SKYLAB de-orbited while we had no manned space program, we were between Apollo and the Shuttle when Skylab fell to Earth.
Now we have the ISS, and guess what? We now have no manned space program, because the Shuttle has been retired.
My guess is that we still won't have any manned space flights by 2020 (ONLY 9 years from now), so they will let it fall to Earth again.
Then, some years later (maybe 2025), they will want a space station again, and we'll have some manned flights, and then they will convince taxpayers to spend a few trillion on some other station, only to deorbit that too, after a decade or so.
We are we so foolish as to allow this over and over again?
I swear, I get more life out a car that costs $4,000 than NASA does out of a space system that costs $100 Billion. (I have a 1979 Diesel Rabbit that took to the roads before the Shuttle ever flew, and will probably *still* be on the road after Dragon/Orion has been retired).
Listen, the thing is worth several hundred billion dollars. Sell it to the Chinese, who obviously would LIKE to have their own space station, divide the money between the partners based on the percentages they spent to build it, and America gets to pay off some of its debt to China, maybe we can even figure out how to make a profit.
Seriously, how stupid is America to spend billions and billions (thanks Carl) on this thing, and in the middle of a huge debt-crisis, decide that all that taxpayer money is OK to throw away?
I say we deorbit Congress instead. Let those guys burn up. We'd be doing the country a huge favor.
Wait... wait.... There are hackers in New Jersey? I think the Feds have the wrong people....
Very likely script kiddies bragging on IRC that they are Anon just to get 37Yt3 status. OSD round two, crack a few heads to make the real culprits decide to lay low for a while.
Seems to me that hackers need a lobbying group. Work within the system, I mean, it's totally corrupt anyhow, take advantage of that. Nobody on wall street ever got arrested for stealing trillions of dollars, and that's because they greased the right palms. Hackers seem to be *too* moral, which is why they get busted.
Thank you. I was about to make the same joke about Wave Motion Energy, and could it power a spaceship made from the remnants of the Yamato, but, you beat me to it.
I think back to my childhood, hearing that trumpet sound and hearing Orion say "Wave Motion Energy at 100%"
But if Rupert Murdoch's people had ordered this done to someone, and the orders came right from the top, and it was done to sell lots of newspapers, nobody would go to jail, and all that would happen is the parent company's stock would dip for a few days.
It's amazing that we are more than happy to see this sociopath get 18 years, but when big business gets away with ruining the lives of hundreds, or millions (as is the case with banks), and nobody does anything, and we're not out there with torches and pitchforks.
Not as close as Taco, but still there. It was magnificent. After that, we went to the Warbird Museum and flew in a C-47 WWII Transport that was used to drop paratroopers in Normandy, D-Day.
In all, a great trip. I hate Florida, but the KSC/Warbird was all worth it.
There's NO solution to this. Sooner or later everything is offensive to someone, just ask the creators of South Park. What are you going to name something then? X9So4TeW? And I'm sure someone's going to be offended by that as well. Heck, some people don't even like certain characters in the alphabet.
The internet and unix have all been created/expanded upon over the years by college students with warped senses of humor: Unwanted email is called "Spam", "Python" itself comes from Monty Python, File Transfers used to be done with "Kermit", and the list goes on.
Christians were offended that Unix uses "deamons", so, do we have to rename those to "Angeals"?
The point is: You can't give something a non-offensive name, because the name is in the eye of the beholder, and they will interpret a meaning to it that even the original author didn't intend.
Admittedly, in this case, the author was deliberately being screwy, but, that's the way computer geeks work, as shown above. If you don't like it, don't use his library.
But if Linus Torvalds had named his kernal "ElmosOnFire", would that have stopped any of us from using it? I don't think so.
The TSA is going to eventually get to the point where they determine that passengers are too dangerous to let on planes, but people have to fly, so the only solution (without having everyone fly naked) is to drug all passengers.
Airlines will love this idea, no more water, peanuts, or stewardesses needed. They will save a fortune, and the drugs to put everyone to sleep will be funded by your tax dollars. Profit!
And of course, the drug will be manufactured in the home state of whatever Senator proposes this idea, and it will turn out that he's a major shareholder or on the Board.
Meantime, since the drug is being administered by below-minimum-wage illegal immigrant workers (i.e, the TSA), there will be a flurry of overdose deaths, particularly concerning kids, but, as the Supreme Court has ruled, you can no longer sue the government for wrongful death. What an "interesting" time we live in.
Que Sam Jackson shouting "I am sick of these muthaf'ing bombs on this mothaf'ing plane!"
Alternate joke: After just having watched some anime, the TSA is worried about Psyonic attacks on planes, so they will be detaining and searching cute, underage girls with long wavy hair and large eyes.
Meantime, the Republicans want to cut *every* social service, but won't cut a single dollar of "defense" spending, which is how the US Army spends more per year ($20 billion) providing Air Conditioning in Afghanistan, than NASA's entire budget.
We cannot sustain fighting three or more Wars (I've lost count), without new taxes. And since nobody wants more taxes, the wars must end. What happened to Rumsfeld promising that we'd get Iraq's Oil, and it would pay for the war???
Is that they have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and... I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way... (Steve Jobs, commenting on Microsoft in PBS's Triumph of the Nerds documentary).
Even John Dvorack thinks that MS is brain-dead. He correctly pointed out YEARS AGO (more than a decade) that if Microsoft *really* employs the best and the brightest, as their PR claims, why is their software so backwards? He took an example of using the "copy" function.
When you drag a bunch of icons to copy stuff from one drive to another, it blindly starts the copy, it doesn't check if there's enough space, it doesn't check if there's a file already at the destination with the same name, so, if this copy is going to take hours, you have to monitor it for any pop-up alerts. Because any of these issues will stop the copy dead. It's 2011 guys, why is "copy" still a function like it's 1950? Is this *really* what the best and brightest can achieve?
MS needs a top to bottom overhaul. They are too mired in management, and even brilliant engineers can't rise to the top in such an environment. MS's greatest innovations came from stealing other people's ideas.
These days, people are smart enough to NOT approach Microsoft to give a demo of new technology, so MS has less and less people to steal from, hence their perceived lack of innovation.
If MS wants to innovate, they are better off separating into two companies -- one that serves their corporate interests, making "Enterprise" software, reliable and dull, that gets updated every 7 years, while the other creates glitzy consumer stuff that can crash, but at least it's cutting-edge, and churns out new OS releases yearly.
And while I've got your attention; what's with the crap in the summary? Bill Gates doesn't have an engineering background, he's a college drop-out. He's not even visionary -- every idea he's ever had was stolen from someone else. Don't get me wrong, I admire his tenacity and drive to dominate the software industry, but that's been his ONLY vision - to be bigger than every other company. Well, he did that, until Google came along.
By the time guilt or innocence *is* proven, the equipment seized becomes useless.
I've seen cases where it can take a decade for things to resolve to the point where you can try and re-obtain your equipment, but by then, who bothers? The hard-drives have seized, the pentium II has since been replaced by the pentium 4, and the OS is 5 generations behind.
Once the law takes your equipment, it's gone. Unless you have some emotional link to a particular computer, it's not worth the effort, paperwork, expense, and headache required to retrieve your now-useless, and very likely terminally damaged, equipment.
You don't have to build a carb out of steel -- that's current car thinking, where they only way to fix it is to replace it -- carbs can be cleaned, rebuilt with a needle and gasket kit, and put back into service as if new. And unless it's filled up with gunk, carbs rarely fail.
From your entire post, I can tell you've never even looked at a carb -- anybody with half a brain can take one apart, clean and rebuild, and get it working again.
And if you think those electronically controlled cars are somehow better, just wait until they start rusting and sending the wrong voltages to the computer. Or your crank position sensor goes, stalling the car at every stop sign. I'd rather have a car that *I* can fix, than be a prisoner of the dealership.
What's with the inflammatory headline? And why is China's "justice system" considered to be any more broken than the USA's?
Didn't we used to hear that Kevin Mitnik wasn't even allowed to use the phone while in prison because officials were worried he could whistle into the mouthpiece and launch nuclear missiles?
If anything, the Chinese handed down a reasonable sentence for industrial espionage, because that's what this case is. In fact, it's a more reasonable sentence than some handed out here in the "land of the free".
Hackers have declared war, it's time to take back our internet from the corporate fools and government cronies who have polluted it.
Thank the deities that there's someone out there keeping the online universe interesting. Not since Operation Sundevil have I been this excited to see the outcome.
Knight Lighting and Phiber Optik have been awaiting this day when the shackles have been thrown off and the geeks shall inherit the Earth.
Only a third to a fourth of the hay was cut with only 10 percent of the crop harvested in some areas. Orchard yields ranged from barren to moderate but enough grains, wheat, and potatoes were harvested to prevent a famine but hardships did occur. Farmers ended up selling their livestock as their crops didn't yield enough. There were reports of people eating raccoons and pigeons.
And this is when the global population was low. Now we are close to the breaking point of what we can produce versus how many mouths to feed. Remember the 2008 Rice Shortage?
It could be that without a continuous good harvest, there will be populations that will simply starve to death if there's not enough solar activity to grow crops.
Industrialization has already wiped out many species of plants and animals. A worldwide famine could also present a huge danger to species on the endangered list. At some point, we will chew up enough resources that the planet will not recover.
When we have fished the oceans to empty sea, and the land will no longer sustain crops, only then will we discover how foolish we've been.
They would already be doing it (and perhaps they *are* and we just don't know). Since China tends to favor the Chinese, I think they would abduct populations and turn them into "Soylent Green" to feed their own population first.
Secondly, there's ALREADY a cheap supply of labor right next door to them, it's called North Korea. The only problem is that NK has zero infrastructure. I think they are waiting for the current regime to die, and then they will waltz in and take over. And it will actually be a good thing for the citizens, as the Chinese might build the infrastructure needed. In which case NK citizens might get things like running water and electricity.
We've seen in WWII that the Germans used slave labor in underground facilities, I'm sure the Chinese are aware of this and could probably pull it off, if it weren't for all that pesky satellite monitoring.
While life is valuable here in western countries (consider what Americans spend in the final year of their lives for a few more months of breathing), elsewhere, and depending upon where you are, life can be bought for as little as a few hundred.
That life transported elsewhere can then be bought and sold for profit, depending upon local laws. It's a weird world we live in, but I'm surprised no one in China has yet thought about selling organs from cheaply produced Nigerian babies.
As population rises, and an increasing number of people get older, I predict a huge underground market for body parts, and since China is swimming with people, and in Nigeria, life is cheap. There's potential here....
Funny, but the technology existed in the early 70's to make the greatest space fantasy film of all time on a mere nine million dollar budget.
I think what's really got him is that his computer-based word processor can't write a decent script by itself. It's lacking the AI that his typewriter had in college. It's lacking the imagination to create anything substantial.
Please George, find a garage sale, and buy a used, beat-up Royal Typewriter, and sit down and write a real script with characters, using nothing but the imagination inside you. Whatever spark of creativity you once had must still exist down there inside you, you've just lost touch with how to access it.
Maybe you need to THROW AWAY all that technology that's got you so befuddled, and go back to something more genuine. You've forgotten that it's the humans in the story the audience is concerned with, not how glitzy you can make the spaceships look.
Story first, then figure out how to film it. It's the most basic rule in all of film-making, and you've forgotten it.
I think what he means is that it's the death of IT in America.
I mean, with virtualization, "cloud" services can allow your admins to be in a cheaper country, like India. Since you never get to touch your hardware, your admins don't need to touch the hardware anymore either.
It's yet another way for management to increase profitability by lowering costs by firing everyone except themselves, who all get big fat bonuses.
What the "cloud" really provides is yet another way to make the rich richer, and everyone else poorer.
Never mind that they are handing the crown jewels over to a bunch of people, who, should the shit hit the fan, are more than happy to steal all that data and keep it for themselves, leaving their rich corporate masters with nothing.
It's akin to giving the serfs all the weapons to protect the castle, and then the king thinking he's somehow safe even though no guards are loyal to him.
Greed has truly fucked up this country. We're going to find, in less than a decade, that we've given away everything that made this nation great, and we'll be left with very little to show for it. Rome was smarter than we were.
Slashdot Mirror
SKYLAB de-orbited while we had no manned space program, we were between Apollo and the Shuttle when Skylab fell to Earth.
Now we have the ISS, and guess what? We now have no manned space program, because the Shuttle has been retired.
My guess is that we still won't have any manned space flights by 2020 (ONLY 9 years from now), so they will let it fall to Earth again.
Then, some years later (maybe 2025), they will want a space station again, and we'll have some manned flights, and then they will convince taxpayers to spend a few trillion on some other station, only to deorbit that too, after a decade or so.
We are we so foolish as to allow this over and over again?
I swear, I get more life out a car that costs $4,000 than NASA does out of a space system that costs $100 Billion. (I have a 1979 Diesel Rabbit that took to the roads before the Shuttle ever flew, and will probably *still* be on the road after Dragon/Orion has been retired).
Listen, the thing is worth several hundred billion dollars. Sell it to the Chinese, who obviously would LIKE to have their own space station, divide the money between the partners based on the percentages they spent to build it, and America gets to pay off some of its debt to China, maybe we can even figure out how to make a profit.
Seriously, how stupid is America to spend billions and billions (thanks Carl) on this thing, and in the middle of a huge debt-crisis, decide that all that taxpayer money is OK to throw away?
I say we deorbit Congress instead. Let those guys burn up. We'd be doing the country a huge favor.
Now if only they could find that 12 Billion that went missing in Iraq. Yeah, whatever happened to *that* ?
Wait... wait.... There are hackers in New Jersey?
I think the Feds have the wrong people....
Very likely script kiddies bragging on IRC that they are Anon just to get 37Yt3 status. OSD round two, crack a few heads to make the real culprits decide to lay low for a while.
Seems to me that hackers need a lobbying group. Work within the system, I mean, it's totally corrupt anyhow, take advantage of that. Nobody on wall street ever got arrested for stealing trillions of dollars, and that's because they greased the right palms. Hackers seem to be *too* moral, which is why they get busted.
Thank you. I was about to make the same joke about Wave Motion Energy, and could it power a spaceship made from the remnants of the Yamato, but, you beat me to it.
I think back to my childhood, hearing that trumpet sound and hearing Orion say "Wave Motion Energy at 100%"
That's still my favorite tv show.... ever.
But if Rupert Murdoch's people had ordered this done to someone, and the orders came right from the top, and it was done to sell lots of newspapers, nobody would go to jail, and all that would happen is the parent company's stock would dip for a few days.
It's amazing that we are more than happy to see this sociopath get 18 years, but when big business gets away with ruining the lives of hundreds, or millions (as is the case with banks), and nobody does anything, and we're not out there with torches and pitchforks.
What a world.
Not as close as Taco, but still there. It was magnificent. After that, we went to the Warbird Museum and flew in a C-47 WWII Transport that was used to drop paratroopers in Normandy, D-Day.
In all, a great trip. I hate Florida, but the KSC/Warbird was all worth it.
There's NO solution to this. Sooner or later everything is offensive to someone, just ask the creators of South Park. What are you going to name something then? X9So4TeW? And I'm sure someone's going to be offended by that as well. Heck, some people don't even like certain characters in the alphabet.
The internet and unix have all been created/expanded upon over the years by college students with warped senses of humor: Unwanted email is called "Spam", "Python" itself comes from Monty Python, File Transfers used to be done with "Kermit", and the list goes on.
Christians were offended that Unix uses "deamons", so, do we have to rename those to "Angeals"?
The point is: You can't give something a non-offensive name, because the name is in the eye of the beholder, and they will interpret a meaning to it that even the original author didn't intend.
Admittedly, in this case, the author was deliberately being screwy, but, that's the way computer geeks work, as shown above. If you don't like it, don't use his library.
But if Linus Torvalds had named his kernal "ElmosOnFire", would that have stopped any of us from using it? I don't think so.
The TSA is going to eventually get to the point where they determine that passengers are too dangerous to let on planes, but people have to fly, so the only solution (without having everyone fly naked) is to drug all passengers.
Airlines will love this idea, no more water, peanuts, or stewardesses needed. They will save a fortune, and the drugs to put everyone to sleep will be funded by your tax dollars. Profit!
And of course, the drug will be manufactured in the home state of whatever Senator proposes this idea, and it will turn out that he's a major shareholder or on the Board.
Meantime, since the drug is being administered by below-minimum-wage illegal immigrant workers (i.e, the TSA), there will be a flurry of overdose deaths, particularly concerning kids, but, as the Supreme Court has ruled, you can no longer sue the government for wrongful death. What an "interesting" time we live in.
Que Sam Jackson shouting "I am sick of these muthaf'ing bombs on this mothaf'ing plane!"
Alternate joke: After just having watched some anime, the TSA is worried about Psyonic attacks on planes, so they will be detaining and searching cute, underage girls with long wavy hair and large eyes.
Why isn't Mastercard and Visa REFUSING to accept "subscriptions" to this paper? Why hasn't THEIR Paypal account been frozen?
See how it's one set of rules for common people and another set of rules for Big Business?
I think you've filled in all the details, and you've completed a business plan that actually works. Bravo Sir!
Meantime, the Republicans want to cut *every* social service, but won't cut a single dollar of "defense" spending, which is how the US Army spends more per year ($20 billion) providing Air Conditioning in Afghanistan, than NASA's entire budget.
We cannot sustain fighting three or more Wars (I've lost count), without new taxes. And since nobody wants more taxes, the wars must end. What happened to Rumsfeld promising that we'd get Iraq's Oil, and it would pay for the war???
Cripes we're in a bad situation.
Is that they have no taste. They have absolutely no taste, and... I don't mean that in a small way, I mean that in a big way... (Steve Jobs, commenting on Microsoft in PBS's Triumph of the Nerds documentary).
Even John Dvorack thinks that MS is brain-dead. He correctly pointed out YEARS AGO (more than a decade) that if Microsoft *really* employs the best and the brightest, as their PR claims, why is their software so backwards? He took an example of using the "copy" function.
When you drag a bunch of icons to copy stuff from one drive to another, it blindly starts the copy, it doesn't check if there's enough space, it doesn't check if there's a file already at the destination with the same name, so, if this copy is going to take hours, you have to monitor it for any pop-up alerts. Because any of these issues will stop the copy dead. It's 2011 guys, why is "copy" still a function like it's 1950? Is this *really* what the best and brightest can achieve?
MS needs a top to bottom overhaul. They are too mired in management, and even brilliant engineers can't rise to the top in such an environment. MS's greatest innovations came from stealing other people's ideas.
These days, people are smart enough to NOT approach Microsoft to give a demo of new technology, so MS has less and less people to steal from, hence their perceived lack of innovation.
If MS wants to innovate, they are better off separating into two companies -- one that serves their corporate interests, making "Enterprise" software, reliable and dull, that gets updated every 7 years, while the other creates glitzy consumer stuff that can crash, but at least it's cutting-edge, and churns out new OS releases yearly.
And while I've got your attention; what's with the crap in the summary? Bill Gates doesn't have an engineering background, he's a college drop-out. He's not even visionary -- every idea he's ever had was stolen from someone else. Don't get me wrong, I admire his tenacity and drive to dominate the software industry, but that's been his ONLY vision - to be bigger than every other company. Well, he did that, until Google came along.
By the time guilt or innocence *is* proven, the equipment seized becomes useless.
I've seen cases where it can take a decade for things to resolve to the point where you can try and re-obtain your equipment, but by then, who bothers? The hard-drives have seized, the pentium II has since been replaced by the pentium 4, and the OS is 5 generations behind.
Once the law takes your equipment, it's gone. Unless you have some emotional link to a particular computer, it's not worth the effort, paperwork, expense, and headache required to retrieve your now-useless, and very likely terminally damaged, equipment.
You don't have to build a carb out of steel -- that's current car thinking, where they only way to fix it is to replace it -- carbs can be cleaned, rebuilt with a needle and gasket kit, and put back into service as if new. And unless it's filled up with gunk, carbs rarely fail.
From your entire post, I can tell you've never even looked at a carb -- anybody with half a brain can take one apart, clean and rebuild, and get it working again.
And if you think those electronically controlled cars are somehow better, just wait until they start rusting and sending the wrong voltages to the computer. Or your crank position sensor goes, stalling the car at every stop sign. I'd rather have a car that *I* can fix, than be a prisoner of the dealership.
Of course, that webpage happened to be Wikileaks.
What's with the inflammatory headline? And why is China's "justice system" considered to be any more broken than the USA's?
Didn't we used to hear that Kevin Mitnik wasn't even allowed to use the phone while in prison because officials were worried he could whistle into the mouthpiece and launch nuclear missiles?
If anything, the Chinese handed down a reasonable sentence for industrial espionage, because that's what this case is. In fact, it's a more reasonable sentence than some handed out here in the "land of the free".
Blank is beautiful.
Hackers have declared war, it's time to take back our internet from the corporate fools and government cronies who have polluted it.
Thank the deities that there's someone out there keeping the online universe interesting. Not since Operation Sundevil have I been this excited to see the outcome.
Knight Lighting and Phiber Optik have been awaiting this day when the shackles have been thrown off and the geeks shall inherit the Earth.
Could someone create a federal bill to be voted into law to criminalize the singing of 'Friday', even by the originator's of this song?
That would be a law I could get behind.
1816 was "The Year Without A Summer".
Only a third to a fourth of the hay was cut with only 10 percent of the crop harvested in some areas. Orchard yields ranged from barren to moderate but enough grains, wheat, and potatoes were harvested to prevent a famine but hardships did occur. Farmers ended up selling their livestock as their crops didn't yield enough. There were reports of people eating raccoons and pigeons.
And this is when the global population was low. Now we are close to the breaking point of what we can produce versus how many mouths to feed. Remember the 2008 Rice Shortage?
It could be that without a continuous good harvest, there will be populations that will simply starve to death if there's not enough solar activity to grow crops.
Industrialization has already wiped out many species of plants and animals. A worldwide famine could also present a huge danger to species on the endangered list. At some point, we will chew up enough resources that the planet will not recover.
When we have fished the oceans to empty sea, and the land will no longer sustain crops, only then will we discover how foolish we've been.
The great senator from Alaska said it best: "The internet isn't just a truck you can dump stuff on, it's a series of tubes..."
Obviously, dumping Palin's email into the internets would cause them all to clog up, taking weeks for people to download their internets.
Actually overheard once at Best Buy: "Does this computer come with the latest version of the internet?"
They would already be doing it (and perhaps they *are* and we just don't know). Since China tends to favor the Chinese, I think they would abduct populations and turn them into "Soylent Green" to feed their own population first.
Secondly, there's ALREADY a cheap supply of labor right next door to them, it's called North Korea. The only problem is that NK has zero infrastructure. I think they are waiting for the current regime to die, and then they will waltz in and take over. And it will actually be a good thing for the citizens, as the Chinese might build the infrastructure needed. In which case NK citizens might get things like running water and electricity.
We've seen in WWII that the Germans used slave labor in underground facilities, I'm sure the Chinese are aware of this and could probably pull it off, if it weren't for all that pesky satellite monitoring.
He could have bought a Nigerian baby for $192 (see: http://www.nodeju.com/nigerian-police-closes-baby-factory/9840/ ), sold the baby's kidney for $3400, bought an iPad and have come out of it with a profit!
While life is valuable here in western countries (consider what Americans spend in the final year of their lives for a few more months of breathing), elsewhere, and depending upon where you are, life can be bought for as little as a few hundred.
That life transported elsewhere can then be bought and sold for profit, depending upon local laws. It's a weird world we live in, but I'm surprised no one in China has yet thought about selling organs from cheaply produced Nigerian babies.
As population rises, and an increasing number of people get older, I predict a huge underground market for body parts, and since China is swimming with people, and in Nigeria, life is cheap. There's potential here....
Funny, but the technology existed in the early 70's to make the greatest space fantasy film of all time on a mere nine million dollar budget.
I think what's really got him is that his computer-based word processor can't write a decent script by itself. It's lacking the AI that his typewriter had in college. It's lacking the imagination to create anything substantial.
Please George, find a garage sale, and buy a used, beat-up Royal Typewriter, and sit down and write a real script with characters, using nothing but the imagination inside you. Whatever spark of creativity you once had must still exist down there inside you, you've just lost touch with how to access it.
Maybe you need to THROW AWAY all that technology that's got you so befuddled, and go back to something more genuine. You've forgotten that it's the humans in the story the audience is concerned with, not how glitzy you can make the spaceships look.
Story first, then figure out how to film it. It's the most basic rule in all of film-making, and you've forgotten it.
I think what he means is that it's the death of IT in America.
I mean, with virtualization, "cloud" services can allow your admins to be in a cheaper country, like India. Since you never get to touch your hardware, your admins don't need to touch the hardware anymore either.
It's yet another way for management to increase profitability by lowering costs by firing everyone except themselves, who all get big fat bonuses.
What the "cloud" really provides is yet another way to make the rich richer, and everyone else poorer.
Never mind that they are handing the crown jewels over to a bunch of people, who, should the shit hit the fan, are more than happy to steal all that data and keep it for themselves, leaving their rich corporate masters with nothing.
It's akin to giving the serfs all the weapons to protect the castle, and then the king thinking he's somehow safe even though no guards are loyal to him.
Greed has truly fucked up this country. We're going to find, in less than a decade, that we've given away everything that made this nation great, and we'll be left with very little to show for it. Rome was smarter than we were.