Their "terrorist incident" was called the Reichstag fire. A "Communist" "terrorist conspiracy" burned down their equivalent to the US Capitol or the UK House of Parliament.
After WWII was over, it was discovered in the records of the Gestapo that the responsible party was, in the opinion of the Gestapo officer who ran the investigation, was a lone nut.
Rather too late for Germany, of course.
There are quite a few people who have drawn parallels between the Reichstag fire and the 9/11 hijackings.
I'm going to assume you're not an American. So, what do you suggest Americans who don't like what the gov is up to do? The way I see it there are two choices:
You'd be wrong. And I'm leaving as soon as I can think of a way to pay for it.
1: Up and move to another country. This is a short term solution. Eventually the country will buckle under US pressure and pass the same laws.
Not necessarily. While this isn't a cureall (see also the UK and AU) and it takes motivated citizens, remember that the US is one of the few nations where political campaigns aren't publically financed, where corporations can buy the political process.
Sometimes it takes a decade or two, but it almost always happens. Of course, then there's not much this new citizen of another country can do since the US has already cemented the law into place all over the rest of the world. Some countries take a look at what the US is doing in some areas then proceed to pass even more draconian laws. I know Canada, England, and Australia have all done this in various areas.
You are talking about the countries with the strongest ties to the US.
The people of the Netherlands have been ignoring the shrill howls of the US government drug warriors about their decriminalizing pot for over a generation. Foriegn nations adopt many stupid US ideas, but not all of them.
The economic consequences of giving up freedom are about to become exceedingly obvious. Selling the idea that giving up freedom is not only stupid, but expensive will be much easier then.
The English-speaking heritage of political freedom, starting with the Magna Carta is being abandoned by English-speaking people in the name of boosting corporate stock prices far enough to trigger CEO quarterly bonuses. There are other places. Perhaps the battle can be won there.
2: Stay here and try to change what's going on, risking imprisonment, but with the chance to still cause some real change. Maybe even before it affects your country. You'll continue to write posts like that,
You take for granted the "Let 'em yap" attitude of the Bushmen towards public policy forum where ordinary people express dissent will last indefinitely. While I expect public discussion to be possible for quite some time, I wouldn't be surprised to see Slashdot hosted in Russia 10 years from now.
but the people who care about freedom will still be here.
In the long run, the ones with brains won't be. The people who care about freedom will either be hiding or behind bars.
At least there's somewhat of a chance, as opposed to ducking tails, running to another country, and postponing the inevitable.
If you want to feed your head into a meatgrinder (perhaps literally), go for it. Maybe Amnesty International will let us know what happened to you.
I'm going to assume that you are a typical American geek, who still has the delusions about the political process that the public schools foster in kids on how the US political process really works. If you knew how the process really works even as well as say, a power Windows user knows his workstation hardware works, you wouldn't have posted this.
The short version: Money talks, bullshit walks. I've been calling here and in other tech forums for some of the high-tech millionaires around here for the last couple of years to put a megabuck or two into building the infrastructure for a Political Action Committee to represent us in Congress, to make it possible to organize the geek political community into something capable of getting meaningful change. Got some nice +5s out of it, but zero interest from anyone willing to do anything about it in a position to do it.
In the days of the American Revolution, we had people with money (George Washington wasn't exactly broke) willing to put their "lives, fortunes, and their sacred honors" on the line for the sake of freedom. There are no such people here with the bucks
When you discover that your latest rant about your taxes in some neo-fascist political forum gets you a midnight visit from the Feds and afterwards, you are never seen or heard of again, you won't get any sympathy from anyone. You won't deserve any.
One of the few comforting things about the "criminalization of dissent" is the certainty that some people like you will get exactly what you deserve. From a government you're stupid enough to trust.
The RIAA will be gone. While there may be a trade organization to replace it, this will be a normal political lobbying group, not an attack dog. The "surviving" labels will be under new management and ownership that decided to keep the old name in the hopes of restoring the brand someday. Possible, remember Tylenol?
Sounds like you should be doing the same thing. Unfortunately, the only way to do something about this is to be in a position to buy Congress. Voting only works if the votes are counted honestly, unlikely in a nation where the major voting machine vendor is run by Bush supporters. And in any case, you can do that from somewhere else.
where everything humanity will ever see is a linear extension of what we see now.
Good until:
The oil runs out (no, conservation and renewable will NOT do it, see below)
The Third World discovers that they will never have the First World lifestyle they've been told they'll get if only they'll sign on to the US "democracy and economic advancement" package. The available energy is just enough to sustain countries that are already First World and maybe countries already on their way to First World status like China and maybe India. We can't get materials (you going to play half-life with a computer with no tantalum caps?) out of there without military force under constant attack, and to be able to exert that level of military force means militarizing our whole civilization. Right now, the US is stretched to its military limits occupying two countries, one of which has oil. You want to see your kids drafted to join corporate "security forces" protecting African mines?
Somebody fucks up terminally on an industrial scale and the species doesn't last long enough to run out of oil. Can anybody say "gray goo"? Lots of other possibilities. The research into GM foods wasn't adequate and there are nasty long-term effects on the consumers. We go to a world full of HTGR reactors and there's a common design flaw in all of them. The problem here isn't the chance of any single disaster, it's that keeping humanity on one planet means that our luck as a species will run out sooner or later.
Then, the best case the entire world gets is a hellride as the First and fastest growing Third World economies go to war over the last few billion barrels of oil. Maybe the species stabilizes at a population where hunter-gathering will keep it going, though I'm not optimistic even about that. Modern war has nasty effects on the ecosystem.
Of course, a human race that agrees with Mark Oakley deserves such a fate. Let some other species that deserves it expand into the galaxy and long-term survival.
Mark doesn't know any better. A guy whose world is defined by his computer and a broadband connect and graphic art set in imaginary sword and sorcery worlds doesn't have to do the kind of research it takes into science, engineering, economics and a dozen other fields it takes to write decent hard SF.
We are the people who make technology. We are supposed to know better.
To many people, it's all been a big success. To a select few, 9/11 was the best thing that's happened in years. Before it, they were worried about getting beat up over a collapsing economy, corruption, and election fraud. Now they're flying high, and all their friends are getting enormous no-bid military procurement and reconstruction contracts. Academic soreheads are easy to ignore.
Some of those people are going to like it a lot less when the research needed to create the technology to build the next-gen military machine is primarily done outside the USA, and every country doing this considers giving this information to America a security risk. More aren't going to like it when the technologies needed to make leading-edge consumer products happens outside the USA, not only because of the Bush Administration, but the technological controls obtained by the *AA organizations from the (mainly) Democratic politicians they 0wN.
However, the few people reaping the bulk of the profits from no-bid military contracts, anti-terror technologies like facial recognition that don't work, etc. will have cashed out long before the results of forcing scientific and technological research out of America hit the US economy like a sledgehammer.
And how exactly do POWs held without a trial apply to the security (or lack thereof) of your family? Aren't you being a little bit too receptive to European anti-US propaganda?
nniillss, this is the exact level of frightening ignorance shown by the typical Bush supporter. Until the leader of his choice is no longer President, you need no further reason to stay out of the USA.
If you want to do useful research, you're simply going to have to leave the US.
This is going to continue. I'd say... go now while the number of people leaving the country is a trickle, the first refugees will get the best research opportunities and first pick of the jobs open to Americans.
You want to read about "Reverse Brain Drain, America's New Problem" sitting in Amsterdam or Berlin or London, not as a struggling grad student wondering what the hell you can research that's useful that the Feds and the corporations will allow.
And when you read "America's lead in high technology irretreivable", you really want to do this from outside America.
It sort of fits that America's best and brightest are going to be the first people pushed out of America by Bush.
Make it easy to sue other users or businesses who let their computers be turned into virus-bots or spam-bots that attack you and to networks/ISPs who get these problems reported and do nothing. Spreading thousands of copies of Sobig.F is NOT a legit use of cablemodem or DSL bandwidth.
Say, via Federal law which allows suing through local small claims courts for $100/violation.
Defenses:
You didn't do it. The header plainly shows that the plaintiff is a clueless luz3r. Judgement for defense and he pays.
First offense. (verified by national centralized database by officer of the court) with admission of guilt. Defendant pays court costs.
Best practices. Defendant shows that he had a (for instance) virus scanner that included the virus he's accused of spreading or a firewall that included stealthing ports on the "service" he's accused of inadvertently hosting as of the day of the attack.
Problem fixed within 24 hours of ISP notification. If the ISP refuses to notify the user of a problem or unplug his account until it's fixed, it can pay his damage claim.
If a luz3r has to pay for the damage his computer does on the Internet, and ISPs are held liable for not unplugging idiots who let their computers be turned into hazardous waste sources, how far are people going to let epidemics go?
Not a complete solution, but I think a good start.
In the name of science, lets forget about manned space flight for a while.
Sorry, but I'm not interested in helping pay billions of dollars to give a few researchers something to publish in academic journals.
The kind of technological development needed to make exploiting the Solar System practical isn't going to come from taking a few pictures or getting a few rock samples.
If we get the full orbital infrastructure needed to put industry into orbit, the kind of multibillion dollar research projects the "no manned space projects that compete for OUR funding" can be accomplished with chump change, i.e. ordinary academic research or industrial research grants. It'll be possible to send researchers into orbit for a price comparable to a trip to Antarctica.
Would you ride in a rocket controlled by Windows CE?
Would you want a space station over your head using maneuvering jets controlled by WinCE to keep it in orbit? Would you like to have that OS controlling your life support systems? Or Windows 2003 running space platforms as a whole?
Though this would give a certain meaning to the favorite in-house MS saying about "cutting off their air supply".
I'd like to see them (and private contractors) designing a half dozen vehicles for just one target: getting people to orbit and back cheaply
The other half of the answer is to find something cheaper than rockets to get freight into orbit. My guess is that over 90% of the materials needed to build a space infrastructure can tolerate short exposures to vacuum and if packed properly, can tolerate acceleration from rail guns of reasonable (say, 70 mile) length. Of course, if the space elevator really is practical, neither accelaration nor vacuum is necessarily important, but the nanotube stuff that's in the labs now has to be proven practical for mass production.
Freight is actually more important than manned vehicles, it's the hard part. If we can put stuff into orbit by the gigaton cheaply, somebody will think of a way to get people into LEO to take those payloads and assemble them into industrial parks and housing and research facilities.
I believe the figure is currently that a 5x5 mile field could literally power the entire nation
Maybe, if that field is in orbit where weather isn't a factor. However, given a close-in infrastructure (say, materials launched by railgun from the moon and refined and fabricated into solar cells in zero-g)... I don't really see any reason to stop at 5x5 miles.
If you want pretty pictures and research publications for college professors and graduate school at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars with minimal technological spinoff that affects normal humans, people do get in the way. By and large, the "we don't need manned space flight" crowd is exclusively composed of those people and those people sufficienly weak-minded to be impressed by their arguments because they're usually signed by people with Dr. as a prefix and PhD as a suffix.
If you want the kind of space industrialization that'll generate jobs for ordinary people including IT pros in the rest of the Solar System, manned space vehicles and non-rocket technologies for launching low-cost freight into LEO, advancing manned space flight technology is the way to go.
I'm sure the RIAA will simply put a new spin on it, in a "we're not monitoring demand, we're monitoring privacy" kind of way. A legit use, but one that doesn't support file-sharing.
It won't do them any good. Subpoenaing the customer list of BigChampagne and calling witnesses from that company and their RIAA label contacts will be enough to tell the judge what is really going on.
The RIAA has the same problem as you. They think of downloading songs as the equivalent of stealing cars. Apples and oranges. File sharing can be made to work for the record industry. There is no way to make auto theft profitable for the auto industry. If the record industry is willing to make some heavy changes to their business model they will survive.
Well let me then suggest that you have the same problem as a lot of/. readers, which is Boolean thinking.
From the content of your post, I believe you have trouble with the concept of thinking, Boolean or otherwise.
So what if they could survive if they make heavy changes to their business model. Do you think bare survival is all they care about?
To make a business run, you market where the customers are and sell products the customer wants, including packaging in whatever form the customers want. An increasing number of people are getting their new music off the Internet the record companies can't control instead of FM radio that the record companies do control. The RIAA response is to try to make it impossible to use the Internet to distribute content by attacking the companies that promote new technology and individual users using their 0wn3d politicians. If the RIAA labels insist on losing money by not adapting to the present, why should taxpayer money go into shoring up their old business model? If the buggy whip manufacturers had organized RIAA-style lobbying in the 1900s, would there be an auto industry today?
You don't have to go to the Stanford School of Business to know that if you have a business and you want it to do better than survive, you change with the times and adapt to what your markets are doing. An industry that refuses to do this doesn't deserve to survive
You say that file sharing can be made to work for the record industry. Fine. That's your opinion (and a pretty common opinion around here).
The most prominent example I know of with respect to file sharing working for the record industry is the prerelease via P2P of Eminem's latest record a month before the official release date. It went straight to #1 as soon as it hit the stores. While other artists are doing quite well with P2P promotion, they generally are not part of the record industry.
However, I can't think of any good reason to care about the record industry. I care about good music. I care about the people who make it. I don't care about a bunch of suits whose contribution to music is parasitic and who subsidize an organization that attacks new technology and its users. If you support the enemies of new technology, what the hell are you doing here?.
But keep in mind that 5 years ago there were a lot of business cases that were pretty commonly espoused on/. that all turned to shit.
Perhaps you can get IBM to listen to your case as to why Open Source is a failure. Other than that, the worst business models of the 90s by and large were NOT promoted here. Is there anyone on slashdot who did anything but laugh about the $300M put into boo.com , a high-end cosmetics retail sales site? How about the $50M put into Dr. Koop's medical portal? Slashdot =! the vulture capital community. By and large, the dot.com failures can be traced to VCs buying into their own hype. I'm a bit surprised that anyone can confuse the two, but I guess an RIAA apologist is going to have funny ideas about how high tech works.
Why should the RIAA listen to you.
What makes you think I want them to? I believe that the artists and the public are best served if every major label goes from deep shit where they are now into bankruptcy and their assets are sold at fire sale prices to investors who have new business models in mind that don't depend on platinum records to support them and can profit from artists selling 10K albums a year.
In the last couple of years, there is a quote that I see in a lot of people's sigs:
All Kazaa, et.al has to do is subpoena the customer lists from Big Champagne and its competitor to prove the RIAA labels use P2P networks themselves for marketing info.
Conspiracy theoretic bullshit. Electrical power, heavy industry, and most other industrial resources aren't coming from space because that would be completely economically ludicrous. The cost of supporting a worker in space is orders of magnitude higher than the cost of supporting him on the ground. It would be like trying to grow bananas at the south pole -- yes, you could do it, but it would be ruinously uncompetitive.
You made the assertions, you back them up.
Hint: the numbers change drastically once the infrastructure is put into space by some method cheaper than the shuttle, LEO railguns and space elevators are the leading candidates.
Supporting industrial facilities in the American West would have been "ruinously uncompetitive" before transcontinental rail lines were available.
More seriously, given the RIAA's new hobby of collecting victims via bot which looks for MP3s and filenames which resemble anything their members sell, we have no idea at all whether or not they have infringed on any RIAA copyrights at all.
However, the behavior of the RIAA member labels tells me that they do indeed deserve to be thwarted at every term.
If they actually cared about piracy instead of making the Internet useless for distributing music for anybody but them, they'd be going after the pirate CD PRESSING PLANTS in Asia, not individual P2P users in the US. If you hadn't heard, pirate CDs and DVDs are sold openly all over Asia, with the artists making not a cent. You'd think the 0wn3d politicians of the *AA organizations would be trying to do something about it instead of attacking individuals.
What they deserve is to follow their ancestors to the tar pits, and switching our entertainment dollars from RIAA label music to music made by anybody but RIAA label employees is the way to give them the push they deserve.
based on that high-power swept infrasound empirical description above?
But James Randi is a MAN OF SCIENCE. (who has never published in a scientific journal or worked as a scientis and has no patents to his name) CSICOP says so!!! What does observed fact have to do with it? HAVE FAITH OR SUFFER ETERNAL DAMNATION!!!
There are only a handful of people in a position to choose between the options which will have the biggest impact on everybody's future.
If you don't have a net worth of over $1,000,000,000 , you are not one of them.
These people have decided without exception that instead of a future where our electric power , our heavy industry, and most of our other indusrial resources come from space, they have chosen for us a one-planet reality in which there is no future for humanity.
Our technology is under their control, because they decide through VC investments what gets funded, both in the private sector and in the public sector through the politicians they 0wN.
They have decided this on the basis of short-term profit regardless of its impact on either the current reality or the future one.
What about their children? One can only infer from their conduct that they figure that the families with the most money will be able to make the most of whatever technology-based comforts are available, even if the rest of civilization turns into something even worse than the worst the Third World has to offer today.
People are retreating into the past because the trends they see are not of a glorious future where humanity moves out into the universe, but of a future where a few industrialized nations fight to the death over the last few billion barrels of oil, followed by the end of technological civilization.
Utopian futures just aren't credible any more. Dystopian futures are no fun to read about.
While the average young person doesn't know why, the average young person does know that the jobs in the professional career he/she is planning will probably be outsourced to a foriegn land, which is not a great incentive to pursue careers in the creation of new technology.
The only rational personal path to pursue is one that involved amassing great wealth through cooking the books so one can join the wealthy in making the best of the dystopia in store for the world.
The X-Prize is great, but unless the trillions of dollars in public and private investment is made in order to have somewhere for earth-to-LEO vehicles to go, to build a space-based industrial and tourist infrastructure, private space doesn't have much of a future.
Slashdot Mirror
After WWII was over, it was discovered in the records of the Gestapo that the responsible party was, in the opinion of the Gestapo officer who ran the investigation, was a lone nut.
Rather too late for Germany, of course.
There are quite a few people who have drawn parallels between the Reichstag fire and the 9/11 hijackings.
You'd be wrong. And I'm leaving as soon as I can think of a way to pay for it.
1: Up and move to another country. This is a short term solution. Eventually the country will buckle under US pressure and pass the same laws.
Not necessarily. While this isn't a cureall (see also the UK and AU) and it takes motivated citizens, remember that the US is one of the few nations where political campaigns aren't publically financed, where corporations can buy the political process.
Sometimes it takes a decade or two, but it almost always happens. Of course, then there's not much this new citizen of another country can do since the US has already cemented the law into place all over the rest of the world. Some countries take a look at what the US is doing in some areas then proceed to pass even more draconian laws. I know Canada, England, and Australia have all done this in various areas.
You are talking about the countries with the strongest ties to the US.
The people of the Netherlands have been ignoring the shrill howls of the US government drug warriors about their decriminalizing pot for over a generation. Foriegn nations adopt many stupid US ideas, but not all of them.
The economic consequences of giving up freedom are about to become exceedingly obvious. Selling the idea that giving up freedom is not only stupid, but expensive will be much easier then.
The English-speaking heritage of political freedom, starting with the Magna Carta is being abandoned by English-speaking people in the name of boosting corporate stock prices far enough to trigger CEO quarterly bonuses. There are other places. Perhaps the battle can be won there.
2: Stay here and try to change what's going on, risking imprisonment, but with the chance to still cause some real change. Maybe even before it affects your country. You'll continue to write posts like that,
You take for granted the "Let 'em yap" attitude of the Bushmen towards public policy forum where ordinary people express dissent will last indefinitely. While I expect public discussion to be possible for quite some time, I wouldn't be surprised to see Slashdot hosted in Russia 10 years from now. but the people who care about freedom will still be here.
In the long run, the ones with brains won't be. The people who care about freedom will either be hiding or behind bars.
At least there's somewhat of a chance, as opposed to ducking tails, running to another country, and postponing the inevitable.
If you want to feed your head into a meatgrinder (perhaps literally), go for it. Maybe Amnesty International will let us know what happened to you.
I'm going to assume that you are a typical American geek, who still has the delusions about the political process that the public schools foster in kids on how the US political process really works. If you knew how the process really works even as well as say, a power Windows user knows his workstation hardware works, you wouldn't have posted this.
The short version: Money talks, bullshit walks. I've been calling here and in other tech forums for some of the high-tech millionaires around here for the last couple of years to put a megabuck or two into building the infrastructure for a Political Action Committee to represent us in Congress, to make it possible to organize the geek political community into something capable of getting meaningful change. Got some nice +5s out of it, but zero interest from anyone willing to do anything about it in a position to do it.
In the days of the American Revolution, we had people with money (George Washington wasn't exactly broke) willing to put their "lives, fortunes, and their sacred honors" on the line for the sake of freedom. There are no such people here with the bucks
I'd thought of that. :-)
When you discover that your latest rant about your taxes in some neo-fascist political forum gets you a midnight visit from the Feds and afterwards, you are never seen or heard of again, you won't get any sympathy from anyone. You won't deserve any.
One of the few comforting things about the "criminalization of dissent" is the certainty that some people like you will get exactly what you deserve. From a government you're stupid enough to trust.
The RIAA will be gone. While there may be a trade organization to replace it, this will be a normal political lobbying group, not an attack dog. The "surviving" labels will be under new management and ownership that decided to keep the old name in the hopes of restoring the brand someday. Possible, remember Tylenol?
Sounds like you should be doing the same thing. Unfortunately, the only way to do something about this is to be in a position to buy Congress. Voting only works if the votes are counted honestly, unlikely in a nation where the major voting machine vendor is run by Bush supporters. And in any case, you can do that from somewhere else.
Good until:
Then, the best case the entire world gets is a hellride as the First and fastest growing Third World economies go to war over the last few billion barrels of oil. Maybe the species stabilizes at a population where hunter-gathering will keep it going, though I'm not optimistic even about that. Modern war has nasty effects on the ecosystem.
Of course, a human race that agrees with Mark Oakley deserves such a fate. Let some other species that deserves it expand into the galaxy and long-term survival.
Mark doesn't know any better. A guy whose world is defined by his computer and a broadband connect and graphic art set in imaginary sword and sorcery worlds doesn't have to do the kind of research it takes into science, engineering, economics and a dozen other fields it takes to write decent hard SF.
We are the people who make technology. We are supposed to know better.
Some of those people are going to like it a lot less when the research needed to create the technology to build the next-gen military machine is primarily done outside the USA, and every country doing this considers giving this information to America a security risk. More aren't going to like it when the technologies needed to make leading-edge consumer products happens outside the USA, not only because of the Bush Administration, but the technological controls obtained by the *AA organizations from the (mainly) Democratic politicians they 0wN.
However, the few people reaping the bulk of the profits from no-bid military contracts, anti-terror technologies like facial recognition that don't work, etc. will have cashed out long before the results of forcing scientific and technological research out of America hit the US economy like a sledgehammer.
nniillss, this is the exact level of frightening ignorance shown by the typical Bush supporter. Until the leader of his choice is no longer President, you need no further reason to stay out of the USA.
This is going to continue. I'd say... go now while the number of people leaving the country is a trickle, the first refugees will get the best research opportunities and first pick of the jobs open to Americans.
You want to read about "Reverse Brain Drain, America's New Problem" sitting in Amsterdam or Berlin or London, not as a struggling grad student wondering what the hell you can research that's useful that the Feds and the corporations will allow.
And when you read "America's lead in high technology irretreivable", you really want to do this from outside America.
It sort of fits that America's best and brightest are going to be the first people pushed out of America by Bush.
Make it easy to sue other users or businesses who let their computers be turned into virus-bots or spam-bots that attack you and to networks/ISPs who get these problems reported and do nothing. Spreading thousands of copies of Sobig.F is NOT a legit use of cablemodem or DSL bandwidth.
Say, via Federal law which allows suing through local small claims courts for $100/violation.
Defenses:
- You didn't do it. The header plainly shows that the plaintiff is a clueless luz3r. Judgement for defense and he pays.
- First offense. (verified by national centralized database by officer of the court) with admission of guilt. Defendant pays court costs.
- Best practices. Defendant shows that he had a (for instance) virus scanner that included the virus he's accused of spreading or a firewall that included stealthing ports on the "service" he's accused of inadvertently hosting as of the day of the attack.
- Problem fixed within 24 hours of ISP notification. If the ISP refuses to notify the user of a problem or unplug his account until it's fixed, it can pay his damage claim.
If a luz3r has to pay for the damage his computer does on the Internet, and ISPs are held liable for not unplugging idiots who let their computers be turned into hazardous waste sources, how far are people going to let epidemics go?Not a complete solution, but I think a good start.
Sorry, but I'm not interested in helping pay billions of dollars to give a few researchers something to publish in academic journals.
The kind of technological development needed to make exploiting the Solar System practical isn't going to come from taking a few pictures or getting a few rock samples.
If we get the full orbital infrastructure needed to put industry into orbit, the kind of multibillion dollar research projects the "no manned space projects that compete for OUR funding" can be accomplished with chump change, i.e. ordinary academic research or industrial research grants. It'll be possible to send researchers into orbit for a price comparable to a trip to Antarctica.
Would you want a space station over your head using maneuvering jets controlled by WinCE to keep it in orbit? Would you like to have that OS controlling your life support systems? Or Windows 2003 running space platforms as a whole?
Though this would give a certain meaning to the favorite in-house MS saying about "cutting off their air supply".
The other half of the answer is to find something cheaper than rockets to get freight into orbit. My guess is that over 90% of the materials needed to build a space infrastructure can tolerate short exposures to vacuum and if packed properly, can tolerate acceleration from rail guns of reasonable (say, 70 mile) length. Of course, if the space elevator really is practical, neither accelaration nor vacuum is necessarily important, but the nanotube stuff that's in the labs now has to be proven practical for mass production.
Freight is actually more important than manned vehicles, it's the hard part. If we can put stuff into orbit by the gigaton cheaply, somebody will think of a way to get people into LEO to take those payloads and assemble them into industrial parks and housing and research facilities.
Maybe, if that field is in orbit where weather isn't a factor. However, given a close-in infrastructure (say, materials launched by railgun from the moon and refined and fabricated into solar cells in zero-g)... I don't really see any reason to stop at 5x5 miles.
Railgun? Space elevator? Scramjet?
If you want the kind of space industrialization that'll generate jobs for ordinary people including IT pros in the rest of the Solar System, manned space vehicles and non-rocket technologies for launching low-cost freight into LEO, advancing manned space flight technology is the way to go.
DHS uses MS products.
It won't do them any good. Subpoenaing the customer list of BigChampagne and calling witnesses from that company and their RIAA label contacts will be enough to tell the judge what is really going on.
Well let me then suggest that you have the same problem as a lot of /. readers, which is Boolean thinking.
From the content of your post, I believe you have trouble with the concept of thinking, Boolean or otherwise.
So what if they could survive if they make heavy changes to their business model. Do you think bare survival is all they care about?
To make a business run, you market where the customers are and sell products the customer wants, including packaging in whatever form the customers want. An increasing number of people are getting their new music off the Internet the record companies can't control instead of FM radio that the record companies do control. The RIAA response is to try to make it impossible to use the Internet to distribute content by attacking the companies that promote new technology and individual users using their 0wn3d politicians. If the RIAA labels insist on losing money by not adapting to the present, why should taxpayer money go into shoring up their old business model? If the buggy whip manufacturers had organized RIAA-style lobbying in the 1900s, would there be an auto industry today?
You don't have to go to the Stanford School of Business to know that if you have a business and you want it to do better than survive, you change with the times and adapt to what your markets are doing. An industry that refuses to do this doesn't deserve to survive
You say that file sharing can be made to work for the record industry. Fine. That's your opinion (and a pretty common opinion around here).
The most prominent example I know of with respect to file sharing working for the record industry is the prerelease via P2P of Eminem's latest record a month before the official release date. It went straight to #1 as soon as it hit the stores. While other artists are doing quite well with P2P promotion, they generally are not part of the record industry.
However, I can't think of any good reason to care about the record industry. I care about good music. I care about the people who make it. I don't care about a bunch of suits whose contribution to music is parasitic and who subsidize an organization that attacks new technology and its users. If you support the enemies of new technology, what the hell are you doing here?.
But keep in mind that 5 years ago there were a lot of business cases that were pretty commonly espoused on /. that all turned to shit.
Perhaps you can get IBM to listen to your case as to why Open Source is a failure. Other than that, the worst business models of the 90s by and large were NOT promoted here. Is there anyone on slashdot who did anything but laugh about the $300M put into boo.com , a high-end cosmetics retail sales site? How about the $50M put into Dr. Koop's medical portal? Slashdot =! the vulture capital community. By and large, the dot.com failures can be traced to VCs buying into their own hype. I'm a bit surprised that anyone can confuse the two, but I guess an RIAA apologist is going to have funny ideas about how high tech works.
Why should the RIAA listen to you.
What makes you think I want them to? I believe that the artists and the public are best served if every major label goes from deep shit where they are now into bankruptcy and their assets are sold at fire sale prices to investors who have new business models in mind that don't depend on platinum records to support them and can profit from artists selling 10K albums a year.
In the last couple of years, there is a quote that I see in a lot of people's sigs:
All Kazaa, et.al has to do is subpoena the customer lists from Big Champagne and its competitor to prove the RIAA labels use P2P networks themselves for marketing info.
You made the assertions, you back them up.
Hint: the numbers change drastically once the infrastructure is put into space by some method cheaper than the shuttle, LEO railguns and space elevators are the leading candidates.
Supporting industrial facilities in the American West would have been "ruinously uncompetitive" before transcontinental rail lines were available.
Now go buy an SCO license or something.
More seriously, given the RIAA's new hobby of collecting victims via bot which looks for MP3s and filenames which resemble anything their members sell, we have no idea at all whether or not they have infringed on any RIAA copyrights at all.
However, the behavior of the RIAA member labels tells me that they do indeed deserve to be thwarted at every term.
If they actually cared about piracy instead of making the Internet useless for distributing music for anybody but them, they'd be going after the pirate CD PRESSING PLANTS in Asia, not individual P2P users in the US. If you hadn't heard, pirate CDs and DVDs are sold openly all over Asia, with the artists making not a cent. You'd think the 0wn3d politicians of the *AA organizations would be trying to do something about it instead of attacking individuals.
What they deserve is to follow their ancestors to the tar pits, and switching our entertainment dollars from RIAA label music to music made by anybody but RIAA label employees is the way to give them the push they deserve.
But James Randi is a MAN OF SCIENCE. (who has never published in a scientific journal or worked as a scientis and has no patents to his name) CSICOP says so!!! What does observed fact have to do with it? HAVE FAITH OR SUFFER ETERNAL DAMNATION!!!
If you don't have a net worth of over $1,000,000,000 , you are not one of them.
These people have decided without exception that instead of a future where our electric power , our heavy industry, and most of our other indusrial resources come from space, they have chosen for us a one-planet reality in which there is no future for humanity.
Our technology is under their control, because they decide through VC investments what gets funded, both in the private sector and in the public sector through the politicians they 0wN.
They have decided this on the basis of short-term profit regardless of its impact on either the current reality or the future one.
What about their children? One can only infer from their conduct that they figure that the families with the most money will be able to make the most of whatever technology-based comforts are available, even if the rest of civilization turns into something even worse than the worst the Third World has to offer today.
People are retreating into the past because the trends they see are not of a glorious future where humanity moves out into the universe, but of a future where a few industrialized nations fight to the death over the last few billion barrels of oil, followed by the end of technological civilization.
Utopian futures just aren't credible any more. Dystopian futures are no fun to read about.
While the average young person doesn't know why, the average young person does know that the jobs in the professional career he/she is planning will probably be outsourced to a foriegn land, which is not a great incentive to pursue careers in the creation of new technology.
The only rational personal path to pursue is one that involved amassing great wealth through cooking the books so one can join the wealthy in making the best of the dystopia in store for the world.
The X-Prize is great, but unless the trillions of dollars in public and private investment is made in order to have somewhere for earth-to-LEO vehicles to go, to build a space-based industrial and tourist infrastructure, private space doesn't have much of a future.