Moon exploration is nothing more than madness. The people involved are doing it to pad their pockets with huge no-low bid contracts.
First of all, there is nothing on the moon. No life, no water, no diamonds, no exotic metals, no oil, no guns, no women, no Jesus, nothing. Nothing worth the hundreds of billions of dollars that will be spent going back there.
Second, there are serious issues and problems here on earth that demand the resources that are to be wasted on this moon and space exploration nonsense. Things like global climate change and dwindling easy oil availablity and overpopulation. The people who are seriously planning to spend billions of other people's money on space exploration madness have been bribed into believing that the problems listed above simply don't exist, or are 'liberal propaganda'. They are deluded fools living in a purchased fantasy world. If you're young and intellegent, then you shouldn't be paying attention to them. Fools die when the fantasy collapses; smart people adapt to reality as it actually is. Be a smart person for a change.
Now finally to all the Slashdot community people who will tell me about how great it is that we are finally going back into real space exploration and about the minute details of obscure technologies that will be enhanced by the expenditure of billions of dollars (borrowed from foreigners and simply just thrown onto the already huge national debt) pissed away on space exploration, I say this:
Take a leave of absence from your job or school, your MUD, and your PC. Get a passport and a ticket to someplace in the developing world. Go someplace that it's cheap to live and where a large number of people speak a language that you understand. * I suggest India for Americans * and travel around. Stay in cheap local hotels and hostels, take the local transportation, talk to the locals in the coffee shops, talk to the other travelers. Do it until you actually begin to feel comfortable (or at least not stressed to extremes of paranoia and xenophobia).
Then return home to live that you used to live and see how weird everything is in the USA. And then get back on Slashdot and tell me with a straight face again about how much we really need space travel and moon exploration. The subject will have come up again by then.
The various world space programs are nothing more than giant welfare programs for pseudo-engineers and techno-nerds who are too stupid, narcissistic, greedy, and selfish to be able to apply their skills, training, and experience (and vision) to real-world problems that affect real-world people.
This is just another foolish idea that the desperate community of download entrepreneurs are trying to get past the cement-heads of the MPAA. All they can get currently are cinema dregs. No one is going to want pay to download junk when they can download good quality DIVx titles from the unlicensed distributors for free. And the entrepreneurs need big profitable download numbers to get the studios to offer popular big name titles. This is another 'zombie' company; already dead and doesn't know it yet.
So why would the studios want paid downloads? They can distribute DVDs inexpensively and profitably to the video outlets that have proliferated widely in the US and developed world. And they generally get the cost of the film product covered through the initial theatre release (where 90% of the box office goes to the studio for the first few weeks of release and 50% of the viewers chose to see the new movie). What does the studio have to gain from paid downloads? Pratically nothing.
Paid downloads are good for films that don't get wide DVD or theatre release. Brilliant little foreign films, etc... But if noone knows about them, then there is no demand. No demand means no paid downloads. Eight dollars isn't cheap and three hours of download time is a high opportunity cost to pay for a bozo film. Three hours spend downloading a turkey is three hours spent that wasn't downloading a good film. It's so much easier just to go to the DVD store in the local supermarket and pick up a six month old title for much less cost in dollars and download time.
Nor could you convince foreign directors to release their films in the USA or other countries as downloads. These guys are very traditional and want their films to be seen in theaters; they don't even like DVDs. The more that the download entrepeneurs are able to pressure them to license their 'vanity' films for download, the less likelyhood that they will be pressed into DVDs. They will be limited to their local national market and whatever government subsidies that they can hussle from their local cultural ministers. Which means boring films, which means fewer people taking a chance on downloading them regardless of the reviews in specialized film magazines.
All in all this is a dumb idea. The only thing that will work is the only thing that is currently working. Which is people crafting their favorite new films into DIVx format 'illegally' and posting them for download on the P2P sites. Eventually the MPAA will have to come to terms with the P2P community, on the terms of the P2P community, and accept whatever residual fees that the P2P community considers it appropriate for the studios to have. In the same manner that the RIAA came to a partial truce with the P2P community with iTunes.
It will take a long time because these guys are exceptionally thick in the head department. Which means we have to wait for a lot of dumb zombie companies like this one to fail before any real progress gets made.
Since this is Hong Kong, one must wonder if they are looking for pirated materials in order to wipe out their competition, or are they looking for something new to pirate that hasn't as yet received wide exposure.
The idea that the children of Hong Kong are being sent on a crusade to supplement the RIAA is absurd, and should not be taken on face value.
Perhaps the Hong Kong politicians who have received gifts from the pirates along with honorariums (to cover expenses, of course) from the RIAA need to show everyone involved on both sides that they are making 'a sincere effort' to address the 'problem'.
The most amazing thing is that it is assumed that Slashdot readers have health insurance or general medical coverage.
A large percentage of those living in the United States don't.
When you're young, it doesn't matter because young people don't get sick often. They only need health care as a result from doing stupid things and getting injured. (Or, if they are female, they need medical care access to avoid unwanted pregnancies. But how many Slashdaughters are female?).
If you get sick in the USA and don't have any very expensive health insurance, you get fucked. Tossed out like a used tissue. Simple fact of life there.
Their bodies were physically in the UK but the hearts, minds, and souls were in the same distant land that their mullah came from. Their mullah convinced them to murder random fellow citizens. English people don't go around convincing other English people randomly in order to serve the demented and paranoid fantasies of bizarre religions.
My point is that there were many people in the Islamic community in that English town who knew that these guys were insane and dangerous. But they said nothing, either because they were afraid (not likely) or because they were in sympathy with the criminals due to a misplaced sense of religion. They, the people who knew and didn't warn, are the ones who are responsible for all of the bad laws and unwarranted arrests and suspicion that befell the English muslims after the bombings happened.
You either are civilized or you're not. If you are, then you have a greater loyality to the other civilized people of your community regardless of their race and nationality. And you don't owe the murderers anything, least of all silence, even if they are part of your church or mosque.
I am so tired of chickenshit Slashdotters telling me that the main points of my arguments are invalid because of irrevelevant details are obscured.
Grow up.
Your attempt at irony is in extremely poor taste, even for a Slashdot nerd.
The peoples of London, Madrid and New York were murdered at random by monsters who came to those places from distant lands where it is common to settle minor disputes by horrific acts of violence. The peoples of London, Madrid, and New York had learned from their history the futility of attempting to settle disputes through mass murder. They developed civilized methods of conflict resolution like fair court systems. They restrained themselves from mass murder in ways that are completely unknown to the subhumans who came to these cities from the disfunctional lands with the intention of genocidal slaughter.
The resulting actions after suffering horrible murder by the citizens of London, Madrid, and New York against the peoples who come from disfunctional cultures are not racist or discriminatory, but reasonable and rational acts of self-defense from the people who come to their cities with the intent of murder. It is sad that the good, law-abiding, and civilized peoples who came to the great cities of civilization in order to escape from the madness of disfuctional societies suffer in the West due to the actions of monsters.
But, it is the responsibility of the good, law-abiding, and civilized peoples from the disfuctional lands to seperate the monsters from their own society when they arrive in the civilized world. If the civilized people of a foreign culture can not or will not isolate and neutralize the monsters who live in their community, then they all will bear responsibility for the crimes that these monsters commit against the rest of the citizens. The entire community will suffer. That is the way that the world works.
The citizens of the cities that have suffered from the crimes that subhumans commit are not responsible for their inability to tell monsters from civilized people among those have come to their cities from distant lands.
If you don't want to expose yourself and your business to random acts of extreme violence in public places, then don't locate your self or your business in the places where the locals have a habit of setting off bombs in public places. These horrible crimes happen because the local leadership (i.e. the mullahs, not the government) encourages the people to do these things.
When everyone who is important decides not to invest money and resources in places where minor theological disputes are handled by putting bombs in public areas, then over the course of time those places will become poor, disinvested, and irrelevant to the world. Their peoples will become marginalized and unimportant. No one will invest there, no one will visit there, and no one will care when they are hit by the natural disasters that decimate the backward and uncivilized peoples of the world.
There's plenty of money and opportunity in the civilized world. Why bother to risk death and dismemberment by trying to make chump change off the barbarians?
Seriously, you got caught in some asshole's juvenile prank. Defacing a public resource (wikipedia) to reflect an immature joke at the expense of the next person to use that resource.
So apologise, repair the mistake, and move on. Just because some jerk doesn't understand the usefullness of an open source public resource doesn't change the utility of that resource. And anyone who is 'offended' by the prank needs to understand this. This is like sueing the streetcar company for racism because some pissant spray-painted a racist remark on a streetcar. The correct response is to find the person responsible if possible, and if not, then to teach your own children why civilized people don't do such things.
the BSD telnet client, which is based on the PD NCSA telnet client....NCSA telnet client
In order to use Linux instead of Windows, a person has to spend hundreds of hours relearning everything that they have already mastered about computer usage. If you don't know (and don't have the time) to learn the difference between a BSD telnet client or a PD NCSA telnet client then using Linux is simply not an option.
Linux users consistently underestimate the extent that their background computer knowledge is needed or used when comparing Windows to Linux. It is this requirement of computer background knowledge which is the main reason preventing the general public from switching to Linux from Windows.
Myself, I will continue to use Windows 98 forever because it allows direct access to the Pentium input/output ports. Further versions of Windows don't allow this, and I need it. Plus I don't have to depend on the whim of Microsoft to get the OS installed and running. The smaller that the version of Linux is that you install, the more computer knowledge that you need to make it work. And I don't get paid for learning about the computer tools that I use, only for the results that get produced by them.
HP had to pay this person tens of millions of dollars just to get her to go away. At the same time they were firing long-term dedicated employees and offering them re-hirement only as perma-temps with no benefits! This was Carly's policy. The woman is a thug and thief. Good riddance.
Now I realize that this standard operating proceedure for America's managerial class. But it doesn't change the fact that it is insane. We had all thought that this plantation mentality didn't hold with the high-tech industry. Boy were we wrong! They wiped out the entire industries stock value and threw away the best workers like used toilet paper.
Carly is simply the flash point of this madness. At least she wasn't assassinated like Kenneth Lay in order to keep her from talking about where all the money went and which politicians got paid off under the table.
This wouldn't be necessary if the Iraqis could simply accept the reality that they are a backward and conquered people. Then the could start (re-)building their country up to modern standards under the guidance of the Americans. After the new infrastructure is in place and the country finally has the ability to stand alone, then and only then would any reasonable people start the process of expelling the foreign rulers.
But not the Arabs. Arab military strategy consists of taunting the enemy into invading with absurd bravado, insults, and vague threats barely plausible enough to take seriously. Then there is the massive run and hide while the enemy invades and conquers the country with surprising ease. Only then does the Arab defense begin. The enemy is constantly attacked by a series of unbelievably duplicitious,barbaric, and savage sneak attacks like wrapping children in high explosives and sending them to the enemy troops begging for food. Or by pretending to be allies of the conquerors and then stabbing them in the back at the first opportunity. The underlining principle is to make the occupation so difficult for the enemy that they will move on to somewhere else more hospitable.
This strategy has worked for the past three thousand years because nobody wants to actually be in the lands where the Arabs live. It's insanely hot (120 degrees Fahrenheit days are not uncommon)and there is little water or shelter. Historically, people only invaded Arab lands to control the location which is to contol access to other more important places. So, yes, the strategy works. [It fails horribly when the conqueror has resolved to never, never leave regardless of the long-term consequences, as is the case with the Israelis. In that case, the Arab strategy of constant pinprick attacks through instances of sub-human behavior results in the eventual long-term annihilation of the people who can not understand the reality of their situation and make peace.]
But it leaves the Arabs permanently poor and backward because no one can trust them. It also inflicts upon them a permanent crypto-fascist religious government for whom it is in the best interest that the people be always backwards and poor. Other countries chose insane leaders, start wars, get their ass kicked, have the leaders executed, and return to a properous peace. But not the Arabs. They are in a 'one step forward, one sideways, one step backwards' lock-cycle forever. After a thousand years, the unreality becomes an integral part of the culture and it becomes impossible to adapt to change.
Will this strategy work on the Americans? Sure. Primarily, they are in the Arab lands for the oil. Secondarily, they are there as an excuse to enrich their military-industrial complex by means of transfering enormous amounts of tax money to the corporations that put up the money for the current American leadership to gain power. There is also the vague belief on the part of many Americans in the hinterlands of that country that the Arabs can be converted to Christianity if only enough missionaries could go over and have 'heart-to-heart' talks with them. They all do worship the same God.
But the easy oil and the money needed for the occupation will run out at the same time. The Americans will change their lifestyles and raise their gas prices. They will leave the Arab countries as everyone else has before them: with 'thousand-yard stares' and random mumblings of incomprehension and curses. They will accomplish nothing because there is nothing to accomplish in the Arab lands. They will waste a vast fortune, leave nothing, and bring home another generation of amputatees and flag-waving post-traumatic psychopaths with bizarre illnesses. The only legacy of this war is just thousands of legless and armless veterans begging outside of the door of the Wall-Mart. And billions for the offshore bank accounts of Haliburton's and Bechtel's management class.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Not to belittle my wonderful neighbors too much, but anything that happens in Vancouver, Washington (not Vancouver BC) should not be taken seriously. The place is on the north side of the Columbia River in the Portland Oregon metro area. Oregon has no sales tax but high income taxes. Consequently Vancouver is filled with people who want the cheap income and property taxes and to also hop across the river to buy everything with no sales tax.
Also, Portland tends to be liberal, environmental, and moderately progressive while Vancouver is packed with pious, self-righteous, bible-thumping, overweight, narrow-minded freaks who believe that they have managed to keep their own little piece of Alabama pure while surrounded by sinners and liberals.
So some guy found a WiFi hot spot. And he parked his car there. Every day. for three months. So what?
And he's a 'sex offender' too. Well, in Vancouver, a sex offender may a guy who has done some seriously bad things with his... Or, it may be some guy who twenty years ago got caught unireating ('taking a whiz' in the American slang) behind a bar or gas station in the middle of the night. Or got caught kissing a 17-year-old girl when he was 18. Or got caught swimming naked in a lake in the woods on a hot summer day. Or, lots of other stupid harmless things that the Americans lump into the category of sex offences that have nothing to do with sex offences.
Or maybe he really is a super predator who actually was endangering the community by...what was it?, oh, yes... parking his car and using his computer in it.
OK, I'll bite. We got pilotless aircraft flying low and slow over neighborhoods in Los Angeles, spying on people, and the authorities say that it's for "finding missing children and lost hikers? C'mon on. The police in LA would only spend all this money on one thing:
"Nigger Control!"
To put it bluntly, in their words [in hushed whispers], not mine.
Do they really have such a big problem that they need all this Kafkaesque technology? Or are they really just a bunch of paranoid psychopathic cowboys with too much money to spend on death machines?
All this weird 'us vs. them' paranoia that infects the wealthy people of Los Angeles (more than anywhere else on Earth) is getting to be rather embarrassing. Do they really believe that their maids are gardeners are going to rise up and slaughter them in the middle of the night?
Get a grip, people, and come back down to the real world.
I'm beginning to think that the entire L.A. techno-fascist police state mentality is directly related to the local Hollywood fantasy mentality. Only it is the inverted nightmare that grows out of too much fantasy, too much money, and too many drugs.
Is there any other place where people live like this? God, let's hope that it doesn't spread.
For example consider the amount of money needed to win an election, ensuring all candidates are either independently wealthy or in the pockets of their campaign contributors)
Actually the cost of an election has gone way down, in America that is. Only a fraction of the money that used to be spent lying to the electorate is now necessary to bribe the programmer of the Diebold election machine. Pay off the programmer and you win: 51% to 49%, each and every time.
Another real issue not spoken about is that India is seriously poor. I mean really dirt poor. I mean people chopping off the fingers of their children so that they can beg better poor. And while there may be 1 or 10 percent of the Indian population that is middle class by USA and EU standards, (and there may not be that), it doesn't change the fact that everyone else is seriously poor.
And has been poor for thousands of years. And will remain poor forever as long as the Indians that actually do have the ability to do something about it continue to refuse to even consider such a course of action.
Which brings us to the main difference between India and America, North America above the Rio Grande. These three countries (USA, Canada, and Quebec) were founded on the dream that by righteous living, accountable rule of government and rule of law, the right balance between private and community resources, and a commitment to personal, economic, and religious freedom; everyone would prosper. India has no cultural commitment to having all Indians prosper. Just the opposite; Indian society is set up so that there would be four economic castes that determine one's place in the society with no hope of ever advancing. Not now, not in ten thousand years.
So yes, there is a group of technically advanced people who can deliver the IT goods for 20% of the price of the USA or the EU. But it is a slavery-based society. And that fact is never going to go away. It will get more and more uncomfortable for the large corporations because the same technology that allows IT work to be done in the half of the world ruled by despots and slavery allows instant communication of the slave conditions to be constantly fed to the West.
Slavery is a moral issue. Do not underestimate the extent morality will eventually overrule economic considerations. It takes a long time for this to happen, but it always does. The anti-slavery movement in the USA and the EU is just as powerful as the corporate forces there. It simply takes longer to consolidate its force.
When both parties in an international dispute have omnicide technology, they don't quibble over trival issues like who's going to pay who for listening to silly love songs.
In the statement above, the word 'omnicide' refers to the ability to destroy all human life on Earth by choice. Both the Americans and Russians are not going to allow the RIAA vs. AllofMe issue to alter their fundamental relationship nor is either side going to threaten to alter their relationship over such a trival issue. And since the Russians aren't going to shut down AllofMe, and the RIAA doesn't have the ability to make them do so, then the current situation will continue regardless of whether or not the RIAA approves.
I would be curious if you have any proof of this. Or if you can at least point to any evidence that makes it likely to be true.
In the new capitalist Russia, there is never any evidence in the Western sense. However, the fact that AllofMe continues to operate means that they are paying someone off. That is the way that the government functions in Russia according to all the reports in books and newspapers that people have written about doing business in Russia since the end of the USSR. The people from the USA and the EU that have gone to Russia to set up international businesses there have all had similar experiences dealing with the Russian government and the Russian Mafia.
Since AllofMe is a successfull international business based in Russia, one must assume that both the government and the Mafia permit it to continue because the necessary financial arrangements have been made. But is there 'proof' in the legal Western sense? No, of course not. There never is in Russia. This is the way that the world works.
So is it legal under Russian law at the moment, or isn't it?
The people who are running the AllOfMe site are making sizeable financial contributions to the people who decide Russian law. Either through taxes or bribes or a delicate combination of both.
The people who make Russian law also just happen to control 10,000 thermonuclear hydrogen bombs, and the submarines and intercontinental missiles to put them anywhere on earth that they chose to.
This puts them into a different category than the schmuck who is running a campus file-sharing service from a server in his dorm room.
I think that we will find that in the coming years that people will be a lot more tolerant of the little 'cross-the-legal-line' things that the Russians do. They will get a lot more 'understanding' than other peoples in the world who don't just happen to have 10,000 hydrogen bombs.
This RIAA vs. AllOfMe.com affair will go nowhere. For once, the RIAA will just shut-the-fuck-up and quietly back off. Just watch and see.
The one primary wrong assumption of the RIAA is that there is an overwhelming demand for their product that allows them to price it and sell it throughout the world at the levels found in wealthy countries. They assume that people would buy their product at high prices if only the digital filesharing networks were all shut down by either technical or legal methods.
But if they managed to do this then people throughout the world would buy entertainment that is priced at the current levels that 'pirated' Hollywood product (both MPAA and RIAA) is current selling for. In other words, if Hollywood manages to choke off the 'pirates' then people will NOT go back to buying Hollywood product, they will continue to buy whatever entertainment is offered at 'pirate' price levels. People have a wide range of adaptability for cheap entertainment. Hollywood happens to believe that they are the absolute best provider of packaged entertainment in the world only because of the way that the media distribution networks were developed in the 20th century.
If Hollywood continues to pursue a course of breaking the technological distribution of their product at the prices that people are willing to pay (especially in the developing world), then they may find that they CAN'T sell their product anymore even at the 'pirate' prices because people have been forced off of Hollywood product (because of DRM) and are now interested in something else. Something that Hollywood can't control the distibution of.
Hollywood should just get smart and license their entertainment products to the 'pirates' and start getting a piece of the enormous pie that the 'pirate' distribution networks are creating. Yes, of course they will get only, say, 10 cents of a $1.00 (in local equivalent currency) sale, but their market will expand so much that they will still make tons of money. Much more than they are making now in markets where 80% or more of the sales of Hollywood product is done in 'pirate' markets.
But all this is assuming intelligence and business savvy on the part of entertainment industry executives. It is, as P.J. O'Rourke pointed out, like trying to argue logic with your dog.
I thought you guys didn't eat beef, you know, scared cows having the right of way in the streets and all that other stuff that we in USA get taught about India.
All the points above are valid and each will nulify any business plan that Hollywood had planned for this service.
This plan can only work if the films being distributed are:
- Not available from Hollywood. This is great for the thousands of films made in Europe and India that don't get any distribution or review in the USA. The disadvantage of distributing films (or anything in the 'long tail') in this manner is that noone knows which few titles are good, and which of the remaining ones are mediocre.
- Significantly cheaper than the current pre-pressed DVD distribution of blockbusters mode of business. Perhaps an 'eBay'-type of auction for little known titles whereby the highest bid after a day would get the opportunity to pickup the DVD-ROM with the downloaded and formatted film from the video store distribution point. The local video store would get half the auction price for the burning service against a minimum guaranteed price that would be made by the film distributor. Many details need to be worked out, but this major change in business model could work.
Ah, but there's the rub.... It requires a major change in the mentality of the entertainment industry for a major change in the business model to occur. However, we all know that can never happen until they are either all bankrupt (unlikely with receipts at record levels) or some big company like Apple tricks or talks them into it.
I once saw a news story on this topic. That Iranian students were painstakingly reassembling the shredded documents from the occupied US embassy. Looking for evidence against the 'Great Satan' and proof of US control of the Shah's government, and so on.
Then I realized that at the time, Iran was in the mist of a totally insane and extremely bloody war. This shredded paper reconstruction, I realized, was a ploy of the well-connected Iranians to keep their children out of the military at a time when all young men were being indiscriminately slaughtered for a dubious cause. Who cared what results they got? As long as when the war was over their children were alive and well, and could prove that they did important service for the cause that necessiated them being away from the front lines.
Every country does this in every war. The poor bleed, the well-connected read. More power to them.
Unfortunately, I can't play the music that I legally bought. I have to download music from BitTorrent, harming the artists and the record companies.
If you bought the music, you have a lifetime license to listen to the music regardless of the format of the recording. The artists and record companies are not harmed as long as money is going from you to them.
When will I be able to buy JPop and good digital classical recordings online?
Don't bother. Please continue buying CDs. Copy the one song or passage that you are interested in to an audio file format and then donate the physical CD to the local library. Over the next five years about 20 to 30 people will check it out. About two thirds will find nothing of interest. Most of the other people will find it of mild interest. They will make an MP3 copy of the album and maybe listen to parts of it once every few years, which is the equivalent of checking the disk from the library. The remaining few people will find the music exciting and buy more CDs of this type of music, thereby supporting the artists. Several people people enjoy the music considerably, and copy the CD without compensating the artists. But they will 'evangalize' the music to others who will buy the recordings. Donating CDs to the local library is good for the artists and the record companies.
Paramount is making a big mistake even considering selling this items individually at auction. The collection should be kept whole and rented out to people and groups who want to make low-budget Star Trek movies.
Since Star Trek fans are different from ordinary movie audiences in their willingness to pay for any filmed episode even remotely related to this genre, the studio should rent the Star Trek sets to low-budget productions. They own the copyright and would make money off any production that uses the Star Trek motif, logos, and fictional settings.
The reason that they are selling the sets is because they don't plan to make anymore of these films themselves. The individual actors are too expensive or are no longer available due to age (or passing). The promotional costs are too high and the specialized audience too small to justify continued expenditures of $50-$100 million on further 'offical' Star Trek productions.
So let someone else make a new set of films for the fanatic audience. Hire new actors, write new plots, and establish new distribution channels. The biggest cost for new independent Star Trek productions is the elaborate and detailed sets. And these sets are already built, documented, and vacant. The money that could be made by renting these sets for independent productions is greater than the money gained by selling off the props individually. Especially since the individual props can be sold off to the fans for the same price in the future after the market for low-budget ST productions has been fully exploited.
For any other film series, selling off the props makes sense. But Star Trek has never been just any other film series. And selling off the props at this time makes no sense.
Every time one of these back-to-space stories comes up on Slashdot, I'm forced, forced by civic duty to point out that (one) there is nothing on the moon to justify the billions of dollars to be spent going there, (two) space programs are just welfare cadillacs for unemployed aerospace engineers, and (three) spending limited government resources on space jaunts instead of serious R&D on other more urgent problems is a criminal misallocation of government funds and lack of vision on the part of the elected leaders.
There; I've said it...again.
Why? Because it needs to be said. Every time that this topic comes up.
No you can troll me and send absurd replies about how much positive results come from the research into space development, how this and that common household thing was originally developed to be used by astronauts. Hell, why not give me a shot of 'Man's Destiny To Explore' while you're at it? I've heard it all before from the Slashdot's Moonbeams. It's all bullshit, and you know it. It all just gets used to make Islam stonger among the billions of young people around the world who know intutively from their daily lives that wasting money on space is nothing more than a corrupt Western-American imperialist fantasy. Seriously, all this stuff gets used against us without our being aware of it.
Leave space exploration to Hollywood where it belongs.
Slashdot Mirror
Moon exploration is nothing more than madness. The people involved are doing it to pad their pockets with huge no-low bid contracts.
First of all, there is nothing on the moon. No life, no water, no diamonds, no exotic metals, no oil, no guns, no women, no Jesus, nothing. Nothing worth the hundreds of billions of dollars that will be spent going back there.
Second, there are serious issues and problems here on earth that demand the resources that are to be wasted on this moon and space exploration nonsense. Things like global climate change and dwindling easy oil availablity and overpopulation. The people who are seriously planning to spend billions of other people's money on space exploration madness have been bribed into believing that the problems listed above simply don't exist, or are 'liberal propaganda'. They are deluded fools living in a purchased fantasy world. If you're young and intellegent, then you shouldn't be paying attention to them. Fools die when the fantasy collapses; smart people adapt to reality as it actually is. Be a smart person for a change.
Now finally to all the Slashdot community people who will tell me about how great it is that we are finally going back into real space exploration and about the minute details of obscure technologies that will be enhanced by the expenditure of billions of dollars (borrowed from foreigners and simply just thrown onto the already huge national debt) pissed away on space exploration, I say this:
Take a leave of absence from your job or school, your MUD, and your PC. Get a passport and a ticket to someplace in the developing world. Go someplace that it's cheap to live and where a large number of people speak a language that you understand. * I suggest India for Americans * and travel around. Stay in cheap local hotels and hostels, take the local transportation, talk to the locals in the coffee shops, talk to the other travelers. Do it until you actually begin to feel comfortable (or at least not stressed to extremes of paranoia and xenophobia).
Then return home to live that you used to live and see how weird everything is in the USA. And then get back on Slashdot and tell me with a straight face again about how much we really need space travel and moon exploration. The subject will have come up again by then.
The various world space programs are nothing more than giant welfare programs for pseudo-engineers and techno-nerds who are too stupid, narcissistic, greedy, and selfish to be able to apply their skills, training, and experience (and vision) to real-world problems that affect real-world people.
In the words of William Shatner: "Get a life"!
This is just another foolish idea that the desperate community of download entrepreneurs are trying to get past the cement-heads of the MPAA. All they can get currently are cinema dregs. No one is going to want pay to download junk when they can download good quality DIVx titles from the unlicensed distributors for free. And the entrepreneurs need big profitable download numbers to get the studios to offer popular big name titles. This is another 'zombie' company; already dead and doesn't know it yet.
So why would the studios want paid downloads? They can distribute DVDs inexpensively and profitably to the video outlets that have proliferated widely in the US and developed world. And they generally get the cost of the film product covered through the initial theatre release (where 90% of the box office goes to the studio for the first few weeks of release and 50% of the viewers chose to see the new movie). What does the studio have to gain from paid downloads? Pratically nothing.
Paid downloads are good for films that don't get wide DVD or theatre release. Brilliant little foreign films, etc... But if noone knows about them, then there is no demand. No demand means no paid downloads. Eight dollars isn't cheap and three hours of download time is a high opportunity cost to pay for a bozo film. Three hours spend downloading a turkey is three hours spent that wasn't downloading a good film. It's so much easier just to go to the DVD store in the local supermarket and pick up a six month old title for much less cost in dollars and download time.
Nor could you convince foreign directors to release their films in the USA or other countries as downloads. These guys are very traditional and want their films to be seen in theaters; they don't even like DVDs. The more that the download entrepeneurs are able to pressure them to license their 'vanity' films for download, the less likelyhood that they will be pressed into DVDs. They will be limited to their local national market and whatever government subsidies that they can hussle from their local cultural ministers. Which means boring films, which means fewer people taking a chance on downloading them regardless of the reviews in specialized film magazines.
All in all this is a dumb idea. The only thing that will work is the only thing that is currently working. Which is people crafting their favorite new films into DIVx format 'illegally' and posting them for download on the P2P sites. Eventually the MPAA will have to come to terms with the P2P community, on the terms of the P2P community, and accept whatever residual fees that the P2P community considers it appropriate for the studios to have. In the same manner that the RIAA came to a partial truce with the P2P community with iTunes.
It will take a long time because these guys are exceptionally thick in the head department. Which means we have to wait for a lot of dumb zombie companies like this one to fail before any real progress gets made.
Since this is Hong Kong, one must wonder if they are looking for pirated materials in order to wipe out their competition, or are they looking for something new to pirate that hasn't as yet received wide exposure.
The idea that the children of Hong Kong are being sent on a crusade to supplement the RIAA is absurd, and should not be taken on face value.
Perhaps the Hong Kong politicians who have received gifts from the pirates along with honorariums (to cover expenses, of course) from the RIAA need to show everyone involved on both sides that they are making 'a sincere effort' to address the 'problem'.
The most amazing thing is that it is assumed that Slashdot readers have health insurance or general medical coverage.
A large percentage of those living in the United States don't.
When you're young, it doesn't matter because young people don't get sick often. They only need health care as a result from doing stupid things and getting injured. (Or, if they are female, they need medical care access to avoid unwanted pregnancies. But how many Slashdaughters are female?).
If you get sick in the USA and don't have any very expensive health insurance, you get fucked. Tossed out like a used tissue. Simple fact of life there.
Their bodies were physically in the UK but the hearts, minds, and souls were in the same distant land that their mullah came from. Their mullah convinced them to murder random fellow citizens. English people don't go around convincing other English people randomly in order to serve the demented and paranoid fantasies of bizarre religions.
My point is that there were many people in the Islamic community in that English town who knew that these guys were insane and dangerous. But they said nothing, either because they were afraid (not likely) or because they were in sympathy with the criminals due to a misplaced sense of religion. They, the people who knew and didn't warn, are the ones who are responsible for all of the bad laws and unwarranted arrests and suspicion that befell the English muslims after the bombings happened.
You either are civilized or you're not. If you are, then you have a greater loyality to the other civilized people of your community regardless of their race and nationality. And you don't owe the murderers anything, least of all silence, even if they are part of your church or mosque.
I am so tired of chickenshit Slashdotters telling me that the main points of my arguments are invalid because of irrevelevant details are obscured.
Grow up.
Your attempt at irony is in extremely poor taste, even for a Slashdot nerd.
The peoples of London, Madrid and New York were murdered at random by monsters who came to those places from distant lands where it is common to settle minor disputes by horrific acts of violence. The peoples of London, Madrid, and New York had learned from their history the futility of attempting to settle disputes through mass murder. They developed civilized methods of conflict resolution like fair court systems. They restrained themselves from mass murder in ways that are completely unknown to the subhumans who came to these cities from the disfunctional lands with the intention of genocidal slaughter.
The resulting actions after suffering horrible murder by the citizens of London, Madrid, and New York against the peoples who come from disfunctional cultures are not racist or discriminatory, but reasonable and rational acts of self-defense from the people who come to their cities with the intent of murder. It is sad that the good, law-abiding, and civilized peoples who came to the great cities of civilization in order to escape from the madness of disfuctional societies suffer in the West due to the actions of monsters.
But, it is the responsibility of the good, law-abiding, and civilized peoples from the disfuctional lands to seperate the monsters from their own society when they arrive in the civilized world. If the civilized people of a foreign culture can not or will not isolate and neutralize the monsters who live in their community, then they all will bear responsibility for the crimes that these monsters commit against the rest of the citizens. The entire community will suffer. That is the way that the world works.
The citizens of the cities that have suffered from the crimes that subhumans commit are not responsible for their inability to tell monsters from civilized people among those have come to their cities from distant lands.
If you don't want to expose yourself and your business to random acts of extreme violence in public places, then don't locate your self or your business in the places where the locals have a habit of setting off bombs in public places. These horrible crimes happen because the local leadership (i.e. the mullahs, not the government) encourages the people to do these things.
When everyone who is important decides not to invest money and resources in places where minor theological disputes are handled by putting bombs in public areas, then over the course of time those places will become poor, disinvested, and irrelevant to the world. Their peoples will become marginalized and unimportant. No one will invest there, no one will visit there, and no one will care when they are hit by the natural disasters that decimate the backward and uncivilized peoples of the world.
There's plenty of money and opportunity in the civilized world. Why bother to risk death and dismemberment by trying to make chump change off the barbarians?
Seriously, you got caught in some asshole's juvenile prank. Defacing a public resource (wikipedia) to reflect an immature joke at the expense of the next person to use that resource.
So apologise, repair the mistake, and move on. Just because some jerk doesn't understand the usefullness of an open source public resource doesn't change the utility of that resource. And anyone who is 'offended' by the prank needs to understand this. This is like sueing the streetcar company for racism because some pissant spray-painted a racist remark on a streetcar. The correct response is to find the person responsible if possible, and if not, then to teach your own children why civilized people don't do such things.
the BSD telnet client, which is based on the PD NCSA telnet client. ...NCSA telnet client
In order to use Linux instead of Windows, a person has to spend hundreds of hours relearning everything that they have already mastered about computer usage. If you don't know (and don't have the time) to learn the difference between a BSD telnet client or a PD NCSA telnet client then using Linux is simply not an option.
Linux users consistently underestimate the extent that their background computer knowledge is needed or used when comparing Windows to Linux. It is this requirement of computer background knowledge which is the main reason preventing the general public from switching to Linux from Windows.
Myself, I will continue to use Windows 98 forever because it allows direct access to the Pentium input/output ports. Further versions of Windows don't allow this, and I need it. Plus I don't have to depend on the whim of Microsoft to get the OS installed and running. The smaller that the version of Linux is that you install, the more computer knowledge that you need to make it work. And I don't get paid for learning about the computer tools that I use, only for the results that get produced by them.
HP had to pay this person tens of millions of dollars just to get her to go away. At the same time they were firing long-term dedicated employees and offering them re-hirement only as perma-temps with no benefits! This was Carly's policy. The woman is a thug and thief. Good riddance.
Now I realize that this standard operating proceedure for America's managerial class. But it doesn't change the fact that it is insane. We had all thought that this plantation mentality didn't hold with the high-tech industry. Boy were we wrong! They wiped out the entire industries stock value and threw away the best workers like used toilet paper.
Carly is simply the flash point of this madness. At least she wasn't assassinated like Kenneth Lay in order to keep her from talking about where all the money went and which politicians got paid off under the table.
This wouldn't be necessary if the Iraqis could simply accept the reality that they are a backward and conquered people. Then the could start (re-)building their country up to modern standards under the guidance of the Americans. After the new infrastructure is in place and the country finally has the ability to stand alone, then and only then would any reasonable people start the process of expelling the foreign rulers.
But not the Arabs. Arab military strategy consists of taunting the enemy into invading with absurd bravado, insults, and vague threats barely plausible enough to take seriously. Then there is the massive run and hide while the enemy invades and conquers the country with surprising ease. Only then does the Arab defense begin. The enemy is constantly attacked by a series of unbelievably duplicitious,barbaric, and savage sneak attacks like wrapping children in high explosives and sending them to the enemy troops begging for food. Or by pretending to be allies of the conquerors and then stabbing them in the back at the first opportunity. The underlining principle is to make the occupation so difficult for the enemy that they will move on to somewhere else more hospitable.
This strategy has worked for the past three thousand years because nobody wants to actually be in the lands where the Arabs live. It's insanely hot (120 degrees Fahrenheit days are not uncommon)and there is little water or shelter. Historically, people only invaded Arab lands to control the location which is to contol access to other more important places. So, yes, the strategy works. [It fails horribly when the conqueror has resolved to never, never leave regardless of the long-term consequences, as is the case with the Israelis. In that case, the Arab strategy of constant pinprick attacks through instances of sub-human behavior results in the eventual long-term annihilation of the people who can not understand the reality of their situation and make peace.]
But it leaves the Arabs permanently poor and backward because no one can trust them. It also inflicts upon them a permanent crypto-fascist religious government for whom it is in the best interest that the people be always backwards and poor. Other countries chose insane leaders, start wars, get their ass kicked, have the leaders executed, and return to a properous peace. But not the Arabs. They are in a 'one step forward, one sideways, one step backwards' lock-cycle forever. After a thousand years, the unreality becomes an integral part of the culture and it becomes impossible to adapt to change.
Will this strategy work on the Americans? Sure. Primarily, they are in the Arab lands for the oil. Secondarily, they are there as an excuse to enrich their military-industrial complex by means of transfering enormous amounts of tax money to the corporations that put up the money for the current American leadership to gain power. There is also the vague belief on the part of many Americans in the hinterlands of that country that the Arabs can be converted to Christianity if only enough missionaries could go over and have 'heart-to-heart' talks with them. They all do worship the same God.
But the easy oil and the money needed for the occupation will run out at the same time. The Americans will change their lifestyles and raise their gas prices. They will leave the Arab countries as everyone else has before them: with 'thousand-yard stares' and random mumblings of incomprehension and curses. They will accomplish nothing because there is nothing to accomplish in the Arab lands. They will waste a vast fortune, leave nothing, and bring home another generation of amputatees and flag-waving post-traumatic psychopaths with bizarre illnesses. The only legacy of this war is just thousands of legless and armless veterans begging outside of the door of the Wall-Mart. And billions for the offshore bank accounts of Haliburton's and Bechtel's management class.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
Not to belittle my wonderful neighbors too much, but anything that happens in Vancouver, Washington (not Vancouver BC) should not be taken seriously. The place is on the north side of the Columbia River in the Portland Oregon metro area. Oregon has no sales tax but high income taxes. Consequently Vancouver is filled with people who want the cheap income and property taxes and to also hop across the river to buy everything with no sales tax.
... Or, it may be some guy who twenty years ago got caught unireating ('taking a whiz' in the American slang) behind a bar or gas station in the middle of the night. Or got caught kissing a 17-year-old girl when he was 18. Or got caught swimming naked in a lake in the woods on a hot summer day. Or, lots of other stupid harmless things that the Americans lump into the category of sex offences that have nothing to do with sex offences.
Also, Portland tends to be liberal, environmental, and moderately progressive while Vancouver is packed with pious, self-righteous, bible-thumping, overweight, narrow-minded freaks who believe that they have managed to keep their own little piece of Alabama pure while surrounded by sinners and liberals.
So some guy found a WiFi hot spot. And he parked his car there. Every day. for three months.
So what?
And he's a 'sex offender' too. Well, in Vancouver, a sex offender may a guy who has done some seriously bad things with his
Or maybe he really is a super predator who actually was endangering the community by...what was it?, oh, yes... parking his car and using his computer in it.
OK, I'll bite. We got pilotless aircraft flying low and slow over neighborhoods in Los Angeles, spying on people, and the authorities say that it's for "finding missing children and lost hikers? C'mon on. The police in LA would only spend all this money on one thing:
"Nigger Control!"
To put it bluntly, in their words [in hushed whispers], not mine.
Do they really have such a big problem that they need all this Kafkaesque technology? Or are they really just a bunch of paranoid psychopathic cowboys with too much money to spend on death machines?
All this weird 'us vs. them' paranoia that infects the wealthy people of Los Angeles (more than anywhere else on Earth) is getting to be rather embarrassing. Do they really believe that their maids are gardeners are going to rise up and slaughter them in the middle of the night?
Get a grip, people, and come back down to the real world.
I'm beginning to think that the entire L.A. techno-fascist police state mentality is directly related to the local Hollywood fantasy mentality. Only it is the inverted nightmare that grows out of too much fantasy, too much money, and too many drugs.
Is there any other place where people live like this? God, let's hope that it doesn't spread.
For example consider the amount of money needed to win an election, ensuring all candidates are either independently wealthy or in the pockets of their campaign contributors)
Actually the cost of an election has gone way down, in America that is. Only a fraction of the money that used to be spent lying to the electorate is now necessary to bribe the programmer of the Diebold election machine. Pay off the programmer and you win: 51% to 49%, each and every time.
Another real issue not spoken about is that India is seriously poor. I mean really dirt poor. I mean people chopping off the fingers of their children so that they can beg better poor. And while there may be 1 or 10 percent of the Indian population that is middle class by USA and EU standards, (and there may not be that), it doesn't change the fact that everyone else is seriously poor.
And has been poor for thousands of years. And will remain poor forever as long as the Indians that actually do have the ability to do something about it continue to refuse to even consider such a course of action.
Which brings us to the main difference between India and America, North America above the Rio Grande. These three countries (USA, Canada, and Quebec) were founded on the dream that by righteous living, accountable rule of government and rule of law, the right balance between private and community resources, and a commitment to personal, economic, and religious freedom; everyone would prosper. India has no cultural commitment to having all Indians prosper. Just the opposite; Indian society is set up so that there would be four economic castes that determine one's place in the society with no hope of ever advancing. Not now, not in ten thousand years.
So yes, there is a group of technically advanced people who can deliver the IT goods for 20% of the price of the USA or the EU. But it is a slavery-based society. And that fact is never going to go away. It will get more and more uncomfortable for the large corporations because the same technology that allows IT work to be done in the half of the world ruled by despots and slavery allows instant communication of the slave conditions to be constantly fed to the West.
Slavery is a moral issue. Do not underestimate the extent morality will eventually overrule economic considerations. It takes a long time for this to happen, but it always does. The anti-slavery movement in the USA and the EU is just as powerful as the corporate forces there. It simply takes longer to consolidate its force.
When both parties in an international dispute have omnicide technology, they don't quibble over trival issues like who's going to pay who for listening to silly love songs.
In the statement above, the word 'omnicide' refers to the ability to destroy all human life on Earth by choice. Both the Americans and Russians are not going to allow the RIAA vs. AllofMe issue to alter their fundamental relationship nor is either side going to threaten to alter their relationship over such a trival issue. And since the Russians aren't going to shut down AllofMe, and the RIAA doesn't have the ability to make them do so, then the current situation will continue regardless of whether or not the RIAA approves.
I would be curious if you have any proof of this. Or if you can at least point to any evidence that makes it likely to be true.
In the new capitalist Russia, there is never any evidence in the Western sense. However, the fact that AllofMe continues to operate means that they are paying someone off. That is the way that the government functions in Russia according to all the reports in books and newspapers that people have written about doing business in Russia since the end of the USSR. The people from the USA and the EU that have gone to Russia to set up international businesses there have all had similar experiences dealing with the Russian government and the Russian Mafia.
Since AllofMe is a successfull international business based in Russia, one must assume that both the government and the Mafia permit it to continue because the necessary financial arrangements have been made. But is there 'proof' in the legal Western sense? No, of course not. There never is in Russia. This is the way that the world works.
So is it legal under Russian law at the moment, or isn't it?
The people who are running the AllOfMe site are making sizeable financial contributions to the people who decide Russian law. Either through taxes or bribes or a delicate combination of both.
The people who make Russian law also just happen to control 10,000 thermonuclear hydrogen bombs, and the submarines and intercontinental missiles to put them anywhere on earth that they chose to.
This puts them into a different category than the schmuck who is running a campus file-sharing service from a server in his dorm room.
I think that we will find that in the coming years that people will be a lot more tolerant of the little 'cross-the-legal-line' things that the Russians do. They will get a lot more 'understanding' than other peoples in the world who don't just happen to have 10,000 hydrogen bombs.
This RIAA vs. AllOfMe.com affair will go nowhere. For once, the RIAA will just shut-the-fuck-up and quietly back off. Just watch and see.
The one primary wrong assumption of the RIAA is that there is an overwhelming demand for their product that allows them to price it and sell it throughout the world at the levels found in wealthy countries. They assume that people would buy their product at high prices if only the digital filesharing networks were all shut down by either technical or legal methods.
But if they managed to do this then people throughout the world would buy entertainment that is priced at the current levels that 'pirated' Hollywood product (both MPAA and RIAA) is current selling for. In other words, if Hollywood manages to choke off the 'pirates' then people will NOT go back to buying Hollywood product, they will continue to buy whatever entertainment is offered at 'pirate' price levels. People have a wide range of adaptability for cheap entertainment. Hollywood happens to believe that they are the absolute best provider of packaged entertainment in the world only because of the way that the media distribution networks were developed in the 20th century.
If Hollywood continues to pursue a course of breaking the technological distribution of their product at the prices that people are willing to pay (especially in the developing world), then they may find that they CAN'T sell their product anymore even at the 'pirate' prices because people have been forced off of Hollywood product (because of DRM) and are now interested in something else. Something that Hollywood can't control the distibution of.
Hollywood should just get smart and license their entertainment products to the 'pirates' and start getting a piece of the enormous pie that the 'pirate' distribution networks are creating. Yes, of course they will get only, say, 10 cents of a $1.00 (in local equivalent currency) sale, but their market will expand so much that they will still make tons of money. Much more than they are making now in markets where 80% or more of the sales of Hollywood product is done in 'pirate' markets.
But all this is assuming intelligence and business savvy on the part of entertainment industry executives. It is, as P.J. O'Rourke pointed out, like trying to argue logic with your dog.
A mountain of beef vindaloo,...
I thought you guys didn't eat beef, you know, scared cows having the right of way in the streets and all that other stuff that we in USA get taught about India.
All the points above are valid and each will nulify any business plan that Hollywood had planned for this service.
This plan can only work if the films being distributed are:
- Not available from Hollywood. This is great for the thousands of films made in Europe and India that don't get any distribution or review in the USA. The disadvantage of distributing films (or anything in the 'long tail') in this manner is that noone knows which few titles are good, and which of the remaining ones are mediocre.
- Significantly cheaper than the current pre-pressed DVD distribution of blockbusters mode of business. Perhaps an 'eBay'-type of auction for little known titles whereby the highest bid after a day would get the opportunity to pickup the DVD-ROM with the downloaded and formatted film from the video store distribution point. The local video store would get half the auction price for the burning service against a minimum guaranteed price that would be made by the film distributor. Many details need to be worked out, but this major change in business model could work.
Ah, but there's the rub.... It requires a major change in the mentality of the entertainment industry for a major change in the business model to occur. However, we all know that can never happen until they are either all bankrupt (unlikely with receipts at record levels) or some big company like Apple tricks or talks them into it.
I once saw a news story on this topic. That Iranian students were painstakingly reassembling the shredded documents from the occupied US embassy. Looking for evidence against the 'Great Satan' and proof of US control of the Shah's government, and so on.
Then I realized that at the time, Iran was in the mist of a totally insane and extremely bloody war. This shredded paper reconstruction, I realized, was a ploy of the well-connected Iranians to keep their children out of the military at a time when all young men were being indiscriminately slaughtered for a dubious cause. Who cared what results they got? As long as when the war was over their children were alive and well, and could prove that they did important service for the cause that necessiated them being away from the front lines.
Every country does this in every war. The poor bleed, the well-connected read. More power to them.
Unfortunately, I can't play the music that I legally bought. I have to download music from BitTorrent, harming the artists and the record companies.
If you bought the music, you have a lifetime license to listen to the music regardless of the format of the recording. The artists and record companies are not harmed as long as money is going from you to them.
When will I be able to buy JPop and good digital classical recordings online?
Don't bother. Please continue buying CDs. Copy the one song or passage that you are interested in to an audio file format and then donate the physical CD to the local library. Over the next five years about 20 to 30 people will check it out. About two thirds will find nothing of interest. Most of the other people will find it of mild interest. They will make an MP3 copy of the album and maybe listen to parts of it once every few years, which is the equivalent of checking the disk from the library. The remaining few people will find the music exciting and buy more CDs of this type of music, thereby supporting the artists. Several people people enjoy the music considerably, and copy the CD without compensating the artists. But they will 'evangalize' the music to others who will buy the recordings. Donating CDs to the local library is good for the artists and the record companies.
Paramount is making a big mistake even considering selling this items individually at auction. The collection should be kept whole and rented out to people and groups who want to make low-budget Star Trek movies.
Since Star Trek fans are different from ordinary movie audiences in their willingness to pay for any filmed episode even remotely related to this genre, the studio should rent the Star Trek sets to low-budget productions. They own the copyright and would make money off any production that uses the Star Trek motif, logos, and fictional settings.
The reason that they are selling the sets is because they don't plan to make anymore of these films themselves. The individual actors are too expensive or are no longer available due to age (or passing). The promotional costs are too high and the specialized audience too small to justify continued expenditures of $50-$100 million on further 'offical' Star Trek productions.
So let someone else make a new set of films for the fanatic audience. Hire new actors, write new plots, and establish new distribution channels. The biggest cost for new independent Star Trek productions is the elaborate and detailed sets. And these sets are already built, documented, and vacant. The money that could be made by renting these sets for independent productions is greater than the money gained by selling off the props individually. Especially since the individual props can be sold off to the fans for the same price in the future after the market for low-budget ST productions has been fully exploited.
For any other film series, selling off the props makes sense. But Star Trek has never been just any other film series. And selling off the props at this time makes no sense.
Every time one of these back-to-space stories comes up on Slashdot, I'm forced, forced by civic duty to point out that (one) there is nothing on the moon to justify the billions of dollars to be spent going there, (two) space programs are just welfare cadillacs for unemployed aerospace engineers, and (three) spending limited government resources on space jaunts instead of serious R&D on other more urgent problems is a criminal misallocation of government funds and lack of vision on the part of the elected leaders.
There; I've said it...again.
Why? Because it needs to be said. Every time that this topic comes up.
No you can troll me and send absurd replies about how much positive results come from the research into space development, how this and that common household thing was originally developed to be used by astronauts. Hell, why not give me a shot of 'Man's Destiny To Explore' while you're at it? I've heard it all before from the Slashdot's Moonbeams. It's all bullshit, and you know it. It all just gets used to make Islam stonger among the billions of young people around the world who know intutively from their daily lives that wasting money on space is nothing more than a corrupt Western-American imperialist fantasy. Seriously, all this stuff gets used against us without our being aware of it.
Leave space exploration to Hollywood where it belongs.
Thank you,