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Why Does the US Have a Civil Space Program?
BDew writes "The Presidents of the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering have commissioned a study on the Rationale and Goals of the US Civil Space Program. In short, the Academies are asking why the nation has a civil space program (including human, robotic, commercial, and personal spaceflight). The study is intended to provide a strategic framework for the nation's activities in space that can provide consistent guidance in an increasingly interconnected world. The members of the study committee are interested in the views (positive or negative) of the general public, particularly those people with a scientific and/or technological interest."
Cracks are visible on the exterior of a settled suburban house in a lower middle-class neighborhood outside of Detroit. During the day, the house is mostly quiet save the occasional noise of babies' cries competing with shrill, high-pitched female voices. At night, the music of a handful of artists known as the "Three T's" - Tupac Shakur, Too Short, and Trick Daddy - blares from the domicile with aging blue-gray paint and bars on all of its windows. It is impossible to see into the house from outside because all of the windows are covered with aluminum foil. One window was broken but promptly taped together with the duct tape in the distinctive tell-tale pattern of brownian motion.
The interior of the house is barren save the sparse arrangement of old, unmatched furniture purchased(or, more likely, stolen) from an inner-city thrift shop; the centerpiece of it all being the stained, chintzy sofa peppered with the burns of marijuana and tobacco cigarettes. The place as a whole appears to be only a temporary living space, yet its inhabitants have lived here consistently for about ten years. The stench of dirty diapers, burned cooking oil, and the by-products of a metabolism so powerful it could fuel the outrunning of gazelles or a successful fistfight against 4 police officers at once permeates the entire home.
It may be mentioned in passing that this house's inhabitants are an assortment of African men, women, and children who live and sleep in intervals diametrically opposite to those of each other so that each inhabitant's productivity is maximized -- everybody in the house has their own role in a setup strikingly similar to the Smurfs' villiage or some other Socialist paradise.
A circular design of red, yellow, and brown was painted on the wall -- "Krylon on drywall" being the medium -- by the teenage male who is but one part of the small collective known as the Ubuntu developers.
The adult males do the brunt of the work. One bedroom of the house, the master bedroom, is the development studio. The whole outfit is the brainchild of Marcus Ubuntu, first-generation African immigrant who studied computer science at the university of Zimbabwe before fleeing the armed rebellion. At his left sit Reggie Omoko, associate programmer; and at his right sit Shawn James, graphic designer(it should be noted here that Shawn is the one who designed and painted the Ubuntu logo, reportedly gleaning Ubuntu's artistic inspiration from the color scheme and the shape of various public toilets).
The 2 women of the house serve as breeders and foragers, collecting the welfare and child support money and then buying copious amounts of food, drink, and dope in support of operations. The children of the house, in turn, support the women, though it is difficult to determine how exactly many children are in the house as they come and go as they please with some leaving permanently, some returning days or even years later.
The primary tools of this trade are an assortment of cutting-edge but stolen laptop and desktop computers. The Ubuntu operating system is coded in object-oriented C, a language Marcus developed at university because he didn't know that somebody had already invented C++. Years of crack and malt liquor-fueled hard work have transformed Ubuntu from a meager startup into the world's most popular open-source operating system.
I call it the finglonger! But I'll need funding to get beyond the prototype phase.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
And thats what life would have been like if I had invented the finglonger, one can always dream, one can always dream..
Fascism starts when the efficiency of the government becomes more important than the rights of the people.