If you don't want a textbook, don't buy one, and try and google it. But writing a good technical text is a heck of a lot of work, as any of us that blows off documentation knows. People won't do it for free.
Saying that because a missile defense system cannot protect against every possible delivery vector is like saying that we may as well not bother with greenhouse gas controls because coal mine fires are doing it anyway.
Flamebait? Gotta love the myth of non-partisan modders.
The irony too, is that, I'm a right wing Republican that got modded down on a generally liberal board for defending a government program against privatization. I'm still scratching my head on that one!
Umm... his economic policies might have had something to do with the highest stock market gains since WW2 during a president's first year?
Yeah but the dollar's value in real purchasing power declined by 25% during that time frame as well, so the gain in the stock market is more of a phantom brought about by the devaluation of the currency than anything else. TO wit, the Germans had a lot of marks during the 1920s, but they were worthless.
The bottom line is, if Obama really wanted to clean the "mess" up, he would have to:
a) cap entitlements spending, that is, end the idea of entitlements and just cap services in some way. And, he'd have to cut them.
b) enact a fairly large tax increase.
That balances the budget and in doing so, forces the Chinese to start buying American products with their dollar reserves, as, they can't just park it all in debt. That would help the balance of payments situation, but ultimately, Obama is going to have to pull the plug on free trade as well. The USA cannot be the buyer of last resort for the products produced by 4 billion people around the world.
IF he does that, he's cleaning up the mess, for real, but if he doesn't, he's just dicking around, just like every other President has done for the last 40 years.
This is a bit off topic, but it's something that always strikes me when reading these sorts of discussions: is the political arena in America really this polarised?
No, they really aren't. Political arguments on Slashdot are a sport, where people take their worries about an uncertain future and an economy and bitch. Are there radicals on both sides? Sure there are, but, I would say that most people who get into "left vs right" arguments on Slashdot or any other internet place are really doing it more to blow off steam than anything else.
I actually wrote like, most of the most bitterly right wing quotes that you cited, and on slashdot in general, but even I would:
a) Gave Obama a fair shake about a tax increase coupled with entitlement caps to balance the budget. Perhaps we could hide it all in "tax reform" that did something like got rid of income taxes but added an energy tax and a tax on financial transactions.
b) Hear out arguments on single payer health care.
But I would think it nice to actually hear some people on the left admit that it wasn't just that things were all rosy until Bush got elected.
Despite some good things, the writing for our current problems was on the wall even during the Clinton administration - the trade imbalance, particularly with Asia, exploded under his watch and the gutting of the manufacturing sector has been ongoing since the Lyndon Johnson administration. Reagan's promised revitalization of American industrial capacity was essentially masked by the emergence of the computer, and, similarly, the general failure of free trade to really deliver on all the promises it was supposed to deliver on.
To top it all off, for all of the talk about the war causing our fiscal calamity, the truth is, entitlements spending is just killing the balance sheet. Democrats made a huge promise that the country can keep - its like, you can have entitlements, or you can have birth control, but not both, because all of our entitlements systems are essentially ponzi scams based on population growth.
So, Republican free trade and investment driven policies haven't really worked. Democratic entitlements have broken the budget, and, what you have hear, is 40 years of bipartisan stupidity, and now the country is completely fucked up. It's not Democrats, or Republicans, its Democrats, and Republicans, and me, and you, and every policy that we thought was a good idea at the time, pretty much didn't work. Democratic entitlements didn't work. Bipartisan free trade didn't work, none of our rosey ideas actually worked, and so now, its back to the basics, if we are willing to stand up and admit that we've all been wrong.
NIH budget in 2002: $19,319,125,000 NIH budget in 2008: $23,841,208,000
Nice cherry picking of statistics and a strawman. First you made the claim the Bush cut the budget, then, you cherry picked the numbers to show he only increased it by 25%. Bottom line is, Bush significantly increased funding for NIH.
Do you also remember how Bush was going to double NSF's budget? We all know how THAT went:
And you wonder why we think all of your science based policy is a joke. First you X NASA to screw with Republicans, and now what, you are going to do global warming legislation to torture us some more? Really, is any science offered by the Left Wing actually true?
The way you talk, is there any reason that I should believe you?
Whine whine, cry cry. People who respond to these threads have the outraged attitude of eight year olds denied a toy. Tell me me how you intended to pay for bubbles on the moon and maybe I'll take the "tragedy" rhetoric seriously
Oh shut up. You could say that about -anything- the gov't spends money on. If you want to play that game, how about we play it with entitlements...
whine whine whine, your grandma will starve unless I pay for her to get some gov't cheese. how about you tell your grandma to go get a job. I'd rather have my tax dollars buy a spaceship. It's a lot better to watch a cool space show on TV than it is to watch some wheezy old tart that didn't save suck up millions of taxpayers dollars just to keep her drooling and pooping herself for another few months.
How come Bush's promises of massive explorations with no funding backing isnt stupid, but when Obama has to clean up Bush's mistakes and bring Bush's BS promises to a real budget, then suddenly he's the bad guy?
Blah blah blah... Obama isn't cleaning up anything. The guy is a stiff.
Seriously... all this talk about Obama "cleaning up", and what has he really done? It's just a talking point, utterly meaningless.
1st rendevous in space, USA 1st multiple rendevous in space, USA 1st practical spacewalk, USA Most landings on the moon, USA 1st man to orbit the moon, USA 1st man on the moon, USA 1st probe to Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and soon Pluto, USA
Like, I've pretty much had it up to here with this myth of "private industry" as the salvation of everything. Banks were private industry, and they screwed the pooch not once, but three times in the last 30 years, to the tune of multiple national, no, worldwide economic meltdowns, hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, and for what? So we can have the pleasure of driving ourselves into the ground with more debt?
By contrast, NASA put a man on the moon.
I'm going NASA over private industry, any day of the week.
So, that accounts for the all ~160 people at his workplace that live within a reasonable distance for cycling yet don't, does it? I think they have other reasons for not cycling, and they are probably largely affected by culture.
How many are married with kids? They want the car to drive around errands.
How many are single, want to eat out and go out, they want the car.
Your neocon president already made his choice, and it was for more military and less of everything else, including space, education, and increased dependance on credit from China. I hope it's worth it.
Some facts would be useful.
Bush increased spending on space - the whole Constellation program was HIS idea. He also funded the development of the other heavy lift options through the USAF - the Delta IV and the new Atlas.
Bush also increased spending on education, like it or not, through no child left behind and other kids initiatives. In fact, Bush increased spending more on science than ANY OTHER PRESIDENT PERIOD. He doubled the funding of the NIH, he built the lions share of the NIF, and more.
Both of the wars are unfortunately expensive, and in retrospect, we would have been better off if we had just nuked Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11 and been done with it. Iraq has proven to be pretty expensive, but at least Bush did the right thing and hung in there and tried to build up the country into a democracy, rather than just bolting and leaving the country to chaos the way the Democrats forced an abandonment of the the Vietnam war they started.
As far as China goes, I agree that free trade is a bust. But free trade is an invention of the Democratic Party - I invite you to read Wilson's speeches and you'll find free trade is on the list of his priorities, just as you'll find free trade as a war aim of Roosevelt in WWII. Republicans have just coopted this bad idea, which I admit was dumb.
But I'll say this much - the last time the USA was reeling from a torrent of foreign goods - Ronald Reagan put on the brakes to imports. When's Obama going to do the same?
He's not, because ultimately, you liberals lack guts to do anything.
The vast majority. At my last job, out of ~200 people, we had one (me) who routinely rode a bike to work. And 80%+ of the employees lived within 5 miles.
Kinda tough to pick up 3 kids from day care / school and then run them to hockey / soccer practice with a bike. For that matter, the extra 30 miles of driving errands for all the kids is another hammer in the electric car.
Of course, you don't even have to say it - why do kids not just play in the neighborhoods?
No. Most houses which include a commuter also have multiple vehicles.
But that's not the point I made. My point was that an EV is not a drop in replacement for another car, and your rebuttal is what? You have to have two cars? What if I only want one car?
Let's see, Chicgao based Exelon, which operates one of the larger nuclear fleets in the USA, has a been a big supporter of Obama since even before he ran for Senator, and now look what the payback is.
Still, it is the hallmark of democracy that often times big political demands make for good policy.
Let Republicans remember that before we start blasting Obama on this, GEORGE W BUSH the GREAT made the essentially same demands on Congress. Let's hope that on this one deal, we can get Obama a vote in favor of it because we know the nutty left is not going to go along with nukes.
Haven't we covered this myth already? I think the rebuttal goes like this: Oh, shucks, EVs will only suit the needs of 95% of the population
But they won't, and that's the problem. Everyone looks at daily commutes and says, hey, that's all people need to do to drive, but they always leave out the weekends, where people tend to drive much, much more, than on weekdays.
And, even the daily commute thing is a bit of a joke, because a lot of people have to run errands after they leave work.
There is a reason that 350 miles is the range of a car - and that's because its about how much range you need for driving for a day. Once fully electric cars can go 300 - 400 miles on a charge, they'll be a drop in replacement for the auto for genuinely most people. But, they won't, and so what's well have is hybrid vehicles.
Really, if daily commuting was all Americans used transportation for, rail would be everywhere. But Americans are not utilitarian drivers, they drive because they enjoy it.
What's really nutty about the whole thing is that, we haven't even really begun to research what a gasoline fuel cell might look like. I mean, what if you could get gasoline to "burn" but harness the photons produced by combustion directly to produce electricity, rather than heat?
So basically, here's the career guide for you. Take all the credit for PayPal at the right time, with the right partner, sell for a ton of money, build a car company that rarely makes any cars, a space ship company that can't launch anything, write a big check to Obama, and the next thing you, the Democrat's Bernie Madoff will wind up with a contract for all manned space flight.
I think international competition is more likely to drive space exploration than all of us holding hands and doing it together.
Those of us who are in the right wing and have no problem shoveling money into NASA see this coming from a mile away. Keeping the USA in the forefront in space is more important than the development of the lateen sail was to the arabs or the silk worm was to the Chinese. It's absolutely, strategically, important.
In fact, I would say that you could the cut the US military budget in half, spend the balance on developing heavy lift boosters, exploring asteroids, getting serious about the whole thing, and get way more out of your taxpayer dollar in terms of geopolitical power than 6 aircraft carriers and 1000 fighters.
To know how abandoned MASM really is... try and make an assembler project in 64 bit under Visual Studio 2008. It's not even supported out of the box - like, they never actually tested the configuration.
But, for all that, I prefer YASM as the assembler. Still, congrats to the OpenWatcom port.. NICE WORK. It's always good to have more hands in an area that so many people see as dead.
Entitlements worked when people had 4 kids. Now they have 2, and don't. We can't afford the entitlements any more.
The reality is thus: there will be a compromise where benefits will have to be cut, and taxes will have to go up, the difference will come from DoD, and the USA will withdraw from NATO and other defense obligations in order to take care of its people.
Have a look. Medicare spending alone went from 120B to 260B, then we have Medicaid on top of that, and then we have Social Security on top of that still. It's really, an additional 1T of entitlements spending.
Entitlements worked when people had 4 kids. Now they have 2, and don't. We can't afford the entitlements any more.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't want a textbook, don't buy one, and try and google it. But writing a good technical text is a heck of a lot of work, as any of us that blows off documentation knows. People won't do it for free.
Nuclear van
Saying that because a missile defense system cannot protect against every possible delivery vector is like saying that we may as well not bother with greenhouse gas controls because coal mine fires are doing it anyway.
It's just a non-argument.
Flamebait? Gotta love the myth of non-partisan modders.
The irony too, is that, I'm a right wing Republican that got modded down on a generally liberal board for defending a government program against privatization. I'm still scratching my head on that one!
Umm... his economic policies might have had something to do with the highest stock market gains since WW2 during a president's first year?
Yeah but the dollar's value in real purchasing power declined by 25% during that time frame as well, so the gain in the stock market is more of a phantom brought about by the devaluation of the currency than anything else. TO wit, the Germans had a lot of marks during the 1920s, but they were worthless.
The bottom line is, if Obama really wanted to clean the "mess" up, he would have to:
a) cap entitlements spending, that is, end the idea of entitlements and just cap services in some way. And, he'd have to cut them.
b) enact a fairly large tax increase.
That balances the budget and in doing so, forces the Chinese to start buying American products with their dollar reserves, as, they can't just park it all in debt. That would help the balance of payments situation, but ultimately, Obama is going to have to pull the plug on free trade as well. The USA cannot be the buyer of last resort for the products produced by 4 billion people around the world.
IF he does that, he's cleaning up the mess, for real, but if he doesn't, he's just dicking around, just like every other President has done for the last 40 years.
This is a bit off topic, but it's something that always strikes me when reading these sorts of discussions: is the political arena in America really this polarised?
No, they really aren't. Political arguments on Slashdot are a sport, where people take their worries about an uncertain future and an economy and bitch. Are there radicals on both sides? Sure there are, but, I would say that most people who get into "left vs right" arguments on Slashdot or any other internet place are really doing it more to blow off steam than anything else.
I actually wrote like, most of the most bitterly right wing quotes that you cited, and on slashdot in general, but even I would:
a) Gave Obama a fair shake about a tax increase coupled with entitlement caps to balance the budget. Perhaps we could hide it all in "tax reform" that did something like got rid of income taxes but added an energy tax and a tax on financial transactions.
b) Hear out arguments on single payer health care.
But I would think it nice to actually hear some people on the left admit that it wasn't just that things were all rosy until Bush got elected.
Despite some good things, the writing for our current problems was on the wall even during the Clinton administration - the trade imbalance, particularly with Asia, exploded under his watch and the gutting of the manufacturing sector has been ongoing since the Lyndon Johnson administration. Reagan's promised revitalization of American industrial capacity was essentially masked by the emergence of the computer, and, similarly, the general failure of free trade to really deliver on all the promises it was supposed to deliver on.
To top it all off, for all of the talk about the war causing our fiscal calamity, the truth is, entitlements spending is just killing the balance sheet. Democrats made a huge promise that the country can keep - its like, you can have entitlements, or you can have birth control, but not both, because all of our entitlements systems are essentially ponzi scams based on population growth.
So, Republican free trade and investment driven policies haven't really worked. Democratic entitlements have broken the budget, and, what you have hear, is 40 years of bipartisan stupidity, and now the country is completely fucked up. It's not Democrats, or Republicans, its Democrats, and Republicans, and me, and you, and every policy that we thought was a good idea at the time, pretty much didn't work. Democratic entitlements didn't work. Bipartisan free trade didn't work, none of our rosey ideas actually worked, and so now, its back to the basics, if we are willing to stand up and admit that we've all been wrong.
NIH budget in 2002: $19,319,125,000
NIH budget in 2008: $23,841,208,000
Nice cherry picking of statistics and a strawman. First you made the claim the Bush cut the budget, then, you cherry picked the numbers to show he only increased it by 25%. Bottom line is, Bush significantly increased funding for NIH.
Do you also remember how Bush was going to double NSF's budget? We all know how THAT went:
Yeah, he did:
http://www.nsf.gov/about/budget/fy2000/overview.htm
Has NSF at 3 billion dollars.
Actual budget, according to your figures, is what,
Actual 2009 budget (even later): $6.85B.
Like, he DOUBLED it.
Unlike our anti-science Obama, Bush was a real science President for you.
and Texas
That's OK, they're all Republicans anyway.
And you wonder why we think all of your science based policy is a joke. First you X NASA to screw with Republicans, and now what, you are going to do global warming legislation to torture us some more? Really, is any science offered by the Left Wing actually true?
The way you talk, is there any reason that I should believe you?
Whine whine, cry cry. People who respond to these threads have the outraged attitude of eight year olds denied a toy. Tell me me how you intended to pay for bubbles on the moon and maybe I'll take the "tragedy" rhetoric seriously
Oh shut up. You could say that about -anything- the gov't spends money on. If you want to play that game, how about we play it with entitlements...
whine whine whine, your grandma will starve unless I pay for her to get some gov't cheese. how about you tell your grandma to go get a job. I'd rather have my tax dollars buy a spaceship. It's a lot better to watch a cool space show on TV than it is to watch some wheezy old tart that didn't save suck up millions of taxpayers dollars just to keep her drooling and pooping herself for another few months.
How come Bush's promises of massive explorations with no funding backing isnt stupid, but when Obama has to clean up Bush's mistakes and bring Bush's BS promises to a real budget, then suddenly he's the bad guy?
Blah blah blah... Obama isn't cleaning up anything. The guy is a stiff.
Seriously... all this talk about Obama "cleaning up", and what has he really done? It's just a talking point, utterly meaningless.
1st rendevous in space, USA
1st multiple rendevous in space, USA
1st practical spacewalk, USA
Most landings on the moon, USA
1st man to orbit the moon, USA
1st man on the moon, USA
1st probe to Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and soon Pluto, USA
Like, I've pretty much had it up to here with this myth of "private industry" as the salvation of everything. Banks were private industry, and they screwed the pooch not once, but three times in the last 30 years, to the tune of multiple national, no, worldwide economic meltdowns, hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts, and for what? So we can have the pleasure of driving ourselves into the ground with more debt?
By contrast, NASA put a man on the moon.
I'm going NASA over private industry, any day of the week.
So, that accounts for the all ~160 people at his workplace that live within a reasonable distance for cycling yet don't, does it? I think they have other reasons for not cycling, and they are probably largely affected by culture.
How many are married with kids? They want the car to drive around errands.
How many are single, want to eat out and go out, they want the car.
See the picture?
Your neocon president already made his choice, and it was for more military and less of everything else, including space, education, and increased dependance on credit from China. I hope it's worth it.
Some facts would be useful.
Bush increased spending on space - the whole Constellation program was HIS idea. He also funded the development of the other heavy lift options through the USAF - the Delta IV and the new Atlas.
Bush also increased spending on education, like it or not, through no child left behind and other kids initiatives. In fact, Bush increased spending more on science than ANY OTHER PRESIDENT PERIOD. He doubled the funding of the NIH, he built the lions share of the NIF, and more.
Both of the wars are unfortunately expensive, and in retrospect, we would have been better off if we had just nuked Afghanistan in retaliation for 9/11 and been done with it. Iraq has proven to be pretty expensive, but at least Bush did the right thing and hung in there and tried to build up the country into a democracy, rather than just bolting and leaving the country to chaos the way the Democrats forced an abandonment of the the Vietnam war they started.
As far as China goes, I agree that free trade is a bust. But free trade is an invention of the Democratic Party - I invite you to read Wilson's speeches and you'll find free trade is on the list of his priorities, just as you'll find free trade as a war aim of Roosevelt in WWII. Republicans have just coopted this bad idea, which I admit was dumb.
But I'll say this much - the last time the USA was reeling from a torrent of foreign goods - Ronald Reagan put on the brakes to imports. When's Obama going to do the same?
He's not, because ultimately, you liberals lack guts to do anything.
The vast majority. At my last job, out of ~200 people, we had one (me) who routinely rode a bike to work. And 80%+ of the employees lived within 5 miles.
Kinda tough to pick up 3 kids from day care / school and then run them to hockey / soccer practice with a bike. For that matter, the extra 30 miles of driving errands for all the kids is another hammer in the electric car.
Of course, you don't even have to say it - why do kids not just play in the neighborhoods?
So, exactly where does SpaceX stock figure in this? It does not.
Falcon 9 Heavy?
No. Most houses which include a commuter also have multiple vehicles.
But that's not the point I made. My point was that an EV is not a drop in replacement for another car, and your rebuttal is what? You have to have two cars? What if I only want one car?
Let's see, Chicgao based Exelon, which operates one of the larger nuclear fleets in the USA, has a been a big supporter of Obama since even before he ran for Senator, and now look what the payback is.
Still, it is the hallmark of democracy that often times big political demands make for good policy.
Let Republicans remember that before we start blasting Obama on this, GEORGE W BUSH the GREAT made the essentially same demands on Congress. Let's hope that on this one deal, we can get Obama a vote in favor of it because we know the nutty left is not going to go along with nukes.
Anything any administration does to further nuclear power and alternative energy, I am 100% in favor of.
Haven't we covered this myth already? I think the rebuttal goes like this: Oh, shucks, EVs will only suit the needs of 95% of the population
But they won't, and that's the problem. Everyone looks at daily commutes and says, hey, that's all people need to do to drive, but they always leave out the weekends, where people tend to drive much, much more, than on weekdays.
And, even the daily commute thing is a bit of a joke, because a lot of people have to run errands after they leave work.
There is a reason that 350 miles is the range of a car - and that's because its about how much range you need for driving for a day. Once fully electric cars can go 300 - 400 miles on a charge, they'll be a drop in replacement for the auto for genuinely most people. But, they won't, and so what's well have is hybrid vehicles.
Really, if daily commuting was all Americans used transportation for, rail would be everywhere. But Americans are not utilitarian drivers, they drive because they enjoy it.
What's really nutty about the whole thing is that, we haven't even really begun to research what a gasoline fuel cell might look like. I mean, what if you could get gasoline to "burn" but harness the photons produced by combustion directly to produce electricity, rather than heat?
So basically, here's the career guide for you. Take all the credit for PayPal at the right time, with the right partner, sell for a ton of money, build a car company that rarely makes any cars, a space ship company that can't launch anything, write a big check to Obama, and the next thing you, the Democrat's Bernie Madoff will wind up with a contract for all manned space flight.
What a joke!
I think international competition is more likely to drive space exploration than all of us holding hands and doing it together.
Those of us who are in the right wing and have no problem shoveling money into NASA see this coming from a mile away. Keeping the USA in the forefront in space is more important than the development of the lateen sail was to the arabs or the silk worm was to the Chinese. It's absolutely, strategically, important.
In fact, I would say that you could the cut the US military budget in half, spend the balance on developing heavy lift boosters, exploring asteroids, getting serious about the whole thing, and get way more out of your taxpayer dollar in terms of geopolitical power than 6 aircraft carriers and 1000 fighters.
This is so obviously an Elon "I wrote a check to Barrack" Musk payback that it is beyond funny.
Do you own Space X stock Phil? Or are you at least getting a free Tesla out of the deal?
To know how abandoned MASM really is... try and make an assembler project in 64 bit under Visual Studio 2008. It's not even supported out of the box - like, they never actually tested the configuration.
But, for all that, I prefer YASM as the assembler. Still, congrats to the OpenWatcom port.. NICE WORK. It's always good to have more hands in an area that so many people see as dead.
Entitlements worked when people had 4 kids. Now they have 2, and don't. We can't afford the entitlements any more.
The reality is thus: there will be a compromise where benefits will have to be cut, and taxes will have to go up, the difference will come from DoD, and the USA will withdraw from NATO and other defense obligations in order to take care of its people.
No, we're bankrupt due to tax cuts, wars and bailouts.
No, really, its entitlements:
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/USbudget/fy06/hist.html
Have a look. Medicare spending alone went from 120B to 260B, then we have Medicaid on top of that, and then we have Social Security on top of that still. It's really, an additional 1T of entitlements spending.
Entitlements worked when people had 4 kids. Now they have 2, and don't. We can't afford the entitlements any more.