Although that was probably(?) meant as a joke, I'm wondering if that might not end up being the way things go. Think for a moment. CDs work by blistering aluminium foil with a laser. It's not perfect, but it works.
If you had a more stable structure and a little more oomph on the writing laser, it is quite possible that there are ceramics or metals you could etch with an information density every bit as good as a hard drive.
As you'd be altering the structure of something, rather than playing with very weak magnetic fields on a medium that doesn't hold them very well, the longevity should be every bit as good as that of the baked clay tablets found Mesopotamia.
Not that there's anything wrong with magnetic fields. Core memory is considered good for 100+ years under normal conditions and is still used today for extreme radiation environments. The magnetic field recorded in lava flows has lasted hundreds of millions of years.
Once upon a great while back, Seagate was one of the première names in hard disk technology. These days, the only press I'm seeing them get is bad firmware, questionable reliability, etc. They've been around longer than Microsoft, they really have no excuse at this point for not even testing their bugfixes on their own hardware. It's not like they even have to test third-party stuff.
I suggest looking up references to the term "Danegold" (the term originated with a Dark Age protection racket run by what I guess modern journalists would call the Danish Mafia). It's a very popular business practice in both the EU and US, so nobody needs to get uppity about one being superior to the other.
No, they're arguing that OEMs should be able to pick what browser they want installed. And no, you don't "need" a broswer at install time - most ISPs supply CDs and many of those contain browsers. Since there's not a whole lot of point in having a web browser if you can't see the web, this would not appear to be undue hardship.
(This ignores all the other ways you can get Firefox, IceWeazel, Opera, Lynx, or other browsers. FTP still works, you've an e-mail client - Outlook - that is quite capable of receiving and processing FTP-by-mail deliveries. If you buy your computer at a store, chances are there's a shelf with shareware and freeware products, and another with commercial apps. You're likely to find a web browser on one of those. So, you see, there's options.)
I really, really hope Windows never, ever loads what it wants onto its operating system. If you thought users loading viruses and trojans was common but stupid (and easily blocked), can you imagine what would happen if the OS kernel decides that it damn well wants some malware and that you've no business telling it not ro?
Oh, you meant Microsoft! Actually, legally, no they can't. They may not use a monopoly in one environment to impose a de-facto monopoly in another market. That is a crime, and rightfully so. Monopolies that try to seize other markets are damn dangerous because you rapidly lack these supposed alternatives. Netscape discovered that one, when Microsoft "knifed the baby" (in Microsoft's own words). Alternative browsers ONLY exist today in meaningful numbers because IE6 was a mess and IE7 took too long to come to market, due to Microsoft having no browser team, having dismembered it. (If you see any suspicious-looking concrete structures with arms sticking out near the Redmond campus, that's probably them.) If Microsoft had kept with IE, then IE would be all that existed. Microsoft would long-since have fixed IIS to never serve a competing browser, and IE would have long-since been fixed to be so non-compliant with standards that IE-capable pages won't work anywhere else. (Actually, that last one is almost the case today.)
No, Microsoft has no business distorting the markets like that, creating monocultures of their choice, exterminating competitors (I suspect at least one MS exec is actually a dalek) and forcing people to only buy what it sells. You're seeing this with the anti-virus market today. MS got information under the false pretenses of working with anti-virus vendors on how the products worked and the data used, then used that information to create a version that it provided ready-installed. Nobody is going to buy software for a few hundred dollars that is not that different from the software that is provided already, which means those vendors are being squeezed out of existance. I expect that, by the time Windows 7 is fully released, very few if any of the current AV suppliers will still exist. Microsoft will have crushed the bones of their business and squeezed the life-blood out of the remains until nothing identifiable without a scanning electron microscope remained.
Now, I would agree with those who say Microsoft is not technically evil, just very very good at what it does. In the same way Nyarlothotep is. Indeed, they're probably related. Bill Gates probably has an actual copy of the Necronomican and his palace, err, home, is suspiciously close to where you might expect Cthulhu to hang out. Not evil, just very very powerful and very very insane.
Shhhhh! I was going to package all of that into some pills and sell them as a miracle health cure. You've gone and spoiled it now. Bah!:) Seriously, you are correct that a healthy diet is important. I'd add one more item: try to incorporate foods with a high level of flavenoids (these include red grapes, onions, and a few other foods - if I recall, blueberries are also on the list). The strongest concentration of flavenoids appears to be in the seeds of red grapes, although red grapes alone are very good for you.
A generically good diet will indeed minimize genetic risks (by eliminating triggers, reducing molecules that the body has a harder time processing, and so on), although it should be possible to optimize the diet if you have a better idea of whether any "typically good" foods will actually be harmful in your specific case. In general, I doubt the difference will be significant.
Knowing health risks may have other benefits. In the case of Chronic Fatigue, it turns out a medicine for one form won't help with a different form (and may even be dangerous - one close friend died from the meds she was given because of this kind of prescription error). In other cases, if the information tells you that some substance X will worsen the condition (Chemical X is another matter), then you can make sensible choices about location - well, assuming pollution is documented well enough. We know, for example, that the Willamette Valley in Oregon is horribly polluted, particularly with mercury. Dangerous levels, well above acceptable levels, can be found in the water, soil and air. From this, we can deduce that all people in Portland are as mad as a hatter - and for the same reason - but that's obvious. Many cities have horribly polluted water supplies (which explains why there are so many teenage mutant ninja cats on YouTube) but there's no reason to suppose all cities carry the same pollution. Knowing what you're likely to be sensitive to in advance would be very helpful.
For these reasons, I would argue that even if you can't do anything about the gene, there is an enormous amount you can do by knowing if the gene is present - and an enormous amount you can do even if you have absolutely no idea and/or don't care.
I'm not convinced. They've found seven markers where the permutation you have indicates whether you are likely to get Chronic Fatigue and how severely. They expect to find more. And that's for what is officially considered a single condition. Autism is connected to at three different markers they know about, two more they suspect and again, probably others besides, where again the permutation determines the form and severity. You need a minimum of ten markers to explain the different subclasses of Bipolar Disorder. One or two markers per condition might tell you if you have the most common form, but as even a common condition is still relatively rare, the benefit in absolute terms of just testing that one form doesn't seem terribly great.
If you scan the platter at a high enough resolution (super-sampling each data point on the disk), you should be able to infer which component of which field corresponds to which layer of writing onto the disk. All you need are enough points to be able to solve the system of equations either uniquely or in such a way that you can search the space of possibilities and have a high probability of correctly disregarding false positives.
And since the results are kept in secret, and since any "extras" ordered via back-handers will be doubly-secret, I don't see how anyone could ever hope to discover if the objections were honoured. There will always be plausible denial. Businesses have had thousands more years than Government to develop the perfect mix of corruption, stealth and finesse. This doesn't mean such things will happen on any given screening, what it means is that you can't ever know.
The only consequence to that I can see is that you should protect yourself as if they know nothing, but learn as much as you can about your genetics as if they knew everything. Maybe the reason insurance companies charge such fantastically high rates is because they already know far more than the rest of us. (I doubt it, because health-care in the US is double that of the next-closest industrialized nation for the same standard of care per capita, and Americans can't be that unhealthy. Well, given the number of Blobs I've seen crunching the street, maybe they can.)
For all you know, the last time you were given a drugs test at work, you were screened by the company for such risks. It's not like you'll ever know if they know. They're not going to tell you, all you'll know is that your premiums seem higher than normal.
So go ahead. Take the test anonymously. You can buy a "gift kit" to be delivered to a PO Box, the company doing the testing won't care. Then you will know the answer and be able to take sensible precautions (when they're known).
It won't help the insurance companies, but they're rich enough and manipulative enough that they don't need your help and there's nothing you can do to stop them. You can reject all the testing companies you like, but if they wanted to know that badly, they'd know.
Isn't it smarter to know at least as much as your insurance company about your health? Paranoia won't save you now.
That depends. If you're in America, your odds of getting heart disease are substantially greater than if you lived in Europe. Part of that is genetics, part is exercise, part is diet, part is that Europeans don't work themselves to death.
Yes, there are probably lots of genetic markers that could increase your risk of one condition or another. There will be other genetic markers that reduce your risk. Until you know more than just one or two, you have no means of knowing what the overall effect will be.
Quite likely. If you look at "traditional" engineering techniques, you start with a specification which you then implement. A fault-tolerant specification implemented such that those faults are themselves unlikely would logically be superior to one that is fault-tolerant but liable to suffer faults or a system in which faults are unlikely but catastrophic.
Alternatively, go in the opposite direction. Design something in such a way that components have few opportunities to fail, but then implement them to be fault-tolerant should that happen.
On a more trivial level, look at materials. Iron is ok as a building material but it's heavy and has a much lower critical temperature at which it will fail than, say, some of NASA's high-temperature ceramics. Logically, a Soyuz capsule that replaced some of the ablative heat-shield with the Shuttle's thermal skin would be lighter (making it less costly to launch) and more heat-resistant (making it safer in the event of too steep a re-entry).
I suspect that the fuel used by the Russian rockets is also less stable than some of the liquid and hybrid fuels used in the US. The US has the means to develop fuels that behave in a highly predictable and controlled manner, whereas the Russians are likely using fuels that might do anything short of tap-dance. It's entirely possible that a Russian launcher converted to use US fuels would be more reliable than either country has produced independently.
NASA's oldest facility is in Hampton, Virginia. Given that it's parked right next to the largest Naval and Air Force bases, not to mention the CIA, it would have been ideal for providing security, clandestine training of astronauts, etc. It's also far enough from any land borders to make a quick escape by Axis scientists to Argentina unlikely.
Building in the south was riskier (the natives aren't the brightest and aren't as sympathetic to Federal goals) and it's extremely unclear that the geographical location was chosen because of the proximity to the equator. There are US-held territories much further south.
A "large school near Madchester" (a popular alternative spelling) probably means Manchester Grammar or Stockport Grammar. No college or University would ever lower itself by calling itself a school, Aquinas is small and the comprehensives would never hire anyone smart enough to use Slashdot. I regard the other Grammars with some suspicion as well.
Manchester Grammar would almost certainly need to use Novell, and Stockport Grammar would be definitely Red Hat territory. Remember, when you get into most of the high-end F/L/OSS stuff, the functionality is almost identical, so what you use is determined more by the colour of the badge than by the product itself.
The Soyuz was (and is) a very simple, basic rocket. As the Russians and Americans had scooped up V2 rocket scientists, my guess is that the Soyuz is basically what the V3 would have been had the war continued. Given that the V2 was designed to be mass-produced as an effective weapon, it would logically follow that Soyuz must be cheap enough that it could have been produced in the tens or hundreds of thousands by a Europe-wide industry in war footing.
One should not assume that Soyuz is perfect, merely because it's simple. Although any engineer will tell you that a more complex system is a less reliable system, Soyuz had problems. At least one capsule malfunction killed all the crew during descent. Control malfunctions causing descent problems are common. Nonetheless, for a program that lost the only engineer who really understood rockets very early on from a brain tumour, it has had astonishing success.
The American and European space programs are not wrong, I believe, to use more modern technology, but they are wrong to use that as an excuse to not perform the additional quality control you need. It makes sense to assume that the number of possible interactions increases exponentially as you increase the number of components, which means you need to spend exponentially more resources on both the design AND the QA for a linear increase in manufacturing complexity.
It should be perfectly possible to design a highly reliable modern rocket system, but it won't be cheap and it won't be easy. Since NASA and the ESA operate on shoestring budgets that would barely pay for enough string for the engineer's shoes, it is clearly impossible for them to be designing such systems correctly. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what it takes a rocket scientist.
For commercial rocketry, though, you probably don't want the sophistication that is possible. A souped-up V2, as per Arthur C Clarke's suggestion in Wireless World and as adopted by the space giants early on, is really all you need, although I don't see the harm in borrowing more modern material science techniques to cut costs and reduce weight.
I imagine you could put a Sputnik-like payload into space for a few hundred thousand dollars and put astronauts in space for a tenth of what Russia has to charge space tourists. Not mainstream, but less the province only of the billionaires of the world.
I think it was former PM Harold Wilson who once said "Those who are not a socialist when they are 20 have no heart, those who are still a socialist when they are 40 have no brain."
My interpretation of this is that caring is innate and cannot be learned, but meaningful, valid conservative values can only be gained through experience. He was "old school" conservative, the sort you might not agree with but you could respect.
Assuming my interpretation is correct, then low IQ conservatism is not conservatism at all. It isn't learned, it's not wisdom from experience, it's not based on the merits of an argument, it's based on religious beliefs and talk-show propaganda alone.
My interpretation also precludes conservatives who hate socialists, as it requires that a person only be conservative where wisdom dictates and socialist in all other cases.
Now, I could be wrong and this might not be what he meant at all, but I put it to my fellow slashdotters that the idea of understanding the place of all philosophies in life is intelligence, that rejecting a belief because it contradicts your own is folly.
Well, yes, there is ftp. And scp, fsp, gopher, and various other protocols. There's also FTP-by-email. And those who want to use HTTP can always use curl, which is not a browser but is quite capable of downloading HTTP-delivered files.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is... does Iron Mountain use Seagate?!
Since "latest and greatest" is false and -1 is true, I say stick with the -1.
Although that was probably(?) meant as a joke, I'm wondering if that might not end up being the way things go. Think for a moment. CDs work by blistering aluminium foil with a laser. It's not perfect, but it works.
If you had a more stable structure and a little more oomph on the writing laser, it is quite possible that there are ceramics or metals you could etch with an information density every bit as good as a hard drive.
As you'd be altering the structure of something, rather than playing with very weak magnetic fields on a medium that doesn't hold them very well, the longevity should be every bit as good as that of the baked clay tablets found Mesopotamia.
Not that there's anything wrong with magnetic fields. Core memory is considered good for 100+ years under normal conditions and is still used today for extreme radiation environments. The magnetic field recorded in lava flows has lasted hundreds of millions of years.
Once upon a great while back, Seagate was one of the première names in hard disk technology. These days, the only press I'm seeing them get is bad firmware, questionable reliability, etc. They've been around longer than Microsoft, they really have no excuse at this point for not even testing their bugfixes on their own hardware. It's not like they even have to test third-party stuff.
What leads to this sort of decline?
I suggest looking up references to the term "Danegold" (the term originated with a Dark Age protection racket run by what I guess modern journalists would call the Danish Mafia). It's a very popular business practice in both the EU and US, so nobody needs to get uppity about one being superior to the other.
No, they're arguing that OEMs should be able to pick what browser they want installed. And no, you don't "need" a broswer at install time - most ISPs supply CDs and many of those contain browsers. Since there's not a whole lot of point in having a web browser if you can't see the web, this would not appear to be undue hardship.
(This ignores all the other ways you can get Firefox, IceWeazel, Opera, Lynx, or other browsers. FTP still works, you've an e-mail client - Outlook - that is quite capable of receiving and processing FTP-by-mail deliveries. If you buy your computer at a store, chances are there's a shelf with shareware and freeware products, and another with commercial apps. You're likely to find a web browser on one of those. So, you see, there's options.)
I really, really hope Windows never, ever loads what it wants onto its operating system. If you thought users loading viruses and trojans was common but stupid (and easily blocked), can you imagine what would happen if the OS kernel decides that it damn well wants some malware and that you've no business telling it not ro?
Oh, you meant Microsoft! Actually, legally, no they can't. They may not use a monopoly in one environment to impose a de-facto monopoly in another market. That is a crime, and rightfully so. Monopolies that try to seize other markets are damn dangerous because you rapidly lack these supposed alternatives. Netscape discovered that one, when Microsoft "knifed the baby" (in Microsoft's own words). Alternative browsers ONLY exist today in meaningful numbers because IE6 was a mess and IE7 took too long to come to market, due to Microsoft having no browser team, having dismembered it. (If you see any suspicious-looking concrete structures with arms sticking out near the Redmond campus, that's probably them.) If Microsoft had kept with IE, then IE would be all that existed. Microsoft would long-since have fixed IIS to never serve a competing browser, and IE would have long-since been fixed to be so non-compliant with standards that IE-capable pages won't work anywhere else. (Actually, that last one is almost the case today.)
No, Microsoft has no business distorting the markets like that, creating monocultures of their choice, exterminating competitors (I suspect at least one MS exec is actually a dalek) and forcing people to only buy what it sells. You're seeing this with the anti-virus market today. MS got information under the false pretenses of working with anti-virus vendors on how the products worked and the data used, then used that information to create a version that it provided ready-installed. Nobody is going to buy software for a few hundred dollars that is not that different from the software that is provided already, which means those vendors are being squeezed out of existance. I expect that, by the time Windows 7 is fully released, very few if any of the current AV suppliers will still exist. Microsoft will have crushed the bones of their business and squeezed the life-blood out of the remains until nothing identifiable without a scanning electron microscope remained.
Now, I would agree with those who say Microsoft is not technically evil, just very very good at what it does. In the same way Nyarlothotep is. Indeed, they're probably related. Bill Gates probably has an actual copy of the Necronomican and his palace, err, home, is suspiciously close to where you might expect Cthulhu to hang out. Not evil, just very very powerful and very very insane.
Shhhhh! I was going to package all of that into some pills and sell them as a miracle health cure. You've gone and spoiled it now. Bah! :) Seriously, you are correct that a healthy diet is important. I'd add one more item: try to incorporate foods with a high level of flavenoids (these include red grapes, onions, and a few other foods - if I recall, blueberries are also on the list). The strongest concentration of flavenoids appears to be in the seeds of red grapes, although red grapes alone are very good for you.
A generically good diet will indeed minimize genetic risks (by eliminating triggers, reducing molecules that the body has a harder time processing, and so on), although it should be possible to optimize the diet if you have a better idea of whether any "typically good" foods will actually be harmful in your specific case. In general, I doubt the difference will be significant.
Knowing health risks may have other benefits. In the case of Chronic Fatigue, it turns out a medicine for one form won't help with a different form (and may even be dangerous - one close friend died from the meds she was given because of this kind of prescription error). In other cases, if the information tells you that some substance X will worsen the condition (Chemical X is another matter), then you can make sensible choices about location - well, assuming pollution is documented well enough. We know, for example, that the Willamette Valley in Oregon is horribly polluted, particularly with mercury. Dangerous levels, well above acceptable levels, can be found in the water, soil and air. From this, we can deduce that all people in Portland are as mad as a hatter - and for the same reason - but that's obvious. Many cities have horribly polluted water supplies (which explains why there are so many teenage mutant ninja cats on YouTube) but there's no reason to suppose all cities carry the same pollution. Knowing what you're likely to be sensitive to in advance would be very helpful.
For these reasons, I would argue that even if you can't do anything about the gene, there is an enormous amount you can do by knowing if the gene is present - and an enormous amount you can do even if you have absolutely no idea and/or don't care.
I'm not convinced. They've found seven markers where the permutation you have indicates whether you are likely to get Chronic Fatigue and how severely. They expect to find more. And that's for what is officially considered a single condition. Autism is connected to at three different markers they know about, two more they suspect and again, probably others besides, where again the permutation determines the form and severity. You need a minimum of ten markers to explain the different subclasses of Bipolar Disorder. One or two markers per condition might tell you if you have the most common form, but as even a common condition is still relatively rare, the benefit in absolute terms of just testing that one form doesn't seem terribly great.
If you scan the platter at a high enough resolution (super-sampling each data point on the disk), you should be able to infer which component of which field corresponds to which layer of writing onto the disk. All you need are enough points to be able to solve the system of equations either uniquely or in such a way that you can search the space of possibilities and have a high probability of correctly disregarding false positives.
And since the results are kept in secret, and since any "extras" ordered via back-handers will be doubly-secret, I don't see how anyone could ever hope to discover if the objections were honoured. There will always be plausible denial. Businesses have had thousands more years than Government to develop the perfect mix of corruption, stealth and finesse. This doesn't mean such things will happen on any given screening, what it means is that you can't ever know.
The only consequence to that I can see is that you should protect yourself as if they know nothing, but learn as much as you can about your genetics as if they knew everything. Maybe the reason insurance companies charge such fantastically high rates is because they already know far more than the rest of us. (I doubt it, because health-care in the US is double that of the next-closest industrialized nation for the same standard of care per capita, and Americans can't be that unhealthy. Well, given the number of Blobs I've seen crunching the street, maybe they can.)
No, they'll just switch to the Mediterranean Diet in the hopes of exploiting the French Paradox and drink themselves to death first.
For all you know, the last time you were given a drugs test at work, you were screened by the company for such risks. It's not like you'll ever know if they know. They're not going to tell you, all you'll know is that your premiums seem higher than normal.
So go ahead. Take the test anonymously. You can buy a "gift kit" to be delivered to a PO Box, the company doing the testing won't care. Then you will know the answer and be able to take sensible precautions (when they're known).
It won't help the insurance companies, but they're rich enough and manipulative enough that they don't need your help and there's nothing you can do to stop them. You can reject all the testing companies you like, but if they wanted to know that badly, they'd know.
Isn't it smarter to know at least as much as your insurance company about your health? Paranoia won't save you now.
That depends. If you're in America, your odds of getting heart disease are substantially greater than if you lived in Europe. Part of that is genetics, part is exercise, part is diet, part is that Europeans don't work themselves to death.
Yes, there are probably lots of genetic markers that could increase your risk of one condition or another. There will be other genetic markers that reduce your risk. Until you know more than just one or two, you have no means of knowing what the overall effect will be.
25 letters missing? That's almost a whole alphabet!
Quite likely. If you look at "traditional" engineering techniques, you start with a specification which you then implement. A fault-tolerant specification implemented such that those faults are themselves unlikely would logically be superior to one that is fault-tolerant but liable to suffer faults or a system in which faults are unlikely but catastrophic.
Alternatively, go in the opposite direction. Design something in such a way that components have few opportunities to fail, but then implement them to be fault-tolerant should that happen.
On a more trivial level, look at materials. Iron is ok as a building material but it's heavy and has a much lower critical temperature at which it will fail than, say, some of NASA's high-temperature ceramics. Logically, a Soyuz capsule that replaced some of the ablative heat-shield with the Shuttle's thermal skin would be lighter (making it less costly to launch) and more heat-resistant (making it safer in the event of too steep a re-entry).
I suspect that the fuel used by the Russian rockets is also less stable than some of the liquid and hybrid fuels used in the US. The US has the means to develop fuels that behave in a highly predictable and controlled manner, whereas the Russians are likely using fuels that might do anything short of tap-dance. It's entirely possible that a Russian launcher converted to use US fuels would be more reliable than either country has produced independently.
NASA's oldest facility is in Hampton, Virginia. Given that it's parked right next to the largest Naval and Air Force bases, not to mention the CIA, it would have been ideal for providing security, clandestine training of astronauts, etc. It's also far enough from any land borders to make a quick escape by Axis scientists to Argentina unlikely.
Building in the south was riskier (the natives aren't the brightest and aren't as sympathetic to Federal goals) and it's extremely unclear that the geographical location was chosen because of the proximity to the equator. There are US-held territories much further south.
Indian software companies use captured Germans? That explains their call centre software!
A "large school near Madchester" (a popular alternative spelling) probably means Manchester Grammar or Stockport Grammar. No college or University would ever lower itself by calling itself a school, Aquinas is small and the comprehensives would never hire anyone smart enough to use Slashdot. I regard the other Grammars with some suspicion as well.
Manchester Grammar would almost certainly need to use Novell, and Stockport Grammar would be definitely Red Hat territory. Remember, when you get into most of the high-end F/L/OSS stuff, the functionality is almost identical, so what you use is determined more by the colour of the badge than by the product itself.
I'd hate to see what happened to the astronaut who ingested a Soyuz. Oh, not that sort of internal. Phew.
The Soyuz was (and is) a very simple, basic rocket. As the Russians and Americans had scooped up V2 rocket scientists, my guess is that the Soyuz is basically what the V3 would have been had the war continued. Given that the V2 was designed to be mass-produced as an effective weapon, it would logically follow that Soyuz must be cheap enough that it could have been produced in the tens or hundreds of thousands by a Europe-wide industry in war footing.
One should not assume that Soyuz is perfect, merely because it's simple. Although any engineer will tell you that a more complex system is a less reliable system, Soyuz had problems. At least one capsule malfunction killed all the crew during descent. Control malfunctions causing descent problems are common. Nonetheless, for a program that lost the only engineer who really understood rockets very early on from a brain tumour, it has had astonishing success.
The American and European space programs are not wrong, I believe, to use more modern technology, but they are wrong to use that as an excuse to not perform the additional quality control you need. It makes sense to assume that the number of possible interactions increases exponentially as you increase the number of components, which means you need to spend exponentially more resources on both the design AND the QA for a linear increase in manufacturing complexity.
It should be perfectly possible to design a highly reliable modern rocket system, but it won't be cheap and it won't be easy. Since NASA and the ESA operate on shoestring budgets that would barely pay for enough string for the engineer's shoes, it is clearly impossible for them to be designing such systems correctly. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to know what it takes a rocket scientist.
For commercial rocketry, though, you probably don't want the sophistication that is possible. A souped-up V2, as per Arthur C Clarke's suggestion in Wireless World and as adopted by the space giants early on, is really all you need, although I don't see the harm in borrowing more modern material science techniques to cut costs and reduce weight.
I imagine you could put a Sputnik-like payload into space for a few hundred thousand dollars and put astronauts in space for a tenth of what Russia has to charge space tourists. Not mainstream, but less the province only of the billionaires of the world.
I think it was former PM Harold Wilson who once said "Those who are not a socialist when they are 20 have no heart, those who are still a socialist when they are 40 have no brain."
My interpretation of this is that caring is innate and cannot be learned, but meaningful, valid conservative values can only be gained through experience. He was "old school" conservative, the sort you might not agree with but you could respect.
Assuming my interpretation is correct, then low IQ conservatism is not conservatism at all. It isn't learned, it's not wisdom from experience, it's not based on the merits of an argument, it's based on religious beliefs and talk-show propaganda alone.
My interpretation also precludes conservatives who hate socialists, as it requires that a person only be conservative where wisdom dictates and socialist in all other cases.
Now, I could be wrong and this might not be what he meant at all, but I put it to my fellow slashdotters that the idea of understanding the place of all philosophies in life is intelligence, that rejecting a belief because it contradicts your own is folly.
Well, yes, there is ftp. And scp, fsp, gopher, and various other protocols. There's also FTP-by-email. And those who want to use HTTP can always use curl, which is not a browser but is quite capable of downloading HTTP-delivered files.
Saxon tried suing Necessity, but Aesop was called as an expert witness to establish the allegations were fables.
And if you can't litigate, fumigate!