U.S. Billionaire Heads to Space Station

TurnAround writes "According to an International Business Times article, a Russian rocket carrying the American billionaire who helped develop Microsoft Word roared into the night skies over Kazakhstan Saturday, sending Charles Simonyi and two cosmonauts soaring into orbit on a two-day journey to the international space station. Climbing on a column of smoke and fire into the clouds over the bleak steppes, the Soyuz TMA-10 capsule lifted off at 11:31 p.m. local time, casting an orange glow over the Baikonur cosmodrome and dozens of officials and well-wishers watching from about a mile away."

Comments

pFirst!

[donutello]

That's Hungarian for First Post.

Re:pFirst!

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always said that they ought blast the asshole who came up with Hungarian notation into space. This is the first of my many insightful suggestions that society has taken me up on.

Re:pFirst!

[donutello]

The m_ notation indicates that a variable is a member of the class. Simonyi's version of the Hungarian notation is actually very useful. Indicating the type of a variable is mostly useless because that's something any competent IDE will give you for free. Simonyi's original concept of the Hungarian notation focused more on indicating the meaning of the variable in question, rather than its type.

Re:pFirst!

[tomhudson]

To be honest, I think "programmers" are objects, not reals (not even ints) ...

Then again, some of them don't really have any methods, so I guess they're just empty structs, no class.

Of course, it depends on how you #define things in the first place ... you can always assert() whatever you need to ...

Harsh

[cyber-vandal]

Word drives me insane sometimes but surely firing him into space for it was a bit OTT.

Re:Harsh

[Rei]

Close. From the statistics gathered by the late, great Steve Kangas:

Year Median Millionaire or Top 1%
1948 5.3% 76.9%
1955 9.1 85.5
1960 12.4 85.5
1965 11.6 66.9
1970 16.1 68.6
1975 20.0 --
1977 -- 35.5
1980 23.7 31.7
1985 24.4 24.9
1989 24.4 26.7

Source: The Reagan Years: Taxes; Info from: "the 1948 figure comes from The Statistical History of the United States, 1976; the figures for 1955 to 1983 come from Alan Lerman of the U.S. Department of the Treasury Office of Tax Analysis. The calculations after 1983 come from Eugene Steuerle and John Bakija, Right Ways and Wrong Ways to Reform Social Security (Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute Press, 1993). Figures from the millionaire column for 1948 to 1970 represent the effective tax rates for those earning $1 million a year and come from the U.S. Treasury Department unpublished data set forth on page 1112 of The Statistical History of the United States, 1976. FICA is not included, but the rates would not be affected by a percentage point. The rates from 1977 onward are for the top 1% of families as computed by the Congressional Budget Office tax simulation model and include all federal taxes. Source: the 1992 Greenbook of the House Ways and Means Committee, p. 1510. The effective rate on millionaires would be close to the rate on the top 1 percent."

I expect to see a lot of people commenting "hey, he was smart, he worked hard, he deserves that money". My response to that is: "Really? Is he a hundred thousand times smarter than the average American? Is he a hundred thousand times harder working than some guy who does hot tar roofing for a living? Really?"

Don't get me wrong; complete wealth redistribution eliminates the incentive to work hard in order to better yourself. But a completely "free", "deregulated" economy leads to situations like the early industrial revolution. The economy inherently becomes polarized, as you need money to make money. This is why we have things like the estate tax and higher rates for the upper class. If the rates were like they used to be back in the 1950s/1960s (our nation's biggest boom time, by the way -- yes, you can't really credit that to the taxes, but it's hard to say that the taxes destroyed the boom), we'd be able to provide full healthcare to every American, full education to every American through grad school, double all government funded research, double all infrastructure projects, and still work toward paying off the national debt.

I think 85% may be a bit extreme, but I'd like to see 65% or so. And I say this as someone who has benefitted greatly from having wealthy parents.

Re:Harsh

[Rei]

I think it's a bit fallacious to assume that all rewards must be linear. If you believe that, then take away the 1.5x and 2x overtime pay that non-exempt workers get.

You're not talking about 1.5x/2x; you're talking about 100,000x. If anything, when you get up to dollar values like that, I'd say that linear may be too kind. A person who makes 20k/year simply *cannot* be spending their money on luxury; almost all of it needs to go to necessities. On the other end of the spectrum, a person who makes 2M/year simply *cannot* be spending all their money on necessity; even a huge family wouldn't "need" that much. The only exception, in the latter case, is charitable contributions -- and we give deductions for that.

In short, my driving stance is quite simple: tax rates should reflect how much of a "luxury" money is being spent on, with pure necessity being untaxed, and pure luxury being taxed highly. Ideally, this would be done through sales taxes; however, that gets complicated pretty quickly (what's the tax rate for a canned button mushrooms? Fresh button mushrooms? Fresh oyster mushrooms? Fresh truffles?). Bracketted taxes with deductions for charitable contributions are a good way to approximate this. Augmented with sales taxes, it's a winning situation, in my book.

Re:Harsh

[SageMusings]

If this billionaire didn't do anything special, why doesn't everyone do what he does?

The truth is he cannot possibly pull that off today. First Microsoft got wise and started getting stingy with stock. Second, Microsoft stock ain't all that any longer. Third, many (not all) today's coders tackle harder coding problems and see nothing but their normal paycheck.

It's just like Bill Gates: These guys were there at the right time in history. The opportunities they had disappeared when the market matured. As I look around now, I believe the next opportunities are going to require tremendous capital and research, effectively locking out the people with little more than drive and coding knowledge. There will never, can never, be another Bill or Charles.

He's probably introducing some great tech solution

[solevita]

"I see you are trying to blast into space, would you like help with that?"

It's a rich man's solar system

[tempestdata]

Not only is it a rich man's world. It is also a rich man's solar system now. Its amazing what money can bring you. He will get to experience something that I most likely never will, and he'll get to do it because he is filthy rich. Does that make him a better man and deserving of this? Most likely the answer to that question is yes. But is it not mildly depressing? Knowing that while you and billions others are scrounging to make ends meet, to buy a home, and in a majority of the cases to put food on the table, there are people who can afford to plunk down $20million + to take a joy ride into space. I don't blame him for it, and I think its his right that he do what he wants with the money he earned. Its just, such an overpowering display of wealth.

Re:It's a rich man's solar system

[haluness]

I think this is common in many areas. Whenever something is new, it is usually upto the rich to buy the thing and try it out.

As time goes by, these things will get cheaper and at one point will hopefully be cheap enough for the ordinary person to buy/try.

So if anything, you were born too early :)

Re:Lets hope...

[julesh]

Would we get to autorecover a version of Simonyi at age 8?

Re:Does it piss anyone else off that....

[lgarner]

Not at all. First, "While at the space station, Simonyi will be conducting a number of experiments, including measuring radiation levels and studying biological organisms inside the lab."

Second, I don't see anything indicating that the US directly paid for the launch. If the Russians want to collect some money to help pay for this thing, then fine. I don't see why the US doesn't do the same- that could have meant $25million fewer of your tax dollars going into the ISS.

Ahhh, ground control this is Major Simonyi

[presidenteloco]

We're experiencing loss of document format stability up here....

We just changed from the small platform to the larger one.

I don't understand what happened to the document.

I'm pulling off the access panel now. Seems to be a whole ratsnest of old embedded
OLE objects in there. Christ that's some ugly HTML.

Sproing! What the hell just happened to my paragraph format?? Oh my god, we have a backward compatibility failure!

Somebody open the hatch, quick! Open it! what do you mean there are two different opening standards!

Ahhhhhhhh!, We're losing all design integrity here. There are so many buttons. Don't know which ones to push......
Mayday, Mayday,

(Sure hope I land on my money pile. Oh, Sh***t)

Systems Hungarian vs. apps Hungarian

[tepples]

Yup, Mr. lpcszHungarianNotation himself has blasted off into space. There are two kinds of Hungarian notation: "systems Hungarian", which prefixes variable names with low-level data types such as the common lpsz representing "32-bit pointer to string"; and "apps Hungarian", which prefixes variable names with high-level data types such as rw for "row", str for "string", n for "number of", x for "horizontal coordinate", etc. Mr. Simonyi didn't advocate the "systems Hungarian" approach as much as "apps Hungarian". Wikipedia covers the difference.