***Who gives a flying fuck about privatized LEO launches of some tycoon (apart of the tycoons themselves)? Private companies will not undertake the large-scale, visionary projects like sending people to Mars,***
Does NASA show any sign of getting you to Mars? Did it ever? Those are rhetorical questions and the answer to both is "No".
In point of fact the MANNED spaceflight side of NASA has been an ongoing disaster for decades. The space shuttle (which I opposed) was wildly overpromised and failed to deliver. The International Space Station (which I opposed and continue to oppose) is pointless. George the Clueless's Mars program (which I opposed) was overpromised and was never going to deliver. We fortunate that the damn thing appears to have failed early on.
Pay private companies to put astronauts in space? Sure, why not? Just don't pay to many of them too much. IMO, It is very unlikely that private companies will come up with safe, cheap methods to put folks and stuff into orbit. But their chances are somewhat better than NASA's I think.
So, let's spend more on unmanned exploration vehicles. Let's spend less on people in space. And let's plug away at getting costs for spaceflight down to levels where human exploration of the solar system is practical.
When we get to the point where sending folks to Mars is practical and not too expensive, I'll support it -- except that won't happen until long after I'm dead.
***I suspect you might be in the minority with your reasoning for home schooling. Don't the majority of home-schoolers do it because they're afraid of evil secular concepts like evolution and geological history?***
Probably not. A large number of homeschoolers just think that they can do a better job on their own than a public school with limited resources and a class schedule geared to the slowest non-idiot. And that's probably true for many of them. Having worked in public school and having had a daughter who felt that she could learn a lot more working at her own speed than in High School, I think I can see both sides. Fortunately, we live in a state -- Vermont -- that is generally very supportive of home schooling. I don't think the kid suffered educationally from planning her own curriculum and doing all the paperwork the state required as well as actually doing the work. When you get right down to it, she's read at least part of Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" -- How many High School students in your state can claim that?
Vermont at least, does require that home schooling parents at least go through the motions of planning a curriculum that addresses the same general material that is taught in public school.
Look, you aren't doing this for us, you're doing it for you. If you are doing a craftsmanlike job that's not a put down. Write software that pleases you. Make it available to others. If they could benefit from it and choose not to, that's not your problem.
"But it's all right now, I've learned my lesson well
You see, you can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself"
Ricky Nelson, Garden Party 1972
That said, a brief statement of what the software does and a link to the project home page would not have been out of place.
***Perhaps the real insecurity is the whole model whereby the entire system depends on the ability for any random server to download arbitrary program code to your machine and execute it just because you visited their server, or a page that had an embedded link to your server.***
That'd be my opinion as well, but apparently you and I are Luddite idiots.
My guess is that if you are right, it will take at least two decades and perhaps one or more complete breakdowns of e-Commerce and/or web services to bring any significant number of folks around to your point of view.
***However, medicine and surgery are not risk free***
Well, yeah. Of course. But most of us would prefer that the risks be unavoidable. This fiasco sounds like it was at least somewhat avoidable with the application of a modest amount of discipline.
No argument really, but could you comment on checklists and their relevance to TMI? My understanding is that unlike Chernobyl (foolish people doing bizarre stuff), the operators at Three Mile Island had very rigid operating procedures. Unfortunately, they encountered a situation outside the scope of their planning and proceded to do a lot of wrong things resulting in VERY serious problems.
Is my understanding correct? If so, how would checklists have helped? What should have been done at TMI?
***the reason you'll *never* see personal transport aircraft is why they've been nothing but a pipe dream anyway...if you can't have trouble free traffic on the ground, would you want the idiot next door flying over your house during rush hour???***
That's one reason. Insurance costs for personal aircraft are likely to be prohibitive.
Other reasons:
Maintenance: Broken cars stop. Broken aircraft drop. Personal air vehicles are surely going to need much more, and much better, maintenance, than cars.
Control: Keeping a car under control and pointed where it belongs is near the limits of many people's abilities. Are they going to be able to handle navigation in three dimensions?
Security: Car bombs are an ongoing problem in the Middle East. How are you going to secure any facility if the air is full of potential DIY cruise missiles?
***Saying your diet has greater impact on your health than exercise is nonsense.***
A data point to support that. The traditional Japanese diet is basically starch and salt. Stuff with the same general nutrient-chemical mix from a vending machine would be alleged to be bad news if not almost instantly lethal. On average, the Japanese outlive just about everyone on the planet. (but they walk... a lot).
One of the charming things about "medical science" is that like economics, you can publish just about anything you want to and it will be treated as if it were credible. This particular study is not obvious nonsense, but you need to keep in mind that the standards for "proof" in this discipline are extremely loose and that the next "study" you encounter may say that a "sedentary lifestyle" (whatever the hell that is) will add decades to your life and greatly reduce the risk of arthritis, lower back pain, headaches and skin diseases.
If this study is accurate, our Rat Terrier is doomed.
There are, or used to be, a number of free assemblers that could generate X86 code. Maybe not all the instructions, but more than enough for "Hello World" and other simple exercises. The problem is -- as others have mentioned -- that the x86 instruction set has all the beauty and elegance of a third world slum.
As an alternative for learning, I'd suggest using an emulator and programming for some sane instruction set. Maybe the MC6809 which had a nice, clean, easily comprehensible instruction set. (I'm sure that there are other equally good choices). If one still has an interest in assembly language programming after that, then by all means tackle x86. You'll probably be appalled.
It really should not be necessary to point out that removing ANY key from the standard keyboard is a really strange idea. By now there will be thousands of programs here and there that use that key for something. And a keyboard without the key will not work with any of them. Is the idea that things that are not broken should not be busted without really good reasons utterly alien to the programming/engineering mind?
Assuming that "mind" is the right term.
If there is an easily discoverable way to generate the SysReq key codes on this fine new keyboard, disregard rant.
***meh. genetic engineering can't be any more difficult than programming a computer...***
Sure. If the operation performed every poorly documented op code depended on the adjacent op codes and what had just been executed. Think x86 instruction set but deliberately obsfucated instead of merely being created by several generations of lunatics.
There's an interesting and sort of thought provoking discussion of the physical characteristics of Silver Foxes bred only for tolerance to humans here:
The curious thing is that in addition to becoming human friendly, these domesticated foxes developed a propensity toward dog like physical characteristics like curly tails, overbites, and piebald coats... curious.
You'd be astonished how badly sextants work in fog or in a rainstorm.
In September 1923 in pre-Loran days, the US Navy ran seven destroyers onto the rocks at Honda Point in California. http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/ev-1920s/ev-1923/hondapt.htm Those ships had plenty of sextants and navigators that knew how to use them.... and they did not know where they were.
***Given the performance and specs, [33K is] not unreasonable,***
Of course 40K (33K) for wheels is unreasonable. The low end Toyota Camry is under 20K. Prius is around 22K.
GM has to know perfectly well that Volt sales will be poor until they get the MSRP down to Camry/Prius country. They are gambling that will not take too many years and that for once they will get the engineering right.
I have not been a GM fan because of the many decades during which they tried to substitute marketing for engineering. But I sincerely hope that they pull this one off.
A quibble. You'd want to worry about products from Massachusetts more than those from Vermont. Vermont Yankee is in Vernon on the largest river in New England about five miles upstream from the Massachusetts border
In fairness to the Poster, the operator at Vermont Yankee -- Entergy -- is not an outfit that inspires a lot of confidence. You'd want to count fingers, check jewelry, and maybe wash your hands after being introduced to them. (Google "Entergy bad faith" or "Entergy dishonest")
OTOH, As far as I can see, there is simply no way that Vermont -- a region with poor solar potential, a rigorous climate, no fossil hydrocarbons, and only limited hydro potential runs a modern industrial society without nuclear power of some sort. Regretably perhaps, Vermont Yankee seems to be necessary. Vermont almost certainly needs more nuclear plants, not fewer.
***But i think a Starbuck mug which you have to pay, does not cover "fair use"...***
That's correct, I think. However, the issue here is not fair use, but public domain. Unlike trademarks, there is supposed to be a time limit on Copyrights. If these are recent "Aztec style" images, then they may well be copyrighted. If they are images actually drawn by the Aztecs then there seems little reason to treat them as protected... outside Mexico anyway.
***To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...***
You could do that with Windows 95 and 98. You frequently had to in Windows 98 since Win98 shutdown was not very reliable. They fixed that with NT based Windows which actually does need a formal shutdown. And, BTW, I find Linux GUI shutdown to be nothing to write home about in terms of either reliability or speed.
***Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.***
You can do something like that with Linux using workspaces and many of us do. I imagine that there are replacement/add-on shells for Windows that do workspaces.
====
As a user am decidedly underwhelmed by the last decade of purported "progress" in GUI OSes. Maybe going back to Amiga or Windows 95 and trying again would not be all that bad an idea.
Crichton gets a bad rap because his attack on global warming mania in "State of Fear" was decidedly not politically correct.
That despite the fact that Crichton indicated in the novel notes that he believed that global warming was a legitimate concern albeit an overstated one. In any case, the novel apparently was not intended as an attack on global warming as much as an attack on our society's operating in a constant state of unfounded fear -- Iraqi weapons of Mass Destruction, global warming, socialized medicine, etc, etc, etc.
Crichton wrote a number of excellent essays on a lot of topics including such topics as intellectual property. Well worth looking up and reading I think even if one doesn't always agree with him.
***I know - since much of the world has fiber optics, most site developers simply don't CARE that loading their page takes 3 minutes in the less developed world.***
It's not just the less developed world. Broadband penetration in the US is substantially overstated because of some simply awful metrics used by the FCC. Basically, if there is even one high speed line anywhere in town, the town is counted as having broadband. An awful lot of rural Americans have a choice of dialup -- probably at about 30K (rural phone lines often are noisy) -- or satellite with latency.
IMHO, the lack of intelligence/concern for users displayed by web page designers and others in our communications infrastructure borders on astonishing.
I do not have a dog in this fight BTW as I have access to both DSL and cable. But there are people a ten minute drive from here who do not.
***But... that would mean that HTML would never work***
Are you asserting that there are people out there that use HTML instead of downloading dubiously necessary, probably insecure, buggy, and extremely cute script programs to do the same job? How primitive! How 20th Century!!
Get with the program man. Get out there and innovate.
***The development of an advanced "airbag" like this will really help accelerate the dawn of "highways in the sky"***
Five car bombs in Baghdad yesterday. 127 dead. 500 Injured. And that's despite checkpoints and vehicle inspections.
You want to try to implement building security in a world with several hundred million flying vehicles that are easily converted to DIY cruise missiles? Think about it.... Really think about it.
Slashdot Mirror
***Who gives a flying fuck about privatized LEO launches of some tycoon (apart of the tycoons themselves)? Private companies will not undertake the large-scale, visionary projects like sending people to Mars,***
Does NASA show any sign of getting you to Mars? Did it ever? Those are rhetorical questions and the answer to both is "No".
In point of fact the MANNED spaceflight side of NASA has been an ongoing disaster for decades. The space shuttle (which I opposed) was wildly overpromised and failed to deliver. The International Space Station (which I opposed and continue to oppose) is pointless. George the Clueless's Mars program (which I opposed) was overpromised and was never going to deliver. We fortunate that the damn thing appears to have failed early on.
Pay private companies to put astronauts in space? Sure, why not? Just don't pay to many of them too much. IMO, It is very unlikely that private companies will come up with safe, cheap methods to put folks and stuff into orbit. But their chances are somewhat better than NASA's I think.
So, let's spend more on unmanned exploration vehicles. Let's spend less on people in space. And let's plug away at getting costs for spaceflight down to levels where human exploration of the solar system is practical.
When we get to the point where sending folks to Mars is practical and not too expensive, I'll support it -- except that won't happen until long after I'm dead.
***I suspect you might be in the minority with your reasoning for home schooling. Don't the majority of home-schoolers do it because they're afraid of evil secular concepts like evolution and geological history?***
Probably not. A large number of homeschoolers just think that they can do a better job on their own than a public school with limited resources and a class schedule geared to the slowest non-idiot. And that's probably true for many of them. Having worked in public school and having had a daughter who felt that she could learn a lot more working at her own speed than in High School, I think I can see both sides. Fortunately, we live in a state -- Vermont -- that is generally very supportive of home schooling. I don't think the kid suffered educationally from planning her own curriculum and doing all the paperwork the state required as well as actually doing the work. When you get right down to it, she's read at least part of Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past" -- How many High School students in your state can claim that?
Vermont at least, does require that home schooling parents at least go through the motions of planning a curriculum that addresses the same general material that is taught in public school.
Look, you aren't doing this for us, you're doing it for you. If you are doing a craftsmanlike job that's not a put down. Write software that pleases you. Make it available to others. If they could benefit from it and choose not to, that's not your problem.
"But it's all right now, I've learned my lesson well
You see, you can't please everyone, so you've got to please yourself"
Ricky Nelson, Garden Party 1972
That said, a brief statement of what the software does and a link to the project home page would not have been out of place.
***Perhaps the real insecurity is the whole model whereby the entire system depends on the ability for any random server to download arbitrary program code to your machine and execute it just because you visited their server, or a page that had an embedded link to your server.***
That'd be my opinion as well, but apparently you and I are Luddite idiots.
My guess is that if you are right, it will take at least two decades and perhaps one or more complete breakdowns of e-Commerce and/or web services to bring any significant number of folks around to your point of view.
***However, medicine and surgery are not risk free***
Well, yeah. Of course. But most of us would prefer that the risks be unavoidable. This fiasco sounds like it was at least somewhat avoidable with the application of a modest amount of discipline.
No argument really, but could you comment on checklists and their relevance to TMI? My understanding is that unlike Chernobyl (foolish people doing bizarre stuff), the operators at Three Mile Island had very rigid operating procedures. Unfortunately, they encountered a situation outside the scope of their planning and proceded to do a lot of wrong things resulting in VERY serious problems.
Is my understanding correct? If so, how would checklists have helped? What should have been done at TMI?
***the reason you'll *never* see personal transport aircraft is why they've been nothing but a pipe dream anyway...if you can't have trouble free traffic on the ground, would you want the idiot next door flying over your house during rush hour???***
That's one reason. Insurance costs for personal aircraft are likely to be prohibitive.
Other reasons:
Maintenance: Broken cars stop. Broken aircraft drop. Personal air vehicles are surely going to need much more, and much better, maintenance, than cars.
Control: Keeping a car under control and pointed where it belongs is near the limits of many people's abilities. Are they going to be able to handle navigation in three dimensions?
Security: Car bombs are an ongoing problem in the Middle East. How are you going to secure any facility if the air is full of potential DIY cruise missiles?
***Saying your diet has greater impact on your health than exercise is nonsense.***
A data point to support that. The traditional Japanese diet is basically starch and salt. Stuff with the same general nutrient-chemical mix from a vending machine would be alleged to be bad news if not almost instantly lethal. On average, the Japanese outlive just about everyone on the planet. (but they walk ... a lot).
One of the charming things about "medical science" is that like economics, you can publish just about anything you want to and it will be treated as if it were credible. This particular study is not obvious nonsense, but you need to keep in mind that the standards for "proof" in this discipline are extremely loose and that the next "study" you encounter may say that a "sedentary lifestyle" (whatever the hell that is) will add decades to your life and greatly reduce the risk of arthritis, lower back pain, headaches and skin diseases.
If this study is accurate, our Rat Terrier is doomed.
***I am starting to regret a lot about this particular field.***
But think of all the beautiful sunrises you would have missed out on had you chosen to repair cars or dig wells.
There are, or used to be, a number of free assemblers that could generate X86 code. Maybe not all the instructions, but more than enough for "Hello World" and other simple exercises. The problem is -- as others have mentioned -- that the x86 instruction set has all the beauty and elegance of a third world slum.
As an alternative for learning, I'd suggest using an emulator and programming for some sane instruction set. Maybe the MC6809 which had a nice, clean, easily comprehensible instruction set. (I'm sure that there are other equally good choices). If one still has an interest in assembly language programming after that, then by all means tackle x86. You'll probably be appalled.
It really should not be necessary to point out that removing ANY key from the standard keyboard is a really strange idea. By now there will be thousands of programs here and there that use that key for something. And a keyboard without the key will not work with any of them. Is the idea that things that are not broken should not be busted without really good reasons utterly alien to the programming/engineering mind?
Assuming that "mind" is the right term.
If there is an easily discoverable way to generate the SysReq key codes on this fine new keyboard, disregard rant.
***meh. genetic engineering can't be any more difficult than programming a computer...***
Sure. If the operation performed every poorly documented op code depended on the adjacent op codes and what had just been executed. Think x86 instruction set but deliberately obsfucated instead of merely being created by several generations of lunatics.
There's an interesting and sort of thought provoking discussion of the physical characteristics of Silver Foxes bred only for tolerance to humans here:
http://www.hum.utah.edu/~bbenham/2510 Spring 09/Behavior Genetics/Farm-Fox Experiment.pdf
The curious thing is that in addition to becoming human friendly, these domesticated foxes developed a propensity toward dog like physical characteristics like curly tails, overbites, and piebald coats ... curious.
You'd be astonished how badly sextants work in fog or in a rainstorm.
In September 1923 in pre-Loran days, the US Navy ran seven destroyers onto the rocks at Honda Point in California. http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/ev-1920s/ev-1923/hondapt.htm Those ships had plenty of sextants and navigators that knew how to use them. ... and they did not know where they were.
***Given the performance and specs, [33K is] not unreasonable,***
Of course 40K (33K) for wheels is unreasonable. The low end Toyota Camry is under 20K. Prius is around 22K.
GM has to know perfectly well that Volt sales will be poor until they get the MSRP down to Camry/Prius country. They are gambling that will not take too many years and that for once they will get the engineering right.
I have not been a GM fan because of the many decades during which they tried to substitute marketing for engineering. But I sincerely hope that they pull this one off.
A quibble. You'd want to worry about products from Massachusetts more than those from Vermont. Vermont Yankee is in Vernon on the largest river in New England about five miles upstream from the Massachusetts border
In fairness to the Poster, the operator at Vermont Yankee -- Entergy -- is not an outfit that inspires a lot of confidence. You'd want to count fingers, check jewelry, and maybe wash your hands after being introduced to them. (Google "Entergy bad faith" or "Entergy dishonest")
OTOH, As far as I can see, there is simply no way that Vermont -- a region with poor solar potential, a rigorous climate, no fossil hydrocarbons, and only limited hydro potential runs a modern industrial society without nuclear power of some sort. Regretably perhaps, Vermont Yankee seems to be necessary. Vermont almost certainly needs more nuclear plants, not fewer.
***But i think a Starbuck mug which you have to pay, does not cover "fair use"...***
That's correct, I think. However, the issue here is not fair use, but public domain. Unlike trademarks, there is supposed to be a time limit on Copyrights. If these are recent "Aztec style" images, then they may well be copyrighted. If they are images actually drawn by the Aztecs then there seems little reason to treat them as protected ... outside Mexico anyway.
Our Lord In Heaven!!! Can you imagine what the Windows Registry is going to look like after 100 generations of copying and updating?
***To shutdown the Amiga, you turned it off. There was no delay, no Start->Shutdown...wait possibly forever...***
You could do that with Windows 95 and 98. You frequently had to in Windows 98 since Win98 shutdown was not very reliable. They fixed that with NT based Windows which actually does need a formal shutdown. And, BTW, I find Linux GUI shutdown to be nothing to write home about in terms of either reliability or speed.
***Sliding screens. Why not give each application its own full screen and allow the user to pull down the top menu to slide between these screens.***
You can do something like that with Linux using workspaces and many of us do. I imagine that there are replacement/add-on shells for Windows that do workspaces.
====
As a user am decidedly underwhelmed by the last decade of purported "progress" in GUI OSes. Maybe going back to Amiga or Windows 95 and trying again would not be all that bad an idea.
Crichton gets a bad rap because his attack on global warming mania in "State of Fear" was decidedly not politically correct.
That despite the fact that Crichton indicated in the novel notes that he believed that global warming was a legitimate concern albeit an overstated one. In any case, the novel apparently was not intended as an attack on global warming as much as an attack on our society's operating in a constant state of unfounded fear -- Iraqi weapons of Mass Destruction, global warming, socialized medicine, etc, etc, etc.
Crichton wrote a number of excellent essays on a lot of topics including such topics as intellectual property. Well worth looking up and reading I think even if one doesn't always agree with him.
***I know - since much of the world has fiber optics, most site developers simply don't CARE that loading their page takes 3 minutes in the less developed world.***
It's not just the less developed world. Broadband penetration in the US is substantially overstated because of some simply awful metrics used by the FCC. Basically, if there is even one high speed line anywhere in town, the town is counted as having broadband. An awful lot of rural Americans have a choice of dialup -- probably at about 30K (rural phone lines often are noisy) -- or satellite with latency.
Even the FCC admitted 18 months ago that their numbers were "Stunningly meaningless". http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20080319/164249588.shtml
IMHO, the lack of intelligence/concern for users displayed by web page designers and others in our communications infrastructure borders on astonishing.
I do not have a dog in this fight BTW as I have access to both DSL and cable. But there are people a ten minute drive from here who do not.
***But... that would mean that HTML would never work***
Are you asserting that there are people out there that use HTML instead of downloading dubiously necessary, probably insecure, buggy, and extremely cute script programs to do the same job? How primitive! How 20th Century!!
Get with the program man. Get out there and innovate.
***The development of an advanced "airbag" like this will really help accelerate the dawn of "highways in the sky"***
Five car bombs in Baghdad yesterday. 127 dead. 500 Injured. And that's despite checkpoints and vehicle inspections.
You want to try to implement building security in a world with several hundred million flying vehicles that are easily converted to DIY cruise missiles? Think about it. ... Really think about it.