Isn't it remarkable how patents stimulate innovative litigation? Think of the tragedy if we just junked the whole nutty system. Imagine the packs of feral, unemployed lawyers roaming the streets attacking innocents.
Sooner or later, we'll save ourselves untold trouble if we vastly scale back the notion of Intellectual (imaginary) property to something relatively sensible.
By the wildest of coincidences, about an hour after that post, My todo list got down to "watch the DVD of 'Hairspray'" that my wife borrowed from a friend. Since I didn't feel like sorting through the bizarre daisy chain of TV, VCR, DVD Player, Wii downstairs to get item 1 connected to item 3, I foolishly popped the DVD into my PC. Fired up mplayer. Mplayer would have naught to do with it. Wrong driver I think. Can't remember the right one or how to specify it (vo= something or other? I have some notes somewhere, but I don't recall exactly where). gxine? gxine crashed -- segmentation fault. OK, maybe xine. Xine played the previews but exited when it got to the menu. Google didn't provide immediate help.
So I took the DVD down and popped it into my wife's XP machine. Up comes a screen that informs that this DVD has enhanced features, do I want to use them? Sure. After answering a few inane questions, I find myself confronted with a blank blue screen -- not a BSOD, just a blank blue screen. The PC is still alive. Num Lock works. But nothing else does -- including ctrl-alt-del. Ate dinner. Still no video. Waiting is not the answer apparently. Current machine state is certainly restful and soothing, but I really wanted to watch a movie. Turned the machine off with the power switch, rebooted, mutter "FY Bill Gates and all thy works" at the usual warning that I must shut the machine down properly (idiotic design for a consumer product... grumble...) and get it back up. Try Windows Media Player. It's the latest version for XP, I just installed it last week. It won't even play the previews.
Back upstairs, shut down Slackware and reboot to Windows Media Center XP. Takes forever to boot compared to Slackware-xfce. For some weird reason, the mouse freezes while all the nagware that I haven't turned off (yes it really did used to be even worse) bombards me with questions that no one could possibly deal with intelligently. Finally, everything calms down and the mouse comes to life. Kill the nagware. Pop the DVD in. Decline the offer to enhance my dvd viewing experience. Skip through the previews. Been there, done that. Finally the menu pops up. Tell it to Play the Movie. It ignores me. Try some other things. A few work. Most don't. Tell it to Play the Movie. It takes me off to some inappropriate submenu. Return. Tell it Play the Movie. It ignores me. Try a few more submenus. Observe that it seems to be a bit confused at times about what I have clicked. Return to main menu. Click Play the Movie about fifteen times. Movie Plays.
So. Linux never did play the actual DVD although the third thing I tried did very nicely with the previews. Windows XP on one machine didn't do that well. Windows XP on another did play the DVD but clearly wasn't working properly and was not in my judgment actually usable by normal human beings.
My conclusion. Linux is not really ready for prime time.... and neither is Windows.
***And I guess by that logic, "Firefox" is a good name that people like, rather than a dorky name that people are confused by.***
As I recall, the name was a rather hastily contrived replacement for the earlier name which was -- as I remember -- Phoenix. IP law strikes again bettering life for us all.
***Linux is only "free" if your time is worth nothing and you have enough of it to spend learning how to do things you already knew how to do.***
That's absolutely correct. But it's not like Windows just works. In point of fact I've spent Waaayyyyy too many hours of my life pursuing weird problems in Windows, clearing malware off windows PCs, waiting for the stupid thing to boot, or shut down, or trying to persuade it to please -- god damn it -- correctly install some piece of software that purports to be Windows friendly/compatible/tolerant and installs just fine on the supposedly identical machine in the next room.
In point of fact, modern Linux distributions have a fair chance of coming up and running Open Office, a web browser, and an e-mail program without tinkering. They may well play CDs and MP3s. If, OTOH, you want to run GoogleEarth, you're likely in for a long afternoon.
At least with Linux, I don't have that ongoing "I really paid money for this piece of excrement?" feeling that I've had with every Windows since 95.
I will be a happy man if I never have to run Regedit again.
2. Require that any lawsuits for copyright infringement be initiated by the creator of the copyrighted work rather than the copyright owner or third party agents like the RIAA.
and/or
3. Dress up like Indians and pitch the RIAA and all their works into Boston Harbor.
***Perhaps, but more importantly, it is not symmetric and has been known to attract left or right socks more strongly than the other. This explains the dryer effect.***
Doesn't the drier affect have to do with putting two pairs of black socks into the washer and getting three black socks and one blue one out of the drier? Perhaps you were thinking of the DB25 affect where when reassembling an elderly computer system you will -- with 50% probability -- find that when attempting to make the last connection you are trying to plug a male connector into a male socket?
***It doesn't, on 9x try making the taskbar a couple of rows high and opening browser windows until it's full with small icons, you will notice things start falling over. Now try doing the same on a NT based version, no problem.***
Absolutely true. As I recall, Windows 95 comes to a screeching halt after opening 72 MSDOS windows in 16mb of memory. (OK, OK, so I sometimes get my loop variables wrong). It actually recovered from that, but it definitely is more fragile than NT. On the other hand, most people would barely notice the difference so I don't consider the difference to be very important. The only case I can think of where an ordinary user might appreciate NT's robustness is when media is removed while in use. Windows 9 generally crashes. NT doesn't although the result is anything but pretty. (Did they clean that up in Vista?)
***Also 9x has absoloutely no concept of user permissions, every user is essentially god.***
True. And a personal computer needs user permissions.. why? I've tried hard to convince myself that the security model that people are trying to sell as the end all actually works. But I just can't. I'm all in favor of some sort of security scheme. And I expect that some sort of permissions and or ACLs will be part of one that works. But I submit that NT security demonstrably doesn't work very well (and I suspect that Unix security isn't much better). Does NT have the sort of access control that will be needed if and when security gets straightened out? My guess is mostly not.
***The real problem that MS is still trying to find a way out of is that most win32 programmers wrote apps that assumed no security because they were developing on a platform that had no security.***
No argument there. Problem is that I think they are now developing on a platform that has problematic security. I guess that's better. But it doesn't mean that their work won't have to be redone -- maybe multiple times.
But OK, yeah. If an OS can be developed that can actually keep users from tromping on one another and the OS while still doing useful work, that'd be a reason to redo the OS. However, NT demonstrably is NOT such an OS. Would it be worth discarding backward compatibility to get real computing security? It might. But rollout would be an enormous problem, and rolling out something that had any substantial number of flaws would be a disaster all round. This is a case where bullshit won't fly. If you promise security at the cost of rewriting everything, you better either deliver or not ship.
***P.S. if you really want to stop windows systems getting messed up without stopping apps working windows steadystate rocks.***
Hey man, the "codger" in my name means that I'm like "old". I don't doubt that you're right, but I'm not quite sure about what. Not as quick as I once was. Could you take that just a bit more slowly?
***I suggest you pay more attention to OS research. Systems like Xen (itself based on the Exokernel) and Singularity (based on a large number of other projects, including JNode) are a lot more interesting architectures than Vista. Even older things like Inferno and Amoeba are more interesting.***
How about you take twenty minutes of your no doubt precious time and tell me and others what these wonders do? Is it really something that we can realistically expect to see in our mainstream OSes anytime soon? Or anytime at all?
The last genuinely interesting concept I saw anyone try to install in a mainstream OS that would actually make life significantly better for users (if it worked) was "Windows File System" and it is something like 14 years late in roll out. It went into beta test about two years ago and then seems to have quietly vanished -- cancelled?
And while you're at it, perhaps you could try making an effort to be civil and losing that "I suggest you.." attitude? If you actually have something to contribute, contribute it. I'll be interested to read it. I'm sure others will as well.
***If they completely ditch backwards compatibility, they could remove all this old cruft and start again with a proper clean design, but as usual they're taking a half-assed poorly thought out approach.***
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, if Microsoft abandoned backward compatibility, they'd lose most corporate users and many home users as well. You don't need an MBA to see why that is not a promising idea.
About the best they can do is what they did with NT. Jack the whole unwholsome mess up, and insert a new frame and engine under it. They did that with NT without all that much success. (Windows 95 runs about as well with far fewer resources if you don't mind a crash every few weeks). I suppose they can try again, but I doubt the results will be any better.
Maybe the idea would be more appealing if there were a "clean" design out there that was actually any better than NT, Unix, OsX. But I don't think there is. AFAICS, for several decades, OS design has consisted of shuffling the subsystems of a 1960s mainframe into slightly different configurations and slapping a shell on it. It's not that I can do better. I can't. Maybe NT, Linux, Vista really are the best we can do. That's a depressing thought.
There is no evidence whatsoever for that. I thought his dad was reasonably OK. But the kid is a disaster. I thought that long before Katrina and before the Main Stream Media media started grumbling. Look at his record. With the exception of Tsunami relief he has done not one single significant thing right. Not One. It's a remarkable record of duplicity, incompetence and stupidity. (To be fair, he did manage to get reasonably honest elections conducted in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, but I don't think he would have done that had he been smart enough to forsee the consequences. Certainly not in Palestine. Probably not the other two either.)
I'm not wild about John McCain, but had he been elected in 2000, he'd probably have been an OK president and the country would be far better off today.
There are many things that Bush says he believes in that I agree with. I thought when he said them that he was lying. The record shows that I was right. When he said them he was in fact lying.
Let's look at the record:
Tax Cuts for the wealthy that would pay for themselves: They haven't
No Child Left Behind: Probably well-intended, but unworkable. Destined to be duct taped again and again into just another huge dysfunctional government program like farm supports.
Iraq: An utter debacle.
North Korea: Six years to get back to where he was when he started.
Iran: When he took office, Iran had a moderate government that was trying to reach to the US. Bush has done every conceivable thing to alienate the country, undermine the moderates, and sow the seeds of even more discord in Southwest Asia. In Don Henley's words "Beating plowshares into swords".
Medicare Prescription drugs: Probably the best of a rum lot. But not funded. Put_It_On_Someone's_Tab economics.
Economic Policy. You probably aren't fully aware of the situation that is unfolding. Most people aren't. But we have a three headed crisis -- currency, the banking system, commodities. Bush-Greenspan-(Bernanke) are responsible for the first two and could have hedged against the third. This is going to be a lot clearer to you by November. Check http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/. I don't think things are as bad as many there would portray them, but they are bad and getting worse.
Civil Liberties: Worst record of any American leader ruler since George III
These are the works of an intelligent man? You sir, have a really strange idea of intelligence.
Let me sum up the virtues I have observed in George W Bush. He's not a racist. That's the only positive quality I see in the man. Our dog isn't a racist either (she loves everyone even the mailman). She is very likely smarter than Bush. And she'd probably have made a better president.
BTW, I'm actually fairly conservative. But my party -- the Republicans -- has been hijacked by 'f***king crazies'. (the phrase attributed, possibly incorrectly, to Colin Powell)
***Come on get realistic Presidents are people like you and me they make mistakes sometimes huge ones but they are not wrong all the time...***
Perfection is difficult. But George W Bush is as close to a perfect fool as I want to see in my lifetime in charge of any major country.
In any case, the reason for going to the Asteroids instead of the Moon is that it is a probably a more effective way to spend money. We've been to the moon. What major unanswered questions do we have about the moon? None that I know of. Colonization? We aren't going to build a viable lunar colony with our current technology base any more than the Vikings were going to use their base in Labrador to colonize Malibu Beach The Asteroids surely have a higher payoff scientifically and possibly financially as well.
Signs of intelligent life at NASA after all these decades. Didn't see THAT coming.
***This basically means that if you don't have written permission to access a computer, you can't access it legally.***
My written permission to access slashdot? Yes officer. I have it around here somewhere.... Just give me a minute... Waddyamean 'I have a right to an attorney'... Hey, not so tight with those handcuffs mate....
*** 'locks will be broken, and so a business model that depends on locking is very vulnerable'***
'very vulnerable' isn't the half of it. You can't lock a tent . If your business model depends on end users not copying your product, you might as well save everyone a lot of trouble and move on to another project. Copyright/Patent/Trademark may protect you a bit against some commercial competition. But you can't do much about end users violating them. And maybe not against mega-corporations with brigades of lawyers either.
Assuming that Reverend Moon's right wing slag sheet has something right for once, half the debris threatening satellites being American wouldn't be far off since almost all of the 80% that was there prior to the Chinese test was put there over the past 50 years by the US and USSR/Russia. But the Chinese test really does seem to have been irresponsible. Presumably they could just as easily have done their test at with a lower altitude target where the majority of the debris would have decayed and burned up in the atmosphere in a few hours, weeks or months.
Does point out a problem with space warfare though. With current technologies or anything resembling them, there's only going to be one battle and a short one at that. After a few dozen satellite destructions, there will likely be so much junk in orbit that near earth satellite lifetimes will be measured in weeks and manned spaceflight will be ill advised for decades or maybe centuries.
***What's the point of individual watermarking if it can't be traced to an individual?***
Non-individualized watermarks won't tell anyone if you are deliberately using illegal copies in your music or movie collection. In all probability, everyone's collection will include some illegal copies. Even the collections of people who actually TRY to stay legal. But watermarks should help in identifying people who are systematically selling or renting illegal copies. If Sleazy Sammy's Junkmart has 200 copies of the same CD with the same watermark in the warehouse, it's a pretty safe bet that Sammy or his supplier is making illegal copies. Judges and juries will likely see it that way also.
Maybe, just maybe, we'll end up with something everyone can live with. The AAs ignore low level personal file sharing, and the serious pirates do jail time. I wouldn't bet on it though.
I'm in favor of ANYTHING that might stop wasting my time with copy protection/prevention schemes that don't work well and/or right and/or prevent me from backing up their fragile distribution media. That would seem to be all of them.
***Oh please. This is America; nobody's going to coerce my vote. They're going to buy it, fair and square.***
Sorry mate. In the interests of efficiency and free trade, we're going to outsource your vote to workers in Somolia. Much cheaper than buying, casting, and counting it here. You can easily see how this benefits both them and you. It's win-win.
*** You can pry my motorcycle from my cold, dead hand.***
That cold dead hand thing would be the problem, now wouldn't it? Not that I'd never ride a motorcycle or motorscooter or bicycle. But they aren't real safe. "Motorcyclists were 37 times more likely than passenger car occupants to die in a crash in 2006, per vehicle mile traveled, and 8 times more likely to be injured,according to NHTSA." http://www.iii.org/media/hottopics/insurance/motorcycle/?table_sort_739222=2
***I'm not an SUV cheerleader by any means, but to suggest that all SUVs have poor crash ratings is mere conjecture. I found some crash ratings [automotive.com] that contradict your assertion in 30 seconds.***
I very much doubt it. What you probably found were ratings that say that if you drive into a wall or large tree, your chances of survival in an SUV are reasonably decent. What the OP was pointing out is that SUVs have a high center of gravity and are prone to roll over in some types of accidents -- sometimes multiple times. Why not spend your next 30 seconds on searching on "SUV single car accidents" on your favorite search engine. I think that you will find the results to be enlightening.
***No. I doubt that the 30 HP engine could climb some of the hills and mountains we have here in Vermont.***
Of course it can. How well it will deal with the six inches of snow that has come down since the plow last came through is a different issue. If the Indian engineers considered muddy roads in the design, it might be OK in snow.
Anyway, I live in Vermont also, and I'd consider using something like this for local driving if it can meet emissions requirements. It's not like you can safely get over 45mph on the roads around here anyway. Not sure I'd take it on I-89 however. At least not until there are a lot of cars like it on the road.
My friend, you need to spend a while studying petroleum reserves, usage rates, exploration, growth rates in the developing world and the American economy (with particular attention to the persistent imbalance of trade).
Trust me on this. Without a breakthrough in cheap energy generation, in twenty or thirty years, you'll probably consider driving a car like this to be perfectly ordinary and normal. That's an optimistic assessment BTW. A least you'll have wheels. Worst case, you won't be able to afford this and won't be able to keep it on the road if you do somehow come by one.
BTW, in Germany (West, not East) about three decades ago, a couple of coworkers rented something called a Fiat Panda. It had enormous trouble accelerating even to 25mph if it happened to be pointed uphill. Cars that are enormously underpowered by current American standards are not, and never have been, confined to the third world.
***Good lord, what if the autobot is localized? I mean, how much worse would the driving be if it was a BostonBot(tm)?***
What's the problem? You just need a sensor and a little code that can juggle the special factors involved in Boston driving -- Relative Vehicle Size, Number of dents, Condition of the paintjob. Vehicle with the least to lose in a collision has the right of way. You won't even notice that a robot is driving.
In fact, judging from most of the computer controlled gadgets around here, you may not even need a sensor or algorithm. Best software practices should yield about the right degree of randomness for Boston driving.
***and honestly i don't have an idea how windy is up there in high altitudes***
The complete answer is complicated. But the short answer is "very windy". There's a reason that wind farms tend to be located on ridge lines and in mountain passes.
However, we certainly do have the technology to build a vastly safer lighter than air craft than the Hindenburg. If we make the payload watertight, bouyant and detachable and equip it with a parachute and take off and land only in vast open spaces where a burning gas bag is not going to incinerate a whole suburb, I wouldn't be at all surprised if a modern lighter than air craft using hydrogen in non-flammable bags wasn't every bit as safe as a modern commuter jet.
There are other problems -- especially the potential vulnerability to weather.
I'm not especially a fan of Hydrogen. A think the whole idea of a Hydrogen economy is fairly nutty. Why replace a perfectly good an well understood natural gas based distribution system with a new one using a gas that is even trickier to handle? Surely the problems of synthesizing methane from atmospheric Carbon are no more difficult than those of dealing with a tiny molecule that leaks through minute holes and forms explosive mixtures with air. But for some types of lighter than air vehicles, Hydrogen looks like a pretty good choice.
Slashdot Mirror
Sooner or later, we'll save ourselves untold trouble if we vastly scale back the notion of Intellectual (imaginary) property to something relatively sensible.
So I took the DVD down and popped it into my wife's XP machine. Up comes a screen that informs that this DVD has enhanced features, do I want to use them? Sure. After answering a few inane questions, I find myself confronted with a blank blue screen -- not a BSOD, just a blank blue screen. The PC is still alive. Num Lock works. But nothing else does -- including ctrl-alt-del. Ate dinner. Still no video. Waiting is not the answer apparently. Current machine state is certainly restful and soothing, but I really wanted to watch a movie. Turned the machine off with the power switch, rebooted, mutter "FY Bill Gates and all thy works" at the usual warning that I must shut the machine down properly (idiotic design for a consumer product ... grumble ...) and get it back up. Try Windows Media Player. It's the latest version for XP, I just installed it last week. It won't even play the previews.
Back upstairs, shut down Slackware and reboot to Windows Media Center XP. Takes forever to boot compared to Slackware-xfce. For some weird reason, the mouse freezes while all the nagware that I haven't turned off (yes it really did used to be even worse) bombards me with questions that no one could possibly deal with intelligently. Finally, everything calms down and the mouse comes to life. Kill the nagware. Pop the DVD in. Decline the offer to enhance my dvd viewing experience. Skip through the previews. Been there, done that. Finally the menu pops up. Tell it to Play the Movie. It ignores me. Try some other things. A few work. Most don't. Tell it to Play the Movie. It takes me off to some inappropriate submenu. Return. Tell it Play the Movie. It ignores me. Try a few more submenus. Observe that it seems to be a bit confused at times about what I have clicked. Return to main menu. Click Play the Movie about fifteen times. Movie Plays.
So. Linux never did play the actual DVD although the third thing I tried did very nicely with the previews. Windows XP on one machine didn't do that well. Windows XP on another did play the DVD but clearly wasn't working properly and was not in my judgment actually usable by normal human beings.
My conclusion. Linux is not really ready for prime time. ... and neither is Windows.
As I recall, the name was a rather hastily contrived replacement for the earlier name which was -- as I remember -- Phoenix. IP law strikes again bettering life for us all.
That's absolutely correct. But it's not like Windows just works. In point of fact I've spent Waaayyyyy too many hours of my life pursuing weird problems in Windows, clearing malware off windows PCs, waiting for the stupid thing to boot, or shut down, or trying to persuade it to please -- god damn it -- correctly install some piece of software that purports to be Windows friendly/compatible/tolerant and installs just fine on the supposedly identical machine in the next room.
In point of fact, modern Linux distributions have a fair chance of coming up and running Open Office, a web browser, and an e-mail program without tinkering. They may well play CDs and MP3s. If, OTOH, you want to run GoogleEarth, you're likely in for a long afternoon.
At least with Linux, I don't have that ongoing "I really paid money for this piece of excrement?" feeling that I've had with every Windows since 95.
I will be a happy man if I never have to run Regedit again.
1. Abolish copyright protection in the US.
or
2. Require that any lawsuits for copyright infringement be initiated by the creator of the copyrighted work rather than the copyright owner or third party agents like the RIAA.
and/or
3. Dress up like Indians and pitch the RIAA and all their works into Boston Harbor.
1. It's lousy for patching ducts.
2. It doesn't work well under water.
Deep Sea cable patching duct tape? Probably not. But bailing wire might work. And they can always try quick setting epoxy or a bent paperclip.
Doesn't the drier affect have to do with putting two pairs of black socks into the washer and getting three black socks and one blue one out of the drier? Perhaps you were thinking of the DB25 affect where when reassembling an elderly computer system you will -- with 50% probability -- find that when attempting to make the last connection you are trying to plug a male connector into a male socket?
Absolutely true. As I recall, Windows 95 comes to a screeching halt after opening 72 MSDOS windows in 16mb of memory. (OK, OK, so I sometimes get my loop variables wrong). It actually recovered from that, but it definitely is more fragile than NT. On the other hand, most people would barely notice the difference so I don't consider the difference to be very important. The only case I can think of where an ordinary user might appreciate NT's robustness is when media is removed while in use. Windows 9 generally crashes. NT doesn't although the result is anything but pretty. (Did they clean that up in Vista?)
***Also 9x has absoloutely no concept of user permissions, every user is essentially god.***
True. And a personal computer needs user permissions .. why? I've tried hard to convince myself that the security model that people are trying to sell as the end all actually works. But I just can't. I'm all in favor of some sort of security scheme. And I expect that some sort of permissions and or ACLs will be part of one that works. But I submit that NT security demonstrably doesn't work very well (and I suspect that Unix security isn't much better). Does NT have the sort of access control that will be needed if and when security gets straightened out? My guess is mostly not.
***The real problem that MS is still trying to find a way out of is that most win32 programmers wrote apps that assumed no security because they were developing on a platform that had no security.***
No argument there. Problem is that I think they are now developing on a platform that has problematic security. I guess that's better. But it doesn't mean that their work won't have to be redone -- maybe multiple times.
But OK, yeah. If an OS can be developed that can actually keep users from tromping on one another and the OS while still doing useful work, that'd be a reason to redo the OS. However, NT demonstrably is NOT such an OS. Would it be worth discarding backward compatibility to get real computing security? It might. But rollout would be an enormous problem, and rolling out something that had any substantial number of flaws would be a disaster all round. This is a case where bullshit won't fly. If you promise security at the cost of rewriting everything, you better either deliver or not ship.
***P.S. if you really want to stop windows systems getting messed up without stopping apps working windows steadystate rocks.***
Hey man, the "codger" in my name means that I'm like "old". I don't doubt that you're right, but I'm not quite sure about what. Not as quick as I once was. Could you take that just a bit more slowly?
How about you take twenty minutes of your no doubt precious time and tell me and others what these wonders do? Is it really something that we can realistically expect to see in our mainstream OSes anytime soon? Or anytime at all?
The last genuinely interesting concept I saw anyone try to install in a mainstream OS that would actually make life significantly better for users (if it worked) was "Windows File System" and it is something like 14 years late in roll out. It went into beta test about two years ago and then seems to have quietly vanished -- cancelled?
And while you're at it, perhaps you could try making an effort to be civil and losing that "I suggest you .." attitude? If you actually have something to contribute, contribute it. I'll be interested to read it. I'm sure others will as well.
At the risk of pointing out the obvious, if Microsoft abandoned backward compatibility, they'd lose most corporate users and many home users as well. You don't need an MBA to see why that is not a promising idea.
About the best they can do is what they did with NT. Jack the whole unwholsome mess up, and insert a new frame and engine under it. They did that with NT without all that much success. (Windows 95 runs about as well with far fewer resources if you don't mind a crash every few weeks). I suppose they can try again, but I doubt the results will be any better.
Maybe the idea would be more appealing if there were a "clean" design out there that was actually any better than NT, Unix, OsX. But I don't think there is. AFAICS, for several decades, OS design has consisted of shuffling the subsystems of a 1960s mainframe into slightly different configurations and slapping a shell on it. It's not that I can do better. I can't. Maybe NT, Linux, Vista really are the best we can do. That's a depressing thought.
There is no evidence whatsoever for that. I thought his dad was reasonably OK. But the kid is a disaster. I thought that long before Katrina and before the Main Stream Media media started grumbling. Look at his record. With the exception of Tsunami relief he has done not one single significant thing right. Not One. It's a remarkable record of duplicity, incompetence and stupidity. (To be fair, he did manage to get reasonably honest elections conducted in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, but I don't think he would have done that had he been smart enough to forsee the consequences. Certainly not in Palestine. Probably not the other two either.)
I'm not wild about John McCain, but had he been elected in 2000, he'd probably have been an OK president and the country would be far better off today.
There are many things that Bush says he believes in that I agree with. I thought when he said them that he was lying. The record shows that I was right. When he said them he was in fact lying.
Let's look at the record:
These are the works of an intelligent man? You sir, have a really strange idea of intelligence.
Let me sum up the virtues I have observed in George W Bush. He's not a racist. That's the only positive quality I see in the man. Our dog isn't a racist either (she loves everyone even the mailman). She is very likely smarter than Bush. And she'd probably have made a better president.
BTW, I'm actually fairly conservative. But my party -- the Republicans -- has been hijacked by 'f***king crazies'. (the phrase attributed, possibly incorrectly, to Colin Powell)
Perfection is difficult. But George W Bush is as close to a perfect fool as I want to see in my lifetime in charge of any major country.
In any case, the reason for going to the Asteroids instead of the Moon is that it is a probably a more effective way to spend money. We've been to the moon. What major unanswered questions do we have about the moon? None that I know of. Colonization? We aren't going to build a viable lunar colony with our current technology base any more than the Vikings were going to use their base in Labrador to colonize Malibu Beach The Asteroids surely have a higher payoff scientifically and possibly financially as well.
Signs of intelligent life at NASA after all these decades. Didn't see THAT coming.
My written permission to access slashdot? Yes officer. I have it around here somewhere. ... Just give me a minute ... Waddyamean 'I have a right to an attorney' ... Hey, not so tight with those handcuffs mate ....
'very vulnerable' isn't the half of it. You can't lock a tent . If your business model depends on end users not copying your product, you might as well save everyone a lot of trouble and move on to another project. Copyright/Patent/Trademark may protect you a bit against some commercial competition. But you can't do much about end users violating them. And maybe not against mega-corporations with brigades of lawyers either.
Does point out a problem with space warfare though. With current technologies or anything resembling them, there's only going to be one battle and a short one at that. After a few dozen satellite destructions, there will likely be so much junk in orbit that near earth satellite lifetimes will be measured in weeks and manned spaceflight will be ill advised for decades or maybe centuries.
Non-individualized watermarks won't tell anyone if you are deliberately using illegal copies in your music or movie collection. In all probability, everyone's collection will include some illegal copies. Even the collections of people who actually TRY to stay legal. But watermarks should help in identifying people who are systematically selling or renting illegal copies. If Sleazy Sammy's Junkmart has 200 copies of the same CD with the same watermark in the warehouse, it's a pretty safe bet that Sammy or his supplier is making illegal copies. Judges and juries will likely see it that way also.
Maybe, just maybe, we'll end up with something everyone can live with. The AAs ignore low level personal file sharing, and the serious pirates do jail time. I wouldn't bet on it though.
I'm in favor of ANYTHING that might stop wasting my time with copy protection/prevention schemes that don't work well and/or right and/or prevent me from backing up their fragile distribution media. That would seem to be all of them.
Sorry mate. In the interests of efficiency and free trade, we're going to outsource your vote to workers in Somolia. Much cheaper than buying, casting, and counting it here. You can easily see how this benefits both them and you. It's win-win.
That cold dead hand thing would be the problem, now wouldn't it? Not that I'd never ride a motorcycle or motorscooter or bicycle. But they aren't real safe. "Motorcyclists were 37 times more likely than passenger car occupants to die in a crash in 2006, per vehicle mile traveled, and 8 times more likely to be injured,according to NHTSA." http://www.iii.org/media/hottopics/insurance/motorcycle/?table_sort_739222=2
I very much doubt it. What you probably found were ratings that say that if you drive into a wall or large tree, your chances of survival in an SUV are reasonably decent. What the OP was pointing out is that SUVs have a high center of gravity and are prone to roll over in some types of accidents -- sometimes multiple times. Why not spend your next 30 seconds on searching on "SUV single car accidents" on your favorite search engine. I think that you will find the results to be enlightening.
Of course it can. How well it will deal with the six inches of snow that has come down since the plow last came through is a different issue. If the Indian engineers considered muddy roads in the design, it might be OK in snow.
Anyway, I live in Vermont also, and I'd consider using something like this for local driving if it can meet emissions requirements. It's not like you can safely get over 45mph on the roads around here anyway. Not sure I'd take it on I-89 however. At least not until there are a lot of cars like it on the road.
Trust me on this. Without a breakthrough in cheap energy generation, in twenty or thirty years, you'll probably consider driving a car like this to be perfectly ordinary and normal. That's an optimistic assessment BTW. A least you'll have wheels. Worst case, you won't be able to afford this and won't be able to keep it on the road if you do somehow come by one.
BTW, in Germany (West, not East) about three decades ago, a couple of coworkers rented something called a Fiat Panda. It had enormous trouble accelerating even to 25mph if it happened to be pointed uphill. Cars that are enormously underpowered by current American standards are not, and never have been, confined to the third world.
What's the problem? You just need a sensor and a little code that can juggle the special factors involved in Boston driving -- Relative Vehicle Size, Number of dents, Condition of the paintjob. Vehicle with the least to lose in a collision has the right of way. You won't even notice that a robot is driving.
In fact, judging from most of the computer controlled gadgets around here, you may not even need a sensor or algorithm. Best software practices should yield about the right degree of randomness for Boston driving.
The complete answer is complicated. But the short answer is "very windy". There's a reason that wind farms tend to be located on ridge lines and in mountain passes.
There are other problems -- especially the potential vulnerability to weather.
I'm not especially a fan of Hydrogen. A think the whole idea of a Hydrogen economy is fairly nutty. Why replace a perfectly good an well understood natural gas based distribution system with a new one using a gas that is even trickier to handle? Surely the problems of synthesizing methane from atmospheric Carbon are no more difficult than those of dealing with a tiny molecule that leaks through minute holes and forms explosive mixtures with air. But for some types of lighter than air vehicles, Hydrogen looks like a pretty good choice.
Because it is too small to have much lift. Depending on how it was built, you might need weights to keep a 21 meter monitor from drifting off.