It would be tough, but it's not necessary to stop the probes, just to kill enough velocity to let conventional tricks work. Since we're talking nasty stuff already first shoot the probe - one that includes/deploys a buffer/shield plate - then shoot a nuke. Once they're past the stress of the backward shot they'll still be going too fast, so explode the nuke. It exerts force against the buffer/shield plate, slowing the probe further. Maybe even repeat with multiple seeded nukes. At some point there'll be an appropriate velocity that can be handled by more conventional means.
Or give up on getting a probe into orbit. Simply getting it to pass through the target system at a slower speed is still a win, because it gives more observation time.
The obvious trick would be to include a mass driver that shoots planetary probes. At the appropirate point of approach start shooting probes backwards, killing as much of the approach velocity as possible. With any luck and perigee/perihelion burns, perhaps the probes could achieve stellar orbit and send back more data.
I've been finding the opposite. As we've been looking more beyond Earth, we've also been looking more at Earth, and understanding how/why it is the way it is. From what I've seen, the more we learn about the Earth, the more unusual it becomes, especially if you want a technological civilization.
- Some sort of major, planet-disrupting collision was necessary well after the Earth was formed and "stable". When forming from a molten glob, all of the "interesting" stuff sinks to the core, leaving the light stuff in the crust. Imagine a crust made of silica, alumina, etc. Not even sure if iron would remain within reach. Trace amounts of anything heavier, if even that. I don't know where that would leave chromium, since it's not that far from iron, but it's at the core of chlorophyll, though I don't know if something else could substitute. But count out lead, silver, gold, uranium, etc.
- Though it was from fiction, Asimov suggested that the oversized moonmight have played a vital role in developing a crust that would support life. For my own part, I suspect that the tides themselves were engines for driving early evolution, causing cycles of isolation and contact allowing myriad "experiments" to take place along coastlines, yet giving successes a path for growth and further experimentation.
- We're also not early on the scene. Anything heavier than helium came from the core of a star, and anything heavier than iron came from a supernova. Our neck of the woods must have once been quite violent, but since then has become quite calm. (and safe)
Now perhaps some of these things are not rare, perhaps they are normal. Perhaps any solar system has a violent beginning with occasional violence lingering for some time after. Perhaps oversized moons aren't that rare. Maybe there are reasons that the "coincidences" that make Earth the benign place that it is aren't really coincidences, but normal events. More learning is needed. Makes one wish we had a solar-orbit very long baseline interferometric telescope.
The thing to remember here is that even if he has bought a camera with h.264 technology in it, he still doesn't necessarily have the right to use that technology. This is the ugly backside of embedded computers - we're starting to get EULAs on things that we think of as "hardware". From what I understand, there really are terms on practically all amateur-grade camcorders, especially those capable of professional-grade picture quality, that you may not make commercial use of them without further negotiations with the parent company.
Think where that could go, now that for instance cars have embedded computers...
Wouldn't things be much better and open if instead of ICANN or IETF we just had joint agreements between Comcast, ATT, Verizon, Time-Warner, and maybe Level3? I guess I should be international and include a few other "key players" in that list, too.
Evidently child pornography, blackmail, and breaking into thousands of women's email accounts merits punishment 6 times more severe than breaking into 1 woman's (Sarah Palin's) email account.
Here's a thought for you... The US economy is STILL based on slave labor for a range of jobs, or something that strongly resembles it. After the slaves were freed, they became sharecroppers. Technically they were free, and it was possible to exercise that freedom, but laws and life were skewed in such a way that they still had few choices - it was still possible to take advantage of them as cheap labor. Then skip to civil rights legislation in the mid-20th century and things started getting better. But somewhere in there the overseas sweatshop started up, and sometime after that illegal immigrants.
The thread they all have in common, slaves, sharecroppers, sweatshop workers, and illegal immigrants, is that they can all be taken advantage of by employers, and they all have little legal recourse - they can't complain.
Of course at 10% unemployment the entire country is close to that situation. The employer can demand better terms for himself of any rank-and-file employee, or "There are a lot of unemployed people who would like your position." Unions were a powerful tool for workers' rights, but they got too much power, became corrupt, and may have unfortunately discredited the concept.
Shaping traffic has never been the problem. I suspect any die-hard net-neutral advocate who really understands, also agrees that shaping is necessary.
The problem is prioritizing, judging, and shaping packets by the $$$ they carry or represent. I won't even argue about Comcast's right to split the provisioning of their network, giving their traffic one treatment and the internet another. It is, after all, their network. I object to their prioritizing internet traffic based on how squeezably soft the packet sources/sinks are.
And yes, it is their network - sort of. But remember: This isn't CompuServe. This isn't GEnie. This isn't Prodigy. This isn't TheSource. This isn't AOL.
This is the internet, and it is what it is, and it has become so successful simply because it is none of the above. Yet every business that gets their fingers into it wants to turn it back into the bad old days, in this mistaken sense of "entitlement" that they can tax the packets.
Here's a fix... Congress could fix this. They could pull IETF out of the public domain - direct a body to patent the whole lot. License it all out for free - with terms and conditions - called Net Neutrality. After all, it was once ARPANet, paid for with your tax dollars and mine.
One of the antecedents of NX was a thing called "dxpc", which I used to use. It did compression, but more performance came from simply being a proxy and short-circuiting many of the round-trip communications X did. X is a very chatty protocol, and much of that chatter can be intelligently done away with. That's one of the things that dxpc, and now NX did.
A year or two back I found dxpc source, dusted it off, and it actually built cleanly. But it didn't work worth spit. I guess X has moved on.
I've never used NX because it always seemed almost insurmountable to do it "free". There was free NX available, but from everything I read, it was much more difficult to set up, and I never had the time to go through it all. Add to that the fact that it seemed necessary to pick up "freely available" parts from NoMachine. I work for a company that's very picky about licenses, and knowing that an attorney's reflexive answer is "NO!" I just stick to known-good licenses like GPL, BSD, and other things I know are already approved.
So I figure in the cumulative time it would take to navigate the maze called NX, setup, licensing, etc, I can just use vnc occasionally.
It sounds like we're in very close to the same place, just on different sides of a line. I believe my vote-with-the-ballot power is slightly more significant than my vote-with-my-dollars power, though neither is very potent. I've already agreed about the evils when government and business get too close - incidentally, the same applies when government allows ANYONE to get too close. That's one thing that makes me nervous about people wanting to tear down the wall of separation between church and state.
You've hit exactly my point for favoring disruptive technologies. Existing technologies are so thoroughly entrenched, both by consolidation and by legislative purchase, that entry is practically impossible. The value of a disruptive technology is that the regulatory landscape is simpler. I'll slightly dispute/modify "it's because government have used regulation to favor them", just to say that incumbent industries have bought that regulation - which goes back to what you said about campaign finance, which I agree with.
You do cite some government abuse, and I won't deny that. A co-worker used to fume about septic inspectors, and how someone had to be paid to watch workers put in a septic system, "because of stupid government regulations." My response was that once upon a time, some unscrupulous contractor charged and collected for a septic system, but really put a pipe outlet into a hole filled with gravel, and skipped town before it obviously failed. Regulation is response to abuse. Sometimes it's heavy-handed, I'll agree, but the abuse was there.
As for changing the government you deal with, we get the opportunity to try on regular periods. It's worth mentioning that many people have died for that opportunity, and I've taken care to avail myself of it my entire adult life. I know sometimes it doesn't feel like much power, and sometimes it seems like two weevils on the ballot and I'm voting for the lesser, but I'm not a resident, I'm a citizen, and I vote. As for insurance providers, I'm not up against that choice yet, because I get it through my employer. Internet service - I don't see much difference between cable and DSL - my 2 choices. In the back-end they're equally evil, and it's part of why I make the point about duopolies. Actually, some time in the past 6 months I came across a summary of a research paper suggesting that when a given marketplace gets down to below 6 or so competitors they naturally tend into duopoly-like price-fixing. No collusion necessary, with so few players it just happens.
I have to agree about a choice between grocers and farmers' market. I don't do enough of the latter, primarily because of convenience, I guess. I know that the food is generally better quality, but it's also generally limited to produce, takes an extra trip, etc. We have been doing more of it in the past year or two.
On the side, I have over 30 years in industry. Many talk about how stupid government can be, but I've seen how stupid industry can be, and I work for what has been considered a well-run company. A few years back a co-worker used the phrase "stepping over dollars to pick up nickels," quite appropriately. Where I work, the attitude has also changed from employees being assets to being expenses, and many short-sighted decisions made based on that attitude. There are areas of expertise known only by grey-hairs here and there without backup, without someone coming along behind - not because they're stingy with knowledge, but because there's nobody for them to mentor. I know of a few areas that would be in a whole world of hurt if/when those guys retire.
I'll certainly have to agree with you that really bad things happen when industry gets too far into bed with government, and I also agree that that is where we are today. I believe we differ in that when we get into this situation, you tend to trust industry over government, and I tend the opposite direction.
As for blaming government for monopolies and duopolies, there is some of that. But I think that the natural desire of every company is toward monopoly, and that somehow needs to be countered. Then we're back to the problem of government-business tying, because too often business influence the legislation that is meant to foster competition, turning that legislation into the barrier to entry that you mention.
I guess right now, as ineffective as my vote seems at the polls, I see it as more effective as the vote my dollar gets in the marketplace.
Perhaps the real common point for both of us is that we'd like to see some way to eliminate the ties between government and business. If the marketplace could be kept free, competitive, and responsive, I'd certainly be happy with a lot less regulation. But we're in the situation we're in, and at this point I don't think that reducing regulation will magically fix things. One thing that might help fix things is new disruptive industries that can sweep away the old. The challenge is, as with regulation, not making things worse. The problem is that current industries understand the meaning of "disruptive" and are doing everything they can to put a lid on it.
It's not about what treatment you can get, it's about what treatment the government will be involved in paying for. If you're sufficiently wealthy and so inclined, you can get all the treatment you can afford.
For someone who can't afford all manner of treatment and can't afford a Cadillac cover-everything health plan, the alternative to a government run death panel is a private industry run death panel. Neither one may be good, but there is a clear and bright line in the case of the private industry death panel, right between giving you treatment and their profits. There is no doubt still such a line in a government death panel between their budget and your treatment, but I'd suggest that it's not so clear and not so bright.
Plus as stated earlier, if you can afford it, you can bypass it all and get whatever care you can afford. If you can't afford it, the rules are clear and written out, and at least hold uniformity and fairness as a goal, even if at times they're not perfect or perfectly executed.
If I would read your political leanings correctly, you're one of those who would see Medicare/Medicaid abolished as "horrid socialism". If you're not in that camp, there are certainly Republicans who are. So on the one side "they" (perhaps not you) say that there should be no government-financed health care, while on the other hand "they" say that government-financed health care should not be able to make rationing decisions to make the most effective use of their funding.
Your last paragraph, when you start invoking eugenics, suggest that you have a deep and innate distrust of government and its decisions. Funny, I think government is generally inefficient and bumbling, but also well-intentioned. But I tend to have a deep distrust of today's business world, because where I see that they're also often inefficient and bumbling, the fundamental drive is greed, that unchecked puts them in direct conflict with my well-being. If the marketplace operated as a proper check and balance, things would be OK. But it doesn't - there are too many monopolies, duopolies, and other situations free from competition. As for eugenics, absent some sort of government-funded health care, only the rich survive major medical problems.
On the second point, I'll repeat my allegation that generally the Republican administration (So that I'm not including you in that group) generally appear to be after knee-jerk reactions, not thoughtful discussion, when they engage the public. Actually, even though I might have been partly wrong about the "death panel" existence, it reinforces my argument.
I'm actually rather pleased to hear that there are "budgetary considerations" taken for health care. Back during the Clinton administration the state of Oregon tried to push through a health care plan that included "rationing". Unfortunately someone (I forget if it was the Clinton administration itself, or some arm of Congress.) took Oregon to task for the rationing aspect of the plan and shut the whole thing down. As a piece of background, please keep in mind that I have an elderly mother and for some years now have been heavily involved in this kind of decisions.
There are 2 aspects to "death panels". One that was immediately owned up to is late-life counseling. I had some of that for my mother, and wouldn't have minded more, though I was able to make the necessary decisions. The other aspect is rationing. I feel no slight whatsoever at the though that my mother wouldn't receive the quantity or depth of care that my kids might, or even I might. Nor do I feel any slight that I might not receive the quantity or depth of care that my kids might. When the money isn't growing on trees, and growing profusely, it's always necessary to consider the "time left" to get value out of that medical care. You do just about anything for a child or young adult. That just seems like common sense to me.
Where I'd take the Republican administration to task is with using "death panels" as a fear-mongering tool to incite the rank and file. Beyond that, I'd think that the Republican party would be generally more in favor of some sort of cost-control measures, and would embrace the idea of some sort of sensible "rationing", particularly as long as one could privately fund care beyond the ration point. So again, I object to the use of the term "death panel" as a fear tool, especially when it aligns with what I see as that party's basic attitude. Besides, we essentially have "death panels" today, except they're in the private sector, the rules are hidden, and it's primarily "afford to live" based, at least until you're old enough or poor enough for Medicare/Medicaid. I favor the idea of clear, known rules for such care.
If we're going to argue the primacy of money, that's an entirely different argument. If we're going to argue the primacy of money, then I'd really like to drag religion in as well, because usually the group that argues the former also argues the latter. But then either way, we're into a different set of arguments.
First, I don't think that the D.O.D. is above shifting some funding responsibility off to someone else if they can get away with it. I'm thinking of the way they drove the shuttle design requirements, then ended up not using it. There are also examples of work from fixed-cost DOD projects getting pushed next-door into NASA cost-plus projects.
Second, as far as this YouCut list goes, I'm assuming they didn't go deeper than the surface. In their dealings with the public, the Republican Party has excelled at promoting knee-jerk superficial thinking. Think "Death Panels".
Just maybe that "worthless soccer study" is actually a study of game theory as it can apply to real-life situations. Maybe they chose to apply game theory to soccer because all of the statistics are readily available, and they can bridge theory to reality in a simple and scientifically valid way. Maybe by taking this first step with soccer, they can make the next bridge between game theory and some other human endeavor - perhaps game theory and North Korean warlike behavior?
Maybe the soccer study is an absolutely worthless waste of money - but maybe it's not. I've outlined one way in which it could be incredibly valuable - I don't know. I do know that taking action based on a line-item title, without taking time for a little more information, is not wise.
I know modeling sounds of stuff breaking in a video game sounds silly. But one man's "video game" is another man's "combat training simulation." If the proper sound effects for breaking stuff is one of the elements preventing a feeling of full immersion in a combat training simulation, perhaps it is worth $1.2e6.
I'm not meaning to defend this on in particular, nor all expenses that look silly. I'm merely saying that none of these thins should be criticized on the basis of line-item title. I also have no doubt that some things with truly important-sounding line-item titles really are wastes of time and money.
No, not entitled - I've earned it - pretty consistently for over 30 years. Ten years ago in my industry everyone was promising a certain innovation, well the team team I'm on has delivered it, qualified and in real products for several years now. I also have a decent patent portfolio. Etc, etc, etc.
But as I see it, as an American I am entitled to try for this, to enter into the competition. Remember, "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness..." I don't consider it entitlement to happiness, but to the pursuit thereof.
Nor do I want to be told by a billionaire who only knows how to cut costs, not how to foster innovation and grow revenue, that I'm overpaid compared to an offshore engineer. If I need to work for offshore salaries, so does he. More than that, since the typical executive suite seems to be a one-tune show with cost-cutting, I see them as underperforming. I may not like Steve Jobs, but I certainly respect him, because he makes Apple grow.
> Can you live without your cable/internet/cell/phone?
Yes, of course you can. It hasn't interfered with your ability to shove food in your pie-hole. But it very likely WILL interfere with your ability to efficiently pursue any sort of technology career. Yeah, you can live without that stuff - but trying to do so means a new kind of glass ceiling.
Well now that you've said that you've acknowledged that you know of their claim, and I presume you've continued to breathe. So when the lawsuit comes you'll be liable for triple damages.
I've heard something like that, and that the hybrids on the road today operate in that sweet spot. But it makes me wonder what's going to happen to the batteries of those people who buy the plug-in kit for the Prius, and presumably deep cycle regularly. BTW, I believe current cars run on NiMH. (Is the Volt the first Li battery car?)
If you hadn't heard of SpaceX until this story, you probably haven't heard of Bigelow, either. (Bigelow is mentioned once higher up on this topic, but no details.)
There was once a module for the ISS called the TransHab - an inflatable living module. It has piles of space compared to what's in the ISS right now. For some reason that probably had to do with what gets built in what congressional districts, powerful parties took an extreme dislike to TransHab, to the point of writing NASA funding legislation that explicitly forbade any money for it. The alternative turned out to be a big tin can, almost as big. Though "inflatable" sounds scary, the assessments I heard suggested that it was actually safer than the rigid can. Of course later on the rigid can got killed too, we that now we can see the mission commander give us a tour of his broom closet.
Bigelow is a hotel company. They bought the TransHab (and the rights) and plan to put a hotel in Space. They already have either 1 or 2 unmanned test articles in orbit. I know that 1 is 1/3 scale, and I'm not sure if there is a second or if it's full-size. They have a business relationship with SpaceX for launch capacity.
No, the real question is why are they so STUPID!!!
I agree that there is a strong neo-feudalism movement afoot. I don't think it's any sort of conspiracy, it's merely that class of people doing the type of things that they are prone to do, and neo-feudalism is the logical end-game. But I still assert that it is STUPID, because serfs don't buy the company's products. Each company seems to have this idea that they can drive THEIR employees down into the dirt, and "somebody else" will buy their products, presumably other company's employees. But when all of the companies are doing this, the pool of "somebody else" dwindles. It's just not a sustainable model.
I suspect that in the modern globalized world US companies expect that the growing middle class in the Far East will buy their products. But even if they can either eliminate every US worker or drive every US worker's pay down to 3rd world levels, their products will STILL have the overhead of an astronomically overpaid executive suite. What's worse is that the executive suite has generally grown addicted to cost reduction as the means of profit improvement. Most of them aren't worth spit in terms of bringing truly innovative products to market, improving the revenue side of the equation. (Reality distortion field aside, and though from everything I've heard he's a real prick, I have a strong sense of respect for Steve Jobs for just this reason.)
Congress isn't doing spit about it because: 1 - They won't cross their big donors. 2 - Republicans tend to believe that the wealthy are that way because they deserve it, and therefore they have the recipe for success, and need to be left alone to continue fostering success. (Particularly in the current situation, I believe that the "recipe for success" is short-term, a catastrophe in the making for the rest of the country and only a cushy retirement plan for those execs.)
You're probably a more reasonable one to answer with this than Score Whore.
I suspect that there's a matter of degree here. I would certainly agree that governments need to keep secrets at times, and I'd have to agree that some of what was released probably shouldn't have been.
But I also think that sometimes governments (and people) start to keep secrets out of habit and out of mindset. Once the cloak of secrecy is thrown over the operations from the top, it tends to cover the whole operation, and you lose track and control of what's happening. This was my argument with ongoing operations in Iraq during the Bush administration. They threw a cloak over the whole thing, and look what we saw when someone pulled the cloak aside... Abu Ghraib. I don't believe Bush/Cheney ordered that stuff, I don't even believe they really knew what was happening. But they created an environment where it could and did happen.
So fits my personal interpretation of the Wikileaks operations. A government should use the cloak of secrecy carefully and sparingly, and it has been too big and too broad. Then again, look at this as a practical matter. The bigger and broader the cloak of secrecy, the more people under it, the greater possiblility of unintended events, and the greater the likelihood of eventual leaks. Keep your secrets few, necessary, and tight!
> in the case of whoever emptied half the US governments databases into wikileaks
What an optimist you are. Somehow I doubt they've scratched very deep into the dirt. If the revelations were done or even half-done, these actions would merely be revenge - usually not worth the money, effort, or bad appearance.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be tough, but it's not necessary to stop the probes, just to kill enough velocity to let conventional tricks work. Since we're talking nasty stuff already first shoot the probe - one that includes/deploys a buffer/shield plate - then shoot a nuke. Once they're past the stress of the backward shot they'll still be going too fast, so explode the nuke. It exerts force against the buffer/shield plate, slowing the probe further. Maybe even repeat with multiple seeded nukes. At some point there'll be an appropriate velocity that can be handled by more conventional means.
Or give up on getting a probe into orbit. Simply getting it to pass through the target system at a slower speed is still a win, because it gives more observation time.
The obvious trick would be to include a mass driver that shoots planetary probes. At the appropirate point of approach start shooting probes backwards, killing as much of the approach velocity as possible. With any luck and perigee/perihelion burns, perhaps the probes could achieve stellar orbit and send back more data.
I've been finding the opposite. As we've been looking more beyond Earth, we've also been looking more at Earth, and understanding how/why it is the way it is. From what I've seen, the more we learn about the Earth, the more unusual it becomes, especially if you want a technological civilization.
- Some sort of major, planet-disrupting collision was necessary well after the Earth was formed and "stable". When forming from a molten glob, all of the "interesting" stuff sinks to the core, leaving the light stuff in the crust. Imagine a crust made of silica, alumina, etc. Not even sure if iron would remain within reach. Trace amounts of anything heavier, if even that. I don't know where that would leave chromium, since it's not that far from iron, but it's at the core of chlorophyll, though I don't know if something else could substitute. But count out lead, silver, gold, uranium, etc.
- Though it was from fiction, Asimov suggested that the oversized moonmight have played a vital role in developing a crust that would support life. For my own part, I suspect that the tides themselves were engines for driving early evolution, causing cycles of isolation and contact allowing myriad "experiments" to take place along coastlines, yet giving successes a path for growth and further experimentation.
- We're also not early on the scene. Anything heavier than helium came from the core of a star, and anything heavier than iron came from a supernova. Our neck of the woods must have once been quite violent, but since then has become quite calm. (and safe)
Now perhaps some of these things are not rare, perhaps they are normal. Perhaps any solar system has a violent beginning with occasional violence lingering for some time after. Perhaps oversized moons aren't that rare. Maybe there are reasons that the "coincidences" that make Earth the benign place that it is aren't really coincidences, but normal events. More learning is needed. Makes one wish we had a solar-orbit very long baseline interferometric telescope.
The thing to remember here is that even if he has bought a camera with h.264 technology in it, he still doesn't necessarily have the right to use that technology. This is the ugly backside of embedded computers - we're starting to get EULAs on things that we think of as "hardware". From what I understand, there really are terms on practically all amateur-grade camcorders, especially those capable of professional-grade picture quality, that you may not make commercial use of them without further negotiations with the parent company.
Think where that could go, now that for instance cars have embedded computers...
Wouldn't things be much better and open if instead of ICANN or IETF we just had joint agreements between Comcast, ATT, Verizon, Time-Warner, and maybe Level3? I guess I should be international and include a few other "key players" in that list, too.
Evidently child pornography, blackmail, and breaking into thousands of women's email accounts merits punishment 6 times more severe than breaking into 1 woman's (Sarah Palin's) email account.
Here's a thought for you... The US economy is STILL based on slave labor for a range of jobs, or something that strongly resembles it. After the slaves were freed, they became sharecroppers. Technically they were free, and it was possible to exercise that freedom, but laws and life were skewed in such a way that they still had few choices - it was still possible to take advantage of them as cheap labor. Then skip to civil rights legislation in the mid-20th century and things started getting better. But somewhere in there the overseas sweatshop started up, and sometime after that illegal immigrants.
The thread they all have in common, slaves, sharecroppers, sweatshop workers, and illegal immigrants, is that they can all be taken advantage of by employers, and they all have little legal recourse - they can't complain.
Of course at 10% unemployment the entire country is close to that situation. The employer can demand better terms for himself of any rank-and-file employee, or "There are a lot of unemployed people who would like your position." Unions were a powerful tool for workers' rights, but they got too much power, became corrupt, and may have unfortunately discredited the concept.
Shaping traffic has never been the problem. I suspect any die-hard net-neutral advocate who really understands, also agrees that shaping is necessary.
The problem is prioritizing, judging, and shaping packets by the $$$ they carry or represent. I won't even argue about Comcast's right to split the provisioning of their network, giving their traffic one treatment and the internet another. It is, after all, their network. I object to their prioritizing internet traffic based on how squeezably soft the packet sources/sinks are.
And yes, it is their network - sort of. But remember:
This isn't CompuServe.
This isn't GEnie.
This isn't Prodigy.
This isn't TheSource.
This isn't AOL.
This is the internet, and it is what it is, and it has become so successful simply because it is none of the above.
Yet every business that gets their fingers into it wants to turn it back into the bad old days, in this mistaken sense of "entitlement" that they can tax the packets.
Here's a fix... Congress could fix this. They could pull IETF out of the public domain - direct a body to patent the whole lot. License it all out for free - with terms and conditions - called Net Neutrality. After all, it was once ARPANet, paid for with your tax dollars and mine.
One of the antecedents of NX was a thing called "dxpc", which I used to use. It did compression, but more performance came from simply being a proxy and short-circuiting many of the round-trip communications X did. X is a very chatty protocol, and much of that chatter can be intelligently done away with. That's one of the things that dxpc, and now NX did.
A year or two back I found dxpc source, dusted it off, and it actually built cleanly. But it didn't work worth spit. I guess X has moved on.
I've never used NX because it always seemed almost insurmountable to do it "free". There was free NX available, but from everything I read, it was much more difficult to set up, and I never had the time to go through it all. Add to that the fact that it seemed necessary to pick up "freely available" parts from NoMachine. I work for a company that's very picky about licenses, and knowing that an attorney's reflexive answer is "NO!" I just stick to known-good licenses like GPL, BSD, and other things I know are already approved.
So I figure in the cumulative time it would take to navigate the maze called NX, setup, licensing, etc, I can just use vnc occasionally.
It sounds like we're in very close to the same place, just on different sides of a line. I believe my vote-with-the-ballot power is slightly more significant than my vote-with-my-dollars power, though neither is very potent. I've already agreed about the evils when government and business get too close - incidentally, the same applies when government allows ANYONE to get too close. That's one thing that makes me nervous about people wanting to tear down the wall of separation between church and state.
You've hit exactly my point for favoring disruptive technologies. Existing technologies are so thoroughly entrenched, both by consolidation and by legislative purchase, that entry is practically impossible. The value of a disruptive technology is that the regulatory landscape is simpler. I'll slightly dispute/modify "it's because government have used regulation to favor them", just to say that incumbent industries have bought that regulation - which goes back to what you said about campaign finance, which I agree with.
You do cite some government abuse, and I won't deny that. A co-worker used to fume about septic inspectors, and how someone had to be paid to watch workers put in a septic system, "because of stupid government regulations." My response was that once upon a time, some unscrupulous contractor charged and collected for a septic system, but really put a pipe outlet into a hole filled with gravel, and skipped town before it obviously failed. Regulation is response to abuse. Sometimes it's heavy-handed, I'll agree, but the abuse was there.
As for changing the government you deal with, we get the opportunity to try on regular periods. It's worth mentioning that many people have died for that opportunity, and I've taken care to avail myself of it my entire adult life. I know sometimes it doesn't feel like much power, and sometimes it seems like two weevils on the ballot and I'm voting for the lesser, but I'm not a resident, I'm a citizen, and I vote. As for insurance providers, I'm not up against that choice yet, because I get it through my employer. Internet service - I don't see much difference between cable and DSL - my 2 choices. In the back-end they're equally evil, and it's part of why I make the point about duopolies. Actually, some time in the past 6 months I came across a summary of a research paper suggesting that when a given marketplace gets down to below 6 or so competitors they naturally tend into duopoly-like price-fixing. No collusion necessary, with so few players it just happens.
I have to agree about a choice between grocers and farmers' market. I don't do enough of the latter, primarily because of convenience, I guess. I know that the food is generally better quality, but it's also generally limited to produce, takes an extra trip, etc. We have been doing more of it in the past year or two.
On the side, I have over 30 years in industry. Many talk about how stupid government can be, but I've seen how stupid industry can be, and I work for what has been considered a well-run company. A few years back a co-worker used the phrase "stepping over dollars to pick up nickels," quite appropriately. Where I work, the attitude has also changed from employees being assets to being expenses, and many short-sighted decisions made based on that attitude. There are areas of expertise known only by grey-hairs here and there without backup, without someone coming along behind - not because they're stingy with knowledge, but because there's nobody for them to mentor. I know of a few areas that would be in a whole world of hurt if/when those guys retire.
I'll certainly have to agree with you that really bad things happen when industry gets too far into bed with government, and I also agree that that is where we are today. I believe we differ in that when we get into this situation, you tend to trust industry over government, and I tend the opposite direction.
As for blaming government for monopolies and duopolies, there is some of that. But I think that the natural desire of every company is toward monopoly, and that somehow needs to be countered. Then we're back to the problem of government-business tying, because too often business influence the legislation that is meant to foster competition, turning that legislation into the barrier to entry that you mention.
I guess right now, as ineffective as my vote seems at the polls, I see it as more effective as the vote my dollar gets in the marketplace.
Perhaps the real common point for both of us is that we'd like to see some way to eliminate the ties between government and business. If the marketplace could be kept free, competitive, and responsive, I'd certainly be happy with a lot less regulation. But we're in the situation we're in, and at this point I don't think that reducing regulation will magically fix things. One thing that might help fix things is new disruptive industries that can sweep away the old. The challenge is, as with regulation, not making things worse. The problem is that current industries understand the meaning of "disruptive" and are doing everything they can to put a lid on it.
You missed a key point.
It's not about what treatment you can get, it's about what treatment the government will be involved in paying for. If you're sufficiently wealthy and so inclined, you can get all the treatment you can afford.
For someone who can't afford all manner of treatment and can't afford a Cadillac cover-everything health plan, the alternative to a government run death panel is a private industry run death panel. Neither one may be good, but there is a clear and bright line in the case of the private industry death panel, right between giving you treatment and their profits. There is no doubt still such a line in a government death panel between their budget and your treatment, but I'd suggest that it's not so clear and not so bright.
Plus as stated earlier, if you can afford it, you can bypass it all and get whatever care you can afford. If you can't afford it, the rules are clear and written out, and at least hold uniformity and fairness as a goal, even if at times they're not perfect or perfectly executed.
If I would read your political leanings correctly, you're one of those who would see Medicare/Medicaid abolished as "horrid socialism". If you're not in that camp, there are certainly Republicans who are. So on the one side "they" (perhaps not you) say that there should be no government-financed health care, while on the other hand "they" say that government-financed health care should not be able to make rationing decisions to make the most effective use of their funding.
Your last paragraph, when you start invoking eugenics, suggest that you have a deep and innate distrust of government and its decisions. Funny, I think government is generally inefficient and bumbling, but also well-intentioned. But I tend to have a deep distrust of today's business world, because where I see that they're also often inefficient and bumbling, the fundamental drive is greed, that unchecked puts them in direct conflict with my well-being. If the marketplace operated as a proper check and balance, things would be OK. But it doesn't - there are too many monopolies, duopolies, and other situations free from competition. As for eugenics, absent some sort of government-funded health care, only the rich survive major medical problems.
On the second point, I'll repeat my allegation that generally the Republican administration (So that I'm not including you in that group) generally appear to be after knee-jerk reactions, not thoughtful discussion, when they engage the public. Actually, even though I might have been partly wrong about the "death panel" existence, it reinforces my argument.
I'm actually rather pleased to hear that there are "budgetary considerations" taken for health care. Back during the Clinton administration the state of Oregon tried to push through a health care plan that included "rationing". Unfortunately someone (I forget if it was the Clinton administration itself, or some arm of Congress.) took Oregon to task for the rationing aspect of the plan and shut the whole thing down. As a piece of background, please keep in mind that I have an elderly mother and for some years now have been heavily involved in this kind of decisions.
There are 2 aspects to "death panels". One that was immediately owned up to is late-life counseling. I had some of that for my mother, and wouldn't have minded more, though I was able to make the necessary decisions. The other aspect is rationing. I feel no slight whatsoever at the though that my mother wouldn't receive the quantity or depth of care that my kids might, or even I might. Nor do I feel any slight that I might not receive the quantity or depth of care that my kids might. When the money isn't growing on trees, and growing profusely, it's always necessary to consider the "time left" to get value out of that medical care. You do just about anything for a child or young adult. That just seems like common sense to me.
Where I'd take the Republican administration to task is with using "death panels" as a fear-mongering tool to incite the rank and file. Beyond that, I'd think that the Republican party would be generally more in favor of some sort of cost-control measures, and would embrace the idea of some sort of sensible "rationing", particularly as long as one could privately fund care beyond the ration point. So again, I object to the use of the term "death panel" as a fear tool, especially when it aligns with what I see as that party's basic attitude. Besides, we essentially have "death panels" today, except they're in the private sector, the rules are hidden, and it's primarily "afford to live" based, at least until you're old enough or poor enough for Medicare/Medicaid. I favor the idea of clear, known rules for such care.
If we're going to argue the primacy of money, that's an entirely different argument.
If we're going to argue the primacy of money, then I'd really like to drag religion in as well, because usually the group that argues the former also argues the latter. But then either way, we're into a different set of arguments.
I'll dispute you on 2 points.
First, I don't think that the D.O.D. is above shifting some funding responsibility off to someone else if they can get away with it. I'm thinking of the way they drove the shuttle design requirements, then ended up not using it. There are also examples of work from fixed-cost DOD projects getting pushed next-door into NASA cost-plus projects.
Second, as far as this YouCut list goes, I'm assuming they didn't go deeper than the surface. In their dealings with the public, the Republican Party has excelled at promoting knee-jerk superficial thinking. Think "Death Panels".
Just maybe that "worthless soccer study" is actually a study of game theory as it can apply to real-life situations. Maybe they chose to apply game theory to soccer because all of the statistics are readily available, and they can bridge theory to reality in a simple and scientifically valid way. Maybe by taking this first step with soccer, they can make the next bridge between game theory and some other human endeavor - perhaps game theory and North Korean warlike behavior?
Maybe the soccer study is an absolutely worthless waste of money - but maybe it's not. I've outlined one way in which it could be incredibly valuable - I don't know. I do know that taking action based on a line-item title, without taking time for a little more information, is not wise.
One man's waste is another man's critical need.
I know modeling sounds of stuff breaking in a video game sounds silly. But one man's "video game" is another man's "combat training simulation." If the proper sound effects for breaking stuff is one of the elements preventing a feeling of full immersion in a combat training simulation, perhaps it is worth $1.2e6.
I'm not meaning to defend this on in particular, nor all expenses that look silly. I'm merely saying that none of these thins should be criticized on the basis of line-item title. I also have no doubt that some things with truly important-sounding line-item titles really are wastes of time and money.
Look a little deeper before making judgments.
No, not entitled - I've earned it - pretty consistently for over 30 years. Ten years ago in my industry everyone was promising a certain innovation, well the team team I'm on has delivered it, qualified and in real products for several years now. I also have a decent patent portfolio. Etc, etc, etc.
But as I see it, as an American I am entitled to try for this, to enter into the competition. Remember, "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness..." I don't consider it entitlement to happiness, but to the pursuit thereof.
Nor do I want to be told by a billionaire who only knows how to cut costs, not how to foster innovation and grow revenue, that I'm overpaid compared to an offshore engineer. If I need to work for offshore salaries, so does he. More than that, since the typical executive suite seems to be a one-tune show with cost-cutting, I see them as underperforming. I may not like Steve Jobs, but I certainly respect him, because he makes Apple grow.
> Can you live without your cable/internet/cell/phone?
Yes, of course you can. It hasn't interfered with your ability to shove food in your pie-hole. But it very likely WILL interfere with your ability to efficiently pursue any sort of technology career. Yeah, you can live without that stuff - but trying to do so means a new kind of glass ceiling.
Well now that you've said that you've acknowledged that you know of their claim, and I presume you've continued to breathe. So when the lawsuit comes you'll be liable for triple damages.
I've heard something like that, and that the hybrids on the road today operate in that sweet spot. But it makes me wonder what's going to happen to the batteries of those people who buy the plug-in kit for the Prius, and presumably deep cycle regularly. BTW, I believe current cars run on NiMH. (Is the Volt the first Li battery car?)
If you hadn't heard of SpaceX until this story, you probably haven't heard of Bigelow, either. (Bigelow is mentioned once higher up on this topic, but no details.)
There was once a module for the ISS called the TransHab - an inflatable living module. It has piles of space compared to what's in the ISS right now. For some reason that probably had to do with what gets built in what congressional districts, powerful parties took an extreme dislike to TransHab, to the point of writing NASA funding legislation that explicitly forbade any money for it. The alternative turned out to be a big tin can, almost as big. Though "inflatable" sounds scary, the assessments I heard suggested that it was actually safer than the rigid can. Of course later on the rigid can got killed too, we that now we can see the mission commander give us a tour of his broom closet.
Bigelow is a hotel company. They bought the TransHab (and the rights) and plan to put a hotel in Space. They already have either 1 or 2 unmanned test articles in orbit. I know that 1 is 1/3 scale, and I'm not sure if there is a second or if it's full-size. They have a business relationship with SpaceX for launch capacity.
No, the real question is why are they so STUPID!!!
I agree that there is a strong neo-feudalism movement afoot. I don't think it's any sort of conspiracy, it's merely that class of people doing the type of things that they are prone to do, and neo-feudalism is the logical end-game. But I still assert that it is STUPID, because serfs don't buy the company's products. Each company seems to have this idea that they can drive THEIR employees down into the dirt, and "somebody else" will buy their products, presumably other company's employees. But when all of the companies are doing this, the pool of "somebody else" dwindles. It's just not a sustainable model.
I suspect that in the modern globalized world US companies expect that the growing middle class in the Far East will buy their products. But even if they can either eliminate every US worker or drive every US worker's pay down to 3rd world levels, their products will STILL have the overhead of an astronomically overpaid executive suite. What's worse is that the executive suite has generally grown addicted to cost reduction as the means of profit improvement. Most of them aren't worth spit in terms of bringing truly innovative products to market, improving the revenue side of the equation. (Reality distortion field aside, and though from everything I've heard he's a real prick, I have a strong sense of respect for Steve Jobs for just this reason.)
Congress isn't doing spit about it because:
1 - They won't cross their big donors.
2 - Republicans tend to believe that the wealthy are that way because they deserve it, and therefore they have the recipe for success, and need to be left alone to continue fostering success. (Particularly in the current situation, I believe that the "recipe for success" is short-term, a catastrophe in the making for the rest of the country and only a cushy retirement plan for those execs.)
You're probably a more reasonable one to answer with this than Score Whore.
I suspect that there's a matter of degree here. I would certainly agree that governments need to keep secrets at times, and I'd have to agree that some of what was released probably shouldn't have been.
But I also think that sometimes governments (and people) start to keep secrets out of habit and out of mindset. Once the cloak of secrecy is thrown over the operations from the top, it tends to cover the whole operation, and you lose track and control of what's happening. This was my argument with ongoing operations in Iraq during the Bush administration. They threw a cloak over the whole thing, and look what we saw when someone pulled the cloak aside... Abu Ghraib. I don't believe Bush/Cheney ordered that stuff, I don't even believe they really knew what was happening. But they created an environment where it could and did happen.
So fits my personal interpretation of the Wikileaks operations. A government should use the cloak of secrecy carefully and sparingly, and it has been too big and too broad. Then again, look at this as a practical matter. The bigger and broader the cloak of secrecy, the more people under it, the greater possiblility of unintended events, and the greater the likelihood of eventual leaks. Keep your secrets few, necessary, and tight!
> in the case of whoever emptied half the US governments databases into wikileaks
What an optimist you are. Somehow I doubt they've scratched very deep into the dirt. If the revelations were done or even half-done, these actions would merely be revenge - usually not worth the money, effort, or bad appearance.