It still sorta fits within the Intel/Rambus contract because it's not a 'new interface', merely a tweak of either the i810 or the BX. But it is a bit afoul because it exceeds 1GB/sec bandwidth, though just barely. OTOH, I doubt any controller can come within 6% of the theoretical max of a PC133 DIMM, so effective bandwidth is probably still low enough.
Lots of people have been looking at the publicly available portions of the Intel/Rambus contract, and speculating about the blanked out parts.
And I thought my milk in Vermont was expensive because it usually gets jugged in Massachesetts. Why it has to go from the cow down there and back before I can drink it annoys me, and IMHO can only happen when transportation (and fuel) is severely undervalued.
On a more related note, I thought the Dairy Compact didn't lift any prices. I thought it merely kept a price floor for the farmer, so that his price for milk won't fall below $15/100lb. So that shouldn't raise any prices, just keep them from falling too far. I did get a "$0.50 Diary Compact Surcharge" on my pizza once, but I take that more as strongarm tactics by Big Dairy than any real reflection on reality.
Does anyone else find it odd that music copyright ownership provisions are placed in a bill titled, "Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999?" I know, this is US Law, and has nothing to do with justice. But in a courtroom, an attorney from one side can object if the attorney from the other side is engaging in irrelevancies.
We need the same for our laws.
Of course I'm from Vermont, and our state is the direct beneficiary of this practice, too. We have a thing called "The Northeast Dairy Compact" that is designed to help keep small and family dairy farms afloat in a corporatist (Take that, Katz!) industrialist megafarm environment. The Northeast Dairy Compact always seems to get killed on its own by the big money on the other side. It only makes it through as an unrelated rider. But it keeps our green hills green and our scenery scenic.
Just because Itanium is a Frankenstein doesn't mean it isn't a steamroller. Consider Windows.
Caught me, I meant to say "Sun" there, not "AMD".
When I said "STILL no generally available hardware," I meant no IA64. Alpha's existence is obvious. So is PowerPC, but in spite of the fact that PowerPC-64 has been sold and IA64 hasn't, some have the former taking a dive before the marketed might of the latter.
They see a steamroller called Itanium on the horizon. Sure, they have an X86 port. But that's more of an entry tool to make sure that customers grow up into their bread and butter, the Sparcs and the rest of the higher end.
By endorsing Sledgehammer, AMD hopes (IMHO) to take some of the wind out of Itanium's sails, and make it less of an 'obvious' choice. Intel is becoming formidable as a systems house, and can challenge Sun in that role. AMD at the moment is merely a chip (including CPUs) vendor.
On the side, I guess it's not so amazing that when Intel announces an upcoming 64-bit CPU, everyone starts planning on it being a success, even before details were known. Where it gets just slightly amazing is when bad news starts to leak out about Merced, how it's a dog, and "Just wait for McKinley!" Yep, we messed up this time, but just wait until next time.
In spite of the flop of Merced a year before its introduction, and the uncertainty of developing decent compilers for VLIW, and the general dislike of Intel's quirky architectures, like X86...
IA-64 is still branded one of the Winners in the 64 bit sweepstakes, and there's STILL no generally available hardware.
But sometimes they do. That's one of the basics of law in the USA. If you don't like some aspect of the law, break it. You MUST be prepared to pay the price, however. Then you get your day in court, and hopefully get the law overturned, by the judicial process. These are often done by 'test cases' that are selected because they highlight some aspect of the law that is wrong, and that there is a decent chance of getting real change as a result.
At the same time, don't make yourself into a test case if you aren't solid. Your loss makes it more difficult for the next case.
How this relates to RIAA/Napster is a different issue. The two wrongs are not precisely aligned against each other.
Try the procedures used in "The Andromeda Strain." A little more realistic/real than a sonic shower, and well enought described (in the book, anyway) to make one feel a little uncomfortable.
>Absolutely right. In the first place, there is no known reason that the FBI needs to place their black box on an
>ISP's network, since the ISP's themselves are quite capable of pulling copies of any and all e-mail traffic
>passing through their systems. Why does the FBI need to "do it themselves"? Don't they trust the ISP's?
The reason the FBI feels that they can't count on ISPs to furnish this information is, "control of evidence." With Carnivore, they know exactly how the evidence was obtained from the network, and they believe (rightly or wrongly) that it is safe against tampering, and will thus stand up in court. They cannot guarantee the same "evidence quality" for information furnished by a third party.
I saw this elsewhere, and don't want to be "Redundant", but it hasn't been posted elsewhere on this topic.
This doesn't mean that I agree with Carnivore. Imagine the first time Carnivore evidence goes up against a savvy lawyer, and he brings out cracker witnesses who have already penetrated...
Not to mention the Civil Liberty issues. At the very least, Carnivore data about ME needs to be available to ME under the Freedom of Information Act, easily and regularly. The quantities and monitored individuals need outside auditing, and the data contained should remain confidential.
The way we're SUPPOSED to do things, connecting to the internet with a home system needs 3 more service boxen.
1: A firewall, running nothing else.
2: A box on a DMZ, for any services you want to offer for incoming connections, perhaps SSH for yourself, at the very least.
3: A dedicated logging box.
Plus a fourth box, if you want proxies or the like. I also find mod_roaming and a local IMAP server handy if the desktop is dual boot. Maybe these could be safely be put on Box 2, above, but a purist would probably say not.
This is a lot of boxes, even if old 486's are cheap. It's starting to run into a lot of floor space and electricity. I like the idea of these tiny computers for this role. All 4 desired computers should be able to be packed into the space of one regular sized unit.
Too bad the subject system costs $1500.
Is there anything fairly small, but very cheap? I keep seeing talk of 1U rack mount cases, but those are pretty pricey, themselves.
We're all presuming that Win2k will take at least double the servers to handle the same load. So while Microsoft will claim victory, they're (presumably) paying a BUNCH of money for hardware for this showcase. So (presumably) MS doesn't win, either.
Margins are so small on computing hardware that the the boxmaker doesn't win, either. Once upon a time, the CPU and hard drive were the only really profitable parts. Given hard drive price erosion, lately, is that list down to the CPU? In that case, Intel emerges as the only clear winner in this whole thing. (I presume these are not AMD CPUs they're fielding.)
Whenever Microsoft loses a market battle, it's only until their next release. Plus the industry seems to accept that by some Rev N+1, Microsoft WILL win.
On the flip side, whenever Microsoft does win a market battle, the industry seems to accept that they have won it forever. Thereafter they cease to contest that piece of turf.
The sideline to this is that Microsoft can now put that piece of turf into 'maintenance mode', and concentrate their efforts on the next acquisition.
IMHO, Linux has been one of the few counters to this phenomenon.
Long ago, Roblimo , put the quote at the bottom on Slashdot. IMHO, the record companies have been ripping us o^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H enjoying high profits and FEAR the end of the gravy train, and having to subsist on the profit margins more common in other industries.
************************************************ ** Re:Another victory for the forces of mediocrity. (Score:3, Insightful) by roblimo (roblimo.nojunk@slashdot.org) on Monday March 27, @09:54AM EDT (#77) (User Info)
More aptly, what if 95% of all popular music was controlled by only four or five record companies and those companies formed a trade association whose main purpose was to keep its members' products selling for high prices instead of allowing "the market" to determine what a given song was worth?
The end result would probably be wholesale music piracy using technology the record companies couldn't control.
Not that anything like this could ever happen in real life, mind you; this is just Monday morning speculation on Slashdot...
Obviously there are the "sinister" motives, but let's ignore those for the moment. Let's resist the temption to morph Gatesmania into Hunkapillarmania.
The two most relevant examples I know of come from science fiction. That lends them no credence whatsoever, but does portend a few consequences.
The first comes from one of Clarke's Rama series, Rama Revealed, IIRC. (Don't ask me WHY I kept reading the Rama series THAT long, I don't know.) He describes a spacefaring race that had expanded nearly to Earth sometime in the not-so-distant past, then died out overnight. The reason: they had been tampering too much with their genes, and some lurker vulnerability propagated too far into their population. It wasn't very fully explained, but think monocultures, think Irish potato famine.
The second described a time in the life of a "normal" girl going to high school with "enhanced" kids, and feeling really down on herself because she wasn't as beautiful, bright, strong, etc, as her classmates. Then, around the 18th birthday, a particularly popular "designer gene" turned out to have some terrible lurking flaws that took that long to show up. About a third of that age began going into convulsions and having mental problems, and most of them died.
OK, these are horror stories, and may not come true. But then again, when "market dynamics" come into play, how farsighted are we really? How likely are we to just start using freon all over the place without knowing the long-term effects. Then, even when we get the warning, it's considered far enough in the future that we STILL don't want to do anything, because there's too much profit in the freon status quo. Eventually we got it right, but I don't remember being paranoid about the Sun when I was a kid.
There's something else happening here, and it's a combination of the DMCA, the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, and the current patent frenzy. These things all favor big, established players, primarily US and Japan.
Take reverse engineering, for instance. There is a much more enlightened policy on this in Europe. Perhaps if European industries were as worldwide-entrenched as US and Japan, that policy wouldn't be there. But it is, and it's part of the groundwork.
So the US just isn't too friendly in the IP business, be it arts or science, unless you work for one of the big players.
So go somewhere else.
Go to Europe.
Go to Latin America.
Go to India.
The Rest-of-the-World is getting to be a big enough market to just ignore silly US protectionism.
Since I'm a US citizen, born and raised here, I have to say that we take these actions at our peril. We may well be building a cozy little box for ourselves, and we'll get passed by.
>Basically any method of generating energy will negatively affect the world in some way (except solar, which negatively affects the sun, slowly).
TANSTAFL
Except that sometimes that free lunch really is there, and by not accepting it, you're letting it go to waste. (Either that, or the "free" lunch really costs, and you'll pay for it in the future.)
The Sun shines regardless of what we do here on Earth. Not only that, a tiny fraction of that light hits the Earth, whether it's hitting a solar cell, a leaf, the ground, or the bald spot on top of your head.
If you really want to worry about disastrous environment effects of solar energy, consider how much we'd have to harvest to significantly change the albedo of the Earth. But I'm not going to bother. (Too much use of solar power satellites might be another matter.)
I have a minivan, precisely because it's the logical family vehicle. It wraps the whole family and our stuff, and takes us on vacations. For normal life, it wraps the wife and kids, and perhaps some friends and kids, and transports them safely. It holds wood, mulch, footlockers, and other occasional stuffl. The mileage could be better, but an SUV would be a lot worse.
Sure, the image stinks. But it makes too much sense in my situation to ignore.
For my commute, I'm presently driving (alone, I guiltily admit) in a beater. But at least my gas mileage is in the 30+ mpg range.
The car is due for replacement. Since it's a commute vehicle and gets less than 10k miles/year, I just can't justify a new car as a replacement, let alone a pricey hybrid. It'd rust out (New England salted winter roads) before anything close to wearing out.
I just wish there was already a market in used electric cars.
You mean Nasa knows how to throw space stations at Australia.
I used to feel it a shame that we couldn't somehow keep Skylab up longer. Then at some point, I got a chance to see a decent cross-section. There was this big waste holding tank at the bottom, and no apparent way to clean it out. Skylab was designed for a fixed mission life. No doubt it was overdesigned, and could have sustained more missions. But if that holding tank was any indication of general design practices, Skylab was incapable of indefinite occupation.
that they were going to show us pictures of a Proton exploding. In the meantime, re-Christen Zvezda with a new name, attach it to Mir as a hotel for Rich Americans, and laugh at us all the way to the bank.
Personally, I dislike the idea of having to carry fuel to land, especially when you probably have to carry that fuel at takeoff, too. It's hard enough to get any payload weight to orbit without adding to that a landing fuel requirement, as well.
Unfortunately, because of its high inclination orbit, the ISS is essentially useless as a stopover to anywhere. As a matter of fact about the only useful thing about that orbit is its politics, because it's readily accessable to both Canavaral and Baikanaur. (I know I really messed the spelling on that last one.)
We launch from Canavaral because it's reasonably close to the equator, and can take advantage of the Earth's rotational speed as a fraction of orbital velocity. Don't forget, as someone else mentioned, of the importance of that first thousand MPH, in terms of fuel.
A high inclination orbit throws away several hundred of that first thousand MPH, diminishing launch capacity and shortening the launch window. The launch window to ISS is on the order of 10 minutes, and it's HARD to get big payloads up there.
Just because Sagan used Vega doesn't mean that it isn't real. As a matter of fact, the Earth is precessing, and Vega is going to be the Pole Star in 20 or 30 thousand years.
By the time I get high-speed access, I hope to have learned enough to run that ethernet adapter from diald, whether id's DHCP or PPPoE. I'd like the convenience of high-speed access when I want it without 24x7 vulnerability. I have a reasonably tight firewall, but I'm sure the right person can get through it. At the moment, even if I had a simple single input input rule on that interface of "-j DENY", I suspect that there are those who could get through even that.
The only truly safe interface is either offline, or disconnected.
Slashdot Mirror
It still sorta fits within the Intel/Rambus contract because it's not a 'new interface', merely a tweak of either the i810 or the BX. But it is a bit afoul because it exceeds 1GB/sec bandwidth, though just barely. OTOH, I doubt any controller can come within 6% of the theoretical max of a PC133 DIMM, so effective bandwidth is probably still low enough.
Lots of people have been looking at the publicly available portions of the Intel/Rambus contract, and speculating about the blanked out parts.
And I thought my milk in Vermont was expensive because it usually gets jugged in Massachesetts. Why it has to go from the cow down there and back before I can drink it annoys me, and IMHO can only happen when transportation (and fuel) is severely undervalued.
On a more related note, I thought the Dairy Compact didn't lift any prices. I thought it merely kept a price floor for the farmer, so that his price for milk won't fall below $15/100lb. So that shouldn't raise any prices, just keep them from falling too far. I did get a "$0.50 Diary Compact Surcharge" on my pizza once, but I take that more as strongarm tactics by Big Dairy than any real reflection on reality.
Too bad this post was late in the discussion. I found it rather, "Informative".
Does anyone else find it odd that music copyright ownership provisions are placed in a bill titled, "Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act of 1999?" I know, this is US Law, and has nothing to do with justice. But in a courtroom, an attorney from one side can object if the attorney from the other side is engaging in irrelevancies.
We need the same for our laws.
Of course I'm from Vermont, and our state is the direct beneficiary of this practice, too. We have a thing called "The Northeast Dairy Compact" that is designed to help keep small and family dairy farms afloat in a corporatist (Take that, Katz!) industrialist megafarm environment. The Northeast Dairy Compact always seems to get killed on its own by the big money on the other side. It only makes it through as an unrelated rider. But it keeps our green hills green and our scenery scenic.
Just because Itanium is a Frankenstein doesn't mean it isn't a steamroller. Consider Windows.
Caught me, I meant to say "Sun" there, not "AMD".
When I said "STILL no generally available hardware," I meant no IA64. Alpha's existence is obvious. So is PowerPC, but in spite of the fact that PowerPC-64 has been sold and IA64 hasn't, some have the former taking a dive before the marketed might of the latter.
They see a steamroller called Itanium on the horizon. Sure, they have an X86 port. But that's more of an entry tool to make sure that customers grow up into their bread and butter, the Sparcs and the rest of the higher end.
By endorsing Sledgehammer, AMD hopes (IMHO) to take some of the wind out of Itanium's sails, and make it less of an 'obvious' choice. Intel is becoming formidable as a systems house, and can challenge Sun in that role. AMD at the moment is merely a chip (including CPUs) vendor.
On the side, I guess it's not so amazing that when Intel announces an upcoming 64-bit CPU, everyone starts planning on it being a success, even before details were known. Where it gets just slightly amazing is when bad news starts to leak out about Merced, how it's a dog, and "Just wait for McKinley!" Yep, we messed up this time, but just wait until next time.
In spite of the flop of Merced a year before its introduction, and the uncertainty of developing decent compilers for VLIW, and the general dislike of Intel's quirky architectures, like X86...
IA-64 is still branded one of the Winners in the 64 bit sweepstakes, and there's STILL no generally available hardware.
But sometimes they do. That's one of the basics of law in the USA. If you don't like some aspect of the law, break it. You MUST be prepared to pay the price, however. Then you get your day in court, and hopefully get the law overturned, by the judicial process. These are often done by 'test cases' that are selected because they highlight some aspect of the law that is wrong, and that there is a decent chance of getting real change as a result.
At the same time, don't make yourself into a test case if you aren't solid. Your loss makes it more difficult for the next case.
How this relates to RIAA/Napster is a different issue. The two wrongs are not precisely aligned against each other.
Try the procedures used in "The Andromeda Strain." A little more realistic/real than a sonic shower, and well enought described (in the book, anyway) to make one feel a little uncomfortable.
>Absolutely right. In the first place, there is no known reason that the FBI needs to place their black box on an
>ISP's network, since the ISP's themselves are quite capable of pulling copies of any and all e-mail traffic
>passing through their systems. Why does the FBI need to "do it themselves"? Don't they trust the ISP's?
The reason the FBI feels that they can't count on ISPs to furnish this information is, "control of evidence." With Carnivore, they know exactly how the evidence was obtained from the network, and they believe (rightly or wrongly) that it is safe against tampering, and will thus stand up in court. They cannot guarantee the same "evidence quality" for information furnished by a third party.
I saw this elsewhere, and don't want to be "Redundant", but it hasn't been posted elsewhere on this topic.
This doesn't mean that I agree with Carnivore. Imagine the first time Carnivore evidence goes up against a savvy lawyer, and he brings out cracker witnesses who have already penetrated...
Not to mention the Civil Liberty issues. At the very least, Carnivore data about ME needs to be available to ME under the Freedom of Information Act, easily and regularly. The quantities and monitored individuals need outside auditing, and the data contained should remain confidential.
The way we're SUPPOSED to do things, connecting to the internet with a home system needs 3 more service boxen.
1: A firewall, running nothing else.
2: A box on a DMZ, for any services you want to offer for incoming connections, perhaps SSH for yourself, at the very least.
3: A dedicated logging box.
Plus a fourth box, if you want proxies or the like. I also find mod_roaming and a local IMAP server handy if the desktop is dual boot. Maybe these could be safely be put on Box 2, above, but a purist would probably say not.
This is a lot of boxes, even if old 486's are cheap. It's starting to run into a lot of floor space and electricity. I like the idea of these tiny computers for this role. All 4 desired computers should be able to be packed into the space of one regular sized unit.
Too bad the subject system costs $1500.
Is there anything fairly small, but very cheap? I keep seeing talk of 1U rack mount cases, but those are pretty pricey, themselves.
If BSD is replaced, the BSD doesn't win.
We're all presuming that Win2k will take at least double the servers to handle the same load. So while Microsoft will claim victory, they're (presumably) paying a BUNCH of money for hardware for this showcase. So (presumably) MS doesn't win, either.
Margins are so small on computing hardware that the the boxmaker doesn't win, either. Once upon a time, the CPU and hard drive were the only really profitable parts. Given hard drive price erosion, lately, is that list down to the CPU? In that case, Intel emerges as the only clear winner in this whole thing. (I presume these are not AMD CPUs they're fielding.)
Whenever Microsoft loses a market battle, it's only until their next release. Plus the industry seems to accept that by some Rev N+1, Microsoft WILL win.
On the flip side, whenever Microsoft does win a market battle, the industry seems to accept that they have won it forever. Thereafter they cease to contest that piece of turf.
The sideline to this is that Microsoft can now put that piece of turf into 'maintenance mode', and concentrate their efforts on the next acquisition.
IMHO, Linux has been one of the few counters to this phenomenon.
Long ago, Roblimo , put the quote at the bottom on Slashdot. IMHO, the record companies have been ripping us o^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H enjoying high profits and FEAR the end of the gravy train, and having to subsist on the profit margins more common in other industries.
* **
***********************************************
Re:Another victory for the forces of mediocrity. (Score:3, Insightful)
by roblimo (roblimo.nojunk@slashdot.org) on Monday March 27, @09:54AM
EDT (#77) (User Info)
More aptly, what if 95% of all popular music was controlled by only four or five record companies and those companies formed a trade association whose main purpose was to keep its members' products selling for high prices instead of allowing "the market" to determine what a given song was worth?
The end result would probably be wholesale music piracy using technology the record companies couldn't control.
Not that anything like this could ever happen in real life, mind you; this is just Monday morning speculation on Slashdot...
- Robin
Obviously there are the "sinister" motives, but let's ignore those for the moment. Let's resist the temption to morph Gatesmania into Hunkapillarmania.
The two most relevant examples I know of come from science fiction. That lends them no credence whatsoever, but does portend a few consequences.
The first comes from one of Clarke's Rama series, Rama Revealed, IIRC. (Don't ask me WHY I kept reading the Rama series THAT long, I don't know.) He describes a spacefaring race that had expanded nearly to Earth sometime in the not-so-distant past, then died out overnight. The reason: they had been tampering too much with their genes, and some lurker vulnerability propagated too far into their population. It wasn't very fully explained, but think monocultures, think Irish potato famine.
The second described a time in the life of a "normal" girl going to high school with "enhanced" kids, and feeling really down on herself because she wasn't as beautiful, bright, strong, etc, as her classmates. Then, around the 18th birthday, a particularly popular "designer gene" turned out to have some terrible lurking flaws that took that long to show up. About a third of that age began going into convulsions and having mental problems, and most of them died.
OK, these are horror stories, and may not come true. But then again, when "market dynamics" come into play, how farsighted are we really? How likely are we to just start using freon all over the place without knowing the long-term effects. Then, even when we get the warning, it's considered far enough in the future that we STILL don't want to do anything, because there's too much profit in the freon status quo. Eventually we got it right, but I don't remember being paranoid about the Sun when I was a kid.
Not only that, but no form of the word, "corporatize", either.
There's something else happening here, and it's a combination of the DMCA, the Sonny Bono Copyright Act, and the current patent frenzy. These things all favor big, established players, primarily US and Japan.
Take reverse engineering, for instance. There is a much more enlightened policy on this in Europe. Perhaps if European industries were as worldwide-entrenched as US and Japan, that policy wouldn't be there. But it is, and it's part of the groundwork.
So the US just isn't too friendly in the IP business, be it arts or science, unless you work for one of the big players.
So go somewhere else.
Go to Europe.
Go to Latin America.
Go to India.
The Rest-of-the-World is getting to be a big enough market to just ignore silly US protectionism.
Since I'm a US citizen, born and raised here, I have to say that we take these actions at our peril. We may well be building a cozy little box for ourselves, and we'll get passed by.
>Basically any method of generating energy will negatively affect the world in some way (except solar, which negatively affects the sun, slowly).
TANSTAFL
Except that sometimes that free lunch really is there, and by not accepting it, you're letting it go to waste. (Either that, or the "free" lunch really costs, and you'll pay for it in the future.)
The Sun shines regardless of what we do here on Earth. Not only that, a tiny fraction of that light hits the Earth, whether it's hitting a solar cell, a leaf, the ground, or the bald spot on top of your head.
If you really want to worry about disastrous environment effects of solar energy, consider how much we'd have to harvest to significantly change the albedo of the Earth. But I'm not going to bother. (Too much use of solar power satellites might be another matter.)
I have a minivan, precisely because it's the logical family vehicle. It wraps the whole family and our stuff, and takes us on vacations. For normal life, it wraps the wife and kids, and perhaps some friends and kids, and transports them safely. It holds wood, mulch, footlockers, and other occasional stuffl. The mileage could be better, but an SUV would be a lot worse.
Sure, the image stinks. But it makes too much sense in my situation to ignore.
For my commute, I'm presently driving (alone, I guiltily admit) in a beater. But at least my gas mileage is in the 30+ mpg range.
The car is due for replacement. Since it's a commute vehicle and gets less than 10k miles/year,
I just can't justify a new car as a replacement, let alone a pricey hybrid. It'd rust out (New England salted winter roads) before anything close to wearing out.
I just wish there was already a market in used electric cars.
Lotsa protons in the fuel and oxidizer, both.
You mean Nasa knows how to throw space stations at Australia.
I used to feel it a shame that we couldn't somehow keep Skylab up longer. Then at some point, I got a chance to see a decent cross-section. There was this big waste holding tank at the bottom, and no apparent way to clean it out. Skylab was designed for a fixed mission life. No doubt it was overdesigned, and could have sustained more missions. But if that holding tank was any indication of general design practices, Skylab was incapable of indefinite occupation.
that they were going to show us pictures of a Proton exploding. In the meantime, re-Christen Zvezda with a new name, attach it to Mir as a hotel for Rich Americans, and laugh at us all the way to the bank.
Personally, I dislike the idea of having to carry fuel to land, especially when you probably have to carry that fuel at takeoff, too. It's hard enough to get any payload weight to orbit without adding to that a landing fuel requirement, as well.
Unfortunately, because of its high inclination orbit, the ISS is essentially useless as a stopover to anywhere. As a matter of fact about the only useful thing about that orbit is its politics, because it's readily accessable to both Canavaral and Baikanaur. (I know I really messed the spelling on that last one.)
We launch from Canavaral because it's reasonably close to the equator, and can take advantage of the Earth's rotational speed as a fraction of orbital velocity. Don't forget, as someone else mentioned, of the importance of that first thousand MPH, in terms of fuel.
A high inclination orbit throws away several hundred of that first thousand MPH, diminishing launch capacity and shortening the launch window. The launch window to ISS is on the order of 10 minutes, and it's HARD to get big payloads up there.
Just because Sagan used Vega doesn't mean that it isn't real. As a matter of fact, the Earth is precessing, and Vega is going to be the Pole Star in 20 or 30 thousand years.
By the time I get high-speed access, I hope to have learned enough to run that ethernet adapter from diald, whether id's DHCP or PPPoE. I'd like the convenience of high-speed access when I want it without 24x7 vulnerability. I have a reasonably tight firewall, but I'm sure the right person can get through it. At the moment, even if I had a simple single input input rule on that interface of "-j DENY", I suspect that there are those who could get through even that.
The only truly safe interface is either offline, or disconnected.