Umm, if I publish a recipe for crack that uses 2 less ingredients than the normal recipe and takes only half the time to make, why would that be a valid argument for making crack legal?
Probably not. Then again, if you published a simple to follow recipe for making crack using nothing but commonly available household items one would have to question the point of banning crack - giving the difficulty in enforcing such a ban. Which is the point.
The most interesting bizarre theory behind some of this was posed at The Register. They claim that IBM may be interested in buying or allying with Apple. It makes some sense, Apple are certainly one of the big vendors for IBM's Power chips, and it would give them a nice UNIX desktop to push, while giving Apple a little more "corporate credibility" and give them a chance to creep into the business desktop market more.
Realistically though, I just don't quite see it. I don't think Apple could quite take the image hit that being owned by IBM would entail, nor do I think the gains would really suit IBM that well. Perhaps some sort of closer alliance may result, but I would expect that to be about as far as things go. Still, and interesting but of completely wild speculation.
The purpose of any education system is to provide the opportunity to learn to those who _want_ to learn. I'd rather have an education system that puts out a few brilliant people a year than the one that's good "on average" but doesn't put out any geniuses.
And how exactly do you know that the US is doing a great job of this? How can you know the US doesn't rate just as badly at putting out geniuses as it is "on average"? Your making wild assetions with nothing to back it up. Look at the tables in the PDF. A miserably low (compared to the rest of the world) percentage of US students fell into the level 6 range - so the US doesn't appear to be any better at excelling than it is on average.
What you need is this! Put that together a few times and you'll have a lot less difficulty. Just for reference I can't entirely correctly place Latvia either - I always get the North/South order of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia confused.
>People can't criticise the Bush administration for >repeated mistakes in Iraq? Yes
There certainly is open discussion of this, and people aren't disappearing in the dark of night, at least not in my neighborhood. And I know some rather vocal critics of the administration.
Heh. Plenty of partisan accusations from both sides yes. Here's one though - how about some discussion of important economic and political issues that neither side is bothering to comment on? Believe me, there are plenty - there's a few in my journal (see sig), but there's many many more similarly important issues that are being quietly ignored.
For a nation build on freedom of speech America sure doesn't seem that free nowadays.
How long will people continue to confuse these things - especially after all the work GNU and Ricjard Stallman have gone to to make clear the differences.
You have "free speech" in the US. That's "free as in speech" but not "free as in beer". Believe me, if you pay enough money to the right people, you can say a anything you like. Unless you front up the cash however...
(Yes, this was meant to be funny - though sadly a little bit true as well)
people have come to the incorrect conclusion that these upstanding Christians were actually listening to stern
the fact is, they aren't. the PTC writes up some draft letter, and they send it out to their 'members', who basically just change the signature. there was an article in the nypost (i think?) about this just a few weeks ago
Which is even worse! They are being told that it's offensive, and just going along with it. There seems to be a dire lack of critial thinking in the US today. The number of people who actually want to find out for themselves various things about the world seems to be decreasing, while the number of people willing to take what they're fed as far "truth" and "reality" goes is growing every day apparently.
Want an example? Here's a good one: How dangerous is a "dirty bomb" - a conventional bomb packed with radioactive material. Yes, as we all know from what the media tells us, it's a terrifyign weapon, and we should truly fear the prospect of terrorists getting access to one. Now, for a change, go and do some research into radioactive substances, radiation poisoning, the effects of blasting radioactive material over a large area with a bomb etc. You m ay find that you come to a rather startling conclusion as to how dangerous a "dirty bomb" is. Honestly, have a quick read of anything that actually has real data to back it up - it's worth the half an hour of your time to dig it up and read it.
This is exactly where the problem of non-enforcement has brought us. Because Oprah gets away with it, Stern thinks he can do it too. However, in reality Oprah was just not caught because none of the complainers were looking at her show, and had somebody complained the stations airing her show would have gotten fined.
That does raise the question of why a whole bunch of upstanding Christians were listening to Howard Stern. I mean, come on, are you really telling me that the people that are getting offended by Stern are otherwise usual Stern listeners? It's like that other group lobbying radio stations not to play Skinny Puppy or else they'll boycott the station... because as we all know the impact of the hordes of fundamentalist christian right wing nutjobs that actually listen to any radio station ever that plays Skinny Puppy is enourmous. These people are deliberately going out looking for trouble and looking to be offended. That's the reason that people that make their name off shock tactics (Stern etc.) are getting targetted, but people doing equally graphics things that aren't known for it (Oprah) get away with it. It's all just silly.
The long-term path to victory is clear, my friends. We must build Improvements on a city-by-city basis in order to solve the energy problem. Most of our cities have a Granary and an Aqueduct now, which is a good first step. I recommend a Factory to boost production, followed by a Recycling Center and a Power Plant in each city.
Come now, the Power Plant is a waste of time - you've already built the Hoover Dam Wonder which provides a Hydro Plant for every city on the continent.
Just look at the evangelism of some of the gentoo users.
Though, to be fair, that can be as damaging as it can be helpful. A lot of advertising is about association - you associate a product with a certain lifestyle, or try and break traditional associations about the product. In the case of the Gentoo evangelists they do a fine job of furthering the association of Gentoo with die hard geeks. Unfortunately they also tend to further the association of Gentoo with 1337-speaking h4x0r wannabes who just want to look cool and extra-1337.
Please note, I'm not saying that's what the Gentoo community actually is - just that that's the association that a lot of Gentoo zealots (i.e. the most vocal ones) tend to help promote.
Word of mouth can work as much against you as for you. While the evangelists helped the initial growth of Gentoo, they've also helped box it into a small limited market where it will stay until perceptions change.
Alternatively, instead of going for word of mouth you could just shamelessly push your product on Slashdot pretty much every post you get, doing your best to sound on topic and/or karma whore in the hopes of getting modded up into visibility. I know I've seen plenty of people trying that strategy around here. Maybe you should give it a go - it might work for you to...
Creative people should have creative control. Irrefutable example of success: The Incredibles
Business people should not have creative control. Irrefutable example of total failure: Lion King 1 1/2
Except you get odd cases like Fight Club. The fact is that, relatively speaking, Fight Club bombed at the US box office. That meant that Brad Pitt got told he was only to take safe roles from here on in, and David Fincher was told no one was going to bank roll him for any creative projects anymore - that's why we got Panic Room.
Of course, in the end, Fight Club has become a huge cult success and is probably raking in money n DVD sales. It took a while to find its market.
It is for that reason, however, that the business people get to make their demands: even great creative projects don't make the initial cash that the business people bank rolling the project desire.
Um, we're talking about Doom, right? What plot? From what I can recall the plot went something like "Demons. Bad. Kill them all."...
That's where the original game started, but if you read the intro text, and the text and the various ends of stages you would have realised there was plot. That plot was further expanded upon in Doom3.
Let's be realistic here, you could easily take the plot that you discover on PDAs and from talking to people in Doom3 and create a film where only the final third of the film has anyone running around killing demons. Think about it:
We can start with the marine arriving on base and hearing the rumpours about weird things and the "dig site", spend plenty of time slowly revealing the teleporters, and the fact that there seems to be something/someplace in between leaving one teleporter and arriving at another. Add to that lots of creepy moments wandering around the base hearing voices occasionally, and incidents with marines and workers (ie teleporter test subjects) going insane, and attacking people etc. and you could easily fill and hour with nary a hell gate opened. That leaves you a nice 30 minutes of of hectic "demons everywhere" conclusion.
Doom could be made into a very good film. It won't be made into a very good film, but that's hardly the game's fault.
So you're saying "You can disable that feature by using TeX"?
I wasn't talking about the minor niggle of email addresses being converted into links, I was talking about the fundamental philosophical issue what the program is designed to produce: High quality print, something for the web, or a half assed "either or". If you want something that specialises in high quality print output then LaTeX or groff are good choices.
That's like disabling website popups by using lynx.
No, that's like answering someone who is complaining about IPhoto plus as a tool for print design that they really ought to check out photoshop. TeX and groff are proffesional quality typesetting programs, Word is not. Word is fine if you want to dash of a letter, or don't care about your output, and it's simple to use. If you want to produce real quality print work then you need something like TeX, groff, or Framemaker. Trying to pretend that Word is great for print work is like trying to pretend that GIMP is great for print work: they're both very good tools, but print is not a job they do at all well in comparison to the competition.
No idea as to what you can make LyX do i'm afraid - I use Kile which most certainly does let you do things like that if you so choose. Sorry I couldn't be more help.
Am I alone in believing that a document intended to be printed on paper is different from a web page?
Nope. Get a Text Processor instead of a Word Processor and all will be well - you can define your output type when you run it on your source file.
Good Text Processor's include: TeX (and family eg. LaTex), and groff/nroff. If you want to produce good looking printed material, both are excellent. Beware the learning curve though.
Jedidiah.
Re:Does a standalone WP have a use now?
on
AbiWord 2.2 Unleashed
·
· Score: 3, Informative
To get good looking PDF output out of a LaTeX document (whihc is all LyX produces really) you ought to be using pdflatex, which goes straight from LaTeX to PDF, no intermediary DVI form. If you include useful modules like hyperlinks you can automatically create document structure links for Acrobat to read, as well as having all your ref's and cite's be clickable links within the PDF. As an added bonus pdflatex supports jpg and png image types, so there's no messing around with converting your images to eps.
If you're a CEO and you slash beaurocracy effectively (that is, cut expenses without cutting value), you lower expenses and raise profits. That's supposed to result in your $tock option$ being more valuable.... And presumably you get a huge bonus to.
So if you're a CEO and you're smart, when the going is good you pad the company out with layers and layers of middle management so that when the going gets tough you can "cut the fat", manage to impressively raise profits for the quarter, and get your huge bonus.
If people are willing to take the risk, why not let them? would the 5000 mine workers who died in China this year because of unsafe working conditions agree with you?
Did you read what I wrote? My point was that if it was voluntary and the workers were not being exploited or forced into it, then its fine. If you are made aware of the risks up front, and still choose to take them, fine.
Did the 5000 chinese mine workers know about the unsafe working conditions? Did they have a choice about working in the mine, or was it basically their only option to earn money and survive (were they being exploited)? I'm bettinjg the answer to bot of those is "No!", which means they were not "willing" to take the risk, as they had no choice
So what would people say if NASA asked for a new technology and the best entry was from a company with ties to the sitting president? Or a company with a bad reputation, such as SCO?
As opposed to now, where the contracts get awarded based on proposals, and seem to have a habit of showing up in appropriate congressional districts? There's plenty enough pork now, I don't see how this will make it worse.
The money goes to whoever comes up with a working prototype first, so I don't see how claims of favouritism can come into it. If Microsoft or SCO manage to be the first to build a cheap reusable orbital vehicle, I won't be crying over it, I'll be cheering.
Claims of favouritism and pork come from contracts going to companies that fail to deliver (like, say EDS over in England). The fundamental basis of these prizes is that you have to deliver the results before you get the money. If someone proves that they can do the job, do it well, and do it first, I don't see any problem with awarding them the cash for doing so. You'd have to be deluded to claim favouritism in that case.
So you are objecting to the principle of NASA paying for actually getting results instead of drawing up attractive proposals? Yes people will need backing to be able to produce results to claim the prize, but there is a big payoff if it works: the prize money. The benefit for NASA is they get to pay for proven results. Considering the amount of money they've spent on the past on "proposals" (for instance they spent over a hundred million on reusable suborbital craft that never made it off the drawing board) paying for results instead seems like a pretty good idea.
The real reason Congress is objecting is because there's no control over to whom the money gets awarded, so they can't trade pork for getting it done in their congressional district.
Worker saftey and standards are somthing that shouldnt be shoved aside in the quest for scientific advancement on the cheap...
If people are willing to take the risk, why not let them. Certainly when worker safety is being compromised through exploitation it might be worth worrying about, but I fail to believe that the test pilots for SpaceShipOne didn't have every option to decline to fly. They were being paid plenty of money to voluntarily take a risk. If they choose to take the risk let them.
Indeed. But then investing money that was already budgeted to NASA into prizes that will help spur private companies to put more money into research and new technologies is actually fairly sensible. The truth is that the US could really use a boost at pushing into new technology markets - in many ways they're lagging. If the US fails to gear up and push on to new markets (especially given the current state of several other economic indicators) then the budget deficit will blow out unbelievably as the Dollar falls and the tax base shrinks.
I'm not a huge fan of NASA in that they tend to be a fairly wasteful bureaucratic organisation, but by putting the money up as prizes they are actually making good investments here, and as long as they get the desired tech in the desired time, what does it matter how they choose to spend it?
Slashdot Mirror
Umm, if I publish a recipe for crack that uses 2 less ingredients than the normal recipe and takes only half the time to make, why would that be a valid argument for making crack legal?
Probably not. Then again, if you published a simple to follow recipe for making crack using nothing but commonly available household items one would have to question the point of banning crack - giving the difficulty in enforcing such a ban. Which is the point.
Jedidiah.
The most interesting bizarre theory behind some of this was posed at The Register. They claim that IBM may be interested in buying or allying with Apple. It makes some sense, Apple are certainly one of the big vendors for IBM's Power chips, and it would give them a nice UNIX desktop to push, while giving Apple a little more "corporate credibility" and give them a chance to creep into the business desktop market more.
Realistically though, I just don't quite see it. I don't think Apple could quite take the image hit that being owned by IBM would entail, nor do I think the gains would really suit IBM that well. Perhaps some sort of closer alliance may result, but I would expect that to be about as far as things go. Still, and interesting but of completely wild speculation.
Jedidiah.
The purpose of any education system is to provide the opportunity to learn to those who _want_ to learn. I'd rather have an education system that puts out a few brilliant people a year than the one that's good "on average" but doesn't put out any geniuses.
And how exactly do you know that the US is doing a great job of this? How can you know the US doesn't rate just as badly at putting out geniuses as it is "on average"? Your making wild assetions with nothing to back it up. Look at the tables in the PDF. A miserably low (compared to the rest of the world) percentage of US students fell into the level 6 range - so the US doesn't appear to be any better at excelling than it is on average.
Jedidiah.
What you need is this! Put that together a few times and you'll have a lot less difficulty. Just for reference I can't entirely correctly place Latvia either - I always get the North/South order of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia confused.
Jedidiah.
I'll refer you to Kuro5hin. I can't see the problem either, but people are strange.
>People can't criticise the Bush administration for
>repeated mistakes in Iraq? Yes
There certainly is open discussion of this, and people aren't disappearing in the dark of night, at least not in my neighborhood. And I know some rather vocal critics of the administration.
Heh. Plenty of partisan accusations from both sides yes. Here's one though - how about some discussion of important economic and political issues that neither side is bothering to comment on? Believe me, there are plenty - there's a few in my journal (see sig), but there's many many more similarly important issues that are being quietly ignored.
Jedidiah
For a nation build on freedom of speech America sure doesn't seem that free nowadays.
How long will people continue to confuse these things - especially after all the work GNU and Ricjard Stallman have gone to to make clear the differences.
You have "free speech" in the US. That's "free as in speech" but not "free as in beer". Believe me, if you pay enough money to the right people, you can say a anything you like. Unless you front up the cash however...
(Yes, this was meant to be funny - though sadly a little bit true as well)
Jedidiah.
people have come to the incorrect conclusion that these upstanding Christians were actually listening to stern
the fact is, they aren't. the PTC writes up some draft letter, and they send it out to their 'members', who basically just change the signature. there was an article in the nypost (i think?) about this just a few weeks ago
Which is even worse! They are being told that it's offensive, and just going along with it. There seems to be a dire lack of critial thinking in the US today. The number of people who actually want to find out for themselves various things about the world seems to be decreasing, while the number of people willing to take what they're fed as far "truth" and "reality" goes is growing every day apparently.
Want an example? Here's a good one: How dangerous is a "dirty bomb" - a conventional bomb packed with radioactive material. Yes, as we all know from what the media tells us, it's a terrifyign weapon, and we should truly fear the prospect of terrorists getting access to one. Now, for a change, go and do some research into radioactive substances, radiation poisoning, the effects of blasting radioactive material over a large area with a bomb etc. You m ay find that you come to a rather startling conclusion as to how dangerous a "dirty bomb" is. Honestly, have a quick read of anything that actually has real data to back it up - it's worth the half an hour of your time to dig it up and read it.
Jedidiah.
This is exactly where the problem of non-enforcement has brought us. Because Oprah gets away with it, Stern thinks he can do it too. However, in reality Oprah was just not caught because none of the complainers were looking at her show, and had somebody complained the stations airing her show would have gotten fined.
That does raise the question of why a whole bunch of upstanding Christians were listening to Howard Stern. I mean, come on, are you really telling me that the people that are getting offended by Stern are otherwise usual Stern listeners? It's like that other group lobbying radio stations not to play Skinny Puppy or else they'll boycott the station... because as we all know the impact of the hordes of fundamentalist christian right wing nutjobs that actually listen to any radio station ever that plays Skinny Puppy is enourmous. These people are deliberately going out looking for trouble and looking to be offended. That's the reason that people that make their name off shock tactics (Stern etc.) are getting targetted, but people doing equally graphics things that aren't known for it (Oprah) get away with it. It's all just silly.
Jedidiah.
The long-term path to victory is clear, my friends. We must build Improvements on a city-by-city basis in order to solve the energy problem. Most of our cities have a Granary and an Aqueduct now, which is a good first step. I recommend a Factory to boost production, followed by a Recycling Center and a Power Plant in each city.
Come now, the Power Plant is a waste of time - you've already built the Hoover Dam Wonder which provides a Hydro Plant for every city on the continent.
Jedidiah.
Which is another wonderful example of taking something that could have been a good film and turnin it into complete crap.
Jedidiah.
Just look at the evangelism of some of the gentoo users.
Though, to be fair, that can be as damaging as it can be helpful. A lot of advertising is about association - you associate a product with a certain lifestyle, or try and break traditional associations about the product. In the case of the Gentoo evangelists they do a fine job of furthering the association of Gentoo with die hard geeks. Unfortunately they also tend to further the association of Gentoo with 1337-speaking h4x0r wannabes who just want to look cool and extra-1337.
Please note, I'm not saying that's what the Gentoo community actually is - just that that's the association that a lot of Gentoo zealots (i.e. the most vocal ones) tend to help promote.
Word of mouth can work as much against you as for you. While the evangelists helped the initial growth of Gentoo, they've also helped box it into a small limited market where it will stay until perceptions change.
Jedidiah.
Alternatively, instead of going for word of mouth you could just shamelessly push your product on Slashdot pretty much every post you get, doing your best to sound on topic and/or karma whore in the hopes of getting modded up into visibility. I know I've seen plenty of people trying that strategy around here. Maybe you should give it a go - it might work for you to...
Jedidiah.
Creative people should have creative control. Irrefutable example of success: The Incredibles
Business people should not have creative control. Irrefutable example of total failure: Lion King 1 1/2
Except you get odd cases like Fight Club. The fact is that, relatively speaking, Fight Club bombed at the US box office. That meant that Brad Pitt got told he was only to take safe roles from here on in, and David Fincher was told no one was going to bank roll him for any creative projects anymore - that's why we got Panic Room.
Of course, in the end, Fight Club has become a huge cult success and is probably raking in money n DVD sales. It took a while to find its market.
It is for that reason, however, that the business people get to make their demands: even great creative projects don't make the initial cash that the business people bank rolling the project desire.
Jedidiah.
Um, we're talking about Doom, right? What plot? From what I can recall the plot went something like "Demons. Bad. Kill them all."...
That's where the original game started, but if you read the intro text, and the text and the various ends of stages you would have realised there was plot. That plot was further expanded upon in Doom3.
Let's be realistic here, you could easily take the plot that you discover on PDAs and from talking to people in Doom3 and create a film where only the final third of the film has anyone running around killing demons. Think about it:
We can start with the marine arriving on base and hearing the rumpours about weird things and the "dig site", spend plenty of time slowly revealing the teleporters, and the fact that there seems to be something/someplace in between leaving one teleporter and arriving at another. Add to that lots of creepy moments wandering around the base hearing voices occasionally, and incidents with marines and workers (ie teleporter test subjects) going insane, and attacking people etc. and you could easily fill and hour with nary a hell gate opened. That leaves you a nice 30 minutes of of hectic "demons everywhere" conclusion.
Doom could be made into a very good film. It won't be made into a very good film, but that's hardly the game's fault.
Jedidiah.
So you're saying "You can disable that feature by using TeX"?
I wasn't talking about the minor niggle of email addresses being converted into links, I was talking about the fundamental philosophical issue what the program is designed to produce: High quality print, something for the web, or a half assed "either or". If you want something that specialises in high quality print output then LaTeX or groff are good choices.
That's like disabling website popups by using lynx.
No, that's like answering someone who is complaining about IPhoto plus as a tool for print design that they really ought to check out photoshop. TeX and groff are proffesional quality typesetting programs, Word is not. Word is fine if you want to dash of a letter, or don't care about your output, and it's simple to use. If you want to produce real quality print work then you need something like TeX, groff, or Framemaker. Trying to pretend that Word is great for print work is like trying to pretend that GIMP is great for print work: they're both very good tools, but print is not a job they do at all well in comparison to the competition.
Jedidiah.
No idea as to what you can make LyX do i'm afraid - I use Kile which most certainly does let you do things like that if you so choose. Sorry I couldn't be more help.
Jedidiah.
Am I alone in believing that a document intended to be printed on paper is different from a web page?
Nope. Get a Text Processor instead of a Word Processor and all will be well - you can define your output type when you run it on your source file.
Good Text Processor's include: TeX (and family eg. LaTex), and groff/nroff. If you want to produce good looking printed material, both are excellent. Beware the learning curve though.
Jedidiah.
To get good looking PDF output out of a LaTeX document (whihc is all LyX produces really) you ought to be using pdflatex, which goes straight from LaTeX to PDF, no intermediary DVI form. If you include useful modules like hyperlinks you can automatically create document structure links for Acrobat to read, as well as having all your ref's and cite's be clickable links within the PDF. As an added bonus pdflatex supports jpg and png image types, so there's no messing around with converting your images to eps.
Jedidiah.
If you're a CEO and you slash beaurocracy effectively (that is, cut expenses without cutting value), you lower expenses and raise profits. That's supposed to result in your $tock option$ being more valuable. ... And presumably you get a huge bonus to.
So if you're a CEO and you're smart, when the going is good you pad the company out with layers and layers of middle management so that when the going gets tough you can "cut the fat", manage to impressively raise profits for the quarter, and get your huge bonus.
Jedidiah.
Did you read what I wrote? My point was that if it was voluntary and the workers were not being exploited or forced into it, then its fine. If you are made aware of the risks up front, and still choose to take them, fine.
Did the 5000 chinese mine workers know about the unsafe working conditions? Did they have a choice about working in the mine, or was it basically their only option to earn money and survive (were they being exploited)? I'm bettinjg the answer to bot of those is "No!", which means they were not "willing" to take the risk, as they had no choice
Please pay attention next time.
Jedidiah.
So what would people say if NASA asked for a new technology and the best entry was from a company with ties to the sitting president? Or a company with a bad reputation, such as SCO?
As opposed to now, where the contracts get awarded based on proposals, and seem to have a habit of showing up in appropriate congressional districts? There's plenty enough pork now, I don't see how this will make it worse.
The money goes to whoever comes up with a working prototype first, so I don't see how claims of favouritism can come into it. If Microsoft or SCO manage to be the first to build a cheap reusable orbital vehicle, I won't be crying over it, I'll be cheering.
Claims of favouritism and pork come from contracts going to companies that fail to deliver (like, say EDS over in England). The fundamental basis of these prizes is that you have to deliver the results before you get the money. If someone proves that they can do the job, do it well, and do it first, I don't see any problem with awarding them the cash for doing so. You'd have to be deluded to claim favouritism in that case.
Jedidiah.
So you are objecting to the principle of NASA paying for actually getting results instead of drawing up attractive proposals? Yes people will need backing to be able to produce results to claim the prize, but there is a big payoff if it works: the prize money. The benefit for NASA is they get to pay for proven results. Considering the amount of money they've spent on the past on "proposals" (for instance they spent over a hundred million on reusable suborbital craft that never made it off the drawing board) paying for results instead seems like a pretty good idea.
The real reason Congress is objecting is because there's no control over to whom the money gets awarded, so they can't trade pork for getting it done in their congressional district.
Jedidiah.
Worker saftey and standards are somthing that shouldnt be shoved aside in the quest for scientific advancement on the cheap...
If people are willing to take the risk, why not let them. Certainly when worker safety is being compromised through exploitation it might be worth worrying about, but I fail to believe that the test pilots for SpaceShipOne didn't have every option to decline to fly. They were being paid plenty of money to voluntarily take a risk. If they choose to take the risk let them.
Jedidiah.
Indeed. But then investing money that was already budgeted to NASA into prizes that will help spur private companies to put more money into research and new technologies is actually fairly sensible. The truth is that the US could really use a boost at pushing into new technology markets - in many ways they're lagging. If the US fails to gear up and push on to new markets (especially given the current state of several other economic indicators) then the budget deficit will blow out unbelievably as the Dollar falls and the tax base shrinks.
I'm not a huge fan of NASA in that they tend to be a fairly wasteful bureaucratic organisation, but by putting the money up as prizes they are actually making good investments here, and as long as they get the desired tech in the desired time, what does it matter how they choose to spend it?
Jedidiah.