First rule of cost savings is to look for efficiencies where they are most likely and will have the most positive impact. Wiping out NASA and all its benefits, jobs, downstream impacts, etc saves you 16B and costs you far more in the long run. Now, and this is completely an unsupported statement, I would be willing to bet you could find a 1% efficiency in the social programs or defense budgets without trying very hard. Without even changing funding levels, that's easily enough to fund NASA at the very least.
The 16 Billion NASA gets is.01% of the 1.6 Trillion that goes into Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid every year. Funding space exploration at this bargain-basement budget level should be a no brainer
In short, there are several commercially available choices that may be available depending on latency, bandwidth, price, reliability, and availability.
1) Classic T-1, 1.5Mbps 2) IMA (Inverse Multiplexing over ATM) - Essentially bonded T-1s up to about 6 Mbps before the cost of the routers becomes prohibitive 3) Ethernet Switching - 10Mbps and higher 4) DS-3 and higher - 45 Mbps and up
If you need high availability, option 1 is ruled out. IMA is good for speed and availability, but increases complexity. Ethernet switching is fast, but redundancy will cost you and it will require additional CPE devices for security and traffic monitoring. DS-3s and up are reliable and fast, but the cost of high availability (e.g. dual-entrance facilities, multiple providers) is astronomical.
Set yourself up a matrix of each of the key metrics that make a difference to you. Talk to all your possible providers and populate your matrix with their service responses. Read their SLAs very carefully. Understand how they calculate their measurements. A 99.98% availability can be insufficient depending on how they calculate it. Weight their responses based on your business requirements and then choose the option that best suits your needs.
If all else fails, bring in a telecommunications expert for a couple hours to help you analyze your options.
How can anyone even debate this? Two words. Personal responsibility. It should be a required class in all primary, secondary and higher education school systems.
Returning to your analogy, it would be like a gun shop not properly securing its merchandise and then shrugging its shoulders when there was a massacre using firearms stolen from said shop.
So the merchant is responsible for someone stealing his merchandise (an illegal act) and then psychoing out somewhere (another illegal act)? If someone steals a car during a test drive, goes out and gets hammered and plows through a line of school children, are you suggesting the dealer is at fault for not "properly securing their merchandise"? I'm having trouble seeing the logic here.
Since there were 10 minutes between your post and mine, I assume you did not go to the site.
Instead of researching on handful of technologies, the NASA budget delivers over 30,000 separate spinoffs over the last 30 years in fields such as health and medicine, environment, public safety, consumer/home/recreation, transportation, computer technology and industrial productivity. I call that a pretty damn good investment. By the way, you are aware that NASA's budget is less than %0.5 of the total federal budget right? I mean we spend more than that on the Farm Service agency in this country (source).
I wish more research would deliver that kind of return on investment.
It is my opinion that a program that eats so much of a country's research budget for so little immediate benefit should be examined. I am merely questioning why the US is willing to spend so much getting to the moon yet is unwilling to devote money and effort to reducing their contribution to the greenhouse effect.
Little benefit. Such as: pacemakers, scratch-resistant lenses, nitinol for dental braces, improved fire-retardant materials, composites, teflon, smoke detectors, battery-powered tools, "memory" metals, shock-absorbent footwear, improved cell culturing, implantable heart pumps, improved diagnostic aids, electric cars, emmisions controls, etc?
Feel free to browse the NASA Spinoff Database to understand where all of that money goes. The funds invested in space technology repay themselves at least a hundred-fold in my opinion. If we weren't so short-sighted we would be investing (publicly and privately) at least 10 times what we do now.
In other news: Iran just cut off trade relations with Denmark because of the cartoons and I wouldn't be surprised if another country or two followed suite.
Well guess that just means I will have to stock up on plenty of Carlsberg and Danish Cheeses.
With all due respect, that was almost 500 years ago. What you're basically saying is that:
1. Christians did it at some point so it's OK for Muslims to do it now. 2. It's OK to be as ignorant as people 500 years ago were.
Neither answer justifies violence by the "religion of Peace". We are talking about political cartoons. There is no image on the face of the Earth worth jeopardizing a human life for.
Well, I'm definitely not a climatologist so I will concede your point makes sense. My support for this still stands though, the nuclear/renewable/hydrogen power combo is better than coal/oil no matter how you slice it. Is it without costs/problems? Of course not. Does it reduce our emissions, encourage energy independence, and eliminate the importance of Middle-Eastern Oil? Without question.
Well, it's definitely more than the river. I don't know how Ann Arbor could be so different, but there hasn't been a snowflake on the ground anywhere in Metro Detroit in weeks. In fact, I think since the beginning of the year, I've worn a jacket to work twice. Definitely uncharacteristic of Michigan in January.
It is about high time countries started giving serious attention to nuclear energy as an option and the research required to make it safe and effective. I have never been a very strong believer in human-caused global warming. I believe something is happening but was skeptical about us being major contributors.
I don't know about the rest of you, but it is January 26 in Detroit and there still hasn't been a single piece of ice in the river. Something is up. Moving from fossil fuels to nuclear may not fix the problem long-term, but it definitely won't make it any worse.
Get us over to a nuclear/renewables/hydrogen economy and another side benefit would be no one giving a crap about how much oil is in the middle-East.
To be fair the 85 page PDF is the complete Errata documentation. The list of bugs is only 3-4 pages long (approx 60 items). This also covers the entire Opteron and Athlon 64 line and in many cases the bugs only apply to a subset of those dies.
I agree that the general reaction to anything nuclear is tantamount to instantaneous hysteria. Even if the "other side" is misguided, there is never harm in a public conversation about an issue that is disputed. I could understand wanting to know a bit more if this guy were living next to me.
Emergency legislation banning home cyclotrons? Gimme a break. Why not just have a councilmember go talk to the guy and say "Hey, look. Your neighbors are concerned. How about coming and giving a presentation to explain this thing to everyone before you install it?"
My problem is that every disagreement in this country has to be some kind of a crusade nowadays. Don't like something? Protest! Shortchanged at the store? Sue! Teacher give your kid a B-? Lynch him! Guess we've lost the art of conversation.
My opinion: If there is no serious, likely risk, let him have it.
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First rule of cost savings is to look for efficiencies where they are most likely and will have the most positive impact. Wiping out NASA and all its benefits, jobs, downstream impacts, etc saves you 16B and costs you far more in the long run. Now, and this is completely an unsupported statement, I would be willing to bet you could find a 1% efficiency in the social programs or defense budgets without trying very hard. Without even changing funding levels, that's easily enough to fund NASA at the very least.
No offense intended, but your Google skills must need work. Wikipedia for starters:
$586.1 billion (+7.0%) - Social Security
$394.5 billion (+12.4%) - Medicare
$367.0 billion (+2.0%) - Unemployment and welfare
$276.4 billion (+2.9%) - Medicaid and other health related
Total: $1.623T
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget,_2007
More:
White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/
Office of the President: http://www.gpoaccess.gov/usbudget/fy07/browse.html
Congressional Budget Office: http://www.cbo.gov/
I think that is sufficient to back up my point.
*sigh* 1%
The 16 Billion NASA gets is .01% of the 1.6 Trillion that goes into Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid every year. Funding space exploration at this bargain-basement budget level should be a no brainer
2008 Budget
Defense/War on Terror (NOT including Iraq): $626B
Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid/Unemployment/Welfare: $1.547 Trillion
Where did you want to get that money from?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_federal_budget,_2008
And that would mark my last SanDisk purchase. Shame too. I really liked their compact MP3 players.
I don't know what everyone else will do, but I will personally have made my last AMD purchase if this is true.
I guess NasGool.com is over the top then?
In short, there are several commercially available choices that may be available depending on latency, bandwidth, price, reliability, and availability.
1) Classic T-1, 1.5Mbps
2) IMA (Inverse Multiplexing over ATM) - Essentially bonded T-1s up to about 6 Mbps before the cost of the routers becomes prohibitive
3) Ethernet Switching - 10Mbps and higher
4) DS-3 and higher - 45 Mbps and up
If you need high availability, option 1 is ruled out. IMA is good for speed and availability, but increases complexity. Ethernet switching is fast, but redundancy will cost you and it will require additional CPE devices for security and traffic monitoring. DS-3s and up are reliable and fast, but the cost of high availability (e.g. dual-entrance facilities, multiple providers) is astronomical.
Set yourself up a matrix of each of the key metrics that make a difference to you. Talk to all your possible providers and populate your matrix with their service responses. Read their SLAs very carefully. Understand how they calculate their measurements. A 99.98% availability can be insufficient depending on how they calculate it. Weight their responses based on your business requirements and then choose the option that best suits your needs.
If all else fails, bring in a telecommunications expert for a couple hours to help you analyze your options.
Not to be picky but the Challenger disaster ocurred on January 28, 1986. Ergo your TV has lasted almost 20 years.
How can anyone even debate this? Two words. Personal responsibility. It should be a required class in all primary, secondary and higher education school systems.
Returning to your analogy, it would be like a gun shop not properly securing its merchandise and then shrugging its shoulders when there was a massacre using firearms stolen from said shop.
So the merchant is responsible for someone stealing his merchandise (an illegal act) and then psychoing out somewhere (another illegal act)? If someone steals a car during a test drive, goes out and gets hammered and plows through a line of school children, are you suggesting the dealer is at fault for not "properly securing their merchandise"? I'm having trouble seeing the logic here.
Since there were 10 minutes between your post and mine, I assume you did not go to the site.
Instead of researching on handful of technologies, the NASA budget delivers over 30,000 separate spinoffs over the last 30 years in fields such as health and medicine, environment, public safety, consumer/home/recreation, transportation, computer technology and industrial productivity. I call that a pretty damn good investment. By the way, you are aware that NASA's budget is less than %0.5 of the total federal budget right? I mean we spend more than that on the Farm Service agency in this country (source).
I wish more research would deliver that kind of return on investment.
It is my opinion that a program that eats so much of a country's research budget for so little immediate benefit should be examined. I am merely questioning why the US is willing to spend so much getting to the moon yet is unwilling to devote money and effort to reducing their contribution to the greenhouse effect.
Little benefit. Such as: pacemakers, scratch-resistant lenses, nitinol for dental braces, improved fire-retardant materials, composites, teflon, smoke detectors, battery-powered tools, "memory" metals, shock-absorbent footwear, improved cell culturing, implantable heart pumps, improved diagnostic aids, electric cars, emmisions controls, etc?
Feel free to browse the NASA Spinoff Database to understand where all of that money goes. The funds invested in space technology repay themselves at least a hundred-fold in my opinion. If we weren't so short-sighted we would be investing (publicly and privately) at least 10 times what we do now.
In other news: Iran just cut off trade relations with Denmark because of the cartoons and I wouldn't be surprised if another country or two followed suite.
Well guess that just means I will have to stock up on plenty of Carlsberg and Danish Cheeses.
With all due respect, that was almost 500 years ago. What you're basically saying is that:
1. Christians did it at some point so it's OK for Muslims to do it now.
2. It's OK to be as ignorant as people 500 years ago were.
Neither answer justifies violence by the "religion of Peace". We are talking about political cartoons. There is no image on the face of the Earth worth jeopardizing a human life for.
Well, I'm definitely not a climatologist so I will concede your point makes sense. My support for this still stands though, the nuclear/renewable/hydrogen power combo is better than coal/oil no matter how you slice it. Is it without costs/problems? Of course not. Does it reduce our emissions, encourage energy independence, and eliminate the importance of Middle-Eastern Oil? Without question.
In fact, I'm failing to see the downside.
Well, it's definitely more than the river. I don't know how Ann Arbor could be so different, but there hasn't been a snowflake on the ground anywhere in Metro Detroit in weeks. In fact, I think since the beginning of the year, I've worn a jacket to work twice. Definitely uncharacteristic of Michigan in January.
It is about high time countries started giving serious attention to nuclear energy as an option and the research required to make it safe and effective. I have never been a very strong believer in human-caused global warming. I believe something is happening but was skeptical about us being major contributors.
I don't know about the rest of you, but it is January 26 in Detroit and there still hasn't been a single piece of ice in the river. Something is up. Moving from fossil fuels to nuclear may not fix the problem long-term, but it definitely won't make it any worse.
Get us over to a nuclear/renewables/hydrogen economy and another side benefit would be no one giving a crap about how much oil is in the middle-East.
To be fair the 85 page PDF is the complete Errata documentation. The list of bugs is only 3-4 pages long (approx 60 items). This also covers the entire Opteron and Athlon 64 line and in many cases the bugs only apply to a subset of those dies.
Just clarifying.
Verizon's FIOS is what I'm waiting for. Can't wait till they deploy it in Michigan.
Your first point is incorrect. This is surplus hardware that has been donated by Johhn Hopkins in perfectly working order.
I agree that the general reaction to anything nuclear is tantamount to instantaneous hysteria. Even if the "other side" is misguided, there is never harm in a public conversation about an issue that is disputed. I could understand wanting to know a bit more if this guy were living next to me.
Emergency legislation banning home cyclotrons? Gimme a break. Why not just have a councilmember go talk to the guy and say "Hey, look. Your neighbors are concerned. How about coming and giving a presentation to explain this thing to everyone before you install it?"
My problem is that every disagreement in this country has to be some kind of a crusade nowadays. Don't like something? Protest! Shortchanged at the store? Sue! Teacher give your kid a B-? Lynch him! Guess we've lost the art of conversation.
My opinion: If there is no serious, likely risk, let him have it.
Riiiiight. No political agenda in THAT writeup.
Or not. Consider who would be buying it.
"Men of the Internet"
THERE'S a calendar I wouldn't want for Christmas.