Information wants to be free blah blah blah, but seriously, why should a person have to give up everything hes worked for after 12 years? Lending = ok, giving for free = not ok.
Logically, then, you oppose any term limitations on copyright? I mean, why should a person have to give up everything after 70 years? Or 95? or death+75?
Actually, there is a reason: Copyright is not a natural monopoly; it's an artificial one, granted by and maintained by the state, not by the natural characteristics of the information. The public must expend resources to provide for you the market you believe you "deserve". In return, the public legitimately demands compensation. That compensation is called "the public domain" -- the vast (but not, IMHO, vast enough) collection of works "owned" by everyone.
Like many on the RIAA side of this, you misconstrue the dictum. The slogan doesn't say "Information providers want information to be free." It says "Information wants to be free". That is, information by itself resists ownership, since ideas replicate freely and, now, digital information can be replicated for a cost that is essentially zero. (NB: It can be replicated for zero cost. I am not arguing that there are no costs of production.)
Information wants to be free in the sense that water wants to reach lower ground. Sure, you can dam up a stream and you can even pump water to a higher level. But both take an input of energy -- the latter takes a continual input, in fact -- and eventually, the water works it way out anyway.
Oh, please. This has never been about fair and accurate terminology. The term "piracy" has become popular with content providers -- rather than the vastly more accurate "copyright infringement" -- because the unsavory connotations give them a default advantage in discussions. Call it what it is, and the issue sounds dry and arcane. Call it "piracy" and the issue sounds nefarious and vicious. So despite the fact that very few boats are pillaged and very few CD copiers sport peglegs, we call it piracy.
Why in the world do you imagine they'd want to give that advantage up, even if it makes their position intrinsically inconsistent?
Err. how do you know it's crap if you didn't buy it and listen? It's the album after the crap one that is meant to suffer.
Um, reviews? friends? singles? You don't need to hear an entire album to decide you don't want to plunk down $20 for it...
But the poster has, accidentally, expressed one more reason the RIAA hates ripping. The last thing in the world you want to do -- if your business model involved bundling lots of crap together -- is to create informed consumers.
Even Phillip K. Dick could never create a reality as fractured as the RIAA...:)
He did write an awful lot about conglomeratization, though, and how in The Future, your only hope is to live in the cracks left between Big Industry and Big Government.
Most serious IT departments don't care about the "hot off the compiler" patches because of the lack of testing involved in said patches
I'm not in IT, but I'd have to see this backed up with solid numbers before I'd believe it. Most of the IT people I know want the holes plugged quickly, and are willing to use early software to do it.
However, I fail to understand how this is really better, other than the fact that some "beta" code was released "in hours".
Because finding a new vulnerability in the patch is no easier than -- and often much harder than -- exploiting the known vulnerability. Sure, the code is probably dashed off, but the window of opportunity is small. No one will be discussing/disclosing problems in the patch, because they'll be fixing them ('cause they can, 'cause they have the source... get it?) Meanwhile, the patch at least blocks the widely-distributed flaw and restores crackers to square one.
Contrast that to the slower model espoused by proprietary systems. Sure, the code might be more bug-free when released -- although I'd want to see actual stats on that -- but during the intervening eight weeks, millions of boxes are sitting with their ports wide open.
Most IIS patches (read: not IE, a completely different product) are out whithin days or a week at the most as well. They're just limited to a very small group of people outside MS that actually have access to it.
Release to a controlled, small subset is essentially the same as not released at all, at least for those unlucky types not in the small, controlled subset.
I am far from a biomedical expert, so I'm going on my impression from news reports and other sources. For example,
What are the ethical issues involved?
Currently, the best source for stem cells is a human embryo. But using human material, such as aborted fetuses, in research is a contensious issue because it can be construed as the sacrifice of human life for scientific progress.
Even if much of the potential of adult stem cells is realised, there are circumstances where they are unlikely to be useful.... The isolation and growth of adult stem cells have to date proved very difficult. Stem cells generally represent a very small proportion of cells in adult tissues. Unambiguous identification is difficult as their presence in a tissue or mixture of cells is generally inferred from a research observation rather than indicated by any specific biochemical marker which might aid their purification... Current understanding of the potential of adult stem cells for redifferentiation is still very limited. Although many studies suggest that such processes occur, there is often a degree of ambiguity... In their natural location in the body adult stem cells do not exhibit great potential for differentiation into new cell types but have evolved to give rise only to specific cell lineages.
While adult stem cells hold real promise, there are some significant limitations to what we may or may not be able to accomplish with them. First of all, stem cells from adults have not been isolated for all tissues of the body. Although many different kinds of multipotent stem cells have been identified, adult stem cells for all cell and tissue types have not yet been found in the adult human. For example, we have not located adult cardiac stem cells or adult pancreatic islet stem cells in humans. Secondly, adult stem cells are often present in only minute quantities, are difficult to isolate and purify, and their numbers may decrease with age. For example, brain cells from adults that may be neuronal stem cells have only been obtained by removing a portion of the brain of epileptics, not a trivial procedure.
This is not to say that the matter is cut-and-dried, but rather, to indicate that there is solid reason for suspecting that stem cells will need to be embryonic to be (fully) useful; and hence, the debate (which was my actual point).
Because that is the way that you write Word templates. VBA is part of Word.
But then shouldn't the figure of merit be not "has a scripting language built in" but "allows the creation of templates"? Which all the alternatives allow, I believe.
Having a scripting language in your word processors leads to things like Word virii... not exactly an advantage, in my book.
Isn't this the creation of an underclass of humans whos purpose it is to serve the higher classes?
There's no reason it has to be. The beuaty of stem cell use is exactly that you can induce particular organs without having to grow the whole organism. That is, we decant a thymus from the vat instead of cloning and growing a whole new human (a la Parts: The Clonus Horror -- I shudder as much at the movie quality as the idea!).
So this is actually much less class-warfare-ish than straight cloning-and-harvesting. The real ethical hangup seems to lie in the source of stem cells... the best grade appears to be embryonic, which naturally raises red flags with a large number of people.
But to call their actions as successful FOR THEMSELVES in the PC sphere is quite a stretch.
Of course, the original author never claimed the strategy was a success. He was asking "Why did they do that?" not "Did it work?" His explanation of why they did it makes a lot of sense. They didn't think that making a clone PC would be held to be legal, so their strategy obviously didn't include clones.
So the unspoken lesson here is, you might have a solid economic reason for doing what you do, and still get spanked in the marketplace.
Re:How science / development often work(sic)
on
Wolframania
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· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
'Science' often believes the myth that it is an objective undertaking, not subject to whim or 'current fashion'.
That's certainly the middle-school version of it, enshrined in textbooks and handed down as wisdom. As a physics teacher I do my best to work against the myth that science is not about people. But almost every single deconstructionist/revisionist in the field of science sociology makes the equally unwarranted leap to the statement that science therefore is just subjective with no special claim on truth.
This, of course, is bull-crap.
Science is a subjective endeavor that leads to objective truth. While there are trends and fashions in science -- because scientists are humans -- the process of peer review and independent replication do move us closer to the truth. Or, at least, they push back the bounds of ignorance, which is much the same thing.
Even the most outlandish theories can gain acceptance, if the evidence bears them out. It can regrettably take a decade or two, sometimes even longer. But every example you offer indicates the strength of the peer review process, not its weakness.
What use is it if a lone wolf "gets it right", if we can't tell that he/she got it right? Peer review is an overwhelmingly successful mechanism for weeding out the wrong and discovering the right. Due to the human nature of the participants, sometimes the glorious unbiased evaluation of new work is more honored in the breach. But the system does work, because if a crazy theory happens to be right, the evidence will accumulate -- even through "safe" channels -- and eventually, the peer review system will correct itself.
Of course, as was once quipped, sometimes you have to wait until all the old scientists are dead.:)
By the way, Poincare could not have "noted the implications of both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics a couple of decades before Einstein". Quantum Mechanics did not even begin to exist until the discovery of the electron in 1897. Indeed, Planck established the ad hoc basis of the field only in 1900(ref). Einsten published his first papers on quantum mechanics in 1905. I will grant that Poincare saw a lot of the implications of non-Euclidean spaces, a fundament of Einstein's General Relativity.
Re:The metaphor for God
on
Wolframania
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· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
So most people still like smoke and mirrors better. And, really, who can blame them. Easy answers, set rules, authority from above. It is very seductive.
I think you have to be careful about too easily dismissing the religious impulse. I myself am not religious in any traditional sense of the word, but I know far too many clear-headed, rational people who nonetheless believe in an ineffable Other. Not everyone runs to religion to run away from responsibility.
Just like, not everyone runs to science to achieve rationality.
The metaphor for God
on
Wolframania
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Is God a software engineer? Not any more -- or any less -- than He is a watchmaker.
Here's the overriding truth of worldviews and metaphors: For at least the past five hudnred years, we in the West have taken the dominant mode of industry and "explained" both human consciousness and the Godhood in terms of it.
First, of course, industry was agriculture... and God was basically a farmer, creating and tilling the Earth, making it ripe.
Then we came upon clockworks. (Too many miss the deep pyschological impact that the idea of time-keeping had upon the world.) Nice orderly systems that run more or less regularly, mimicking the order seen in, say, the motion of planets. And here, of course, God is the ultimate watchmaker.
The Age of Steam comes next and now God is the ultimate civil enginner. The Universe is a vast and complicated -- but ultimately comprehensible -- machine. It's made of discrete little bits that fall into recognizable types. If we understand the types and how they interact, we can reverse-engineer the machine.
Now we're in the Age of Information. The rising dominant archetype is the digital computer, revolutionizing our world the way that the steam engine did the 1700s. It almost goes without saying that of course some people are going to see digital computers in everything -- even the deepest bits of the Universe -- and so of course someone is going to claim God is the ultimate software engineer.
My impression is that these metaphors reveal less about God than they do about us... we don't come any closer to understanding God through them, but we might -- if we pay attention -- come closer to understanding how we understand ourselves.
Re:Has anyone here ever heard...
on
Wolframania
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Blockquoth the poster:
Isn't it possible that he's such a unique guy that he doesn't fit any kind of mold you're aware of?
Of course it's possible. It's also possible that he's a complete crackpot who, by dint of owning a publishing company, gets to blare his name across the ether.
Luckily, after millenia of history and centuries of struggle, we've managed to evolve a system that -- much more often than not -- functions to separate the truly original and productive thinker from the truly original and marginal nutcase. It's a system that, amazingly, allows us to make confident statements about things of which we cannot have direct knowledge and that provides relatively surefire ways to establish tests to enhance that confidence.
That system of course is the system of peer review matched with rigorous experiment, coupled to independent replication of significant results.
Since the scientific system excludes certain types of claims and certain ways of making claims, it logically runs the risk of excluding the bona fide true revolutionary.... Yet in truth it does not seem to do that all that often. If a result is radical and useful, it eventually works its way into the community. Einstein's theories were nothing short of the demolition of the prevailing, overwhelmingly successful Newtonian worldview. But he made that revolution within the system, and the system accommodated it.
Too few people appreciate the astounding success and use that follows from a simple, oft-misunderstood fact: Science is not about "discovering truth". It's about quantifying ingorance... bounding the unknown so as to make it slightly more comprehensible.
In science we don't know all that much, compared to the vast possibilities of the Universe. But what we know, we know well.
Whaaaa? Re:So let me get this straight.
on
Wolframania
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· Score: 3, Informative
Blockquoth the poster:
being a physicist and therefore having no real clue of math
That's sort of like saying, being a painter and having no real clue of paint. Archimedes? Newton? Maxwell? Laplace? Legendre? Einstein? It is no accident that major fields in mathematics have been opened up by... wait for it... physicists. It might be argued that physicists and their little problems have done more for the advancement of pure mathematics than all the scribblings of pure mathematicians. At the very least, an out-of-hand dismissal of physicists as, apparently, math-illiterates, is without justification.
Since Congress makes the law, they can change it in any way they like (within Constitutional limits), and the supreme court wouldn't have anything to say about it.
Well, of course, the Court could rule that the change extends Congress' reach beyond what the Copyright Clause (and other clauses) give it. But it'd be a stretch...
You're completely missing the point, I think, of people's negative reactions. It's not that Yoda was CG and not a puppet. It was that Yoda was a spinning superball bouncing around in a manifestly wasteful way. If they had done it with a puppet, it would have still been dumb. If they had used the CG to render more conventional scenes, it would have been better.
The issue here is: Lucas was seduced by what he could animate, and didn't pay attention to what he should animate. The scene was well-executed but poorly-written and debases the character.
Now, the scenes immediately before -- with Yoda as the Patton of the Star Wars Universe -- were great. They made much better use of the subtleties available through CGI, and they didn't tear down the character.
What are the chances that once reading the EULA becomes common knowledge, companies will work to make them more obfuscated, convoluted, and otherwise obscure?
More obfuscated, convoluted, and obscure than they are now? It gives me the shudders just thinking of such a thing!:)
The limiting factor, likely, is room on a Shuttle or Soyuz to lift the thing to orbit. Trajectories are very mass-sensitive and have likely been worked out. Plus the next few supply runs are probably already carrying important components.
If the system is similar to that on Hubble, they only need three gyroscopes to remain fully functional, and can get by with only two. So there's not the sense of urgency you seem to feel.
What he worth his golden parachute? The cynical will say no, but if he had managed to turn the company around, he would have been worth ten times what he got.
Then it seems that it was the Board and the shareholders who took the risk, not him.
I'm not sure people are riled about the size of a CEO's salary (and perks, etc.) I think people are upset because (a) that salary is so astronomical, yet (b) seems not to be tied to performance at all. Read the NY Times article referenced in the story for the tale of the SBC CEO, whose compensation soared when the company did not better -- or even significantly worse -- than the national and the industry average.
Strong nations decline due to being worn out by external factors.
I'm sure you know this, but your picture is oversimplified. Waves of barbarians broke themselves on the rock of Roman legions for literally centuries before the Empire declined. The external threat is a crucial ingredient, but so is internal decadence and decay. When the attention of officeholders leaves the world scene and concrentrates increasingly on the capital -- because the one nation is so overwhelmingly dominant that more gain can be had rearranging seats at the council table than in trade or even conquest -- and foreign affairs become merely tools for domestic intrigue, a great nation begins to decline.
Anyway, not to disagree with your conclusions, but the analysis is somewhat more complex.
CEOs don't just run companies. They take risks. Big risks. They know that if they do something risky they're going to get replaced.
Risks? Then why are so many CEOs "forced out" with multi-million-dollar golden parachutes, while the companies they leave endure a death-spiral?
Re:The chair belongs in the Smithsoniam
on
Trek Prop Collecting
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Blockquoth the poster:
Infact I think Paramount shouldn't have thrown or given away the whole set, but donated it to the Smithsonian.
Look, I love ST:TOS too and I grew up wanting to be Kirk or Spock, but let's face facts: When Star Trek went off the air in 1969, it was just this moderately-successful TV show, sailing into the sunset after a respectable but not record-breaking three seasons. It wasn't thought to be a phenomenon, a classic, or a national treasure. Trek occupies a place, now, in the culture not due to the show itself but due to the die-hard, never-give-up, even obsessive nature of its fan base durng the 1970s and (less so) 1980s, who kept the show alive through ways essentially unheard-of before (comics, conventions, fanfic).
No one -- no one -- in 1969 knew this stuff would be important. It's unreasonable to expect them to have saved it.
Slashdot Mirror
Logically, then, you oppose any term limitations on copyright? I mean, why should a person have to give up everything after 70 years? Or 95? or death+75?
Actually, there is a reason: Copyright is not a natural monopoly; it's an artificial one, granted by and maintained by the state, not by the natural characteristics of the information. The public must expend resources to provide for you the market you believe you "deserve". In return, the public legitimately demands compensation. That compensation is called "the public domain" -- the vast (but not, IMHO, vast enough) collection of works "owned" by everyone.
Like many on the RIAA side of this, you misconstrue the dictum. The slogan doesn't say "Information providers want information to be free." It says "Information wants to be free". That is, information by itself resists ownership, since ideas replicate freely and, now, digital information can be replicated for a cost that is essentially zero. (NB: It can be replicated for zero cost. I am not arguing that there are no costs of production.)
Information wants to be free in the sense that water wants to reach lower ground. Sure, you can dam up a stream and you can even pump water to a higher level. But both take an input of energy -- the latter takes a continual input, in fact -- and eventually, the water works it way out anyway.
Why in the world do you imagine they'd want to give that advantage up, even if it makes their position intrinsically inconsistent?
Um, reviews? friends? singles? You don't need to hear an entire album to decide you don't want to plunk down $20 for it...
But the poster has, accidentally, expressed one more reason the RIAA hates ripping. The last thing in the world you want to do -- if your business model involved bundling lots of crap together -- is to create informed consumers.
He did write an awful lot about conglomeratization, though, and how in The Future, your only hope is to live in the cracks left between Big Industry and Big Government.
I'm not in IT, but I'd have to see this backed up with solid numbers before I'd believe it. Most of the IT people I know want the holes plugged quickly, and are willing to use early software to do it.
Because finding a new vulnerability in the patch is no easier than -- and often much harder than -- exploiting the known vulnerability. Sure, the code is probably dashed off, but the window of opportunity is small. No one will be discussing/disclosing problems in the patch, because they'll be fixing them ('cause they can, 'cause they have the source... get it?) Meanwhile, the patch at least blocks the widely-distributed flaw and restores crackers to square one.
Contrast that to the slower model espoused by proprietary systems. Sure, the code might be more bug-free when released -- although I'd want to see actual stats on that -- but during the intervening eight weeks, millions of boxes are sitting with their ports wide open.
Release to a controlled, small subset is essentially the same as not released at all, at least for those unlucky types not in the small, controlled subset.
and
and
This is not to say that the matter is cut-and-dried, but rather, to indicate that there is solid reason for suspecting that stem cells will need to be embryonic to be (fully) useful; and hence, the debate (which was my actual point).
But then shouldn't the figure of merit be not "has a scripting language built in" but "allows the creation of templates"? Which all the alternatives allow, I believe.
Having a scripting language in your word processors leads to things like Word virii... not exactly an advantage, in my book.
There's no reason it has to be. The beuaty of stem cell use is exactly that you can induce particular organs without having to grow the whole organism. That is, we decant a thymus from the vat instead of cloning and growing a whole new human (a la Parts: The Clonus Horror -- I shudder as much at the movie quality as the idea!).
So this is actually much less class-warfare-ish than straight cloning-and-harvesting. The real ethical hangup seems to lie in the source of stem cells... the best grade appears to be embryonic, which naturally raises red flags with a large number of people.
Of course, the original author never claimed the strategy was a success. He was asking "Why did they do that?" not "Did it work?" His explanation of why they did it makes a lot of sense. They didn't think that making a clone PC would be held to be legal, so their strategy obviously didn't include clones.
So the unspoken lesson here is, you might have a solid economic reason for doing what you do, and still get spanked in the marketplace.
That's certainly the middle-school version of it, enshrined in textbooks and handed down as wisdom. As a physics teacher I do my best to work against the myth that science is not about people. But almost every single deconstructionist/revisionist in the field of science sociology makes the equally unwarranted leap to the statement that science therefore is just subjective with no special claim on truth.
This, of course, is bull-crap.
Science is a subjective endeavor that leads to objective truth. While there are trends and fashions in science -- because scientists are humans -- the process of peer review and independent replication do move us closer to the truth. Or, at least, they push back the bounds of ignorance, which is much the same thing.
Even the most outlandish theories can gain acceptance, if the evidence bears them out. It can regrettably take a decade or two, sometimes even longer. But every example you offer indicates the strength of the peer review process, not its weakness.
What use is it if a lone wolf "gets it right", if we can't tell that he/she got it right? Peer review is an overwhelmingly successful mechanism for weeding out the wrong and discovering the right. Due to the human nature of the participants, sometimes the glorious unbiased evaluation of new work is more honored in the breach. But the system does work, because if a crazy theory happens to be right, the evidence will accumulate -- even through "safe" channels -- and eventually, the peer review system will correct itself.
Of course, as was once quipped, sometimes you have to wait until all the old scientists are dead.
By the way, Poincare could not have "noted the implications of both Relativity and Quantum Mechanics a couple of decades before Einstein". Quantum Mechanics did not even begin to exist until the discovery of the electron in 1897. Indeed, Planck established the ad hoc basis of the field only in 1900(ref). Einsten published his first papers on quantum mechanics in 1905. I will grant that Poincare saw a lot of the implications of non-Euclidean spaces, a fundament of Einstein's General Relativity.
I think you have to be careful about too easily dismissing the religious impulse. I myself am not religious in any traditional sense of the word, but I know far too many clear-headed, rational people who nonetheless believe in an ineffable Other. Not everyone runs to religion to run away from responsibility.
Just like, not everyone runs to science to achieve rationality.
Here's the overriding truth of worldviews and metaphors: For at least the past five hudnred years, we in the West have taken the dominant mode of industry and "explained" both human consciousness and the Godhood in terms of it.
First, of course, industry was agriculture... and God was basically a farmer, creating and tilling the Earth, making it ripe.
Then we came upon clockworks. (Too many miss the deep pyschological impact that the idea of time-keeping had upon the world.) Nice orderly systems that run more or less regularly, mimicking the order seen in, say, the motion of planets. And here, of course, God is the ultimate watchmaker.
The Age of Steam comes next and now God is the ultimate civil enginner. The Universe is a vast and complicated -- but ultimately comprehensible -- machine. It's made of discrete little bits that fall into recognizable types. If we understand the types and how they interact, we can reverse-engineer the machine.
Now we're in the Age of Information. The rising dominant archetype is the digital computer, revolutionizing our world the way that the steam engine did the 1700s. It almost goes without saying that of course some people are going to see digital computers in everything -- even the deepest bits of the Universe -- and so of course someone is going to claim God is the ultimate software engineer.
My impression is that these metaphors reveal less about God than they do about us... we don't come any closer to understanding God through them, but we might -- if we pay attention -- come closer to understanding how we understand ourselves.
Of course it's possible. It's also possible that he's a complete crackpot who, by dint of owning a publishing company, gets to blare his name across the ether.
Luckily, after millenia of history and centuries of struggle, we've managed to evolve a system that -- much more often than not -- functions to separate the truly original and productive thinker from the truly original and marginal nutcase. It's a system that, amazingly, allows us to make confident statements about things of which we cannot have direct knowledge and that provides relatively surefire ways to establish tests to enhance that confidence.
That system of course is the system of peer review matched with rigorous experiment, coupled to independent replication of significant results.
Since the scientific system excludes certain types of claims and certain ways of making claims, it logically runs the risk of excluding the bona fide true revolutionary.... Yet in truth it does not seem to do that all that often. If a result is radical and useful, it eventually works its way into the community. Einstein's theories were nothing short of the demolition of the prevailing, overwhelmingly successful Newtonian worldview. But he made that revolution within the system, and the system accommodated it.
Too few people appreciate the astounding success and use that follows from a simple, oft-misunderstood fact: Science is not about "discovering truth". It's about quantifying ingorance
In science we don't know all that much, compared to the vast possibilities of the Universe. But what we know, we know well.
That's sort of like saying, being a painter and having no real clue of paint. Archimedes? Newton? Maxwell? Laplace? Legendre? Einstein? It is no accident that major fields in mathematics have been opened up by
Well, of course, the Court could rule that the change extends Congress' reach beyond what the Copyright Clause (and other clauses) give it. But it'd be a stretch...
Um, neither are Galaxy-spanning Empires woven together with FTL starships and communicators...
The issue here is: Lucas was seduced by what he could animate, and didn't pay attention to what he should animate. The scene was well-executed but poorly-written and debases the character.
Now, the scenes immediately before -- with Yoda as the Patton of the Star Wars Universe -- were great. They made much better use of the subtleties available through CGI, and they didn't tear down the character.
More obfuscated, convoluted, and obscure than they are now? It gives me the shudders just thinking of such a thing!
If the system is similar to that on Hubble, they only need three gyroscopes to remain fully functional, and can get by with only two. So there's not the sense of urgency you seem to feel.
Then it seems that it was the Board and the shareholders who took the risk, not him.
I'm not sure people are riled about the size of a CEO's salary (and perks, etc.) I think people are upset because (a) that salary is so astronomical, yet (b) seems not to be tied to performance at all. Read the NY Times article referenced in the story for the tale of the SBC CEO, whose compensation soared when the company did not better -- or even significantly worse -- than the national and the industry average.
I'm sure you know this, but your picture is oversimplified. Waves of barbarians broke themselves on the rock of Roman legions for literally centuries before the Empire declined. The external threat is a crucial ingredient, but so is internal decadence and decay. When the attention of officeholders leaves the world scene and concrentrates increasingly on the capital -- because the one nation is so overwhelmingly dominant that more gain can be had rearranging seats at the council table than in trade or even conquest -- and foreign affairs become merely tools for domestic intrigue, a great nation begins to decline.
Anyway, not to disagree with your conclusions, but the analysis is somewhat more complex.
Risks? Then why are so many CEOs "forced out" with multi-million-dollar golden parachutes, while the companies they leave endure a death-spiral?
Look, I love ST:TOS too and I grew up wanting to be Kirk or Spock, but let's face facts: When Star Trek went off the air in 1969, it was just this moderately-successful TV show, sailing into the sunset after a respectable but not record-breaking three seasons. It wasn't thought to be a phenomenon, a classic, or a national treasure. Trek occupies a place, now, in the culture not due to the show itself but due to the die-hard, never-give-up, even obsessive nature of its fan base durng the 1970s and (less so) 1980s, who kept the show alive through ways essentially unheard-of before (comics, conventions, fanfic).
No one -- no one -- in 1969 knew this stuff would be important. It's unreasonable to expect them to have saved it.