Imagine opening the paper every day and seeing a headline that a company the size of IBM just closed its doors - EVERY DAY. Obviously that wouldn't be sustainable.
No, but it'd be hella popular. Sure, a bunch of people would be out of work, but some of 'em would form small businesses and hire most of the rest, using the money from loans that banks and other financial institutions would give them since investing in big biz wouldn't be anywhere near as safe as an ordinary small-time entrepeneur.
...you know, I'm not so sure it wouldn't be that sustainable, to have some effect like that preventing companies from getting too big unless they were constantly fighting to maintain their size.
Irrelevant legality. Armadillo being HQed in the US, the US gov't would demand it back, and they would get it - even if the only practical effect would be to prevent anybody from doing anything with it, when the gov't didn't actually send anybody to it. Eminent domain, if nothing else.
As of yet, none of this is happening even though it is all very possible and we are just as capable of doing right now.
Actually, it's almost all happening, or being worked on (that is, if you want it that bad, you can go help make it happen, for you and everyone else, and get paid while doing so). Taking your examples:
I would also love free art,
I don't know about those who try to make their living from art, but I know that most of what art I have created has been given away. Granted, it's low production value, but it's been good enough for the people I made it for. There are a lot of indie artists out there who just give away their art - some of it very good, if you know what you're into and where to look for it.
obtainable medicines for those that need it,
Being worked on. (Aspirin, for instance, once cost a lot more than it does now. Or do you claim that even aspirin is too expensive for the masses? Follow the same trend with other medicines, and give it enough time.)
not charged to use the airwaves around me,
Talk to the FCC. They're floating that very proposal right now. (For instance, if no one's using a certain TV channel in a given area, the corresponding bandwidth becomes unlicensed in that area unless and until someone buys it.)
I suspect you'd prefer to know WTF you're modifying first. That's the approach those who are working on this are taking: first, make sure those who would do it know what edits will have what results, then make it easy/cheap/free for everyone to do it. In short, being worked on.
Oh, I don't know, I think it worked pretty well. I mean, they can't actually stop the military from putting Windows on their computers; they can only make it a Really Bad Idea to do so, at least for anything critical or anything that has to be secure. And in that, they would appear to have succeeded.
Keeping that analogy, these same friends wouldn't react if someone suggested they were having sex with their mothers. They would calmly deny it, perhaps - though, in this situation, where everyone involved knows it's a fantasy story, they might just play along, bragging (fictionally) about how good a lay their moms are. So, no, the test wouldn't work here either.
cypherpunkss/cypherpunkss. You'd think almost everyone would have heard about this (anon registration = "cypherpunk", with one or more "s" at the end, as username and password) by now.
As could a programmer hired to write these programs (a specific program for each specific test). My bet would be on the programmer to do so before the program, at least in the near future.
Thing is, I know some people who would just calmly accept these sorts of questions and statements. It's just not in their nature to get emotional about anything. Pupil dilation probably wouldn't detect them either: they really aren't getting emotional, but they really are human beings. (Unless you believe the conspiracy theories that intelligent AI droids really are out there right now, of course. ^_-)
Didn't someone come out with a desktop nuclear fusion model a couple years ago? Still took more energy than it produced, but at least some experiments could be run a lot more cheaply.
Hear, hear. That's the real problem with targetting small satellites: you can't launch anything for less than $1M. Even a half-gram microsatellite. But the people who go small typically do so because they have very constrained budgets - i.e., they can't afford $1M per launch.
He's projecting launch costs over $1M per. No surprise that he isn't finding any takers.
I was introduced to the series starting with that book, and didn't get why my friends liked the series so much. I take it that was not a good starting point?
Some folks would like to simply DO their jobs without having to take personal time to conastantly keep up to date with whatever frivolous new product or "paradigm" some big software company wants to push on us.
It is sad, but true, how many human beings aspire to be robots. I, for one, would rather be human, but to each their own.
That said, though, you're right about personal time. Learning is a job function, therefore you should be able to do it on the job, during working hours. And, honestly, who's going to stop you from taking some time during work to play around with this or that new field they're asking you to tackle but you don't yet really know? (And if learning something is a prerequisite to applying it to a project, so be it: that's legitimately part of the time estimate you supply for how long it'll take you to do X.)
They'll believe until we've got people living up there. And maybe even then.
"I live in Luna City. Yesterday, my class took a field trip to see the Apollo rover. I touched it and everything!" is what it will take to at least greatly reduce the number of critics. (Their thinking: if we could get to the Moon then, why aren't we still doing so? As you pointed out, actual logic, including the rationalization about their concerns just being about the US's historical capabilities, has little to do with it.)
Why is it that you think it's possible to manufacture stuff on the moon?
Because there's stuff there, not just void. Granted, it'd be technologically difficult, but there is nothing that would need to be developed that seems impossible.
Let's take a simple moonbase, for instance - an area that is protected from solar radiation, large enough to live in, with a way to get in and out and send signals. Dig several meters underground, melting the sides of the tunnel into a solid wall (yes, there's no water involved - so what?). When you're far enough down that cosmic radiation is at Earth surface levels (blocked by all that lunar regolith), dig a cave at that point. Put in a ladder if you want (not an elevator, yet). Melt more regolith to make a couple doors, or maybe bring along an airlock, and seal the tunnel so you can pressurize the cave - slowly, using (in part) oxygen extracted from water ice. Bring a hydroponics facility with a few plants, and feed them with nutrients from the lunar soil you've been excavating. Use the plants to recycle carbon dioxide and human waste, and grow food (eventually, though you'd be importing food for a bit until enough plants grew). Put a solar oven up above to melt more soil, separating it into its components, then bring the refined ore down below so you can shape it by hand. Solar panels would be among the first things you build: sheets of silicon dusted with the proper impurities, with wires placed to capture the resulting electricity.
Granted, you'd have to import a fair buch of stuff at first. The point is to eventually transition to self-sufficiency.
last I heard, the US and other countries are a part of a treaty that forbids colonization on any natural body in space
Claiming, perhaps, but not colonization. The US could not claim the Moon as its own even if a significant part of its population were to settle there, without backing out of the treaty as said treaty allows (with proper notice) - which you can bet they'd do if this happened.
This is what advertising and merchandising were invented for: to make a profit off a bunch of people who would never pay for the core content you are providing. There is a reason many Web comics are taking this route (and/or just asking for donations) and surviving from it.
Been there, done that. One mistake I made, which you might want to avoid: don't forget to route part of the money into your own account. If Finance investigates, tell them it's a service charge; never let on that it's a service charge you're imposing.
Maybe I'm biased when I say that, if you're given freedom to architect (as you were) and enough time (which you apparently were), setting up an ecommerce system single-handed is not that difficult these days, at least for the best of developers.
Ah, but that's a form of regulation. And everyone knows regulation is just a way of cracking down on the poor folks who can't buy their own regulations. (Granted, it's often true, but not always.)
I recall having had some particularly good kebabs, purchased from a street vendor, about a couple months ago. This was in San Jose, CA, definitely within US territory.
Oxidizer: hydrogen peroxide. Made from, and dissolves back into, water, oxygen, and energy.
Fuel: kerosene. With the amounts he'd need, even a large-scale space tourist operation would barely make a dent in the world's supply, at least in the years, maybe decades, it will take to start mining the Moon for helium-3 and develop that as a power source (fusion == much more efficient thrust).
Slashdot Mirror
Imagine opening the paper every day and seeing a headline that a company the size of IBM just closed its doors - EVERY DAY. Obviously that wouldn't be sustainable.
...you know, I'm not so sure it wouldn't be that sustainable, to have some effect like that preventing companies from getting too big unless they were constantly fighting to maintain their size.
No, but it'd be hella popular. Sure, a bunch of people would be out of work, but some of 'em would form small businesses and hire most of the rest, using the money from loans that banks and other financial institutions would give them since investing in big biz wouldn't be anywhere near as safe as an ordinary small-time entrepeneur.
Irrelevant legality. Armadillo being HQed in the US, the US gov't would demand it back, and they would get it - even if the only practical effect would be to prevent anybody from doing anything with it, when the gov't didn't actually send anybody to it. Eminent domain, if nothing else.
As of yet, none of this is happening even though it is all very possible and we are just as capable of doing right now.
Actually, it's almost all happening, or being worked on (that is, if you want it that bad, you can go help make it happen, for you and everyone else, and get paid while doing so). Taking your examples:
I would also love free art,
I don't know about those who try to make their living from art, but I know that most of what art I have created has been given away. Granted, it's low production value, but it's been good enough for the people I made it for. There are a lot of indie artists out there who just give away their art - some of it very good, if you know what you're into and where to look for it.
obtainable medicines for those that need it,
Being worked on. (Aspirin, for instance, once cost a lot more than it does now. Or do you claim that even aspirin is too expensive for the masses? Follow the same trend with other medicines, and give it enough time.)
not charged to use the airwaves around me,
Talk to the FCC. They're floating that very proposal right now. (For instance, if no one's using a certain TV channel in a given area, the corresponding bandwidth becomes unlicensed in that area unless and until someone buys it.)
to be able to travel into space,
Being worked on.
and to be able to modify my own DNA at my whim,
I suspect you'd prefer to know WTF you're modifying first. That's the approach those who are working on this are taking: first, make sure those who would do it know what edits will have what results, then make it easy/cheap/free for everyone to do it. In short, being worked on.
Oh, I don't know, I think it worked pretty well. I mean, they can't actually stop the military from putting Windows on their computers; they can only make it a Really Bad Idea to do so, at least for anything critical or anything that has to be secure. And in that, they would appear to have succeeded.
Keeping that analogy, these same friends wouldn't react if someone suggested they were having sex with their mothers. They would calmly deny it, perhaps - though, in this situation, where everyone involved knows it's a fantasy story, they might just play along, bragging (fictionally) about how good a lay their moms are. So, no, the test wouldn't work here either.
cypherpunkss/cypherpunkss. You'd think almost everyone would have heard about this (anon registration = "cypherpunk", with one or more "s" at the end, as username and password) by now.
As could a programmer hired to write these programs (a specific program for each specific test). My bet would be on the programmer to do so before the program, at least in the near future.
Thing is, I know some people who would just calmly accept these sorts of questions and statements. It's just not in their nature to get emotional about anything. Pupil dilation probably wouldn't detect them either: they really aren't getting emotional, but they really are human beings. (Unless you believe the conspiracy theories that intelligent AI droids really are out there right now, of course. ^_-)
Didn't someone come out with a desktop nuclear fusion model a couple years ago? Still took more energy than it produced, but at least some experiments could be run a lot more cheaply.
Q: What's the white stuff in bird poop?
...and more. But thanks for the info flash anyway. ;)
Here's everything you need to know:
Yeah, but at least that'd settle the "life on Mars" debate once and for all.
I thought that was, "...at three times the price."
Hear, hear. That's the real problem with targetting small satellites: you can't launch anything for less than $1M. Even a half-gram microsatellite. But the people who go small typically do so because they have very constrained budgets - i.e., they can't afford $1M per launch.
He's projecting launch costs over $1M per. No surprise that he isn't finding any takers.
I was introduced to the series starting with that book, and didn't get why my friends liked the series so much. I take it that was not a good starting point?
Some folks would like to simply DO their jobs without having to take personal time to conastantly keep up to date with whatever frivolous new product or "paradigm" some big software company wants to push on us.
It is sad, but true, how many human beings aspire to be robots. I, for one, would rather be human, but to each their own.
That said, though, you're right about personal time. Learning is a job function, therefore you should be able to do it on the job, during working hours. And, honestly, who's going to stop you from taking some time during work to play around with this or that new field they're asking you to tackle but you don't yet really know? (And if learning something is a prerequisite to applying it to a project, so be it: that's legitimately part of the time estimate you supply for how long it'll take you to do X.)
They'll believe until we've got people living up there. And maybe even then.
"I live in Luna City. Yesterday, my class took a field trip to see the Apollo rover. I touched it and everything!" is what it will take to at least greatly reduce the number of critics. (Their thinking: if we could get to the Moon then, why aren't we still doing so? As you pointed out, actual logic, including the rationalization about their concerns just being about the US's historical capabilities, has little to do with it.)
Why is it that you think it's possible to manufacture stuff on the moon?
Because there's stuff there, not just void. Granted, it'd be technologically difficult, but there is nothing that would need to be developed that seems impossible.
Let's take a simple moonbase, for instance - an area that is protected from solar radiation, large enough to live in, with a way to get in and out and send signals. Dig several meters underground, melting the sides of the tunnel into a solid wall (yes, there's no water involved - so what?). When you're far enough down that cosmic radiation is at Earth surface levels (blocked by all that lunar regolith), dig a cave at that point. Put in a ladder if you want (not an elevator, yet). Melt more regolith to make a couple doors, or maybe bring along an airlock, and seal the tunnel so you can pressurize the cave - slowly, using (in part) oxygen extracted from water ice. Bring a hydroponics facility with a few plants, and feed them with nutrients from the lunar soil you've been excavating. Use the plants to recycle carbon dioxide and human waste, and grow food (eventually, though you'd be importing food for a bit until enough plants grew). Put a solar oven up above to melt more soil, separating it into its components, then bring the refined ore down below so you can shape it by hand. Solar panels would be among the first things you build: sheets of silicon dusted with the proper impurities, with wires placed to capture the resulting electricity.
Granted, you'd have to import a fair buch of stuff at first. The point is to eventually transition to self-sufficiency.
last I heard, the US and other countries are a part of a treaty that forbids colonization on any natural body in space
Claiming, perhaps, but not colonization. The US could not claim the Moon as its own even if a significant part of its population were to settle there, without backing out of the treaty as said treaty allows (with proper notice) - which you can bet they'd do if this happened.
This is what advertising and merchandising were invented for: to make a profit off a bunch of people who would never pay for the core content you are providing. There is a reason many Web comics are taking this route (and/or just asking for donations) and surviving from it.
Sorry, you have to quote Homer in order to get the Simpsons Karma Score Bonus.
Ah, okay, got it.
D'oh!
Been there, done that. One mistake I made, which you might want to avoid: don't forget to route part of the money into your own account. If Finance investigates, tell them it's a service charge; never let on that it's a service charge you're imposing.
Maybe I'm biased when I say that, if you're given freedom to architect (as you were) and enough time (which you apparently were), setting up an ecommerce system single-handed is not that difficult these days, at least for the best of developers.
O_o
Okay, I'll bite:
The Simpsons.
Umm...actually, it makes sense as is. It would make better sense in another form, agreed, but...
Publishers' Attack Free-Government Sites
As in, publishers own sites which attack this thing called "Free Government". Which just about sounds like what's happening.
Ah, but that's a form of regulation. And everyone knows regulation is just a way of cracking down on the poor folks who can't buy their own regulations. (Granted, it's often true, but not always.)
I recall having had some particularly good kebabs, purchased from a street vendor, about a couple months ago. This was in San Jose, CA, definitely within US territory.
Well, taking Carmack's setup as an example...
Oxidizer: hydrogen peroxide. Made from, and dissolves back into, water, oxygen, and energy.
Fuel: kerosene. With the amounts he'd need, even a large-scale space tourist operation would barely make a dent in the world's supply, at least in the years, maybe decades, it will take to start mining the Moon for helium-3 and develop that as a power source (fusion == much more efficient thrust).