6) Other more or less reputable news media "lifts" it from slashdot 7) Somebody references it on wikipedia 8) Other more or less reputable news media "lifts" it from wikipedia 9) Somebody adds more sources to wikipedia 10) Welcome to 1984 - and then some
I think most cases get simpler if we forget the Internet. If I put some stuff in a bank vault and the police would like to take a look at it, must they serve me or just the bank? I might be wierd, but I actually thought the bank. Yes, the warrant must name me and the scope of the search is naturally limited to my box and not the entire vault, but I didn't think it was necessary to actually serve the suspect with the warrant. My impression was that with a warrant they could just serve it to whoever opened the door or just break down the door and search the place that way, if there's nobody to serve. Imagine if I was loaning power tools from all the neighbors, should then the police serve each of them with a warrant before searching them for drugs in my house because they each have their individual right to privacy that requires a warrant? No. Ah well, encryption is the better form of privacy anyway...
Considering there's decent evidence to suggest that there was flowing water on Mars long ago, it's quite possible they formed then and survived until now. Life on earth is also apparently very old, according to the wikipedia article on abiogenesis "The oldest ancient fossil microbe-like objects are dated to be 3.5 Ga (billion years old), just a few hundred million years younger than Earth itself." We have extremely little data on what sparks life though, so much bigger window but possibly a much narrower target than our extremophiles. Doesn't really get proven on way or the other until we find life, or at least fossils, on Mars.
This isn't necessarily a bad model - as you point out, it has worked before. But it resulted in a stifling and uninnovative musical environment (good for religious folks though).
Back when most people would never have heard anything by Mozart since they were nowhere near a concert hall and you needed an orchestra to play it live and the orchestra would have to do it without microphones and amplifiers?
Let's try that again with the record once, seek donations from a few billion potential online customers everywhere model. I think a few things have changed since the times you talked about.
Ultimately it can't not be about the business, because that's the whole purpose of running a business. If you're not serving the needs of what's generating income, you're not doing a very good job. But IT also needs to have backbone and say "you know what you want, we know what can be delivered". And IT often has to be those saying you have to invest today so you can keep generating income tomorrow too. But I've met far too many that deliver something that is technically correct and/or neat, yet completely useless to anyone in the real world. It's very annoying.
I wonder how humanity would be if it was full of people like you, I'm thinking they'd still be in the same cave in the same valley using stone age technology, because there's nothing obviously useful about ever going outside that box and start to melt bronze to get to the bronze age. We want to know because we want to know, whether it's astrophysics or social sciences (try putting a ROI on most of that stuff) or whatever. Of course this we can guess at but that's only because you can guess at what's just a little bit out. When I was a kid they didn't know of a single exoplanet, they just had some models of it. In another 50-100 years we might be looking at earth size planets, moon-sized satellites, spectral atmospheric analysis trying to figure out if there are habitable planets and sooner or later they might even get going.
Why does everything have to have a ROI right now? A lot of people wouldn't see money their children inherit as "wasted" even if they didn't get to spend it themselves, why would you think so with knowledge? If we've started them off on research they will complete that's as good an investment in the future as any. They're still working on fusion for power. They're still working on nanotechnology. Things take decades to go from idea to reality and that's actually fast - in the older days it could take centuries. There's plenty denial going around in religious circles because science has always been a thorn in their side suggesting that earth isn't the center of the universe nor that we're all that unique. Copycat earths would be another indicator of that, and I think that'd do humanity far more good in the long run. Of course unless they said "God is just playing tricks on us and the dinosaur bones is a test or not real or from a young earth or whatever.", but those people are pretty much lost anyway.
Probably people that think it's some limited promotion to create buzz, then start charging once the demand coming it. They'd probably be very confused about the whole model. "It's free" "Now, yeah so I'm ordering a million" "No it'll stay free" "???" "It's free software" "But, but..." It's not just bean counters that throw a divide by zero error when they encounter free things.
The parent is what should be modded up informative. This is what means SSDs make sense, cost/GB doesn't matter because you can barely get drives under 1-200 GB these days. Put a 32/64GB SSD in there and you cover many people, make it 128 GB and you cover most. And the rest only need 1.5TB+ discs to go with that SSD.
Who the HELL runs at 10% of the capacity? I have as much data as I can afford storage space to save the data in.
Almost all laptops at my company for example. There's a few exceptions in development but everyone else mostly runs Office or some equally small applications and work on files less than 10 MB in size. I'd say that's a considerable market that's prime to switch to SSD since they're paying a rather high $/hour cost on people, it doesn't take many seconds per operation to save the cost of a SSD.
Good thing we haven't been working with solid state storage in digital cameras for 10+ years then. Or the RAID controller technology which could make them kick-ass fast. Sorry, but SSDs aren't revolutionary in that sense, they're taking two rather mainstream technologies combined with the same process improvement you see in CPU/GPU/RAM and coming to whoop ass in all performance oriented markets. I have an SSD as my primary disk and I'd say it's the biggest revolution since dual cores. Almost no matter what I do, the machine remains very responsive under heavy IO load completely unlike hard disks.
I have to assume that if I see a video on YouTube, I have the right to do so. If a video happens to be uploaded illegally, that's not my fault as viewer, and I cannot be made responsible for the fact that I was shown that video.
Not that US law is relevant to Germans, but USC 17504(c)(2):
(...) In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200.
Windows Mobile will either have to offer an extremely compelling experience, Apple-like, or will be FOSSed into oblivion ? I'm taking bets, but only one way ^^
Since you use the phrase "FOSSed into oblivion", I guessed which way. Do you also take bets on year of the Linux desktop? I smell easy money...
You keep bringing this same thing in to every discussion, but are you saying that people should be allowed to download those songs *because* only 1 album sale is lost? So that's your rationalizing for piracy?
Let me put up two alternatives: 1. 1000 people have a copy, because 1000 people liked it enough to buy it. 2. The whole world has it in their "bigger than Spotify" collection of all music, 1000 people liked it enough to buy it.
Not looking at the law, does it really matter? The creators get paid as much as before, the consumers still pay for what they like. Yes, there are millions more copies in circulation but does it change anything for anybody? Ultimately the 99% you don't listen to are meaningless. and if I gave you a collection 100x greater then the 99.99% you don't listen to are meaningless. So maybe I'll find some different, better music in there and pay them instead but it'll just be a reallocation, my moral compass doesn't give me a linear need to spend 100x more for still spending the same amount of time listening to music.
The only illusion here is that copyright holders still believe it's their copyright that makes us pay them, not their moral ownership of the movie as such but their exclusive ability to make copies. Copies are absolutely everywhere, you couldn't find a college student anywhere that doesn't know how. They might not all do it, but they certainly all know how if they wanted to. If that was the reason we are paying, they'd be stone cold dead. All the silly ways they're trying to stop copying are embarrassing failures and copies go everywhere you don't offer them. It's complete absurdity to think you can build up rabid fans and expect the same rabid fans to not pirate what you're not offering.
Waiting for prices to climb is a lousy reason not to sell right now. There is no guarantee that the values will indeed rise.
Actually, there's quite a few models on how the "real" economy should work. But humans are herd animals, when the media tell them to stop buying they stop and start buying they start. Sometimes, anyway. The stock market is just like that, only much worse. It's not like the value of the economy drops or rises by 50% like the stock market does, it's a wierd amplified effect driven by everyone thinking they'll outsmart everyone else on future expectations.
I decided this crunch was the perfect time to buy an apartment. I read all the tea leafs and I managed to hit the bottom pretty well but it had absolutely nothing to do with the real figures, only about expectations about price development, interest rate development, unemployment rate and so on. The media is always boom or doom but you can tell when they're running out of "steam", so to speak.
Grab a small SSD for apps/games and a 5400RPM terabyte disk for all your music/movies/series/home video/whatever. 64/80GB disks seems to be the sweetspot now, which even leaves some space for apps after installing Win7;)
Koala was to put focus on an endangered species. Karmic is your fairly uncommon adjective that Ubuntu can "coup" so you can google for "karmic *whatever your problem is*" and get relevant results that don't belong to a version from two years ago or every other page that happened to use the numbers 09.10. It works much, much better than Debian that I came from where they typically used stable, testing and unstable which left a ton of junk that doesn't apply to my stable all over the net. Yeah it's corny but it works extremely well.
Yes well, some of the problem is that the open source community doesn't work on one calendar. At any given time, some groups have decided to bork something with an architectural overhaul. There are distros that have tried to wait for the stars to align, but each time one issue is resolved three new appears. Rolling distros were even worse because they just randomly broke some day when you were patching up. Despite all the problems of releasing on the dot like *buntu does, I've found it the lesser of the evils. Test, does it work? If so keep else revert. If you don't want to play that game stay with the LTS, like you said the last LTS was quite good and the next LTS (in six months) will probably be too. They know that people that complain about the 6 months releases don't seem to be hurting enough to use the LTS, so it can't be that bad. Personally I skipped the 8.10 release but 9.04 was quite ok. If 9.10 is a flop I'll just wait for 10.04, that's the way you have to work with them, not all of them will work with you.
Here's my take on Linux support: Not that long ago, I'd have to chase high and low to find any Linux compatible hardware and certain things like wireless cards was near impossible. These days I have no problems finding Linux-compatible hardware, even though not all or even most hardware is compatible with Linux. There's usually some well-supported official drivers in most categories instead of the "best of the reverse engneered" there used to be. I don't remember this machine having a kernel panic ever, though X did have an oops a month ago because I've upgraded to a beta KDE/X release.
If I was to say my biggest greatest annoyance with Linux, it's media plugins and flash in particular. If only Firefox would stop being so patent-freaky and decode H.264 when it is available then we could kill flash and live happily ever after. *buntu seem perfectly capable of shipping a video player that'll use the x264 codec if installed, so should Firefox.
What most people fail to understand is that a free market has very little to do with a competitive market. Competitive markets are good, and obviously you can't have competition if there's a state controlling everything, but it's only a necessary and not sufficient condition. You can read a few libraries worth of books about all the legal and illegal ways to corner a market and extract as much money as possible from it while keeping competitors away. The blank vote of not buying has limited value in many cases, because they are big multinationals that'll easily outlast your boycott and so it doesn't really matter as long as they keep competitors out. That's assuming you even get it right in the first place, since they got their tentacles in so many things under so many names and that "other brand" LCD you bought may still contain the same panel and make them good cash. And assuming you could get a decent portion of the customers started in the first place, seeing as they also control the media and will tell them there's no reason to do that.
Lack of competition absolutely doesn't happen just because of inequalities of power or lack of transparency in the market. In fact, with very much transparency and limited actors you'll see implicit collusion almost immediately. Try looking at the prices of two gas stations in sight of each other. They'll start a few wars but if the other is always constantly following they're only killing both their margins. Quite soon they'll return to a kind of "play" competition where they both got comfortable margins and take turns trying to steal customers from the people up and down the road. If they really started an all-out war, the chains on both sides would back them up and it'd be the business version of the Cuban missile crisis that'll only hurt both of them badly. Every time you have a market, the sellers have an incentive to collude against the buyers. No rational business will start a price war that'll hurt them almost as bad as the competition, except in certain market deterrence strategies. They fight at the edges and bleed the captive centers of their markets. That is the rational behavior in a realistic model, not a game theoretic one leading to perfect competition.
If you lose one payload chances are whatever your mission was is shot anyway until you replace it, unless you are going to build a spare for every module and have spare launchers ready to go,
For launchers, that'd be kind of the point. Say you got 10 launchers, 8 for the original parts and 2 in reserve - you'd have pretty good reliability for a 25% increase in cost or less on that. For the modules, let us first for the launch success rate assume that you're building two of any module for QA purposes anyway, not very unlikely. Let us assume a 95% success rate, not too unlikely given the shuttle trackrecord. the odds of all 10 launches going well on first try is 59.87%. The odds of one failure + successful relaunch is 28.36% and two failures on different modules 6.72% for a grand total of 94.95% success probability.
As for the modules, yes they're mostly unique but it's not like we hammer them out by hand anymore. Most of the parts are built to very exact electronic specifications, they go through all sorts of tolerances testing, stress testing, radiation testing and so I really can't imagine them being that costly to produce exact replicas. Yes, sometimes they use highly experimental materials in these things but say for example the Mars rovers is mostly an aluminum structure with scientific equipemnt. Lithium-ion batteries are in every laptop. It's not really the materials driving up most costs.
Where I'm guessing the big blocker is would be the modularization itself. If you build it as one "thing", you can just weld it or glue it or whatever they do together and you can do that with tons of external equipment and QA here on earth or use larger parts and don't have a assembly point at all. Also all the cables and wires and tubes that ought to go from one module to another, it all gets much harder. One thing is research robots that we can slowly send off on a space trajectory, minimal acceleration also means minimal stress. Building something like a Mars expedition craft that will assemble in orbit and reliably not have structural failure when you turn on the engines to get going is a different matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you mind telling my head that? It keeps leaping back and forth and sometimes warps it altogether.
5) Verified "news" on slashdot
6) Other more or less reputable news media "lifts" it from slashdot
7) Somebody references it on wikipedia
8) Other more or less reputable news media "lifts" it from wikipedia
9) Somebody adds more sources to wikipedia
10) Welcome to 1984 - and then some
I think most cases get simpler if we forget the Internet. If I put some stuff in a bank vault and the police would like to take a look at it, must they serve me or just the bank? I might be wierd, but I actually thought the bank. Yes, the warrant must name me and the scope of the search is naturally limited to my box and not the entire vault, but I didn't think it was necessary to actually serve the suspect with the warrant. My impression was that with a warrant they could just serve it to whoever opened the door or just break down the door and search the place that way, if there's nobody to serve. Imagine if I was loaning power tools from all the neighbors, should then the police serve each of them with a warrant before searching them for drugs in my house because they each have their individual right to privacy that requires a warrant? No. Ah well, encryption is the better form of privacy anyway...
Considering there's decent evidence to suggest that there was flowing water on Mars long ago, it's quite possible they formed then and survived until now. Life on earth is also apparently very old, according to the wikipedia article on abiogenesis "The oldest ancient fossil microbe-like objects are dated to be 3.5 Ga (billion years old), just a few hundred million years younger than Earth itself." We have extremely little data on what sparks life though, so much bigger window but possibly a much narrower target than our extremophiles. Doesn't really get proven on way or the other until we find life, or at least fossils, on Mars.
This isn't necessarily a bad model - as you point out, it has worked before. But it resulted in a stifling and uninnovative musical environment (good for religious folks though).
Back when most people would never have heard anything by Mozart since they were nowhere near a concert hall and you needed an orchestra to play it live and the orchestra would have to do it without microphones and amplifiers?
Let's try that again with the record once, seek donations from a few billion potential online customers everywhere model. I think a few things have changed since the times you talked about.
Ultimately it can't not be about the business, because that's the whole purpose of running a business. If you're not serving the needs of what's generating income, you're not doing a very good job. But IT also needs to have backbone and say "you know what you want, we know what can be delivered". And IT often has to be those saying you have to invest today so you can keep generating income tomorrow too. But I've met far too many that deliver something that is technically correct and/or neat, yet completely useless to anyone in the real world. It's very annoying.
I wonder how humanity would be if it was full of people like you, I'm thinking they'd still be in the same cave in the same valley using stone age technology, because there's nothing obviously useful about ever going outside that box and start to melt bronze to get to the bronze age. We want to know because we want to know, whether it's astrophysics or social sciences (try putting a ROI on most of that stuff) or whatever. Of course this we can guess at but that's only because you can guess at what's just a little bit out. When I was a kid they didn't know of a single exoplanet, they just had some models of it. In another 50-100 years we might be looking at earth size planets, moon-sized satellites, spectral atmospheric analysis trying to figure out if there are habitable planets and sooner or later they might even get going.
Why does everything have to have a ROI right now? A lot of people wouldn't see money their children inherit as "wasted" even if they didn't get to spend it themselves, why would you think so with knowledge? If we've started them off on research they will complete that's as good an investment in the future as any. They're still working on fusion for power. They're still working on nanotechnology. Things take decades to go from idea to reality and that's actually fast - in the older days it could take centuries. There's plenty denial going around in religious circles because science has always been a thorn in their side suggesting that earth isn't the center of the universe nor that we're all that unique. Copycat earths would be another indicator of that, and I think that'd do humanity far more good in the long run. Of course unless they said "God is just playing tricks on us and the dinosaur bones is a test or not real or from a young earth or whatever.", but those people are pretty much lost anyway.
Probably people that think it's some limited promotion to create buzz, then start charging once the demand coming it. They'd probably be very confused about the whole model. "It's free" "Now, yeah so I'm ordering a million" "No it'll stay free" "???" "It's free software" "But, but..." It's not just bean counters that throw a divide by zero error when they encounter free things.
Read? Just wiggle the magic 8-ball and write something bad about Windows, good about Linux and how Macs are overpriced and you're done.
Guess we found a replacement for Cowboy Neal as the joke option at the end of the poll...
The parent is what should be modded up informative. This is what means SSDs make sense, cost/GB doesn't matter because you can barely get drives under 1-200 GB these days. Put a 32/64GB SSD in there and you cover many people, make it 128 GB and you cover most. And the rest only need 1.5TB+ discs to go with that SSD.
Who the HELL runs at 10% of the capacity? I have as much data as I can afford storage space to save the data in.
Almost all laptops at my company for example. There's a few exceptions in development but everyone else mostly runs Office or some equally small applications and work on files less than 10 MB in size. I'd say that's a considerable market that's prime to switch to SSD since they're paying a rather high $/hour cost on people, it doesn't take many seconds per operation to save the cost of a SSD.
Good thing we haven't been working with solid state storage in digital cameras for 10+ years then. Or the RAID controller technology which could make them kick-ass fast. Sorry, but SSDs aren't revolutionary in that sense, they're taking two rather mainstream technologies combined with the same process improvement you see in CPU/GPU/RAM and coming to whoop ass in all performance oriented markets. I have an SSD as my primary disk and I'd say it's the biggest revolution since dual cores. Almost no matter what I do, the machine remains very responsive under heavy IO load completely unlike hard disks.
I have to assume that if I see a video on YouTube, I have the right to do so. If a video happens to be uploaded illegally, that's not my fault as viewer, and I cannot be made responsible for the fact that I was shown that video.
Not that US law is relevant to Germans, but USC 17504(c)(2):
(...) In a case where the infringer sustains the burden of proving, and the court finds, that such infringer was not aware and had no reason to believe that his or her acts constituted an infringement of copyright, the court in its discretion may reduce the award of statutory damages to a sum of not less than $200.
Or the short version: Yes, you can.
Windows Mobile will either have to offer an extremely compelling experience, Apple-like, or will be FOSSed into oblivion ? I'm taking bets, but only one way ^^
Since you use the phrase "FOSSed into oblivion", I guessed which way. Do you also take bets on year of the Linux desktop? I smell easy money...
You keep bringing this same thing in to every discussion, but are you saying that people should be allowed to download those songs *because* only 1 album sale is lost? So that's your rationalizing for piracy?
Let me put up two alternatives:
1. 1000 people have a copy, because 1000 people liked it enough to buy it.
2. The whole world has it in their "bigger than Spotify" collection of all music, 1000 people liked it enough to buy it.
Not looking at the law, does it really matter? The creators get paid as much as before, the consumers still pay for what they like. Yes, there are millions more copies in circulation but does it change anything for anybody? Ultimately the 99% you don't listen to are meaningless. and if I gave you a collection 100x greater then the 99.99% you don't listen to are meaningless. So maybe I'll find some different, better music in there and pay them instead but it'll just be a reallocation, my moral compass doesn't give me a linear need to spend 100x more for still spending the same amount of time listening to music.
The only illusion here is that copyright holders still believe it's their copyright that makes us pay them, not their moral ownership of the movie as such but their exclusive ability to make copies. Copies are absolutely everywhere, you couldn't find a college student anywhere that doesn't know how. They might not all do it, but they certainly all know how if they wanted to. If that was the reason we are paying, they'd be stone cold dead. All the silly ways they're trying to stop copying are embarrassing failures and copies go everywhere you don't offer them. It's complete absurdity to think you can build up rabid fans and expect the same rabid fans to not pirate what you're not offering.
Waiting for prices to climb is a lousy reason not to sell right now. There is no guarantee that the values will indeed rise.
Actually, there's quite a few models on how the "real" economy should work. But humans are herd animals, when the media tell them to stop buying they stop and start buying they start. Sometimes, anyway. The stock market is just like that, only much worse. It's not like the value of the economy drops or rises by 50% like the stock market does, it's a wierd amplified effect driven by everyone thinking they'll outsmart everyone else on future expectations.
I decided this crunch was the perfect time to buy an apartment. I read all the tea leafs and I managed to hit the bottom pretty well but it had absolutely nothing to do with the real figures, only about expectations about price development, interest rate development, unemployment rate and so on. The media is always boom or doom but you can tell when they're running out of "steam", so to speak.
Grab a small SSD for apps/games and a 5400RPM terabyte disk for all your music/movies/series/home video/whatever. 64/80GB disks seems to be the sweetspot now, which even leaves some space for apps after installing Win7 ;)
Koala was to put focus on an endangered species. Karmic is your fairly uncommon adjective that Ubuntu can "coup" so you can google for "karmic *whatever your problem is*" and get relevant results that don't belong to a version from two years ago or every other page that happened to use the numbers 09.10. It works much, much better than Debian that I came from where they typically used stable, testing and unstable which left a ton of junk that doesn't apply to my stable all over the net. Yeah it's corny but it works extremely well.
Yes well, some of the problem is that the open source community doesn't work on one calendar. At any given time, some groups have decided to bork something with an architectural overhaul. There are distros that have tried to wait for the stars to align, but each time one issue is resolved three new appears. Rolling distros were even worse because they just randomly broke some day when you were patching up. Despite all the problems of releasing on the dot like *buntu does, I've found it the lesser of the evils. Test, does it work? If so keep else revert. If you don't want to play that game stay with the LTS, like you said the last LTS was quite good and the next LTS (in six months) will probably be too. They know that people that complain about the 6 months releases don't seem to be hurting enough to use the LTS, so it can't be that bad. Personally I skipped the 8.10 release but 9.04 was quite ok. If 9.10 is a flop I'll just wait for 10.04, that's the way you have to work with them, not all of them will work with you.
Here's my take on Linux support: Not that long ago, I'd have to chase high and low to find any Linux compatible hardware and certain things like wireless cards was near impossible. These days I have no problems finding Linux-compatible hardware, even though not all or even most hardware is compatible with Linux. There's usually some well-supported official drivers in most categories instead of the "best of the reverse engneered" there used to be. I don't remember this machine having a kernel panic ever, though X did have an oops a month ago because I've upgraded to a beta KDE/X release.
If I was to say my biggest greatest annoyance with Linux, it's media plugins and flash in particular. If only Firefox would stop being so patent-freaky and decode H.264 when it is available then we could kill flash and live happily ever after. *buntu seem perfectly capable of shipping a video player that'll use the x264 codec if installed, so should Firefox.
What most people fail to understand is that a free market has very little to do with a competitive market. Competitive markets are good, and obviously you can't have competition if there's a state controlling everything, but it's only a necessary and not sufficient condition. You can read a few libraries worth of books about all the legal and illegal ways to corner a market and extract as much money as possible from it while keeping competitors away. The blank vote of not buying has limited value in many cases, because they are big multinationals that'll easily outlast your boycott and so it doesn't really matter as long as they keep competitors out. That's assuming you even get it right in the first place, since they got their tentacles in so many things under so many names and that "other brand" LCD you bought may still contain the same panel and make them good cash. And assuming you could get a decent portion of the customers started in the first place, seeing as they also control the media and will tell them there's no reason to do that.
Lack of competition absolutely doesn't happen just because of inequalities of power or lack of transparency in the market. In fact, with very much transparency and limited actors you'll see implicit collusion almost immediately. Try looking at the prices of two gas stations in sight of each other. They'll start a few wars but if the other is always constantly following they're only killing both their margins. Quite soon they'll return to a kind of "play" competition where they both got comfortable margins and take turns trying to steal customers from the people up and down the road. If they really started an all-out war, the chains on both sides would back them up and it'd be the business version of the Cuban missile crisis that'll only hurt both of them badly. Every time you have a market, the sellers have an incentive to collude against the buyers. No rational business will start a price war that'll hurt them almost as bad as the competition, except in certain market deterrence strategies. They fight at the edges and bleed the captive centers of their markets. That is the rational behavior in a realistic model, not a game theoretic one leading to perfect competition.
Call it what you want, but not TPM. TPM is one specific initiative where the master key to all computers is with the illuminati/TPM group.
If you lose one payload chances are whatever your mission was is shot anyway until you replace it, unless you are going to build a spare for every module and have spare launchers ready to go,
For launchers, that'd be kind of the point. Say you got 10 launchers, 8 for the original parts and 2 in reserve - you'd have pretty good reliability for a 25% increase in cost or less on that. For the modules, let us first for the launch success rate assume that you're building two of any module for QA purposes anyway, not very unlikely. Let us assume a 95% success rate, not too unlikely given the shuttle trackrecord. the odds of all 10 launches going well on first try is 59.87%. The odds of one failure + successful relaunch is 28.36% and two failures on different modules 6.72% for a grand total of 94.95% success probability.
As for the modules, yes they're mostly unique but it's not like we hammer them out by hand anymore. Most of the parts are built to very exact electronic specifications, they go through all sorts of tolerances testing, stress testing, radiation testing and so I really can't imagine them being that costly to produce exact replicas. Yes, sometimes they use highly experimental materials in these things but say for example the Mars rovers is mostly an aluminum structure with scientific equipemnt. Lithium-ion batteries are in every laptop. It's not really the materials driving up most costs.
Where I'm guessing the big blocker is would be the modularization itself. If you build it as one "thing", you can just weld it or glue it or whatever they do together and you can do that with tons of external equipment and QA here on earth or use larger parts and don't have a assembly point at all. Also all the cables and wires and tubes that ought to go from one module to another, it all gets much harder. One thing is research robots that we can slowly send off on a space trajectory, minimal acceleration also means minimal stress. Building something like a Mars expedition craft that will assemble in orbit and reliably not have structural failure when you turn on the engines to get going is a different matter.
Two words: Page hits.