Every single word of this bill was intentionally crafted to do what it does -- make Congress look anti-spam to everyone except spammers.
Right.
We're just going to have to undo this. I think we can do this. We're the people who explain technology to the clueless around us, and we can prove what we say in non-technical terms.
Know anyone at your local paper? As soon as the new spam epidemic hits, explain that the spam was directly caused by a fake anti-spam bill written by the spammers themselves, add the URLs from the original article for explanation . Tell everybody you know who isn't a tech type. Write op-ed letters. Talk shows. This is something that can be gotten across "people to people".
The American people need to know that our elected Congress is totally, absolutely clueless about technology and there is no solution other than replacement.
I'd avoid the "Do Not Spam" registry before it shows up being spamvertised as "50,000,000 e-mail addresses confirmed by the US Government"... I think the Nigerians will have real fun with this.
Imagine Congresscritters taking public credit for "anti-spam" legislation, and discovering that everybody is correctly blaming them for the amount of crap hitting our inboxes doubling or tripling.
Tell everyone you know who did this to us. If you know anyone running against an incumbent, let that challenger know who did this to us, and why that person's level of spam has gone up and very possibly, why his ISP bill (and yours and mine) has gone up as well.
Chances are, your Congresscritter and Senators voted YES!!! But to be absolutely sure:
And if your representatives voted YES, vote for ANYBODY else. This isn't just about screwing up our inboxes and the Internet itself. A Yes vote means that the representative is so dangerously and completely clueless about technology as to endanger us all.
You want a person clueless enough to screw this up deciding what high-tech weapons systems DOD gets, or what NASA projects need funding, or about anything else having to do with the Internet? The Net isn't just about geeks anymore. It's the communications backbone on which governmental, military, and business communications depend. Imagine the kind of traffic the last Windows megavirus attack being normal on the Internet. Is this likely to improve its efficiency?
Will this help businesses (other than spam) function better? Would you like to be in a war zone and discover that you can't find what the hell you've been ordered to do because your inbox is full of "Penile Enlargement" messages, each in full compliance with S.877 with a real snailmail address on the bottom?
Most of us have been saying for years that our Congress is dangerously and fundamentally clueless about technology. The DMCA passed by comparable majorities. At least in areas where the voting machines aren't e-votescam hardware, we might have a chance to get rid of some of these idiots.
This is about to become proof visible even to Joe Sixpack that Congress does NOT know what the fuck is doing. IF Joe Sixpack is told what it means. The typical Internet user is Joe Sixpack now.
Don't depend on the media to get this story out.
Finally, here's the honor roll of every single member of Congress who voted NO. (there aren't any Senators who opposed this. Vote for these guys and support them, regardless of what you think of the rest of their political views.
Honda
Kucinich
Paul
Jackson-Lee (TX)
Lofgren
We know that bad decisions about technology by elected officials can endanger our jobs, the economy, public safety, and the lives of members of our armed forces. So far, it's just us that knows because the comprehension gap between us and Joe Sixpack is just far too great.
If Joe Sixpack is getting 50 spams a day instead of 20, and he is informed that a law passed by his representatives made this possible, he'll get it. So as soon as this happens, tell your non-tech friends and families and co-workers.
Don't worry about the "Do Not Spam" registry, anyone who opts out of US spam will get it replaced by Nigerian and Chinese and Taiwanese spam. How long before spam ads for the "Do Not Spam" registry CD of "XX million e-mail addresses confirmed by the US Government" show upin your e-mail?
This is a unique opportunity. Don't let it go to waste.
Do you know that their student bookstore doesn't?
Is the drop in CD sales affecting the sources of income for the University of florida? If not, isn't this a stupid comment?
No, but your comment is.
The *AA companies aren't using the U of FL as a tool to attack the end users because of their principled allegiance to an abstract concept of intellectual property law. They are supposed to be doing this in order to maximize profits for their stockholders by selling more records. If record sales go down as a result of their actions as any reasonable person familiar with the music scene would expect, it means they're harassing their customers without legitimate reasons.
Yes, downloading copyrighted material is illegal, whether you think this is right or wrong. If you don't like this, go to a different university, or get a private net connection.
Were the students informed that their Net access was going to be robo-censored before they paid their tuition and housing fees? Would you like to find you are being harassed for downloading Linux ISOs via Bit-torrent?
Your getting upmodded to 5 is a grim comment about the intelligence of at least 3 of our mods... speaking as one of them.
So why aren't kids transferring? Any school that shows this kind of evidence of corporate 0wnership obviously can't be trusted on non-IT subjects, and as for IT, who wants to run through a network that's been prehacked by employees of the most brain-damaged corporate suits in the business world today?
Imagine creating a cool new protocol and getting "punished" for trying to run it.
Tell everyone you know who did this to us. If you know anyone running against an incumbent, let that challenger know who did this to us, and why that person's level of spam has gone up and very possibly, why his ISP bill (and yours and mine) has gone up as well.
Chances are, your Congresscritter and Senators voted YES!!! But to be absolutely sure,
Senatorial roll call vote
And if your representatives voted YES, vote for ANYBODY else. This isn't just about screwing up our inboxes and the Internet itself. A Yes vote means that the representative is so dangerously and completely clueless about technology as to endanger us all.
You want a person clueless enough to screw this up deciding what high-tech weapons systems DOD gets, or what NASA projects need funding, or about anything else having to do with the Internet? The Net isn't just about geeks anymore. It's the communications backbone on which governmental, military, and business communications depend. Imagine the kind of traffic the last Windows megavirus attack being normal on the Internet. Is this likely to improve its efficiency?
Will this help businesses (other than spam) function better? Would you like to be in a war zone and discover that you can't find what the hell you've been ordered to do because your inbox is full of "Penile Enlargement" messages, each in full compliance with S.877 with a real snailmail address on the bottom?
Most of us have been saying for years that our Congress is dangerously and fundamentally clueless about technology. The DMCA passed by comparable majorities. At least in areas where the voting machines aren't e-votescam hardware, we might have a chance to get rid of some of these idiots.
This is about to become proof visible even to Joe Sixpack that Congress does NOT know what the fuck is doing. IF Joe Sixpack is told what it means. The typical Internet user is Joe Sixpack now.
Don't depend on the media to get this story out.
Finally, here's the honor roll of every single member of Congress who voted NO. (there aren't any Senators who opposed this. Vote for these guys and support them, regardless of what you think of the rest of their political views.
Honda
Kucinich
Paul
Jackson-Lee (TX)
Lofgren
We know that bad decisions about technology by elected officials can endanger our jobs, the economy, public safety, and the lives of members of our armed forces. So far, it's just us that knows because the comprehension gap between us and Joe Sixpack is just far too great.
If Joe Sixpack is getting 50 spams a day instead of 20, and he is informed that a law passed by his representatives made this possible, he'll get it. So as soon as this happens, tell your non-tech friends and families and co-workers.
Don't worry about the "Do Not Spam" registry, anyone who opts out of US spam will get it replaced by Nigerian and Chinese and Taiwanese spam. How long before spam ads for the "Do Not Spam" registry CD of "XX million e-mail addresses confirmed by the US Government" show upin your e-mail?
This is a unique opportunity. Don't let it go to waste.
The anger people express about spam is very surprising, even more than telemarketing
Could a DA actually get a conviction from a jury against a person who goes after a spammer?
Would anyone here vote to convict a person who goes after a spammer regardless of how compelling the evidence is?
Could a jury be empaneled from a typical population that wouldn't have at least one person who would refuse to vote "Guilty"?
Of course, a person could be asked "Could you be objective in judging the evidence against a person accused of [insert horrifying crime here] against a spammer?"
A person could lie and say "Yes" even if he intended to vote innocent.
Of course, prosecutors get spammed, too, and there's a distinct possibility that such a question would not be asked.
Assuming honesty, how many jurors would have to be rejected in order to empanel a jury in a normal urban population?
Could a jury even be made up from a typical jury pool of people who'd judge on any basis other than "this person _________ a spammer, let's give him a medal and apologize for wasting his time?"
Note, if you are called for such a jury, do NOT wear a "Fully Informed Jury Association" button to court and do not discuss "jury nullification" until deliberations actually start.
Two words. Jury nullification. If juries refuse to convict anyone who goes after spammers, DAs will either have to quit charging people for this or try to select non-Internet using jurors.
How many defense attorneys are going to miss that kind of mistake? The phrase "jury of his peers" comes to mind.
Why are public funds being wasted in prosecuting this guy?
I can't think of any public purpose, including buying new high-end office furnishings for the top suits at the DA's office that is not more important than prosecuting somebody for respondsing to spam harassment.
Personally, if I were on a jury, I would vote "Not Guilty" no matter how compelling the evidence, and I would still vote "Not Guilty" if the guy had actually carried out his threats.
Wow...and here I was thinking a Lexus or a Honda was a well put together reliable car. But NO, they can't even make a probe that lasts longer than several hundred lightyears. What kinda mileage is that?!
That's why it's called "rocket science". Because this is not easy.
Second, the fact that it's opt-out, means that it legalizes spam - it's a pro-spam bill, not an anti-spam bill.
Congratulations. You're the first poster I've seen on this thread who got it right.
I'm guessing that our level of spam is going to at least double as a result.
The only good news in this is that anyone challenging an incumbent stupid enough to have voted for this has a campaign issue good for beating on the incumbent with.
Something tells me that a Congresscritter who "helped legalize spam" is going to be in very deep shit with the voters whose inboxes are filling faster than ever before, and it's only a matter of time before ISPs have to start charging us all more to pay for the increased bandwidth and filtering the new crapflow.
It appears that the patent specifically relates to dialup telephone systems. There are a large number of references in the claims to "telephone number" and "special telephone number".
The impression I had is that AT&T knew how to make this work with telephones and while they had no clue how to make this work with any other form of communications, decided to try claiming the universe because they could.
The basic purpose of a patent is to provide a description for those who are "skilled in the art" to build a copy of the invention.
If you want to try getting from the patent to a modern online credit card transaction system, have fun and good luck.
Does this mean that everybody involved in e-commerce has a chance to break the patent, or at least the parts of it that "claim" to apply but anything but dialup telephone systems?
For starters how do you avoid melting the vehicle as it leaves the launcher low in the atmosphere?
Ever heard of ablative coatings?
The other obvious point is that if one can launch payloads continuously, 50 tonne individual payloads are neither desirable nor necessary. I'd be content with 1 tonne payloads... as long as 20 or 30 can be launched per day. 1 tonne looks easier than 50. Got any other straw men to torch?
They way we've done it in the past is through the application of stupendous amounts of money; that amount of money just is no longer available. Your governments have other priorities and aren't willing to spend 3-5% of GDP in space, regardless of how promising a few visionaries think it is. Heartbreaking, yes, but also a fact.
You might be right. If you are, this is either the last or next to last generation of technological civilization, unless humanity gets real lucky with hydrogen fusion. What happens after that? Dieoff. Though the waves of war over the last few billion barrels of oil may kill a good part of the human species long before it dies due to the inability to sustain the technological infrastructure needed to keep 10 or 15 billion people alive by 2020 or 2030.
Google on "peak oil" to find out what I mean. It should cure any delusions you have that we can keep on doing business as usual into the indefinite future.
We can do this now at a cost of 3-5% GDP (which I think exaggerated) or we can do it a generation from now at... 20-30% GDP? Which programs needed to keep people at the margins of society will get cut?
Actually, the most likely end to your scenario is that politicians will do nothing until no amount of expenditure of national resources can prevent disaster. Given your straw man arguments, I infer that this is the outcome you favor.
When it comes to energy, it is also much cheaper to "leap-frog" our technology. Just like many third-world countries have more cell phones than land-lines, it's easier to develop right away with energy efficient, low-cost technology. The reason? much lower capital outlays... the same reason will force many to go to hybrid cars, passive solar, and energy-efficiency + renewable combos.
I think you just made my point for me. Why shouldn't India and China go straight to powersats and rectenna farms to create a real, reliable national power grid? That way, they create and/or buy from the US at bargain prices a buttload of tech they can improve on and sell back to us.
While I think hybrid cars and various renewable energy systems are indeed good things, I see their role as buying more time for somebody to get powersats online.
Think of 300 million hybrid cars in China and 200 million in India. How optimistic are you about the world's energy supply holding out for a generation?
You forgot that the supply of oil is finite, with at best a generation or two left assuming demand doesn't go up due to increasing Third World prosperity. Ever heard of India and China?
Oddly enough, it's those two nations who have announced new and aggressive space programs.
the answer to that is currently no. there is nothing in space, aside from studying the effects of spacefaring life on human physiology that couldn't be done (and more efficiently and cheaper) from the ground via robots and drones.
Building and operating solar-energy collection satellites, gathering materials from the asteroid belt, and building and operating factories beyond earth's atmosphere can be done more efficiently from the ground?
Guess what. Robots capable of the flexibility of handling exceptions that humans have are science fiction and likely to remain so for quite a few years after we have working powersats and space stations.
You can argue that this will never need to be done, but if humanity listens to arguments like yours, our technological civilization goes out of business after the oil runs out a generation or less from now.
Nobody is suggesting that materials be moved back to Earth via transportation with per pound costs remotely close to the Space Shuttle outside Luddite fantasy.
Getting material back to earth requires reducing that cost per pound by several orders of magnitude.
The technologically literate consensus, which you and several moderators aren't part of, believes this possible.
However, explaining how in a way you can profit from will have to wait until somebody willing to dumb down the concepts to point-and-grunt level comes along, and I am not that person.
Space Elevator (if CNT tech gets there) or raligun technology as improved for the Strategic Defense Initiative (almost ready) seem to be the best candidates.
man is a hell of a lot easier to get around in. If anyone really feels the need to replace it with something with internal hyperlinks and easy page-to-page navigation, there is a standard document format that supports this quite easily.
It's called html. From what I've been able to see, info was intended to do some of what html does. Badly.
If one is working from the console and doesn't want to start a GUI (or there isn't one), lynx works quite well.
The place for info? Print out all the info files and dump them on SCO HQ from an altitude of 20km. They'll be much more useful that way.
Are you an RIAA shill or just a tard of the sort that used to be called "useful idiot"?
A 128K MP3 is the digital equivalent of what comes out of your FM radio. Did you get written permission from the artist's label to listen to each of the Britney Spears songs that comes out of your radio?
If MS stops selling product in EU, the money that needs to be thrown at Linux in order to get it usable for home users and small businesses will be spent a hell of a lot faster than even IBM was planning to.
This can only benefit the rest of us.
Wouldn't it be nice to drive to a local mass market electronics store and be able to buy shrinkwrapped apps at random without having to worry about hardware configuration, what libraries you have installed, which versions of what desktops you are running?
There's only one major company which wouldn't benefit from this. 1 geek point for the name of the company.:-)
Who wants to find the right addresses for MS and for whichever part of the EU government to talk to about this?
Imagine MS under the delusion that they actually have popular US support for their violation of EU antitrust law.
Bill Gates wealth was grandfathered in? I thought he made took a chance and decided to a open a software company, turned out his chance worked out because he provided a good product and figured out the best way to distrubute it before anyone else.
He had rich parents with rich friends... which made financing a company a lot easier.
Mrs. Lamone was highly critical of Dr Rubin's testimony, stating that he was doing 'a great disservice to democracy. They're telling the public: Don't trust them, don't trust the voting equipment.' This begs the question: Is it better for security researchers to avoid publicly criticizing e-voting flaws? Is public faith in the system more important than overall system security?"
The only reasons to not want real e-voting flaws criticized are:
because it might interfere with getting paid
because it might interfere with the ability to deliberately fsck an election, or to allow others to do so.
Linda Lamone should be immediately terminated for incompetence. Her comments show that she is unworthy of public trust.
She should be told privately that if she protests, she can always find herself under investigation for conspiracy to commit election fraud or conspiracy to defraud the state government, i.e. facilitating the purchase of voting machines she knew were inadequate for the job.
Slashdot Mirror
Right.
We're just going to have to undo this. I think we can do this. We're the people who explain technology to the clueless around us, and we can prove what we say in non-technical terms.
Know anyone at your local paper? As soon as the new spam epidemic hits, explain that the spam was directly caused by a fake anti-spam bill written by the spammers themselves, add the URLs from the original article for explanation . Tell everybody you know who isn't a tech type. Write op-ed letters. Talk shows. This is something that can be gotten across "people to people".
The American people need to know that our elected Congress is totally, absolutely clueless about technology and there is no solution other than replacement.
I'd avoid the "Do Not Spam" registry before it shows up being spamvertised as "50,000,000 e-mail addresses confirmed by the US Government"... I think the Nigerians will have real fun with this.
Imagine Congresscritters taking public credit for "anti-spam" legislation, and discovering that everybody is correctly blaming them for the amount of crap hitting our inboxes doubling or tripling.
Chances are, your Congresscritter and Senators voted YES!!! But to be absolutely sure:
-
Congressional roll call vote
-
Senatorial roll call vote
And if your representatives voted YES, vote for ANYBODY else. This isn't just about screwing up our inboxes and the Internet itself. A Yes vote means that the representative is so dangerously and completely clueless about technology as to endanger us all.You want a person clueless enough to screw this up deciding what high-tech weapons systems DOD gets, or what NASA projects need funding, or about anything else having to do with the Internet? The Net isn't just about geeks anymore. It's the communications backbone on which governmental, military, and business communications depend. Imagine the kind of traffic the last Windows megavirus attack being normal on the Internet. Is this likely to improve its efficiency?
Will this help businesses (other than spam) function better? Would you like to be in a war zone and discover that you can't find what the hell you've been ordered to do because your inbox is full of "Penile Enlargement" messages, each in full compliance with S.877 with a real snailmail address on the bottom?
Most of us have been saying for years that our Congress is dangerously and fundamentally clueless about technology. The DMCA passed by comparable majorities. At least in areas where the voting machines aren't e-votescam hardware, we might have a chance to get rid of some of these idiots.
This is about to become proof visible even to Joe Sixpack that Congress does NOT know what the fuck is doing. IF Joe Sixpack is told what it means. The typical Internet user is Joe Sixpack now.
Don't depend on the media to get this story out.
Finally, here's the honor roll of every single member of Congress who voted NO. (there aren't any Senators who opposed this. Vote for these guys and support them, regardless of what you think of the rest of their political views.
- Honda
- Kucinich
- Paul
- Jackson-Lee (TX)
- Lofgren
We know that bad decisions about technology by elected officials can endanger our jobs, the economy, public safety, and the lives of members of our armed forces. So far, it's just us that knows because the comprehension gap between us and Joe Sixpack is just far too great.If Joe Sixpack is getting 50 spams a day instead of 20, and he is informed that a law passed by his representatives made this possible, he'll get it. So as soon as this happens, tell your non-tech friends and families and co-workers.
Don't worry about the "Do Not Spam" registry, anyone who opts out of US spam will get it replaced by Nigerian and Chinese and Taiwanese spam. How long before spam ads for the "Do Not Spam" registry CD of "XX million e-mail addresses confirmed by the US Government" show upin your e-mail?
This is a unique opportunity. Don't let it go to waste.
Do you know that their student bookstore doesn't? Is the drop in CD sales affecting the sources of income for the University of florida? If not, isn't this a stupid comment?
No, but your comment is.
The *AA companies aren't using the U of FL as a tool to attack the end users because of their principled allegiance to an abstract concept of intellectual property law. They are supposed to be doing this in order to maximize profits for their stockholders by selling more records. If record sales go down as a result of their actions as any reasonable person familiar with the music scene would expect, it means they're harassing their customers without legitimate reasons.
Yes, downloading copyrighted material is illegal, whether you think this is right or wrong. If you don't like this, go to a different university, or get a private net connection.
Were the students informed that their Net access was going to be robo-censored before they paid their tuition and housing fees? Would you like to find you are being harassed for downloading Linux ISOs via Bit-torrent?
Your getting upmodded to 5 is a grim comment about the intelligence of at least 3 of our mods... speaking as one of them.
Imagine creating a cool new protocol and getting "punished" for trying to run it.
What a bunch of fucking sheep.
Chances are, your Congresscritter and Senators voted YES!!! But to be absolutely sure,
Congresionnal roll call vote
Senatorial roll call vote And if your representatives voted YES, vote for ANYBODY else. This isn't just about screwing up our inboxes and the Internet itself. A Yes vote means that the representative is so dangerously and completely clueless about technology as to endanger us all.
You want a person clueless enough to screw this up deciding what high-tech weapons systems DOD gets, or what NASA projects need funding, or about anything else having to do with the Internet? The Net isn't just about geeks anymore. It's the communications backbone on which governmental, military, and business communications depend. Imagine the kind of traffic the last Windows megavirus attack being normal on the Internet. Is this likely to improve its efficiency?
Will this help businesses (other than spam) function better? Would you like to be in a war zone and discover that you can't find what the hell you've been ordered to do because your inbox is full of "Penile Enlargement" messages, each in full compliance with S.877 with a real snailmail address on the bottom?
Most of us have been saying for years that our Congress is dangerously and fundamentally clueless about technology. The DMCA passed by comparable majorities. At least in areas where the voting machines aren't e-votescam hardware, we might have a chance to get rid of some of these idiots.
This is about to become proof visible even to Joe Sixpack that Congress does NOT know what the fuck is doing. IF Joe Sixpack is told what it means. The typical Internet user is Joe Sixpack now.
Don't depend on the media to get this story out.
Finally, here's the honor roll of every single member of Congress who voted NO. (there aren't any Senators who opposed this. Vote for these guys and support them, regardless of what you think of the rest of their political views.
We know that bad decisions about technology by elected officials can endanger our jobs, the economy, public safety, and the lives of members of our armed forces. So far, it's just us that knows because the comprehension gap between us and Joe Sixpack is just far too great.
If Joe Sixpack is getting 50 spams a day instead of 20, and he is informed that a law passed by his representatives made this possible, he'll get it. So as soon as this happens, tell your non-tech friends and families and co-workers.
Don't worry about the "Do Not Spam" registry, anyone who opts out of US spam will get it replaced by Nigerian and Chinese and Taiwanese spam. How long before spam ads for the "Do Not Spam" registry CD of "XX million e-mail addresses confirmed by the US Government" show upin your e-mail?
This is a unique opportunity. Don't let it go to waste.
Could a DA actually get a conviction from a jury against a person who goes after a spammer?
Would anyone here vote to convict a person who goes after a spammer regardless of how compelling the evidence is?
Could a jury be empaneled from a typical population that wouldn't have at least one person who would refuse to vote "Guilty"?
Of course, a person could be asked "Could you be objective in judging the evidence against a person accused of [insert horrifying crime here] against a spammer?"
A person could lie and say "Yes" even if he intended to vote innocent.
Of course, prosecutors get spammed, too, and there's a distinct possibility that such a question would not be asked.
Assuming honesty, how many jurors would have to be rejected in order to empanel a jury in a normal urban population?
Could a jury even be made up from a typical jury pool of people who'd judge on any basis other than "this person _________ a spammer, let's give him a medal and apologize for wasting his time?"
Note, if you are called for such a jury, do NOT wear a "Fully Informed Jury Association" button to court and do not discuss "jury nullification" until deliberations actually start.
Two words. Jury nullification. If juries refuse to convict anyone who goes after spammers, DAs will either have to quit charging people for this or try to select non-Internet using jurors.
How many defense attorneys are going to miss that kind of mistake? The phrase "jury of his peers" comes to mind.
So what? These guys are megaspammers, how many of the specific spams described in the article have you gotten?
As far as I'm concerned, a parking ticket is too great a penalty for this guy to pay for his "crime".
I can't think of any public purpose, including buying new high-end office furnishings for the top suits at the DA's office that is not more important than prosecuting somebody for respondsing to spam harassment.
Personally, if I were on a jury, I would vote "Not Guilty" no matter how compelling the evidence, and I would still vote "Not Guilty" if the guy had actually carried out his threats.
That's why it's called "rocket science". Because this is not easy.
Congratulations. You're the first poster I've seen on this thread who got it right.
I'm guessing that our level of spam is going to at least double as a result.
The only good news in this is that anyone challenging an incumbent stupid enough to have voted for this has a campaign issue good for beating on the incumbent with.
Something tells me that a Congresscritter who "helped legalize spam" is going to be in very deep shit with the voters whose inboxes are filling faster than ever before, and it's only a matter of time before ISPs have to start charging us all more to pay for the increased bandwidth and filtering the new crapflow.
It appears that the patent specifically relates to dialup telephone systems. There are a large number of references in the claims to "telephone number" and "special telephone number".
The impression I had is that AT&T knew how to make this work with telephones and while they had no clue how to make this work with any other form of communications, decided to try claiming the universe because they could.
The basic purpose of a patent is to provide a description for those who are "skilled in the art" to build a copy of the invention.
If you want to try getting from the patent to a modern online credit card transaction system, have fun and good luck.
Does this mean that everybody involved in e-commerce has a chance to break the patent, or at least the parts of it that "claim" to apply but anything but dialup telephone systems?
Ask somebody else, IANAL.
Ever heard of ablative coatings?
The other obvious point is that if one can launch payloads continuously, 50 tonne individual payloads are neither desirable nor necessary. I'd be content with 1 tonne payloads... as long as 20 or 30 can be launched per day. 1 tonne looks easier than 50. Got any other straw men to torch?
They way we've done it in the past is through the application of stupendous amounts of money; that amount of money just is no longer available. Your governments have other priorities and aren't willing to spend 3-5% of GDP in space, regardless of how promising a few visionaries think it is. Heartbreaking, yes, but also a fact.
You might be right. If you are, this is either the last or next to last generation of technological civilization, unless humanity gets real lucky with hydrogen fusion. What happens after that? Dieoff. Though the waves of war over the last few billion barrels of oil may kill a good part of the human species long before it dies due to the inability to sustain the technological infrastructure needed to keep 10 or 15 billion people alive by 2020 or 2030.
Google on "peak oil" to find out what I mean. It should cure any delusions you have that we can keep on doing business as usual into the indefinite future.
We can do this now at a cost of 3-5% GDP (which I think exaggerated) or we can do it a generation from now at... 20-30% GDP? Which programs needed to keep people at the margins of society will get cut?
Actually, the most likely end to your scenario is that politicians will do nothing until no amount of expenditure of national resources can prevent disaster. Given your straw man arguments, I infer that this is the outcome you favor.
I think you just made my point for me. Why shouldn't India and China go straight to powersats and rectenna farms to create a real, reliable national power grid? That way, they create and/or buy from the US at bargain prices a buttload of tech they can improve on and sell back to us.
While I think hybrid cars and various renewable energy systems are indeed good things, I see their role as buying more time for somebody to get powersats online.
Think of 300 million hybrid cars in China and 200 million in India. How optimistic are you about the world's energy supply holding out for a generation?
The RIAA had sense enough to buy a few politicians.
Oddly enough, it's those two nations who have announced new and aggressive space programs.
What do they know that you don't?
Building and operating solar-energy collection satellites, gathering materials from the asteroid belt, and building and operating factories beyond earth's atmosphere can be done more efficiently from the ground?
Guess what. Robots capable of the flexibility of handling exceptions that humans have are science fiction and likely to remain so for quite a few years after we have working powersats and space stations.
You can argue that this will never need to be done, but if humanity listens to arguments like yours, our technological civilization goes out of business after the oil runs out a generation or less from now.
Getting material back to earth requires reducing that cost per pound by several orders of magnitude.
The technologically literate consensus, which you and several moderators aren't part of, believes this possible.
However, explaining how in a way you can profit from will have to wait until somebody willing to dumb down the concepts to point-and-grunt level comes along, and I am not that person.
Space Elevator (if CNT tech gets there) or raligun technology as improved for the Strategic Defense Initiative (almost ready) seem to be the best candidates.
It's called html. From what I've been able to see, info was intended to do some of what html does. Badly.
If one is working from the console and doesn't want to start a GUI (or there isn't one), lynx works quite well.
The place for info? Print out all the info files and dump them on SCO HQ from an altitude of 20km. They'll be much more useful that way.
A 128K MP3 is the digital equivalent of what comes out of your FM radio. Did you get written permission from the artist's label to listen to each of the Britney Spears songs that comes out of your radio?
Kill yourself, you're a MUSIC thief.
This can only benefit the rest of us.
Wouldn't it be nice to drive to a local mass market electronics store and be able to buy shrinkwrapped apps at random without having to worry about hardware configuration, what libraries you have installed, which versions of what desktops you are running?
There's only one major company which wouldn't benefit from this. 1 geek point for the name of the company. :-)
Who wants to find the right addresses for MS and for whichever part of the EU government to talk to about this?
Imagine MS under the delusion that they actually have popular US support for their violation of EU antitrust law.
He had rich parents with rich friends... which made financing a company a lot easier.
Good product? You a tard or something?
As for distribution, remember the antitrust action in which MS was declared a monopoly? Bush didn't buy the EU government antitrust people.
Some people use it as a substitute for thinking for themselves. Why else do people use XP?
I control the router. I read the logs. When they turn 18, if they are still living in my house, we'll discuss it. Until then, what I say goes.
You sound a lot like my father, though the issue of computers never came up, since I turned 18 in 1972.
I haven't spoken to him in over 30 years. Perhaps you regard this as an example of successful parenting.
Perhaps you'll succeed equally well with your kids.
The only reasons to not want real e-voting flaws criticized are:
Linda Lamone should be immediately terminated for incompetence. Her comments show that she is unworthy of public trust.
She should be told privately that if she protests, she can always find herself under investigation for conspiracy to commit election fraud or conspiracy to defraud the state government, i.e. facilitating the purchase of voting machines she knew were inadequate for the job.