Yes, but we need a manned launcher next week. We're dead out. We've no manned spacecraft launchers, reusable or otherwise, because we're cheap. Three trillion dollars for Iraq and its aftermath, but tossing NASA 20 billion to build a real launch system is politically impossible. One may cry "politics", but "politics" only means "people". Americans don't want to do it, and their elected politicians thus will not. We should be building a electromagnetic launch rail for first-stage emulation, a spaceplane, a cargo rocket, a reusable SSTO prototype AND funding an elevator project simultaneously. Private enterprise is too slow and really never will have a business model to do all that. The only real customer is the government and its deep pockets if you're talking about manned space flight. To get a place-to-go, you need to spend government cash. Then private enterprise can build the transports for its own use.
Budget cuts would have happened regardless, unless the President, like Bush, didn't give a damn about the debt. Cut taxes, increase spending, like he did (and Reagan did) and the debt shoots from 3 trillion to 16 trillion - and then, after all that money floats down on the wealthy and warriors, demand spending cuts. Space dies. The democratic presidents get to clean up the spilled booze after the republicans party.
I left off a LOT. I've been watching for something like forty years. The space program has always been at risk from a citizenry that believes the world is ending soon, is six thousand years old and was flooded a few thousand years ago. We're anti-reality; most people think we go to "space", rather than low earth orbit. The US is not a space-faring nation. We don't have the mindspace for it, and I think that the flags-and-boots on the moon pretty much ruined what space travel means to both the country and NASA. Stunts, science exploration and national prestige aren't nearly enough. We needed to open it up to travel, mining, solar power sats and the terraria settlements needed to really pull off migration off-planet. Mars? It's a international wilderness park, not a business opportunity. O'Neill et al nailed the real purpose: get off this rock and into zero g to make places to live and pots of money and transmit enormous amounts of power to the home base. Anything else is just a stunt.
Using computers to register, count, transfer, and archive vote tallies is impossible to do without an almost certain effort to alter the vote totals by parties interior to the project (people creating and maintaining the systems and the show runners) and outside the project ("hackers"). Of the two, the insiders are far more likely.
This is not a failure of tech or of implementation. This is a human thing: those disposed to alter election tallies have infinite motivation to find a way to do it. They can either slip in during the coding phase or the implementation phase, or even during the elections. Like rats, they will find a way.
The difference between paper and electronic is basic: paper leaves a physical trail. E-voting can be rigged to leave NO trace. IS rigged to leave no trace. No audit is possible: all audits are predicated that the datasets and code are correct to begin with. If someone slips in backdoors, they can alter vote totals in real time and therefore all recounts will be "accurate". Paper receipts are useless, because what is printed is not necessarily what actually happened. Paper printouts that are reviewed by the voter on site for accuracy and then stored in boxes by the voting agents *can* be a valuable check, for the paper should match the e-count. But why then the extra step of the computer? Just use paper to begin with. Canada does it (I hope still does) and they count elections by hand in three hours, no matter what the size, local or national, because human counting easily scales.
Source code is worthless as a trace. One never knows what the machine is actually doing from microsecond to microsecond; the code executed need not match what you see on the source. This makes coders heads explode, but it is true. The machine can be programmed to lie. I know this, because I have done it, on orders from my bosses, in the past, to make a bit more money for my company. Cheating is easy and it is undetectable if you are even marginally clever about it. The count can also be altered far from the source tabulating machine and local system, at other levels. Such malignancy will not be accounted for by the counting company; their rep is on the line, they don't believe it is possible and further they don't want to know.
Use e-voting and you will see the powerful grab control, one way or another. Use paper.
Apple is not "declining". They are growing. (They also make most of the profit.) Android is growing fast, Apple is growing fast. Both statements can be true at the same time. Both can win. This is not a zero-sum game. Your opponent doesn't have to die so that you can live.
Kill shuttles, kill the DC-X, kill spaceplanes, kill research, find the cheapest possible source of launchers. Make a business out of manned spaceflight. So now we're hostage to Russia, because they were cheaper than building a reusable launch system. SpaceX ain't ready yet. So, we're screwed. May Elon Musk get what he wishes for, and may he be able to deliver. Next month.
A President will be allowed to increase the power of the loose confederacy of those really in charge. Never to decrease. You think Presidents run the US? They're just executives, not kings.
Don't let those five smug-n-stupid white men rule on any - ANY - matter until one of them dies and we can fix the Reagan/Bush stacking. Wait. Don't let them set precedents. Avoid engagement. They can wreck the future of the human race, as the US is pretty much ruling the world.
We can't pay poor people a few bucks to eat, but we've infinite cash for surveillance and war. Who the hell is threatening us with chemicals? The US had THE stockpiles of nerve toxins on this planet. We still haven't gotten rid of it all. And for what did we make enough poison to wipe out all life on earth a million times? We seem to be the biggest threat on the planet, by far.
Or don't pay your condo association fees for a month. Or homeowners association fees. They can confiscate.
There's no place in the world you can live where a bastard can't figure out a legal way to steal your home. Never was. Government or private. Remember the hundreds of thousands of faked refinance agreements that banks and capital groups used to steal people's homes in the last ten years? Got clean away with it. Kept the houses, too. We can't touch them anymore. Red handed, and they walked away with tiny fines.
The only defense against thieves? Live somewhere they don't want to live, or where they can't figure a way to rent your property for a good price. This is the new Gilded Age, and the bastards are just getting warmed up. We're gonna see what supercapital trillionaires are capable of in our lifetimes.
Nope. They won't. Renters are peons. No leverage. The leverage is money. Too many rich people, too many trust funds. Better for the landlords (capital funds will buy up the good units very soon now) to evict and replace with more affluent renters - or even better, write some new laws so the landlords can rent the units out at AirBnB prices themselves. Why not?
Really. Can't rent an apartment there, can't rent a hotel room there, can't breath the air there without a trust fund. Godz forbid we should find a way not to pay the rapacious owners of San Francisco even more money. No, this is not the way the free market goes, Rand Fans. This market will never be "free". It's monopoly of space. Space is limited. There's too much money in the city. Prices go up. Eventually the place is full of empty apartments owned by capital funds and by Saudi and Colombian investors, as London has shown us. Free for whom? No the people who live there, damn it. They're peons now.
Capital funds are now rolling up the apartments into securities now, and selling them on Wall Street as investments. Of course, surrounded by derivative bets. No chance of a crash there, eventually. And the complaints of a reduction if not elimination of maintenance are of course rolling in, 'cause that's what an unfree market does: charge you more for less and less.
Don't care about the laws. Laws are bought by the owners of the city, and we duck around them as best we can. If you are rich enough, you ignore the laws and pay the fines if they catch you. Or just buy a new law, just for you. The law is a joke. Contracts are a joke. We have no power to negotiate a better deal, so the hell with it.
Don't see an end to the hoovering up of the peon army's piggy banks any time soon. Students now owe a trillion dollars in student loans that most can never repay in their lifetimes, and additionally they'll have to live in cars or trucks when the rentiers start enforcing the limits on the number of people living in a single unit. Don't want those poor people in your neighborhood. And "poor" is a relative term. The middle class are starting to understand that they are the new "poor" now, in some places.
Where the hell are people gonna live? This is amusing. SF might become a true Randian paradise. A lost cause for 95+ per cent of the population. New York used to have rent control, and that might have saved SF from the upcoming years of rage; but "free" markets are the rule now. Let's see what happens. Vomit on the buses? That's the beginning. We're replaying the 1930's. Gonna have to start getting those private security forces, rich people. (Odd thing: if you've money, you tell your private police what to do. If you don't have capital, public police tell *you* what to do)
End result, less money from tourists, visitors and job seekers looking for a place to crash while finding their bearings. The rentiers don't care; they're rich anyway. Also, the people paying 4000 - FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS A MONTH for their two bedroom can't make a little cash back. They can't buy the appropriate laws. Shrug. Lost cause here.
Keep it simple stupid - an engineering principle that has been tossed out forever.
Another damned piece of electronics that will fail in less than seven years. Another piece of electronic junk with a thousand dollar replacement or repair price tag (dealer cost to you). More damned code that can fail. More maintenance costs. More power consumption. More holes in the shell to let rust in. Tech lust as engineering.
Geeze, let's not use a MIRROR. My side view mirror was just torn off by a speed-crazed yuppie - it cost me 23 bucks to replace it, good as new, from an eBay vendor. Shipping included.
the idea is to make damned sure that no new car will have a lifetime greater than seven to ten years. New cars, new debt without end. Cars as smart phones - unrepairable. Toss 'em out and get a new one will be the only option. The used car market will slowly shrivel and finally die when the last repairable car gets totaled.
So? We constitutionally shipped back a liner of refugees back to Germany to die before WW II. "Constitutional" doesn't mean "moral". This is about right and wrong - concepts about which business law is devoutly silent.
You really don't understand what Baidu is. It's a fascist corporation teamed with the Chinese government to perception manage a billion people. It's not a plucky lemonade stand. It's not a business.
Thus, in libertarian heaven, all search engines are indeed private, so... everything you read and see and hear is subject to whatever the company owners collectively think you should. Tyranny, same as if they owned the roads you travel on.
"Sorry, My. Grumpy, but our manager informs that you are not welcome on Roads Numbers 456-780. Please remove your vehicle from our private property or we'll notify our private police force, which you'll notice have a laser battery pointed at you up above. And oh, yes, it seems you are banned on all competing roads in the area, just to give you a heads up. You must have got someone important angry over at corporate, ha ha. You know, watch what you say, watch what you do. Words to live by, indeed. We hope for your future patronage on the Richard Cheney Memorial Highway System, Incorporated. Have a nice day. Get out or get shot."
God handed the constitution to Jefferson on a mountain in the 1780's? The founders did not envision a private (government-controlled, for fuck's sake!) company controlling access to the world. They didn't have to. They didn't want to. They expected us to evolve and add more rights. They did not see the document as holy writ. They gave us the 9th amendment to slap us in the face with that fact. Rights exist whether or not the holy book explicitly enumerates those rights. So, fuck the constitution, as I am sure Jefferson would say. Fuck private company takeover of the world. Corporations are legal government-created fictions. They are OUR dogs. We are not theirs. HEEL, bitches.
Corporation only exist by government fiat. They have no other existence and derive all rights from our common will through our laws. They are a game, a fiction, a cheat.
Slashdot Mirror
As I used to proclaim on Slashdot: don't let the people who own the pipes also sell you the water.
We know. And we kinda are copying their module.
Yes, but we need a manned launcher next week. We're dead out. We've no manned spacecraft launchers, reusable or otherwise, because we're cheap. Three trillion dollars for Iraq and its aftermath, but tossing NASA 20 billion to build a real launch system is politically impossible. One may cry "politics", but "politics" only means "people". Americans don't want to do it, and their elected politicians thus will not. We should be building a electromagnetic launch rail for first-stage emulation, a spaceplane, a cargo rocket, a reusable SSTO prototype AND funding an elevator project simultaneously. Private enterprise is too slow and really never will have a business model to do all that. The only real customer is the government and its deep pockets if you're talking about manned space flight. To get a place-to-go, you need to spend government cash. Then private enterprise can build the transports for its own use.
Budget cuts would have happened regardless, unless the President, like Bush, didn't give a damn about the debt. Cut taxes, increase spending, like he did (and Reagan did) and the debt shoots from 3 trillion to 16 trillion - and then, after all that money floats down on the wealthy and warriors, demand spending cuts. Space dies. The democratic presidents get to clean up the spilled booze after the republicans party.
I left off a LOT. I've been watching for something like forty years. The space program has always been at risk from a citizenry that believes the world is ending soon, is six thousand years old and was flooded a few thousand years ago. We're anti-reality; most people think we go to "space", rather than low earth orbit. The US is not a space-faring nation. We don't have the mindspace for it, and I think that the flags-and-boots on the moon pretty much ruined what space travel means to both the country and NASA. Stunts, science exploration and national prestige aren't nearly enough. We needed to open it up to travel, mining, solar power sats and the terraria settlements needed to really pull off migration off-planet. Mars? It's a international wilderness park, not a business opportunity. O'Neill et al nailed the real purpose: get off this rock and into zero g to make places to live and pots of money and transmit enormous amounts of power to the home base. Anything else is just a stunt.
Using computers to register, count, transfer, and archive vote tallies is impossible to do without an almost certain effort to alter the vote totals by parties interior to the project (people creating and maintaining the systems and the show runners) and outside the project ("hackers"). Of the two, the insiders are far more likely.
This is not a failure of tech or of implementation. This is a human thing: those disposed to alter election tallies have infinite motivation to find a way to do it. They can either slip in during the coding phase or the implementation phase, or even during the elections. Like rats, they will find a way.
The difference between paper and electronic is basic: paper leaves a physical trail. E-voting can be rigged to leave NO trace. IS rigged to leave no trace. No audit is possible: all audits are predicated that the datasets and code are correct to begin with. If someone slips in backdoors, they can alter vote totals in real time and therefore all recounts will be "accurate". Paper receipts are useless, because what is printed is not necessarily what actually happened. Paper printouts that are reviewed by the voter on site for accuracy and then stored in boxes by the voting agents *can* be a valuable check, for the paper should match the e-count. But why then the extra step of the computer? Just use paper to begin with. Canada does it (I hope still does) and they count elections by hand in three hours, no matter what the size, local or national, because human counting easily scales.
Source code is worthless as a trace. One never knows what the machine is actually doing from microsecond to microsecond; the code executed need not match what you see on the source. This makes coders heads explode, but it is true. The machine can be programmed to lie. I know this, because I have done it, on orders from my bosses, in the past, to make a bit more money for my company. Cheating is easy and it is undetectable if you are even marginally clever about it. The count can also be altered far from the source tabulating machine and local system, at other levels. Such malignancy will not be accounted for by the counting company; their rep is on the line, they don't believe it is possible and further they don't want to know.
Use e-voting and you will see the powerful grab control, one way or another. Use paper.
Apple is not "declining". They are growing. (They also make most of the profit.) Android is growing fast, Apple is growing fast. Both statements can be true at the same time. Both can win. This is not a zero-sum game. Your opponent doesn't have to die so that you can live.
Kill shuttles, kill the DC-X, kill spaceplanes, kill research, find the cheapest possible source of launchers. Make a business out of manned spaceflight. So now we're hostage to Russia, because they were cheaper than building a reusable launch system. SpaceX ain't ready yet. So, we're screwed. May Elon Musk get what he wishes for, and may he be able to deliver. Next month.
A President will be allowed to increase the power of the loose confederacy of those really in charge. Never to decrease. You think Presidents run the US? They're just executives, not kings.
Don't let those five smug-n-stupid white men rule on any - ANY - matter until one of them dies and we can fix the Reagan/Bush stacking. Wait. Don't let them set precedents. Avoid engagement. They can wreck the future of the human race, as the US is pretty much ruling the world.
God help us all from people like you.
We can't pay poor people a few bucks to eat, but we've infinite cash for surveillance and war. Who the hell is threatening us with chemicals? The US had THE stockpiles of nerve toxins on this planet. We still haven't gotten rid of it all. And for what did we make enough poison to wipe out all life on earth a million times? We seem to be the biggest threat on the planet, by far.
Or don't pay your condo association fees for a month. Or homeowners association fees. They can confiscate.
There's no place in the world you can live where a bastard can't figure out a legal way to steal your home. Never was. Government or private. Remember the hundreds of thousands of faked refinance agreements that banks and capital groups used to steal people's homes in the last ten years? Got clean away with it. Kept the houses, too. We can't touch them anymore. Red handed, and they walked away with tiny fines.
The only defense against thieves? Live somewhere they don't want to live, or where they can't figure a way to rent your property for a good price. This is the new Gilded Age, and the bastards are just getting warmed up. We're gonna see what supercapital trillionaires are capable of in our lifetimes.
Nope. They won't. Renters are peons. No leverage. The leverage is money. Too many rich people, too many trust funds. Better for the landlords (capital funds will buy up the good units very soon now) to evict and replace with more affluent renters - or even better, write some new laws so the landlords can rent the units out at AirBnB prices themselves. Why not?
Really. Can't rent an apartment there, can't rent a hotel room there, can't breath the air there without a trust fund. Godz forbid we should find a way not to pay the rapacious owners of San Francisco even more money. No, this is not the way the free market goes, Rand Fans. This market will never be "free". It's monopoly of space. Space is limited. There's too much money in the city. Prices go up. Eventually the place is full of empty apartments owned by capital funds and by Saudi and Colombian investors, as London has shown us. Free for whom? No the people who live there, damn it. They're peons now.
Capital funds are now rolling up the apartments into securities now, and selling them on Wall Street as investments. Of course, surrounded by derivative bets. No chance of a crash there, eventually. And the complaints of a reduction if not elimination of maintenance are of course rolling in, 'cause that's what an unfree market does: charge you more for less and less.
Don't care about the laws. Laws are bought by the owners of the city, and we duck around them as best we can. If you are rich enough, you ignore the laws and pay the fines if they catch you. Or just buy a new law, just for you. The law is a joke. Contracts are a joke. We have no power to negotiate a better deal, so the hell with it.
Don't see an end to the hoovering up of the peon army's piggy banks any time soon. Students now owe a trillion dollars in student loans that most can never repay in their lifetimes, and additionally they'll have to live in cars or trucks when the rentiers start enforcing the limits on the number of people living in a single unit. Don't want those poor people in your neighborhood. And "poor" is a relative term. The middle class are starting to understand that they are the new "poor" now, in some places.
Where the hell are people gonna live? This is amusing. SF might become a true Randian paradise. A lost cause for 95+ per cent of the population. New York used to have rent control, and that might have saved SF from the upcoming years of rage; but "free" markets are the rule now. Let's see what happens. Vomit on the buses? That's the beginning. We're replaying the 1930's. Gonna have to start getting those private security forces, rich people. (Odd thing: if you've money, you tell your private police what to do. If you don't have capital, public police tell *you* what to do)
End result, less money from tourists, visitors and job seekers looking for a place to crash while finding their bearings. The rentiers don't care; they're rich anyway. Also, the people paying 4000 - FOUR THOUSAND DOLLARS A MONTH for their two bedroom can't make a little cash back. They can't buy the appropriate laws. Shrug. Lost cause here.
Keep it simple stupid - an engineering principle that has been tossed out forever.
Another damned piece of electronics that will fail in less than seven years. Another piece of electronic junk with a thousand dollar replacement or repair price tag (dealer cost to you). More damned code that can fail. More maintenance costs. More power consumption. More holes in the shell to let rust in. Tech lust as engineering.
Geeze, let's not use a MIRROR. My side view mirror was just torn off by a speed-crazed yuppie - it cost me 23 bucks to replace it, good as new, from an eBay vendor. Shipping included.
the idea is to make damned sure that no new car will have a lifetime greater than seven to ten years. New cars, new debt without end. Cars as smart phones - unrepairable. Toss 'em out and get a new one will be the only option. The used car market will slowly shrivel and finally die when the last repairable car gets totaled.
So? We constitutionally shipped back a liner of refugees back to Germany to die before WW II. "Constitutional" doesn't mean "moral". This is about right and wrong - concepts about which business law is devoutly silent.
You really don't understand what Baidu is. It's a fascist corporation teamed with the Chinese government to perception manage a billion people. It's not a plucky lemonade stand. It's not a business.
Thus, in libertarian heaven, all search engines are indeed private, so... everything you read and see and hear is subject to whatever the company owners collectively think you should. Tyranny, same as if they owned the roads you travel on.
"Sorry, My. Grumpy, but our manager informs that you are not welcome on Roads Numbers 456-780. Please remove your vehicle from our private property or we'll notify our private police force, which you'll notice have a laser battery pointed at you up above. And oh, yes, it seems you are banned on all competing roads in the area, just to give you a heads up. You must have got someone important angry over at corporate, ha ha. You know, watch what you say, watch what you do. Words to live by, indeed. We hope for your future patronage on the Richard Cheney Memorial Highway System, Incorporated. Have a nice day. Get out or get shot."
Doesn't mean you have to obey another country's laws, either. I'm looking at you, Yahoo.
Bullshit.
A nation of business-addled fools blindly following their bosses' leads.
God handed the constitution to Jefferson on a mountain in the 1780's? The founders did not envision a private (government-controlled, for fuck's sake!) company controlling access to the world. They didn't have to. They didn't want to. They expected us to evolve and add more rights. They did not see the document as holy writ. They gave us the 9th amendment to slap us in the face with that fact. Rights exist whether or not the holy book explicitly enumerates those rights. So, fuck the constitution, as I am sure Jefferson would say. Fuck private company takeover of the world. Corporations are legal government-created fictions. They are OUR dogs. We are not theirs. HEEL, bitches.
Corporation only exist by government fiat. They have no other existence and derive all rights from our common will through our laws. They are a game, a fiction, a cheat.
Shoved into a Supreme Court ruling by a former railroad trust lobbyist turned Supreme Court clerk using his unique position. Never was our choice.
In China is there is only one microphone. Sucks to be the rest of the universe, I guess.