Yeah seriously. Windows is still awful and still controls the entire desktop market, twenty years after we could have solved the problem legally. We predicted that the desktop market would be lost to competition forever, and it has been exactly so. Our rightness is unquestionable.
We pretend it was yesterday because they never got any punishment after all that bother, and because after that things got exactly as bad as we always said they would. We were right and if we keep harping on how right we were, then that example will help promote our rightness.
Compare that to corporate personhood. When was that court decision, like 150 years ago? And here we are still harping on it because we are still right and history bears out our rightness with new examples every week or every month.
My great-grandchildren can harp on Microsoft, too, because they will still be suffering under the thumb of Windows.
operating some kind of habitat in space is deeply non trivial. The ISS has allowed them to learn a lot about that aspect of it.
Yeah, okay, they learned all about that, and then George W. Bush was elected. And then fourteen MORE years went by. We went to the moon in nine years. How long are we going to spend floating around just above the atmosphere pooping into ever-more-expensive toilets? If ISS were a stepping stone to (say) Mars, then we would have been on Mars in 2002. If that is the justification for the ISS, then the ISS is a complete failure.
My point is that if we shoved off large ships onto the sea staffed by scarecrows instead of humans, that would have been stupid. The King of Spain didn't pay for large ships to sail the sea; he paid for HUMANS on large ships to sail the sea. I desperately support NASA when it puts human beings into outer space -- something that it has either never done (depending on how far out "outer space" is for you) or hasn't done for fifty years.
NASA doesn't "do" human exploration of space, and human exploration of space is the ONLY mission I support for them. Robots, telescopes, LEO? No, I don't care enough about those things to have NASA as a separate agency. Do those things with the Air Force and the NSF.
"Yes, they are both parts of Sony corporation"
I have heard your argument about other companies -- specifically AT&T. I had AT&T for my cell phone and they did nothing but make me angry. The service was mediocre, not terrible, but their handling of contracts and service were downright offensive. When I had a chance, I dropped them in favor of prepaid.
Later a man came knocking at my door selling AT&T branded internet(+phone+whatever else). I told him no, shove it, get off my lawn, I will never be an AT&T customer. He said "It's actually a completely different company, we just share the AT&T name." Here's my answer:
Someone got paid a lot of money to decide that co-branding "different" businesses all under the AT&T nameplate would be good for business. If they think they can reap positive benefits from such an association, then they sure as shit can reap the negative consequences, and me hating AT&T is one such.
Sony BMG, Sony Pictures, Sony Music, Sony Whatthefuck -- I don't care. If Sony Pictures doesn't want to be associated with Sony BMG then they should be completely disconnected and use a different name. That is their fault, not mine. As long as they are all called "Sony", they are all the same to me, and they all deserve to die a quick painful death. The rookit fiasco was EXACTLY an extinction-level corporate boondoggle. Sony should cease to exist completely for such a criminal mistake. Their current woes are music to my ears and I hope they suffer all the way to bankruptcy court.
Zero sympathy. They are currently getting less than they deserve.
Isn't that any place above the highest point on the planet? If you shoot a laser off of Mt Everest, the light "isn't coming down". You might want to consider a different definition.
I personally can list many amazing NASA accomplishments, but only ONE OF THEM couldn't have been done better by the military or by the NSF.
Let's play your game. Tell me the best thing NASA has done, other than put humans on the moon. Pick one example, your best example. Then, before you click "Submit" re-read your comment and ask yourself "so why the heck do we need NASA to do this instead of some other special-purpose government agency such as the Navy or the NSF?"
If you have such an example, and that example sustains that question, then let's talk about it.
I have never even heard anyone suggest that the ISS was a stepping-stone to exploration of outer space, much less is there a plausible argument that such a claim could be true.
The IIS a neat toy where a tiny amount of middling science is done. Yeah, okay, I like middling science, but not so much as to have an entire federal program which spends sixty years PRETENDING that it is trying to advance human exploration of space.
NASA started with the right missing: put a living human being onto another world. Then, immediately thereafter and forever hence, it hasn't done jack shit that couldn't be done better by the Navy or the NSF. It is a 100% embarrassment.
"Look! We took these pretty photographs!" What the fuck is NASA now, fucking Instagram? I don't want to spend billions of dollars to get photos of gas clouds. If you're asking me to spend billions of dollars it is to put humans inside of space suits onto rocks other than Earth. There is no other justification for the money.
If you want science, fund NSF.
NASA took "human exploration of space" out of their mission statement about twenty-five years after they abandoned human exploration of space. I think they should have saved everyone the trouble and just stopped trying on the day they closed the Apollo program. We'd have saved a medium amount of money and a metric ton of embarrassment, plus a few astronaut lives.
The NSF is the appropriate place to fund science that we hope leads to cool inventions. We don't need NASA for that. That is a nice side benefit. It could never make up for the complete failure in its primary mission.
What will happen when robots replace workers? The workers stop doing their former jobs and start new jobs programming, building, and maintaining robots. At the end of that process, all humans have more wealth, so the world is a better place.
Next question, please.
I require an apology from Microsoft before I will ever consider anything from them. After the apology they need to break themselves into a dozen or more companies none of which have "Micro" or "soft" in their name.
Then? Maybe. Until then? No, their brand is toxic.
Dear world,
We are so sorry! We know we hijacked the entire tech industry for thirty years and foisted substandard products onto people without the capability to know better. We know that we have sold Windows as a Desktop Operating System when frankly it isn't even good enough to run calculators. We sold you office products and development tools which would be laughed at by rocks and we profited in the billions.
Today we are returning your money. We are liquidating our operations, combining the proceeds with all of our cash, and disbursing that money back to the customers who we cheated over the years. That is how bad we feel. Various parts of our former business will end up owned by companies around the world and we hope you can give them the second chance which we are too embarrassed to ask you to give us. We don't deserve it and you would be right not to give it to us.
This will be the last-ever communication from Microsoft Corp because after this we will cease to exist. Goodbye and we're sorry again and we hope the world can make something good out of our former products.
Sincerely,
Microsoft
That would do it. Less than that, no.
I used C# and
But I really did like C# and
If C# could be completely divorced from anything have anything to do with Microsoft, then I would consider taking a job working with it. I don't consider that highly likely, though.
In the same way that we have upped the standards of what "broadband" means, can we please up the standard of what "space" means to no longer include low-orbit? I'd like NASA to start referring to anything closer than the moon as "Above Earth". Anything farther than that they can call "space".
Suddenly everyone would realize how ridiculous NASA is: "Why has it been 50 years and NASA still hasn't taken humans into space? Shouldn't we be going to space by now?"
NASA over its entire history has been almost a complete waste. They have done precisely one cool thing in their entire history: landing humans on the moon. Everything else has been stupid.
"Look! We built a telescope!" Yeah that's cool but I don't care, we already had telescopes.
"Look! We built a re-usable spaceship!" But then you didn't go anywhere with it.
"Hey, we have this permanent space station!" Who cares? Is that another world? No.
"We landed robots on some places!" Call me back when they are humans.
"But we've done so much useful science!" I'm in favor of the government funding science but we already have the NSF.
Humans on other worlds, or pack up and go home. Thus, they should pack up and go home. They should have packed up and gone home after the Apollo program. And when we started riding with the Russians into space? Can any American think of a bigger humiliation than that?
NASA has been a failure for longer than I've been alive (1979). They don't even have plans to put humans on other worlds. Reagan should have defunded it. Bush should have defunded it. Clinton should have defunded it. The War Criminal should have defunded it. Obama should defund it.
Go home, NASA. Shutter the offices. Your scientists can go work for the NSF and America can save the embarrassment of your constant underperformance.
If a thing's worth doing, it is worth doing badly. -- G.K. Chesterton
