There's traffic density that would make clog up modern highways for years, but its all flow-controlled, so you go 120MpH with only inches between cars, so your trip takes half the time.
The problem with this is that everyone has to have the same car performance-wise. That might be achievable. There could be standards mandated to enter the particular roadway... but then everyone using these cars/trucks will have to keep them maintained and performing in the same fashion. This probably isn't achievable. One guys car breaks down suddenly, and the whole system crashs... Literally, as in, into each other. Bob's car has a tire fly off, the 600 cars behind him are going to have a rough time if they are travelling at 120 with scant inches between themselves, no matter how smart the highway is.
So does mine... funny story, once in Italy, a small shop owner (not speaking english) demanded that the signature space on my recipt be filled in with 'ASK FOR ID' in the exact same writing....
Sadly enough, in the world of star wars fan fiction and even in the approved novels that are it's only the movies that are considered true canon law in the world. And they are often referred to as 'the canon law' and as 'the bible'. All other works based in the stars wars world are basically stories... the only things that 'really' happened in the world are what are portrayed in the movies.
Just what my brother and I have done for our business interests. Check your local laws to see how they work where you live.
First, let me give my specifics so you can know where we're coming from. We are living in Titusville, FL. Both unemployed since the tech bust.
My bro is a high level web designer who used to work for a BIG company out of DC. He's worked on nike's website, timberland's and exxon mobile's. So he's got the skills. I've been doing backend programming and database type stuff for a while... so we're a good pair to do a web design business.
Additionally, we're into kite flying and run sort of a hobby business off of our kite site. (see sig) So this is a second business.
Beyond that, my bro's wife... my sister in law... does medical transcription. So this is a third business.
Anyway, we knew there were going to be a multitude of businesses that we were going to have our noses in. So, we incorporated. For a fee (forget how much offhand, but not TOO much) we filled out the articles of incorporation for a Limited Liability Company (LLC). Thus began the company Lutter Enterprises, LLC. (lutter being our surname). The LLC then filed a fictitious name of Kitestop.com.
With a company, and a name (and the documents to prove it) it was easy enough to go to city hall and get a business license for our home. We had to get one from the county as well. They require that we don't have any employees that don't live here. We can't have signs or outwardly recognizeable business items. Can't be having trucks coming or going all the time either. After that, we registered with the feds to get a Fed Tax ID and the state to get a sales tax certificate (which is what all our manufacturers look for before they will wholesale us anything)Pretty easy to have a business structure, huh?
After this, we needed to give the bank about a million documents and forms before we could talk them into giving us a business account and merchant account in the company name.
Then, when we decided to expand a bit, we got an office space in Cocoa, FL for cheap. Now we run all three business out of it. Of course we had to get new fictitious names for Lutter Interactive (web design Biz) and Far Out Transcription. We also had to go to Cocoa city hall to get permits and back to the county again. Plus it was a headache again dealing with the bank to get our accounts split up so the names all match up.
Cost a heap in fees and all that, but this gives us plenty of liability protection. The city, county, state and feds are all happy and we are 100%legal.
and because it was incessantly segfaulting for mysterious reasons
Those reasons are undebugged code. No app just mysteriously segfaults (mystery isn't allowed in computers)... if the code was correct, it wouldn't segfault. Might be something minor... and you might have poured over it a million times, but somewhere you're code was still wrong.
TEACH Act, huh? Convenient that it has to do with education...
Who's with me that the acronym for something should be the letters(whatever they happen to be) for the thing's real name, instead of someone thinking of a clever word they want to have as their acronym and massaging the things name to have those letters?
Very well said. It's the vocal minority syndrome. They are the loudest group, so they think they are in the majority... which just isn't the case. It's sad but true.
Re:didnt stalin call churchill a warmongerer too?
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
What Churchill wanted was to upgrade the Armed Forces to be able to fight when the fight came. And when the fight came, he and the other Allies had no trouble bringing it back to Berlin to end the war. Coincidentally liberating France and the rest of western Europe in the mean-time. This war started in 1991 with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, was postponed contingent to Iraq disarming (which they clearly haven't) and is being continued today. We're going to Baghdad to end the war. It's a stretch to compare that to the allies going to Berlin... but while we're making comparisons...
Saddam is a tin pot dictator with neither the vision nor the means to achieve a hundredth of what Hitler did. Thank goodness this is true. But the fact that it is true doesn't mean he wouldn't if he could.
So, in other words, in the near future, we're going to see the editor, Michael, walking around with a Dr. Pepper hat and toting a Dr. Pepper bookbag....
Strange, isn't it, that Taiwan can effectively demand concessions from a foreign company
One thing to consider (not saying this happened here, but it's interesting) is that Taiwan comes from a position of power in the computer world. Piss them off, and memory prices could triple. Similar situation with lots of other computer components.... MS can't sell so many new copies of windows when nobody is buying computers anymore....
Would you trade one person's life (not your own, but somebody else's)for that of a thousand? Would you trade one person's life for that of 500? 100? 10?
You stipulate that Saddam has killed "thousands and thousands" and obviously you have no doubt that he would kill thousands more if given the chance. If you answered yes to any of my above questions then you agree that lives can be traded on a one to one basis. If lives (on either side) are equivalent, then the best way to do something is the way that less people die. If you agree to that, then the issue can be boiled down to this:
if(deaths caused by invasion <= deaths caused by leaving him){ invade; }else{ don't invade; }
So really, it's a matter of figuring out how many of his or our people will die if he gets WMD's and comparing that number to what will happen if we go in now while he probably doesn't. Considering that Saddam rules with an iron fist (and as such, if the Americans are coming i think most of the iraqi people will help us, not fight us) and considering our great technologies (thus being able to target only soldiers not civilians) I'm going to guess going in now will cause less deaths than waiting.
Why are we so sure there will be a 'next' terrorist attack? On US soil is one thing, but US lives are another. There have been US lives lost in:
1.US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania 2.Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerby Scotland 3.Marine Barracks bombing in Lebanon 4.USS Cole bombing
There are hundreds of lives lost to terrorists in Ireland and Israel/Palestine. It seems terrorism is something the world is going to have to live with. It's not something to loose all our civil liberties over... but we need to be vigilant.
The United Nations is supposed to be the authority through which the international community deals with these threats
Which, as your post names several places, it is tragically unable to do. For the UN to be even slightly effective it has to have some teeth and it has to be willing to do use them now and again. Talk is cheap. There is a time for negotiation and there is a time for action. If the UN can't get it's head out of it's ass and do what's RIGHT, then they are no better than the League of Nations was.
Maybe the US shouldn't be the police force of the world, but if not, then who? It won't be the UN that's for sure.
It's detestable that we would go after Saddam, but let the African dictatorships alone... but we can't take EVERYONE on, we do have to pick and choose our battles. Let's be honest it's about the oil... but stacked against the injustices of Saddam's regime, the oil, and the threat that Saddam poses by developing WMD's... the shit going down in Africa is pretty minor.
And we are also trying to say that war is horrible, and kills people, and should be avoided at all costs. Yeah, and that's what the UN has been trying to do since the end of the gulf war some 11 years ago. A good effort, but WTF? It's just drawing lines in the sand. Europe tried to avoid war at all costs as well... the result was WW2. Sure Saddam couldn't dream of marching across Europe, but appeasement was not the answer then and it is not now...
But worse than war, is genocide... (something that Saddam has perpetrated against his own people, the Kurds... and in the past he's used chemical weapons to do it) It kills people too, and in most cases those people are defenseless. Shouldn't it be avoided at all costs too? Is one of the 'all costs' to include a war?
Dude, sharing a building with AI types an expert on AI does not make.
Examples of advances in AI:
1. Computer programs able to spank all but the best humans playing chess.
2. Computer programs able to spank your ass playing even more complex games like CIV 3, C&C, etc.
3. Google saying "Searching 3,083,324,652 web pages" and "Results 1 - 10 of about 1,500,000. Search took 0.07 seconds"
There's been huge advances in AI with such things as Genetic Algorithms and Fuzzy logic. The applications are very specific and are not the far reaching HAL 9000 that people traditionally think of when you say AI. There is no 'singular consciosusness' that is going to pop out of your computer. That is NOT what AI is about. AI is about solving problems. More specifically, it's about finding methods for a computer to solve problems without brute forcing them.
For example, it would be easy for a computer to beat a chessmaster if the computer had the whole search tree available. The out come of every move of every game would be available, and it would be trivial to steer it towards a victory. But since the tree is HUGE and would take many hundreds of years to generate, the problem of computers playing chess is to get them to figure out a 'smart' way to beat the chessmaster. Alpha-beta tree pruning and things like that are the results. Don't underestimate the power of these.
There are great things coming out of AI research all the time, but you will not be seeing HAL 9000 any time soon.
I got to thinking about this real quick and, as i'm too lazy to read the actual interview and it's probably addressed there, what are the effects of diminishing returns?
The 'mythical man month' basically says that one programmer (or other worker) can produce more in one month than two workers each working half a month... who can do more than three workers all in 1/3 of a month. And further that just throwing more people at a problem doesn't really do much past a certain point. For some problems, it might be the case that one guy working for a month can do more than ten guys working for the same period of time.
How does swarm behavior overcome all of this great stuff?
I presume that it must be an essential part of the deal that the problem must be something very trivial for there to be great effects by swarming.
There is no doubt that swarming technologies have been AWESOME for p2p applications.... downloading a file from more than one source speeds up napstering (like the verbing there?).
It is great marketing... and i'm sure that they are thrilled that it's becoming a common term. But there is legal precedent (from xerox and kleenex, asprin and the like) that if you don't protect your trademarks now and then, you lose them. When you lose your trademark, anyone can then use the name.
While it is great mindshare to have everyone googling for information it's only cool when you are the only site named Google. If Google loses their trademark and now Bob's Search Engine gets to call itself 'google'.... well, that sucks for the real Google. I'm sure they don't want that. Now if they rattle a few sabres now and again, protect their trademark... it can still be a popular term, but they get to be the only ones who benefit from it.
Which, isn't so bad... afterall, they DID make the term popular and they DO have the bomb search engine that everyone is really talking about when they say 'google'.
Please don't take this post as supporting spam anyway, as i don't.... but i would have to answer your post by saying "Oh f-ing well...."
There are operating costs associated with every business. There are certain things that the customer pays for and expects. Each business has to deal with these expenses, minimize them as much as possible and charge the customer accordingly. All businesses do this... those that don't aren't very competitive and don't last very long.
Spam is a reality of the ISP's day to day life and the customer expects it to be processed and/or filtered. They expect it done well and not to lose anything. Part of your costs is to do that, so part of your fee has to make up for that cost. You minimize your costs as much as possible and deal with it. If this pushes your prices up past that of your competitors, you better figure out how they are minimizing the costs and do it as good or better. That's the nature of the free market.
Can't say i blame you for your viewpoint, though... nobody wants their profit margins cut or the kind of hassles spam creates. But it's part of the biz and you gotta realize that.
Better would be to make friends with him, give him that $500 bucks he wants to start his company(making you a partner), and be generally encouraging of that whole DOS thing he's talking about.
And when you're a kajillionaire, VP of Microsoft and all that, give that guy Linus anything he wants...
Well, while everyone is dreaming and throwing around crazy cyberpunk ideas, i'll throw one out. Sure it's equally as unlikely as anything everyone else is spouting off about, but somewhat cool none-the-less.
Instead of implanted chips or ports, just inject people with a trillion or so microscopic robots. Kinda like the idea of 'mites' from Stephenson's 'Diamond Age'. Probably, these little suckers would be too small, to do more than one task, but for that one task they could be really adept and each one (or each hundred or so) could have it's own job. One batch could be 'go seek out the visual cortex neuron 148 and report back what it's doing' and other batchs would have other equally important tasks. Some for input, some for output, others for infrastructure, conceivably others for security, etc... The lot of them work together as a little P2P network passing short-range messages and eventually it all gets reported back to the central computer... which could then do all the nifty ass crap that you can imagine by being brain-linked to a computer. Infinite recall, knowledge, processing, simulations... you're in the matrix now.
The little critters wouldn't ever be obsolete cause you could replace them from time to time by getting a shot... there is a lot of redundancy, and (assuming you have the micro technology to make them in the first place) would be probably pretty damn cheap to make and use.
I live in Titusville, FL right across the Indian River from the Kennedy Space Center. The Vehicle Assembly Building and the launchpads are visible from this city.
I was 7 when the Challenger exploded on takeoff. I am old enough to remember the hit our economy took in the years after the space program petered out. A large portion of out population are engineers, electricians, maintenance staff, etc. at the space center. Really, almost everyone here is directly related to the space program by one or more family members. The resulting layoffs after the challenger tragedy were devastating to our area. Laid off employees moved away. Housing prices dropped off. Many businesses closed. As a small town already such a thing could turn us into a veritable ghost town.
As tragic as this event is, there are much more far reaching implications for a great many families involved in the program. It is a shame that space exploration may come to a halt, but worse still is what will become of NASA employees, families and relations. In addition, there are hundreds of contractors that could fold because of a decline in the space program. Lockheed, USA, Harris and others will take a big hit. The effects could be devastating for us and our community.
Slashdot Mirror
There's traffic density that would make clog up modern highways for years, but its all flow-controlled, so you go 120MpH with only inches between cars, so your trip takes half the time.
The problem with this is that everyone has to have the same car performance-wise. That might be achievable. There could be standards mandated to enter the particular roadway... but then everyone using these cars/trucks will have to keep them maintained and performing in the same fashion. This probably isn't achievable. One guys car breaks down suddenly, and the whole system crashs... Literally, as in, into each other. Bob's car has a tire fly off, the 600 cars behind him are going to have a rough time if they are travelling at 120 with scant inches between themselves, no matter how smart the highway is.
So does mine... funny story, once in Italy, a small shop owner (not speaking english) demanded that the signature space on my recipt be filled in with 'ASK FOR ID' in the exact same writing....
Sadly enough, in the world of star wars fan fiction and even in the approved novels that are it's only the movies that are considered true canon law in the world. And they are often referred to as 'the canon law' and as 'the bible'. All other works based in the stars wars world are basically stories... the only things that 'really' happened in the world are what are portrayed in the movies.
And it's sad that i know that.
Just what my brother and I have done for our business interests. Check your local laws to see how they work where you live.
:)
First, let me give my specifics so you can know where we're coming from. We are living in Titusville, FL. Both unemployed since the tech bust.
My bro is a high level web designer who used to work for a BIG company out of DC. He's worked on nike's website, timberland's and exxon mobile's. So he's got the skills. I've been doing backend programming and database type stuff for a while... so we're a good pair to do a web design business.
Additionally, we're into kite flying and run sort of a hobby business off of our kite site. (see sig) So this is a second business.
Beyond that, my bro's wife... my sister in law... does medical transcription. So this is a third business.
Anyway, we knew there were going to be a multitude of businesses that we were going to have our noses in. So, we incorporated. For a fee (forget how much offhand, but not TOO much) we filled out the articles of incorporation for a Limited Liability Company (LLC). Thus began the company Lutter Enterprises, LLC. (lutter being our surname). The LLC then filed a fictitious name of Kitestop.com.
With a company, and a name (and the documents to prove it) it was easy enough to go to city hall and get a business license for our home. We had to get one from the county as well. They require that we don't have any employees that don't live here. We can't have signs or outwardly recognizeable business items. Can't be having trucks coming or going all the time either. After that, we registered with the feds to get a Fed Tax ID and the state to get a sales tax certificate (which is what all our manufacturers look for before they will wholesale us anything)Pretty easy to have a business structure, huh?
After this, we needed to give the bank about a million documents and forms before we could talk them into giving us a business account and merchant account in the company name.
Then, when we decided to expand a bit, we got an office space in Cocoa, FL for cheap. Now we run all three business out of it. Of course we had to get new fictitious names for Lutter Interactive (web design Biz) and Far Out Transcription. We also had to go to Cocoa city hall to get permits and back to the county again. Plus it was a headache again dealing with the bank to get our accounts split up so the names all match up.
Cost a heap in fees and all that, but this gives us plenty of liability protection. The city, county, state and feds are all happy and we are 100%legal.
Now... just to make some money.
and because it was incessantly segfaulting for mysterious reasons
Those reasons are undebugged code. No app just mysteriously segfaults (mystery isn't allowed in computers)... if the code was correct, it wouldn't segfault. Might be something minor... and you might have poured over it a million times, but somewhere you're code was still wrong.
TEACH Act, huh? Convenient that it has to do with education...
Who's with me that the acronym for something should be the letters(whatever they happen to be) for the thing's real name, instead of someone thinking of a clever word they want to have as their acronym and massaging the things name to have those letters?
You, apparently, have never seen the movie Pulp Fiction. If you had, you would have found the parent comment funny as hell.
Very well said.
It's the vocal minority syndrome. They are the loudest group, so they think they are in the majority... which just isn't the case. It's sad but true.
What Churchill wanted was to upgrade the Armed Forces to be able to fight when the fight came.
And when the fight came, he and the other Allies had no trouble bringing it back to Berlin to end the war. Coincidentally liberating France and the rest of western Europe in the mean-time. This war started in 1991 with the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, was postponed contingent to Iraq disarming (which they clearly haven't) and is being continued today. We're going to Baghdad to end the war. It's a stretch to compare that to the allies going to Berlin... but while we're making comparisons...
Saddam is a tin pot dictator with neither the vision nor the means to achieve a hundredth of what Hitler did.
Thank goodness this is true. But the fact that it is true doesn't mean he wouldn't if he could.
So, in other words, in the near future, we're going to see the editor, Michael, walking around with a Dr. Pepper hat and toting a Dr. Pepper bookbag....
He posted the story, he must be one of the six.
Strange, isn't it, that Taiwan can effectively demand concessions from a foreign company
One thing to consider (not saying this happened here, but it's interesting) is that Taiwan comes from a position of power in the computer world. Piss them off, and memory prices could triple. Similar situation with lots of other computer components.... MS can't sell so many new copies of windows when nobody is buying computers anymore....
Ok, you are now getting to the central issue.
Would you trade one person's life (not your own, but somebody else's)for that of a thousand? Would you trade one person's life for that of 500? 100? 10?
You stipulate that Saddam has killed "thousands and thousands" and obviously you have no doubt that he would kill thousands more if given the chance. If you answered yes to any of my above questions then you agree that lives can be traded on a one to one basis. If lives (on either side) are equivalent, then the best way to do something is the way that less people die. If you agree to that, then the issue can be boiled down to this:
if(deaths caused by invasion <= deaths caused by leaving him){
invade;
}else{
don't invade;
}
So really, it's a matter of figuring out how many of his or our people will die if he gets WMD's and comparing that number to what will happen if we go in now while he probably doesn't. Considering that Saddam rules with an iron fist (and as such, if the Americans are coming i think most of the iraqi people will help us, not fight us) and considering our great technologies (thus being able to target only soldiers not civilians) I'm going to guess going in now will cause less deaths than waiting.
Why are we so sure there will be a 'next' terrorist attack?
On US soil is one thing, but US lives are another. There have been US lives lost in:
1.US Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania
2.Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerby Scotland
3.Marine Barracks bombing in Lebanon
4.USS Cole bombing
There are hundreds of lives lost to terrorists in Ireland and Israel/Palestine. It seems terrorism is something the world is going to have to live with. It's not something to loose all our civil liberties over... but we need to be vigilant.
PS it's only been 1 year and a half since 9/11.
The United Nations is supposed to be the authority through which the international community deals with these threats
Which, as your post names several places, it is tragically unable to do. For the UN to be even slightly effective it has to have some teeth and it has to be willing to do use them now and again. Talk is cheap. There is a time for negotiation and there is a time for action. If the UN can't get it's head out of it's ass and do what's RIGHT, then they are no better than the League of Nations was.
Maybe the US shouldn't be the police force of the world, but if not, then who? It won't be the UN that's for sure.
It's detestable that we would go after Saddam, but let the African dictatorships alone... but we can't take EVERYONE on, we do have to pick and choose our battles. Let's be honest it's about the oil... but stacked against the injustices of Saddam's regime, the oil, and the threat that Saddam poses by developing WMD's... the shit going down in Africa is pretty minor.
And we are also trying to say that war is horrible, and kills people, and should be avoided at all costs.
Yeah, and that's what the UN has been trying to do since the end of the gulf war some 11 years ago. A good effort, but WTF? It's just drawing lines in the sand. Europe tried to avoid war at all costs as well... the result was WW2. Sure Saddam couldn't dream of marching across Europe, but appeasement was not the answer then and it is not now...
But worse than war, is genocide... (something that Saddam has perpetrated against his own people, the Kurds... and in the past he's used chemical weapons to do it) It kills people too, and in most cases those people are defenseless. Shouldn't it be avoided at all costs too? Is one of the 'all costs' to include a war?
Dude, sharing a building with AI types an expert on AI does not make.
Examples of advances in AI:
1. Computer programs able to spank all but the best humans playing chess.
2. Computer programs able to spank your ass playing even more complex games like CIV 3, C&C, etc.
3. Google saying "Searching 3,083,324,652 web pages" and "Results 1 - 10 of about 1,500,000. Search took 0.07 seconds"
There's been huge advances in AI with such things as Genetic Algorithms and Fuzzy logic. The applications are very specific and are not the far reaching HAL 9000 that people traditionally think of when you say AI. There is no 'singular consciosusness' that is going to pop out of your computer. That is NOT what AI is about. AI is about solving problems. More specifically, it's about finding methods for a computer to solve problems without brute forcing them.
For example, it would be easy for a computer to beat a chessmaster if the computer had the whole search tree available. The out come of every move of every game would be available, and it would be trivial to steer it towards a victory. But since the tree is HUGE and would take many hundreds of years to generate, the problem of computers playing chess is to get them to figure out a 'smart' way to beat the chessmaster. Alpha-beta tree pruning and things like that are the results. Don't underestimate the power of these.
There are great things coming out of AI research all the time, but you will not be seeing HAL 9000 any time soon.
I got to thinking about this real quick and, as i'm too lazy to read the actual interview and it's probably addressed there, what are the effects of diminishing returns?
The 'mythical man month' basically says that one programmer (or other worker) can produce more in one month than two workers each working half a month... who can do more than three workers all in 1/3 of a month. And further that just throwing more people at a problem doesn't really do much past a certain point. For some problems, it might be the case that one guy working for a month can do more than ten guys working for the same period of time.
How does swarm behavior overcome all of this great stuff?
I presume that it must be an essential part of the deal that the problem must be something very trivial for there to be great effects by swarming.
There is no doubt that swarming technologies have been AWESOME for p2p applications.... downloading a file from more than one source speeds up napstering (like the verbing there?).
It is great marketing... and i'm sure that they are thrilled that it's becoming a common term. But there is legal precedent (from xerox and kleenex, asprin and the like) that if you don't protect your trademarks now and then, you lose them. When you lose your trademark, anyone can then use the name.
While it is great mindshare to have everyone googling for information it's only cool when you are the only site named Google. If Google loses their trademark and now Bob's Search Engine gets to call itself 'google'.... well, that sucks for the real Google. I'm sure they don't want that. Now if they rattle a few sabres now and again, protect their trademark... it can still be a popular term, but they get to be the only ones who benefit from it.
Which, isn't so bad... afterall, they DID make the term popular and they DO have the bomb search engine that everyone is really talking about when they say 'google'.
C compiled by GCC 3.2: 15.38 seconds.
C++ compiled by GCC 3.2: 18.56 seconds.
Java compiled by Sun JDK 1.4.1: 1 minute, 8.93 seconds.
Ability to run the compiled bytecode on any platform: priceless.
Please don't take this post as supporting spam anyway, as i don't.... but i would have to answer your post by saying "Oh f-ing well...."
There are operating costs associated with every business. There are certain things that the customer pays for and expects. Each business has to deal with these expenses, minimize them as much as possible and charge the customer accordingly. All businesses do this... those that don't aren't very competitive and don't last very long.
Spam is a reality of the ISP's day to day life and the customer expects it to be processed and/or filtered. They expect it done well and not to lose anything. Part of your costs is to do that, so part of your fee has to make up for that cost. You minimize your costs as much as possible and deal with it. If this pushes your prices up past that of your competitors, you better figure out how they are minimizing the costs and do it as good or better. That's the nature of the free market.
Can't say i blame you for your viewpoint, though... nobody wants their profit margins cut or the kind of hassles spam creates. But it's part of the biz and you gotta realize that.
Better would be to make friends with him, give him that $500 bucks he wants to start his company(making you a partner), and be generally encouraging of that whole DOS thing he's talking about.
And when you're a kajillionaire, VP of Microsoft and all that, give that guy Linus anything he wants...
Wide adoption of THIS project as reviewed on slashdot a while ago.
Well, while everyone is dreaming and throwing around crazy cyberpunk ideas, i'll throw one out. Sure it's equally as unlikely as anything everyone else is spouting off about, but somewhat cool none-the-less.
Instead of implanted chips or ports, just inject people with a trillion or so microscopic robots. Kinda like the idea of 'mites' from Stephenson's 'Diamond Age'.
Probably, these little suckers would be too small, to do more than one task, but for that one task they could be really adept and each one (or each hundred or so) could have it's own job. One batch could be 'go seek out the visual cortex neuron 148 and report back what it's doing' and other batchs would have other equally important tasks. Some for input, some for output, others for infrastructure, conceivably others for security, etc... The lot of them work together as a little P2P network passing short-range messages and eventually it all gets reported back to the central computer... which could then do all the nifty ass crap that you can imagine by being brain-linked to a computer. Infinite recall, knowledge, processing, simulations... you're in the matrix now.
The little critters wouldn't ever be obsolete cause you could replace them from time to time by getting a shot... there is a lot of redundancy, and (assuming you have the micro technology to make them in the first place) would be probably pretty damn cheap to make and use.
I live in Titusville, FL right across the Indian River from the Kennedy Space Center. The Vehicle Assembly Building and the launchpads are visible from this city.
I was 7 when the Challenger exploded on takeoff. I am old enough to remember the hit our economy took in the years after the space program petered out. A large portion of out population are engineers, electricians, maintenance staff, etc. at the space center. Really, almost everyone here is directly related to the space program by one or more family members. The resulting layoffs after the challenger tragedy were devastating to our area. Laid off employees moved away. Housing prices dropped off. Many businesses closed. As a small town already such a thing could turn us into a veritable ghost town.
As tragic as this event is, there are much more far reaching implications for a great many families involved in the program. It is a shame that space exploration may come to a halt, but worse still is what will become of NASA employees, families and relations. In addition, there are hundreds of contractors that could fold because of a decline in the space program. Lockheed, USA, Harris and others will take a big hit. The effects could be devastating for us and our community.
He most definately cost them money.
So do picket lines, but they are still legal... as they definately should be.