No doubt we're going to invade Iraq to free their people and bring them democracy, right?
Actually, I think so. Sure, it may only be a side effect, but I think it will happen, and I think that it is actually in the West's long-term strategic interest to do so. The whole Middle East is full of disenfranchised people held in line by a combination of propaganda blaming infidels (the carrot) and secret police (the stick). It's a powder keg waiting to go off. A truly democratic regime in the region will bleed off a lot of the pressure.
And clamping the international price of petroleum forever has nothing to do with it, right?
I got news for you: jacking up the price of oil is the economic equivalent of sending the Navy to blockade a port. Both are forms of economic warfare, and both are a threat.
And funneling several hundred billion dollars through the defense industry while ignoring the growing crowds of unemployed has nothing to do with it, right?
So, let's see what you're saying here, Dubya is bad because he's ignoring the economy, and Dubya is bad because he's trying to see off a far worse economic threat. Which is it to be? Or have you made up your mind that anything he does is wrong by definition?
Personally, I'd rather see the money spent on a way to make the West independent of the Middle East for energy (like fusion research), but even you cannot deny that defense spending creates jobs. That's a historical fact.
And giving the top 5% income bracket lots of new tax breaks and only giving the rest of us a few hundred bucks has nothing to do with it, right?
I read in the Washington Post that the top 5% of earners pay 41% of the total Federal tax collected annually. That's an awful lot. I think those folks have been carrying more than their fair share of the tax burden for a long time. BTW, those on $30k/year or less effectively pay no Federal tax at all.
And imposing the Christian version of the Taliban on us has nothing to do with it, right? And suspending our rights to privacy and due process so we don't get in their way has nothing to do with it, right?
Yeah, I agree with you here. The moral of the story: if you want to be critical of someone, and be taken seriously yourself, criticise them for what they actually have done, don't go off on an unsubstantiated rant about irrelevant issues.
this is probaly read by some idiot who thinks his personal freedom and personality are expressed by a huge V 12 sportscar/SUV in his garage
Indeed. American consumers funnel billions of completely unnecessary dollars to the Middle East every year, yet think Old Glory on a bumper sticker makes them patriots.
About the most patriotic thing any American can do right now is buy a small European or Japanese car, and use it only when the journey's too far to walk or cycle.
The article addressed this directly: SimDesk allows Houston to turn their PC's into X terminals. Thus, they don't have to spend extra money on new hardware just to run this week's version of Office.
You don't need SimDesk to do that... VNC, or even XFree86 running ontop of Cygwin would be cheaper.
The real advantage of SimDesk is that they don't have to worry about being shaken down by Microsoft.
The real advantage of Microsoft is that it's easy (and hence cheap) to find people who know how to use their products, and Microsoft themselves aren't going anywhere anytime soon. The classic problem with startups is that they won't be viable 'til they get some big customers, but big customers are wary of becoming reliant on a company that might not be viable.
It never ceases to amaze me how Microsoft apologists will attempt to reduce any valid reason for not using a Microsoft product into some irrational "Anything But Microsoft" motivation.
Problem is, a lot of Slashbots do believe in "anything but MS".
This means that, for the foreseeable future, MS users will be getting a product that will be the result of a pricewar with Free software, will have features that compete with OSS features, and will have a level of quality that attempts to approach OSS quality.
Have a look at simdesk.com - it's covered in words like "proprietary" and "patented". Houston's decision is neither particularly good nor bad for OSS.
I don't think any army has ever been overly concerned with civilian casualties. The real boon for this is that it leaves strategic buildings intact for use by the bomb's owner.
I think you're wrong. Western armies care very much about what the voters back home think about them. Quite seriously: any General knows full well how much elected politicans meddling with the defense budget can do. As for strategic buildings, is there anything in Iraq (or wherever) that couldn't be rebuilt by the Royal Engineers/Corps of Engineers after the fact?
Do you really believe the USMC couldn't have flattened Somalia over the weekend if they had to? The reason they didn't, and why the US allowed itself to be humiliated like that, is because the civilian casualties would have been unacceptable. In fact, that's probably why Bush the First didn't let General Schwarzkopf enter Baghdad in GW1 - it would have been impossible to take the city without unnaceptable civilian casualties.
On the whole, Western armies in modern times have gone out of their way even though it resulted in a tactical disadvantage relative to their opponents to avoid "collateral damage" wherever possible. Funny, tho', the liberal media always seem to blame the air force for bombing a hospital and not Saddam for building one over his command center in the first place.
Its been established that nature plays a lesser role than nurture in the personality of a human.. obviously, the same must apply to animals as well..
That much is intuitively obvious... what is less obvious is why the cats have different colored fur. After all, human twins are often physically indistinguishable.
Charge what the market will bear and don't leave money on the table. Sales and Marketing 101.
You can only charge what the market will bear if you have your own cashflow under control. In 1998, a Fortune 100 website project was worth millions of dollars, because there were so few people who could build a high-end web site. The web agencies made one major mistake: they did not believe that websites would become commodities. So, they wrote their business plans assuming millions of dollars would come flowing in, that they could pick and choose clients, and that they didn't have to look for a new business model and get it in place before the bottom dropped out of the market.
A smart company would be charging what the market will bear, but running the business as if the only money coming in was what the job was really worth, and saved the money in the cash reserve for the lean times.
Uh, because it would be bloody annoying to have to tap out a 38-digit number (IPv6 has 10^38 possible combinations, IPv4 doesn't have the capacity to be used for telephony) everytime you wanted to reach someone?
I don't think this is a problem. Most of my calls I make from my Nokia and I have all the numbers I use in there, like "Bobby (Home)" or "John {Work)". And numbers usually get into the phone from another electronic device anyway, IR link from another Nokia, vcard via SMS or however. It won't be too long before the idea of phone numbers is as obsolete as keying an IP address (yes I know Slashbots probably use IP addresses every day, but the typical user has no idea that there even is such a thing). When was the last time you emailed someone as username@aaa.bb.ccc.dd?
They wouldn't... unless they know whom they are communicating with. Like single human would never bother communicating until there is a group of human-likes.
Dude, what do you think we're doing posting to/.?:-)
This doesn't seem right, because I think we will be using every band from now on. Sure, we may not be using it for music radio, but we would be stupid to just leave those bands empty--and I don't expect that we ever will,
I don't forsee abandoning any parts of the frequency spectrum, but instead of a few powerful transmitters on each frequency, there will very many short-range users of each frequency. That's the only way to get more concurrent users squeezed into the spectrum.
Just because SETI uses radio telescopes to listen doesn't mean that the little green men used radio to transmit. Couldn't the signals have been red shifted to radio by the expansion of the universe?
Yes, but if they weren't beamed at us in the first place, they would also have to be bent around to us as they passed stars. That makes it many orders of magnitude more unlikely that those signals would happen to cross our path.
Who is to say that a more advanced civilization would even bother communicating with Radio? That whole "Light Speed" limit kind of makes communication by this method rather worthless.
Even if you assume that that light speed is an absolute limit, there are good reasons not to use radio over any distance greater than a few hundred metres. The reason is simply efficiency: if you know more or less where the entity you want to communicate with is, why waste energy by broadcasting the signal on other directions? Over short ranges, broadcasting is good because it gives you freedom to move relative to a relay station, but between relay stations, hard links like optical fibre, or directional transmission by laser or microwave are the way to go.
This can explain also why SETI@Home haven't found anything. The period of time between an alien civilization starting to broadcast radio and then realizing that there were more efficient ways to communication would have to overlap with the period in which our civilization was listening for said signals. Not only that, but even if a civilization would have overlapped at 50 lightyears, if they happened to be 200 lightyears away, there would be no overlap. We are talking about mere decades out of millions of years. Maybe exactly the signals we were looking for passed us by just before radio invented.
Further, the limitation of lightspeed in communication is only really a problem if you assume that the users of it have to worry about time. I think it is reasonable to assume that before any civilization makes it any distance into space, they will have solved the problem of aging for themselves by whatever means.
She pointed out how when Wal-Mart or K-Mart or Target have sales on CDs where the price drops quite low, say $10/CD, they sell out of the popular CDs. She also pointed out that in order for everyone to get paid reasonably, the cost to produce a CD would be about $5.
Very true. It's like today, I was in Tower Records or somewhere, and I saw a DVD of Big Trouble In Little China. Now, I enjoy this movie every time I see it, which is a few, and if it's on TV again, I'll probably watch it. But it's quite old now, and it was always kinda cheesy, and it's the sort of thing I would expect to find in the bargain bin for GBP4.99 or so. Imagine my surprise that the DVD was GBP22.99! (That's a little over $30 for you Americans). No fuckin' way!
They had to whore themselves out for 7 years to pay off the right to travel there.
They weren't paying for the "right" to travel, they were paying the cost of the passage, which is different. I would be willing to bet that if a corporation said "work for us for 7 years and we'll pay for your passage to Mars" they would have more volunteers than they knew what to do with.
The reason that consumer products get shelved out to the "common man", or seem like they do, is only because of the rising standard of living that comes with being as ass-kicking militaristic country. You have no military, your economy will sink, and the wealth will never trickle down to the masses. Just look at Japan since 1988.
What about Sweden? Denmark? Switzerland? Canada? Singapore? New Zealand? Ireland? All wealthy, prosperous countries with a high standard of living, yet all are well known for avoiding foreign "adventures".
Military strength is important, because without it you cannot have sufficient certainty about the survival of what you have built with your economy, but it's by no means the sole condition for wealth. Look at the old Soviet Empire: a full-blown superpower in its own right, with plenty of raw materials under its control, but its people lived in poverty.
aren't there easier/faster ways of propulsion already in existance than even nuclear?
Right now, nothing even comes close to uranium/plutonium for energy density. There are really two issues: power and reaction mass. A rocket combines the two, but a nuclear propulsion system doesn't. If ice is the reaction mass, then you can "refuel" on a comet. The more energy per unit of reaction mass you can get, the less of it you need.
There are already ion engines in existance, solar powered, but they are very low powered, incapable of moving significant mass through space at a useful speed.
Because originally, EVERYONE paid for it (i.e. through public taxes), and if its privatized, than only the RICH people will be able to use it. That, my friends, is theft. Go ahead, look it up
Two words, my friend: airline industry. From a toy for the rich to mass transport in a couple of decades. What about cellphones? From wealthy stockbrokers to teenagers in mere years. And computers: from the most massive corporations paying millions of dollars for each unit to the average consumer paying $500 for a machine that makes one of those multi-million-dollar monsters look like a joke.
Your argument that only the rich will benefit simply does not stand up to historical fact.
I think what he meant was, where we go will be limited only by our imagination, and the speed of light.
So long as you can get close to the speed of light, it's not really a problem. What matters is subjective time (time as perceived by a spaceship's crew). If you average 0.1c over the voyage, 10n years to get anywhere, where n is the distance in lightyears. But (and someone who can do the math will have to answer this) if you can maintain 1G acceleration to the midpoint of your journey and 1G deceleration after that over say 50 lightyears, while your voyage might take 100 years realtime, it will take a fraction of the time subjectively. Think about the difference between wall clock time and CPU time. That means, if you have a drive technology that can maintain 1G, you don't need to worry about generation ships or any of that sci-fi stuff (altho' some sort of anti-aging tech, or suspended animation might be useful). And you sidestep the physiological problems of bone density and muscle mass for free.
Once you have the drive, the rest is an airtight box. We already know a lot about food storage, recycling, the psychology of confined spaces - nuclear submarines do 6 month voyages as a matter of course. I think a sufficiently motivated crew could spend (subjective) decades on a mission without insurmountable problems occuring.
The more I think about it, the more I think that the light speed limit is a blessing in disguise.
Remember, Intel is run by businessmen, for businessmen.
I suggest you read Andy Grove's book, Only the Paranoid Survive. Intel is run by engineers who don't differentiate between performance from an engineering or a business perspective. Whether it's optimizing a CPU to run faster or a business unit to produce more cash, it's the same to them.
Technology to them is only a means to generate cash.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but consider this: if you're in the 3D industry, games or movies, technology is only a way to generate pretty graphics. If you're in the telco business, technology is only a way to route other people's data from point to point. If you're a naval architect, technology is only a means to make your boat faster.
See where I'm going with this? No-one apart from hobbyists sees technology as an end in itself - it's got to make their real task easier, or it has no point. If you're an investor, then of course technology is a means to make money.
On the other hand, I would really like to move to Mars (assuming I can get Internet access there), and I don't see a profit-driven operation accomplishing that anytime soon.
I know lots of Slashbots hate patents, but the reason a pharma corporation invests hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D every year is because the regulatory environment is such that if you discover something, you can have exclusive rights to it for a few years.
Now consider the state of Alaska. The problem: a lot of land, but no-one who wants to colonize it. The answer was called "homesteading". This basically meant that if you showed up on a plot of unclaimed land, fenced it and farmed it, after a certain amount of time, it was yours legally.
The commercial exploitation of space will be driven by similar concepts. Let's say a treaty is signed that any corporation who lands on the moon gets exclusive mining/colonization rights for a circle x km around their point of landing. That creates the incentive for investment, now a business plan can be written. Unless there's something in it for the investors, why would they invest their money?
Right now money spent on space is not an investment, it's a donation.
The line of failures is due to the fact that NASA can't realize that the Shuttle is the compilation of the best ideas we have. If they want to really boost their space program, they should focus on building a new fleet of SPACE SHUTTLES, with new (lighter) computer systems, and incorporating other modifications, such as an crew ejection/escape system and modules that allow the shuttle to perform more tasks (that it is capable of). Examples of these tasks include the current research lab role, whereas a slight modification could turn the Shuttle into a heavy lifter capable of carrying the biggest of payloads to the Station
You gotta wonder why NASA aren't cranking out Shuttles like Boeing crank out 747s. Any first year MBA will tell you that the key to funding any development that requires substantial upfront investment is to realize economies of scale in production. If there was a weekly - or even more frequent - shuttle run to LEO, that anyone could buy passage on, and shuttles with life support in the unpressurised cargo bay, the economic exploitation of space would happening orders of magnitude quicker than it is today. And ultimately, space exploration has got to pay for itself if it's going to happen.
I also think the failures are due to a huge lack of incentive. In the Capitalistic society we live in, there is no monetary incentive for a new shuttle; we can send satellites up on cheaper expendable rockets. The dreams for moon and mars colonies are so far in the future that the risk is far too great for anyone to invest in.
I'm not so sure that's true. Consider trading missions to the far east in the 16th century. Voyages took years, with no guarantee that everything would not be lost in a storm or other disaster. The banking, insurance and reinsurance industries were created to manage that risk, and make it acceptable to investors. A similar thing will happen with space missions.
As soon as there is a demand on Earth for products from space - raw materials, components or devices that can only be manufactured in low gravity or with plenty of cheap vaccuum, etc - Capitalists will find a way to make it happen.
They want to - get this - privatize and commercialize the International Space Station!
What's wrong with that?
Right now, the space programme is going nowhere. We have been able to place objects in orbit in the 1950s. Apart from the occasional scientific probe, NASA is basically the Greyhound bus service of LEO.
Space exploration won't happen for real until miners, production engineers, manufacturing corporations, porn stars, hoteliers ands couriers are using space as an everyday part of their jobs.
Apart from the commercial satellite users - telcos and broadcasters mainly - space is a black hole for money. It's got to pay for itself, or we won't be going anywhere.
at 20 grand US for an 18 month program in systems administration it better be good...
How can you do an 18 month program in system administration!? What on earth takes that long? I would estimate you could teach a sysadmin everything they need to know to take a junior role in 6 weeks, and from then on, it's all experience and self-study. If someone can't do this, then they'll never be a sysadmin only an operator, and you can teach someone to change tapes in 1/2 hr.
Way to go on this one moderators. Um, ever heard of CORBA or ORBit? They too are ways of moving objects around (CORBA being the standard, ORBit being an implementation thereof). Yet, CORBA is considered an accepted standard. DCOM is not. Microsoft once again decided to reinvent the wheel. There's no reason you can't use CORBA on Windows
Yes, there are ways, but that's not the point. COM is deeply ingrained into Windows. You can use the same basic technique to request that the OS add a user as to request that Excel draws a graph for you as to query SQL server on a remote machine. Once you get your head around it, it's enormously powerful.
Meanwhile, on Unix, they can't even decide if a configuration file should be.conf or.rc or.ini or even have no extension at all, let alone standardizing the format of the files. The only standard way of getting data from some applications to others is as a stream of text, it's very difficult to move structured data around on Unix - why do you think, after decades, that it's still so hard to cut and paste in X windows? Maybe XML can address that, but your point stands: why reinvent the wheel?
Authors of Windows programs generally adhere to no standards except their own. Open source projects are pretty predicatable.
That simply isn't true. Example: if I want to pipe the output of lynx to a file, I need to use -source on the command line. If I want to do the exact same thing in wget, it's -o. In netcat, I can just use the redirection of the shell. Open Source programmers are notorious for doing their own thing (and why shouldn't they, not as if it will hurt their revenue stream). In the commercial world, on NT or Unix, playing well with others is much more important.
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No doubt we're going to invade Iraq to free their people and bring them democracy, right?
Actually, I think so. Sure, it may only be a side effect, but I think it will happen, and I think that it is actually in the West's long-term strategic interest to do so. The whole Middle East is full of disenfranchised people held in line by a combination of propaganda blaming infidels (the carrot) and secret police (the stick). It's a powder keg waiting to go off. A truly democratic regime in the region will bleed off a lot of the pressure.
And clamping the international price of petroleum forever has nothing to do with it, right?
I got news for you: jacking up the price of oil is the economic equivalent of sending the Navy to blockade a port. Both are forms of economic warfare, and both are a threat.
And funneling several hundred billion dollars through the defense industry while ignoring the growing crowds of unemployed has nothing to do with it, right?
So, let's see what you're saying here, Dubya is bad because he's ignoring the economy, and Dubya is bad because he's trying to see off a far worse economic threat. Which is it to be? Or have you made up your mind that anything he does is wrong by definition?
Personally, I'd rather see the money spent on a way to make the West independent of the Middle East for energy (like fusion research), but even you cannot deny that defense spending creates jobs. That's a historical fact.
And giving the top 5% income bracket lots of new tax breaks and only giving the rest of us a few hundred bucks has nothing to do with it, right?
I read in the Washington Post that the top 5% of earners pay 41% of the total Federal tax collected annually. That's an awful lot. I think those folks have been carrying more than their fair share of the tax burden for a long time. BTW, those on $30k/year or less effectively pay no Federal tax at all.
And imposing the Christian version of the Taliban on us has nothing to do with it, right? And suspending our rights to privacy and due process so we don't get in their way has nothing to do with it, right?
Yeah, I agree with you here. The moral of the story: if you want to be critical of someone, and be taken seriously yourself, criticise them for what they actually have done, don't go off on an unsubstantiated rant about irrelevant issues.
this is probaly read by some idiot who thinks his personal freedom and personality are expressed by a huge V 12 sportscar/SUV in his garage
Indeed. American consumers funnel billions of completely unnecessary dollars to the Middle East every year, yet think Old Glory on a bumper sticker makes them patriots.
About the most patriotic thing any American can do right now is buy a small European or Japanese car, and use it only when the journey's too far to walk or cycle.
The article addressed this directly: SimDesk allows Houston to turn their PC's into X terminals. Thus, they don't have to spend extra money on new hardware just to run this week's version of Office.
You don't need SimDesk to do that... VNC, or even XFree86 running ontop of Cygwin would be cheaper.
The real advantage of SimDesk is that they don't have to worry about being shaken down by Microsoft.
The real advantage of Microsoft is that it's easy (and hence cheap) to find people who know how to use their products, and Microsoft themselves aren't going anywhere anytime soon. The classic problem with startups is that they won't be viable 'til they get some big customers, but big customers are wary of becoming reliant on a company that might not be viable.
It never ceases to amaze me how Microsoft apologists will attempt to reduce any valid reason for not using a Microsoft product into some irrational "Anything But Microsoft" motivation.
Problem is, a lot of Slashbots do believe in "anything but MS".
This means that, for the foreseeable future, MS users will be getting a product that will be the result of a pricewar with Free software, will have features that compete with OSS features, and will have a level of quality that attempts to approach OSS quality.
Have a look at simdesk.com - it's covered in words like "proprietary" and "patented". Houston's decision is neither particularly good nor bad for OSS.
I don't think any army has ever been overly concerned with civilian casualties. The real boon for this is that it leaves strategic buildings intact for use by the bomb's owner.
I think you're wrong. Western armies care very much about what the voters back home think about them. Quite seriously: any General knows full well how much elected politicans meddling with the defense budget can do. As for strategic buildings, is there anything in Iraq (or wherever) that couldn't be rebuilt by the Royal Engineers/Corps of Engineers after the fact?
Do you really believe the USMC couldn't have flattened Somalia over the weekend if they had to? The reason they didn't, and why the US allowed itself to be humiliated like that, is because the civilian casualties would have been unacceptable. In fact, that's probably why Bush the First didn't let General Schwarzkopf enter Baghdad in GW1 - it would have been impossible to take the city without unnaceptable civilian casualties.
On the whole, Western armies in modern times have gone out of their way even though it resulted in a tactical disadvantage relative to their opponents to avoid "collateral damage" wherever possible. Funny, tho', the liberal media always seem to blame the air force for bombing a hospital and not Saddam for building one over his command center in the first place.
Its been established that nature plays a lesser role than nurture in the personality of a human.. obviously, the same must apply to animals as well..
That much is intuitively obvious... what is less obvious is why the cats have different colored fur. After all, human twins are often physically indistinguishable.
funny, as a consumer who actually buys the tires, I don't remember ever asking for this
I guess you didn't ask for barcodes either? But everyone benefits when the cost of transacting and tracking is minimized.
Charge what the market will bear and don't leave money on the table. Sales and Marketing 101.
You can only charge what the market will bear if you have your own cashflow under control. In 1998, a Fortune 100 website project was worth millions of dollars, because there were so few people who could build a high-end web site. The web agencies made one major mistake: they did not believe that websites would become commodities. So, they wrote their business plans assuming millions of dollars would come flowing in, that they could pick and choose clients, and that they didn't have to look for a new business model and get it in place before the bottom dropped out of the market.
A smart company would be charging what the market will bear, but running the business as if the only money coming in was what the job was really worth, and saved the money in the cash reserve for the lean times.
Uh, because it would be bloody annoying to have to tap out a 38-digit number (IPv6 has 10^38 possible combinations, IPv4 doesn't have the capacity to be used for telephony) everytime you wanted to reach someone?
I don't think this is a problem. Most of my calls I make from my Nokia and I have all the numbers I use in there, like "Bobby (Home)" or "John {Work)". And numbers usually get into the phone from another electronic device anyway, IR link from another Nokia, vcard via SMS or however. It won't be too long before the idea of phone numbers is as obsolete as keying an IP address (yes I know Slashbots probably use IP addresses every day, but the typical user has no idea that there even is such a thing). When was the last time you emailed someone as username@aaa.bb.ccc.dd?
Bleh, fucking lame ass government stifling innovation because of imagined phantoms.
More likely, until they figure out the most lucrative way to tax them.
They wouldn't ... unless they know whom they are communicating with. Like single human would never bother communicating until there is a group of human-likes.
/.? :-)
Dude, what do you think we're doing posting to
This doesn't seem right, because I think we will be using every band from now on. Sure, we may not be using it for music radio, but we would be stupid to just leave those bands empty--and I don't expect that we ever will,
I don't forsee abandoning any parts of the frequency spectrum, but instead of a few powerful transmitters on each frequency, there will very many short-range users of each frequency. That's the only way to get more concurrent users squeezed into the spectrum.
Just because SETI uses radio telescopes to listen doesn't mean that the little green men used radio to transmit. Couldn't the signals have been red shifted to radio by the expansion of the universe?
Yes, but if they weren't beamed at us in the first place, they would also have to be bent around to us as they passed stars. That makes it many orders of magnitude more unlikely that those signals would happen to cross our path.
Who is to say that a more advanced civilization would even bother communicating with Radio? That whole "Light Speed" limit kind of makes communication by this method rather worthless.
Even if you assume that that light speed is an absolute limit, there are good reasons not to use radio over any distance greater than a few hundred metres. The reason is simply efficiency: if you know more or less where the entity you want to communicate with is, why waste energy by broadcasting the signal on other directions? Over short ranges, broadcasting is good because it gives you freedom to move relative to a relay station, but between relay stations, hard links like optical fibre, or directional transmission by laser or microwave are the way to go.
This can explain also why SETI@Home haven't found anything. The period of time between an alien civilization starting to broadcast radio and then realizing that there were more efficient ways to communication would have to overlap with the period in which our civilization was listening for said signals. Not only that, but even if a civilization would have overlapped at 50 lightyears, if they happened to be 200 lightyears away, there would be no overlap. We are talking about mere decades out of millions of years. Maybe exactly the signals we were looking for passed us by just before radio invented.
Further, the limitation of lightspeed in communication is only really a problem if you assume that the users of it have to worry about time. I think it is reasonable to assume that before any civilization makes it any distance into space, they will have solved the problem of aging for themselves by whatever means.
She pointed out how when Wal-Mart or K-Mart or Target have sales on CDs where the price drops quite low, say $10/CD, they sell out of the popular CDs. She also pointed out that in order for everyone to get paid reasonably, the cost to produce a CD would be about $5.
Very true. It's like today, I was in Tower Records or somewhere, and I saw a DVD of Big Trouble In Little China. Now, I enjoy this movie every time I see it, which is a few, and if it's on TV again, I'll probably watch it. But it's quite old now, and it was always kinda cheesy, and it's the sort of thing I would expect to find in the bargain bin for GBP4.99 or so. Imagine my surprise that the DVD was GBP22.99! (That's a little over $30 for you Americans). No fuckin' way!
They had to whore themselves out for 7 years to pay off the right to travel there.
They weren't paying for the "right" to travel, they were paying the cost of the passage, which is different. I would be willing to bet that if a corporation said "work for us for 7 years and we'll pay for your passage to Mars" they would have more volunteers than they knew what to do with.
The reason that consumer products get shelved out to the "common man", or seem like they do, is only because of the rising standard of living that comes with being as ass-kicking militaristic country. You have no military, your economy will sink, and the wealth will never trickle down to the masses. Just look at Japan since 1988.
What about Sweden? Denmark? Switzerland? Canada? Singapore? New Zealand? Ireland? All wealthy, prosperous countries with a high standard of living, yet all are well known for avoiding foreign "adventures".
Military strength is important, because without it you cannot have sufficient certainty about the survival of what you have built with your economy, but it's by no means the sole condition for wealth. Look at the old Soviet Empire: a full-blown superpower in its own right, with plenty of raw materials under its control, but its people lived in poverty.
aren't there easier/faster ways of propulsion already in existance than even nuclear?
Right now, nothing even comes close to uranium/plutonium for energy density. There are really two issues: power and reaction mass. A rocket combines the two, but a nuclear propulsion system doesn't. If ice is the reaction mass, then you can "refuel" on a comet. The more energy per unit of reaction mass you can get, the less of it you need.
There are already ion engines in existance, solar powered, but they are very low powered, incapable of moving significant mass through space at a useful speed.
Because originally, EVERYONE paid for it (i.e. through public taxes), and if its privatized, than only the RICH people will be able to use it. That, my friends, is theft. Go ahead, look it up
Two words, my friend: airline industry. From a toy for the rich to mass transport in a couple of decades. What about cellphones? From wealthy stockbrokers to teenagers in mere years. And computers: from the most massive corporations paying millions of dollars for each unit to the average consumer paying $500 for a machine that makes one of those multi-million-dollar monsters look like a joke.
Your argument that only the rich will benefit simply does not stand up to historical fact.
I think what he meant was, where we go will be limited only by our imagination, and the speed of light.
So long as you can get close to the speed of light, it's not really a problem. What matters is subjective time (time as perceived by a spaceship's crew). If you average 0.1c over the voyage, 10n years to get anywhere, where n is the distance in lightyears. But (and someone who can do the math will have to answer this) if you can maintain 1G acceleration to the midpoint of your journey and 1G deceleration after that over say 50 lightyears, while your voyage might take 100 years realtime, it will take a fraction of the time subjectively. Think about the difference between wall clock time and CPU time. That means, if you have a drive technology that can maintain 1G, you don't need to worry about generation ships or any of that sci-fi stuff (altho' some sort of anti-aging tech, or suspended animation might be useful). And you sidestep the physiological problems of bone density and muscle mass for free.
Once you have the drive, the rest is an airtight box. We already know a lot about food storage, recycling, the psychology of confined spaces - nuclear submarines do 6 month voyages as a matter of course. I think a sufficiently motivated crew could spend (subjective) decades on a mission without insurmountable problems occuring.
The more I think about it, the more I think that the light speed limit is a blessing in disguise.
Remember, Intel is run by businessmen, for businessmen.
I suggest you read Andy Grove's book, Only the Paranoid Survive. Intel is run by engineers who don't differentiate between performance from an engineering or a business perspective. Whether it's optimizing a CPU to run faster or a business unit to produce more cash, it's the same to them.
Technology to them is only a means to generate cash.
You say that like it's a bad thing, but consider this: if you're in the 3D industry, games or movies, technology is only a way to generate pretty graphics. If you're in the telco business, technology is only a way to route other people's data from point to point. If you're a naval architect, technology is only a means to make your boat faster.
See where I'm going with this? No-one apart from hobbyists sees technology as an end in itself - it's got to make their real task easier, or it has no point. If you're an investor, then of course technology is a means to make money.
On the other hand, I would really like to move to Mars (assuming I can get Internet access there), and I don't see a profit-driven operation accomplishing that anytime soon.
I know lots of Slashbots hate patents, but the reason a pharma corporation invests hundreds of millions of dollars in R&D every year is because the regulatory environment is such that if you discover something, you can have exclusive rights to it for a few years.
Now consider the state of Alaska. The problem: a lot of land, but no-one who wants to colonize it. The answer was called "homesteading". This basically meant that if you showed up on a plot of unclaimed land, fenced it and farmed it, after a certain amount of time, it was yours legally.
The commercial exploitation of space will be driven by similar concepts. Let's say a treaty is signed that any corporation who lands on the moon gets exclusive mining/colonization rights for a circle x km around their point of landing. That creates the incentive for investment, now a business plan can be written. Unless there's something in it for the investors, why would they invest their money?
Right now money spent on space is not an investment, it's a donation.
The line of failures is due to the fact that NASA can't realize that the Shuttle is the compilation of the best ideas we have. If they want to really boost their space program, they should focus on building a new fleet of SPACE SHUTTLES, with new (lighter) computer systems, and incorporating other modifications, such as an crew ejection/escape system and modules that allow the shuttle to perform more tasks (that it is capable of). Examples of these tasks include the current research lab role, whereas a slight modification could turn the Shuttle into a heavy lifter capable of carrying the biggest of payloads to the Station
You gotta wonder why NASA aren't cranking out Shuttles like Boeing crank out 747s. Any first year MBA will tell you that the key to funding any development that requires substantial upfront investment is to realize economies of scale in production. If there was a weekly - or even more frequent - shuttle run to LEO, that anyone could buy passage on, and shuttles with life support in the unpressurised cargo bay, the economic exploitation of space would happening orders of magnitude quicker than it is today. And ultimately, space exploration has got to pay for itself if it's going to happen.
I also think the failures are due to a huge lack of incentive. In the Capitalistic society we live in, there is no monetary incentive for a new shuttle; we can send satellites up on cheaper expendable rockets. The dreams for moon and mars colonies are so far in the future that the risk is far too great for anyone to invest in.
I'm not so sure that's true. Consider trading missions to the far east in the 16th century. Voyages took years, with no guarantee that everything would not be lost in a storm or other disaster. The banking, insurance and reinsurance industries were created to manage that risk, and make it acceptable to investors. A similar thing will happen with space missions.
As soon as there is a demand on Earth for products from space - raw materials, components or devices that can only be manufactured in low gravity or with plenty of cheap vaccuum, etc - Capitalists will find a way to make it happen.
They want to - get this - privatize and commercialize the International Space Station!
What's wrong with that?
Right now, the space programme is going nowhere. We have been able to place objects in orbit in the 1950s. Apart from the occasional scientific probe, NASA is basically the Greyhound bus service of LEO.
Space exploration won't happen for real until miners, production engineers, manufacturing corporations, porn stars, hoteliers ands couriers are using space as an everyday part of their jobs.
Apart from the commercial satellite users - telcos and broadcasters mainly - space is a black hole for money. It's got to pay for itself, or we won't be going anywhere.
at 20 grand US for an 18 month program in systems administration it better be good...
How can you do an 18 month program in system administration!? What on earth takes that long? I would estimate you could teach a sysadmin everything they need to know to take a junior role in 6 weeks, and from then on, it's all experience and self-study. If someone can't do this, then they'll never be a sysadmin only an operator, and you can teach someone to change tapes in 1/2 hr.
Way to go on this one moderators. Um, ever heard of CORBA or ORBit? They too are ways of moving objects around (CORBA being the standard, ORBit being an implementation thereof). Yet, CORBA is considered an accepted standard. DCOM is not. Microsoft once again decided to reinvent the wheel. There's no reason you can't use CORBA on Windows
.conf or .rc or .ini or even have no extension at all, let alone standardizing the format of the files. The only standard way of getting data from some applications to others is as a stream of text, it's very difficult to move structured data around on Unix - why do you think, after decades, that it's still so hard to cut and paste in X windows? Maybe XML can address that, but your point stands: why reinvent the wheel?
Yes, there are ways, but that's not the point. COM is deeply ingrained into Windows. You can use the same basic technique to request that the OS add a user as to request that Excel draws a graph for you as to query SQL server on a remote machine. Once you get your head around it, it's enormously powerful.
Meanwhile, on Unix, they can't even decide if a configuration file should be
Authors of Windows programs generally adhere to no standards except their own. Open source projects are pretty predicatable.
That simply isn't true. Example: if I want to pipe the output of lynx to a file, I need to use -source on the command line. If I want to do the exact same thing in wget, it's -o. In netcat, I can just use the redirection of the shell. Open Source programmers are notorious for doing their own thing (and why shouldn't they, not as if it will hurt their revenue stream). In the commercial world, on NT or Unix, playing well with others is much more important.