If you are going to attack this problem, you need to distinguish between different levels of technology that could all properly be called "nanotech".
There are technolgies under development now, which will be commercial in 3-10 years, which could easily be considered "nanotech". For example: nanosized magnetic core memory (recently on/.); small nanoparticles that can be used to carry drugs to particular parts of the body and release them where it is appropriate (don't have the reference, sorry). Most of these technologies fall under the heading of self-assembling nanotech. I.e. You figure out that a certain set of compounds under the proper conditions will spontaneously arrange themselves in some useful fashion. This is legitimately nanotech, but is a far cry from autonomous, self-replicating nanobots.
Another level of development will be marked by the use of nanomachines to assemble bulk materials. At the simplest level, such a machine would act as a filter: pour in slurried ore, and it spits out streams of refined metal. At greater levels of complexity, you can produce things like wood, meat, cloth, etc. This requires a high degree of fine control, but it is relatively simple because you're just building the same "cell" over and over and over.
Moving beyond that, you enter the age of the general assember, and the nanite robot. This is the sort of nanotech people write SF about, and that gives Bill Joy the screaming heebie-jeebies. There are several stages within this level of development. Initially, probably, general assemblers will be huge, not very efficient, hard to build, and limitted in capability (i.e. they can't build something as complex as another one of themselves). They will only be available to corporations and governments. At this point, you have the potential to produce product very cheaply and sell it for whatever the market will bear. Which means that it may be quite a while before we move beyond this step, because in this phase, big business holds all the cards and the consumers just have to line up and take what they get. Fortunately, there are avenues for research that aren't focussed on profit, and there are profit-oriented research centers that will continue to push the envelope for the sake of getting an edge on the competition. But I suspect there will be a very strong push to keep things more or less at this level, and keep the assemblers under the control of a monied elite. Yes, this worries me. The resistance is because, in the next phase, general assemblers are smaller, cheaper, more available, and more capable (and capable of reproducing themselves, probably). At this point, there is the potential to develop a pure information economy, because you can make anything you want using just raw materials, electricity (and probably not much of that), an assembler, and a design. You could even have a totally open-source economy. The economics of scarcity and profit go to hell in a handbasket. But you also introduce the very real possibility that any reasonably bright and deranged person can design a nanoplauge to wipe out humanity (the grey goo and the Unabomber problems).
There is also a shift that will occur when it is possible to build self-reproducing nanites. This is somewhat, though not completely, decoupled from assembler technology, so it's hard to say when it occurs. This level of technology is what really heralds the danger that Bill Joy was freaking out over. Without self-reproducing nanites, nanotech is still dangerous, but it's not world-breaking.
Each of these technologies is going to have a whole set of reprocussions and ramifications. You may find that it is hard to survey the entire future history of the development of this technology without winding up writing a book. So you may want to focus on a particular level of development. Also, trying to predict what's going to happen once general assemblers are available, even primitive ones, is basically prophesy and therefore probably bullshit. (Everything I've said that could be construed as a prediction should be read as if it was prefaced with a huge honking disclaimer. I don't pretend to be a seer; these are just my guesses.)
So, no, I don't think that the concept of IP is so "unnatural" as you make it to be. Yes, for the tangible property there is the "loss of use" argument -- if somebody takes away my car, I cannot use it any more -- which does not apply to IP. However, there is still the "create incentive to produce more" argument that is just as valid for IP as it is for traditional physical property.
I agree with all your basic points. However, I think there is a distinction to be made here. Let us divide the rights protected under law into two rough categories: 1) Rights that protect you from "takings" or agression. Meatspace property rights fall into this category: If I take your car/house/food/etc, you don't have it any more. 2) Rights that are upheld to create the incentive to produce more of value x.
In most cases, these two aspects co-exist, and it makes it easy to fail to see the difference between them. In meatspace property, a taking means that my gain is your loss. But in IP, my gain is not necessarily your loss. It costs you nothing if I use a piece of IP that you created that I would not have been willing to pay for (either because your asking price is greater than its utility to me, though its utility is nonzero, or because I am too poor).
Rights are social phenomena that are recognized in society because it benefits the members of the society to do so. The consequence of failing to recognize meatspace property rights is despotism and oppression. The consequence of failing to recognize IP rights may be a retardation of the production of valuable IP, but it is not the same. Meatspace property rights are protected so that people don't go around killing each other taking/defending property. IP rights are protected so that productive people will produce more, which is to everyone's benefit. I am not saying that it's fair to fail to pay someone for their IP, when they produced that IP in the expectation that they could make a living off it. That is theft. I'm just saying that there is an intrinsic difference between meatspace property and IP rights, and it's important to recognize that difference if we are to come to a reasonable understanding of the proper role of property rights.
Note that I would class the theft of personal (non public) information as a form of agression and therefore protect such information as if it were meatspace property, even though it's just data. Because in the case of private information, part of the value of that information is intrinsic in the fact that it IS private. If you take that information and spread it around, it is no longer private, and so you have taken something from me.
You are in need of the platitude. When the message people are trying to get across is "Think for yourself, dammit!", how exactly does "getting it" become some type of conformity to a behavioural pattern?
For everyone who is making a big deal out of the drop in Microsoft's stock value, let me point out that when AMD released their 1 Ghz chip, their stock jumped by 6 point. When Intel released their 1 Ghz chip a few days later, AMD's stock fell by 3 points. The pissing war these two companies are involved in is silly. It's even more absurd to think that a few days difference in release date has anything at all to do with long-term viability or profitability. If anything, the pissing war worries me: It's just a matter of time until one of them hurries a chip to market too fast and releases it with a bad bug. (I'm betting it's going to be Intel, but we shall see.) Note that AMD's stock was trading around $50 at the time that this happened, so the change in price was of the same relative order as today's slide in Microsoft stock.
Everybody who works with computers knows what a pain in the ass it can be to upgrade to a new version of the software. The interface may change, so you get confused users. You have new bugs and new hardware compatibility issues, etc, etc. And of course with an OS, it's even worse. Lots of companies spend alot of money and time preparing for upgrades to major applications packages. Now, imagine a world in which upgrades happen, not when the IT manager or even the company president says they do, but when the software publisher says they do.
Take a minute to finish screaming.
...
OK, all better now? If UCITA becomes the law of the land (which is an issue unto itself) and companies like M$ start selling temporary licences, I think that at least some companies will have enough clue to realize that selling software that doesn't expire and doesn't force upgrades will give them an overwhelming competitive advantage in the long run. As far as the private user goes, I'll vote with my bucks: I'll buy software that doesn't expire, or I'll get hacks of the stuff that does.
Don't misunderstand: UCITA is evil and we should fight it tooth and nail. If it becomes widespread, it will be a Very Bad Thing. But it won't be the end of the world, and it will probably fall by the wayside after a few years.
M:tA states that reality is a concensus against which you have to struggle. In essence, it is a doomed attempt, as you are but one voice in a sea of reality definitions. It states that you can alter reality only by paying great attention to what other individuals have to say, and thus are in constant danger of being 'juged'.
M:tA does not say that you are doomed in an attempt to alter reality, simply that it is very difficult to alter reality in a way that obviously violates everyone else's opinion of what reality is supposed to do. So causing your enemy to trip over his own shoelaces is easy, but turning him into a newt is hard. This may not conincide with the historical point of view, but I find it a very compelling model because it matches very nicely with my own personal (though limited) experience of magick. I have experienced events that could be described as manifestations of coincidental magick. I have never seen someone throw a fireball from their hand or otherwise violate the dominant paradigm in a major way.
The form of magick depicted in The Matrix is the application of Will, as described by even the earlier sorcerors and actualised by the likes of Crowley and the others of the Golden Dawn in the early 20th Century. It never depicts reality as a concensus, but rather as a personal entity.
OK, yeah, you're right. I was being imprecise. The Matrix was not based on Mage, or anything quite that direct. The reality of the Matrix was not consensual. But I still think there is a similarity: Neo, like the Ascended mage, is a reality hacker who is able to manipulate his world based on an understanding of it's underlying structure. As with any such ephiphany, there is a learning period and process involved. I thought they could have done some interesting things with that.
M:tG was, for all intents and purposes, mythical mumbo-jumbo written by idiots who had no grasp of what the historical depiction of magick was about. How did M:tG (Magic: the Gathering) get into this discussion? Or did you intend to refer to Mage: The Ascension? At any rate, I don't think Mage:tA was attempting to be historical or authentic, but I do think they suggest a valid and useful perspective on the manipulation of reality. Whether or not it passes the review of a purist like yourself is another question.
Neo dies and then his 'divine' nature is revealed. Think this is crap? Then sue the Apostles for not dwelling enough into Jesus' psyche before he was crucified and made God... Well, actually, I wouldn't give the Apostles a Nobel in literature, either.:-) Seriously, I agree, it's a traditional scenario. Heh. Everybody made a big deal out of how The Matrix went off the beaten path and broke new ground, but it's just another formulaic fantasy plot. It's just a bit more exotic than the usual formula (or a bit more basic, depending on your point of view). I guess I really do expect too much from Hollywood, to think that they could actually break new ground and explore the process of this transformation.
I left the theatre feeling really disappointed, actually. I mean, it was a cool action flick and the special effects were neat and all that, but they could have done so much more with the movie than they did. The central point of the plot was the the Metaphysic of Magick, and the transformation of the individual from a mundane into a mage. They could have cut 5 minutes of the random mayhem (and still had enough blood and guts to satisfy any action-movie freak), and used that time to focus more on the process of the transformation, as Neo becomes aware of the true nature of reality, and then becomes aware of how this newfound knowledge allows him to control reality. But instead the transformation was virutally instantaneous: Neo went from clueless shmoe to uber-mage in one scene. And I'm not even going to get started on the absurdity of the basic premise that the machines were using humans as a power source.
Maybe I just expect too much from Hollywood. I guess there is a reason I don't see many movies. Sigh...
NB: The references to the Metaphysic of Magic, etc are from Mage: The Ascension. The MofM, in a nutshell, is the principle that reality is a fluid thing that is created by our common perception of reality. (Yes it's circular. Don't ask me.) Understanding this key fact allows a person to manipulate reality, in a limited fashion, by imposing their version of what should be on the consensual reality. This is what makes someone a mage.
Let's see: I think most of us agree that the current way of doing business in the music world screws both the artists and the consumers, and the labels make out like the bandits that they are. Seems to me that there is an obvious and necessary first step to creating a new, better system: We have to get the artists to realize that their interests, and our interests (as consumers) are aligned. I can think of one way that the average joe-geek-consumer can work towards that end: If you download a bunch of music, and keep it, pay the artist for it. Directly. Send him/her/them a money order (better keep it annoymous). If lots of artists start getting $5 & $10 chunks of cash coming it, they're going to see the light. I want to do this. The problem is, I don't know where to send something like that so that it will get into the hands of the artists, and not some label or PR flack.
Does anyone out there have any ideas or information to make it easier to get the money directly to the bands?
The other thing I would point out is that, before we will ever have the artists' widespread support for a new business model, they have to get out from under their contracts with the record companies. I don't know how that's going to happen.
If you are interested in this sort of free-market, high-tech green-tech, check out The Rocky Mountain Institute. They are doing excellent work in developing and propagating technologies and approaches that are simultaneously good for the environment and good for the economy. In particular, they have done great work on green buildings -- I've been to their headquarters, and it's every bit as cool as they claim. It's something like a 4000 square-foot building, at 8000 feet elevation (Snowmass, CO), and the only active heating they need is a pair of small woodstoves. The rest is provided by passive solar. And they grow bananas and other things inside the building during the winter! They are also some of the original proponents of composite-body, fuel-cell-driven cars. Neat stuff.
"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
NASA upper management is a slave to political priorities, which often conflict with the engineering realities that one must deal with to actually accomplish anything in the real world. This isn't going to change; it's the nature of the beast. If you want to go off planet, look elsewhere for your ride.
It's a bit like the aftermath of Challenger, where they went nuts on the hardware instead of looking at the fundamental problem, which was the prostitution of the program for political reasons. The outcome of that is that we now have a NASA which is completely paranoid about public opinion and afraid of its own shadow when it comes to safety, but which still won't look at the whole picture, and still twitches to the political beat.
You are absolutely correct. Much of the rank and file of NASA is highly competent, particularly the folks at JPL and others behind the unmanned exploration probes. But the middle and upper management do things for truly bizzare reasons. My favorite example: Back before they got bought, Macdonald-Douglas put together a small team who did an absolutely crack job on the DC-X program. It was fast, it was cheap, and it did what it was designed to do and built hardware that worked. So when it came time to select the contactor for the next phase of the program, NASA in its infinite wisdom ignored the proposal from the MacDonald-Douglas team (which would have built on the things they had learned and done already) and selected the X-33/VentureStar program proposed by Lockheed. Why? Because the Lockheed proposal provided the greatest technical challenge and involved developing the most new technology. Last time I checked, the X-33 was grossly overweight (including 5000 lbs of lead ballast in the nose, to balance out the engines, which were too heavy), has had its speed envelope reduced by nearly half, was way behind schedule and over budget (of course), and was having a host of fabrication problems (primarily with their "revolutionary" new tank technology).
Sigh. It's things like this that have convinced me that NASA is not the place to look for cheap space access, or much of anything else except the occasional really cool spaceprobe.
As an aside: if your interested in cheap space access, check out the Rotary Rocket Company to see how it might of happened (if they hadn't run out of cash). And then check out X-Cor Aerospace, which is all that's left of Rotary Rocket that's actually doing anything.
It's not practical, and here's why. As someone else pointed out, you have two options if you want to do this:
1) An earth-return trajectory. This doesn't make sense, because you only get one flyby look at your target, it's hard to get close, and you are going FAST.
2) Break out of orbit, and go home. This doesn't work because the fuel cost is prohibitive. Not just hard. Impossible with chemical rockets (go to nuke rockets, and it's a different story altogether). It's relatively easy (in terms of energy/fuel) to capture into orbit. Getting out requires adding alot of deltaV, which you can't get from gravity assist (because you've been captured), so it has to come from burning fuel. Which had to be accelerated along with the rest of the craft to get to the target in the first place. Which requires a LOT more fuel. And getting into orbit is relatively easy, but it isn't free, so you pay another fuel penalty when you get there. And of course, this makes the craft heavier and harder (i.e. more expensive) to lift. Bottom line is, when your run the numbers, you can't do it with anything like a reasonable vehicle size/cost. Which is a damn shame, since it would be cool to have stuff like this hanging around in a museum. But if we want to do that, we're gonna have to develop the technology to go out there and get it. Which is a whole 'nother can of worms.
/*begin letter*/ This is something that should more properly be sent to public relations, but no such email address was provided. Please forward it to the appropriate people.
I have recently been made aware of your company's harrassment of the Peacefire.org group concerning their decryption of I-Gear's blocking list. http://peacefire.org/censorware/I-Gear/igdecode/sy mantec-to-media3.3-1-2000.txt
As a customer and longtime user of Symantec Products, I thought you should know that your company's action in this matter has cost you my business. The sort of reverse engineering done by Bennett Haselton is essential to keep companies honest(as the reaction of your company in this situation amply demonstrates). Your attempts to prevent this sort of activity will hurt you in the marketplace, as many, many IT professionals care passionately about issues of privacy, censorship, and the freedom of information. In the future, I will be buying from your competition, until such time as your company reverses its position on this matter.
Does anyone have any way of contacting someone relevant at Symantec? I want to send email and bitch them out. And y'all should too. We're customers, and some of us make purchasing decisions for large companies. They've pissed us off, and they need to know it. Problem is, all the email addresses on their site are for tech support and customer service and the like. I want an email to a VP, or at least to someone in public relations, whose job it is to care about things like this. Anyone who has this info, please post it, and y'all moderators, up it so people will see it!
I don't usually post Me Toos, but I wanted to emphasize a point from the last post
The truth is, the corporations can sue us only as long as we buy their stuff. Once we realize that it's just glitter without substance, we're free from them.
We are only subject to their rules if we want to play their game. I personally hate DMCA, but I must admit that one of the recurring arguements against it just doesn't make sense: people say that the DMCA will destroy the ability of the small, independent artist to use the digital medium to distribute his work. Bullshit! If an artist does not sign with a major label (i.e. retains copyright to his own work) and wants to distribute his stuff via Napster, etc, I don't see how DMCA can stop him. Granted, if you can't get mainstream music off of Napster, services like it will become the domain of small, independent artists and their fans, and be alot less popular. So this will hurt the indies, and their ability to compete with the mainstream. But it's not like it's gonna kill the medium. And the degree to which this effect occurs is entirely dependent on the level of fan support given to the indies. Again: The megacorps can't hurt you (much) if you just don't eat their dogfood. If you care about the small independent artists and their ability to get their stuff out, then stop buying mainstream artists (or go pirate, if you must) and focus on the independents. Remember, you are the consumer. In our culture, that makes you (ultimately) all powerful. (And listening to indie music is alot more fun than writing letters to your congressman, but you should do that too.)
And on the subject of piracy: In a previous comment (subject: Napster Alternative) Yurik suggested the idea of a distributed, client-based Napster-like music server system. If you think that making a profit off of information is wrong, this is an exellent idea. Yes, there are serious technical difficulties, and I'm not the guy to address them (I'm a mechanical geek, not a electronic geek). But you're all bright boys and girls -- I'm sure you can figure it out, given the proper motivation. And the motivation is there: free music, and a chance to stick it to the major corps. So there is an endrun around the DCMA problem, if you care to exploit it. Yeah, sure, it'd still be illegal, but so what. There is no way they could enfore the law effectively against a distributed network. So if you want your free music, get busy!
That said, I think that DMCA is a lousy law, setting a lousy precedent. And it is clearly a case of an old, stagnant industry using its clout try to block progress because it is easier to be reactionary than to adapt to changing times. Which means that, in the end, they will fail; it just might take a long long time. And Bons is right: most people (the AOLites) are going to continue to toe the line and eat from the corporate feedbag because they don't know any better. DMCA will perpetuate that behavior, with the consequence of a general reduction in quality of life for us geeks (i.e. it retards culture, and the ability of people around you to think for themselves). So get out there and fight DMCA. But try not to get too depressed about it.
I used to work for the Rotary Rocket Company; I was part of the team that was developing the main engine. It was one hell of a cool company and one hell of a cool project. And, most significantly, we had a great team that included the best engineers that I have ever had the privilege to work alongside. SSTO is a very ambitious goal -- there are "experts" (mostly in NASA) who still say that practical SSTO is impossible -- but that team had the Right Stuff and might have actually pulled it off. Unfortunately, the company ran out of money and has cut staff back to a bare skeleton crew. In particular, the entire engineering team is gone.
As somebody who was on the inside, I can tell you this: the main problem was, as always, a lack of money. But lack of management at the very top was a close second. Gary Hudson (Rotary's CEO) is a great visionary, but the man does not know how to manage an engineering project. Alot of the progress that was made at Rotary occurred despite Gary, rather than because of him.
The current state of affairs is that Rotary has a whole lot of hardware, but nothing in the way of a team. Hudson got more seed money -- by at least two orders of magnitude -- for this project than any cheap space advocate has ever seen in one place before. Unfortunately, he blew it. Rotary Rocket is, I am sad to say, effectively dead, and no amount of money is going to revive it, unless that money comes along with a major reorganization (i.e. get a new CEO). And Gary will not allow that to happen.
However, work continues. The former head of Propulsion, the chief engineer, and a couple of my ex-coworkers have created a company, X-Cor Aerospace , to develop rocket engines for commercial applications. Currently they are seeking customers and/or investors who want to support their work. And they have built a small rocket engine, literally in their garage, using their own money. Their ultimate goal is to gather the resources necessary to build a cheap commercial launch vehicle, and succeede where Rotary failed. But at the moment, they are struggling to survive.
Wow. I spent lunch thinking about this, and it is a really tough and really interesting problem. I would say there are really three questions that have to be addressed here: 1) What to preserve. 2) How to preserve it. 3) How to control its release so that, by the time the re-emergent cultures read about things like genetic engineering and nuclear weapons, they have at least some chance of not killing themselves.
Problem #1 becomes less of an issue as you address problem #3. Binary-encoded information on micromachined gold disks in caches scattered around the globe is a good way to preserve information on nuclear physics, biotech, cosmology, etc, as well as various data of interest to an archeologist (i.e. stuff that wouldn't be interesting to a young re-emergent civ but would be very interesting as they start to mature). Hide the caches, preferably underground. And make many, to allow for attrition and so that one nation (in the new world order) doesn't get all the goodies. Leaving clues as to their general location encoded as mathematical problems (possibly requiring values of certain fundemental constants, like/h) is a good way to at least make sure the retrieving civilization is technologically sophisticated enough to deal with the knowledge. Whether they are wise enough to do so is a whole 'nother problem, but we do what we can, eh? Don't reveal their exact location: make them look using sonar, etc. Again, a filter for technological sophistication.
The problem of what and how to preserve are much harder when you are looking at the first tier of information -- the stuff you want them to find right away. Large stone blocks are a good idea (ala Greg Bear's Heigira). Carving the information into nickel or stainless steel (or better yet, Monel or Inconel) plates is also good, although then you have to make lots of copies, widely distributed, to get around the problem that some people will melt the things down for their metal. Still, I would suspect this would be less of a problem than you might expect, if the engravings are obvious and readable by eye: The reemergents will know that there was a technological civilization before them, and anything that might be from that civilization will likely be highly valued, especially if it contains information. Besides, if you use Monel/Inconel, by the time the new civilization figures out the technology to make forges hot enough to work them, they will know enough to want the data instead.
As far as what to preserve, at the first tier, I would argue for mathematics and materials science/chemistry. Math is the limiting factor in scientific progress, and materials technology is the limiting factor on much technological progress. Whenever I read or think about rebuilding technology, where you need the tools to make the tools to make the tools, math and materials are always right at the top of their respective lists. And there is another advantage: written language may change, but both math and chemistry can be well represented by other symbol sets that can be tied directly to concrete reality. Math (esp. geometry) is universal. So is chemistry to a large extent -- once you get the idea of atoms and molecules across, a molecular model makes sense no matter what language you speak.
It's late and I have to work tomorrow, so I'm going to confine myself to addressing the most relevant issue that you raised: the cost of launch.
You are correct: Getting into space IS prohibitively expensive. The going rate is around $5000/pound to Low Earth Orbit on the cheapest (Russian) ride available. If you want to fly the Shuttle, you're looking at more like $10000+/pound. And you are also correct in your assumption that we cannot do anything that makes sense in space until we get the cost to orbit down.
BUT IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!! Your belief that space access is inherently expensive is a common misperception, which has been propagated and supported at every opportunity by NASA and the companies that feed off their largess. The technical problems are hard, do not misunderstand me, but the primary challenges and limitations are organizational, political, and operational in nature, not technical. NASA is a hidebound bureaucracy; they have no motivation to be cheap and efficient. The shuttle requires ground support by tens of thousands of people between every launch. No wonder it is expensive. Since the end of Apollo, NASA has repeatedly and consistently selected the launch system development programs that are least likely to produce results.
For a good summary of why we must go to space, and how NASA has worked to make that impossible, go to the latest report from the Space Access Society.
As long as I am getting up on this soapbox, let me establish my credentials: I have worked for NASA (at JPL) and I have worked on a launch vehicle development program. A privately funded launch vehicle development program. The company in question, the Rotary Rocket Company, is now effectively out of business for lack of funding. But in two years we built and tested four new rocket engine designs, while spending less than $2,000,000. Compare that to any program run by NASA, and you will understand why they have consistently failed to produce a reasonable launch vehicle. We can develop the technology RIGHT NOW that would put us in orbit for 1/10 what NASA has to spend. And once space began to be commercialized in a big way, that cost would drop by another order of magnitude in less than a decade. All we need is the development money, and not very bloody much of it at that. Come on, all you dotcom millionaires who grew up loving Star Trek. Do you want to live the dream? Then let's make it happen!
I welcome replies posted here, or to brent@lorax.org.
Or more, depending on how you cook the books (e.g. do you try to amortize the R&D cost, like you would for a commercial venture? That is not included in the number quoted above)
In a previous discussion related to DeCSS, somebody pointed out that it was absurd to restrict the distribution of a piece of code, pointing to the example of various distributions of information on how to make bombs/guns/poison, etc. The right to distribute that kind of information (at least printed on paper) has been upheld again and again, regardless of its potential to lead to someone getting hurt.
This got me thinking: Bomb plans are legal to create, possess, distribute, etc. But making and owning the bomb itself is illegal most places. I.e. the knowledge is legal, but the implementation is not. With a decryption scheme the difference between the knowledge and the implementation is much less clear cut, but it still exists: it is the difference between source code and compiled code. So if they want to be consistent with precedent, they should permit the distribution of the source, but not the compiled code.
This is silly and spurious! you say. Well, it does seem that way, but I think this might be a compromise with something to offer. Think about the consequences: The hacker community can continue to pass around the code, and, yes compile it and run it and copy DVDs or whatever...
BUT
Nobody will be able to (legally; i.e. very profitably) produce a DVD copy machine that uses this code. This plugs a potentially enormous profit leak that I'm sure worries the Hollywood folks to no end. Also, Joe Q AOL User will not have even the minimal level of competence required to compile and use the (freely available) decryption algorithm. And 98% of the consumer public are in that class.
The essence of this solution is that it allows the movie/music/etc industry to continue to fleece the sheep. But those who take the time and trouble to educate themselves can opt out. Personally, I find that arrangement very appealing.
Of course, this is a compromise, which means that the entertainment industry gives up some level of control over their material, and the computer/consumer community gives up some of their freedom. So in point of fact it may be a solution that everybody can hate equally. Besides the fact that very few lawyers and fewer judges know the difference between source code, compiled code, and Morse code, so this solution will never be implemented. Nevertheless, I thought I'd toss it out there for people to pick at.
Anyone looking for inspiration on this subject should read _A_Deepness_in_the_Sky_ by Vernor Vinge. (Well, you should read it anyway, as well _A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep_; these two books represent the most mind-blowing SF out there, IMHO). Anyway, in _Deepness_, Vinge describes his vision of what wearable, portable processing can be like. The tech involved comes down to wearable, wireless networking, with interface via chorded keyboards and HUDs. Everybody's unit speaks to everyone else's, allowing for consenual virtual environments and so forth. Anyway, the real value (for me, at least) was in his depiction of the things in use, and how they impact the users' lives. I can't possibly recreate that information here, so if you're interested, go read the book.
There really have been some cool experiments with spiders on drugs, and how that impacts their work. Check out this page. And this page, which includes a picture of a web spun by a spider on LSD -- it's more precise than the work done by a straight spider. Pretty damn weird.
Slashdot Mirror
If you are going to attack this problem, you need to distinguish between different levels of technology that could all properly be called "nanotech".
/.); small nanoparticles that can be used to carry drugs to particular parts of the body and release them where it is appropriate (don't have the reference, sorry). Most of these technologies fall under the heading of self-assembling nanotech. I.e. You figure out that a certain set of compounds under the proper conditions will spontaneously arrange themselves in some useful fashion. This is legitimately nanotech, but is a far cry from autonomous, self-replicating nanobots.
There are technolgies under development now, which will be commercial in 3-10 years, which could easily be considered "nanotech". For example: nanosized magnetic core memory (recently on
Another level of development will be marked by the use of nanomachines to assemble bulk materials. At the simplest level, such a machine would act as a filter: pour in slurried ore, and it spits out streams of refined metal. At greater levels of complexity, you can produce things like wood, meat, cloth, etc. This requires a high degree of fine control, but it is relatively simple because you're just building the same "cell" over and over and over.
Moving beyond that, you enter the age of the general assember, and the nanite robot. This is the sort of nanotech people write SF about, and that gives Bill Joy the screaming heebie-jeebies. There are several stages within this level of development.
Initially, probably, general assemblers will be huge, not very efficient, hard to build, and limitted in capability (i.e. they can't build something as complex as another one of themselves). They will only be available to corporations and governments. At this point, you have the potential to produce product very cheaply and sell it for whatever the market will bear. Which means that it may be quite a while before we move beyond this step, because in this phase, big business holds all the cards and the consumers just have to line up and take what they get. Fortunately, there are avenues for research that aren't focussed on profit, and there are profit-oriented research centers that will continue to push the envelope for the sake of getting an edge on the competition. But I suspect there will be a very strong push to keep things more or less at this level, and keep the assemblers under the control of a monied elite. Yes, this worries me.
The resistance is because, in the next phase, general assemblers are smaller, cheaper, more available, and more capable (and capable of reproducing themselves, probably). At this point, there is the potential to develop a pure information economy, because you can make anything you want using just raw materials, electricity (and probably not much of that), an assembler, and a design. You could even have a totally open-source economy. The economics of scarcity and profit go to hell in a handbasket. But you also introduce the very real possibility that any reasonably bright and deranged person can design a nanoplauge to wipe out humanity (the grey goo and the Unabomber problems).
There is also a shift that will occur when it is possible to build self-reproducing nanites. This is somewhat, though not completely, decoupled from assembler technology, so it's hard to say when it occurs. This level of technology is what really heralds the danger that Bill Joy was freaking out over. Without self-reproducing nanites, nanotech is still dangerous, but it's not world-breaking.
Each of these technologies is going to have a whole set of reprocussions and ramifications. You may find that it is hard to survey the entire future history of the development of this technology without winding up writing a book. So you may want to focus on a particular level of development. Also, trying to predict what's going to happen once general assemblers are available, even primitive ones, is basically prophesy and therefore probably bullshit. (Everything I've said that could be construed as a prediction should be read as if it was prefaced with a huge honking disclaimer. I don't pretend to be a seer; these are just my guesses.)
So, no, I don't think that the concept of IP is so "unnatural" as you make it to be. Yes, for the tangible property there is the "loss of use" argument -- if somebody takes away my car, I cannot use it any more -- which does not apply to IP. However, there is still the "create incentive to produce more" argument that is just as valid for IP as it is for traditional physical property.
I agree with all your basic points. However, I think there is a distinction to be made here. Let us divide the rights protected under law into two rough categories:
1) Rights that protect you from "takings" or agression. Meatspace property rights fall into this category: If I take your car/house/food/etc, you don't have it any more.
2) Rights that are upheld to create the incentive to produce more of value x.
In most cases, these two aspects co-exist, and it makes it easy to fail to see the difference between them. In meatspace property, a taking means that my gain is your loss. But in IP, my gain is not necessarily your loss. It costs you nothing if I use a piece of IP that you created that I would not have been willing to pay for (either because your asking price is greater than its utility to me, though its utility is nonzero, or because I am too poor).
Rights are social phenomena that are recognized in society because it benefits the members of the society to do so. The consequence of failing to recognize meatspace property rights is despotism and oppression. The consequence of failing to recognize IP rights may be a retardation of the production of valuable IP, but it is not the same. Meatspace property rights are protected so that people don't go around killing each other taking/defending property. IP rights are protected so that productive people will produce more, which is to everyone's benefit.
I am not saying that it's fair to fail to pay someone for their IP, when they produced that IP in the expectation that they could make a living off it. That is theft. I'm just saying that there is an intrinsic difference between meatspace property and IP rights, and it's important to recognize that difference if we are to come to a reasonable understanding of the proper role of property rights.
Note that I would class the theft of personal (non public) information as a form of agression and therefore protect such information as if it were meatspace property, even though it's just data. Because in the case of private information, part of the value of that information is intrinsic in the fact that it IS private. If you take that information and spread it around, it is no longer private, and so you have taken something from me.
You are in need of the platitude. When the message people are trying to get across is "Think for yourself, dammit!", how exactly does "getting it" become some type of conformity to a behavioural pattern?
Repeat after me "We are all Individuals"
WE ARE ALL INDIVIDUALS!
I'm not!
Sorry. Had to do it.
For everyone who is making a big deal out of the drop in Microsoft's stock value, let me point out that when AMD released their 1 Ghz chip, their stock jumped by 6 point. When Intel released their 1 Ghz chip a few days later, AMD's stock fell by 3 points.
The pissing war these two companies are involved in is silly. It's even more absurd to think that a few days difference in release date has anything at all to do with long-term viability or profitability. If anything, the pissing war worries me: It's just a matter of time until one of them hurries a chip to market too fast and releases it with a bad bug. (I'm betting it's going to be Intel, but we shall see.)
Note that AMD's stock was trading around $50 at the time that this happened, so the change in price was of the same relative order as today's slide in Microsoft stock.
Everybody who works with computers knows what a pain in the ass it can be to upgrade to a new version of the software. The interface may change, so you get confused users. You have new bugs and new hardware compatibility issues, etc, etc. And of course with an OS, it's even worse. Lots of companies spend alot of money and time preparing for upgrades to major applications packages.
...
Now, imagine a world in which upgrades happen, not when the IT manager or even the company president says they do, but when the software publisher says they do.
Take a minute to finish screaming.
OK, all better now? If UCITA becomes the law of the land (which is an issue unto itself) and companies like M$ start selling temporary licences, I think that at least some companies will have enough clue to realize that selling software that doesn't expire and doesn't force upgrades will give them an overwhelming competitive advantage in the long run.
As far as the private user goes, I'll vote with my bucks: I'll buy software that doesn't expire, or I'll get hacks of the stuff that does.
Don't misunderstand: UCITA is evil and we should fight it tooth and nail. If it becomes widespread, it will be a Very Bad Thing. But it won't be the end of the world, and it will probably fall by the wayside after a few years.
M:tA states that reality is a concensus against which you have to struggle. In essence, it is a doomed attempt, as you are but one voice in a sea of reality definitions. It states that you can alter reality only by paying great attention to what other individuals have to say, and thus are in constant danger of being 'juged'.
M:tA does not say that you are doomed in an attempt to alter reality, simply that it is very difficult to alter reality in a way that obviously violates everyone else's opinion of what reality is supposed to do. So causing your enemy to trip over his own shoelaces is easy, but turning him into a newt is hard.
This may not conincide with the historical point of view, but I find it a very compelling model because it matches very nicely with my own personal (though limited) experience of magick. I have experienced events that could be described as manifestations of coincidental magick. I have never seen someone throw a fireball from their hand or otherwise violate the dominant paradigm in a major way.
The form of magick depicted in The Matrix is the application of Will, as described by even the earlier sorcerors and actualised by the likes of Crowley and the others of the Golden Dawn in the early 20th Century. It never depicts reality as a concensus, but rather as a personal entity.
:-)
OK, yeah, you're right. I was being imprecise. The Matrix was not based on Mage, or anything quite that direct. The reality of the Matrix was not consensual. But I still think there is a similarity: Neo, like the Ascended mage, is a reality hacker who is able to manipulate his world based on an understanding of it's underlying structure. As with any such ephiphany, there is a learning period and process involved. I thought they could have done some interesting things with that.
M:tG was, for all intents and purposes, mythical mumbo-jumbo written by idiots who had no grasp of what the historical depiction of magick was about.
How did M:tG (Magic: the Gathering) get into this discussion? Or did you intend to refer to Mage: The Ascension? At any rate, I don't think Mage:tA was attempting to be historical or authentic, but I do think they suggest a valid and useful perspective on the manipulation of reality. Whether or not it passes the review of a purist like yourself is another question.
Neo dies and then his 'divine' nature is revealed. Think this is crap? Then sue the Apostles for not dwelling enough into Jesus' psyche before he was crucified and made God...
Well, actually, I wouldn't give the Apostles a Nobel in literature, either.
Seriously, I agree, it's a traditional scenario. Heh. Everybody made a big deal out of how The Matrix went off the beaten path and broke new ground, but it's just another formulaic fantasy plot. It's just a bit more exotic than the usual formula (or a bit more basic, depending on your point of view). I guess I really do expect too much from Hollywood, to think that they could actually break new ground and explore the process of this transformation.
I left the theatre feeling really disappointed, actually. I mean, it was a cool action flick and the special effects were neat and all that, but they could have done so much more with the movie than they did. The central point of the plot was the the Metaphysic of Magick, and the transformation of the individual from a mundane into a mage. They could have cut 5 minutes of the random mayhem (and still had enough blood and guts to satisfy any action-movie freak), and used that time to focus more on the process of the transformation, as Neo becomes aware of the true nature of reality, and then becomes aware of how this newfound knowledge allows him to control reality. But instead the transformation was virutally instantaneous: Neo went from clueless shmoe to uber-mage in one scene.
And I'm not even going to get started on the absurdity of the basic premise that the machines were using humans as a power source.
Maybe I just expect too much from Hollywood. I guess there is a reason I don't see many movies. Sigh...
NB: The references to the Metaphysic of Magic, etc are from Mage: The Ascension. The MofM, in a nutshell, is the principle that reality is a fluid thing that is created by our common perception of reality. (Yes it's circular. Don't ask me.) Understanding this key fact allows a person to manipulate reality, in a limited fashion, by imposing their version of what should be on the consensual reality. This is what makes someone a mage.
So don't buy it. Or make judicious use of a wirecutter.
Let's see: I think most of us agree that the current way of doing business in the music world screws both the artists and the consumers, and the labels make out like the bandits that they are.
Seems to me that there is an obvious and necessary first step to creating a new, better system: We have to get the artists to realize that their interests, and our interests (as consumers) are aligned.
I can think of one way that the average joe-geek-consumer can work towards that end: If you download a bunch of music, and keep it, pay the artist for it. Directly. Send him/her/them a money order (better keep it annoymous). If lots of artists start getting $5 & $10 chunks of cash coming it, they're going to see the light.
I want to do this. The problem is, I don't know where to send something like that so that it will get into the hands of the artists, and not some label or PR flack.
Does anyone out there have any ideas or information to make it easier to get the money directly to the bands?
The other thing I would point out is that, before we will ever have the artists' widespread support for a new business model, they have to get out from under their contracts with the record companies. I don't know how that's going to happen.
If you are interested in this sort of free-market, high-tech green-tech, check out The Rocky Mountain Institute. They are doing excellent work in developing and propagating technologies and approaches that are simultaneously good for the environment and good for the economy. In particular, they have done great work on green buildings -- I've been to their headquarters, and it's every bit as cool as they claim. It's something like a 4000 square-foot building, at 8000 feet elevation (Snowmass, CO), and the only active heating they need is a pair of small woodstoves. The rest is provided by passive solar. And they grow bananas and other things inside the building during the winter!
They are also some of the original proponents of composite-body, fuel-cell-driven cars. Neat stuff.
"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence."
NASA upper management is a slave to political priorities, which often conflict with the engineering realities that one must deal with to actually accomplish anything in the real world. This isn't going to change; it's the nature of the beast. If you want to go off planet, look elsewhere for your ride.
It's a bit like the aftermath of Challenger, where they went nuts on the hardware instead of looking at the fundamental problem, which was the prostitution of the program for political reasons. The outcome of that is that we now have a NASA which is completely paranoid about public opinion and afraid of its own shadow when it comes to safety, but which still won't look at the whole picture, and still twitches to the political beat.
You are absolutely correct. Much of the rank and file of NASA is highly competent, particularly the folks at JPL and others behind the unmanned exploration probes. But the middle and upper management do things for truly bizzare reasons.
My favorite example: Back before they got bought, Macdonald-Douglas put together a small team who did an absolutely crack job on the DC-X program. It was fast, it was cheap, and it did what it was designed to do and built hardware that worked. So when it came time to select the contactor for the next phase of the program, NASA in its infinite wisdom ignored the proposal from the MacDonald-Douglas team (which would have built on the things they had learned and done already) and selected the X-33/VentureStar program proposed by Lockheed. Why? Because the Lockheed proposal provided the greatest technical challenge and involved developing the most new technology.
Last time I checked, the X-33 was grossly overweight (including 5000 lbs of lead ballast in the nose, to balance out the engines, which were too heavy), has had its speed envelope reduced by nearly half, was way behind schedule and over budget (of course), and was having a host of fabrication problems (primarily with their "revolutionary" new tank technology).
Sigh. It's things like this that have convinced me that NASA is not the place to look for cheap space access, or much of anything else except the occasional really cool spaceprobe.
As an aside: if your interested in cheap space access, check out the Rotary Rocket Company to see how it might of happened (if they hadn't run out of cash). And then check out X-Cor Aerospace, which is all that's left of Rotary Rocket that's actually doing anything.
It's not practical, and here's why. As someone else pointed out, you have two options if you want to do this:
1) An earth-return trajectory. This doesn't make sense, because you only get one flyby look at your target, it's hard to get close, and you are going FAST.
2) Break out of orbit, and go home. This doesn't work because the fuel cost is prohibitive. Not just hard. Impossible with chemical rockets (go to nuke rockets, and it's a different story altogether). It's relatively easy (in terms of energy/fuel) to capture into orbit. Getting out requires adding alot of deltaV, which you can't get from gravity assist (because you've been captured), so it has to come from burning fuel. Which had to be accelerated along with the rest of the craft to get to the target in the first place. Which requires a LOT more fuel. And getting into orbit is relatively easy, but it isn't free, so you pay another fuel penalty when you get there. And of course, this makes the craft heavier and harder (i.e. more expensive) to lift. Bottom line is, when your run the numbers, you can't do it with anything like a reasonable vehicle size/cost. Which is a damn shame, since it would be cool to have stuff like this hanging around in a museum. But if we want to do that, we're gonna have to develop the technology to go out there and get it. Which is a whole 'nother can of worms.
I sent the following to Symantec via online feedback forms. We'll see what happens.
/*begin letter*/
y mantec-to-media3.3-1-2000.txt
Product Feedback
URLabs support(They're the subsidiary apparently responsible for IGear)
This is something that should more properly be sent to public relations, but no such email address was provided. Please forward it to the appropriate people.
I have recently been made aware of your company's harrassment of the Peacefire.org group concerning their decryption of I-Gear's blocking list. http://peacefire.org/censorware/I-Gear/igdecode/s
As a customer and longtime user of Symantec Products, I thought you should know that your company's action in this matter has cost you my business. The sort of reverse engineering done by Bennett Haselton is essential to keep companies honest(as the reaction of your company in this situation amply demonstrates). Your attempts to prevent this sort of activity will hurt you in the marketplace, as many, many IT professionals care passionately about issues of privacy, censorship, and the freedom of information.
In the future, I will be buying from your competition, until such time as your company reverses its position on this matter.
Thank you very much,
Brent R Eubanks
Does anyone have any way of contacting someone relevant at Symantec? I want to send email and bitch them out. And y'all should too. We're customers, and some of us make purchasing decisions for large companies. They've pissed us off, and they need to know it. Problem is, all the email addresses on their site are for tech support and customer service and the like. I want an email to a VP, or at least to someone in public relations, whose job it is to care about things like this. Anyone who has this info, please post it, and y'all moderators, up it so people will see it!
Thanks
I don't usually post Me Toos, but I wanted to emphasize a point from the last post
The truth is, the corporations can sue us only as long as we buy their stuff. Once we realize that it's just glitter without substance, we're free from them.
We are only subject to their rules if we want to play their game. I personally hate DMCA, but I must admit that one of the recurring arguements against it just doesn't make sense: people say that the DMCA will destroy the ability of the small, independent artist to use the digital medium to distribute his work. Bullshit! If an artist does not sign with a major label (i.e. retains copyright to his own work) and wants to distribute his stuff via Napster, etc, I don't see how DMCA can stop him. Granted, if you can't get mainstream music off of Napster, services like it will become the domain of small, independent artists and their fans, and be alot less popular. So this will hurt the indies, and their ability to compete with the mainstream. But it's not like it's gonna kill the medium. And the degree to which this effect occurs is entirely dependent on the level of fan support given to the indies. Again: The megacorps can't hurt you (much) if you just don't eat their dogfood. If you care about the small independent artists and their ability to get their stuff out, then stop buying mainstream artists (or go pirate, if you must) and focus on the independents. Remember, you are the consumer. In our culture, that makes you (ultimately) all powerful. (And listening to indie music is alot more fun than writing letters to your congressman, but you should do that too.)
And on the subject of piracy: In a previous comment (subject: Napster Alternative) Yurik suggested the idea of a distributed, client-based Napster-like music server system. If you think that making a profit off of information is wrong, this is an exellent idea. Yes, there are serious technical difficulties, and I'm not the guy to address them (I'm a mechanical geek, not a electronic geek). But you're all bright boys and girls -- I'm sure you can figure it out, given the proper motivation. And the motivation is there: free music, and a chance to stick it to the major corps. So there is an endrun around the DCMA problem, if you care to exploit it. Yeah, sure, it'd still be illegal, but so what. There is no way they could enfore the law effectively against a distributed network. So if you want your free music, get busy!
That said, I think that DMCA is a lousy law, setting a lousy precedent. And it is clearly a case of an old, stagnant industry using its clout try to block progress because it is easier to be reactionary than to adapt to changing times. Which means that, in the end, they will fail; it just might take a long long time. And Bons is right: most people (the AOLites) are going to continue to toe the line and eat from the corporate feedbag because they don't know any better. DMCA will perpetuate that behavior, with the consequence of a general reduction in quality of life for us geeks (i.e. it retards culture, and the ability of people around you to think for themselves). So get out there and fight DMCA. But try not to get too depressed about it.
I used to work for the Rotary Rocket Company; I was part of the team that was developing the main engine. It was one hell of a cool company and one hell of a cool project. And, most significantly, we had a great team that included the best engineers that I have ever had the privilege to work alongside.
SSTO is a very ambitious goal -- there are "experts" (mostly in NASA) who still say that practical SSTO is impossible -- but that team had the Right Stuff and might have actually pulled it off. Unfortunately, the company ran out of money and has cut staff back to a bare skeleton crew. In particular, the entire engineering team is gone.
As somebody who was on the inside, I can tell you this: the main problem was, as always, a lack of money. But lack of management at the very top was a close second. Gary Hudson (Rotary's CEO) is a great visionary, but the man does not know how to manage an engineering project. Alot of the progress that was made at Rotary occurred despite Gary, rather than because of him.
The current state of affairs is that Rotary has a whole lot of hardware, but nothing in the way of a team. Hudson got more seed money -- by at least two orders of magnitude -- for this project than any cheap space advocate has ever seen in one place before. Unfortunately, he blew it. Rotary Rocket is, I am sad to say, effectively dead, and no amount of money is going to revive it, unless that money comes along with a major reorganization (i.e. get a new CEO). And Gary will not allow that to happen.
However, work continues. The former head of Propulsion, the chief engineer, and a couple of my ex-coworkers have created a company, X-Cor Aerospace , to develop rocket engines for commercial applications. Currently they are seeking customers and/or investors who want to support their work. And they have built a small rocket engine, literally in their garage, using their own money. Their ultimate goal is to gather the resources necessary to build a cheap commercial launch vehicle, and succeede where Rotary failed. But at the moment, they are struggling to survive.
Wow. I spent lunch thinking about this, and it is a really tough and really interesting problem. I would say there are really three questions that have to be addressed here:
/h) is a good way to at least make sure the retrieving civilization is technologically sophisticated enough to deal with the knowledge. Whether they are wise enough to do so is a whole 'nother problem, but we do what we can, eh? Don't reveal their exact location: make them look using sonar, etc. Again, a filter for technological sophistication.
1) What to preserve.
2) How to preserve it.
3) How to control its release so that, by the time the re-emergent cultures read about things like genetic engineering and nuclear weapons, they have at least some chance of not killing themselves.
Problem #1 becomes less of an issue as you address problem #3. Binary-encoded information on micromachined gold disks in caches scattered around the globe is a good way to preserve information on nuclear physics, biotech, cosmology, etc, as well as various data of interest to an archeologist (i.e. stuff that wouldn't be interesting to a young re-emergent civ but would be very interesting as they start to mature). Hide the caches, preferably underground. And make many, to allow for attrition and so that one nation (in the new world order) doesn't get all the goodies. Leaving clues as to their general location encoded as mathematical problems (possibly requiring values of certain fundemental constants, like
The problem of what and how to preserve are much harder when you are looking at the first tier of information -- the stuff you want them to find right away. Large stone blocks are a good idea (ala Greg Bear's Heigira). Carving the information into nickel or stainless steel (or better yet, Monel or Inconel) plates is also good, although then you have to make lots of copies, widely distributed, to get around the problem that some people will melt the things down for their metal. Still, I would suspect this would be less of a problem than you might expect, if the engravings are obvious and readable by eye: The reemergents will know that there was a technological civilization before them, and anything that might be from that civilization will likely be highly valued, especially if it contains information. Besides, if you use Monel/Inconel, by the time the new civilization figures out the technology to make forges hot enough to work them, they will know enough to want the data instead.
As far as what to preserve, at the first tier, I would argue for mathematics and materials science/chemistry. Math is the limiting factor in scientific progress, and materials technology is the limiting factor on much technological progress. Whenever I read or think about rebuilding technology, where you need the tools to make the tools to make the tools, math and materials are always right at the top of their respective lists. And there is another advantage: written language may change, but both math and chemistry can be well represented by other symbol sets that can be tied directly to concrete reality. Math (esp. geometry) is universal. So is chemistry to a large extent -- once you get the idea of atoms and molecules across, a molecular model makes sense no matter what language you speak.
It's late and I have to work tomorrow, so I'm going to confine myself to addressing the most relevant issue that you raised: the cost of launch.
You are correct: Getting into space IS prohibitively expensive. The going rate is around $5000/pound to Low Earth Orbit on the cheapest (Russian) ride available. If you want to fly the Shuttle, you're looking at more like $10000+/pound. And you are also correct in your assumption that we cannot do anything that makes sense in space until we get the cost to orbit down.
BUT IT DOESN'T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY!! Your belief that space access is inherently expensive is a common misperception, which has been propagated and supported at every opportunity by NASA and the companies that feed off their largess.
The technical problems are hard, do not misunderstand me, but the primary challenges and limitations are organizational, political, and operational in nature, not technical.
NASA is a hidebound bureaucracy; they have no motivation to be cheap and efficient.
The shuttle requires ground support by tens of thousands of people between every launch. No wonder it is expensive.
Since the end of Apollo, NASA has repeatedly and consistently selected the launch system development programs that are least likely to produce results.
For a good summary of why we must go to space, and how NASA has worked to make that impossible, go to the latest report from the Space Access Society.
As long as I am getting up on this soapbox, let me establish my credentials: I have worked for NASA (at JPL) and I have worked on a launch vehicle development program. A privately funded launch vehicle development program. The company in question, the Rotary Rocket Company, is now effectively out of business for lack of funding. But in two years we built and tested four new rocket engine designs, while spending less than $2,000,000. Compare that to any program run by NASA, and you will understand why they have consistently failed to produce a reasonable launch vehicle.
We can develop the technology RIGHT NOW that would put us in orbit for 1/10 what NASA has to spend. And once space began to be commercialized in a big way, that cost would drop by another order of magnitude in less than a decade. All we need is the development money, and not very bloody much of it at that.
Come on, all you dotcom millionaires who grew up loving Star Trek. Do you want to live the dream? Then let's make it happen!
I welcome replies posted here, or to brent@lorax.org.
Not a chance. Not even close. Try $400,000,000
Or more, depending on how you cook the books (e.g. do you try to amortize the R&D cost, like you would for a commercial venture? That is not included in the number quoted above)
In a previous discussion related to DeCSS, somebody pointed out that it was absurd to restrict the distribution of a piece of code, pointing to the example of various distributions of information on how to make bombs/guns/poison, etc. The right to distribute that kind of information (at least printed on paper) has been upheld again and again, regardless of its potential to lead to someone getting hurt.
This got me thinking: Bomb plans are legal to create, possess, distribute, etc. But making and owning the bomb itself is illegal most places. I.e. the knowledge is legal, but the implementation is not. With a decryption scheme the difference between the knowledge and the implementation is much less clear cut, but it still exists: it is the difference between source code and compiled code.
So if they want to be consistent with precedent, they should permit the distribution of the source, but not the compiled code.
This is silly and spurious! you say. Well, it does seem that way, but I think this might be a compromise with something to offer. Think about the consequences:
The hacker community can continue to pass around the code, and, yes compile it and run it and copy DVDs or whatever...
BUT
Nobody will be able to (legally; i.e. very profitably) produce a DVD copy machine that uses this code. This plugs a potentially enormous profit leak that I'm sure worries the Hollywood folks to no end.
Also, Joe Q AOL User will not have even the minimal level of competence required to compile and use the (freely available) decryption algorithm. And 98% of the consumer public are in that class.
The essence of this solution is that it allows the movie/music/etc industry to continue to fleece the sheep. But those who take the time and trouble to educate themselves can opt out. Personally, I find that arrangement very appealing.
Of course, this is a compromise, which means that the entertainment industry gives up some level of control over their material, and the computer/consumer community gives up some of their freedom. So in point of fact it may be a solution that everybody can hate equally. Besides the fact that very few lawyers and fewer judges know the difference between source code, compiled code, and Morse code, so this solution will never be implemented. Nevertheless, I thought I'd toss it out there for people to pick at.
Anyone looking for inspiration on this subject should read _A_Deepness_in_the_Sky_ by Vernor Vinge. (Well, you should read it anyway, as well _A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep_; these two books represent the most mind-blowing SF out there, IMHO).
Anyway, in _Deepness_, Vinge describes his vision of what wearable, portable processing can be like. The tech involved comes down to wearable, wireless networking, with interface via chorded keyboards and HUDs. Everybody's unit speaks to everyone else's, allowing for consenual virtual environments and so forth.
Anyway, the real value (for me, at least) was in his depiction of the things in use, and how they impact the users' lives. I can't possibly recreate that information here, so if you're interested, go read the book.
--
There really have been some cool experiments with spiders on drugs, and how that impacts their work. Check out this page. And this page, which includes a picture of a web spun by a spider on LSD -- it's more precise than the work done by a straight spider. Pretty damn weird.