In many countries, wait staff are paid a decent working wage so they don't need to rely on tips to survive. The listed price is the price you pay. (In fact, tipping is banned in some industries, such as casinos.)
Moreso, the artists/promoters could tune the auction to deliver the preferred result, maximum profit or maximum venue capacity.
Smart auction-ware could even detect larger or smaller than expected demand, and switch to a larger/smaller venue; either increasing profits, or increasing crowd-density & atmosphere.
Recently saw an Australian version of one of those border-security reality TV shows. Customs guy says a problem they have with arriving US travellers is bullets. Hunters grab the same bag they use camping to use for carry-on, they take out any boxes of ammo of course, but there's always a few rounds rattling around in the bottom of the bag. Apparently TSA never picks it up.
(This isn't a security issue here, the tourists are inbound. It's a customs issue. It's illegal to personally import ammunition into Australia.)
Most of us can't figure out how to live sustainably here on Earth. Or maybe that's the point? We're sending people to Mars so they can, by necessity, learn how to live within their means and then to teach the rest of us?
Now you're getting it. Greenfield development allows social and technological experimentation that is impossible within an existing system.
England pretty much created the industrial revolution. But the US was the first industrialised country.
here's why not: people on death row have been condemned for very good reasons. If you're assuming the mission will kill the volunteers, how could you trust the worst kind of psychopaths and sociopaths humanity can offer up to complete what they're supposed to do?
Moreover, it's not what happened in Australia. England hanged her murderers and rapists. Transportees were primarily thieves and prostitutes. (Mmm, good times.) And they spent their first years working for the military, or as farm labour for free-settlers. They weren't just dumped out with a bag of seed and left to fight amongst themselves.
I suspect sending criminals to colonies is actually a good idea. Many are just reacting to the overly tight constraints of society. But not in the first colony ship, when everyone relies on everyone else for survival.
And finally, why the hell should a death row inmate be able to volunteer for something that plenty of professional non-criminal astronauts would gladly do?
Speaking of Australia, IIRC, some committed petty crimes purely to get transported.
I already see the ad. "NASA looking for experienced geologists and planetologists...."
Mining engineers and chemists would be better for the first phase. Given that it isn't a return trip, the science can be done by 'bots, but the equipment needs to be run properly.
(And it has previously been noted that engineers are statistically over-represented amongst terrorists, so there may be a larger pool to recruit from as well, compared to deathrow. Obama did promise to close Gitmo, and Bolden told Arab audiences that NASA's priority was to reach out to Muslims... I'm just saying, patterns people, it's all coming together...)
At the lower right of the smooth middle, there's a small white lump just inside the shadow-line, poking up into the sunlight. A shard of ice or rock projecting through the surrounding dust. It's apparently 100 metres high. (330ft.) What's that, about 20 stories?
Stare at that spot for awhile, imagine you're standing at the base of a 20 story building, and someone's taking an aerial photo of the area. Let your brain adjust to that scale. Now look at the rest of the comet.
(Since you replied late, I assume you won't mind an even later reply.)
If an object at 10 ft altitude is moving at a high enough velocity, it sure as hell is going into orbit unless something gets in its way, without any additional propellant.
...with a perigee 10ft above the ground.
Probably less. When you turn off your propulsion the maximum perigee is your current height. And then only if your velocity is horizontal to the ground; if you're angled upwards (and you will be), perigee is even lower than your current altitude.
At that point, you are in a nominal Hohmann tranfer orbit. But if you don't do an orbital burn at apogee, you will continue back down to perigee (hitting the atmosphere and/or ground first. Hence the "nominal".)
So the railgun payloads have to have a smallish rocket engine to normalise/circularise their orbit. And that rocket (and associated gear) has to survive the railgun's acceleration. Not impossible, but it means you are not just launching "dumb" payloads.
(Assuming velocity is below escape. Coz I'm assuming you weren't just being a pedantic dick.)
It must be so because I got modded flamebait last time I suggested Windows was more virus prone than alternatives./rant
You might have been modded flamebait because your post reads as flamebait. Seriously, read it again with fresh eyes. The subj, and the first three lines/paragraphs. You sound exactly like any random shouty dickhead. Few people would bother reading down to the last paragraph of your post, which contains the only interesting, non-flamebait part; and is the only reason I bothered to reply.
* There are lots of areas where landing or taking off is dangerous, or otherwise prohibited by terrain, such as rocky ground, forests, etc. In those circumstances, if you want to want to insert infantry, it will be a one-way trip, and they'll have to radio and then wait for extraction. They won't have a humvee, they won't have air support, they can only hoof it.
Hmmm, random thought. I wonder if a more practical alternative would be a UAV-tilt-rotor that carries a humvee-like vehicle under it. You travel by air, land and release the humvee, then the UAV portion ascends to altitude and waits. UAV's have ridiculously long "loiter" times.
The humvee section gives you ground mobility; while the UAV part offers "personalised" air support, eye-in-the-sky and extraction.
(It's a bit late in the thread, but if there's anyone with mod-points left wandering around, please reverse the -1 Flamebait mods to Clarkkent09's two messages. It's obvious he's expressing a genuine belief, not trying to provoke a mindless flamewar. Suppressing a poster you disagree with isn't a fair use of mod-points. Hell, we're even sort of almost vaguely on topic.)
I think it is "quite clear" that publishing the names of Afghans who, in Taliban's view, collaborate with the enemy puts their lives [...] at risk without any further evidence needed.
Accepted.
Same for publishing operational details, even coordinates of ground bases etc. Basically any information that helps the enemy be even a little bit more effective in fighting us obviously also puts lives at risk.
No. You have to work out the net effect. Unnecessary civilian deaths drive potential allies (and neutrals) towards the enemy. That puts a hell of a lot more lives at risk than two year old patrol routes. Or long established bases.
(The reports shows such effects. Apparently the US Marine shooting I mentioned was followed by civilian rioting and had local authorities begging the US to stop patrols in that area because they feared mixing angry-shouty relatives and panicky Marines. Such events provide aid and comfort to the enemy and should be treated as such. Failure to do so is to harm the US and its allies. Any commander that covers up a civilian killing should be publicly executed.)
Btw, accidentally shooting some civilians is not a war crime. You have to show intent.
Wilful disregard is enough. (Not that anyone ever enforces that one.)
My point, however, stands. You've placed unquestioning faith in unsupported claims that the reports will get soldiers killed at some hypothetical time in the future, but won't accept claims that the reports contain records of unlawful civilian killings, unless someone details it for you. (And be honest, would you even accept it then?)
Do you have any comprehension of how absurd that sounds?
Less and less the closer you get to the end of the very text you quoted? "They'd probably refuse, but..."
3. A list of informants would be very, very juicy and thus tempting to release but it could also be a false list that is intended to mislead, in case it is released.
Wikileaks tried to redact names of collaborators. WL isn't 4chan, they aren't doing this for lulz. If the media reported that WL had asked various governments for help, the harm-minimisation would be consistent with their stated methodology. Failing to properly cleanse the reports, OTOH, made them look callous/stupid, and allowed the US Govt to steal the debate.
4. In that situation wikileaks would have to trust the government to give them a correct list and the government would have to trust wikileaks not to release it.
That's just silly. I'm not saying ask for a complete list of all collaborators, I'm saying send a copy of the soon-to-be-leaked reports and ask "are there any names/etc that you consider sensitive?" (Analogy: Say I asked "Read my original comment, and point out any spelling mistakes." I'm not asking you to send me the entire dictionary. Nor do I have to blindly trust your response.)
Since the value of any cooperation would depend entirely on mutual trust and that is obviously absent
But asking first gives Wikileaks the moral high-ground when later criticised for putting informants at risk. "We asked you for help. You refused."
(I've read that Wikileaks has made such a request to the US DoD to help cleanse the remaining 15,000 unpublished documents. But doing it now looks cheap, they've allowed themselves to lose any moral high-ground.)
And what exactly did he tell us about what [...] "war crimes" are you talking about? Care to cite any examples?
And yet, I haven't seen anything that justifies [...] quite clearly putting lives of our Afghan allies and our own soldiers a risk.
(Pardon the elisions, I wanted to contrast those two statements. I don't think I've altered your intended meaning.)
Do you see the contradiction? You have accepted without evidence the claims that the leak "quite clearly" puts soldiers at risk, but you won't accept claims that the reports detail unlawful civilian killings, instead demanding proof.
Shouldn't you extend the same skepticism to the government's claims?
That said, I think Wikileaks screwed up the release by dumping it all at once. Since the US Gov was primed for it (after the arrest of PFC Manning) they were ready to counter-attack by making the issue about the leak itself, not the contents of the leak.
It would have been better doled out in smaller event-specific lumps. (Such as the Polish mortar attack on a village. Or the US Marine panic killing of civilians.) And better to have first privately, then publicly, approached other governments (UK, other NATO, Afghan, etc) to request help with hiding names of Afghani informants. They'd probably refuse, but you'd have media reports of the attempts before anything was released.
50+ comments all screaming "LOLZ! YOU IZ TARD NOT CHANGE PASSWORD! THAT HOW TEH HAXZ0RZ GET IN! GET OFF MY INTARWEBZ! LOLZ!" and apparently not a single one of them knew about the TR-069 protocol "backdoor", it seems most of them didn't even know the OP was referring to the LAN-side password or understand what that means.
Followed by who knows how many mods +1 Funnying every one of those comments (or -1 Trolling those trying to genuinely answer.)
And not one of those commenters, not a single fucking one, read the rest of the thread and realised that they just learned something they didn't know before, and posted a retraction.
And not one of the mods, not a single fucking one, read the rest of the thread and realised that they too just learned something they didn't know before, and posted to undo their mods.
And the great thing is, every single last motherfucking one of them will do the exact same thing tomorrow.
True, it might be harder for a teacher to write an exam crafted in such a way that the student's understanding of the material is demonstrated in the steps they write down to get to the solution rather than just checking that the final numerical answer matches the key, but I think that's not beyond the typical math teacher's capacities.
"Answer keys"? When I did maths & physics exams, we were always told the method was more important than the answer. Always show your workings, that way if you make a stupid mistake, you lose 1 point but not the entire 10 points for the question.
It may not be expensive for our country to build twenty of these, but it is expensive for NASA.
The point, however, is that the cost of building two is nowhere near double the cost of building one. Spirit/Opportunity did not cost double MSL, the Voyagers didn't cost double Galileo. In fact, NASA will always build multiple rovers/probes to have spares on Earth to practice fixing a problem before risking the real rover/probe. Building a single MSL rover is a false economy, in a $-per-discovery sense.
Also, look at the gap between rovers...
Pathfinder: 1997
Spirit/Opportunity: 2004
MSL-Curiosity: 2012 (best case)
MAX-C: 2018 (earliest proposed launch.)
How much more cost effective would the Mars program be if they had launched another half a dozen Pathfinder- then Spirit-class rovers in the interims.
Probes to the outer planets are worse. Look at the gap between the Voyagers and Galileo, Galileo and Cassini. Cassini was apparently fifteen years in the making. How much extra would it have really cost to build two or three? (Oh, plus one to Jupiter, one to Pluto... Heh heh heh...)
The other problem is putting your eggs in the same basket. [...] better for us to launch one rover every year for five years (each of which presumably more capable than the last), than to launch five all at once every five years.
AC didn't say all twenty would be launched at once. That's almost certainly impossible. But sending "five in five years" would require exactly the sort of multi-rover program it was talking about.
What if there was some instruments/capabilities that would be beneficial to have on them, but didn't know they would come in handy until after they landed?
And how is that different to any probe/rover? Given their development cycle, they'll be out of date before they are finished being built.
They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Facebook already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about walled gardens and open source won't make normal people switch over.
You don't want to try to appeal to normal people. Then it would be lame, and early adopters would shun it. You want it to seem exclusive.
You want something built for people who don't get what they want from Facebook. Start with developers. Then business professionals. Then tech literate hangers-on. Then college students. By then it's just a web standard. "Web 4.0".
Also, how do you handle things like Facebook games and cooperation with people in them? Oh, you say Facebook games are stupid and people shouldn't play them. We aren't the ones to tell other people what they should or shouldn't like.
So we shouldn't, but Facebook should? This is one of the advantages of a new open system. New uses that the system's creators never imagined. The more open it is, the more creative people can be with it.
300 years ago, England sent all their convicts to Australia. America got all their religious nuts.
Errr, not quite. Cook's mapping, 1770. First colony fleet, 1788.
Note how close those dates are to a certain American historical event. Prior to 1776, Briton had North America to send its transportees, after the 1780's it needed a new hole. Most of the Australian colonies were founded as "free" (non-convict), but later we got convicts that would have been sent to you. That said, "Convicts" is misleading; murderers, rapists, etc, were executed in Briton. Transportees were mostly petty thieves/prostitutes (the poor) and Irish political prisoners. Fun mix.
Slashdot Mirror
In many countries, wait staff are paid a decent working wage so they don't need to rely on tips to survive. The listed price is the price you pay. (In fact, tipping is banned in some industries, such as casinos.)
Moreso, the artists/promoters could tune the auction to deliver the preferred result, maximum profit or maximum venue capacity.
Smart auction-ware could even detect larger or smaller than expected demand, and switch to a larger/smaller venue; either increasing profits, or increasing crowd-density & atmosphere.
If you have scalpers, you are doing it wrong.
Poor Mike Collins, always the bridesmaid...
Recently saw an Australian version of one of those border-security reality TV shows. Customs guy says a problem they have with arriving US travellers is bullets. Hunters grab the same bag they use camping to use for carry-on, they take out any boxes of ammo of course, but there's always a few rounds rattling around in the bottom of the bag. Apparently TSA never picks it up.
(This isn't a security issue here, the tourists are inbound. It's a customs issue. It's illegal to personally import ammunition into Australia.)
Same way you profit from a wagon-train. Sell wagons.
Most of us can't figure out how to live sustainably here on Earth. Or maybe that's the point? We're sending people to Mars so they can, by necessity, learn how to live within their means and then to teach the rest of us?
Now you're getting it. Greenfield development allows social and technological experimentation that is impossible within an existing system.
England pretty much created the industrial revolution. But the US was the first industrialised country.
here's why not: people on death row have been condemned for very good reasons. If you're assuming the mission will kill the volunteers, how could you trust the worst kind of psychopaths and sociopaths humanity can offer up to complete what they're supposed to do?
Moreover, it's not what happened in Australia. England hanged her murderers and rapists. Transportees were primarily thieves and prostitutes. (Mmm, good times.) And they spent their first years working for the military, or as farm labour for free-settlers. They weren't just dumped out with a bag of seed and left to fight amongst themselves.
I suspect sending criminals to colonies is actually a good idea. Many are just reacting to the overly tight constraints of society. But not in the first colony ship, when everyone relies on everyone else for survival.
And finally, why the hell should a death row inmate be able to volunteer for something that plenty of professional non-criminal astronauts would gladly do?
Speaking of Australia, IIRC, some committed petty crimes purely to get transported.
I already see the ad. "NASA looking for experienced geologists and planetologists. ..."
Mining engineers and chemists would be better for the first phase. Given that it isn't a return trip, the science can be done by 'bots, but the equipment needs to be run properly.
(And it has previously been noted that engineers are statistically over-represented amongst terrorists, so there may be a larger pool to recruit from as well, compared to deathrow. Obama did promise to close Gitmo, and Bolden told Arab audiences that NASA's priority was to reach out to Muslims...
I'm just saying, patterns people, it's all coming together...)
Article 1, section 8?
Now the real trick would be to have spiky metal underwear, and let them see how hard they grope then
pat pat jab "Ouch!"
"Prickly little buggers, aren't they!"
You've never seen a jet contrail? Seriously? In your entire life, you've never actually seen a jet contrail?
At the lower right of the smooth middle, there's a small white lump just inside the shadow-line, poking up into the sunlight. A shard of ice or rock projecting through the surrounding dust. It's apparently 100 metres high. (330ft.) What's that, about 20 stories?
Stare at that spot for awhile, imagine you're standing at the base of a 20 story building, and someone's taking an aerial photo of the area. Let your brain adjust to that scale. Now look at the rest of the comet.
Happiness?
(Since you replied late, I assume you won't mind an even later reply.)
If an object at 10 ft altitude is moving at a high enough velocity, it sure as hell is going into orbit unless something gets in its way, without any additional propellant.
...with a perigee 10ft above the ground.
Probably less. When you turn off your propulsion the maximum perigee is your current height. And then only if your velocity is horizontal to the ground; if you're angled upwards (and you will be), perigee is even lower than your current altitude.
At that point, you are in a nominal Hohmann tranfer orbit. But if you don't do an orbital burn at apogee, you will continue back down to perigee (hitting the atmosphere and/or ground first. Hence the "nominal".)
So the railgun payloads have to have a smallish rocket engine to normalise/circularise their orbit. And that rocket (and associated gear) has to survive the railgun's acceleration. Not impossible, but it means you are not just launching "dumb" payloads.
(Assuming velocity is below escape. Coz I'm assuming you weren't just being a pedantic dick.)
So now that it's published, it becomes a source for itself. Doesn't this usually result in head asplosions?
It must be so because I got modded flamebait last time I suggested Windows was more virus prone than alternatives. /rant
You might have been modded flamebait because your post reads as flamebait. Seriously, read it again with fresh eyes. The subj, and the first three lines/paragraphs. You sound exactly like any random shouty dickhead. Few people would bother reading down to the last paragraph of your post, which contains the only interesting, non-flamebait part; and is the only reason I bothered to reply.
* There are lots of areas where landing or taking off is dangerous, or otherwise prohibited by terrain, such as rocky ground, forests, etc. In those circumstances, if you want to want to insert infantry, it will be a one-way trip, and they'll have to radio and then wait for extraction. They won't have a humvee, they won't have air support, they can only hoof it.
Hmmm, random thought. I wonder if a more practical alternative would be a UAV-tilt-rotor that carries a humvee-like vehicle under it. You travel by air, land and release the humvee, then the UAV portion ascends to altitude and waits. UAV's have ridiculously long "loiter" times.
The humvee section gives you ground mobility; while the UAV part offers "personalised" air support, eye-in-the-sky and extraction.
(It's a bit late in the thread, but if there's anyone with mod-points left wandering around, please reverse the -1 Flamebait mods to Clarkkent09's two messages. It's obvious he's expressing a genuine belief, not trying to provoke a mindless flamewar. Suppressing a poster you disagree with isn't a fair use of mod-points. Hell, we're even sort of almost vaguely on topic.)
I think it is "quite clear" that publishing the names of Afghans who, in Taliban's view, collaborate with the enemy puts their lives [...] at risk without any further evidence needed.
Accepted.
Same for publishing operational details, even coordinates of ground bases etc. Basically any information that helps the enemy be even a little bit more effective in fighting us obviously also puts lives at risk.
No. You have to work out the net effect. Unnecessary civilian deaths drive potential allies (and neutrals) towards the enemy. That puts a hell of a lot more lives at risk than two year old patrol routes. Or long established bases.
(The reports shows such effects. Apparently the US Marine shooting I mentioned was followed by civilian rioting and had local authorities begging the US to stop patrols in that area because they feared mixing angry-shouty relatives and panicky Marines. Such events provide aid and comfort to the enemy and should be treated as such. Failure to do so is to harm the US and its allies. Any commander that covers up a civilian killing should be publicly executed.)
Btw, accidentally shooting some civilians is not a war crime. You have to show intent.
Wilful disregard is enough. (Not that anyone ever enforces that one.)
My point, however, stands. You've placed unquestioning faith in unsupported claims that the reports will get soldiers killed at some hypothetical time in the future, but won't accept claims that the reports contain records of unlawful civilian killings, unless someone details it for you. (And be honest, would you even accept it then?)
Do you have any comprehension of how absurd that sounds?
Less and less the closer you get to the end of the very text you quoted? "They'd probably refuse, but..."
3. A list of informants would be very, very juicy and thus tempting to release but it could also be a false list that is intended to mislead, in case it is released.
Wikileaks tried to redact names of collaborators. WL isn't 4chan, they aren't doing this for lulz. If the media reported that WL had asked various governments for help, the harm-minimisation would be consistent with their stated methodology. Failing to properly cleanse the reports, OTOH, made them look callous/stupid, and allowed the US Govt to steal the debate.
4. In that situation wikileaks would have to trust the government to give them a correct list and the government would have to trust wikileaks not to release it.
That's just silly. I'm not saying ask for a complete list of all collaborators, I'm saying send a copy of the soon-to-be-leaked reports and ask "are there any names/etc that you consider sensitive?" (Analogy: Say I asked "Read my original comment, and point out any spelling mistakes." I'm not asking you to send me the entire dictionary. Nor do I have to blindly trust your response.)
Since the value of any cooperation would depend entirely on mutual trust and that is obviously absent
But asking first gives Wikileaks the moral high-ground when later criticised for putting informants at risk. "We asked you for help. You refused."
(I've read that Wikileaks has made such a request to the US DoD to help cleanse the remaining 15,000 unpublished documents. But doing it now looks cheap, they've allowed themselves to lose any moral high-ground.)
And what exactly did he tell us about what [...] "war crimes" are you talking about? Care to cite any examples?
And yet, I haven't seen anything that justifies [...] quite clearly putting lives of our Afghan allies and our own soldiers a risk.
(Pardon the elisions, I wanted to contrast those two statements. I don't think I've altered your intended meaning.)
Do you see the contradiction? You have accepted without evidence the claims that the leak "quite clearly" puts soldiers at risk, but you won't accept claims that the reports detail unlawful civilian killings, instead demanding proof.
Shouldn't you extend the same skepticism to the government's claims?
That said, I think Wikileaks screwed up the release by dumping it all at once. Since the US Gov was primed for it (after the arrest of PFC Manning) they were ready to counter-attack by making the issue about the leak itself, not the contents of the leak.
It would have been better doled out in smaller event-specific lumps. (Such as the Polish mortar attack on a village. Or the US Marine panic killing of civilians.) And better to have first privately, then publicly, approached other governments (UK, other NATO, Afghan, etc) to request help with hiding names of Afghani informants. They'd probably refuse, but you'd have media reports of the attempts before anything was released.
What a thread!
50+ comments all screaming "LOLZ! YOU IZ TARD NOT CHANGE PASSWORD! THAT HOW TEH HAXZ0RZ GET IN! GET OFF MY INTARWEBZ! LOLZ!" and apparently not a single one of them knew about the TR-069 protocol "backdoor", it seems most of them didn't even know the OP was referring to the LAN-side password or understand what that means.
Followed by who knows how many mods +1 Funnying every one of those comments (or -1 Trolling those trying to genuinely answer.)
And not one of those commenters, not a single fucking one, read the rest of the thread and realised that they just learned something they didn't know before, and posted a retraction.
And not one of the mods, not a single fucking one, read the rest of the thread and realised that they too just learned something they didn't know before, and posted to undo their mods.
And the great thing is, every single last motherfucking one of them will do the exact same thing tomorrow.
Glorious.
I love you all.
True, it might be harder for a teacher to write an exam crafted in such a way that the student's understanding of the material is demonstrated in the steps they write down to get to the solution rather than just checking that the final numerical answer matches the key, but I think that's not beyond the typical math teacher's capacities.
"Answer keys"? When I did maths & physics exams, we were always told the method was more important than the answer. Always show your workings, that way if you make a stupid mistake, you lose 1 point but not the entire 10 points for the question.
When did they stop doing that?
Watching an arsehole being hoist by their own petard is funny. But does not mean I like seeing nice people being blown up*.
(* Petard means explosive. From the French, "to break wind.")
It may not be expensive for our country to build twenty of these, but it is expensive for NASA.
The point, however, is that the cost of building two is nowhere near double the cost of building one. Spirit/Opportunity did not cost double MSL, the Voyagers didn't cost double Galileo. In fact, NASA will always build multiple rovers/probes to have spares on Earth to practice fixing a problem before risking the real rover/probe. Building a single MSL rover is a false economy, in a $-per-discovery sense.
Also, look at the gap between rovers...
Pathfinder: 1997
Spirit/Opportunity: 2004
MSL-Curiosity: 2012 (best case)
MAX-C: 2018 (earliest proposed launch.)
How much more cost effective would the Mars program be if they had launched another half a dozen Pathfinder- then Spirit-class rovers in the interims.
Probes to the outer planets are worse. Look at the gap between the Voyagers and Galileo, Galileo and Cassini. Cassini was apparently fifteen years in the making. How much extra would it have really cost to build two or three? (Oh, plus one to Jupiter, one to Pluto... Heh heh heh...)
The other problem is putting your eggs in the same basket. [...] better for us to launch one rover every year for five years (each of which presumably more capable than the last), than to launch five all at once every five years.
AC didn't say all twenty would be launched at once. That's almost certainly impossible. But sending "five in five years" would require exactly the sort of multi-rover program it was talking about.
What if there was some instruments/capabilities that would be beneficial to have on them, but didn't know they would come in handy until after they landed?
And how is that different to any probe/rover? Given their development cycle, they'll be out of date before they are finished being built.
They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Facebook already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about walled gardens and open source won't make normal people switch over.
You don't want to try to appeal to normal people. Then it would be lame, and early adopters would shun it. You want it to seem exclusive. You want something built for people who don't get what they want from Facebook. Start with developers. Then business professionals. Then tech literate hangers-on. Then college students. By then it's just a web standard. "Web 4.0".
Also, how do you handle things like Facebook games and cooperation with people in them? Oh, you say Facebook games are stupid and people shouldn't play them. We aren't the ones to tell other people what they should or shouldn't like.
So we shouldn't, but Facebook should? This is one of the advantages of a new open system. New uses that the system's creators never imagined. The more open it is, the more creative people can be with it.
300 years ago, England sent all their convicts to Australia. America got all their religious nuts.
Errr, not quite. Cook's mapping, 1770. First colony fleet, 1788.
Note how close those dates are to a certain American historical event. Prior to 1776, Briton had North America to send its transportees, after the 1780's it needed a new hole. Most of the Australian colonies were founded as "free" (non-convict), but later we got convicts that would have been sent to you. That said, "Convicts" is misleading; murderers, rapists, etc, were executed in Briton. Transportees were mostly petty thieves/prostitutes (the poor) and Irish political prisoners. Fun mix.