Keep going. I can still get a no-name DVD player for $30, region free as well.
Speak for yourself. I'd be perfectly satisfied buying a Blu-ray player at under $200; I don't demand Blu-ray players reach the prices of DVD players before they become worthwhile to me. I won't be interested if discs are still over $35 each, though. $20 would be a good price point for me.
Blu-ray will eventually be as cheap as DVD (if it doesn't die a laserdisc death first), but mass adoption is going to occur well before it hits the $20 Walmart made-in-China player price.
A pressed disc is also vastly faster to write to than an electronic memory device. The time it would take to write a 50 GB movie to a hypothetical future flash drive has a time measured in minutes, while we're talking less than a second to stamp out a disc. With parallel writing, sure, you can match the throughput either way, but it drives up the cost.
I read it differently than you did. He's projecting a world where everything is standardized and faster (less 'bus plumbing' GPUs). In such a world you won't need APIs because you'll have libraries that you can include in the compile process.
No, you won't need APIs because you'll have a standard instruction set. Current graphics APIs are oriented around things like pushing triangles and running shaders on them. Why bother with the complexity of the graphics APIs, if you can create a standardized instruction set for GPUs?
We essentially already have that, but it's wrapped in the paradigm of shader programming. Stop treating the GPU as a graphics processor, and as just this really parallel coprocessor, and you get what Sweeney is talking about.
The basic point is that GPUs aren't really for graphics anymore, and as we move away from a graphics fixation, we'll come to realize that they're just specialized computers. Using graphics APIs to program them would be as stupid as using OpenGL to write a word processor. Sure, with modern capabilities, it's actually possible, but it's a bad conceptual fit.
Only a research scientist does need that. Meanwhile, uninformed consumers are being suckered into buying way more than they need to check email and type their documents.
Or, say, play Quake.
The nice thing about functionality moving into the CPU standard is that it opens up that functionality for a lot more applications than originally intended. FPUs may have mainly been for scientific work early on, but because it's essentially ubiquitous, now a vast array of programs do floating point computation... probably including your word processor.
The main reason I might have my doubts about this is that graphics performance has been advancing faster than CPU performance for a while. If that trend continues, I'm not sure people would want to be tied down to a single unit for a while. People on the cutting edge replace their CPUs a lot less often than their GPUs. In the long run, it's probably inevitable.
Not that amazing, it is a hardy species that can survive most anything... So if they are a successful species then why wouldn't they be common in your back yard.
Well, I think you could be legitimately amazed. Being able to deal with extreme conditions imposes a cost on a species in terms of the biological machinery necessary to survive those conditions. Under mild conditions, such species are often out-competed by less hardy species, which may be more focused on more efficient feeding rather than surviving hard radiation, for example.
In other words, specializing for the worst case often leaves you at a disadvantage in the common case.
Perhaps the best form of DRM would be to offer digital downloads, then mail people a paper manual when they buy the game. You get something tangible, and the developer is offering something you can't copy with a single command.
I'd feel a lot better if that patch existed, somewhere in escrow, in case that happened.
I'm pretty sure game developers don't need to have the CD in the drive in order to develop the game. Adding DRM to the binary is something that happens after, not before, the build is complete.
However, since games can create the sound dynamically you shouldn't be limited to 5.1 channels. Instead buy a pair of stereo headphones, set the headphone option in your game of choice (so it knows where the speakers are relative to you) and enjoy having something that can simulate sound from any direction.
Meh, the problem with that theory is that HRTFs aren't perfect. If the HRTF used doesn't match your own head's to a good degree, the directionality can be much poorer.
Ideally, you would have an infinite number of speakers arranged uniformly in a sphere around your head. This is almost completely impractical, but more sound sources still works a lot better than just two. 5.1 sound systems are designed to provide positional sound, too, they just use more sound sources to do it, widening the "sweet spot."
Then there's the fact that most headphones aren't designed to deliver the subwoofer channel. I have some 5.1 channel headphones that work OK (I'm not very picky), but they cut out the subwoofer. Really annoying.
As an aside, the way "real" 5.1 headphones work is that they have multiple resonance chambers, designed to direct the sound to your ear as if they were coming from spatially separated speakers. Theoretically, you could design the chambers in such a way that they'd simulate a real 5.1 sound system.
The real solution, though, is to build a soundproof room and crank the volume up on a good set of speakers.:)
and even *with* diffraction, you can overcome it with sharpening. I often shoot my photos 'with too high an f-stop' according to common theory; but my post-processing overcomes the diffraction issues in practice; and I get the nice large depth-of-field that I was after with quite good sharpness, as well.
Sharpening filters don't add detail that isn't there, they just make the image crisper by making edges more well-defined. It looks nice, but you're not actually recovering any more usable resolution.
There are techniques for recovering more resolution than the classical Rayleigh limit (which is more of an arbitrary cut-off than a real limit), but they aren't quite as simple as pushing the "make sharper!" button.
I would think the variable size of compressed memory blocks would throw a monkey wrench in trying to recover a decent amount of free RAM, without killing cache performance, which relies on fixed-size memory blocks at fixed locations, after all.
You might be able to work out a solution with some additional indirection, but you're talking about adding more and more cycles of latency.
Every time you want to use self-signed certificates with HTTPS, just use plain HTTP. They have exactly equivalent security. Encryption without authentication is worthless. Any other expectation is just deluding yourself.
If you can distribute a self-signed certificate securely, then you can also distribute instructions to install the certificate before Firefox ever pops up an error message.
And no, putting the certificate up on your unsecured Web site doesn't count.
How could you make a TV show or a Movie about a simulation game that is supposed to be limitless ?
A movie with creatures made from the game ?
Actually... I just thought of an approach that would be kinda creative and fun.
Instead of making a game set in the "Spore universe," whatever that is (and you're quite accurate in saying such a thing is ridiculous), what about a movie about the ideas that go behind a game like Spore?
If Spore is ultimately about simulated evolution, perhaps you could make a movie about the simulation, rather than taking it at face value. A bunch of lab geeks playing god with their artificial world. Throw in some typical Hollywood business about the simulation becoming self-aware, and you've got an interesting idea. It'd be a movie about the relationship between a god and his/her creations, with the twist that the gods are just normal human beings.
Alternately, you could just do a sort of Matrix-style thing. Any of the Sim franchises is probably ripe for it, although I don't know how far you could push the novelty of that.
Of course, it could just be that EA's licensing the rights as a marketing move to sorta highlight that, "Hey, Spore is such a big franchise, we're even licensing the rights to it. Never mind that there's almost no chance we actually make a movie based on it, and even if we do, it'll probably be crap."
This sounds like it's forgetting some important law of physics, like, say, the second law of thermodynamics that states that the entropy of all real systems always increases.
Did you miss the bit where they apply an electric field?
I know that Lucas thinks that everyone 'relies on him" to come up with good ideas... but seriously, Lucus is a one trick pony. He makes exactly one good movie in a series, then he either hands it off to someone who is talented or makes a crapfest. I personally hope he does what he did with the Empire Strikes Back. Give some writer and director WHO IS NOT LUCUS a rough outline of what he wants, and let them make a good movie.
The only problem with your theory is that this is pretty much exactly what Lucas has done with the Indiana Jones series.
The Indiana Jones movies are directed by Steven Spielberg. Always has been. Lucas has a producer credit, which basically means his role is just to come up with ideas (and bankroll them).
That didn't stop the most recent one from sucking pretty badly. Guess Spielberg is losing his touch, too.
A bit simplified, but here are the basic physical relationships:
Power = Energy / Time. Energy (kinetic) = 1/2 Mass * Velocity^2.
Force (thrust) = Impulse / Time Impulse = Mass * Velocity.
Over a period of 1 second (Time = 1):
Energy = 50 kW * 1 second = 50 kJ = 50000 kg m^2/s^2 = 1/2 MV^2 M = 2 (50000 kg m^2/s^2) / V^2
Impulse = 0.5 N * 1 second = 0.5 kg m/s = MV M = (0.5 kg m/s) / V
(0.5 kg m/s) / V = 2 (50 kg m^2/s^2) / V^2 V = 2 (50000 kg m^2/s^2) / (0.5 kg m/s)
V = 200 000 m/s = 200 km/s M = 2.5e-6 kg = 2.5 mg
Summary: They're pushing a very very tiny amount of mass very very fast. For a given amount of thrust, this is very efficient in terms of mass, terribly wasteful in terms of energy.
Actually, the main reason to have a variable Isp (specific impulse) engine is because there's a direct trade-off between Isp, and energy.
Note that momentum transfer increases linearly with velocity and mass, but kinetic energy increases linearly with mass and with the square of velocity. Thus, to make a given amount of mass go faster requires a lot more energy.
A more concrete example: You want to impart a total impulse of 2MV. You can either get it throwing out a mass M at 2V (mass efficient), or by throwing out a mass 2M at V (energy efficient).
In the first case, you use 1/2 M (2V)^2 = 1/2 M 4V^2 = 2MV^2 energy, while in the second case, you use 1/2 2M V^2 = MV^2 energy, or half as much, for the same total impulse. This only gets worse the bigger the velocity difference gets.
Often, the limiting factor in electric propulsion technologies like these is the power supply, not the thruster. Generally, to get the max Isp all the time you'd need a power supply so massive (like a nuclear reactor) as to completely throw off the mass fraction.
So generally, the way these systems are proposed to be operated is with a fixed power budget, and switched between mass efficient, low thrust mode (for long term delta-V), and mass inefficient, high thrust mode (for certain maneuvers).
Likewise, the absence of a verified server side certificate does not necessarily mean that SSL is providing no value. Encryption without authentication provides a degree of privacy, raising the level of difficulty significantly for anyone who would want to eavesdrop.
Except it doesn't, because if you can't trust the certificate the server offers, you've left yourself completely open to a man-in-the-middle attack.
Alice and Bob want to communicate via SSL. Bob creates a self-signed certificate for www.example.com.
Now Carol can't duplicate Bob's certificate with his presumably secret private key, but she can create her own self-signed certificate for www.example.com. Then she hijack's Alice's DNS (perhaps using the recent DNS cache poisoning exploit) to point to her server instead of Bob's, then transparently proxies between Alice and Bob (since Bob doesn't verify Alice's identity, either), intercepting all communications.
If Bob's certificate was signed by a known authority, then Carol couldn't trivially create another certificate that claimed she was www.example.com, too, preventing this attack.
Self-signed certificates with unknown parties are pretty much tantamount to no security at all; the encryption can't be relied on for more than obfuscation. Probably the only good use for self-signed certificates is when you can get the certificate via a secure channel (and no, accepting the certificate via a browser dialog isn't a secure channel). Obviously, this approach doesn't scale.
The primary reason for the tool was to avoid Cartesian joins and loops in SQL written by hand, with many joined tables. The database will execute such a statement, if syntactically correct, resulting in runaway queries that can bring the database down.
SQL isn't Turing complete. It can't loop. That's sorta the whole point.
to this day, I prefer going through a checkout line run by humans rather than the 'self checkout' lines where you scan and pay for your stuff by yourself. Humans are still better than machines... for now... and only when humans aren't acting like machines.
I do, too, but this probably isn't the best example. Unless you're buying produce (for which the self-check line is truly an ordeal), you're using the exact same mix of humans and automation in both lines.
The difference, of course, is that even a grocery clerk working a summer job and making minimum wage is better at scanning groceries than your average and completely untrained shopper.
Of course, it doesn't help that the scanners are clunky (do I really need to scan my item, then put it in the bag, then oops, I wasn't supposed to put in the bag, scan it again, no, false alarm, it was just fine, just leave it in the bag), but you're actually comparing apples to oranges here.
While Rutan knows how to build aircraft and rockplanes he has absolutely no experience in building rockets.
The GP's point is that Rutan is an engineer. When they came up with the X Prize, he looked at the most effective way to solve the problem, and then did so. While other people were fooling around with overdesigned launch systems, he realized that a short suborbital hop was well within the capabilities of a glorified glider with a rocket booster stuck to the back.
Rutan's already said that he plans to go orbital with SpaceShip Three, assuming the line of SpaceShip Two's is a commercial success. He's also said that a SpaceShip Three would likely be very different from One or Two; he's a smart guy, a brilliant aeronautical engineer, and he's not pretending that the One/Two approach will scale up to an orbital vehicle.
If he gets around to building it, SpaceShip Three may well look like something out of the Mercury days. Don't think he's an idiot just because he builds the right vehicle for the job.
The Apollo program failed quite a number of times before Apollo 11 was able to reach the moon safely and back.
Umm... that's not how the Apollo program worked.
NASA didn't just design the whole Apollo spacecraft, from the Saturn V to the LEM, and then strap three astronauts in and decide to try for the moon on Apollo 1.
The space program during the moonshot years was based on steady, incremental progress. Every Apollo between 2 and 10 (excepting the tragic case of Apollo 1, of course) had incremental goals over previous attempts, and every single one of these missions were a success.
When they finally got to Apollo 11, they decided they were going to go for a landing. They'd already been to the Moon many times before, just not on it. They declared Apollo 11 The One, and then they went and did it.
The government space program has had plenty of spectacular failures, but it's also been marked by a cautious, incremental approach that's been quite successful (if expensive).
With the combination of NZB files [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NZB], and SSL, you'd be nuts to ever use a torrent again. Speed + security + real files.
You must be pretty naive if you think SSL NNTP connections automatically makes a USENET provider "secure." There's absolutely nothing stopping someone with a search warrant from heading down to one of these providers and examining their records.
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Keep going. I can still get a no-name DVD player for $30, region free as well.
Speak for yourself. I'd be perfectly satisfied buying a Blu-ray player at under $200; I don't demand Blu-ray players reach the prices of DVD players before they become worthwhile to me. I won't be interested if discs are still over $35 each, though. $20 would be a good price point for me.
Blu-ray will eventually be as cheap as DVD (if it doesn't die a laserdisc death first), but mass adoption is going to occur well before it hits the $20 Walmart made-in-China player price.
A pressed disc is also vastly faster to write to than an electronic memory device. The time it would take to write a 50 GB movie to a hypothetical future flash drive has a time measured in minutes, while we're talking less than a second to stamp out a disc. With parallel writing, sure, you can match the throughput either way, but it drives up the cost.
I read it differently than you did. He's projecting a world where everything is standardized and faster (less 'bus plumbing' GPUs). In such a world you won't need APIs because you'll have libraries that you can include in the compile process.
No, you won't need APIs because you'll have a standard instruction set. Current graphics APIs are oriented around things like pushing triangles and running shaders on them. Why bother with the complexity of the graphics APIs, if you can create a standardized instruction set for GPUs?
We essentially already have that, but it's wrapped in the paradigm of shader programming. Stop treating the GPU as a graphics processor, and as just this really parallel coprocessor, and you get what Sweeney is talking about.
The basic point is that GPUs aren't really for graphics anymore, and as we move away from a graphics fixation, we'll come to realize that they're just specialized computers. Using graphics APIs to program them would be as stupid as using OpenGL to write a word processor. Sure, with modern capabilities, it's actually possible, but it's a bad conceptual fit.
"Only a research scientist would need that!"
Only a research scientist does need that. Meanwhile, uninformed consumers are being suckered into buying way more than they need to check email and type their documents.
Or, say, play Quake.
The nice thing about functionality moving into the CPU standard is that it opens up that functionality for a lot more applications than originally intended. FPUs may have mainly been for scientific work early on, but because it's essentially ubiquitous, now a vast array of programs do floating point computation... probably including your word processor.
The main reason I might have my doubts about this is that graphics performance has been advancing faster than CPU performance for a while. If that trend continues, I'm not sure people would want to be tied down to a single unit for a while. People on the cutting edge replace their CPUs a lot less often than their GPUs. In the long run, it's probably inevitable.
Not that amazing, it is a hardy species that can survive most anything... So if they are a successful species then why wouldn't they be common in your back yard.
Well, I think you could be legitimately amazed. Being able to deal with extreme conditions imposes a cost on a species in terms of the biological machinery necessary to survive those conditions. Under mild conditions, such species are often out-competed by less hardy species, which may be more focused on more efficient feeding rather than surviving hard radiation, for example.
In other words, specializing for the worst case often leaves you at a disadvantage in the common case.
Perhaps the best form of DRM would be to offer digital downloads, then mail people a paper manual when they buy the game. You get something tangible, and the developer is offering something you can't copy with a single command.
I'd feel a lot better if that patch existed, somewhere in escrow, in case that happened.
I'm pretty sure game developers don't need to have the CD in the drive in order to develop the game. Adding DRM to the binary is something that happens after, not before, the build is complete.
I avoid pricewatch.com like the plague these days. It's just too easy to get directed to a site with horrible service and/or product (usually both).
However, since games can create the sound dynamically you shouldn't be limited to 5.1 channels. Instead buy a pair of stereo headphones, set the headphone option in your game of choice (so it knows where the speakers are relative to you) and enjoy having something that can simulate sound from any direction.
Meh, the problem with that theory is that HRTFs aren't perfect. If the HRTF used doesn't match your own head's to a good degree, the directionality can be much poorer.
Ideally, you would have an infinite number of speakers arranged uniformly in a sphere around your head. This is almost completely impractical, but more sound sources still works a lot better than just two. 5.1 sound systems are designed to provide positional sound, too, they just use more sound sources to do it, widening the "sweet spot."
Then there's the fact that most headphones aren't designed to deliver the subwoofer channel. I have some 5.1 channel headphones that work OK (I'm not very picky), but they cut out the subwoofer. Really annoying.
As an aside, the way "real" 5.1 headphones work is that they have multiple resonance chambers, designed to direct the sound to your ear as if they were coming from spatially separated speakers. Theoretically, you could design the chambers in such a way that they'd simulate a real 5.1 sound system.
The real solution, though, is to build a soundproof room and crank the volume up on a good set of speakers. :)
and even *with* diffraction, you can overcome it with sharpening. I often shoot my photos 'with too high an f-stop' according to common theory; but my post-processing overcomes the diffraction issues in practice; and I get the nice large depth-of-field that I was after with quite good sharpness, as well.
Sharpening filters don't add detail that isn't there, they just make the image crisper by making edges more well-defined. It looks nice, but you're not actually recovering any more usable resolution.
There are techniques for recovering more resolution than the classical Rayleigh limit (which is more of an arbitrary cut-off than a real limit), but they aren't quite as simple as pushing the "make sharper!" button.
I would think the variable size of compressed memory blocks would throw a monkey wrench in trying to recover a decent amount of free RAM, without killing cache performance, which relies on fixed-size memory blocks at fixed locations, after all.
You might be able to work out a solution with some additional indirection, but you're talking about adding more and more cycles of latency.
Every time you want to use self-signed certificates with HTTPS, just use plain HTTP. They have exactly equivalent security. Encryption without authentication is worthless. Any other expectation is just deluding yourself.
If you can distribute a self-signed certificate securely, then you can also distribute instructions to install the certificate before Firefox ever pops up an error message.
And no, putting the certificate up on your unsecured Web site doesn't count.
How could you make a TV show or a Movie about a simulation game that is supposed to be limitless ?
A movie with creatures made from the game ?
Actually... I just thought of an approach that would be kinda creative and fun.
Instead of making a game set in the "Spore universe," whatever that is (and you're quite accurate in saying such a thing is ridiculous), what about a movie about the ideas that go behind a game like Spore?
If Spore is ultimately about simulated evolution, perhaps you could make a movie about the simulation, rather than taking it at face value. A bunch of lab geeks playing god with their artificial world. Throw in some typical Hollywood business about the simulation becoming self-aware, and you've got an interesting idea. It'd be a movie about the relationship between a god and his/her creations, with the twist that the gods are just normal human beings.
Alternately, you could just do a sort of Matrix-style thing. Any of the Sim franchises is probably ripe for it, although I don't know how far you could push the novelty of that.
Of course, it could just be that EA's licensing the rights as a marketing move to sorta highlight that, "Hey, Spore is such a big franchise, we're even licensing the rights to it. Never mind that there's almost no chance we actually make a movie based on it, and even if we do, it'll probably be crap."
"...change from disorganized to organized..."
This sounds like it's forgetting some important law of physics, like, say, the second law of thermodynamics that states that the entropy of all real systems always increases.
Did you miss the bit where they apply an electric field?
I know that Lucas thinks that everyone 'relies on him" to come up with good ideas... but seriously, Lucus is a one trick pony. He makes exactly one good movie in a series, then he either hands it off to someone who is talented or makes a crapfest. I personally hope he does what he did with the Empire Strikes Back. Give some writer and director WHO IS NOT LUCUS a rough outline of what he wants, and let them make a good movie.
The only problem with your theory is that this is pretty much exactly what Lucas has done with the Indiana Jones series.
The Indiana Jones movies are directed by Steven Spielberg. Always has been. Lucas has a producer credit, which basically means his role is just to come up with ideas (and bankroll them).
That didn't stop the most recent one from sucking pretty badly. Guess Spielberg is losing his touch, too.
Well, if it had the degree symbol between the 2 and the K.
There's no such thing as a "degree Kelvin". In the SI system, kelvins are a unit (kelvin), not a temperature scale.
A bit simplified, but here are the basic physical relationships:
Power = Energy / Time.
Energy (kinetic) = 1/2 Mass * Velocity^2.
Force (thrust) = Impulse / Time
Impulse = Mass * Velocity.
Over a period of 1 second (Time = 1):
Energy = 50 kW * 1 second = 50 kJ = 50000 kg m^2/s^2 = 1/2 MV^2
M = 2 (50000 kg m^2/s^2) / V^2
Impulse = 0.5 N * 1 second = 0.5 kg m/s = MV
M = (0.5 kg m/s) / V
(0.5 kg m/s) / V = 2 (50 kg m^2/s^2) / V^2
V = 2 (50000 kg m^2/s^2) / (0.5 kg m/s)
V = 200 000 m/s = 200 km/s
M = 2.5e-6 kg = 2.5 mg
Summary: They're pushing a very very tiny amount of mass very very fast. For a given amount of thrust, this is very efficient in terms of mass, terribly wasteful in terms of energy.
Actually, the main reason to have a variable Isp (specific impulse) engine is because there's a direct trade-off between Isp, and energy.
Note that momentum transfer increases linearly with velocity and mass, but kinetic energy increases linearly with mass and with the square of velocity. Thus, to make a given amount of mass go faster requires a lot more energy.
A more concrete example: You want to impart a total impulse of 2MV. You can either get it throwing out a mass M at 2V (mass efficient), or by throwing out a mass 2M at V (energy efficient).
In the first case, you use 1/2 M (2V)^2 = 1/2 M 4V^2 = 2MV^2 energy, while in the second case, you use 1/2 2M V^2 = MV^2 energy, or half as much, for the same total impulse. This only gets worse the bigger the velocity difference gets.
Often, the limiting factor in electric propulsion technologies like these is the power supply, not the thruster. Generally, to get the max Isp all the time you'd need a power supply so massive (like a nuclear reactor) as to completely throw off the mass fraction.
So generally, the way these systems are proposed to be operated is with a fixed power budget, and switched between mass efficient, low thrust mode (for long term delta-V), and mass inefficient, high thrust mode (for certain maneuvers).
Likewise, the absence of a verified server side certificate does not necessarily mean that SSL is providing no value. Encryption without authentication provides a degree of privacy, raising the level of difficulty significantly for anyone who would want to eavesdrop.
Except it doesn't, because if you can't trust the certificate the server offers, you've left yourself completely open to a man-in-the-middle attack.
Alice and Bob want to communicate via SSL. Bob creates a self-signed certificate for www.example.com.
Now Carol can't duplicate Bob's certificate with his presumably secret private key, but she can create her own self-signed certificate for www.example.com. Then she hijack's Alice's DNS (perhaps using the recent DNS cache poisoning exploit) to point to her server instead of Bob's, then transparently proxies between Alice and Bob (since Bob doesn't verify Alice's identity, either), intercepting all communications.
If Bob's certificate was signed by a known authority, then Carol couldn't trivially create another certificate that claimed she was www.example.com, too, preventing this attack.
Self-signed certificates with unknown parties are pretty much tantamount to no security at all; the encryption can't be relied on for more than obfuscation. Probably the only good use for self-signed certificates is when you can get the certificate via a secure channel (and no, accepting the certificate via a browser dialog isn't a secure channel). Obviously, this approach doesn't scale.
The primary reason for the tool was to avoid Cartesian joins and loops in SQL written by hand, with many joined tables. The database will execute such a statement, if syntactically correct, resulting in runaway queries that can bring the database down.
SQL isn't Turing complete. It can't loop. That's sorta the whole point.
to this day, I prefer going through a checkout line run by humans rather than the 'self checkout' lines where you scan and pay for your stuff by yourself. Humans are still better than machines... for now... and only when humans aren't acting like machines.
I do, too, but this probably isn't the best example. Unless you're buying produce (for which the self-check line is truly an ordeal), you're using the exact same mix of humans and automation in both lines.
The difference, of course, is that even a grocery clerk working a summer job and making minimum wage is better at scanning groceries than your average and completely untrained shopper.
Of course, it doesn't help that the scanners are clunky (do I really need to scan my item, then put it in the bag, then oops, I wasn't supposed to put in the bag, scan it again, no, false alarm, it was just fine, just leave it in the bag), but you're actually comparing apples to oranges here.
While Rutan knows how to build aircraft and rockplanes he has absolutely no experience in building rockets.
The GP's point is that Rutan is an engineer. When they came up with the X Prize, he looked at the most effective way to solve the problem, and then did so. While other people were fooling around with overdesigned launch systems, he realized that a short suborbital hop was well within the capabilities of a glorified glider with a rocket booster stuck to the back.
Rutan's already said that he plans to go orbital with SpaceShip Three, assuming the line of SpaceShip Two's is a commercial success. He's also said that a SpaceShip Three would likely be very different from One or Two; he's a smart guy, a brilliant aeronautical engineer, and he's not pretending that the One/Two approach will scale up to an orbital vehicle.
If he gets around to building it, SpaceShip Three may well look like something out of the Mercury days. Don't think he's an idiot just because he builds the right vehicle for the job.
The Apollo program failed quite a number of times before Apollo 11 was able to reach the moon safely and back.
Umm... that's not how the Apollo program worked.
NASA didn't just design the whole Apollo spacecraft, from the Saturn V to the LEM, and then strap three astronauts in and decide to try for the moon on Apollo 1.
The space program during the moonshot years was based on steady, incremental progress. Every Apollo between 2 and 10 (excepting the tragic case of Apollo 1, of course) had incremental goals over previous attempts, and every single one of these missions were a success.
When they finally got to Apollo 11, they decided they were going to go for a landing. They'd already been to the Moon many times before, just not on it. They declared Apollo 11 The One, and then they went and did it.
The government space program has had plenty of spectacular failures, but it's also been marked by a cautious, incremental approach that's been quite successful (if expensive).
With the combination of NZB files [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NZB], and SSL, you'd be nuts to ever use a torrent again.
Speed + security + real files.
You must be pretty naive if you think SSL NNTP connections automatically makes a USENET provider "secure." There's absolutely nothing stopping someone with a search warrant from heading down to one of these providers and examining their records.
Let me know when every program ever needed has been written.