with a decent wage and not fire them when they turn 40. Or 35.
That's it. Graduation and education will take care of itself.
Most fired PhD's over 40 will never get another technical job again, unless they have a top security clearance and want to work in military industries. (With the budget deficit in USA, this spending will stop soon as well.)
There have always been many Asian students in graduate programs in the USA.
Before, they could get a job here. Now they can't, but there are tremendous opportunities in Asia, especially for those with high-quality American PhD's.
American PhD's can't get those jobs. Chinese and Japanese and Korean are much too difficult for a non-native speaker, and in India + Korea + Japan there is plenty of ethnic and nationalistic discrimination. "Why should we hire you foreigner, when we have plenty of smart natives trying to get that job?"
Nuclear power plants have liability limitations because they know that what is liable in law courts, and with uneducated juries, is almost but not quite entirely not related to scientific fact.
In reality: coal has gotten away with it because it has gotten away with it, and precedent matters a lot in the legal system.
A nuclear plant would be a magnet to lawsuits if they zapped a bird.
Given my experience in one, the probability that they had effective off-site backup procedures is almost nil.
Many places, like mine, have no system administrator either or centralized policy. It usually falls down to whatever random grad students or postdocs happen to know a little bit more than the others.
People hook up their own computers fairly randomly. Lots of people know root passwords.
The reason is obvious: no money.
It is difficult enough to get grants to pay for science researchers themselves. Given the high overhead rates (which never comes back as professional system administration) nobody bothers because it is directly taking away money from themselves.
Researchers on soft money are often unemployed (in the financial sense, but not in the time sense) a significant fraction of the time.
Take away whatever crumbs for system administration? Off-site backup?
A couple of extra CD-R's people burn would be impressive as a backup policy.
I predict: whatever computer data remains will be so because people were lucky enough to have it on their laptops they took home. And the rest is sitting in Gmail.
In this case, however, the main losses will be to equipment and optical experiments which take a long amount of time to set up and calibrate. The computer software and data is not significant by comparison.
Is DOD screwing up great NSA plans?
on
Patents vs. Secrecy
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
tin-foil hat theory.
NSA publishes details of what-seem-to-be-awfully-good-security-systems except they have a tiny-little-flaw-that-only-we-know about.
Hoping that they get included in products, "NSA-designed security system!!"
DOD, stultified and paranoid in the Rumsfeld regime thwarts it without thinking.
People persist in this strange belief that "private enterprise" can make up any damn terms it pleases, and such terms which are considered odious when performed by government are suddently acceptable. They aren't. Privatizing oppression just privatizes it, not justifies it. The relationship between private and public may have to be managed more delicately but the notion that normal rights are nullified by a corporate entity is silly.
There is the idea of "theoretical freedom", as in the existence, somewhere somehow, of some school/company that might concievably be lobbied to be acceptable, is reason and justification enough to allow all sorts of real-life intrusions on practical freedom, as in what really happens in peoples lives.
The example is obvious: "Whites only".
The legal justification: 9th Amendment.
What about employement: can they demand to snoop through your private files and financial records and political voting records before hiring you? Can they say "vote for Corporate Tool Republican or you're fired?"
Hint to young liberatrian geeks:
(1) the law, and its underlying ethical principles, are not algorithms. (2) Ayn Rand is a skanky manipulative bitch who doesn't grok squat.
It was a proxy for development of ICBM technology. An ICBM warhead is a satellite whose orbit happens to intersect the surface of the earth.
Having the capability for heavy lift, accurate guidance, precise orbital adjustments and robust communication shows that your ICBMs are probably also just as good, without divulging specific classified technological details.
Basic research is very good (and underfunded and underappreciated) but there is also something significant to be learned when basic research is applied to a rigorous problem, e.g. space technology, before it has to hit the commercial market.
There is the "valley of death" in R&D development: it takes about 25 years from a technology to go from lab discovery to commercial development.
Academic development does the first 7 years, by then it is "old" and professors can't really write good papers or get good grants and tenure dicking around with small things.
Commercial development funds the last 2 years only.
The middle is the Valley of Death and you need some kind of funding source and goal to take technologies from a lab formula to a product of economic significance.
The writers of the Constitution were very careful with their words. There is already plenty of documentary evidence attesting to what they may have considered while writing it. They didn't put fluff in the written text for no reason, there are tomes of fluff and prolix argumentation.
The conclusion is assuming a section of the Constitution has no active meaning or import, nor never had any useful meaning, is mistaken. If it was intended to have no importance, restriction or direction, then it would not have been included.
Law is not like a Lisp program.
It is quite clear by any intent and historical documentation and use of half a brain, that the clauses are intended as direction to the legislature to make more specific law along those lines.
In fact, if you read the whole section, Article 2 section 8, the whole description makes it clear that the principal purpose is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts"
"Congress shall have the power to... promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
If they wanted to say:
"Congress shall have the power to... secure for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
they would have, just as the Constitution elsewhere in that very section quite clearly says "Congress has the power to [verb]".
They share the monopoly on power and extremism of Lenin with aggressive capitalism.
A very dangerous combination, as orthodox Marxism-Leninism (e.g. Cuba,DPRK) was and is unable to make nations wealthy enough to seriously triumph over free democracies.
The U.S. military is bracing for future attacks in space, and the Air Force has deployed an electronic-warfare unit capable of jamming enemy satellites, the general in charge of space defenses says....
Instead, offensive anti-satellite weapons currently are limited to "countercommunications" operations -- interrupting the signals sent from the ground to satellites that try to disrupt U.S. military or civilian spacecraft, Gen. Lord said.
The 76th Space Control Squadron, based at Peterson Air Force Base, Colo., last year deployed the first offensive countercommunications system that uses mobile teams that can fire electronic jamming gear capable of knocking out enemy satellite communications.
Didn't anybody read? There ain't no Death Star. Where did "satellite launch from the US" come into things? Oh yeah, it's Slashdot, foolish jumping to conclusions for nerds.
This "unit" is a group of trained people, most likely on the ground or from the air, who shoot electronic jammy things at ground stations which link to enemy satellites, or enemy ground stations which themselves are jamming US satellites. The US wants to keep its satellites, and since it has more capable and more expensive satellites than competitors it would rather not get in a "you blow up mine, I blow up yours" competition since the endpoint negates US advantages. They want to "I blow up your jammers so my satellites work again."
That's precisely the problem! Ballmer can only think of "winning"---as in somebody else has to lose. OS/2. Novell. Netscape, Sun, whoever, and now Google.
Did Apple "win" the whatever? Never. They made an iPod.
They did win affection. Like Google.
Where's Microsoft's iPod? Whatever it is, it's going to be made in Gooogle Labs now.
They ought to think what's the coolest thing they can do with a comptuer----hardware and software included.
(MS hardware---mice etc---is more innovative than their software)
Well, what about porn? Has anybody put in a billion in research into making the orgasmotron really work? Make the iPod for the dick.
This has a fundamental chicken and egg problem: So you store the information, you also need to store the format of that information. So then how do you read "format of the information" document? What format is *that* in?
Latin, videlicet.
But seriously the problem in records is not going to be collecting the data, but turning it into knowledge. Meaning that humans in the future are likely to seriously misinterpret or be unaware of the intended meanings and social and political contexts of the preserved data.
This is not a technology problem.
They ought to make sure that real professional historians are there.
A mainstream news magazine which can, in fact, get science generally correct.
As well as most of their other reporting. They have a clear editorial bias, but it is at least open, and mostly rational unlike the Wall Street Journal (editorials).
Yes, I am a professional scientist myself, and I have fairly high standards on this. The Economist does well, sometimes the NYTimes science reporter, and few others.
Unavoidable risk: a rocket is an enormous explosive just barely controlled by exotic, expensive and difficult technology.
Avoidable risk: doing stupid things in your design to endanger lives.
The laws of physics, and many realities of engineering, are exactly the same today as they were in 1960.
For instance: what is the right place to locate the humans?
On the very top, because then they are the furthest away from the really dangerous bits. And delicate stuff needed for re-entry can be shielded and be far away from the immensely violent launch and debris and whatever is coming out of the ground and shaken off the rocket.
Corollary: where do you put the fuel tanks? On the rear end, dummy.
There's lots of reasons the Saturn V looked like it does. And how it looks like a whole lot of other rockets, except the shuttle. Ain't a coincidence.
These problems were known and solved, and the shuttle un-solved them.
Obviously, we need some more Nazi rocket scientists.
So a plane which can fly back is supposed to be 'cost effective'. But why does it have to be so big? You generally take big fat cargos up and then work on them. So take them in a big fucking can, which sits UNDER your small, human sized space plane which re-enters and holds the people, tools and control bits. You throw away the can. And under the cargo, you put the fat ass rockets.
You make them as cheap as possible, with metal-wrangling shipbuilding level technology, not ultra-high tech fancy pants stuff. That stuff is use 'once or twice', if it's still OK when you get it back off the ocean. Only the engines are the big monetary per-launch loss, but even now they have big solid rocket boosters which are one-use only.
They should make a big Saturn V style launcher with cheap ass solids strapped around the bottom for the initial heavy lift, like the Soyuz, then a cheap ass liquid booster module. Then a cargo can, and on top, the orbital and re-entry vehicle.
And also put that doohickey on the very top like with the Saturn V. What's it for? It's a little escape pod rocket and parachute to get the people the fuck away from the big explosive bits if something really bad happens.
If the Challenger worked like that, the crew might have been able to walk away, depending on circumstances.
Steve Jobs did this exact thing once before. I think he'd rather catch pancreatic cancer again before repeating that playbook.
My humble opinion is that Apple should create a HCL (Hardware Compatability List) like Sun does for Solaris and say if your box has X in it we support it. If it doesn't your SOL. There is WAAAAY to much shit hardware out there that they don't need to support.
That precisely describes OPENSTEP. When Steve Jobs ported his OS to generic PC's and tried to have a hardware-compatibility list of sane perepherials and cards. When were "fat binaries" invented? Yes, about 1993, by NeXT, for this very purpose, to go from motorola 68040 to generic PC's.
And that was back when OPENSTEP was zillions of times better than Windows, rather than OPENSTEP-based MacOS X being only just significantly better than Windows.
The result was that it sucked really hard as hardware manufacturers never bothered for a millisecond to make an OPENSTEP driver, and there's no way that NeXT could have even remotely kept up with all the crappy hardware being churned out all the time.
With this market move Apple has to become a software / services company. They can no longer be a hardware company as their primary focus.
And what reputation does Apple have for software services? Will they start somehwere down well below job-jettisoning Fiorinized HP?
Or maybe it will go exactly the same way as NeXT as they they had to jettison their OS and start making Objective-C development environments and "custom programming" services and Web Objects for Windows. And even though the technology was zillions of times better than standard Windows crap at the time and all the other crappy web services, how well did that work? Answer: very horribly, until they were bought by Apple to fix Apple's OS problems.
Why can't Apple be a hardware company as their primary focus? They do have some significant ability in hardware engineering.
Heard of Powerbook? iPod?
Oh by the way, how well is Solaris x86 doing on generic PCs at Fry's? What, you say the guys working there think it sounds like an Xbox game?
In truth, Solaris x86 is being used nearly exclusively by paying customers on Sun's own Opteron-based hardware.
There's another major strategic consideration.
If, as they are doing, they switch to Intel based CPU's for their own hardware: they gain a powerful best new buddy in Intel. Microsoft doesn't care too much yet they're not directly trying to steal away their prime customers.
If Apple gives up hardware and sells only OS to generic PC makers what happens?
They compete against Microsoft in Microsoft's prime business model. They have no powerful friends like Intel or IBM to shield them from Microsoft's wrath.
Remember, there is a 100% Republican US government now. You think anti-trust actions will be successful at restraining Microsoft's vengance?
Apple is much safer on the friendly side of a powerful monopoly like Intel instead of being scheduled for termination by Microsoft.
Let's see how well that worked before for anybody except Microsoft.
Palm spins off PalmOS and licenses OS here and their hardware. Result: Palm corp gets nearly destroyed, Handspring merges back, and Windows Pocket takes off.
And then there's the fact that Steve Jobs tried exactly the same thing before, with nearly the same operating system back when it was grey instead of lickable: OPENSTEP.
How well were they able to keep up with drivers for modern hardware? Very poorly.
How well were they able to convince major PC makers to include OPENSTEP as pre-built option, at a competitive price? Not one bit.
Did this make NeXT Inc, stronger or weaker compared to when NeXT made hardware? Much weaker.
Jobs had a near-death experience doing exactly this strategy.
There's also the fact that this puts them in direct competition with Microsoft, attempting to copy Microsoft's business model, and competing with Microsoft for clients.
How well has this worked for IBM {OS/2}? Not very well at all.
How well does this work for Linux, which is even free and has zillions of people trying to write drivers? Only marginally, after 10 years. You can't easily click a button and get a Linux based Dell (especially a laptop) with everything pre-loaded, supported, and with all features working. After 10 years.
That definitely has to be a job where the rewards are intrinsic to the creation of knoweldge, because the external rewards sucketh and getting grants and jobs is even harder.
The atomic theory of matter wasn't even remotely experimentally provable. The periodic table was unknown and the idea of nuclei completely absent.
Chemistry then was very empirical and without significant systematic reasoning. Here Newton was very right that there was in fact something substantially scientific which could be discovered.
Unfortunately, experimental knowledge and technical ability wasn't available at the time to succeed in his quest, and it didn't happen for a hundred fifty to 200 more years.
There was no scientific reason known at the time why lead (or anything else) couldn't be turned into gold with chemical reactions.
Just imagine if Newton could have done spectroscopy or IR scattering experiments.
>While I'll be the first to agree that some programs are worth subsidizing (law enforcement and health care being examples), what happens to the argument that free and open markets lead to more efficient practices?
Sometimes it's wrong. First: it's competition that leads to more efficient practices, and this adds some competition. Of course, private companies prefer high-profit, low work monopolies, but that isn't societally optimal.
>When and why doesn't it apply in these cases?
Economist buzzword: "rents".
GPL buzzword: information hoarding
real life: There is a fundamental societal value in providing maximum communication about fundamental science because science progress is f undamentally stochastic and unpredictable. At the earliest stages therefore it is valuable to have as free information exchange before commercialization is feasible.
Putting a commercial barrier in the way is just extracting "rents", a private sector taxation, from the producers and consumers of that information, both of whom are already publically funded.
That free markets (defined however) leads to societally optimal results is an *empirically testable* phenomenon---not an axiom.
It is not always true, and especially when the meaning of "free markets" is narrow and ideological.
If governments, as society, decide, on their own free will to do "X", is that really a lessening of freedom?
Imagine an HP which actually tries to get its geek-cred back, making high quality pro-nerd machines.
OSX would work here---if Apple licensed HP to sell OSX to *businesses* with their service and consulting agreements, to universities, and to engineering companies.
Apple computers come with an iPod dock, and HP/OSX come with Intel C++ and Fortran compilers, and a calculator dock.
The Oak Ridge Reservation comprises X-10, Y-12 and K-25 plants.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) was a predominantly civilian research facility based at X-10, and a little bit of Y-12.
The Y-12 Plant, as an institution, on the other hand, was predominantly concerned for decades with the manufacture of the fusion secondaries for thermonuclear weapons. It's the secondary (H-bomb) part which has the really secret and high tech bits.
I worked at ORNL a number of years ago, and my office was in the unclassified Y-12 side.
Inside the (electric security) fence was the nuclear bits. These days, it is the "Fort Knox" of highly enriched uranium.
It does not at all look very "high tech", compared to any modern industrial engineering plant it seems pathetically ugly, dull and dreary, a cross between a chemical plant and a Soviet-style apartment block, and neither of which was updated since 1947 or so. One of the most unpleasant physical environments to work in.
Jobs: "Been there, done that, got the 'buy us now before we go out of business' t-shirt."
The "other" business model was NEXTSTEP. They did what all the talking heads told them to do: give up proprietary hardware and go to the "vast" x86 market and sell the operating system, as OPENSTEP.
It was disasterous because they couldn't keep up with the vast array of weird PC hardware, the PC manufacturers had no desire to help them write drivers (and they barely do for the much larger Linux market) and there just wasn't remotely enough revenue to support continued OPENSTEP.
This, despite the fact that OPENSTEP was enormously better than the contemporary Windows---a larger gap certainly than MacOSX is from Windows XP.
I'd love to be able to use MacOSX on cheap hardware. But I also know it's not going to happen.
Jobs is also a genius because Apple took over a desperate and struggling company and he ended up taking over Apple.
Why is Apple still here and not dead dead dead?
Because of hardware: iMac
Why is Apple now thriving?
Because of hardware: iPod, Powerbooks.
NeXT was doing OK when they still had hardware.
How many times do Steve's nuts have to be zapped until he screams "KEEP THE HARDWARE STUPID!"
Besides, if they go as a real software operating system company they end up in the primary targeting computers of the Borg.
Apple can do pretty well decently competing against HP/Compaq, Sony, Samsung (pods), Creative, etc, and by staying somewhat out of Dell's target market of cheap generic Windows PCs. They know how to do that.
Apple has no experience and no ability to compete successfully against Microsoft, and nobody has ever survived where contracts to OEM PC makers are critical.
If you want to buy cheap software from Jobs, buy a Pixar DVD.
1) Intel is sick of having most of its cool technology dropped through the narrow mindset of Taiwan^H^H^H^H^H^H^HChinese motherboard makers and the control-freak Microsoft. Microsoft's strategic interest is to blast hardware margins, differentiation and technology differences to zero, creating massive low price competition and a single software target. Then all innovation and profit margin goes onto the Microsoft side.
Intel hates this. Now, they have a cool computer maker who agrees with them and isnt' Microsoft's beeyatch.
2) Microsoft said "fuck you" to Intel on xbox.
4) IBM said "ok pay us....one TRILLION dollars" when Apple wanted them to actually make lots of performance and heat compatible chips at a fair price.
Slashdot Mirror
with a decent wage and not fire them when they turn 40. Or 35.
That's it. Graduation and education will take care of itself.
Most fired PhD's over 40 will never get another technical job again, unless they have a top security clearance and want to work in military industries. (With the budget deficit in USA, this spending will stop soon as well.)
There have always been many Asian students in graduate programs in the USA.
Before, they could get a job here. Now they can't, but there are tremendous
opportunities in Asia, especially for those with high-quality American PhD's.
American PhD's can't get those jobs. Chinese and Japanese and Korean are much too difficult for a non-native speaker, and in India + Korea + Japan there is plenty of ethnic and nationalistic discrimination. "Why should we hire you foreigner, when we have plenty of smart natives trying to get that job?"
Nuclear power plants have liability limitations because they know that
what is liable in law courts, and with uneducated juries, is almost
but not quite entirely not related to scientific fact.
In reality: coal has gotten away with it because it has gotten
away with it, and precedent matters a lot in the legal system.
A nuclear plant would be a magnet to lawsuits if they zapped a bird.
Given my experience in one, the probability that they had
effective off-site backup procedures is almost nil.
Many places, like mine, have no system administrator either or
centralized policy. It usually falls down to whatever random
grad students or postdocs happen to know a little bit more than
the others.
People hook up their own computers fairly randomly. Lots of people
know root passwords.
The reason is obvious: no money.
It is difficult enough to get grants to pay for science researchers
themselves. Given the high overhead rates (which never comes back
as professional system administration) nobody bothers because it
is directly taking away money from themselves.
Researchers on soft money are often unemployed (in the financial sense, but not in the time sense) a significant fraction of the time.
Take away whatever crumbs for system administration? Off-site backup?
A couple of extra CD-R's people burn would be impressive as a backup policy.
I predict: whatever computer data remains will be so because people were lucky enough to have it on their laptops they took home. And the rest is sitting in Gmail.
In this case, however, the main losses will be to equipment and optical experiments which take a long amount of time to set up and calibrate. The computer software and data is not significant by comparison.
tin-foil hat theory.
NSA publishes details of what-seem-to-be-awfully-good-security-systems
except they have a tiny-little-flaw-that-only-we-know about.
Hoping that they get included in products, "NSA-designed security system!!"
DOD, stultified and paranoid in the Rumsfeld regime thwarts it without thinking.
Dictate any terms?
People persist in this strange belief that "private enterprise" can make up any damn terms it pleases, and such terms which are considered odious when performed by government are suddently acceptable. They aren't. Privatizing oppression just privatizes it, not justifies it. The relationship between private and public may have to be managed more delicately but the notion that normal rights are nullified by a corporate entity is silly.
There is the idea of "theoretical freedom", as in the existence, somewhere somehow, of some school/company that might concievably be lobbied to be acceptable, is reason and justification enough to allow all sorts of real-life intrusions on practical freedom, as in what really happens in peoples lives.
The example is obvious: "Whites only".
The legal justification: 9th Amendment.
What about employement: can they demand to snoop through your private files and financial records and political voting records before hiring you? Can they say "vote for Corporate Tool Republican or you're fired?"
Hint to young liberatrian geeks:
(1) the law, and its underlying ethical principles, are not algorithms.
(2) Ayn Rand is a skanky manipulative bitch who doesn't grok squat.
It was a proxy for development of ICBM technology. An ICBM warhead is a satellite whose orbit happens to intersect the surface of the earth.
Having the capability for heavy lift, accurate guidance, precise orbital adjustments and robust communication shows that your ICBMs are probably also just as good, without divulging specific classified technological details.
Basic research is very good (and underfunded and underappreciated) but there is also something significant to be learned when basic research is applied to a rigorous problem, e.g. space technology, before it has to hit the commercial market.
There is the "valley of death" in R&D development: it takes about 25 years from a technology to go from lab discovery to commercial development.
Academic development does the first 7 years, by then it is "old" and professors can't really write good papers or get good grants and tenure dicking around with small things.
Commercial development funds the last 2 years only.
The middle is the Valley of Death and you need some kind of funding source and goal to take technologies from a lab formula to a product of economic significance.
The writers of the Constitution were very careful with their words.
... promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.
... secure for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
There is already plenty of documentary evidence attesting to what they
may have considered while writing it. They didn't put fluff in the
written text for no reason, there are tomes of fluff and prolix argumentation.
The conclusion is assuming a section of the Constitution has no active meaning
or import, nor never had any useful meaning, is mistaken. If it was intended to have
no importance, restriction or direction, then it would not have been included.
Law is not like a Lisp program.
It is quite clear by any intent and historical documentation and use of half a brain,
that the clauses are intended as direction to the legislature to make
more specific law along those lines.
In fact, if you read the whole section, Article 2 section 8, the whole description makes it clear that the principal purpose is "to promote the progress of science and useful arts"
"Congress shall have the power to
If they wanted to say:
"Congress shall have the power to
they would have, just as the Constitution elsewhere in that very section quite clearly says "Congress has the power to [verb]".
But they didn't.
They share the monopoly on power and extremism of Lenin with
aggressive capitalism.
A very dangerous combination, as orthodox Marxism-Leninism (e.g. Cuba,DPRK)
was and is unable to make nations wealthy enough to seriously triumph
over free democracies.
Didn't anybody read? There ain't no Death Star. Where did "satellite launch from the US" come into things? Oh yeah, it's Slashdot, foolish jumping to conclusions for nerds.
This "unit" is a group of trained people, most likely on the ground or from the air, who shoot electronic jammy things at ground stations which link to enemy satellites, or enemy ground stations which themselves are jamming US satellites. The US wants to keep its satellites, and since it has more capable and more expensive satellites than competitors it would rather not get in a "you blow up mine, I blow up yours" competition since the endpoint negates US advantages. They want to "I blow up your jammers so my satellites work again."
If the computations are 2-d then complex algebra will work very well, and often be quite rapid, and the formulae clean and compact.
And you don't have to worry about domain problems (-pi, to pi) or (0 to 2pi) or whatever.
That's precisely the problem! Ballmer can only think of "winning"---as in somebody else has to lose. OS/2. Novell. Netscape, Sun, whoever, and now Google.
Did Apple "win" the whatever? Never. They made an iPod.
They did win affection. Like Google.
Where's Microsoft's iPod? Whatever it is, it's going to be made in Gooogle Labs now.
They ought to think what's the coolest thing they can do with a comptuer----hardware and software included.
(MS hardware---mice etc---is more innovative than their software)
Well, what about porn? Has anybody put in a billion in research into making the orgasmotron really work? Make the iPod for the dick.
This has a fundamental chicken and egg problem: So you store the information, you also need to store the format of that information. So then how do you read "format of the information" document? What format is *that* in?
Latin, videlicet.
But seriously the problem in records is not going to be collecting the data, but turning it into knowledge. Meaning that humans in the future are likely to seriously misinterpret or be unaware of the intended meanings and social and political contexts of the preserved data.
This is not a technology problem.
They ought to make sure that real professional historians are there.
A mainstream news magazine which can, in fact, get science generally correct.
As well as most of their other reporting. They have a clear editorial bias, but it is at least open, and mostly rational unlike the Wall Street Journal (editorials).
Yes, I am a professional scientist myself, and I have fairly high standards on this. The Economist does well, sometimes the NYTimes science reporter, and few others.
Unavoidable risk: a rocket is an enormous explosive just barely controlled by exotic, expensive and difficult technology.
Avoidable risk: doing stupid things in your design to endanger lives.
The laws of physics, and many realities of engineering, are exactly the same today as they were in 1960.
For instance: what is the right place to locate the humans?
On the very top, because then they are the furthest away from the really dangerous bits. And delicate stuff needed for re-entry can be shielded and be far away from the immensely violent launch and debris and whatever is coming out of the ground and shaken off the rocket.
Corollary: where do you put the fuel tanks? On the rear end, dummy.
There's lots of reasons the Saturn V looked like it does. And how it looks like a whole lot of other rockets, except the shuttle. Ain't a coincidence.
These problems were known and solved, and the shuttle un-solved them.
Obviously, we need some more Nazi rocket scientists.
So a plane which can fly back is supposed to be 'cost effective'. But why does it have to be so big? You generally take big fat cargos up and then work on them. So take them in a big fucking can, which sits UNDER your small, human sized space plane which re-enters and holds the people, tools and control bits. You throw away the can. And under the cargo, you put the fat ass rockets.
You make them as cheap as possible, with metal-wrangling shipbuilding level technology, not ultra-high tech fancy pants stuff. That stuff is use 'once or twice', if it's still OK when you get it back off the ocean. Only the engines are the big monetary per-launch loss, but even now they have big solid rocket boosters which are one-use only.
They should make a big Saturn V style launcher with cheap ass solids strapped around the bottom for the initial heavy lift, like the Soyuz, then a cheap ass liquid booster module. Then a cargo can, and on top, the orbital and re-entry vehicle.
And also put that doohickey on the very top like with the Saturn V. What's it for? It's a little escape pod rocket and parachute to get the people the fuck away from the big explosive bits if something really bad happens.
If the Challenger worked like that, the crew might have been able to walk away, depending on circumstances.
Steve Jobs did this exact thing once before. I think he'd rather catch pancreatic cancer again before repeating that playbook.
My humble opinion is that Apple should create a HCL (Hardware Compatability List) like Sun does for Solaris and say if your box has X in it we support it. If it doesn't your SOL. There is WAAAAY to much shit hardware out there that they don't need to support.
That precisely describes OPENSTEP. When Steve Jobs ported his OS to generic PC's and tried to have a hardware-compatibility list of sane perepherials and cards. When were "fat binaries" invented? Yes, about 1993, by NeXT, for this very purpose, to go from motorola 68040 to generic PC's.
And that was back when OPENSTEP was zillions of times better than Windows, rather than OPENSTEP-based MacOS X being only just significantly better than Windows.
The result was that it sucked really hard as hardware manufacturers never bothered for a millisecond to make an OPENSTEP driver, and there's no way that NeXT could have even remotely kept up with all the crappy hardware being churned out all the time.
With this market move Apple has to become a software / services company. They can no longer be a hardware company as their primary focus.
And what reputation does Apple have for software services? Will they start somehwere down well below job-jettisoning Fiorinized HP?
Or maybe it will go exactly the same way as NeXT as they they had to jettison their OS and start making Objective-C development environments and "custom programming" services and Web Objects for Windows. And even though the technology was zillions of times better than standard Windows crap at the time and all the other crappy web services, how well did that work? Answer: very horribly, until they were bought by Apple to fix Apple's OS problems.
Why can't Apple be a hardware company as their primary focus? They do have some significant ability in hardware engineering.
Heard of Powerbook? iPod?
Oh by the way, how well is Solaris x86 doing on generic PCs at Fry's? What, you say the guys working there think it sounds like an Xbox game?
In truth, Solaris x86 is being used nearly exclusively by paying customers on Sun's own Opteron-based hardware.
There's another major strategic consideration.
If, as they are doing, they switch to Intel based CPU's for their own hardware: they gain a powerful best new buddy in Intel. Microsoft doesn't care too much yet they're not directly trying to steal away their prime customers.
If Apple gives up hardware and sells only OS to generic PC makers what happens?
They compete against Microsoft in Microsoft's prime business model. They have no powerful friends like Intel or IBM to shield them from Microsoft's wrath.
Remember, there is a 100% Republican US government now. You think anti-trust actions will be successful at restraining Microsoft's vengance?
Apple is much safer on the friendly side of a powerful monopoly like Intel instead of being scheduled for termination by Microsoft.
Let's see how well that worked before for anybody except Microsoft.
Palm spins off PalmOS and licenses OS here and their hardware. Result: Palm corp gets nearly destroyed, Handspring merges back, and Windows Pocket takes off.
And then there's the fact that Steve Jobs tried exactly the same thing before, with nearly the same operating system back when it was grey instead of lickable: OPENSTEP.
How well were they able to keep up with drivers for modern hardware? Very poorly.
How well were they able to convince major PC makers to include OPENSTEP as pre-built option, at a competitive price? Not one bit.
Did this make NeXT Inc, stronger or weaker compared to when NeXT made hardware? Much weaker.
Jobs had a near-death experience doing exactly this strategy.
There's also the fact that this puts them in direct competition with Microsoft, attempting to copy Microsoft's business model, and competing with Microsoft for clients.
How well has this worked for IBM {OS/2}? Not very well at all.
How well does this work for Linux, which is even free and has zillions of people trying to write drivers? Only marginally, after 10 years. You can't easily click a button and get a Linux based Dell (especially a laptop) with everything pre-loaded, supported, and with all features working. After 10 years.
meaning that they get paid by tax money.
That definitely has to be a job where the rewards are intrinsic to the creation of knoweldge, because the external rewards sucketh and getting grants and jobs is even harder.
Why was it crazy?
The atomic theory of matter wasn't even remotely experimentally provable. The periodic table was unknown and the idea of nuclei completely absent.
Chemistry then was very empirical and without significant systematic reasoning. Here Newton was very right that there was in fact something substantially scientific which could be discovered.
Unfortunately, experimental knowledge and technical ability wasn't available at the time to succeed in his quest, and it didn't happen for a hundred fifty to 200 more years.
There was no scientific reason known at the time why lead (or anything else) couldn't be turned into gold with chemical reactions.
Just imagine if Newton could have done spectroscopy or IR scattering experiments.
>While I'll be the first to agree that some programs are worth subsidizing (law enforcement and health care being examples), what happens to the argument that free and open markets lead to more efficient practices?
Sometimes it's wrong. First: it's competition that leads to more efficient practices, and this adds some competition. Of course, private companies prefer high-profit, low work monopolies, but that isn't societally optimal.
>When and why doesn't it apply in these cases?
Economist buzzword: "rents".
GPL buzzword: information hoarding
real life: There is a fundamental societal value in providing maximum communication about fundamental science because science progress is f undamentally stochastic and unpredictable. At the earliest stages therefore it is valuable to have as free information exchange before commercialization is feasible.
Putting a commercial barrier in the way is just extracting "rents", a private sector taxation, from the producers and consumers of that information, both of whom are already publically funded.
That free markets (defined however) leads to societally optimal results is an *empirically testable* phenomenon---not an axiom.
It is not always true, and especially when the meaning of "free markets" is narrow and ideological.
If governments, as society, decide, on their own free will to do "X", is that really a lessening of freedom?
The post-Carly HP may be a good target here.
Imagine an HP which actually tries to get its geek-cred back, making high quality pro-nerd machines.
OSX would work here---if Apple licensed HP to sell OSX to *businesses* with their service and consulting agreements, to universities, and to engineering companies.
Apple computers come with an iPod dock, and HP/OSX come with Intel C++ and Fortran compilers, and a calculator dock.
RPN, of course.
The Oak Ridge Reservation comprises X-10, Y-12 and K-25 plants.
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) was a predominantly civilian research facility based at X-10, and a little bit of Y-12.
The Y-12 Plant, as an institution, on the other hand, was predominantly concerned for decades with the manufacture of the fusion secondaries for thermonuclear weapons. It's the secondary (H-bomb) part which has the really secret and high tech bits.
I worked at ORNL a number of years ago, and my office was in the unclassified Y-12 side.
Inside the (electric security) fence was the nuclear bits. These days, it is the "Fort Knox" of highly enriched uranium.
It does not at all look very "high tech", compared to any modern industrial engineering plant it seems pathetically ugly, dull and dreary, a cross between a chemical plant and a Soviet-style apartment block, and neither of which was updated since 1947 or so. One of the most unpleasant physical environments to work in.
Jobs: "Been there, done that, got the 'buy us now before we go out of business' t-shirt."
The "other" business model was NEXTSTEP. They did what all the talking heads told them to do: give up proprietary hardware and go to the "vast" x86 market and sell the operating system, as OPENSTEP.
It was disasterous because they couldn't keep up with the vast array of weird PC hardware, the PC manufacturers had no desire to help them write drivers (and they barely do for the much larger Linux market) and there just wasn't remotely enough revenue to support continued OPENSTEP.
This, despite the fact that OPENSTEP was enormously better than the contemporary Windows---a larger gap certainly than MacOSX is from Windows XP.
I'd love to be able to use MacOSX on cheap hardware. But I also know it's not going to happen.
Jobs is also a genius because Apple took over a desperate and struggling company and he ended up taking over Apple.
Why is Apple still here and not dead dead dead?
Because of hardware: iMac
Why is Apple now thriving?
Because of hardware: iPod, Powerbooks.
NeXT was doing OK when they still had hardware.
How many times do Steve's nuts have to be zapped until he screams "KEEP THE HARDWARE STUPID!"
Besides, if they go as a real software operating system company they end up in the primary targeting computers of the Borg.
Apple can do pretty well decently competing against HP/Compaq, Sony, Samsung (pods), Creative, etc, and by staying somewhat out of Dell's target market of cheap generic Windows PCs. They know how to do that.
Apple has no experience and no ability to compete successfully against Microsoft, and nobody has ever survived where contracts to OEM PC makers are critical.
If you want to buy cheap software from Jobs, buy a Pixar DVD.
It's the superpipelined pentium 4's which are hot and slow.
The upgrades of the Pentium M will not suck.
1) Intel is sick of having most of its cool technology dropped through the narrow mindset of Taiwan^H^H^H^H^H^H^HChinese motherboard makers and the control-freak Microsoft. Microsoft's strategic interest is to blast hardware margins, differentiation and technology differences to zero, creating massive low price competition and a single software target. Then all innovation and profit margin goes onto the Microsoft side.
Intel hates this. Now, they have a cool computer maker who agrees with them and isnt' Microsoft's beeyatch.
2) Microsoft said "fuck you" to Intel on xbox.
4) IBM said "ok pay us....one TRILLION dollars" when Apple wanted them to actually make lots of performance and heat compatible chips at a fair price.
5) Intel to Apple: "Hey Sailor, new in town?"
as soon as they open the door to the mainstream market, will they do a better job at it than say, microsoft
yes. The first spyware/virus that infects Mac OSX will make the Macheads scream and wail so loud that Apple will really keep on it.
And maybe the design is just intrinsically more secure?