It was Congress that came up with the $400 billion estimate back in '92, not Nasa. There have been no recent cost estimates that I've seen but Nasa itself in the same time frame estimated a cost of only $25 billion for a lunar outpost and only $40 billion for a manned mission to Mars. That was _before_ Faster, Better, Cheaper became the mantra. Taking into account that we now know how to do missions cheaper and more quickly and factoring in inflation, the costs are still going to be significantly less then $400 billion which was an overall 30 year estimate anyway.
Re:Asteroid Mining
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I'm not so sure. If something that is rare and valuable suddenly becomes abundant, it's price typically plummets. If there are suddenly 10 million tons of new gold or other minerals/metals available to the market from asteriod mining, the price will fall dramatically and you no longer have the economic incentives that you once perceived. Gold would be cheaper and more available than aluminum foil.
*To be honest, I really have no idea if the numbers are even remotely accurate. I'm just trying to make a point.
1 Trillion Dollars
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Ah, yes, once again we see that famous 1 Trillion Dollars figure. That's 1 Trillion Dollars using technologies and methodologies that are 15 years out of date to be spent over 30+ years and including missions that have already been accomplished and other missions not directly related to the Moon or Mars. This is becoming the stuff of Urban Legend. If you haven't read http://www.thespacereview.com/article/119/1, I highly encourage it. It appears to be a very thorough debunking of that whole misinformation campaign and clearly points the finger for bad numbers at media outlets as opposed to real accountants who are directly involved.
Besides the obvious environmental problems with creating millions of disposable DVD's (ala AOL cd's), I don't really see much bad about these. If I could buy (read rent) a DVD for $2.00 that I didn't have to bring back to a store then I'd likely do that. Or play a self-destructing game as a sample of the full game and save $48.00 if I don't like it. Looks potentially like a money saver to me.
Out of all the comments above, I only saw one person who understood the real issue. It's not that the user downloads the images, that happens all the time. The problem is that the user is not seeing any copyright information that may also be present on the web page *with* the image. They may then think that the image is public domain and re-use it in their own works. If I were to somehow create a really great image and integrate it into my website, I wouldn't want to have copyright information or visible watermarks messing it up, nor would I want someone taking that image and reusing it on their own site or publication or whatever. The image search engines don't have a method of verifying or displaying copyright information. Perhaps something needs to be added to robots.txt to address this. A specific list of images that are public-domain or vice-versa.
Let me give you a perfectly legitimate example of why this is bad. Let's say that I have my own personal account with a smaller ISP without national dialup. I also have my corporate email, again without national dialup. Now, both of these SMTP servers have limitations on them such that you can not send email through them unless you are using an IP that is on their network. This is a perfectly reasonable relay-limiting technique. Now, I also travel a lot so I've got to have some kind of national dialup so that I can send and receive both corporate and personal email. Because of the aforementioned anti-relay technique (currently in use by most ISP's), I would only be able to send through my dialup providers SMTP server. Now Verizon is saying that even though I am paying for an national dialup account, with use of their SMTP servers, I can no longer use it for one of the most popular reasons [business] people get national dialup accounts. I really don't think this will fly in the long run because those users will either put up a stink or move somewhere else. It's unduly limiting and won't really prevent what they want to prevent. The spammers will start using @verizon.com in the From: field and use a Reply-To: or put it in the body of the message.
And there aren't potential legal issues with what is effectively a DOS attack against small to medium sized sites that get linked from here? What's worse is that site may be virtual-hosted and then it not only affects that site, but all others hosted on that machines or farm.
I have to agree with the original poster.
We use a biblical naming convention (even though the majority of us are athiests or agnostics). Names that reflect the type of service offered if possible, but foremost names that are neat at first glance but looking deeper at the actual meaning of the name have a dark side. For example: Babel - mail server. Of course we all know about the Tower of Babel Famine, Plague, Death, War - Clustered web servers. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse others: eden abel eve adam cain gozan goliath aegis -- omeganon
Slashdot Mirror
It was Congress that came up with the $400 billion estimate back in '92, not Nasa. There have been no recent cost estimates that I've seen but Nasa itself in the same time frame estimated a cost of only $25 billion for a lunar outpost and only $40 billion for a manned mission to Mars. That was _before_ Faster, Better, Cheaper became the mantra. Taking into account that we now know how to do missions cheaper and more quickly and factoring in inflation, the costs are still going to be significantly less then $400 billion which was an overall 30 year estimate anyway.
I'm not so sure. If something that is rare and valuable suddenly becomes abundant, it's price typically plummets. If there are suddenly 10 million tons of new gold or other minerals/metals available to the market from asteriod mining, the price will fall dramatically and you no longer have the economic incentives that you once perceived. Gold would be cheaper and more available than aluminum foil.
*To be honest, I really have no idea if the numbers are even remotely accurate. I'm just trying to make a point.
Ah, yes, once again we see that famous 1 Trillion Dollars figure. That's 1 Trillion Dollars using technologies and methodologies that are 15 years out of date to be spent over 30+ years and including missions that have already been accomplished and other missions not directly related to the Moon or Mars. This is becoming the stuff of Urban Legend. If you haven't read http://www.thespacereview.com/article/119/1, I highly encourage it. It appears to be a very thorough debunking of that whole misinformation campaign and clearly points the finger for bad numbers at media outlets as opposed to real accountants who are directly involved.
Could've fooled me --
4:09pm up 5:55, 2 users, load average: 2.57, 2.18, 1.26
89 processes: 87 sleeping, 2 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped
CPU0 states: 23.0% user, 10.0% system, 0.0% nice, 66.0% idle
CPU1 states: 25.1% user, 8.0% system, 0.0% nice, 65.0% idle
CPU2 states: 14.0% user, 10.0% system, 0.0% nice, 75.0% idle
CPU3 states: 18.0% user, 11.0% system, 0.0% nice, 70.0% idle
Mem: 2065188K av, 2051860K used, 13328K free, 0K shrd, 240812K buff
Swap: 2048152K av, 0K used, 2048152K free 1701480K cached
Stock Redhat 7.3 SMP kernel.
Linux oscar 2.4.18-3smp #1 SMP Thu Apr 18 07:27:31 EDT 2002 i686 unknown
--
Omeganon
Besides the obvious environmental problems with creating millions of disposable DVD's (ala AOL cd's), I don't really see much bad about these. If I could buy (read rent) a DVD for $2.00 that I didn't have to bring back to a store then I'd likely do that. Or play a self-destructing game as a sample of the full game and save $48.00 if I don't like it. Looks potentially like a money saver to me.
--
Omeganon
Out of all the comments above, I only saw one person who understood the real issue. It's not that the user downloads the images, that happens all the time. The problem is that the user is not seeing any copyright information that may also be present on the web page *with* the image. They may then think that the image is public domain and re-use it in their own works. If I were to somehow create a really great image and integrate it into my website, I wouldn't want to have copyright information or visible watermarks messing it up, nor would I want someone taking that image and reusing it on their own site or publication or whatever. The image search engines don't have a method of verifying or displaying copyright information. Perhaps something needs to be added to robots.txt to address this. A specific list of images that are public-domain or vice-versa.
--
Marc
Let me give you a perfectly legitimate example of why this is bad. Let's say that I have my own personal account with a smaller ISP without national dialup. I also have my corporate email, again without national dialup. Now, both of these SMTP servers have limitations on them such that you can not send email through them unless you are using an IP that is on their network. This is a perfectly reasonable relay-limiting technique. Now, I also travel a lot so I've got to have some kind of national dialup so that I can send and receive both corporate and personal email. Because of the aforementioned anti-relay technique (currently in use by most ISP's), I would only be able to send through my dialup providers SMTP server. Now Verizon is saying that even though I am paying for an national dialup account, with use of their SMTP servers, I can no longer use it for one of the most popular reasons [business] people get national dialup accounts. I really don't think this will fly in the long run because those users will either put up a stink or move somewhere else. It's unduly limiting and won't really prevent what they want to prevent. The spammers will start using @verizon.com in the From: field and use a Reply-To: or put it in the body of the message.
And there aren't potential legal issues with what is effectively a DOS attack against small to medium sized sites that get linked from here? What's worse is that site may be virtual-hosted and then it not only affects that site, but all others hosted on that machines or farm. I have to agree with the original poster.
We use a biblical naming convention (even though the majority of us are athiests or agnostics). Names that reflect the type of service offered if possible, but foremost names that are neat at first glance but looking deeper at the actual meaning of the name have a dark side. For example: Babel - mail server. Of course we all know about the Tower of Babel Famine, Plague, Death, War - Clustered web servers. Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse others: eden abel eve adam cain gozan goliath aegis -- omeganon