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Leave Outer Space to the Millionaires

Posted by michael on from the sit-back-and-have-another-beer dept.

tcd004 writes "Martin Rees, Britain's Astronomer Royal has an interesting article in Foreign Policy arguing that the future of manned space travel should be left to wealthy adventurers. He points to the fact that modern state-funded space disasters become national traumas, and argues that that gung-ho millionaires are more free to take risks because they 'don't represent a nation; [they] represent humanity.'"

6 of 487 comments (clear)

  1. Fuckers! by Bob+Wehadababyitsabo · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    FP!!!!

    --
    fsck -u
  2. Massive Security hole found in Mozillabird 1.5! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    If you use mozillabird 1.5, then *DON'T*, for the sake of your mom click this link

    This is serious, bugs have been filed.

    1. Re:Massive Security hole found in Mozillabird 1.5! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      I can break out of it (without quitting netscape).....just takes the mind of a programmer I guess...

      has anyone else managed to escape?

    2. Re:Massive Security hole found in Mozillabird 1.5! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Yep, I escaped. And I didn't exit Mozilla. I just nuked the process.

      Actually since the loop counter is stored as a 16-bit value you can simply wait until it overflows at 65535.

  3. upper hand by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    who has the upper hand ?

    Microsoft, for getting an add on the frontpage of an anti MS site ?

    Or /. for having the enemy pay for their bw/hosting costs ?

  4. Re:Send the spammers by stephanruby · · Score: -1, Offtopic
    The Myth of Interference

    "Interference is a metaphor that paints an old limitation of technology as a fact of nature." So says David P. Reed, electrical engineer, computer scientist, and one of the architects of the Internet. If he's right, then spectrum isn't a resource to be divvied up like gold or parceled out like land. It's not even a set of pipes with their capacity limited by how wide they are or an aerial highway with white lines to maintain order.

    Spectrum is more like the colors of the rainbow, including the ones our eyes can't discern. Says Reed: "There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green. We could instantly hook up to the Internet everyone who can pick up a radio signal, and they could pump through as many bits as they could ever want. We'd go from an economy of digital scarcity to an economy of digital abundance."

    For the rest of the the article.