The mark of good games is when you can still pick up and play them 5, 10, 15 or even 25 years from now and they are just as good as the first time you picked them up.
I can't say that many Xbox or PS1 games can say that. On the other hand, almost the entire NES library seems to be filled with examples that are just as fun today as they were back in the day without having to put on rose-tinted glasses of saying that this game was fun for its time.
And yes, despite the fact that it can prevent cancer we still have opposition to it.
Re:In the End...
on
Why Microsoft?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It makes a lot of sense not to join the army if you don't like/trust the president.
It doesn't make sense to not work as a high-paid lower-level employee if you don't like the CEO because chances are, his decisions will only slightly affect you.
Good luck finding people who support nuclear fission. Even though it is one of the safest, most economical, sources of power so called "green" activists will prevent us from building any more. Its becoming increasingly obvious that the environmentalist movement doesn't care about us being sustainable, but rather us living like we did 300 years ago.
Microsoft isn't that bad...
on
Why Microsoft?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Microsoft wouldn't really be that bad to work at because all their problems occur in management. Everyone who I've talked to that works at Microsoft loves it, the reasons their products are crap is because they have terrible management, separate people into "teams" which have little communication with each other, then they have separate "teams" working on the same product... which ends up being a mess.
This is all incredibly stupid. First off, we should never have a "cyber cold war" because we shouldn't put our fucking important infrastructure on the internet! If it could harm human lives if it goes down and there isn't a non-networked backup that can be used at a millisecond's notice, it shouldn't be on the internet.
If you've spent 2.3 billion to construct another power plant and you are too lazy to actually staff it, something tells me an extra $150,000 to run dedicated lines from it to your main office is just a drop in the bucket.
If we can lay a direct telephone line between Washington DC and Moscow to prevent a nuclear war, something tells me we can afford to lay some cable 10 miles to prevent some "cyber cold war"
Except that they didn't, now did they? They built a limited government, and it expanded again and again, because the limited one just wasn't enough.
As with all governments, the idealists always lose their (good intentioned) ideals when in power. One only needs to look at the history of Soviet Russia to see that, what was started as having a class-free society quickly became a "hey, I have unlimited power, lets use it!", I really hate to bring up Animal Farm but it highlights exactly what happens when a government gets into power, um, freedom of speech, yeah, we really didn't mean it go be used against the government...
This quick erosion from good-intentioned ideals to being what they opposed is why the founding fathers wrote the constitution, however, they were quick to ignore it (look at the Alien and Sedition Acts)
And if I use that right to not take a vaccine, get the disease, and it mutates on my body so that it'll bypass vaccinations of my neighbours, I've just harmed them through my choices.
Not really because it was simply the virus mutating as it would normally. While there are some arguments in favor of mandatory vaccinations, there are several side effects to various vaccines and it should be up to the person if they want to take them or not.
Now, if you were intentionally mutating viruses to make deadly strains (like the government has done in their biological warfare programs...) that is a different story.
I suppose I should have clarified, I meant economic freedom, not complete disregard to the economic sector. Governments should be able to enforce contracts, prosecute fraud, etc. but not interfere with free trade and the like.
can I demand my female secretary to "entertain" me and my guests?
You can't demand, but if you pay someone to do sexual or other acts and they accept, that should be perfectly acceptable.
what's minimum wage (answer "none" and watch what happens when people get the choice between starvation and rebellion).
No, answer none and the prices of goods reflect it. The reasons why people in developed countries don't starve isn't because of government welfare, it isn't because of minimum wage it is the simple fact of technology. Consider making a loaf of bread back in the 1600s, first someone had to plant and tend the wheat. What took a day to accomplish using the labor of 20 people can be done in a few hours by the work of one person. Secondly, once the wheat was ready to be harvested people had to go out into the field with a scythe then take it in and separate it from the chafe. Today, we have combines that can do all of that. Next, they had to grind the wheat into flour using stone and livestock, today we can do that all electrically. Then the bread would be baked.
What used to take several people several days to make a loaf of bread can now be done by a few people rather quickly.
So naturally the price reflects that. Considering this huge technological leap in 400 years, it is now cheaper to buy food. Because of this, in order to maintain their business, the prices of food would stay relatively the same proportional to their wages.
However, what minimum wage -does- do is it pays people less than what they are actually doing. For example, everyone gets taken down to the lowest level, if someone who says "welcome to walmart" has to make say, $7 an hour, other people have to take pay cuts to keep a low-skills job. It also prevents wage competition, because everyone has an idea what low-skills labor is "worth" they are only going to pay that minimum. Effectively creating a "trust" between businesses.
Government is always limited, unless you happen to live in a dictatorship. Everyone agrees that letting Caligula have unlimited power is bad; the controversy is about where the limits lay.
No, what I'm advocating is that there are certain areas which the government can't interfere in. The problem with consensus is that people many times in the face of fear or euphoria lose logic. I'm sure that you could find a consensus on September 12th to go to war with Afghanistan but it was disastrous.
There needs to be clear limits to what the government can and can't do, and no matter how many people agree with allowing the government to increase power, they can't.
Plus, consensus leads to groupthink and a decline of rationality. No one wants to be the person to speak out against a plan, and a consensus can never be accurately formed with secret ballot so you have all the pitfalls of large groups of people.
Also, consensus is too vague, either you still have the majority against the minority pitfall of plain old democracy, or you put veto power in a few individuals. While its easy to say "we've got 70 yes votes and 10 no votes" and make decisions that way, it is a lot harder to do that with a consensus. For example, if out of 100 people, you have 95 supporters and 5 dissenters who are vocal, what happens? On one hand, you have only a 5% of the people who are against it, but at the same time you have 95% of people who are supporting it. Can you really say consensus has been reached? It also allows for people to sell their vote more effectively, if there was really only one dissenter, who bought 4 people's votes, in an ordinary election it would be too expensive and too obvious to buy everyone's vote, but in a consensus it is easier.
If rather than have a consensus for a vote, you had simply limited government so the scope of government involving that issue was eliminated, you'd have less elections and less problems.
Consensus voting isn't exactly a bad thing, but first and foremost the government needs to be limited as to not ever encroach on the rights of others, even if it is 1,000 to one.
Lets face it, yeah, wi-fi routers can be hacked, yeah, a lot of people don't have secure wi-fi, but in all honesty does it matter to most people? Credit card information already should be encrypted with HTTPS so that wouldn't be sniffed, most sites let you use security to log in, etc.
Just make a limited government like the framers of the US constitution were planning and the majority of real issues go away.
Democracy leads to mob rule no matter how carefully you plan it. A limited government using democracy leads to peace and prosperity. But the point is, the government has to be very limited to prevent abuses.
Take for instance gay marriage, if your neighbor is gay does that make you gay? If you are gay and your neighbor is straight does that make you less gay? The very idea of taking something that shouldn't be a government problem and making it into an issue in elections is simply the tyranny of the majority, and I don't think that meta-government or any other solution other than limited government would prevent these things because these issues are becoming more and more common.
There are a ton of rights that the government, and by extension the people, should have no say in your exercise of them. The freedom of your own body, to do whatever you wish to it without harming others is a basic right. The right to free expression is a basic right. The right to own property, to engage in business, and to be entitled to the fruit of your labors are all basic rights too. These things should have no government involvement and by extension democracy should not violate them.
Democracy, metagovernment, etc. is only worthwhile when the government is limited, that is the key point. The key point isn't that we live in a democracy, the key point is that we were/are under a limited government.
Exactly. The -vast- majority of mathematics have little to no practical application to most people.
If you want to be a computer science, physics or other math-heavy person, go for it. But really, for the majority of the population, simply having a calculator to add, subtract, multiply and divide is enough for them.
Kids should be able to use the internet, their neighbors, laptops, cell phones, Wikipedia, etc. to solve problems. The memorization part will come later. In the real world, no one sits down to their job and has to have all these dates memorized.
Its really a waste of time to have kids memorize useless information. Education should be teaching kids skills primarily, then having kids take classes which interest them and relate to their chosen career field and have them take those classes.
Lets face it, its nice to know when the reign of King George III started, but unless that is your field of expertise, you should simply know the skills needed to Google the question.
Our education system was made for a world without a huge search-able database of data. To look up even a basic fact would take a few minutes, not just a few seconds.
No, you praise the good and you let natural consequences come with the bad.
There are a lot of things that are in essence harmless that parents forbid. For example, eating cookies rather than vegetables. Why do you think so many Americans are fat? It is because they've been conditioned from an early age that cookies = good, vegetables = bad. When parents say that the kids are only allowed say, 2 cookies a day, but don't ration something like corn, beans and broccoli, kids quickly realize that cookies are more "valuable" and it is what they desire.
If a kid, at an early age, isn't restricted eating sweets, they will get a stomach ache and quit craving them so much. But when sweets are used as a reward, it conditions them to crave them.
Same thing with R rated movies, if your 13 year old kid thinks they want to watch "Scary creepy gorefest III" you should let them, if they get nightmares, well, it is their choice.
There are of course a few things which you should forbid, but you should only forbid them rationally, letting natural consequences take the place of parental intervention. A kid who fails a class and has to repeat it learns the value of studying a lot more than a kid who is forced to study day after day.
What needs to happen is that managers need to stop grading people on their behavior and focus instead on things related to work. Just because someone had a few drinks once and has some pictures on Facebook with them holding a beer doesn't make them not qualified.
When managers finally pull their head out of their buzzword-laced asses and realize that we are all humans, and that personal and private lives rarely are similar and simply give jobs to people who are qualified, this will be a non-issue.
If I was a manager, I wouldn't care if my applicant was a drunk, enjoys partying on the weekends and hell, so long as they showed up to work and got the work done decently, I couldn't care less if they showed up to work hungover in the morning.
But alas, I don't think I can handle all the buzzwords to become a manager.
Exactly. Heck, strict parenting has your kids go wild later in life. The people who control their kids lives in middle and high school either have a massive rebellion in high school, or if they put them in the college that the kid doesn't want to go to, they will rebel later in life.
If you don't let your kids do little things (watch R rated movies, hang out with friends, read what they want to, etc.) and then whenever they do realize that those things aren't really harmful, they will question your judgment on things that are harmful, such as drinking and driving.
When parents cry wolf at every little silly harmless "moral panic" they lose credibility with their kids.
I wonder, what will the next great "moral panic" be? Quite honestly, I hope this is the last one, because every "moral panic" only harms the world, does nothing to benefit it and there was never any harm to begin with.
Why is it that the masses and the media can't differentiate between real threats and panic?
Public labs at a university. While I have a hard time thinking of any time that I -need- to log into Facebook and can't just use, say, a smartphone app. There are a lot of occasions where in university you realize that there is something you need to do online (such as quickly type and turn in a paper you just remembered is due in 2 hours) but you can't trust the security of a lab computer (its pretty easy to install hardware keyloggers that just go between the PS2 or USB port and capture keystrokes) so you end up logging into an unsecured machine.
Like another poster said most phones already have a Facebook app. But really, that is why you have a lock on your phone if you are around people who you don't trust.
The space shuttle isn't the thing private spaceflight needs, it is the plans to the space shuttle, the blueprints needed with all the calculations paid for by our tax dollars that are so frequently classified. We've had a ton of R&D go into making our spaceflight and it ends up being all scrapped so private enterprise can't build on it.
The simple fact is that the publicly visible space program has been seen as government-based because it is based around scientific research, which is paid for by the government. That hasn't prevented thousands of commercial satellites from going up - but there's been no commercial imperative for private, peopled, tourist-style space flight, so you haven't seen the "private" side of access to space. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by letting citizens use what they've paid for, but I'd disagree with the idea that citizens have not had access, nor benefited from the space program just by staying here on earth.
The fact is, citizens can't retrieve the R&D data which would be valuable to producing a commercially viable space program because it is all classified in the manner of "national security".
You mean like with the British and French? They're allies with atomic weapons developed independently of the US. We've survived for years without going toe-to-toe with China. All of whom have space programs. Don't see how that's relevant to the first part of your argument, though.
The only argument that people use against letting taxpayers use their purchased R&D is in the interest of national security which is self-crippling. The fear is that a country which we've bullied (Iran, North Korea, etc.) will get ICBM technology and use it against us if we open up our information to our taxpayers who paid for it. And rather than trying to have a foreign policy that makes it so North Korea, Iran, etc. won't want to attack us when they get ICBM technology, we instead try to make it so they can't get it by crippling our own technological progress in a vain attempt to prevent the development of technology which will eventually come to pass.
Ok, lets see here NASA has a yearly operating budget of US$17.6 billion, to compare that, Sir Richard Branson has a net worth of about 4.6 billion USD. So, lets see here: $17.6 billion a year with:
A) Billions of dollars in taxpayer funded R&D that are inaccessible to private companies because they are classified.
B) Several spacecraft
C) The ability to use a lot of military technology
D) A guaranteed revenue source from US taxpayers
E) NASA had almost unlimited funding during the height of the cold war
Private companies have none of these advantages and yet they've managed to do a lot more on a lot less of a budget.
We've paid for a shitload of R&D that will never be realized because A) NASA has decided not to pursue it and B) It is considered classified so private enterprise can't use it.
Dollar for dollar, private enterprise accomplishes worlds more of progress than any government space agency has. Want private enterprise to go to the moon? Give them $170 billion (cost of Apollo missions adjusted for inflation) and I'm sure we could get beyond a few spaceflights to the moon.
The only advantage government has compared to the private sector is that no matter what they can steal -- I mean, acquire, enough money to fund their programs.
Well of course it is Russia. Unlike the US who seems to think that we're not subject to the laws of economics and can spend all we want in dead end projects thinking that deathtraps like the Shuttle can last for 30 some years, Russia doesn't have the cash to go out and design an all new untested spacecraft and has to make do with what they have.
Apollo was a technological dead-end. The Shuttle was a technological dead end. On the other hand Soyuz did what it needed to do and had a design that could be adapted effectively while cutting costs.
Slashdot Mirror
The mark of good games is when you can still pick up and play them 5, 10, 15 or even 25 years from now and they are just as good as the first time you picked them up.
I can't say that many Xbox or PS1 games can say that. On the other hand, almost the entire NES library seems to be filled with examples that are just as fun today as they were back in the day without having to put on rose-tinted glasses of saying that this game was fun for its time.
Exactly. Java has become a massive security hole with exploits left and right with fewer and fewer things that use it.
Plus, the patch wants you to install a massive amount of crapware in order to patch your system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HPV_vaccine
And yes, despite the fact that it can prevent cancer we still have opposition to it.
It makes a lot of sense not to join the army if you don't like/trust the president.
It doesn't make sense to not work as a high-paid lower-level employee if you don't like the CEO because chances are, his decisions will only slightly affect you.
Good luck finding people who support nuclear fission. Even though it is one of the safest, most economical, sources of power so called "green" activists will prevent us from building any more. Its becoming increasingly obvious that the environmentalist movement doesn't care about us being sustainable, but rather us living like we did 300 years ago.
Microsoft wouldn't really be that bad to work at because all their problems occur in management. Everyone who I've talked to that works at Microsoft loves it, the reasons their products are crap is because they have terrible management, separate people into "teams" which have little communication with each other, then they have separate "teams" working on the same product... which ends up being a mess.
This is all incredibly stupid. First off, we should never have a "cyber cold war" because we shouldn't put our fucking important infrastructure on the internet! If it could harm human lives if it goes down and there isn't a non-networked backup that can be used at a millisecond's notice, it shouldn't be on the internet.
If you've spent 2.3 billion to construct another power plant and you are too lazy to actually staff it, something tells me an extra $150,000 to run dedicated lines from it to your main office is just a drop in the bucket.
If we can lay a direct telephone line between Washington DC and Moscow to prevent a nuclear war, something tells me we can afford to lay some cable 10 miles to prevent some "cyber cold war"
Except that they didn't, now did they? They built a limited government, and it expanded again and again, because the limited one just wasn't enough.
As with all governments, the idealists always lose their (good intentioned) ideals when in power. One only needs to look at the history of Soviet Russia to see that, what was started as having a class-free society quickly became a "hey, I have unlimited power, lets use it!", I really hate to bring up Animal Farm but it highlights exactly what happens when a government gets into power, um, freedom of speech, yeah, we really didn't mean it go be used against the government...
This quick erosion from good-intentioned ideals to being what they opposed is why the founding fathers wrote the constitution, however, they were quick to ignore it (look at the Alien and Sedition Acts)
And if I use that right to not take a vaccine, get the disease, and it mutates on my body so that it'll bypass vaccinations of my neighbours, I've just harmed them through my choices.
Not really because it was simply the virus mutating as it would normally. While there are some arguments in favor of mandatory vaccinations, there are several side effects to various vaccines and it should be up to the person if they want to take them or not.
Now, if you were intentionally mutating viruses to make deadly strains (like the government has done in their biological warfare programs...) that is a different story.
I suppose I should have clarified, I meant economic freedom, not complete disregard to the economic sector. Governments should be able to enforce contracts, prosecute fraud, etc. but not interfere with free trade and the like.
can I demand my female secretary to "entertain" me and my guests?
You can't demand, but if you pay someone to do sexual or other acts and they accept, that should be perfectly acceptable.
what's minimum wage (answer "none" and watch what happens when people get the choice between starvation and rebellion).
No, answer none and the prices of goods reflect it. The reasons why people in developed countries don't starve isn't because of government welfare, it isn't because of minimum wage it is the simple fact of technology. Consider making a loaf of bread back in the 1600s, first someone had to plant and tend the wheat. What took a day to accomplish using the labor of 20 people can be done in a few hours by the work of one person. Secondly, once the wheat was ready to be harvested people had to go out into the field with a scythe then take it in and separate it from the chafe. Today, we have combines that can do all of that. Next, they had to grind the wheat into flour using stone and livestock, today we can do that all electrically. Then the bread would be baked.
What used to take several people several days to make a loaf of bread can now be done by a few people rather quickly.
So naturally the price reflects that. Considering this huge technological leap in 400 years, it is now cheaper to buy food. Because of this, in order to maintain their business, the prices of food would stay relatively the same proportional to their wages.
However, what minimum wage -does- do is it pays people less than what they are actually doing. For example, everyone gets taken down to the lowest level, if someone who says "welcome to walmart" has to make say, $7 an hour, other people have to take pay cuts to keep a low-skills job. It also prevents wage competition, because everyone has an idea what low-skills labor is "worth" they are only going to pay that minimum. Effectively creating a "trust" between businesses.
Government is always limited, unless you happen to live in a dictatorship. Everyone agrees that letting Caligula have unlimited power is bad; the controversy is about where the limits lay.
Except for the fact it isn'
No, what I'm advocating is that there are certain areas which the government can't interfere in. The problem with consensus is that people many times in the face of fear or euphoria lose logic. I'm sure that you could find a consensus on September 12th to go to war with Afghanistan but it was disastrous.
There needs to be clear limits to what the government can and can't do, and no matter how many people agree with allowing the government to increase power, they can't.
Plus, consensus leads to groupthink and a decline of rationality. No one wants to be the person to speak out against a plan, and a consensus can never be accurately formed with secret ballot so you have all the pitfalls of large groups of people.
Also, consensus is too vague, either you still have the majority against the minority pitfall of plain old democracy, or you put veto power in a few individuals. While its easy to say "we've got 70 yes votes and 10 no votes" and make decisions that way, it is a lot harder to do that with a consensus. For example, if out of 100 people, you have 95 supporters and 5 dissenters who are vocal, what happens? On one hand, you have only a 5% of the people who are against it, but at the same time you have 95% of people who are supporting it. Can you really say consensus has been reached? It also allows for people to sell their vote more effectively, if there was really only one dissenter, who bought 4 people's votes, in an ordinary election it would be too expensive and too obvious to buy everyone's vote, but in a consensus it is easier.
If rather than have a consensus for a vote, you had simply limited government so the scope of government involving that issue was eliminated, you'd have less elections and less problems.
Consensus voting isn't exactly a bad thing, but first and foremost the government needs to be limited as to not ever encroach on the rights of others, even if it is 1,000 to one.
Lets face it, yeah, wi-fi routers can be hacked, yeah, a lot of people don't have secure wi-fi, but in all honesty does it matter to most people? Credit card information already should be encrypted with HTTPS so that wouldn't be sniffed, most sites let you use security to log in, etc.
the practice of law enforcement is an actual valid endeavour
Only when the laws are valid. Which in many cases they aren't.
Legalizing something just makes it legal, not moral, not right, not correct, etc.
against actual criminals
But there is no evidence that they are against actual criminals though.
There is so little oversight when it comes to the police and the military we don't -know- as taxpayers what all they do.
Just make a limited government like the framers of the US constitution were planning and the majority of real issues go away.
Democracy leads to mob rule no matter how carefully you plan it. A limited government using democracy leads to peace and prosperity. But the point is, the government has to be very limited to prevent abuses.
Take for instance gay marriage, if your neighbor is gay does that make you gay? If you are gay and your neighbor is straight does that make you less gay? The very idea of taking something that shouldn't be a government problem and making it into an issue in elections is simply the tyranny of the majority, and I don't think that meta-government or any other solution other than limited government would prevent these things because these issues are becoming more and more common.
There are a ton of rights that the government, and by extension the people, should have no say in your exercise of them. The freedom of your own body, to do whatever you wish to it without harming others is a basic right. The right to free expression is a basic right. The right to own property, to engage in business, and to be entitled to the fruit of your labors are all basic rights too. These things should have no government involvement and by extension democracy should not violate them.
Democracy, metagovernment, etc. is only worthwhile when the government is limited, that is the key point. The key point isn't that we live in a democracy, the key point is that we were/are under a limited government.
Exactly. The -vast- majority of mathematics have little to no practical application to most people.
If you want to be a computer science, physics or other math-heavy person, go for it. But really, for the majority of the population, simply having a calculator to add, subtract, multiply and divide is enough for them.
Kids should be able to use the internet, their neighbors, laptops, cell phones, Wikipedia, etc. to solve problems. The memorization part will come later. In the real world, no one sits down to their job and has to have all these dates memorized.
Its really a waste of time to have kids memorize useless information. Education should be teaching kids skills primarily, then having kids take classes which interest them and relate to their chosen career field and have them take those classes.
Lets face it, its nice to know when the reign of King George III started, but unless that is your field of expertise, you should simply know the skills needed to Google the question.
Our education system was made for a world without a huge search-able database of data. To look up even a basic fact would take a few minutes, not just a few seconds.
No, you praise the good and you let natural consequences come with the bad.
There are a lot of things that are in essence harmless that parents forbid. For example, eating cookies rather than vegetables. Why do you think so many Americans are fat? It is because they've been conditioned from an early age that cookies = good, vegetables = bad. When parents say that the kids are only allowed say, 2 cookies a day, but don't ration something like corn, beans and broccoli, kids quickly realize that cookies are more "valuable" and it is what they desire.
If a kid, at an early age, isn't restricted eating sweets, they will get a stomach ache and quit craving them so much. But when sweets are used as a reward, it conditions them to crave them.
Same thing with R rated movies, if your 13 year old kid thinks they want to watch "Scary creepy gorefest III" you should let them, if they get nightmares, well, it is their choice.
There are of course a few things which you should forbid, but you should only forbid them rationally, letting natural consequences take the place of parental intervention. A kid who fails a class and has to repeat it learns the value of studying a lot more than a kid who is forced to study day after day.
What needs to happen is that managers need to stop grading people on their behavior and focus instead on things related to work. Just because someone had a few drinks once and has some pictures on Facebook with them holding a beer doesn't make them not qualified.
When managers finally pull their head out of their buzzword-laced asses and realize that we are all humans, and that personal and private lives rarely are similar and simply give jobs to people who are qualified, this will be a non-issue.
If I was a manager, I wouldn't care if my applicant was a drunk, enjoys partying on the weekends and hell, so long as they showed up to work and got the work done decently, I couldn't care less if they showed up to work hungover in the morning.
But alas, I don't think I can handle all the buzzwords to become a manager.
See, /. knows that people don't read TFA, so they were thinking about licensing this technology to put the summaries in Spanish so we'd read TFA.
Exactly. Heck, strict parenting has your kids go wild later in life. The people who control their kids lives in middle and high school either have a massive rebellion in high school, or if they put them in the college that the kid doesn't want to go to, they will rebel later in life.
If you don't let your kids do little things (watch R rated movies, hang out with friends, read what they want to, etc.) and then whenever they do realize that those things aren't really harmful, they will question your judgment on things that are harmful, such as drinking and driving.
When parents cry wolf at every little silly harmless "moral panic" they lose credibility with their kids.
I wonder, what will the next great "moral panic" be? Quite honestly, I hope this is the last one, because every "moral panic" only harms the world, does nothing to benefit it and there was never any harm to begin with.
Why is it that the masses and the media can't differentiate between real threats and panic?
Public labs at a university. While I have a hard time thinking of any time that I -need- to log into Facebook and can't just use, say, a smartphone app. There are a lot of occasions where in university you realize that there is something you need to do online (such as quickly type and turn in a paper you just remembered is due in 2 hours) but you can't trust the security of a lab computer (its pretty easy to install hardware keyloggers that just go between the PS2 or USB port and capture keystrokes) so you end up logging into an unsecured machine.
Like another poster said most phones already have a Facebook app. But really, that is why you have a lock on your phone if you are around people who you don't trust.
The simple fact is that the publicly visible space program has been seen as government-based because it is based around scientific research, which is paid for by the government. That hasn't prevented thousands of commercial satellites from going up - but there's been no commercial imperative for private, peopled, tourist-style space flight, so you haven't seen the "private" side of access to space. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by letting citizens use what they've paid for, but I'd disagree with the idea that citizens have not had access, nor benefited from the space program just by staying here on earth.
The fact is, citizens can't retrieve the R&D data which would be valuable to producing a commercially viable space program because it is all classified in the manner of "national security".
You mean like with the British and French? They're allies with atomic weapons developed independently of the US. We've survived for years without going toe-to-toe with China. All of whom have space programs. Don't see how that's relevant to the first part of your argument, though.
The only argument that people use against letting taxpayers use their purchased R&D is in the interest of national security which is self-crippling. The fear is that a country which we've bullied (Iran, North Korea, etc.) will get ICBM technology and use it against us if we open up our information to our taxpayers who paid for it. And rather than trying to have a foreign policy that makes it so North Korea, Iran, etc. won't want to attack us when they get ICBM technology, we instead try to make it so they can't get it by crippling our own technological progress in a vain attempt to prevent the development of technology which will eventually come to pass.
Ok, lets see here NASA has a yearly operating budget of US$17.6 billion, to compare that, Sir Richard Branson has a net worth of about 4.6 billion USD. So, lets see here: $17.6 billion a year with:
A) Billions of dollars in taxpayer funded R&D that are inaccessible to private companies because they are classified.
B) Several spacecraft
C) The ability to use a lot of military technology
D) A guaranteed revenue source from US taxpayers
E) NASA had almost unlimited funding during the height of the cold war
Private companies have none of these advantages and yet they've managed to do a lot more on a lot less of a budget.
We've paid for a shitload of R&D that will never be realized because A) NASA has decided not to pursue it and B) It is considered classified so private enterprise can't use it.
Dollar for dollar, private enterprise accomplishes worlds more of progress than any government space agency has. Want private enterprise to go to the moon? Give them $170 billion (cost of Apollo missions adjusted for inflation) and I'm sure we could get beyond a few spaceflights to the moon.
The only advantage government has compared to the private sector is that no matter what they can steal -- I mean, acquire, enough money to fund their programs.
Also: "what the hell took you so long"?
Government.
Well of course it is Russia. Unlike the US who seems to think that we're not subject to the laws of economics and can spend all we want in dead end projects thinking that deathtraps like the Shuttle can last for 30 some years, Russia doesn't have the cash to go out and design an all new untested spacecraft and has to make do with what they have.
Apollo was a technological dead-end. The Shuttle was a technological dead end. On the other hand Soyuz did what it needed to do and had a design that could be adapted effectively while cutting costs.