Well, one thing that folks seem to be missing is that Mr. Armstrong is invested heavily in the recipients of some of that Congressional pork barrelling. I have to go digging and look it up again, but Armstrong is heavily invested in Lockheed-Martin or ATK or Rocketdyne...essentially, he is heavily invested in one of the companies that stood to gain a lot of unregulated cash flow from Congress for the Constellation Project. But I can't remember the specifics off the top of my head, I have to go look it up again...
But they provide science and engineering in other fields. Manned spaceflight research begets research on various medical treatments, research on the human body response to extreme environments, research on making self-sustainable, completely autonomous outposts, etc. Some of these items of research have application in other fields like deep-sea exploration, Antartic research stations, and the development of other isolated outposts (deserts, mountains, whatever).
Unmanned spacecraft also provide a slew of spinoff research and technologies as well, but in different areas.
Personally, I think funding research and engineering in both areas is important. Funding research and development in fields that only seem, 'practical,' for the time being is a great way to stagnate a society and prevent it from funding what will be, 'practical,' in tomorrow's world.
And you can say what you want about irrational emotional appeals, but seeing humans going places no one has ever had the ability to go to before (LEO, the Moon, etc.) really does inspire the rest of humanity to try harder. It gives us higher goals to reach for. Show me one young American boy that didn't say, at some point during his childhood, "I want to be an astronaut when I grow up!"
The problem with that idea is that it doesn't let every little idiot lawyer-politician pretend he is a rocket scientist by micro-managing some pet project in NASA's ledger via irrational funding decisions.
No, but I sure wonder how the homeless fella had regular enough access to a reliable internet connection to commit any serious hacking crimes. I suppose that's part of the burden of evidence that rests on the prosecution, right?
But how different is that from their Northern Hemisphere cousins the Americans?
We States dwellers fought a damned revolution in the name of minimal, just government, liberty, and independence. Almost 250 years later we are habitually putting more power in the hands of the Federal government, mandating or outlawing just about everything (at least if you live in California), turning the other cheek when the NSA wiretaps our phone companies, and naming legislation that suspends Habeus Corpus the God damned PATRIOT Act, of all things.
It seems that, for some reason, once societies get to a certain level of comfort, they inevitably start fucking up their citizens' lives for no good reason other than sheer boredom and, possibly, social paranoia of invisible boogeymen.
Americans used to wrestle bears and Australians used to wrestle crocodiles but these days we'll sell out our rights as soon as we hear the words "terrorist!," or, "pedophile!"
Oh what a load of horse shit. I worked a number of minimum wage jobs when I was in high school and a good few of my coworkers worked those jobs as their primary income. They were, and stil are, some of the hardest working people I have met. That guy loading lumber in the back of a contractor's truck to build a house? There's a good chance he is getting minimum wage. The guy unloading pallets of fertilizer from the back of a truck to sell to farmers ro grow food? Probably minimum wage. Hell, even some of the shift managers at the bookstores where I worked got paid minimum wage or, maybe, a quarter over it and they sure as hell were productive.
All the illegal immigrants picking the food that you eat off your table every night are getting paid less than minimum wage, actually. And you can't tell me they aren't productive with a straight face.
If you honestly think wages are tied to productivity in this society you are off your fucking rocker. If you need some evidence of that just look at HR and middle management in 90% of the companies that exist today.
I'm middle class. I pay $5 for a cup of Starbucks every once in awhile. But I don't bother to buy myself a new computer every 2 or 3 years. I drive a ncier Toyota, rather than a chevy, but I also don't go to the doctor regularly to have to cough up a few hundred bucks in copays every year.
For the record, I also drink Folgers regularly, and my roomate and I restored an old beater because, well, it was fun, so we drive that around too. That was actually a pretty decent bang-for-the-buck investment.
I'm not presuming to discredit your point, but I think it is worth pointing out that class lines don't always fall into neatly organized categories where members of class X always do Y while members of class U always do V.
Class structures are much, more complicated than that, based simply on the fact that different folks value different things.
It's always funny to me to hear people talk about, "The American Dream," myth as if it supposed to apply to one generation only. For instance, in your example of Bill Gates, you chose to focus on the fact that he got a head start from his father. But you didn't bother to discuss how his father got into the well-connected lawyer position. Nor did you discuss Gates's grandfather, great grandfather, and so on.
The way I always understood it, the American Dream deal was meant to apply to a family lineage. One person, in his life, may make the leap from bottom-line ultimate poor guy up to someone who managed to earn a nice, steady wage sweeping a shop. His kid could then grow up a little stronger and work in a field or something, providing a slightly better lifestyle for his kid. That kid might grow up to become the co-owner of the farm or something like that. Then he could send his kid to secondary education. That kid could study to become a skilled technician, allowing him to earn a wage to send his kid to law school. The newly made lawyer could then provide his child with enough luxury time and investment cash to allow his son to conquer the newly booming computer industry. And, thus, over the entire 200+ year history of the land of the free, one's family could mature from street urchin to aristocrat.
At least, that's how it was always explained to me. And that is also the reason that I thought so much value was supposed to be put on one's family. Don't work hard to become a billionaire and drive yachts and whore yourself out to hot looking, half-silicon women. Nah. Work hard to give your kids a slightly better life than you had.
Patience and steady hard work can cause really cool things to happen.
But like I said, that's just the understanding I gathered based on growing up in a very small U.S. town where your last name had some meaning attached to it.
It would be a lot easier to save money if standard American wages paid for more than the bare minimum necessary for survival.
(Don't believe me on that? Calculate the maximum total income someone can earn working full time at minimum wage and then compare it to shitty-box rent prices and regular monthly utility bills over the course of a year. Let me know how much is left over for savings after those calculations, because last time I ran those numbers for California, the minimum wage worker actually was in the red at the end of the year).
It can also be a symptom of severe Vitamin B deficiency. So get some blood work done too. Both situations are nasty (though, the heart disease would be the worse case to have).
Obviously you haven't been killing enough brain cells throughout your life. Sound practical advice: go buy some whiskey and melt those memories away (along with your liver! Yay!).
Good luck maintaining a solar farm so large that it covers 0.3% of the Sahara. Or did you think that producing, transporting, maintaining, and supplying infrastructure for acres of solar panels in a relatively unsettled, remote location would be as simple as waving a magic wand?
And yet, somehow, despite the bold claim that human society is not yet capable of handling nuclear power in an appropriately safe manner, France has managed to do pretty well running a whole slew of nuclear plants. Hell, even the U.S. has managed to keep a number of different reactors running safely for quite awhile now. These designs range from 40 year old technology to some relatively new designs closer to the East Coast.
I keep seeing folks claim that human society isn't capable of responsibly handling nuclear power, and yet, if you look at the whole industry on a percentile basis, only very, very few nuclear power plants have severe problems. And even fewer still ever go critical in an uncontrolled manner. For every Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island, and Fukushima, how many nuclear power plants are operating perfectly safely today?
Only on the internet could a company making an honest effort to make their content open and accessible to other nations be labeled as racist.
Can much of the Japanese population read English?
Probably.
Do people often prefer to digest information in their native language?
Yes.
Can Japanese scientists rigorously analyze their own disasters?
Probably.
Does it often help to have independent sets of eyeballs analyzing a problem in a scientific field when those eyeballs belong to people who are experts in that field?
Yes.
Should we berate "Mindy Kay Bricker," for speaking on behalf of her journal's honest attempt to open the science and informed opinions of experts in this industry to other experts in this industry?
No.
Are you really making a stretch of cynicism to turn this into something negative?
Most definitely.
You know what doesn't mix well? People and trans-oceanic travel. We are not sea-water consumption tolerant, solar radiation tolerant, or even high-moisture air tolerant (you wouldn't believe how many cases of hypothermia can be brought on by a cool breeze and a high humidity level!). In fact, all that extra stuff you have to take with a person just so they don't starve or dehydrate is a lot of dead weight (and if your boat is loaded up with too much dead weight, it will definitely sink!). On top of all that, there is the huge PR cost if one of these leaky wooden tubs springs a hole and sinks to the bottom of the Atlantic.
Don't try to send humans West across the ocean to do a caravan's job.
Do you think folks back in the 1300's and 1400's talked like that a lot? I'll bet they did.
You typed a lot in your post but all I could make out was, "blah blah blah I don't do any real computing with my computers!"
Mobile computers (tablets, phones, laptops, whatever) are great, fine, and dandy devices for listening to music, browsing the internet, and playing around with an MS Paint style app. But for those of us that use our computers designing advanced control systems, programming embedded chips for use in other products, conducting scientific simulations, running batches of data through various algorithms, or, hell, even reading in audio data, chopping it up, filtering it, and spitting it back out into a cleaned up song or recording, the desktop PC lives on and will remain strong.
95% of the population will be happy with their internet consumption device tablets. The rest of us that use computers to do what computers were designed to do much prefer having the raw power and modularity available to us through the desktop architecture.
As excited as I am about this platform being opened up to more users (I am getting tired of seeing nothing but CmdrTaco and Lady Ada updates), Google+ is still lacking the one thing that would help it dominate in the social networking market: scantily clad 16 year old girls.
Say what you want about how annoying 16 year old girls are on the internet (OMGPWNIES layouts and such), but they really are the catalyst to social networks taking off. Once high school girls start to establish a presence on a website, other high school girls want to join to keep up with their friends, and every male on the internet wants to join so he can creep on those girls' profiles and fap to their bikini pictures. That may sound offensive to some, but it is the one truth of social networking.
Until Google has a large userbase of skanky girls to lurk on, it will not take off as the dominant social platform.
...which we'll pay using digital cash rendered as virtual 3-d gold coins by manually moving those simulated virtual coins out of our virtual 3-d rendered pockets and handing them to the emo slacker teen cashier kid who virtually places the virtual coins in the virtual cash register, one at a time.
I knew it! This is a bitcoin story in disguise! Burn the heretic!!!!!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, one thing that folks seem to be missing is that Mr. Armstrong is invested heavily in the recipients of some of that Congressional pork barrelling. I have to go digging and look it up again, but Armstrong is heavily invested in Lockheed-Martin or ATK or Rocketdyne...essentially, he is heavily invested in one of the companies that stood to gain a lot of unregulated cash flow from Congress for the Constellation Project. But I can't remember the specifics off the top of my head, I have to go look it up again...
But they provide science and engineering in other fields. Manned spaceflight research begets research on various medical treatments, research on the human body response to extreme environments, research on making self-sustainable, completely autonomous outposts, etc. Some of these items of research have application in other fields like deep-sea exploration, Antartic research stations, and the development of other isolated outposts (deserts, mountains, whatever).
Unmanned spacecraft also provide a slew of spinoff research and technologies as well, but in different areas.
Personally, I think funding research and engineering in both areas is important. Funding research and development in fields that only seem, 'practical,' for the time being is a great way to stagnate a society and prevent it from funding what will be, 'practical,' in tomorrow's world.
And you can say what you want about irrational emotional appeals, but seeing humans going places no one has ever had the ability to go to before (LEO, the Moon, etc.) really does inspire the rest of humanity to try harder. It gives us higher goals to reach for. Show me one young American boy that didn't say, at some point during his childhood, "I want to be an astronaut when I grow up!"
The problem with that idea is that it doesn't let every little idiot lawyer-politician pretend he is a rocket scientist by micro-managing some pet project in NASA's ledger via irrational funding decisions.
No, but I sure wonder how the homeless fella had regular enough access to a reliable internet connection to commit any serious hacking crimes. I suppose that's part of the burden of evidence that rests on the prosecution, right?
But how different is that from their Northern Hemisphere cousins the Americans?
We States dwellers fought a damned revolution in the name of minimal, just government, liberty, and independence. Almost 250 years later we are habitually putting more power in the hands of the Federal government, mandating or outlawing just about everything (at least if you live in California), turning the other cheek when the NSA wiretaps our phone companies, and naming legislation that suspends Habeus Corpus the God damned PATRIOT Act, of all things.
It seems that, for some reason, once societies get to a certain level of comfort, they inevitably start fucking up their citizens' lives for no good reason other than sheer boredom and, possibly, social paranoia of invisible boogeymen.
Americans used to wrestle bears and Australians used to wrestle crocodiles but these days we'll sell out our rights as soon as we hear the words "terrorist!," or, "pedophile!"
Oh what a load of horse shit. I worked a number of minimum wage jobs when I was in high school and a good few of my coworkers worked those jobs as their primary income. They were, and stil are, some of the hardest working people I have met. That guy loading lumber in the back of a contractor's truck to build a house? There's a good chance he is getting minimum wage. The guy unloading pallets of fertilizer from the back of a truck to sell to farmers ro grow food? Probably minimum wage. Hell, even some of the shift managers at the bookstores where I worked got paid minimum wage or, maybe, a quarter over it and they sure as hell were productive.
All the illegal immigrants picking the food that you eat off your table every night are getting paid less than minimum wage, actually. And you can't tell me they aren't productive with a straight face.
If you honestly think wages are tied to productivity in this society you are off your fucking rocker. If you need some evidence of that just look at HR and middle management in 90% of the companies that exist today.
I'm middle class. I pay $5 for a cup of Starbucks every once in awhile. But I don't bother to buy myself a new computer every 2 or 3 years. I drive a ncier Toyota, rather than a chevy, but I also don't go to the doctor regularly to have to cough up a few hundred bucks in copays every year.
For the record, I also drink Folgers regularly, and my roomate and I restored an old beater because, well, it was fun, so we drive that around too. That was actually a pretty decent bang-for-the-buck investment.
I'm not presuming to discredit your point, but I think it is worth pointing out that class lines don't always fall into neatly organized categories where members of class X always do Y while members of class U always do V.
Class structures are much, more complicated than that, based simply on the fact that different folks value different things.
It's always funny to me to hear people talk about, "The American Dream," myth as if it supposed to apply to one generation only. For instance, in your example of Bill Gates, you chose to focus on the fact that he got a head start from his father. But you didn't bother to discuss how his father got into the well-connected lawyer position. Nor did you discuss Gates's grandfather, great grandfather, and so on.
The way I always understood it, the American Dream deal was meant to apply to a family lineage. One person, in his life, may make the leap from bottom-line ultimate poor guy up to someone who managed to earn a nice, steady wage sweeping a shop. His kid could then grow up a little stronger and work in a field or something, providing a slightly better lifestyle for his kid. That kid might grow up to become the co-owner of the farm or something like that. Then he could send his kid to secondary education. That kid could study to become a skilled technician, allowing him to earn a wage to send his kid to law school. The newly made lawyer could then provide his child with enough luxury time and investment cash to allow his son to conquer the newly booming computer industry. And, thus, over the entire 200+ year history of the land of the free, one's family could mature from street urchin to aristocrat.
At least, that's how it was always explained to me. And that is also the reason that I thought so much value was supposed to be put on one's family. Don't work hard to become a billionaire and drive yachts and whore yourself out to hot looking, half-silicon women. Nah. Work hard to give your kids a slightly better life than you had.
Patience and steady hard work can cause really cool things to happen.
But like I said, that's just the understanding I gathered based on growing up in a very small U.S. town where your last name had some meaning attached to it.
It would be a lot easier to save money if standard American wages paid for more than the bare minimum necessary for survival.
(Don't believe me on that? Calculate the maximum total income someone can earn working full time at minimum wage and then compare it to shitty-box rent prices and regular monthly utility bills over the course of a year. Let me know how much is left over for savings after those calculations, because last time I ran those numbers for California, the minimum wage worker actually was in the red at the end of the year).
Aaaaaahhhhhhhhh Yeeeaaaaaaahhhhhhh!
It can also be a symptom of severe Vitamin B deficiency. So get some blood work done too. Both situations are nasty (though, the heart disease would be the worse case to have).
Obviously you haven't been killing enough brain cells throughout your life. Sound practical advice: go buy some whiskey and melt those memories away (along with your liver! Yay!).
Our robotic overlords, obviously.
Sheesh, slashdot really is slipping these days...
Undoing Mod.
Good luck maintaining a solar farm so large that it covers 0.3% of the Sahara. Or did you think that producing, transporting, maintaining, and supplying infrastructure for acres of solar panels in a relatively unsettled, remote location would be as simple as waving a magic wand?
And yet, somehow, despite the bold claim that human society is not yet capable of handling nuclear power in an appropriately safe manner, France has managed to do pretty well running a whole slew of nuclear plants. Hell, even the U.S. has managed to keep a number of different reactors running safely for quite awhile now. These designs range from 40 year old technology to some relatively new designs closer to the East Coast.
I keep seeing folks claim that human society isn't capable of responsibly handling nuclear power, and yet, if you look at the whole industry on a percentile basis, only very, very few nuclear power plants have severe problems. And even fewer still ever go critical in an uncontrolled manner. For every Chernobyl, Three-Mile Island, and Fukushima, how many nuclear power plants are operating perfectly safely today?
Only on the internet could a company making an honest effort to make their content open and accessible to other nations be labeled as racist.
Can much of the Japanese population read English?
Probably.
Do people often prefer to digest information in their native language?
Yes.
Can Japanese scientists rigorously analyze their own disasters?
Probably.
Does it often help to have independent sets of eyeballs analyzing a problem in a scientific field when those eyeballs belong to people who are experts in that field?
Yes.
Should we berate "Mindy Kay Bricker," for speaking on behalf of her journal's honest attempt to open the science and informed opinions of experts in this industry to other experts in this industry?
No.
Are you really making a stretch of cynicism to turn this into something negative?
Most definitely.
Calm down. The world doesn't always have to suck.
See comment title. 'Nuff said.
You know what doesn't mix well? People and trans-oceanic travel. We are not sea-water consumption tolerant, solar radiation tolerant, or even high-moisture air tolerant (you wouldn't believe how many cases of hypothermia can be brought on by a cool breeze and a high humidity level!). In fact, all that extra stuff you have to take with a person just so they don't starve or dehydrate is a lot of dead weight (and if your boat is loaded up with too much dead weight, it will definitely sink!). On top of all that, there is the huge PR cost if one of these leaky wooden tubs springs a hole and sinks to the bottom of the Atlantic.
Don't try to send humans West across the ocean to do a caravan's job.
Do you think folks back in the 1300's and 1400's talked like that a lot? I'll bet they did.
You typed a lot in your post but all I could make out was, "blah blah blah I don't do any real computing with my computers!"
Mobile computers (tablets, phones, laptops, whatever) are great, fine, and dandy devices for listening to music, browsing the internet, and playing around with an MS Paint style app. But for those of us that use our computers designing advanced control systems, programming embedded chips for use in other products, conducting scientific simulations, running batches of data through various algorithms, or, hell, even reading in audio data, chopping it up, filtering it, and spitting it back out into a cleaned up song or recording, the desktop PC lives on and will remain strong.
95% of the population will be happy with their internet consumption device tablets. The rest of us that use computers to do what computers were designed to do much prefer having the raw power and modularity available to us through the desktop architecture.
Go for it, you can even attribute it to me if you like. I'm on G+ as Brady C. Jackson (the one with the pic of my working on a surfboard).
Why must these wireheaded mechanists defile themselves with these electro-mechanical devices?
That's what I said! But my girlfriend insists they offer a better experience....
Thanks for the tips.
As excited as I am about this platform being opened up to more users (I am getting tired of seeing nothing but CmdrTaco and Lady Ada updates), Google+ is still lacking the one thing that would help it dominate in the social networking market: scantily clad 16 year old girls.
Say what you want about how annoying 16 year old girls are on the internet (OMGPWNIES layouts and such), but they really are the catalyst to social networks taking off. Once high school girls start to establish a presence on a website, other high school girls want to join to keep up with their friends, and every male on the internet wants to join so he can creep on those girls' profiles and fap to their bikini pictures. That may sound offensive to some, but it is the one truth of social networking.
Until Google has a large userbase of skanky girls to lurk on, it will not take off as the dominant social platform.
...which we'll pay using digital cash rendered as virtual 3-d gold coins by manually moving those simulated virtual coins out of our virtual 3-d rendered pockets and handing them to the emo slacker teen cashier kid who virtually places the virtual coins in the virtual cash register, one at a time.
I knew it! This is a bitcoin story in disguise! Burn the heretic!!!!!!!