> Space X doesn't have to build their components in 40 different states and in order to please 40 congressmen and get the funding etc.
Are you sure about that? It's still congress that decides NASA's budget. I'm sure congress knows where SpaceX's factories are. So long as NASA is SpaceXs biggest customer what makes you think they are immune to politics? I doubt SpaceX would thrive if NASA was defunded.
You have a point that just because one group couldn't do it doesn't prove that another can't either. Maybe they should try. On the other hand you seem to be completely discounting the wisdom of learning from other people's experience. Having already tried to do this maybe NASA knows something about it. Or should every other rocket maker from NASA to the end of time all repeat the same expensive mistakes just in case they can find a way.
>>NASA, these days, is nothing but an organization designed to enrich top managers and engineers. It's a jobs program designed to pay out huge paychecks >>and accrue great retirement benefits.
I don't think this should be modded down. Not because it isn't flamebait (it is) but because it is flamebait that is likely to spark a decent discussion. It kind of sucks when you read a +5 but it's all out of context because the parent post is below your threshold!
>>NASA, these days, is nothing but an organization designed to enrich top managers and engineers. It's a jobs program designed to pay out huge >>paychecks and accrue great retirement benefits.
So what? It's not like funding rocket science for the benefit of exploration ever got us anywhere.
When people first started dreaming of traveling to space using rockets all the action was in little private rocket clubs. They did some groundbreaking work and deserve to be remembered for that but they had no chance of ever acruing the resources to build actual spacecraft.
Do you know how scientists with an interest in spaceflight finally got the resources to build something that might actually make it to space? By piggybacking on the ambitions of the Nazis. A team of some of the brightest German scientists had the Nazis pay the bill for building some of the first rockets that could just about make it to space. The catch of course being that they carried explosives and for the most part 'landed' on England.
After WWII the US and Russians nabbed as many of those scientists as they could. That's how the first two human space flight programs started. Now the scientists were getting funded because the two sides of the cold war were afraid that if they didn't develop space the other would. That got us pretty much everything mankind ever did in space up until very recently when the Chinese managed to launch a few people. Keep in mind of course that the Chinese based their work on the Russians.
So with the cold war over (or is it...) I'm glad to see any funding go towards spaceflight, even if it is mostly the product of politicians sending money to their friends.
I would love to see this, not just in mobile devices but in desktops as well! It would require some sort of standardized api that the drivers hook into. That would be tough to get across operating systems. New versions would have to always be backward compatible or risk obsoleting a bunch of hardware. That might be especially tough when a security bug is found in the API.
Why does everything have to be 'what the masses want'?
I'm pretty sure that in the US anyway more people eat Big Macs than Sushi. And yet I don't see all the Benihanas converting to McDonalds! Why can't somebody make something for a smaller, geekier market? Just look at personal computers pre-internet. That was a small, geeky market and yet a lot of people got rich off of it. Can't somebody cater to us today too?
Don't get me wrong, surviving a 2 meter drop is pretty good compared to most consumer products these days. Still.. I would expect much much better from a $5600 tablet marketed to the military. It should at least survive a couple of stories!
>> Why tie up higher education resources fixing what K-12 broke?
After submitting I realized this sounds kind of wrong. I'm not saying giving people a chance at a good education is unimportant. I'm just saying that you don't need UofM to learn something that should have been taught in high school. It isn't going to make someone any smarter to learn these things from some big name school. Get the basics out of the way at a place that focuses on the basics. Then learn the truly advanced stuff at the advanced school.
If someone grows up in a situation that is disadvantaged doesn't that begin before college? Aren't they being taught less in K-12? So someone decides it's not their fault (perhaps this is true) and lets them in the college anyway. Are they prepared to take the same courses as someone who went to a better school previously? So now what do they do? Do they take a bunch of remedial courses? Why does someone need a prestigious university to do that? Why can't they take those kind of courses at a community college or at least a smaller university. If they are dedicated and intelligent enough to get good grades there then that should be taken into consideration allowing them to transfer to the university from there. Why tie up higher education resources fixing what K-12 broke?
On an individual basis it's probably impossible to 'level the playing field'. People and the lives which shape them are too complicated for anyone to evaluate fully on a case by case basis. IF it's even worthwile to try to make things 'fair' at all though there could be better criteria than skin color. How about looking at the high school they went to. Students who went to under-performing high schools could get a little boost. Maybe a kid who gets a mediocre grade in a school where nobody is taking things seriously and half the kids drop out really is showing more dedication, responsibility or even intelligence than one who gets a better grade at a school where everyone is expected to perform?
If people of a certain race truly need affirmative action then percentage-wise they are probably more likely to come from those schools anyway so they will still get mostly the same help. This would also help non-minorities who happen to come from rough neighborhoods (like Marshal Mathers if he never became Eminem) while not giving yet another advantage to already advantaged minorities that don't need it (like president Obama's daughters).
If people pusing for affirmative action really want to help the disadvantage and to break the cycles that cause disadvantage they should be supportive of a more 'fair' criteria. So long as they are basing everythign on race I think they are either looking for a handout themselves or are lacking some critical thinking skills and have been fooled by those who are.
You mean performance issues like power consumption, heat and noise? There is more to performance than speed. Actually, with all the speed we get today even from mechanical hard drives IMHO these other things are far more interesting than squeezing out a little more speed. Why do I care if a program loads in 1/2 a second vs 1/4 second?
Why is capacitive touch so important? Multi-touch is cool but I use my Android phone all the time and for just about everything. The only multi-touch gesture I even know is pinch zoom/out. I go whole days without using that and if I didn't have it some sort of disappearing slider would suit me just fine.
I miss the resistive touch screen on my Sharp Zaurus. No, I didn't HAVE to use the stylus. For the normal stuff I do with my capacitive touch screen now I usually just 'clicked' with my fingernail. But... if I wanted to draw a picture, write something (actual handwriting), or use tiny controls (such as desktop apps via VNC) I could do that with a stylus. Capacitive touch screens CANNOT DO THAT!!! they are way too inprecise.
Ideally I would like to have both. My understanding is that some company has a patent on a touch screen which is basically just both a capacitive and a resistive sensor stacked. That way you can have precise single-touch sensing AND multitouch. I have yet to see any product though. It is just wonderful that we have a system where companies can patent good ideas without ever making them available to people who might want to buy them!
I don't think it's likely to be 'in addition to'. 'In addition to' requires building of infrastructure. Taking away from everyone else just requires a software tweak in the routers.
Slashdot Mirror
>>I'm pretty sure NASA (and plenty of others) also said Elon/Space-X was stupid...
Actually, didn't NASA award SpaceX a bunch of money to help get started... That's what I remember anyway. Do they help fund stupid?
> Space X doesn't have to build their components in 40 different states and in order to please 40 congressmen and get the funding etc.
Are you sure about that? It's still congress that decides NASA's budget. I'm sure congress knows where SpaceX's factories are. So long as NASA is SpaceXs biggest customer what makes you think they are immune to politics? I doubt SpaceX would thrive if NASA was defunded.
You have a point that just because one group couldn't do it doesn't prove that another can't either. Maybe they should try. On the other hand you seem to be completely discounting the wisdom of learning from other people's experience. Having already tried to do this maybe NASA knows something about it. Or should every other rocket maker from NASA to the end of time all repeat the same expensive mistakes just in case they can find a way.
Your right because clearly starting up your little games faster should be top priority of any operating system.
Actually it isn't.
LOL... as if we could!
Umm... The Manhattan project was US, not German. And... the rockets they made bombed the hell out of England.
And then it wouldn't have a USB port anymore.
>>NASA, these days, is nothing but an organization designed to enrich top managers and engineers. It's a jobs program designed to pay out huge paychecks
>>and accrue great retirement benefits.
I don't think this should be modded down. Not because it isn't flamebait (it is) but because it is flamebait that is likely to spark a decent discussion. It kind of sucks when you read a +5 but it's all out of context because the parent post is below your threshold!
>>NASA, these days, is nothing but an organization designed to enrich top managers and engineers. It's a jobs program designed to pay out huge >>paychecks and accrue great retirement benefits.
So what? It's not like funding rocket science for the benefit of exploration ever got us anywhere.
When people first started dreaming of traveling to space using rockets all the action was in little private rocket clubs. They did some groundbreaking work and deserve to be remembered for that but they had no chance of ever acruing the resources to build actual spacecraft.
Do you know how scientists with an interest in spaceflight finally got the resources to build something that might actually make it to space? By piggybacking on the ambitions of the Nazis. A team of some of the brightest German scientists had the Nazis pay the bill for building some of the first rockets that could just about make it to space. The catch of course being that they carried explosives and for the most part 'landed' on England.
After WWII the US and Russians nabbed as many of those scientists as they could. That's how the first two human space flight programs started. Now the scientists were getting funded because the two sides of the cold war were afraid that if they didn't develop space the other would. That got us pretty much everything mankind ever did in space up until very recently when the Chinese managed to launch a few people. Keep in mind of course that the Chinese based their work on the Russians.
So with the cold war over (or is it...) I'm glad to see any funding go towards spaceflight, even if it is mostly the product of politicians sending money to their friends.
It's about damn time
I would love to see this, not just in mobile devices but in desktops as well! It would require some sort of standardized api that the drivers hook into. That would be tough to get across operating systems. New versions would have to always be backward compatible or risk obsoleting a bunch of hardware. That might be especially tough when a security bug is found in the API.
Why does everything have to be 'what the masses want'?
I'm pretty sure that in the US anyway more people eat Big Macs than Sushi. And yet I don't see all the Benihanas converting to McDonalds! Why can't somebody make something for a smaller, geekier market? Just look at personal computers pre-internet. That was a small, geeky market and yet a lot of people got rich off of it. Can't somebody cater to us today too?
Don't get me wrong, surviving a 2 meter drop is pretty good compared to most consumer products these days. Still.. I would expect much much better from a $5600 tablet marketed to the military. It should at least survive a couple of stories!
>> Why tie up higher education resources fixing what K-12 broke?
After submitting I realized this sounds kind of wrong. I'm not saying giving people a chance at a good education is unimportant. I'm just saying that you don't need UofM to learn something that should have been taught in high school. It isn't going to make someone any smarter to learn these things from some big name school. Get the basics out of the way at a place that focuses on the basics. Then learn the truly advanced stuff at the advanced school.
If someone grows up in a situation that is disadvantaged doesn't that begin before college? Aren't they being taught less in K-12? So someone decides it's not their fault (perhaps this is true) and lets them in the college anyway. Are they prepared to take the same courses as someone who went to a better school previously? So now what do they do? Do they take a bunch of remedial courses? Why does someone need a prestigious university to do that? Why can't they take those kind of courses at a community college or at least a smaller university. If they are dedicated and intelligent enough to get good grades there then that should be taken into consideration allowing them to transfer to the university from there. Why tie up higher education resources fixing what K-12 broke?
On an individual basis it's probably impossible to 'level the playing field'. People and the lives which shape them are too complicated for anyone to evaluate fully on a case by case basis. IF it's even worthwile to try to make things 'fair' at all though there could be better criteria than skin color. How about looking at the high school they went to. Students who went to under-performing high schools could get a little boost. Maybe a kid who gets a mediocre grade in a school where nobody is taking things seriously and half the kids drop out really is showing more dedication, responsibility or even intelligence than one who gets a better grade at a school where everyone is expected to perform?
If people of a certain race truly need affirmative action then percentage-wise they are probably more likely to come from those schools anyway so they will still get mostly the same help. This would also help non-minorities who happen to come from rough neighborhoods (like Marshal Mathers if he never became Eminem) while not giving yet another advantage to already advantaged minorities that don't need it (like president Obama's daughters).
If people pusing for affirmative action really want to help the disadvantage and to break the cycles that cause disadvantage they should be supportive of a more 'fair' criteria. So long as they are basing everythign on race I think they are either looking for a handout themselves or are lacking some critical thinking skills and have been fooled by those who are.
I wonder what, if any functionality they are removing.
You mean performance issues like power consumption, heat and noise?
There is more to performance than speed. Actually, with all the speed we get today even from mechanical hard drives IMHO these other things are far more interesting than squeezing out a little more speed. Why do I care if a program loads in 1/2 a second vs 1/4 second?
I would happily sacrifice the multi-touch capability that capacitive screens bring to get back the precision of a resistive one.
Why is capacitive touch so important? Multi-touch is cool but I use my Android phone all the time and for just about everything. The only multi-touch gesture I even know is pinch zoom/out. I go whole days without using that and if I didn't have it some sort of disappearing slider would suit me just fine.
I miss the resistive touch screen on my Sharp Zaurus. No, I didn't HAVE to use the stylus. For the normal stuff I do with my capacitive touch screen now I usually just 'clicked' with my fingernail. But... if I wanted to draw a picture, write something (actual handwriting), or use tiny controls (such as desktop apps via VNC) I could do that with a stylus. Capacitive touch screens CANNOT DO THAT!!! they are way too inprecise.
Ideally I would like to have both. My understanding is that some company has a patent on a touch screen which is basically just both a capacitive and a resistive sensor stacked. That way you can have precise single-touch sensing AND multitouch. I have yet to see any product though. It is just wonderful that we have a system where companies can patent good ideas without ever making them available to people who might want to buy them!
I just got a Slashdot Alpha page!!! Worse than the beta, it's Facebook comments!
Maybe you just don't have a very good grasp on who "most people here" are.
Duh, they were announcing planet X. Those anouncements have always turned out to be wrong! That was fun. We'll do this again in a couple of years.
I don't think it's likely to be 'in addition to'. 'In addition to' requires building of infrastructure. Taking away from everyone else just requires a software tweak in the routers.