And they would then be subject to all kinds of monopoly legislation, both in the US and the EU. The main reason that Microsoft stopped Apple from going under was so that they could claim that they had no monopoly on desktop operating systems. If Apple had folded, Microsoft would probably have had to inject cash into Linux, Gnome and/or KDE. They wouldn't want to do that...Apple had to succeed well enough to be a credible desktop threat, but not well enough to be a real threat.
So, AC, what are the errors? If I am wrong - and I operated that system for over 4 years and had it safety certified - please explain what they are.
Nowhere did I say I was writing about bluewater cruising sailboats. Their needs are quite different and they don't normally marinise production engines, but use small dedicated auxiliaries like Yanmars, Buchs and Listers, along with dedicated packaged generators which are quieter because there is no sound output from the hood via the shaft.. I was describing what is done with a whole lot of small powerboats including inshore and river cruisers in Europe, where not enough sun is available and one is frequently moored sheltered from wind.
Normally I can't be arsed to respond to ACs, especially when there is no possible issue of confidentiality of information being conveyed, but if you are going to warn someone off using this approach you need to spell out the errors. So what are they, so I can respond to them?
A very simple system is to put in a higher rated marine alternator, already available for conversion kits for marinising many older engines, and something like a Sterling ABY130 (I think) which is an intelligent charger with 2 outputs, one for the starter battery and one for the domestic battery bank. The Sterling device not only splits the load, it has all sorts of intelligence built in to provide anti-sulfating and to prioritise the starter battery. It charges the domestic battery to full charge, which most rigs simply do not do. It also waits till the engine is at speed before putting a load on the alternator, protecting the drive belt. Make sure there is plenty of space around it for the fan to circulate air. I ran one for years without problems. Get your 110V from a good quality inverter, put a 32W solar panel on the roof as a booster for your starter battery, put in a couple of leisure 110AH batteries as your domestic bank (100A traction fuses in the leads to each, min cross-section 25mm squared supply cable) , make sure you have a 2kg powder fire extinguisher on board, and you should be happy.
Modern car tires are sufficiently conductive that static buildup is rarely a problem except when conditions are so dry that ground resistance is very high - which would stop the conductive strip from working. (And yes, I have done work in this area, while working in R&D for a company that made antistatic and lightning protection products.)
It said "actual lightning is pure electrostatic DC anyway". It is not. I think on reflection the GGP may have meant "electrostatic discharge", but in any case lightning is not a "direct current" in the usual sense of the word. DC is used to mean a circuit where conventional current flows from a higher to a lower potential (obviously the electrons actually flow from lower to higher potential but that's a whole other can of worms).
In lightning an initial spike ionises air, and then the next spike of current travels down the ionised track. Electrons move one way, ions move in different directions depending on charge. Because the velocity and population density of both is changing very rapidly, EM fields are generated with gradients in varying directions. It is about as unlike a one-way current in a wire or an electron beam in vacuo as you can easily get.
My complaint with the GGP was that it is an inaccurate description of what happens, contains nonsense like "surrounded by a dense gold shield", and yet gets moderated up to +5 despite it.
As Max Hastings (UK military historian) observes, the problem with the US military is that they imagine that a sufficiently large and advanced weapon will bring a war to an end quickly. The Manhattan project reinforced this mindset, although the conventional bombing of Japan was more lethal than the atom bombing, and it may merely have provided a pretext for the Emperor to rule that the war should end. Since WW2, the approach hasn't worked. But generals and military bureaucrats are always trying to fight the last big war over again.
They are suitable for modulation (as in broadcast) but for straight microwaves a magnetron is your generator of choice. It really is so simple that when the first magnetron was taken from the UK to the US as part of WW2 technology exchange, the reaction of the American engineers was "It's just a diode and a magnet! Why didn't we think of that?" Apocryphally one engineer remarked "It's just an electronic dog whistle", to which another replied "Explain a dog whistle". However...
Years ago a few of us playing with a 500W magnetron did manage to light a small bulb connected to a dipole a few meters away, and deflect the needle of an Avometer with a loop aerial at about 10M. But focussing is a pig, and your claims of knocking out wifi over a mile away with a poxy little 200W is nonsense. There is this thing called the inverse square law. You would be better off with a maser, but even so to do any damage you would need to keep the beam in the same place for quite some time, and with two moving vehicles this will be difficult. Vehicle electronics are rather well protected nowadays, and there are few points you could hit where the beam would transmit significant energy into the ECU. The ECU connections are protected with transient suppressors, and can normally withstand 28V for a while.
You'd do much better with a high intensity cobalt-60 pulse source, but again getting the range without either killing yourself with radiation or having to transport the ass end of a nuclear sub around with you might prove difficult.
If it is electrostatic it is not a direct current (hint: static=not moving, current = moving).
Lightning normally consists of two pulses, one up and one down. The latter usually contains most of the current, but as it is a pulse with a rapidly rising leading edge, the EM field is considerable. The terms "AC" and "DC" do not really apply in this case.
The significant thing is not so much the frequency spectrum of the pulse, but the actual cross section of the ionised region through which the current is passing. If this is relatively large, the current density is low and a Faraday cage is effective. If it is small, the current density may be so high that the actual resistance of the target becomes important; the heat generated may melt a hole in the target resulting in the penetration of ionised gas into the target and current flowing down it. This explains rare cases where a lightning rod has not sufficiently reduced the potential gradient over a building, and the first strike has blown a hole in one of the conductors and then perhaps jumped into the building and started a fire. (I have seen photos of this effect but not seen them anywhere on the net.)
The idea of a target surrounded by a "dense gold shield" is just plain silly, by the way. All gold is dense...and a thick gold shield would be impracticably expensive. Copper is fine (higher melting point and greater thermal capacity than aluminum) but reinforced concrete with the rebar internally welded together would be much cheaper, more generally effective, and should easily be able to cope with the very limited power available from any human-built weapon.
Both are ways of seeking malicious intermediation in other people's activities, and seeking to glean entrepreneurial profit. (It is also called "rent-seeking"). Patent trolls seek to make money by the ownership of the right to do something in which they have no actual interest: hedge funds try to manipulate the price of commodities which they neither produce nor consume, also for profit.
If patent litigation was limited to inventors and the users of the inventions, and commodities derivatives were limited to actual producers and consumers, I suspect we would see a sudden reduction in income inequality. But it isn't going to happen, because the accumulation of wealth with the entrepreneurs gives them too much control over law and its enforcement.
(I am using entrepreneur in the literal sense of a middleman who seeks to profit without adding value; its meaning has been extended to "people who start productive businesses", which is part of the devaluation of linguistic currency that has helped getting us into this mess.)
I believe that most Google staff are Linux users and they are rather well paid. So you might be right. I imagine the average hobbyist Linux user would be a hard sell for escort services. "You charge what?? I could get a new computer for that and I wouldn't need to shower after I'd paid for it."
I don't have a facebook profile, just a locked down empty page to stop minor identity theft. And I am worried that in some parts of the world, including parts of the USA, ending anonymity would put legitimate posters about abuses at some risk. Whistleblowing on local crime and corruption is an important function of newspapers. But otherwise I think this is a sound idea. One option might be to block all posts which contain entries from a variety of keywords with a message saying "You appear to be advertising. To continue you must buy a subscription using a credit or debit card. Only one subscription will be allowed per credit card number. $X buys you Y words. Occasional advertisers will be charged at small-ad rates, frequent advertisers will be charged commercial rates, available on request". Subscription posts would then be labelled as such.
The one-credit-card rule is to make it harder for political parties to bankroll lots of students, especially under-18s.
If I want to say that Councillor Bent Warpson is a thief, a liar and a serial sheep abuser, I can always write the local newspaper a letter.
I've mentioned this before, but at a meeting of the British Association my supervisor in psychology, a statistics expert, presented a graph of the size estimates of Pluto and predicted a date for it to disappear.
Then he presented the calculations used to arrive at each size estimate from observation and showed how the published results had all been placed at the very top end of the (decreasing with time) range - because there was a strong desire to have Pluto larger than it was measured to be. When a line was drawn through the mean observations it was practically horizontal.
"Hard" scientists are often exposed to significant bias which they do not recognise as such (the desire for confirmation, peer pressure, management desire to get a drug approved, justification of an expensive experiment). My own view is that this needs to be presented to social sciences students, but with a clear understanding that this cannot be extrapolated to the strange idea that science is purely a social construct - an idea presumably promoted by some sociologists and philosophers who obviously failed the more mathematical parts of their courses.
I think the fact that you are posting this on Slashdot more or less rules you out of getting a job in this area.
That said, how is your knowledge of statistics, probability theory, game theory and/or real time computing? Finance is basically applied maths with a good dollop of psychology and an understanding of self-promotion. This is as true now as it was in the 14th century. If you want to succeed as a designer of upmarket sports cars, expertise in the design of sparking plugs is possibly not the best starting point.
I had a comment moderated up and then moderated down to 0 which was, I thought, a really quite unbiased comparison of the Apple and Microsoft approach which did not attack either company. I concluded, based on this and other similarly moderated posts by other people, that the PR companies of both Apple and MS employ people who gain moderation rights and then moderate down anything which is either a reasoned analysis that might get lifted by a journalist, or a snappy comment that might get picked up by one. In a time of high unemployment of people in the 18-25 age group, this is a relatively cheap PR spend that is easy to sell to managements. Although we often mock it, Slashdot is still perceived in many areas as being influential, especially among developers and IT departments.
I also get comments like this one moderated down - so it's another test post.
The last head of Rolls Royce was a psychologist, and he did the job that was needed - to get it across to "traders" and "investors" that RR was a reliable delivery vehicle for long term shareholder value and that short-termism made no sense. I suggest that the problem is quite different. Psychopathic personalities tend to accumulate where there is power without obvious accountability. The management of large corporations constitute a perfect field of operations where the complexities and the sheer scale mean that psychopaths can carve out private empires and remain un-noticed for long periods. In a small company, a dysfunctional asshole pursuing his own interests gets noticed quickly.
It is hard for a psychopath to become a good engineer or scientist; it is a career they avoid.
It's interesting (to me at least) that the founders of RIM, faced with a product and management succession crisis, developed a new CEO internally, while Nokia faced with the same crisis brought in a manager from Microsoft. Although both companies are in serious doo-doos, RIM is still profitable and it is Nokia that has been left to develop a load of phones for Microsoft which they are then told will not be supported by the next OS. What's more, RIM owns its next-gen OS and has customers for it in other fields, while Nokia is now completely owned by Microsoft.
Unfortunately it is all too easy to confuse being a psychopath with rugged American individualism.
So let me see: a Canadian company is speculated about by a Murdoch-owned newspaper in the UK with no evidence and no sources, this is referred to by Reuters, and you translate this as "RIM is now openly mulling...."
Remind me again why anybody should take your pronouncement seriously?
No. Apple got lucky through a very cunning plan. The iPhone and then the iPad were goods aimed at people with a high disposable income. Which mostly rules out technical people. They planned for volume and they planned to get as much lock in as possible for their manufacturers by buying up component production. They basically identified a new market and went all out for it. Perhaps this was facilitated because Jobs knew he did not have many years left and would go down as the man who made Apple or who destroyed it - just as Hitler thought that he would either become the ruler of all Europe or preside over the complete destruction of Germany and, at times, almost seemed not to care which.
Basically, they flooded the market and the only possible volume competitor was Samsung because they were a major leading-edge manufacturer themselves. Samsung actually responded pretty fast, but they had lost the biggest tranche of the target market. It's significant that their best selling tablet is a big phone. Their volumes do not generate the profits needed to stay ahead technically as Apple has done.
This will stop when the technology is good enough, which I think is quite close. Once the parts are there for anyone to make a good enough tablet, product differentiation becomes harder and price comes into play. This could be as soon as 2013 - battery life is now good enough, screens are good enough, manufacturers are differentiating on features like water resistance.
I think MS is getting involved now because the commodity hardware will be good enough to run even Windows on a small format machine. They are OEMing in an effort to keep some additional margin for themselves. But that may not save them from growing irrelevance.
It will be seen as the year when the desktop computer started its real decline and the ordinary user started to replace desktops and laptops with small-screen machines, the majority of which run Linux and just about all of which run POSIX-compliant Unix-like operating systems. Meanwhile at home televisions are being replaced by Internet-connected machines which run...Linux. Microsoft is being squeezed in two directions.
The worst stuff is in fact on television and is cleared for viewing by children. Fast food, gratuitous violence, conspicuous consumption. While I have concerns about things like objectification - whether of women or men - the worst objectification isn't a few pictures of naked women on the Internet; it is the ruthless objectification promoted by "reality" shows, "dating" shows and so on.
I simply don't think that 9 year olds should be using the Internet unsupervised. But I definitely think that children should not have TV sets in their rooms. (In fact, the majority view of my children is not to have TV in the house).
A near miss is just that; a miss that was close to the target. Example: "The shell was a near miss but the helmsman on the bridge was killed by a splinter".
In Latin "Prius" is not a noun, and so radius/radii does not apply. Normal rules of English mean the plural of Prius the vehicle is Priuses. (And the plural of octopus is similarly octopuses; it is not a Latin word but the Greek "oktopous", and its Greek plural is oktopodes.)
As the Latin tag says, "Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius" (those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they send mad thinking about the plural of Prius".
Island soon to be covered in condos rented to Oracle's many, many lawyers so they can recover in comfort from the shock of a judge explaining to them that their client's suit had no merit. Not nice. Before long when Ellison picks up the phone to his lawyers they'll be out working on more important cases - contested parking tickets, for instance. Going to court with zilch case may be the fault of the client, but it still won't look good on his lawyers' CVs.
When she was elected, I thought Louise Mensch might actually be some use in Parliament. Certainly a lot of the attacks on her have been (a) unmerited and (b) seem to come from people who are not quite right in the head. But Arianna Huffington she is not. And it is pretty clear that, no matter how MPs of all parties may complain about News International and its proprietor, David Cameron is determined that no harm shall come to Murdoch, his cashflow, or (given the retention of Hunt) Murdoch's moles. Rather than waste time on a website doomed to oblivion, shouldn't she be trying to get her own party on board the prevention of foreign media interference in the UK Government?
I think the real difference is nothing to do with computer power; after all the Russian space program used drum timers (rad hard and easy to test). The difference is that, to Western countries at least, immediately after a war, casualties in non-military exploits are more acceptable. As time goes on and the threat of war recedes, they are less so. The Moon landings were possible for the US because it was still involved in Vietnam and still perceived the Soviet Union as a credible threat; the risk to the lives of a few astronauts was nothing compared to the 70 000 US dead in Vietnam.
In 2012, the perceived risk to a relatively few individuals dominates. The Shuttle disasters were nothing compared to the number of people killed on the roads, but were high profile. The result is that any manned expeditions have a huge safety overhead not present in the past, making them more expensive and harder to carry out. The Chinese government won't care. Their internal propaganda still has lots of stories of heroic cadres killed spreading Communism, and the like. A few dozen deaths getting to the Moon will not matter compared to the national prestige.
Incidentally I think we are right. Prestige is not worth killing people for. The Mars rovers and the probes sent to outer planets are in reality a far greater achievement than putting people on the Moon, and there is a point to them; for instance, we are now aware of the dangers of asteroid/cometary collisions and are starting to think seriously about averting them, and the ability to study weather and geology on other planets has huge implications for climate modeling. It may not be practical to get the human race off this rock (I happen to think the economics are completely against it), but what we are learning about the rest of the Solar System could have a huge impact on how long we are able to keep inhabiting it.
Slashdot Mirror
And they would then be subject to all kinds of monopoly legislation, both in the US and the EU. The main reason that Microsoft stopped Apple from going under was so that they could claim that they had no monopoly on desktop operating systems. If Apple had folded, Microsoft would probably have had to inject cash into Linux, Gnome and/or KDE. They wouldn't want to do that...Apple had to succeed well enough to be a credible desktop threat, but not well enough to be a real threat.
Nowhere did I say I was writing about bluewater cruising sailboats. Their needs are quite different and they don't normally marinise production engines, but use small dedicated auxiliaries like Yanmars, Buchs and Listers, along with dedicated packaged generators which are quieter because there is no sound output from the hood via the shaft.. I was describing what is done with a whole lot of small powerboats including inshore and river cruisers in Europe, where not enough sun is available and one is frequently moored sheltered from wind.
Normally I can't be arsed to respond to ACs, especially when there is no possible issue of confidentiality of information being conveyed, but if you are going to warn someone off using this approach you need to spell out the errors. So what are they, so I can respond to them?
A very simple system is to put in a higher rated marine alternator, already available for conversion kits for marinising many older engines, and something like a Sterling ABY130 (I think) which is an intelligent charger with 2 outputs, one for the starter battery and one for the domestic battery bank. The Sterling device not only splits the load, it has all sorts of intelligence built in to provide anti-sulfating and to prioritise the starter battery. It charges the domestic battery to full charge, which most rigs simply do not do. It also waits till the engine is at speed before putting a load on the alternator, protecting the drive belt. Make sure there is plenty of space around it for the fan to circulate air. I ran one for years without problems. Get your 110V from a good quality inverter, put a 32W solar panel on the roof as a booster for your starter battery, put in a couple of leisure 110AH batteries as your domestic bank (100A traction fuses in the leads to each, min cross-section 25mm squared supply cable) , make sure you have a 2kg powder fire extinguisher on board, and you should be happy.
Modern car tires are sufficiently conductive that static buildup is rarely a problem except when conditions are so dry that ground resistance is very high - which would stop the conductive strip from working. (And yes, I have done work in this area, while working in R&D for a company that made antistatic and lightning protection products.)
In lightning an initial spike ionises air, and then the next spike of current travels down the ionised track. Electrons move one way, ions move in different directions depending on charge. Because the velocity and population density of both is changing very rapidly, EM fields are generated with gradients in varying directions. It is about as unlike a one-way current in a wire or an electron beam in vacuo as you can easily get.
My complaint with the GGP was that it is an inaccurate description of what happens, contains nonsense like "surrounded by a dense gold shield", and yet gets moderated up to +5 despite it.
As Max Hastings (UK military historian) observes, the problem with the US military is that they imagine that a sufficiently large and advanced weapon will bring a war to an end quickly. The Manhattan project reinforced this mindset, although the conventional bombing of Japan was more lethal than the atom bombing, and it may merely have provided a pretext for the Emperor to rule that the war should end. Since WW2, the approach hasn't worked. But generals and military bureaucrats are always trying to fight the last big war over again.
Years ago a few of us playing with a 500W magnetron did manage to light a small bulb connected to a dipole a few meters away, and deflect the needle of an Avometer with a loop aerial at about 10M. But focussing is a pig, and your claims of knocking out wifi over a mile away with a poxy little 200W is nonsense. There is this thing called the inverse square law. You would be better off with a maser, but even so to do any damage you would need to keep the beam in the same place for quite some time, and with two moving vehicles this will be difficult. Vehicle electronics are rather well protected nowadays, and there are few points you could hit where the beam would transmit significant energy into the ECU. The ECU connections are protected with transient suppressors, and can normally withstand 28V for a while.
You'd do much better with a high intensity cobalt-60 pulse source, but again getting the range without either killing yourself with radiation or having to transport the ass end of a nuclear sub around with you might prove difficult.
Lightning normally consists of two pulses, one up and one down. The latter usually contains most of the current, but as it is a pulse with a rapidly rising leading edge, the EM field is considerable. The terms "AC" and "DC" do not really apply in this case.
The significant thing is not so much the frequency spectrum of the pulse, but the actual cross section of the ionised region through which the current is passing. If this is relatively large, the current density is low and a Faraday cage is effective. If it is small, the current density may be so high that the actual resistance of the target becomes important; the heat generated may melt a hole in the target resulting in the penetration of ionised gas into the target and current flowing down it. This explains rare cases where a lightning rod has not sufficiently reduced the potential gradient over a building, and the first strike has blown a hole in one of the conductors and then perhaps jumped into the building and started a fire. (I have seen photos of this effect but not seen them anywhere on the net.)
The idea of a target surrounded by a "dense gold shield" is just plain silly, by the way. All gold is dense...and a thick gold shield would be impracticably expensive. Copper is fine (higher melting point and greater thermal capacity than aluminum) but reinforced concrete with the rebar internally welded together would be much cheaper, more generally effective, and should easily be able to cope with the very limited power available from any human-built weapon.
If patent litigation was limited to inventors and the users of the inventions, and commodities derivatives were limited to actual producers and consumers, I suspect we would see a sudden reduction in income inequality. But it isn't going to happen, because the accumulation of wealth with the entrepreneurs gives them too much control over law and its enforcement.
(I am using entrepreneur in the literal sense of a middleman who seeks to profit without adding value; its meaning has been extended to "people who start productive businesses", which is part of the devaluation of linguistic currency that has helped getting us into this mess.)
I believe that most Google staff are Linux users and they are rather well paid. So you might be right. I imagine the average hobbyist Linux user would be a hard sell for escort services. "You charge what?? I could get a new computer for that and I wouldn't need to shower after I'd paid for it."
The one-credit-card rule is to make it harder for political parties to bankroll lots of students, especially under-18s.
If I want to say that Councillor Bent Warpson is a thief, a liar and a serial sheep abuser, I can always write the local newspaper a letter.
Then he presented the calculations used to arrive at each size estimate from observation and showed how the published results had all been placed at the very top end of the (decreasing with time) range - because there was a strong desire to have Pluto larger than it was measured to be. When a line was drawn through the mean observations it was practically horizontal.
"Hard" scientists are often exposed to significant bias which they do not recognise as such (the desire for confirmation, peer pressure, management desire to get a drug approved, justification of an expensive experiment). My own view is that this needs to be presented to social sciences students, but with a clear understanding that this cannot be extrapolated to the strange idea that science is purely a social construct - an idea presumably promoted by some sociologists and philosophers who obviously failed the more mathematical parts of their courses.
That said, how is your knowledge of statistics, probability theory, game theory and/or real time computing? Finance is basically applied maths with a good dollop of psychology and an understanding of self-promotion. This is as true now as it was in the 14th century. If you want to succeed as a designer of upmarket sports cars, expertise in the design of sparking plugs is possibly not the best starting point.
I also get comments like this one moderated down - so it's another test post.
It is hard for a psychopath to become a good engineer or scientist; it is a career they avoid.
It's interesting (to me at least) that the founders of RIM, faced with a product and management succession crisis, developed a new CEO internally, while Nokia faced with the same crisis brought in a manager from Microsoft. Although both companies are in serious doo-doos, RIM is still profitable and it is Nokia that has been left to develop a load of phones for Microsoft which they are then told will not be supported by the next OS. What's more, RIM owns its next-gen OS and has customers for it in other fields, while Nokia is now completely owned by Microsoft.
Unfortunately it is all too easy to confuse being a psychopath with rugged American individualism.
Remind me again why anybody should take your pronouncement seriously?
Basically, they flooded the market and the only possible volume competitor was Samsung because they were a major leading-edge manufacturer themselves. Samsung actually responded pretty fast, but they had lost the biggest tranche of the target market. It's significant that their best selling tablet is a big phone. Their volumes do not generate the profits needed to stay ahead technically as Apple has done.
This will stop when the technology is good enough, which I think is quite close. Once the parts are there for anyone to make a good enough tablet, product differentiation becomes harder and price comes into play. This could be as soon as 2013 - battery life is now good enough, screens are good enough, manufacturers are differentiating on features like water resistance.
I think MS is getting involved now because the commodity hardware will be good enough to run even Windows on a small format machine. They are OEMing in an effort to keep some additional margin for themselves. But that may not save them from growing irrelevance.
It will be seen as the year when the desktop computer started its real decline and the ordinary user started to replace desktops and laptops with small-screen machines, the majority of which run Linux and just about all of which run POSIX-compliant Unix-like operating systems. Meanwhile at home televisions are being replaced by Internet-connected machines which run...Linux. Microsoft is being squeezed in two directions.
In either case, bang goes the neighbourhood.
I simply don't think that 9 year olds should be using the Internet unsupervised. But I definitely think that children should not have TV sets in their rooms. (In fact, the majority view of my children is not to have TV in the house).
A near miss is just that; a miss that was close to the target. Example: "The shell was a near miss but the helmsman on the bridge was killed by a splinter".
As the Latin tag says, "Quem deus vult perdere, dementat prius" (those whom the Gods wish to destroy, they send mad thinking about the plural of Prius".
Island soon to be covered in condos rented to Oracle's many, many lawyers so they can recover in comfort from the shock of a judge explaining to them that their client's suit had no merit. Not nice. Before long when Ellison picks up the phone to his lawyers they'll be out working on more important cases - contested parking tickets, for instance. Going to court with zilch case may be the fault of the client, but it still won't look good on his lawyers' CVs.
When she was elected, I thought Louise Mensch might actually be some use in Parliament. Certainly a lot of the attacks on her have been (a) unmerited and (b) seem to come from people who are not quite right in the head. But Arianna Huffington she is not. And it is pretty clear that, no matter how MPs of all parties may complain about News International and its proprietor, David Cameron is determined that no harm shall come to Murdoch, his cashflow, or (given the retention of Hunt) Murdoch's moles. Rather than waste time on a website doomed to oblivion, shouldn't she be trying to get her own party on board the prevention of foreign media interference in the UK Government?
In 2012, the perceived risk to a relatively few individuals dominates. The Shuttle disasters were nothing compared to the number of people killed on the roads, but were high profile. The result is that any manned expeditions have a huge safety overhead not present in the past, making them more expensive and harder to carry out. The Chinese government won't care. Their internal propaganda still has lots of stories of heroic cadres killed spreading Communism, and the like. A few dozen deaths getting to the Moon will not matter compared to the national prestige.
Incidentally I think we are right. Prestige is not worth killing people for. The Mars rovers and the probes sent to outer planets are in reality a far greater achievement than putting people on the Moon, and there is a point to them; for instance, we are now aware of the dangers of asteroid/cometary collisions and are starting to think seriously about averting them, and the ability to study weather and geology on other planets has huge implications for climate modeling. It may not be practical to get the human race off this rock (I happen to think the economics are completely against it), but what we are learning about the rest of the Solar System could have a huge impact on how long we are able to keep inhabiting it.