We learned rather alot from going to the moon.. and when we do finally get to mars and the second mission starts planning, will you be piping up with, "What did we learn from mars? Wouldn't it be better to have an international effort to explore another rock in space -- like Venus?"
We never really even explored the moon. We have maps of it out the wazoo thanks to the fact that you can take a map-quality picture of it with a backyard telescope (albeit and expensive backyard telescope), but we've only been up there the one time. In fact, in all the time since we've never even bothered to leave a fairly shallow earth orbit. Here we are talking about going to mars (and don't get me wrong here, i wholeheartedly support anything that launches something at mars with at least a 60% chance of it not exploding) and yet we can get neither funding nor interest to go somewhere as close and potentially profitable as the moon. Dreamweaver
And if the space station is run by castronauts, how long until we have a custody battle over little Alien Gonzalez who came 53,000 light years to live in america?
Data overlays on vision are a failed idea? When did this happen? Last i checked nobody'd actually come up with a system that does this at a high enough resolution or low enough cost to even qualify as a tried idea, much less failed one. Dreamweaver
Of course MS releases a new programming language.. they've probably had it in a red, glass-fronted box in the legal department for years marked with a "Break glass in case of anti-trust" sign. Now when they're forced to release the windows source code, they'll just release it in 'C sharp' which nobody knows and is just close enough to C and java to really screw up the people who Do know them. Dreamweaver
Not just touchtone phones, Octothorpe is the correct name for the # symbol.. though i'm betting the MS marketing department didn't know that, because Coctothorpe sounds like a really awful porn adaptation of a B-grade horror movie. Dreamweaver
Sure, except that we've not landed anything in any of those places, or even near them, and the soil would have about the same effect on earth bacteria as bleach..
You mean everybody doesn't hear that? I figured i must be at least a little over-sensative, since i can hear a medium size TV through a closed window from outside, but i'd always just assumed everyone heard that annoying buzz and just ignored it.. Dreamweaver
The point isn't whether or not you feel sorry for them, it's whether the RIAA or the musician has control of their music. You can say the RIAA is evil, the musicians are stupid, or make unrelated statements about unpopular bands, but the point is that even if every musician in america decided tomorrow to say "Okay, you can all trade MP3's of my music all you want", the RIAA could still sue you, me, napster, etc to their heart's content. Dreamweaver
Yeah, i've always wondered what 'classical' music would have been like had the composers of the time had access to things like synthesizers and electric guitars. Dreamweaver
Er, how could that possibly work? Even if somehow they kept me from running any video capture programs on my monitor, i can still just pipe it to my TV instead of my computer monitor, run it in fullscreen, and record onto a tape (or, soon, DVD). Dreamweaver
I don't know about cellphones being the ultimate platform for.. well.. anything other than communications. The current trend for cellulars seems to be smaller and less noticable. With those fractal antennas that were in an article here a while back i wouldn't be surprsed at cellular headsets that clip behind your ear within a year or so.
The real multi-player game platform is still computers. For simple games like cards or gambling, a PDA can do the job much more easily than a cell' and with the advent of built-in wireless internet connections it's no less convenient than the phone. For more complex games, which are what make the big bucks anyway- $10/month is all well and good, but $60 plus $10-20 a month is even better-desktop computers are a long way from being replaced, since the interface for palmtops is still so clunky and laptop batteries are so inefficient. Not to mention how much cheaper bandwidth is at home. Dreamweaver
It's true too. The only true Natural Rights (or God given if you're of a religious turn) are:
1) The right to the attempt at continued existence Nobody can make you stop trying to continue to exist. Being drowned, set on fire, spotaneously combusting, or sucked into a black hole may all seriously limit the possibility of continued survival, but they don't take away your right to try to do it. 2) The right to decay Everyone and everything suffers from entropy and nothing can stop it short of absolute zero.
Aside from those, every 'right', supposedly natural or otherwise, is just a societal convenience to make living with our fellow homos sapiens sapiens a bit easier. Ones like 'life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness' are just the most basic life-easing concepts out there. Now go back a couple hundred years and it would have been 'life and the persuit of happiness'. Go back a couple thousand years and it's just 'the persuit of happiness'. And the only reason nobody's come up with a way around that one is because we've yet to find a way to keep people from being capable of conscious thought.
Perhaps in another few decades the 'modern' world will give way to a new order with the core values being 'life, liberty, the persuit of happiness, and a free exchange of ideas'.. but until then we geeks must continue to don our digital ski masks and fight the power.
Well, everything i could say about time requirements and budgets has been said a thousand times already.. so i'll just go to what annoyed me about the whole article: suits.
Seriously. Why is wearing a suit such a huge thing in the business world? I can understand if you're a lawyer and need to impress people with your multi-thousand dollar clothing, or an executive who deals with customers and must appease the customers' sense of what's proper in an executive.. but other than that.. WHY?
It's been proven and re-proven that people are more productive in an environment where they're comfortable. In this particular case the idea seems to be to make your coders as un-cumfortable as possible so they can think of nothing but getting the code perfect the first time so they can go home.. but most places (as has been mentioned repeatedly) aren't like that. So why is it that a guy who works in a cubicle and never gets closer to customers than a middle-manager who is in charge of a supervisor who is in charge of the customer service department has to show up to work in a tie?
And the worst part is that the business world seems to think people enjoy this. Sure, it's nice to look good.. if you've got a $2,000 suit you're going to want to wear it on occasion.. but how many of us can honestly say that we feel more productive in it? Dreamweaver
I'm confused.. what game since DOOM (we'll just say it's more innovative than wolfenstein since it was multiplayer) was innovative exactly? All their games are the same old thing drug back out of the closet with a new engine slapped on them. The non-iD 1st person shooters did so well because they have a (*gasp*) plot and give a more varied and interactive experience than the tired old iD 'lookie, i'm a space marine! Uh oh, it's lava!' bit. Dreamweaver
That looks even stupider than the barcode thing.. it's just a variant of a regular pressure-sensative pen/pad input device, but you have to keep buying their special, one-use paper and (presumably) ink for the pen, not to mention the hassle of having to recharge your pen all the time..
If you replaced their whole camera assembly with a pressure sensor for the nib to see when you're writing and an absolute position sensor in the pen you could just store pen movement and reproduce it as writing with software, rather than worrying about dots on paper and recognizing them in varying light conditions and such with a camera.. not to mention taking less power. You'd not have to write on their special paper either, which with 73 billion sheets would still run out fairly fast if it's meant for business use.
I don't know if i'd call free "earth shattering".. it's only free if you have the time and bandwidth to download it, though it's certainly cheaper in stores than other OSes (usually anyway.. the corel package was in the $90 range last time i was at best buy).. and open source isn't really earth shattering either, since the only difference it makes to Average Joe User is that it's harder to get some programs running since he (Joe) has to figure out how to compile it first.
Now if it were free (and commonly available in a free state), open source, easy to use, and had at least a reasonable chance of being capable of utilizing all the resources of a typical off-the-shelf PC, That would be 'earth shattering'.. but i guess 1.5 out of 4 is better than none. Dreamweaver
1) Blizzard has said and demostrated that they care a great deal about quality control on their games.. letting Loki port it, no matter how good loki may be, puts the linux port's quality under Loki's control, not Blizzard's.. which goes against what Blizzard is about.
2) It might not cost them Directly to have loki port the game, but they'd certainly not get as much as if they sold their entire game to any other company (which is pretty much what they'd be doing) and while they may not want to go to the expense of porting to linux for another couple thousand sales, they don't want to intentionally Lose a few thousand from the people who run windows just for gaming and would then not buy it from Blizzard when they can get it for linux from Loki. (i'm sure you'll flame them about that too, but it, again, is just good business practice).
3) While i'm sure it terribly offends your rebelious sensibilities.. Blizzard is a big company, they're not going to be terribly willing to listen to Loki, who most of blizzard's staff has probably never heard of. Dreamweaver
It's more inherently 'right' to reform a criminal rather than 'throw them away' because, assuming you can come up with a way to do it, if a criminal can be reformed to a point where they will not commit the crime again and become a functioning member of society, you have one more functioning member and one less drain on the public good.
If hypothetical criminal killed my brother but was somehow reformed such that he'd never kill again, I'd have no problem with him being released back into society at large. In fact, I'd rather that than have him stay locked away for the rest of his life. Whether he's locked up, out and about, or fried in the chair my brother would still be dead.. the idea that the perpetrator should die in order to somehow make up for his crime is stupid beyond belief. It doesn't do anything but assuage your skewed sense of what's fair in the world. The dead person is dead, and giving him company doesn't do a thing. Keeping the criminal in jail all his life costs me a great deal of money and puts the criminal in an arguably much worse position than my dead brother. My brother died and was dead, all over in at most a week or two if the criminal really drew it out. He's being, most likely, mentally and physically tortured and raped all the rest of his life, the whole time knowing he can never get away from it.. that seems a bit uneven.
And if affecting a person's life negatively in any way makes a person not elligable for basic human rights, then i doubt there's a single person left on earth who can claim them. It's impossible to exist at all without messing up Someone's life.. even if you died right now you'd be negatively effecting the lives of all the people who care about you, so you can't even die without screwing someone over.
And that's not even taking into account people who are wrongly imprisoned. What happens if the guy who killed my brother gets away because the cops arrest some Other guy who looks guilty but, in reality, isn't? It's nice to think that the justice system would find him innocent if he truly is, but it doesn't work that way. Obviously 'reforming' a person who has nothing to reform isn't a perfect solution.. but if i get jailed for a murder i didn't commit, i'd expect it would be considerably easier for me to get through the reform system and get out than the current system, wherein i'm either put to death for nothing or spend the rest of my life in a living hell for not having a good defense attorney. Dreamweaver
You know, when i first saw this story my first thought was Not "Ew, they used VB?" so much as "Er.. judges are walking around sentencing people on the street?" I'm all for geekiness, but methinks someone's priorities are a midge skewed:)
Now that advertisers and corporations have taken over the 'net and are progressively turning it into a bad commercial, the government has decided it's time to step in and stop all this free speech, and you can't turn around without some gap-shopper chained to the nearest bandwagon talking about AOL in butchered tech-jargon.. what do we do now? It's time for us geeks to band together and come up with something new to sweep the world with, while giving us another decade or so of confusing the norms before they jump on it.
(Oh, and if any of you say linux, OSS, or something along the lines of "Down with the mpaa!" i swear i'll hunt you down and kick you in the head..) Dreamweaver
...we should start thinking about these issues now, not twenty or thirty years from now.
Now, on the whole, i agree with you.. and i think most of our fellow geeks agree.. nanotech Does have potential dangers that are nearly as obvious as the potential benefits. We all agree, too, that the benefits are So enormous that they outweight the possible dangers. We also know that we need to think about the dangers as we step toward nanotech.. but we don't really know what dangers to think about. What we're capable of and what we expect to be possible seems to change daily.. will nanobots the size of cells be possible? the size of molecules? Will they be useful in health care? product fabrication? will they be capable of things on the scale of clearing fat out of your arteries, or will they be able to actually take apart and re-combine molecules? There are so many variables with no real limitations on the possible that it's hard to come up with any reasonable models for the situation. We can come up with ways to defend ourselves from nano-terrorism, but what happens if nanobots are capable of completely circumventing our defenses because something we'd considered impossible (or at least highly unlikely) turned out to be easy?
So yes, we should think about these things.. but we shouldn't dwell on them to the extent that we slow down the progress of the technology. When it becomes obvious where the technology is going, what it will be capable of, Then will be the time to start thinking about how to keep wackos from turning us all into gray dust.. Dreamweaver
Actually, the shuttle isn't FAA certified because traditional FAA certification rules couldn't possibly apply to the shuttle since it would require things of no practical use on a spacecraft and not require things that are of a great deal of practical use. So, rather than have to come up with a whole new shuttle certification system that would almost certainly no longer be valid as soon as some new spacecraft design as put into use (and remember, this is back when we still thought we'd only be using the shuttle for a few years until something better came along), they classified it as a non-atmospheric vehicle. In other words: not a plane. Hence, the FAA has no control over it or it's safety specs.
And as for there being no abort option between SRB ignition and SRB seperation... no crap einstein, you're sitting on top of a contiual explosion. Space is dangerous, trying to make every second of the mission 'safe' is what has led to most of the space-exploration stagnation since the 70's. Back then people were willing to take a few chances.. they knew they were doing dangerous stuff but did it anyway so that they could be the ones to do it.
I mean come on people.. you're riding in a tin can on top of tons and tons of exploding propellant moving at escape velocity. Trying to say that Any set of abort options makes it safe is insane.. it's an inherently dangerous situation. Dreamweaver
Re:Uh, doesn't seem very "rational" at all
on
The Mind of God
·
· Score: 1
Then your analogy wasn't very fitting.. he was talking about finding underlying meaning to the universe. I assumed that's what gold represented, whereby my analogy was the religious reaction to the search for underlying meaning in anything but religious doctrine. Mainly: ostracism, fear, and threats. People have been burned or otherwise painfully killed for expressing the belief that there might be an underlying foundation to the universe other than god. As for the rest, general religious belief: if it's fun it's probably evil, and if you do it you're going to go to hell (or appropriate naughty afterlife for your religion). Dreamweaver
Slashdot Mirror
We learned rather alot from going to the moon.. and when we do finally get to mars and the second mission starts planning, will you be piping up with, "What did we learn from mars? Wouldn't it be better to have an international effort to explore another rock in space -- like Venus?"
We never really even explored the moon. We have maps of it out the wazoo thanks to the fact that you can take a map-quality picture of it with a backyard telescope (albeit and expensive backyard telescope), but we've only been up there the one time. In fact, in all the time since we've never even bothered to leave a fairly shallow earth orbit. Here we are talking about going to mars (and don't get me wrong here, i wholeheartedly support anything that launches something at mars with at least a 60% chance of it not exploding) and yet we can get neither funding nor interest to go somewhere as close and potentially profitable as the moon.
Dreamweaver
And if the space station is run by castronauts, how long until we have a custody battle over little Alien Gonzalez who came 53,000 light years to live in america?
/. at 5:30 am...
Boy, i gotta stop reading
Dreamweaver
Data overlays on vision are a failed idea? When did this happen? Last i checked nobody'd actually come up with a system that does this at a high enough resolution or low enough cost to even qualify as a tried idea, much less failed one.
Dreamweaver
User:But...
Computer:Oh, and another thing, I was lying. I've seen much bigger hard drives.
Dreamweaver
Of course MS releases a new programming language.. they've probably had it in a red, glass-fronted box in the legal department for years marked with a "Break glass in case of anti-trust" sign. Now when they're forced to release the windows source code, they'll just release it in 'C sharp' which nobody knows and is just close enough to C and java to really screw up the people who Do know them.
Dreamweaver
Not just touchtone phones, Octothorpe is the correct name for the # symbol.. though i'm betting the MS marketing department didn't know that, because Coctothorpe sounds like a really awful porn adaptation of a B-grade horror movie.
Dreamweaver
Sure, except that we've not landed anything in any of those places, or even near them, and the soil would have about the same effect on earth bacteria as bleach..
Dreamweaver
You mean everybody doesn't hear that? I figured i must be at least a little over-sensative, since i can hear a medium size TV through a closed window from outside, but i'd always just assumed everyone heard that annoying buzz and just ignored it..
Dreamweaver
The point isn't whether or not you feel sorry for them, it's whether the RIAA or the musician has control of their music. You can say the RIAA is evil, the musicians are stupid, or make unrelated statements about unpopular bands, but the point is that even if every musician in america decided tomorrow to say "Okay, you can all trade MP3's of my music all you want", the RIAA could still sue you, me, napster, etc to their heart's content.
Dreamweaver
Yeah, i've always wondered what 'classical' music would have been like had the composers of the time had access to things like synthesizers and electric guitars.
Dreamweaver
Er, how could that possibly work? Even if somehow they kept me from running any video capture programs on my monitor, i can still just pipe it to my TV instead of my computer monitor, run it in fullscreen, and record onto a tape (or, soon, DVD).
Dreamweaver
I don't know about cellphones being the ultimate platform for.. well.. anything other than communications. The current trend for cellulars seems to be smaller and less noticable. With those fractal antennas that were in an article here a while back i wouldn't be surprsed at cellular headsets that clip behind your ear within a year or so.
The real multi-player game platform is still computers. For simple games like cards or gambling, a PDA can do the job much more easily than a cell' and with the advent of built-in wireless internet connections it's no less convenient than the phone. For more complex games, which are what make the big bucks anyway- $10/month is all well and good, but $60 plus $10-20 a month is even better-desktop computers are a long way from being replaced, since the interface for palmtops is still so clunky and laptop batteries are so inefficient. Not to mention how much cheaper bandwidth is at home.
Dreamweaver
"Hey Phil, did you leave the incubator on last night?"
"Don't think so Mike, why?"
"Well, we seem to have a supercomputer where the lab used to be."
Dreamweaver
It's true too. The only true Natural Rights (or God given if you're of a religious turn) are:
1) The right to the attempt at continued existence
Nobody can make you stop trying to continue to exist. Being drowned, set on fire, spotaneously combusting, or sucked into a black hole may all seriously limit the possibility of continued survival, but they don't take away your right to try to do it.
2) The right to decay
Everyone and everything suffers from entropy and nothing can stop it short of absolute zero.
Aside from those, every 'right', supposedly natural or otherwise, is just a societal convenience to make living with our fellow homos sapiens sapiens a bit easier. Ones like 'life, liberty, and the persuit of happiness' are just the most basic life-easing concepts out there. Now go back a couple hundred years and it would have been 'life and the persuit of happiness'. Go back a couple thousand years and it's just 'the persuit of happiness'. And the only reason nobody's come up with a way around that one is because we've yet to find a way to keep people from being capable of conscious thought.
Perhaps in another few decades the 'modern' world will give way to a new order with the core values being 'life, liberty, the persuit of happiness, and a free exchange of ideas'.. but until then we geeks must continue to don our digital ski masks and fight the power.
Dreamweaver
Well, everything i could say about time requirements and budgets has been said a thousand times already.. so i'll just go to what annoyed me about the whole article:
suits.
Seriously. Why is wearing a suit such a huge thing in the business world? I can understand if you're a lawyer and need to impress people with your multi-thousand dollar clothing, or an executive who deals with customers and must appease the customers' sense of what's proper in an executive.. but other than that.. WHY?
It's been proven and re-proven that people are more productive in an environment where they're comfortable. In this particular case the idea seems to be to make your coders as un-cumfortable as possible so they can think of nothing but getting the code perfect the first time so they can go home.. but most places (as has been mentioned repeatedly) aren't like that. So why is it that a guy who works in a cubicle and never gets closer to customers than a middle-manager who is in charge of a supervisor who is in charge of the customer service department has to show up to work in a tie?
And the worst part is that the business world seems to think people enjoy this. Sure, it's nice to look good.. if you've got a $2,000 suit you're going to want to wear it on occasion.. but how many of us can honestly say that we feel more productive in it?
Dreamweaver
...innovative game we know ID can produce
I'm confused.. what game since DOOM (we'll just say it's more innovative than wolfenstein since it was multiplayer) was innovative exactly? All their games are the same old thing drug back out of the closet with a new engine slapped on them. The non-iD 1st person shooters did so well because they have a (*gasp*) plot and give a more varied and interactive experience than the tired old iD 'lookie, i'm a space marine! Uh oh, it's lava!' bit.
Dreamweaver
That looks even stupider than the barcode thing.. it's just a variant of a regular pressure-sensative pen/pad input device, but you have to keep buying their special, one-use paper and (presumably) ink for the pen, not to mention the hassle of having to recharge your pen all the time..
If you replaced their whole camera assembly with a pressure sensor for the nib to see when you're writing and an absolute position sensor in the pen you could just store pen movement and reproduce it as writing with software, rather than worrying about dots on paper and recognizing them in varying light conditions and such with a camera.. not to mention taking less power. You'd not have to write on their special paper either, which with 73 billion sheets would still run out fairly fast if it's meant for business use.
Dreamweaver
I don't know if i'd call free "earth shattering".. it's only free if you have the time and bandwidth to download it, though it's certainly cheaper in stores than other OSes (usually anyway.. the corel package was in the $90 range last time i was at best buy).. and open source isn't really earth shattering either, since the only difference it makes to Average Joe User is that it's harder to get some programs running since he (Joe) has to figure out how to compile it first.
Now if it were free (and commonly available in a free state), open source, easy to use, and had at least a reasonable chance of being capable of utilizing all the resources of a typical off-the-shelf PC, That would be 'earth shattering'.. but i guess 1.5 out of 4 is better than none.
Dreamweaver
1) Blizzard has said and demostrated that they care a great deal about quality control on their games.. letting Loki port it, no matter how good loki may be, puts the linux port's quality under Loki's control, not Blizzard's.. which goes against what Blizzard is about.
2) It might not cost them Directly to have loki port the game, but they'd certainly not get as much as if they sold their entire game to any other company (which is pretty much what they'd be doing) and while they may not want to go to the expense of porting to linux for another couple thousand sales, they don't want to intentionally Lose a few thousand from the people who run windows just for gaming and would then not buy it from Blizzard when they can get it for linux from Loki. (i'm sure you'll flame them about that too, but it, again, is just good business practice).
3) While i'm sure it terribly offends your rebelious sensibilities.. Blizzard is a big company, they're not going to be terribly willing to listen to Loki, who most of blizzard's staff has probably never heard of.
Dreamweaver
It's more inherently 'right' to reform a criminal rather than 'throw them away' because, assuming you can come up with a way to do it, if a criminal can be reformed to a point where they will not commit the crime again and become a functioning member of society, you have one more functioning member and one less drain on the public good.
If hypothetical criminal killed my brother but was somehow reformed such that he'd never kill again, I'd have no problem with him being released back into society at large. In fact, I'd rather that than have him stay locked away for the rest of his life. Whether he's locked up, out and about, or fried in the chair my brother would still be dead.. the idea that the perpetrator should die in order to somehow make up for his crime is stupid beyond belief. It doesn't do anything but assuage your skewed sense of what's fair in the world. The dead person is dead, and giving him company doesn't do a thing. Keeping the criminal in jail all his life costs me a great deal of money and puts the criminal in an arguably much worse position than my dead brother. My brother died and was dead, all over in at most a week or two if the criminal really drew it out. He's being, most likely, mentally and physically tortured and raped all the rest of his life, the whole time knowing he can never get away from it.. that seems a bit uneven.
And if affecting a person's life negatively in any way makes a person not elligable for basic human rights, then i doubt there's a single person left on earth who can claim them. It's impossible to exist at all without messing up Someone's life.. even if you died right now you'd be negatively effecting the lives of all the people who care about you, so you can't even die without screwing someone over.
And that's not even taking into account people who are wrongly imprisoned. What happens if the guy who killed my brother gets away because the cops arrest some Other guy who looks guilty but, in reality, isn't? It's nice to think that the justice system would find him innocent if he truly is, but it doesn't work that way. Obviously 'reforming' a person who has nothing to reform isn't a perfect solution.. but if i get jailed for a murder i didn't commit, i'd expect it would be considerably easier for me to get through the reform system and get out than the current system, wherein i'm either put to death for nothing or spend the rest of my life in a living hell for not having a good defense attorney.
Dreamweaver
You know, when i first saw this story my first thought was Not "Ew, they used VB?" so much as "Er.. judges are walking around sentencing people on the street?" I'm all for geekiness, but methinks someone's priorities are a midge skewed :)
Dreamweaver
Now that advertisers and corporations have taken over the 'net and are progressively turning it into a bad commercial, the government has decided it's time to step in and stop all this free speech, and you can't turn around without some gap-shopper chained to the nearest bandwagon talking about AOL in butchered tech-jargon.. what do we do now? It's time for us geeks to band together and come up with something new to sweep the world with, while giving us another decade or so of confusing the norms before they jump on it.
(Oh, and if any of you say linux, OSS, or something along the lines of "Down with the mpaa!" i swear i'll hunt you down and kick you in the head..)
Dreamweaver
...we should start thinking about these issues now, not twenty or thirty years from now.
Now, on the whole, i agree with you.. and i think most of our fellow geeks agree.. nanotech Does have potential dangers that are nearly as obvious as the potential benefits. We all agree, too, that the benefits are So enormous that they outweight the possible dangers. We also know that we need to think about the dangers as we step toward nanotech.. but we don't really know what dangers to think about. What we're capable of and what we expect to be possible seems to change daily.. will nanobots the size of cells be possible? the size of molecules? Will they be useful in health care? product fabrication? will they be capable of things on the scale of clearing fat out of your arteries, or will they be able to actually take apart and re-combine molecules? There are so many variables with no real limitations on the possible that it's hard to come up with any reasonable models for the situation. We can come up with ways to defend ourselves from nano-terrorism, but what happens if nanobots are capable of completely circumventing our defenses because something we'd considered impossible (or at least highly unlikely) turned out to be easy?
So yes, we should think about these things.. but we shouldn't dwell on them to the extent that we slow down the progress of the technology. When it becomes obvious where the technology is going, what it will be capable of, Then will be the time to start thinking about how to keep wackos from turning us all into gray dust..
Dreamweaver
Actually, the shuttle isn't FAA certified because traditional FAA certification rules couldn't possibly apply to the shuttle since it would require things of no practical use on a spacecraft and not require things that are of a great deal of practical use. So, rather than have to come up with a whole new shuttle certification system that would almost certainly no longer be valid as soon as some new spacecraft design as put into use (and remember, this is back when we still thought we'd only be using the shuttle for a few years until something better came along), they classified it as a non-atmospheric vehicle. In other words: not a plane. Hence, the FAA has no control over it or it's safety specs.
And as for there being no abort option between SRB ignition and SRB seperation... no crap einstein, you're sitting on top of a contiual explosion. Space is dangerous, trying to make every second of the mission 'safe' is what has led to most of the space-exploration stagnation since the 70's. Back then people were willing to take a few chances.. they knew they were doing dangerous stuff but did it anyway so that they could be the ones to do it.
I mean come on people.. you're riding in a tin can on top of tons and tons of exploding propellant moving at escape velocity. Trying to say that Any set of abort options makes it safe is insane.. it's an inherently dangerous situation.
Dreamweaver
Then your analogy wasn't very fitting.. he was talking about finding underlying meaning to the universe. I assumed that's what gold represented, whereby my analogy was the religious reaction to the search for underlying meaning in anything but religious doctrine. Mainly: ostracism, fear, and threats. People have been burned or otherwise painfully killed for expressing the belief that there might be an underlying foundation to the universe other than god. As for the rest, general religious belief: if it's fun it's probably evil, and if you do it you're going to go to hell (or appropriate naughty afterlife for your religion).
Dreamweaver