release it is relatively stable.
If after getting this release I find a way to code the drivers of my graphics card a little better I can submit my work for the next release. I am not sure how this is done, but I know it can be.
Now so far we are pretty parrellel between Linux and Wikipedia. Here is where things diverge.
Lets say I don't have a clue about coding and my drivers are absolute garbage. They would never make it through the review process into the next code revision. Simple as that. There are gatekeepers who give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to what goes into the revisions, and it is these gatekeepers that ensure quality.
Wikipedia offers none of that. If Linux were run the way Wikipedia is run then there would be no Linux.
And this is the problem with using the internet for research. Since when does the idea that a majority of people agree on something make it correct? If so then the Earth is flat. We have only believed it is round for a short time, comparetivly speaking. No reason I couldn't convince a room full of 2nd graders that 5+5=11. Since most of the minds in the room agree, does that make it correct? Maybe correct only in that room? I can BS with the best of them. If I go on Wikipedia and write an article, but pull it from my netherregions, and you are not informed enough to recognize my attempt at BS, does that make it correct? Or is Obi-Wan correct, 'Who is the more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows?'
If you could get in a time machine, travel back 6 years and sit down with your past selves for a beer do you think you could get your past selves to believe that this little cartoon project has turned into the monster that it is?
Just because you can does not mean you should.
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High-Tech Shopping Carts
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think my subject pretty much sums up my feelings. This sounds to me like one of the most annoying uses for technology I have heard about in a very long time.
I wonder if the person who invented those automated touch tone dialers that pass as customer service departments that I find so despicable had anything to do with this?
I would most certainly purchase and install it. Doesn't mean I wouldn't still run windows. Possibly do a dual boot or a windows on mac kind of solution.
Ain't never gonna happen though. Apple makes money off there hardware and the OS is why people purchase the hardware. Be a foolish thing for Apple to do.
That is all fine and dandy, but your point is moot.
Most people I know would rather carve out there eyes with butter knives then talk on corded phones at home. Off the top of my head myself, my parents and my best friend all have nothing but cordless phones. We are SOL during power outages anyways.
But then again we all have cell phones and those are backups for power outages.
I'm with ya on this. I wish you hadn't posted as AC though. Cause I think what you are saying is more pertinent then the parent to this.
Cookies are way overrated. Some people are unreasonably scared of them. Lets face it, a cookie is a tool. And just like any other tool there are times when it should be used and times when it should not. There are times when it is abused and times when it is used well.
And if you are smart enough to post on slashdot then you are smart enough to know how to clean out your cookie file. You are also smart enough not to be scared of them.
Stuktongue said: 'Finally, thermal management is an important part of modern satellite design. Heat pipes, thermal radiators (mirrors), finishes, and other techniques are all used to collect, distribute, and reject heat. The effectiveness of these techniques can limit a design, and how capable a company is at dealing with thermal problems can determine the capabilities of its offerings relative to those of its competitors.'
You seem to know what you are talking about. Mind fielding a question for me?
I know space is a vacum (duh). My understanding is that when people say it is quite cold in space this is kind of a misconception. Heat requires a medium to be conducted in (on the Earth air is most prominent) but without a medium, as in a vacum, heat cannot be conducted - hence space being cold is a misnomer because it is not possible for a vacum to be hot.
Therefore.... on a satelite that gets heated up there really is nowhere for the heat to be radiated too.
You mentioned that there are all kinds of tricks being used in dealing with heat in todays satelites. Is the subject of heat on satelites a big problem? Is it hard for them to cool the satelites? Or am I missing something?
Do yourself a favor and wait at least 6 months between finishing Snow Crash and reading Cryptonomicon.
Crypto is an amazing, incredible classic book that will blow your mind. You will feel smarter for having read it. However it is as different from Snow Crash as one can get. So much so that if you are freshly done with Snow Crash you probably won't like Cryptonomicon. This isn't a put down of either book. But rather a compliment to the author. That he can write 2 distinctly different books that are both legendary among there fans yet are so different as to spoil a person.
How much can someone consume? Wrong question..
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Ethernet at 10 Gbps
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· Score: 1
How about how much information can someone serve?
Off the very top of my head I can think of a couple of ways for me to digest huge amounts of data over the internet. For one, how about a noncompressed HDTV stream? What about video games that don't require a hard drive (and are then more secure)? Hell, how about loosing the hard drive altogether and just having a dumb terminal?
Nah, asking how much data can one person consume is a lot like saying that building a hard drive over 20 gigs is stupid cause it will never be filled.
The real question is how much data can one person (or a company) serve?
Back to the idea of uncompressed HDTV content. If HBO decided to put such a thing on the web for subscribers how many unique subscribers could it possibly hope to serve at a time? Seems to me that asking a server to supply many streeams of these uber bandwith apps at once would be problematic.
Look, we are the superior life forms on this planet. Period. Something needed to rise to the top, it was us. We have millions of years of history of making clothes from animals, eating animals using animals for our own benefit, I refuse to buy into some nansy-pansy organization that think that they are the enlightened ones and want to throw all that away.
Thing is..... As the superior life form, top predator, alpha dog on this planet we carry a certain weight on our shoulders that no other living creature on this planet must bear (maybe THIS is what seperates us). It is our duty to use our superior intellect to protect the ecosystem of this planet. It is our duty to protect animals from extinction. It is our duty to take a look at our technological progress every so often and ask ourselves 'Can we do a better more efficient job, can we polute less because of new technology'. It is our duty to monitor ecosystems and be certain that we are not destroying them, that we are not responsible for extinctions. And when we are it is our duty to correct those things.
As a society it is our duty to treat animals better then if they were just mere tools. Farmers have a responsibility to feed there stock and protect against sickness and natural predators. And when the animals go to slaughter we have a duty to be certain that they are being slaughtered quickly, cleanly and as humanely as our technology will allow.
In short it isn't that we should stop eating animals, look at our teeth, we are creatures meant to consume meat - besides we have been doing it all this time. It isn't that we should stop wearing clothes made from animal products, once again we have been doing this for millenia. And most fabrics we can make that are not made from animals have there own drawbacks, chemical pollutants, oil based and such. It isn't that we should stop using animals for work or pleasure. Domesticating animals is something that also goes back millions of years. Besides, nature has a proud history of animals that are dependent on other animals not of there species.
But it is our duty as a superior life form and ask ourselves if in any of these tasks we can give the animals a better life. Can we improve things, even if the animals are being raised for slaughter, even if they are farm animals, can we make things better? It is our duty to pass laws that say it is wrong to drop kick kittens or to put explosives in the mouths of puppies.
And this is the problem with organizations such as PETA, SPCA and Greenpeace. While I would be willing to support there core beliefs specifically PETA and Greenpeace go much too far. These organizations support terrorists. And under no conditions will I support terrorists in any way shape or form. That includes listening to there demands. I simply will not do it.
I don't believe the SPCA supports terrorism, however the SPCA aligns itself with Greenpeace and PETA. And friends of terrorists are still friends of terrorists and I cannot support those people either.
You gotta be kidding. If I were some sort of technology bigwig and I wanted to buy a product and someone said those words to me I would do an about face and try real hard to not let the door hit my ass on the way out.
I would be much more impressed with the figures of what it would take to hack the discs. Cause in my opinion - encryption is made to be broken.
Now if he is saying that it cannot legally be hacked. Well that is probably true....
I completly understand that there are technical challenges ahead. If we can drive a remote controlled car on mars I think we can overcome this issue.
I mean, I understand that to the average user the IP address is transparent. You can change the IP address your WWW address goes to. But you know, I am not certain you should have too.
I am talking over my head here, my knowledge is not such that I should be permitted to say stuff like this. But I am just sitting here thinking about the issue.
Do you suppose there is any precedent for, say a small business owner who has a web presence. However his provider sucks rocks. And the small business owner takes the abuse from the provider because he thinks his WWW address is tied into the provider or maybe it is too difficult to do it?
In such a case IP portability might put the power back in the hands of the consumer.
Sending this out to my friends, to celebrate today, June 21'st, a milestone in aviation history.
Anyone that knows me knows that aviation is my thing. So it should be no surprise to anyone that I am following this. I was sitting here contemplating what happened today, and for only the 1 millionth time since I learned of this venture I was struck by how purely good this news is. I mean, you turn on CNN or Fox, you pick up the newspapers or whatever and they are filled with this negative crap. So much more these last few months, and for no better reason then 2004 can be divided evenly by 4.
But this, I am hard pressed to see how anyone can put a negative spin on this.
In the fall of the year 1903 The Brothers Wright made a flight of just a few hundered feet in a wooden and canvas contraption that would change the world. They would have been hard pressed to have imagined what there hard work would lead to. These Brothers did this thing of there own accord, they had no help, no government hand outs, no proclamations from the president that a thing will be done because it is hard, just two brothers that owned a bycicle shop and had a thought about how to make this thing work.
A mere 60 years later that creation had blossomed into the likes of which the Wright Brothers would never have imagined. People that had picked up the newspapers in 1903 to read about this marvelous flying machine were now turning on the TV sets and tunning in the radio to learn of Sputnik and rocket ships. Space travel was hard, but our society had marked it as a necessity. As a society we knew we could achieve the impossible, setting foot on the moon, photographing continents and solving communication problems that had plagued mankind since the dark ages. But getting there would not be cheap, and it was decided that only a government could afford to solve this problem.
In the 70's humans would set there feet on the moon. A place that has for the entirety of humanity, been nothing but a backdrop in an inkjet sky turned into a land of wonders. Armstrong said his famous words, left his footprints, astronauts would play a bit of golf, mirrors would be left, flags planted and after about a decade we would leave that place as we found it, inaccessable - a land where we only talk of going.
And now today. Burt Rutan designs airplanes. Up until today his most famous creation is displayed in the Smithsonian. It is called 'Voyager' and it traveled around the globe non-stop without refuleing. You may not be impressed, but consider how much money you will spend in gas just to get to work this week, it was quite an achievment.
Burt Rutan has built a spacecraft that he has called 'Spaceship One'. It is a small, quaint thing that CNN describes as shaped like a 'shuttlecock'. As accurate a description as any I have heard. Today Mike Melvill piloted Spaceship One, with the help of it's mate 'White Knight' and slipped the surly bonds of Earth, and returned again. What it did, admittedly, by the standards of shuttle flights that until last year seemed to be monthly occurances, doesn't seem that spectacular. It leapt a mere 100 kilometers (62 miles) and came down again. Landing at the same Mohave airstrip it took off from. But when Mike came back had the distinction of being the only person ever to earn his astronaut wings without any government help whatsoever.
Take a few minutes today and Google 'Gemini Series'. This is what Burt Rutans craft is compareable to. The early Gemini rockets did not achieve orbit. The went up, and came back down again. Then go to http://www.scaledcomposites.com or google 'Spaceship One' and compare the crafts. What you are looking at isn't just what 50+ years of technology advances will get you. But you are also looking at is a clear illustration of how the private sector (Wright Brothers) can often shatter paradigms that the government has put in place.
I read a little while ago about how when OLED displays age they loose there color. At the time I thought that while a TV may look nice at first, who wants to spend a grand on a TV that is gonna look bad in a couple of years.
I was assuming of course that the price point of a large screen OLED would be comparable to a large screen LCD which is comparable to a traditional set.
Sometimes it is nice to be wrong.
Basicaly it sounds to me like they create a large circuit board and 'print' the pixels on top of it with a large ink jet printer.
I know I am simplifying it tremendously, but it sounds a hell of a lot less costly then traditional and LCD sets.
Am I right to assume that something like this could seriously come down in price?
I imagine that eventually the price point would be so that when the colors faded you pitched the old set, bought a new one and thought nothing more of it then if you were upgrading a video game console.
My theory is that Gmail was a wake up call to Microsoft, AOL and YAHOO that they were not ready for. I think that one or all of those companies are pulling strings behind the scenes and THAT is what the fuss about.
Granted that California senator (or whatever she is) is playing this for the face time during an election year, but one has to wonder if she has recieved any contributions recently to her campaign...
Slashdot Mirror
50% of all species on the planet will be extinct in the next 50 years
Whenever I hear some moron say that or read it on the internet I want to strangle said moron.
I mean, that statement doesn't even make sense!
Just the fact that the author Mr. Anonymous put that in there hints that he doesn't think about this garbage he is spewing.
50% in 50 years.
Anything can be addictive. Someone already said it, some people have addictive personalities.
That is why we need to hold this up against a baseline of some sort.
I say we use alcoholism as a baseline.
Face it, porn is more available then alcohol. You just try getting a 6 pack delivered to your computer terminal at 4am on a Monday morning in less then 30 seconds without having to put your pants back on. Can't be done.
Porn is more available to minors then alcohol ever will be.
No reason the two can't be compared.
But they don't. Alcoholics have all kinds of problems. Livers that go bad, hangovers, missing work, abuse of all kinds, killing people. Alcohol also tends to make some people violent.
Porn pretty much makes you horny.
I suppose I can come up with some sort of list of negative things. But I can't think of one thing that porn is responsible for that is as bad as DUI's.
Don't say rape. People that rape are effed in the head LONG before the porn. I argue that if we could take all porn from our society rape statistics would not change much.
Hell, when you talk 'date rape' then alcohol is a contributing factor.
Congress has better things to do.
I think.
I don't know much about skylab but how you describe it sounds like it would be an attractive option.
Certainly sounds like the costs would be much more reasonable then the current fiasco.
I suppose if NASA wanted to do something like that I could live with it not relating to Mars. But that spacestation we have is sucking the resources out of NASA.
I don't look at Apollo 13 as any sort of failure.
Look at what those people did in order to survive. The story (no matter where you find it) is just awe inspiring, what the people did on the ground and what the astronauts did in space.
The fact that they returned alive is a success of a magnitude that everyone should be happy with.
What would be a failure is if NASA and intellectuals didn't go over the incident with a fine tooth comb and learn everything they could.
The first time I saw a picture of Spaceship One and White Night my mind got stuck on just one concept.
That concept was that everything one needs to know about why private business trumps government projects can be found right HERE.
And I'll tell you, when I got to see it in action for the first time I felt justified. When I looked at the numbers (read MONEY) I really felt justified.
NASA needs to die. That doesn't mean we need to stay out of space, quite the opposite actually. I just feel that NASA is holding us back.
Bush's idea for MARS is a good one. The only type of government project that can be justified is one that private business cannot or will not accomplish. Going to MARS is an excellent example of that.
It would be nice to see Bush take a hard line approach on NASA and get them out of the sattelite launching business.
Someone needs to take a cold hard look at the space station. That thing is a mess and it is sucking up money like an intergalactic Hoover. Neat idea, glad we tried it (hey if we didn't give it the good Ol' College try then we would not have known.) but at some point we have to call it a day and say that it doesn't make financial sense anymore.
The only way I would be willing to let the Space Station live is if it was proved to me that the space station beneffited the Mars mission in a way that is unique and nothing cheaper could accomplish.
The exact same look has to be taken at the space shuttle.
What happens when an out of state driver fills up in Oregon?
They don't get taxed.
The circumvention to this system is a joke. Just cover up the antennas and don't worry about it. If anyone asks you about it just say you are out of state.
If they look at your plates then just punch them in the face. See problem solved.
You have demonstrated my point.
In order for me to qualify what you are saying I have to get a hold of a book, a book that may in fact be incorrect.
I mean, how do I know this book isn't some PC anti-Christopher Columbus thing?
For that matter I have no proof that you didn't make it all up.
The point is this, we are telling our kids that the internet is a fine place to get information. The internet is not a fine place to get information.
Is Wikpedia an interesting project? Hell yeah.
But the reliability of the information is no better then the reliability of the information you posted about the world being round.
Do you believe what you wrote here? I'm gonna give you the benefit of the doubt and say you do.
So what is stopping you from signing onto Wikpedia and doing some massive editing of the Christopher Columbus section?
Just because a large group of people believes something does not make it true.
I understand your point.
But there is a great big distinction between Linux and Wikpedia.
Releases.
(forgive my ignorance I am not a follower of the cult of Linux)
As a user I can go out on the net and get the latest release of the kernal. I can assume (well actually this is in respect to where I find the kernal release, I would start my search at Sourceforge.net) that because it is the latest release it is relatively stable.
If after getting this release I find a way to code the drivers of my graphics card a little better I can submit my work for the next release.
I am not sure how this is done, but I know it can be.
Now so far we are pretty parrellel between Linux and Wikipedia. Here is where things diverge.
Lets say I don't have a clue about coding and my drivers are absolute garbage.
They would never make it through the review process into the next code revision. Simple as that.
There are gatekeepers who give a thumbs up or a thumbs down to what goes into the revisions, and it is these gatekeepers that ensure quality.
Wikipedia offers none of that.
If Linux were run the way Wikipedia is run then there would be no Linux.
And this is the problem with using the internet for research.
Since when does the idea that a majority of people agree on something make it correct?
If so then the Earth is flat. We have only believed it is round for a short time, comparetivly speaking.
No reason I couldn't convince a room full of 2nd graders that 5+5=11. Since most of the minds in the room agree, does that make it correct? Maybe correct only in that room?
I can BS with the best of them. If I go on Wikipedia and write an article, but pull it from my netherregions, and you are not informed enough to recognize my attempt at BS, does that make it correct?
Or is Obi-Wan correct, 'Who is the more foolish? The fool, or the fool who follows?'
If you could get in a time machine, travel back 6 years and sit down with your past selves for a beer do you think you could get your past selves to believe that this little cartoon project has turned into the monster that it is?
I think my subject pretty much sums up my feelings. This sounds to me like one of the most annoying uses for technology I have heard about in a very long time.
I wonder if the person who invented those automated touch tone dialers that pass as customer service departments that I find so despicable had anything to do with this?
I would most certainly purchase and install it.
Doesn't mean I wouldn't still run windows. Possibly do a dual boot or a windows on mac kind of solution.
Ain't never gonna happen though. Apple makes money off there hardware and the OS is why people purchase the hardware. Be a foolish thing for Apple to do.
That is all fine and dandy, but your point is moot.
Most people I know would rather carve out there eyes with butter knives then talk on corded phones at home. Off the top of my head myself, my parents and my best friend all have nothing but cordless phones.
We are SOL during power outages anyways.
But then again we all have cell phones and those are backups for power outages.
I'm with ya on this.
I wish you hadn't posted as AC though. Cause I think what you are saying is more pertinent then the parent to this.
Cookies are way overrated. Some people are unreasonably scared of them. Lets face it, a cookie is a tool. And just like any other tool there are times when it should be used and times when it should not. There are times when it is abused and times when it is used well.
And if you are smart enough to post on slashdot then you are smart enough to know how to clean out your cookie file. You are also smart enough not to be scared of them.
Stuktongue said:
'Finally, thermal management is an important part of modern satellite design. Heat pipes, thermal radiators (mirrors), finishes, and other techniques are all used to collect, distribute, and reject heat. The effectiveness of these techniques can limit a design, and how capable a company is at dealing with thermal problems can determine the capabilities of its offerings relative to those of its competitors.'
You seem to know what you are talking about. Mind fielding a question for me?
I know space is a vacum (duh). My understanding is that when people say it is quite cold in space this is kind of a misconception. Heat requires a medium to be conducted in (on the Earth air is most prominent) but without a medium, as in a vacum, heat cannot be conducted - hence space being cold is a misnomer because it is not possible for a vacum to be hot.
Therefore.... on a satelite that gets heated up there really is nowhere for the heat to be radiated too.
You mentioned that there are all kinds of tricks being used in dealing with heat in todays satelites. Is the subject of heat on satelites a big problem? Is it hard for them to cool the satelites? Or am I missing something?
Do yourself a favor and wait at least 6 months between finishing Snow Crash and reading Cryptonomicon.
Crypto is an amazing, incredible classic book that will blow your mind. You will feel smarter for having read it.
However it is as different from Snow Crash as one can get. So much so that if you are freshly done with Snow Crash you probably won't like Cryptonomicon.
This isn't a put down of either book.
But rather a compliment to the author. That he can write 2 distinctly different books that are both legendary among there fans yet are so different as to spoil a person.
How about how much information can someone serve?
Off the very top of my head I can think of a couple of ways for me to digest huge amounts of data over the internet. For one, how about a noncompressed HDTV stream?
What about video games that don't require a hard drive (and are then more secure)?
Hell, how about loosing the hard drive altogether and just having a dumb terminal?
Nah, asking how much data can one person consume is a lot like saying that building a hard drive over 20 gigs is stupid cause it will never be filled.
The real question is how much data can one person (or a company) serve?
Back to the idea of uncompressed HDTV content. If HBO decided to put such a thing on the web for subscribers how many unique subscribers could it possibly hope to serve at a time?
Seems to me that asking a server to supply many streeams of these uber bandwith apps at once would be problematic.
Look, we are the superior life forms on this planet.
Period.
Something needed to rise to the top, it was us.
We have millions of years of history of making clothes from animals, eating animals using animals for our own benefit, I refuse to buy into some nansy-pansy organization that think that they are the enlightened ones and want to throw all that away.
Thing is.....
As the superior life form, top predator, alpha dog on this planet we carry a certain weight on our shoulders that no other living creature on this planet must bear (maybe THIS is what seperates us). It is our duty to use our superior intellect to protect the ecosystem of this planet. It is our duty to protect animals from extinction. It is our duty to take a look at our technological progress every so often and ask ourselves 'Can we do a better more efficient job, can we polute less because of new technology'. It is our duty to monitor ecosystems and be certain that we are not destroying them, that we are not responsible for extinctions. And when we are it is our duty to correct those things.
As a society it is our duty to treat animals better then if they were just mere tools. Farmers have a responsibility to feed there stock and protect against sickness and natural predators. And when the animals go to slaughter we have a duty to be certain that they are being slaughtered quickly, cleanly and as humanely as our technology will allow.
In short it isn't that we should stop eating animals, look at our teeth, we are creatures meant to consume meat - besides we have been doing it all this time. It isn't that we should stop wearing clothes made from animal products, once again we have been doing this for millenia. And most fabrics we can make that are not made from animals have there own drawbacks, chemical pollutants, oil based and such. It isn't that we should stop using animals for work or pleasure. Domesticating animals is something that also goes back millions of years. Besides, nature has a proud history of animals that are dependent on other animals not of there species.
But it is our duty as a superior life form and ask ourselves if in any of these tasks we can give the animals a better life. Can we improve things, even if the animals are being raised for slaughter, even if they are farm animals, can we make things better?
It is our duty to pass laws that say it is wrong to drop kick kittens or to put explosives in the mouths of puppies.
And this is the problem with organizations such as PETA, SPCA and Greenpeace. While I would be willing to support there core beliefs specifically PETA and Greenpeace go much too far. These organizations support terrorists.
And under no conditions will I support terrorists in any way shape or form. That includes listening to there demands. I simply will not do it.
I don't believe the SPCA supports terrorism, however the SPCA aligns itself with Greenpeace and PETA. And friends of terrorists are still friends of terrorists and I cannot support those people either.
'the discs, by themselves, cannot be hacked.'
You gotta be kidding. If I were some sort of technology bigwig and I wanted to buy a product and someone said those words to me I would do an about face and try real hard to not let the door hit my ass on the way out.
I would be much more impressed with the figures of what it would take to hack the discs. Cause in my opinion - encryption is made to be broken.
Now if he is saying that it cannot legally be hacked. Well that is probably true....
I completly understand that there are technical challenges ahead.
If we can drive a remote controlled car on mars I think we can overcome this issue.
I mean, I understand that to the average user the IP address is transparent. You can change the IP address your WWW address goes to.
But you know, I am not certain you should have too.
I am talking over my head here, my knowledge is not such that I should be permitted to say stuff like this. But I am just sitting here thinking about the issue.
Do you suppose there is any precedent for, say a small business owner who has a web presence. However his provider sucks rocks. And the small business owner takes the abuse from the provider because he thinks his WWW address is tied into the provider or maybe it is too difficult to do it?
In such a case IP portability might put the power back in the hands of the consumer.
Fair enough.
I would edit this if I could.
But I can't. So I won't.
Sending this out to my friends, to celebrate today, June 21'st, a milestone in aviation history.
Anyone that knows me knows that aviation is my thing. So it should be no surprise to anyone that I am following this.
I was sitting here contemplating what happened today, and for only the 1 millionth time since I learned of this venture I was struck by how purely good this news is. I mean, you turn on CNN or Fox, you pick up the newspapers or whatever and they are filled with this negative crap. So much more these last few months, and for no better reason then 2004 can be divided evenly by 4.
But this, I am hard pressed to see how anyone can put a negative spin on this.
In the fall of the year 1903 The Brothers Wright made a flight of just a few hundered feet in a wooden and canvas contraption that would change the world. They would have been hard pressed to have imagined what there hard work would lead to. These Brothers did this thing of there own accord, they had no help, no government hand outs, no proclamations from the president that a thing will be done because it is hard, just two brothers that owned a bycicle shop and had a thought about how to make this thing work.
A mere 60 years later that creation had blossomed into the likes of which the Wright Brothers would never have imagined. People that had picked up the newspapers in 1903 to read about this marvelous flying machine were now turning on the TV sets and tunning in the radio to learn of Sputnik and rocket ships. Space travel was hard, but our society had marked it as a necessity. As a society we knew we could achieve the impossible, setting foot on the moon, photographing continents and solving communication problems that had plagued mankind since the dark ages. But getting there would not be cheap, and it was decided that only a government could afford to solve this problem.
In the 70's humans would set there feet on the moon. A place that has for the entirety of humanity, been nothing but a backdrop in an inkjet sky turned into a land of wonders. Armstrong said his famous words, left his footprints, astronauts would play a bit of golf, mirrors would be left, flags planted and after about a decade we would leave that place as we found it, inaccessable - a land where we only talk of going.
And now today. Burt Rutan designs airplanes. Up until today his most famous creation is displayed in the Smithsonian. It is called 'Voyager' and it traveled around the globe non-stop without refuleing. You may not be impressed, but consider how much money you will spend in gas just to get to work this week, it was quite an achievment.
Burt Rutan has built a spacecraft that he has called 'Spaceship One'. It is a small, quaint thing that CNN describes as shaped like a 'shuttlecock'. As accurate a description as any I have heard. Today Mike Melvill piloted Spaceship One, with the help of it's mate 'White Knight' and slipped the surly bonds of Earth, and returned again. What it did, admittedly, by the standards of shuttle flights that until last year seemed to be monthly occurances, doesn't seem that spectacular. It leapt a mere 100 kilometers (62 miles) and came down again. Landing at the same Mohave airstrip it took off from. But when Mike came back had the distinction of being the only person ever to earn his astronaut wings without any government help whatsoever.
Take a few minutes today and Google 'Gemini Series'. This is what Burt Rutans craft is compareable to. The early Gemini rockets did not achieve orbit. The went up, and came back down again. Then go to http://www.scaledcomposites.com or google 'Spaceship One' and compare the crafts. What you are looking at isn't just what 50+ years of technology advances will get you. But you are also looking at is a clear illustration of how the private sector (Wright Brothers) can often shatter paradigms that the government has put in place.
Congratulations Burt and Mike. Today is your day.
OLEM displays.
Organic
Light
Emitting
Mice
Don't tell PETA they will flip and we will all be out a cool technology.
One word: COST.
I read a little while ago about how when OLED displays age they loose there color. At the time I thought that while a TV may look nice at first, who wants to spend a grand on a TV that is gonna look bad in a couple of years.
I was assuming of course that the price point of a large screen OLED would be comparable to a large screen LCD which is comparable to a traditional set.
Sometimes it is nice to be wrong.
Basicaly it sounds to me like they create a large circuit board and 'print' the pixels on top of it with a large ink jet printer.
I know I am simplifying it tremendously, but it sounds a hell of a lot less costly then traditional and LCD sets.
Am I right to assume that something like this could seriously come down in price?
I imagine that eventually the price point would be so that when the colors faded you pitched the old set, bought a new one and thought nothing more of it then if you were upgrading a video game console.
My theory is that Gmail was a wake up call to Microsoft, AOL and YAHOO that they were not ready for. I think that one or all of those companies are pulling strings behind the scenes and THAT is what the fuss about.
Granted that California senator (or whatever she is) is playing this for the face time during an election year, but one has to wonder if she has recieved any contributions recently to her campaign...