They purchased about $150 mil worth of apple stock back in the early imac days as part of a big deal between the two companies to settle some patent disputes and a few other things. They have since then sold that stock and made a healthy chunk of change off of it. They might own some stock in Apple currently, but it's not a very big amount, and MS certainly does not have any say in the way the company is run. If so, Apple wouldn't have put banners saying "Redmond, start your photocopiers" up when they showed off 10.4.
Microsoft has already been legally declared as a monopoly. They can't claim otherwise, with or without Apple.
From the trailers and commercials I've seen so far, the part that's got me worried the most is the uniforms they're wearing. Why weren't they wearing normal military gear? Aren't they basically going on an off-world mission like all the SG teams have been doing for years? Why do they all of the sudden have clothes that look like they're from babylon 5?
Although SG-1 is definite sci-fi in a lot of its plot, the characters (except maybe teal'c, but he's got an excuse) feel pretty real and contemporary. I think if they try too hard to set atlantis completely apart from the SG-1 universe, they're going to lose a large part of what makes it so good.
I can't remember who said it or where I read it, but I remember a quote from an actor where he said (this is paraphrasing) that his job was easy because all he had to do was unforget a skill that all children have.
Well, that's obviously part of it. But creativity does not happen in a vacuum, and almost everything that anyone makes has some roots in prior experience.
A child pretending to drive a car is remembering some of what they've seen, yet they've most likely never actually driven, so their mind is filling in plenty of blank spots.
I definitely do believe in evolution. Notice I didn't say that humans are better than animals, or that we deserve the earth more, or that we should slaughter as many as we can find without feeling bad.
I'm fairly confident that a human mind is much more capable than that of any animal that I've seen. Would you like to offer some evidence proving otherwise?
Cool deal. My question about the interior walls was geared more towards the wall between the garage and the rest of the house. That wall can sort of straddle the line between an interior and exterior surface. In hinsight, maybe it could've been done made of concrete?
If the exterior walls are the only thing supporting the floor, then what kind of interior spans are you looking at? I think that is the thing that would bug me the most about that sort of construction. Breaking up the ceiling plane (double height spaces and such) would become much more complicated. Platform framing with interior walls carrying structure is pretty flexible in terms of inital design. Of course, your point about being able to reconfigure the interior walls whenever you feel like it still stands.
Post tensioning is good stuff. They usually do it for parking garages. If for some reason you ever get a chance to watch them post tension a parking garage, when the tension gets high enough, the whole slab sort of bounces up and flexes in a way that you can hardly imagine concrete doing.
That is definitely interesting. Concrete is a fascinating material. It doesn't get used much for residential stuff where I live (New Orleans), because it'd most likely just make the house sink.
An insulated garage door. That's interesting. So the interior walls aren't concrete? Just framed out?
I agree too. Although I must mention that my girlfriend has recently been buying some of their Designer sets (animals and bugs and stuff made from random pieces, not customized plastic forms), and the instruction booklets are really well done. The sets come in big boxes, just because of the size of the book. Full color pages, instructions for probably twenty different creatures, photographs of other things they made but w/o instructions. And some of the stuff in the book uses the pieces in clever ways. I learned a couple tricks just looking through it.
Actually, it's to turn bits into other bits as instructed by a human. Otherwise we could just expose the RAM to some nice interference, and all sorts of bits would change, and we could do without all that expensive programming nonsense.
Computers are just tools, some of the most versitile ones that human's have ever imagined. Kay's just upset that the wrench he helped invent turned out to work really well as a hammer, and more people need hammers than wrenches right now.
I entirely disagree. Just about everyone is born creative. Watch some little kids sometimes. When they get bored they'll take whatever toys they can get their hands on and use them as props to get completely absorbed in a storyline or world that their brain makes as they go. It may not be very complicated, but kids don't yet have much to base it on.
Life does a good job of teaching us to be less creative. Our culture is so full of complicated yet boring things that we have to spend most of our time doing, and so creativity can often fall by the wayside. I'm glad that I had to take all of those math classes in grade school, but every hour that I spent doing my geometry homework was one less hour I could spend playing with photoshop. Now-a-days, I've not only got work to deal with, I've also got to spend my free time paying bills, going grocery shopping, cleaning the house, trying to understand what the hell is going on with the politics in my city, state, and country... when I sit down with a pad and paper and try to design a table that I need to build, I'm too tired to think.
Sadly enough, I think things have gotten worse for kids as well. There are so many different toys, and they have such complex features, they almost take the need for creativity away. An example talked about often on/. is lego. When I was younger, I had a few random sets. Some spaceships, some the city, some just plain old blocks. And I made all sorts of crap. My next door neighbor had all of the sets from one of the spaceship series (including the badass monorail), but he was so obsessed with that series itself that he would just build each object according to the instructions, and sit it on the floor with all the others. He wouldn't dare take them apart, much less let me near them. The only decisions he made was which space station outpost got put next to the lunar landing pad. That jerk was pretty much the same way with all of his GI-joes too. Until I started throwing them down the stairs, he did enjoy that.
Anyways, while some people are naturally better at being creative than others, doesn't mean many people are inherently unable to be creative. Creativity is one of the defining features of our intelligence. It's what puts our minds above those of animals. Anytime you aid the creative process, you improve it. It's not a learned skill persay, it's a Re-learned one.
I would think that since it's "Personal" computing, that the individual user can decide what it's all about to them. My mom uses her computer to keep in touch with me over email and instant messaging, and she trades stupid email jokes, programs, and malware with all of her friends. Those are pretty personal, non-business related uses if you ask me.
Maybe Kay should've tried to call it the Educational Computer instead of Personal computer all those years ago.
Good call. If you're willing to spend some extra money on energy conservation, you might as well spend a little extra more and construct a house that will last. Hire a good architect versed in sustainable design, and make it quality.
You don't think they'd rather charge $10 per month, and then just add a constant dribble of new content into the game? Sure, major upgrades to the graphics engine or physics engine or whatever would be a bit harder to coordinate, but not impossible. So you pay $10 per month, which doesn't sound bad, you're getting new content each month, which seems pretty cool, and you're ending up paying $120/year, which makes the company happy.
The only potential issue I see here is that I imagine many of the repeat buyers getting the game, playing for 2-3 months, getting bored, and forgetting about it until they buy the new one the next time around.
Yeah, that just seems to be the way that people think business should be run. Make the prices as low as possible, and do whatever it takes to get those prices down, down, down. Everyone wants stuff as cheap as possible, quality be damned! And then they wonder why companies, Walmart for example, are always trying their best to screw over their employees, and why so much of what they buy ends up being total crap.
Buisness is about offering a product or a service at a fair price. For a higher quality product or service, the fair price goes up. Cheap, low quality stuff is not the only way to run an economy.
I do. And I'm a fairly irresponsible 24 year old. A computer is expensive. I tend to keep records of anything that I drop a lot of money on. It's just common sense.
I still think it would be a good idea. Going over to a friend's house and using their mac to look up directions somewhere on mapquest isn't going to get anyone that excited. My girlfriend uses my macs from time to time when she's over here, but she still doesn't understand what's that different about them. To really get that into it, she'd need to have her own mac for maybe a week. She'd need time to adapt to the some of the subtle differences from windows, so they cease to be annoying just because they're different. She needs a chance to customize things to a way that fits her methods of working. The eyecandy appearance of the mac is good for getting people to first notice it, but it's not the reason that people are such diehard fans. It's more about the details that you hardly even realize after months with your computer, until you have to go back to windows for whatever reason.
In the mid-80's, 24-48 hours was enough, because the mac was so much different than anything else now. Now the differences are harder to spot, but still important. The trial period needs to be longer.
At my university, (and most others probably), the school had an agreement with pepsi, to sell only pepsi products in all of their cafeteria/restaurants. And the corrollary to that was that they couldn't offer coke products. Occasionally a student group would do a fund raiser by selling cokes, but the school overlooked that. A few years into my education, the school signed a new contract, and we became a Coca-cola campus, so all of the vending machines and fountains were switched out, and you couldn't find any pepsi stuff anymore.
Yes, we do need to hear it, if for no other reason as to have more information to spread to others. There's not going to be any change in the system until enough people get upset about it. The rich and powerful people who could change it easily are too busy profiting off of it, and the common masses are underinformed and too busy worrying about more immediate issues.
Our culture in general is not forwards thinking enough to fix any problems before they become a disaster. As unintuitive as it sounds, often the easiest way to right a wrong is to bring on the crisis as soon as possible.
I've been to plenty of places that provided those amenities, just none of them were banks before. I've been to a million auto repair shops where they had a little coffee station. Pretty much any doctor or dentist's office has a corner full of toys for kids. Some of them probably offer coffee too. Why does the fact that WaMu is a bank make their idea so unique and worth protecting?
I wouldn't give them the root password to my computer, but I'd certainly allow them root access to their own computer if that's what they wanted. I'd just inform them that with it, they have the capability of really mess things up, and so they should be ready for the consequences of it.
Hey, I hear ya with the being 14 and a computer is the focal point of your life. I'm 24 now, but I was the exact same way (actually, I was 15 when it started, but close enough). I still spend most of my free time on the computer; and I'm still, for the most part, too poor to buy a new one, so I try to be very careful around my stuff.
But I think the point still is that the computer manufacturers should not take the responsibility for keeping people out of a machine by making it hard to open. Almost every computer you can buy (including the G5's), has some of locking mechanism by which you could keep others out. Usually it just involves throwing a padlock on a latch, but it's quite effective.
Although the whole music thing you mentioned is sort of off-topic, I'll comment on that too. I've never really cared all that much about music, but I do remember being your age, and how important music was to my classmates and all. Whenever you talked to someone (especially girls), the third or fourth question was usually "soooo...what kind of music do you like?". I'm guessing it was some sort of ice-breaker comment, but I remember not liking it, because I never had a good answer for it, and it seemed like a pretty shallow question anyways. But don't worry about that too much, music stops mattering in that way when you get older. I mostly just listen to it on the radio when I'm driving nowadays, and I listen to everything, from classic rock, to contemporary whatever it's called now, and even a lot of that 60's and 70's oldies stuff. My mom would always listen to that when driving us to school or wherever. So it's kind of like it's the music I grew up with, even though it was written when my mom was young. I don't think knowing that helps you at all, but I'm just sharing.
I'm not trying to complain about your outlook on life. I was just suggesting that an opinion you expressed about a very specific aspect of computers was incorrect, and I tried to offer reasons why. Please don't take debate or criticism as complaints about your outlook on life.
Other people have already spoke about the G5, so I won't say too much there.
About the keyboard not matching with the aluminum of the mac...so what? I wouldn't want an aluminum keyboard anyways. And besides, it matches with the imac and emac just fine. My white iPod doesn't match my 4 year old black powerbook, but you know what? They look just fine sitting next to each other on my desk.
Yeah, the iMac design hasn't been changed in a while. That's why it didn't get any awards this year. If you're hoping for a new machine sometime, that's fine, but the fact that they haven't released one doesn't speak poorly of their design abilities.
And it's not really fair to criticize based on rumors. The closest thing to pictures that we've seen on the rumor sites are "artists renditions", which we've seen before, and which have had varying degrees of accuracy. Wait till they're announced in a few days, then feel free to bash them;)
Whether or not you like all of Apple's designs, you have to accept that they're trying a lot harder than any other computer manufacturers, and it seems to be working for them. Sometimes with awards (G5), and sometimes with awards and lots of money (iPods).
How did you learn how to fix hardware? I'm guessing most of the people on slashdot started by fearlessly cracking open their computer case, without any real clue what they'd find inside. And I bet I'm not the only one that first did it at least 10 years ago, before we all had easy access to the internet, where we could quickly find lots of specs and photographs to help us. Trial and error is one of the best ways to learn, and computers are getting cheaper all the time, so why not let someone poke around inside?
Yeah, if someone in my family was touching the inside of my computer, I'd be upset too. Not because they didn't know what they're doing, but because it's MY computer, paid for by me, and them messing with it is just disrespectful. If I was still living at home, and it was the Family computer, I don't have much right to complain, even if I did spend most every waking hour on it. My mom has just as much right to look inside that computer as I do. In fact, I wish she would, because the more she learns, the more she can fix herself, and the less I get annoyed.
If a company could manage to manufacture such a robot, they'd have no problem selling them faster than the assembly line could spit them out. There are plenty of companies trying to do such things, and spending way more than 10 mil on it. It's just a whole lot harder than it sounds.
Maybe some of the administrators at NASA watched Scaled do their thing, and suddenly believe that maybe private industry actually can pull this stuff off. I don't think anyone expects Scaled or anyone else to go to mars any time soon, but life is not an all or nothing game. If some company can figure out a way to get materials into orbit for significantly less money than is currently possible, that'll make it much easier for NASA to move their cool Mars ship pieces into space and then assemble them for the trip.
Sure, NASA doesn't have that cool Mars ship yet, but maybe if they can get other people to worry about figuring out all this earth orbiting stuff, then they can put all their talented engineers to work doing all that pure science stuff. It'll be hard to convince a company that they can make money sending probes to Saturn, so let NASA free up all the money they spend on things like the shuttle program, and we'll move those funds to lots of little rovers to drive around on Europa or something.
Interesting. I'm actually going to be taking my first trip to china in about a month and a half, so maybe I'll ask some people there what they think about it.
Slashdot Mirror
They purchased about $150 mil worth of apple stock back in the early imac days as part of a big deal between the two companies to settle some patent disputes and a few other things. They have since then sold that stock and made a healthy chunk of change off of it. They might own some stock in Apple currently, but it's not a very big amount, and MS certainly does not have any say in the way the company is run. If so, Apple wouldn't have put banners saying "Redmond, start your photocopiers" up when they showed off 10.4.
Microsoft has already been legally declared as a monopoly. They can't claim otherwise, with or without Apple.
From the trailers and commercials I've seen so far, the part that's got me worried the most is the uniforms they're wearing. Why weren't they wearing normal military gear? Aren't they basically going on an off-world mission like all the SG teams have been doing for years? Why do they all of the sudden have clothes that look like they're from babylon 5?
Although SG-1 is definite sci-fi in a lot of its plot, the characters (except maybe teal'c, but he's got an excuse) feel pretty real and contemporary. I think if they try too hard to set atlantis completely apart from the SG-1 universe, they're going to lose a large part of what makes it so good.
I can't remember who said it or where I read it, but I remember a quote from an actor where he said (this is paraphrasing) that his job was easy because all he had to do was unforget a skill that all children have.
Well, that's obviously part of it. But creativity does not happen in a vacuum, and almost everything that anyone makes has some roots in prior experience.
A child pretending to drive a car is remembering some of what they've seen, yet they've most likely never actually driven, so their mind is filling in plenty of blank spots.
I definitely do believe in evolution. Notice I didn't say that humans are better than animals, or that we deserve the earth more, or that we should slaughter as many as we can find without feeling bad.
I'm fairly confident that a human mind is much more capable than that of any animal that I've seen. Would you like to offer some evidence proving otherwise?
Cool deal. My question about the interior walls was geared more towards the wall between the garage and the rest of the house. That wall can sort of straddle the line between an interior and exterior surface. In hinsight, maybe it could've been done made of concrete?
If the exterior walls are the only thing supporting the floor, then what kind of interior spans are you looking at? I think that is the thing that would bug me the most about that sort of construction. Breaking up the ceiling plane (double height spaces and such) would become much more complicated. Platform framing with interior walls carrying structure is pretty flexible in terms of inital design. Of course, your point about being able to reconfigure the interior walls whenever you feel like it still stands.
Post tensioning is good stuff. They usually do it for parking garages. If for some reason you ever get a chance to watch them post tension a parking garage, when the tension gets high enough, the whole slab sort of bounces up and flexes in a way that you can hardly imagine concrete doing.
That is definitely interesting. Concrete is a fascinating material. It doesn't get used much for residential stuff where I live (New Orleans), because it'd most likely just make the house sink.
An insulated garage door. That's interesting. So the interior walls aren't concrete? Just framed out?
I agree too. Although I must mention that my girlfriend has recently been buying some of their Designer sets (animals and bugs and stuff made from random pieces, not customized plastic forms), and the instruction booklets are really well done. The sets come in big boxes, just because of the size of the book. Full color pages, instructions for probably twenty different creatures, photographs of other things they made but w/o instructions. And some of the stuff in the book uses the pieces in clever ways. I learned a couple tricks just looking through it.
Actually, it's to turn bits into other bits as instructed by a human. Otherwise we could just expose the RAM to some nice interference, and all sorts of bits would change, and we could do without all that expensive programming nonsense.
Computers are just tools, some of the most versitile ones that human's have ever imagined. Kay's just upset that the wrench he helped invent turned out to work really well as a hammer, and more people need hammers than wrenches right now.
I entirely disagree. Just about everyone is born creative. Watch some little kids sometimes. When they get bored they'll take whatever toys they can get their hands on and use them as props to get completely absorbed in a storyline or world that their brain makes as they go. It may not be very complicated, but kids don't yet have much to base it on.
/. is lego. When I was younger, I had a few random sets. Some spaceships, some the city, some just plain old blocks. And I made all sorts of crap. My next door neighbor had all of the sets from one of the spaceship series (including the badass monorail), but he was so obsessed with that series itself that he would just build each object according to the instructions, and sit it on the floor with all the others. He wouldn't dare take them apart, much less let me near them. The only decisions he made was which space station outpost got put next to the lunar landing pad. That jerk was pretty much the same way with all of his GI-joes too. Until I started throwing them down the stairs, he did enjoy that.
Life does a good job of teaching us to be less creative. Our culture is so full of complicated yet boring things that we have to spend most of our time doing, and so creativity can often fall by the wayside. I'm glad that I had to take all of those math classes in grade school, but every hour that I spent doing my geometry homework was one less hour I could spend playing with photoshop. Now-a-days, I've not only got work to deal with, I've also got to spend my free time paying bills, going grocery shopping, cleaning the house, trying to understand what the hell is going on with the politics in my city, state, and country... when I sit down with a pad and paper and try to design a table that I need to build, I'm too tired to think.
Sadly enough, I think things have gotten worse for kids as well. There are so many different toys, and they have such complex features, they almost take the need for creativity away. An example talked about often on
Anyways, while some people are naturally better at being creative than others, doesn't mean many people are inherently unable to be creative. Creativity is one of the defining features of our intelligence. It's what puts our minds above those of animals. Anytime you aid the creative process, you improve it. It's not a learned skill persay, it's a Re-learned one.
I would think that since it's "Personal" computing, that the individual user can decide what it's all about to them. My mom uses her computer to keep in touch with me over email and instant messaging, and she trades stupid email jokes, programs, and malware with all of her friends. Those are pretty personal, non-business related uses if you ask me.
Maybe Kay should've tried to call it the Educational Computer instead of Personal computer all those years ago.
Good call. If you're willing to spend some extra money on energy conservation, you might as well spend a little extra more and construct a house that will last. Hire a good architect versed in sustainable design, and make it quality.
You don't think they'd rather charge $10 per month, and then just add a constant dribble of new content into the game? Sure, major upgrades to the graphics engine or physics engine or whatever would be a bit harder to coordinate, but not impossible. So you pay $10 per month, which doesn't sound bad, you're getting new content each month, which seems pretty cool, and you're ending up paying $120/year, which makes the company happy.
The only potential issue I see here is that I imagine many of the repeat buyers getting the game, playing for 2-3 months, getting bored, and forgetting about it until they buy the new one the next time around.
Yeah, that just seems to be the way that people think business should be run. Make the prices as low as possible, and do whatever it takes to get those prices down, down, down. Everyone wants stuff as cheap as possible, quality be damned! And then they wonder why companies, Walmart for example, are always trying their best to screw over their employees, and why so much of what they buy ends up being total crap.
Buisness is about offering a product or a service at a fair price. For a higher quality product or service, the fair price goes up. Cheap, low quality stuff is not the only way to run an economy.
I do. And I'm a fairly irresponsible 24 year old. A computer is expensive. I tend to keep records of anything that I drop a lot of money on. It's just common sense.
I still think it would be a good idea. Going over to a friend's house and using their mac to look up directions somewhere on mapquest isn't going to get anyone that excited. My girlfriend uses my macs from time to time when she's over here, but she still doesn't understand what's that different about them. To really get that into it, she'd need to have her own mac for maybe a week. She'd need time to adapt to the some of the subtle differences from windows, so they cease to be annoying just because they're different. She needs a chance to customize things to a way that fits her methods of working. The eyecandy appearance of the mac is good for getting people to first notice it, but it's not the reason that people are such diehard fans. It's more about the details that you hardly even realize after months with your computer, until you have to go back to windows for whatever reason.
In the mid-80's, 24-48 hours was enough, because the mac was so much different than anything else now. Now the differences are harder to spot, but still important. The trial period needs to be longer.
At my university, (and most others probably), the school had an agreement with pepsi, to sell only pepsi products in all of their cafeteria/restaurants. And the corrollary to that was that they couldn't offer coke products. Occasionally a student group would do a fund raiser by selling cokes, but the school overlooked that. A few years into my education, the school signed a new contract, and we became a Coca-cola campus, so all of the vending machines and fountains were switched out, and you couldn't find any pepsi stuff anymore.
Not quite a grocery store, but silly nonetheless.
Yes, we do need to hear it, if for no other reason as to have more information to spread to others. There's not going to be any change in the system until enough people get upset about it. The rich and powerful people who could change it easily are too busy profiting off of it, and the common masses are underinformed and too busy worrying about more immediate issues.
Our culture in general is not forwards thinking enough to fix any problems before they become a disaster. As unintuitive as it sounds, often the easiest way to right a wrong is to bring on the crisis as soon as possible.
I've been to plenty of places that provided those amenities, just none of them were banks before. I've been to a million auto repair shops where they had a little coffee station. Pretty much any doctor or dentist's office has a corner full of toys for kids. Some of them probably offer coffee too. Why does the fact that WaMu is a bank make their idea so unique and worth protecting?
I wouldn't give them the root password to my computer, but I'd certainly allow them root access to their own computer if that's what they wanted. I'd just inform them that with it, they have the capability of really mess things up, and so they should be ready for the consequences of it.
Hey, I hear ya with the being 14 and a computer is the focal point of your life. I'm 24 now, but I was the exact same way (actually, I was 15 when it started, but close enough). I still spend most of my free time on the computer; and I'm still, for the most part, too poor to buy a new one, so I try to be very careful around my stuff.
But I think the point still is that the computer manufacturers should not take the responsibility for keeping people out of a machine by making it hard to open. Almost every computer you can buy (including the G5's), has some of locking mechanism by which you could keep others out. Usually it just involves throwing a padlock on a latch, but it's quite effective.
Although the whole music thing you mentioned is sort of off-topic, I'll comment on that too. I've never really cared all that much about music, but I do remember being your age, and how important music was to my classmates and all. Whenever you talked to someone (especially girls), the third or fourth question was usually "soooo...what kind of music do you like?". I'm guessing it was some sort of ice-breaker comment, but I remember not liking it, because I never had a good answer for it, and it seemed like a pretty shallow question anyways. But don't worry about that too much, music stops mattering in that way when you get older. I mostly just listen to it on the radio when I'm driving nowadays, and I listen to everything, from classic rock, to contemporary whatever it's called now, and even a lot of that 60's and 70's oldies stuff. My mom would always listen to that when driving us to school or wherever. So it's kind of like it's the music I grew up with, even though it was written when my mom was young. I don't think knowing that helps you at all, but I'm just sharing.
I'm not trying to complain about your outlook on life. I was just suggesting that an opinion you expressed about a very specific aspect of computers was incorrect, and I tried to offer reasons why. Please don't take debate or criticism as complaints about your outlook on life.
Other people have already spoke about the G5, so I won't say too much there.
;)
About the keyboard not matching with the aluminum of the mac...so what? I wouldn't want an aluminum keyboard anyways. And besides, it matches with the imac and emac just fine. My white iPod doesn't match my 4 year old black powerbook, but you know what? They look just fine sitting next to each other on my desk.
Yeah, the iMac design hasn't been changed in a while. That's why it didn't get any awards this year. If you're hoping for a new machine sometime, that's fine, but the fact that they haven't released one doesn't speak poorly of their design abilities.
And it's not really fair to criticize based on rumors. The closest thing to pictures that we've seen on the rumor sites are "artists renditions", which we've seen before, and which have had varying degrees of accuracy. Wait till they're announced in a few days, then feel free to bash them
Whether or not you like all of Apple's designs, you have to accept that they're trying a lot harder than any other computer manufacturers, and it seems to be working for them. Sometimes with awards (G5), and sometimes with awards and lots of money (iPods).
How did you learn how to fix hardware? I'm guessing most of the people on slashdot started by fearlessly cracking open their computer case, without any real clue what they'd find inside. And I bet I'm not the only one that first did it at least 10 years ago, before we all had easy access to the internet, where we could quickly find lots of specs and photographs to help us. Trial and error is one of the best ways to learn, and computers are getting cheaper all the time, so why not let someone poke around inside?
Yeah, if someone in my family was touching the inside of my computer, I'd be upset too. Not because they didn't know what they're doing, but because it's MY computer, paid for by me, and them messing with it is just disrespectful. If I was still living at home, and it was the Family computer, I don't have much right to complain, even if I did spend most every waking hour on it. My mom has just as much right to look inside that computer as I do. In fact, I wish she would, because the more she learns, the more she can fix herself, and the less I get annoyed.
If a company could manage to manufacture such a robot, they'd have no problem selling them faster than the assembly line could spit them out. There are plenty of companies trying to do such things, and spending way more than 10 mil on it. It's just a whole lot harder than it sounds.
Maybe some of the administrators at NASA watched Scaled do their thing, and suddenly believe that maybe private industry actually can pull this stuff off. I don't think anyone expects Scaled or anyone else to go to mars any time soon, but life is not an all or nothing game. If some company can figure out a way to get materials into orbit for significantly less money than is currently possible, that'll make it much easier for NASA to move their cool Mars ship pieces into space and then assemble them for the trip.
Sure, NASA doesn't have that cool Mars ship yet, but maybe if they can get other people to worry about figuring out all this earth orbiting stuff, then they can put all their talented engineers to work doing all that pure science stuff. It'll be hard to convince a company that they can make money sending probes to Saturn, so let NASA free up all the money they spend on things like the shuttle program, and we'll move those funds to lots of little rovers to drive around on Europa or something.
Interesting. I'm actually going to be taking my first trip to china in about a month and a half, so maybe I'll ask some people there what they think about it.