Less than 10% of what Spain paid in fighting Muslims?
No, not "fighting" Muslims; that had happened before. Queen Isabelle made a one time payment to Muslim rulers to get them to leave. Think of it as "one time international aid" or "reparations".
Would it be comparable if we were to invest 10% of one year's cost in Iraq and Afghanistan?
NASA funding is about 18 billion dollars/year. The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was $180 billion at its peak (2008). So NASA is, in fact, getting about 10% of what we spend fighting there at its peak (right now, we're spending about $40 billion per year).
The Apollo program cost about $110 billion in 2010 dollars, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost about $1 trillion. So, we spent the equivalent of 10% of those wars on going to the moon.
In comparison, Columbus's voyage probably cost less than $100 million in modern terms.
Mind you, I don't think we should have gone to war in either Iraq or Afghanistan. But I also think that money shouldn't have gone to NASA; in reality, NASA is just part of the military-industrial complex.
Columbus, Magellen and most every other explorer you've ever heard of was government sponsored.
Using [Isabelle's] government as an example illustrating what the [US] government should do is logically wrong, because the two terms of "government" refer to different things. While, in the US, government (public) funding and private funding are mutually exclusive, Queen Isabelle's "government funding" was just another form of private funding.
That's the most bizarre leap of bad logic I've heard in quite a while. Thanks for a good laugh over something absurd.
It only seems "absurd" to you because you haven't thought it through properly. As yourself: we live in a democracy and people have lots of money. If they wanted something like the Moon program, why wouldn't they just donate money for it? The Apollo program cost $110 billion in 2010 dollars, or more than $1000 per tax payer. How many people would donate that kind of money voluntarily? Tyson wants the government to force people to spend that kind of money, and because that's likely to be politically unpopular, he wants to create new, artificial threats ("militarized space race") . And the sad thing is that NASA is piss poor and horrifically inefficient at space exploration. Its primary purpose is crony capitalism, a facade for military technology development, and aerospace subsidies.
No private company could have justified a Moon mission in the 1960s. Anyone who claims otherwise is delusional.
You're absolutely right: no private company could have justified a Moon mission in the 1960's, or the space shuttles and ISS afterwards. Those projects were a f*cking waste of money. That is exactly why government budgets for space exploration should be cut sharply, because they are using the money so inefficiently
You cannot build a business model around "let's go explore over there where no one has ever been and see if we can find something profitable".
Well, perhaps you can't, but Queen Isabelle certainly could and did build a business model around it: to her, Columbus' voyage was a business venture, and it was exploring the unknown. It was the same to the other private investors, who provided more financing than her. And it was the same to Columbus and other professionals, sailors, etc. who took these risks because they were promised a cut of any discoveries.
Furthermore, most modern startups are built on just such a business model, and the vast majority of them fail. Investors invest in highly risky and speculative ventures all the time. To claim otherwise is just ignorant.
By the way, I wonder about the mindset of people who believe that Americans should be treated and dictated to like the subjects of European monarchy, because that's what is implicit in your and deGrasse-Tyson's argument that Queen Isabella's investments are comparable to US government spending.
You might want to check your facts [wikipedia.org]. It was financed out of the royal treasury and commissioned by the Queen.
I know the facts, but you (and deGrasse-Tyson) simply aren't thinking this through. deGrasse-Tyson's argument is that private companies don't pay for exploration with their funds because it's too risky. But the risk of the expedition was actually insured by private companies and half the investment came from private investment. And as far as Queen Isabella was concerned, the "royal treasury" wasn't functioning like a modern budget (when Bush or Obama waste our budget, it doesn't affect their personal fortunes) it was functioning like the private property of the Queen. Finally, Queen Isabella very much expected a return and treated the deal like a business deal.
Of course, deGrasse-Tyson's basic premise about risk is wrong too. Private investors make investments not based on risk, but based on expected return. Queen Isabella knew that investing in Columbus' voyages was risky, but she weighed her investment against a potentially huge return; she also knew that there were doubts about Columbus' estimates of the length of the voyage, but she guessed that he might still discover new lands. Queen Isabella made a moderate investment for a potentially huge return. Government-funded space missions and space races, on the other hand, require a huge investment for a nearly certain negative return, and that's particularly true for a "militarized space race", which is utterly worthless to humanity. His premise that the government should invest in ventures that private investors shun is wrong.
As for asteroid mining, it's just a fact that people are starting to invest in it. And whether or not they miscalculated the risk, it's pretty much the only thing that makes sense investing large amounts of money in in space right now. NASA should limit itself to basic science: robotic probes and small sample return missions.
(Your analysis of the costs and risks of asteroid mining is bogus, by the way, because you start from the wrong premises. It's not about returning stuff to the surface of the Earth, that would be foolish, it's about getting mass in space, where launch costs make it valuable; asteroids don't contain "minerals", they primarily contain water, carbon, rock, and iron, just what we need for building space vehicles and habitats; "mining" an asteroid doesn't require complicated tech, it mostly just requires picking an asteroid made out of the material you want and of the size you need; and moving them around can be done with current technology and very little energy, since it can be done slowly.)
By the way, the fact that deGrasse Tyson thinks of the US government like Queen Isabella is the problem: deep down, he believes the people should be governed by an aristocracy.
Yes Minister explains this in more modern language:
And where do you think Queen Isabella got that money? She wasn't a tech billionaire. The funding came from the Spanish Royal Treasury. That means Spanish peasants paid for it and spoils of war paid for it and outright theft paid for it.
Correct. Queen Isabella treated her subjects like her personal property; Spanish peasants didn't have any say in what was going to be done with that money. Furthermore, and more important to deGrasse Tyson's argument, once Queen Isabella had stolen the money, it was her money to do with as she pleased. That is, any risks she took weren't risks to some impersonal national budget, they were risks to her personal wealth.
That is why deGrasse Tyson's analogy between Queen Isabella's "government" and modern government is false: unlike modern politicians, Queen Isabella took a personal financial risk when she invested in Columbus. The money she spent on Columbus was money she couldn't spent on making her castle nicer or building monuments or whatever it is that queens spend their money on.
That US government you speak of derisively got us to the moon and back in fucking 1969. While the mighty private sector is barely replicating what the Mercury Program did over half a century ago.
The private sector also hasn't "replicated" Versailles or Neuschwanstein. The fact that we went to the moon in "fucking 1969" is exactly the problem: it was a colossal waste of money. And the reason we haven't returned is the same reason: it still would be a colossal waste of money. The moon (or Mars) is not where we should focus our space exploration efforts; those are useless lumps of rock.
You have to send everything you need along for the ride. All the food that the astronauts need to eat on the ride will need to be brought along with them
You have full, unfiltered sunshine 24/7. You don't need to bring along anything other than water and algae.
Even if mankind had the capability to warp off to some other star system capable of supporting life, how many humans would make the journey?
We don't need to go to some other star system; ours is just fine and full of resources. We could settle the asteroid belt and beyond, and then take things from there.
How expensive is it to get to the asteroid belt? Not very. Once space travel is common and the engineering has been done (even without new technologies), the main cost is fuel. We can bound fuel cost from above by looking at old, inefficient missions like Apollo. Apollo burned about 2 million kg of propellant to get to the moon, which isn't all that different from getting to the asteroid belt. At about $0.30/kg retail price for natural gas, that makes the fuel cost for each crew member $200000 at US retail natural gas prices in current dollars. A flight to the asteroid belt would actually likely be cheaper than that.
This back of the envelope calculation is, of course, very rough, but it shows that costs for space travel are roughly what middle class and above could afford. For example, $200k is probably a typical house in the G7, so about half of the G7, or about 400 million people could probably muster the economic resources for emigrating to the asteroid belt.
NdGT makes a very good point [youtube.com] that the only technologies that are really expensive (like space travel) that get funded are either in response to existential threats (i.e. nuclear war, etc) or for tangible financial gain.
Except he gets his facts completely wrong. For example, Columbus' Voyage was privately financed, and the risk of such voyages was generally privately insured.
When it comes to space exploration you simply cannot quantify the risks sufficiently to get a return on investment so financial gain is off the table for anything on the frontier of our technology and knowledge.
The asteroid belt alone is so full of easily reachable resources that there is almost no risk and spectacular gains being made. That's why the private sector is gearing up for private (robotic) space exploration and mining.
The real issue isn't about financing. deGrasse Tyson and his buddies can get their billions and it's only a rounding error; they will flush it down the toilet, but at least they won't be killing people with it.
The real danger is that the US government is going to interfere with private space exploration through ridiculous regulations and restrictions. If we're lucky, space exploration would move to other nations, but if the US then throws its political weight around, it may perpetuate space treaties that prohibit the commercial use of space, and that really would be a disaster.
I think some funding for NASA for unmanned, science-related exploration is a reasonably good idea. But a "militarized space race" would be a gigantic waste of money and prevent just the kind of exploration, economic, and scientific progress we want to make, because there is little that is more discouraging to private investment than turning space into a potential battlefield between two superpowers.
In fact, he is wrong on numerous accounts. First of all, these voyages were not all that expensive, probably less than $100 million in modern dollars; they were less than 10% of what Spain paid that year to get the Moors out of Spain. And Queen Isabella was a totalitarian ruler who effectively invested her private money in this venture, and she very much wanted a return. Furthermore, the expedition to the new world was insured by private insurers, so it was actually the private sector taking the risk; much of the expense of such exploration was, in fact, for insurance. Finally, about half of the money for the expedition actually came from other private investors.
So, when deGrasse Tyson advocates that we should engage in a government-funded space race with the Chinese, he is guided by numerous wrong assumptions. deGrasse Tyson always sounds like he is very authoritative (it's the voice and the delivery), but his actual knowledge of economics and history seems to be poor. And don't kid yourself, the guy is lobbying in his own interest, because once private space exploration takes off, people like him will become irrelevant.
When he says that it is wrong that "if we had given the money we spent on NASA to the private sector, we would be on the moon and on Mars more cheaply", he is, however, absolutely right. He is right because it makes little difference whether government pays its cronies in the private sector directly or through NASA; the error in both cases is that government takes the money and reallocates it in ways that are driven by lobbying and politics, not efficiency and results.
The fact that the study purporting for the hypothesis to be true was fake doesn't mean it's "not true", it means that we don't know whether it's true. In fact, the reason so many people believed it is that it's pretty plausible, at least if you stick to dark chocolate with little sugar content.
People frequently make the same error even for valid scientific studies: "study X failed to show a difference between A and B" is not the same as "study X showed that there is no difference between A and B".
You clearly haven't read the brief, or even have a basic understanding of the case (hint: API's are not copyrighted). If Google wins, there is no such thing as copyrighted software anymore. All software with available source code, can simply be pasted into the IDE of your choice and compiled. Everything will be totally free.
Anybody who wants to know what these cases are about can just read the Wikipedia article and find more information on the web:
The idea that Java was ever free was rooted in Sun's original promises about making Java an open standard. But Sun dragged that process out for years and eventually just reneged on it, all the while filing patents and making sure that they owned the platform completely. Sun probably did that because they had learned that open and free platforms like Linux and X11 were eating their lunch.
Because a lot of FOSS developers had counted on Sun's promises, by the time it was clear that Java was going to remain proprietary and that Sun was going to break their promises, those developers preferred to maintain the myth that Java was "free" instead of facing reality, losing their investments and livelihood, and moving away from the platform.
Microsoft was kind of the opposite; Sun beat them over the head with a legal stick, that's why they created.NET. And Microsoft pretty quickly tried to put the legal framework in place to guarantee that.NET was a free and open platform, but because of Microsoft's rotten history, people didn't trust them.
I don't think this should make your head explode, it's just companies reacting to their past experiences, and people acting with rational self interest, even if their self-interest is really harmful to the community (like people who advocated Java as a free and open platform after around 2000).
The copyright phase consisted of several distinct claims of infringement: a nine-line rangeCheck function, several test files, the structure, sequence and organization of the Java Application Programming Interface (API), and the API documentation
No matter what Google may have copied, according to Oracle's own court case and allegations, they did not create a single API by copy-and-paste, as you allege.
The only "actual Java source code" copied is these nine lines:
private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex {
if (fromIndex > toIndex)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + fromIndex +
") > toIndex(" + toIndex+")");
if (fromIndex < 0)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
if (toIndex > arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex); }
But, actually, these lines pretty much follow from normal Java programming conventions; whether or not Google actually copied them, they should not be covered by copyright law since they are not creative.
Google did a copy/paste of the Java source code into their own source code.
Google probably does copy/paste of the Java source code all the time, like lots of other people, because it's open source, so that is a meaningless accusation.
Google distributed interface definitions that look very similar to Oracle's. That's probably because in Java, there really aren't a lot of different ways of describing the same interface. Furthermore, interfaces should not usually be considered copyrightable.
Google also distributed some copyrighted Java source files. That was stupid, but those files appear to have been test cases, not code that ships on handsets, and it appears to have been unintentional. It's hard to argue that Oracle suffered any harm from that and Google came into compliance.
Looks like Obama's primary legacy may be to enshrine API copyrights in law. If this had been the law of the land in the 80's and 90's, Linux and FOSS would never have gotten off the ground.
By the restrictive "no cost to anyone anywhere" definition, there's nothing free, so the word is meaningless.
The word "free" means "not in bondage" and "unrestrained in movement". It stands for "free" in the sense of liberty and free software.
The term "for free" in the sense of "at no charge" is meaningless, confusing, and manipulative. The sooner we get rid of that sense from the English language, the better.
We need to elect someone who puts an end to this nonsense. Maybe the guy who said this would be a good candidate:
This Administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we demand. I will provide our intelligence and law enforcement agencies with the tools they need to track and take out the terrorists without undermining our Constitution and our freedom.
That means no more illegal wiretapping of American citizens. No more national security letters to spy on citizens who are not suspected of a crime. No more tracking citizens who do nothing more than protest a misguided war. No more ignoring the law when it is inconvenient.
The simplest change would be (as I said) simply to strike the term "marriage" from the laws and replace it by "civil union"; that wouldn't change anybody's rights, but it would get rid of the stupid discussions around the state redefining religious marriage.
Converting marriage into a private contractual arrangement and unbundling it is harder. Nevertheless, what you are worried about isn't a big problem: old marriages would simply be deemed equivalent to a specific modern contract.
(1) The car isn't self-parking, it's under driver control.
(2) Pedestrian detection wouldn't have helped because the driver was overriding the automatic features of the car.
Pedestrian detection costs extra money because it requires installing a radar and camera.
We reached out to Volvo for answers about what went wrong here, and the company’s response was also a bit disturbing. Volvo spokesperson Johan Larsson explained that the video is mislabeled. He said the car is not attempting to self-park. “It seems they are trying to demonstrate pedestrian detection and auto-braking,” said Larsson by email. “Unfortunately, there were some issues in the way the test was conducted.”
The pedestrian detection feature, which works using a radar in the car’s grill and a camera located behind the windshield. has been around since the mid 2000s, and even started detecting cyclists in 2011, but it costs approximately $3,000, according to IEEE.
But even if it did have the feature, Larsson says the driver would have interfered with it by the way they were driving and “accelerating heavily towards the people in the video.” “The pedestrian detection would likely have been inactivated due to the driver inactivating it by intentionally and actively accelerating,” said Larsson. “Hence, the auto braking function is overrided by the driver and deactivated.”
As someone who just had his husband in the hospital for a month. That shit does matter.
Of course it matters! Did I say otherwise anywhere?
But let me tell you. I've done Domestic Partnership,... But without even a marriage certificate,
And why should you have to get a marriage certificate in order to get these legal rights? Why shouldn't everybody (straight or gay) be able to make these arrangements for their partnerships without labeling it "marriage" or get them as part of a "take-it-or-leave-it" package?
Slashdot Mirror
No, not "fighting" Muslims; that had happened before. Queen Isabelle made a one time payment to Muslim rulers to get them to leave. Think of it as "one time international aid" or "reparations".
NASA funding is about 18 billion dollars/year. The cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was $180 billion at its peak (2008). So NASA is, in fact, getting about 10% of what we spend fighting there at its peak (right now, we're spending about $40 billion per year).
The Apollo program cost about $110 billion in 2010 dollars, and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq cost about $1 trillion. So, we spent the equivalent of 10% of those wars on going to the moon.
In comparison, Columbus's voyage probably cost less than $100 million in modern terms.
Mind you, I don't think we should have gone to war in either Iraq or Afghanistan. But I also think that money shouldn't have gone to NASA; in reality, NASA is just part of the military-industrial complex.
Using [Isabelle's] government as an example illustrating what the [US] government should do is logically wrong, because the two terms of "government" refer to different things. While, in the US, government (public) funding and private funding are mutually exclusive, Queen Isabelle's "government funding" was just another form of private funding.
It only seems "absurd" to you because you haven't thought it through properly. As yourself: we live in a democracy and people have lots of money. If they wanted something like the Moon program, why wouldn't they just donate money for it? The Apollo program cost $110 billion in 2010 dollars, or more than $1000 per tax payer. How many people would donate that kind of money voluntarily? Tyson wants the government to force people to spend that kind of money, and because that's likely to be politically unpopular, he wants to create new, artificial threats ("militarized space race") . And the sad thing is that NASA is piss poor and horrifically inefficient at space exploration. Its primary purpose is crony capitalism, a facade for military technology development, and aerospace subsidies.
You're absolutely right: no private company could have justified a Moon mission in the 1960's, or the space shuttles and ISS afterwards. Those projects were a f*cking waste of money. That is exactly why government budgets for space exploration should be cut sharply, because they are using the money so inefficiently
Well, perhaps you can't, but Queen Isabelle certainly could and did build a business model around it: to her, Columbus' voyage was a business venture, and it was exploring the unknown. It was the same to the other private investors, who provided more financing than her. And it was the same to Columbus and other professionals, sailors, etc. who took these risks because they were promised a cut of any discoveries.
Furthermore, most modern startups are built on just such a business model, and the vast majority of them fail. Investors invest in highly risky and speculative ventures all the time. To claim otherwise is just ignorant.
By the way, I wonder about the mindset of people who believe that Americans should be treated and dictated to like the subjects of European monarchy, because that's what is implicit in your and deGrasse-Tyson's argument that Queen Isabella's investments are comparable to US government spending.
I know the facts, but you (and deGrasse-Tyson) simply aren't thinking this through. deGrasse-Tyson's argument is that private companies don't pay for exploration with their funds because it's too risky. But the risk of the expedition was actually insured by private companies and half the investment came from private investment. And as far as Queen Isabella was concerned, the "royal treasury" wasn't functioning like a modern budget (when Bush or Obama waste our budget, it doesn't affect their personal fortunes) it was functioning like the private property of the Queen. Finally, Queen Isabella very much expected a return and treated the deal like a business deal.
Of course, deGrasse-Tyson's basic premise about risk is wrong too. Private investors make investments not based on risk, but based on expected return. Queen Isabella knew that investing in Columbus' voyages was risky, but she weighed her investment against a potentially huge return; she also knew that there were doubts about Columbus' estimates of the length of the voyage, but she guessed that he might still discover new lands. Queen Isabella made a moderate investment for a potentially huge return. Government-funded space missions and space races, on the other hand, require a huge investment for a nearly certain negative return, and that's particularly true for a "militarized space race", which is utterly worthless to humanity. His premise that the government should invest in ventures that private investors shun is wrong.
As for asteroid mining, it's just a fact that people are starting to invest in it. And whether or not they miscalculated the risk, it's pretty much the only thing that makes sense investing large amounts of money in in space right now. NASA should limit itself to basic science: robotic probes and small sample return missions.
(Your analysis of the costs and risks of asteroid mining is bogus, by the way, because you start from the wrong premises. It's not about returning stuff to the surface of the Earth, that would be foolish, it's about getting mass in space, where launch costs make it valuable; asteroids don't contain "minerals", they primarily contain water, carbon, rock, and iron, just what we need for building space vehicles and habitats; "mining" an asteroid doesn't require complicated tech, it mostly just requires picking an asteroid made out of the material you want and of the size you need; and moving them around can be done with current technology and very little energy, since it can be done slowly.)
By the way, the fact that deGrasse Tyson thinks of the US government like Queen Isabella is the problem: deep down, he believes the people should be governed by an aristocracy.
Yes Minister explains this in more modern language:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Any sane person would say "hell, no!" to a military space race with the Chinese.
Correct. Queen Isabella treated her subjects like her personal property; Spanish peasants didn't have any say in what was going to be done with that money. Furthermore, and more important to deGrasse Tyson's argument, once Queen Isabella had stolen the money, it was her money to do with as she pleased. That is, any risks she took weren't risks to some impersonal national budget, they were risks to her personal wealth.
That is why deGrasse Tyson's analogy between Queen Isabella's "government" and modern government is false: unlike modern politicians, Queen Isabella took a personal financial risk when she invested in Columbus. The money she spent on Columbus was money she couldn't spent on making her castle nicer or building monuments or whatever it is that queens spend their money on.
The private sector also hasn't "replicated" Versailles or Neuschwanstein. The fact that we went to the moon in "fucking 1969" is exactly the problem: it was a colossal waste of money. And the reason we haven't returned is the same reason: it still would be a colossal waste of money. The moon (or Mars) is not where we should focus our space exploration efforts; those are useless lumps of rock.
You have full, unfiltered sunshine 24/7. You don't need to bring along anything other than water and algae.
http://earthzine.org/2014/08/2...
We don't need to go to some other star system; ours is just fine and full of resources. We could settle the asteroid belt and beyond, and then take things from there.
How expensive is it to get to the asteroid belt? Not very. Once space travel is common and the engineering has been done (even without new technologies), the main cost is fuel. We can bound fuel cost from above by looking at old, inefficient missions like Apollo. Apollo burned about 2 million kg of propellant to get to the moon, which isn't all that different from getting to the asteroid belt. At about $0.30/kg retail price for natural gas, that makes the fuel cost for each crew member $200000 at US retail natural gas prices in current dollars. A flight to the asteroid belt would actually likely be cheaper than that.
This back of the envelope calculation is, of course, very rough, but it shows that costs for space travel are roughly what middle class and above could afford. For example, $200k is probably a typical house in the G7, so about half of the G7, or about 400 million people could probably muster the economic resources for emigrating to the asteroid belt.
The human population isn't growing exponentially anymore. In fact, it's going to stabilize at around 11 billion.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No, actually the opposite is true: we'll be taking land out of production and it will be idle.
Actually, wars and other violence has been steadily decreasing.
However, the biggest drain on our economy is opportunity costs from governmental restrictions and interference in free markets.
Except he gets his facts completely wrong. For example, Columbus' Voyage was privately financed, and the risk of such voyages was generally privately insured.
The asteroid belt alone is so full of easily reachable resources that there is almost no risk and spectacular gains being made. That's why the private sector is gearing up for private (robotic) space exploration and mining.
The real issue isn't about financing. deGrasse Tyson and his buddies can get their billions and it's only a rounding error; they will flush it down the toilet, but at least they won't be killing people with it.
The real danger is that the US government is going to interfere with private space exploration through ridiculous regulations and restrictions. If we're lucky, space exploration would move to other nations, but if the US then throws its political weight around, it may perpetuate space treaties that prohibit the commercial use of space, and that really would be a disaster.
I think some funding for NASA for unmanned, science-related exploration is a reasonably good idea. But a "militarized space race" would be a gigantic waste of money and prevent just the kind of exploration, economic, and scientific progress we want to make, because there is little that is more discouraging to private investment than turning space into a potential battlefield between two superpowers.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is the guy who claimed that Columbus was "government financed":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
In fact, he is wrong on numerous accounts. First of all, these voyages were not all that expensive, probably less than $100 million in modern dollars; they were less than 10% of what Spain paid that year to get the Moors out of Spain. And Queen Isabella was a totalitarian ruler who effectively invested her private money in this venture, and she very much wanted a return. Furthermore, the expedition to the new world was insured by private insurers, so it was actually the private sector taking the risk; much of the expense of such exploration was, in fact, for insurance. Finally, about half of the money for the expedition actually came from other private investors.
So, when deGrasse Tyson advocates that we should engage in a government-funded space race with the Chinese, he is guided by numerous wrong assumptions. deGrasse Tyson always sounds like he is very authoritative (it's the voice and the delivery), but his actual knowledge of economics and history seems to be poor. And don't kid yourself, the guy is lobbying in his own interest, because once private space exploration takes off, people like him will become irrelevant.
When he says that it is wrong that "if we had given the money we spent on NASA to the private sector, we would be on the moon and on Mars more cheaply", he is, however, absolutely right. He is right because it makes little difference whether government pays its cronies in the private sector directly or through NASA; the error in both cases is that government takes the money and reallocates it in ways that are driven by lobbying and politics, not efficiency and results.
Care to provide some citations to back up your statement that "Earth warms at exponential rates"?
The fact that the study purporting for the hypothesis to be true was fake doesn't mean it's "not true", it means that we don't know whether it's true. In fact, the reason so many people believed it is that it's pretty plausible, at least if you stick to dark chocolate with little sugar content.
People frequently make the same error even for valid scientific studies: "study X failed to show a difference between A and B" is not the same as "study X showed that there is no difference between A and B".
Anybody who wants to know what these cases are about can just read the Wikipedia article and find more information on the web:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O....
https://majadhondt.wordpress.c...
Either you have no understanding of the case, or you are Larry Ellison's towel boy and shilling for your sugar daddy.
The idea that Java was ever free was rooted in Sun's original promises about making Java an open standard. But Sun dragged that process out for years and eventually just reneged on it, all the while filing patents and making sure that they owned the platform completely. Sun probably did that because they had learned that open and free platforms like Linux and X11 were eating their lunch.
Because a lot of FOSS developers had counted on Sun's promises, by the time it was clear that Java was going to remain proprietary and that Sun was going to break their promises, those developers preferred to maintain the myth that Java was "free" instead of facing reality, losing their investments and livelihood, and moving away from the platform.
Microsoft was kind of the opposite; Sun beat them over the head with a legal stick, that's why they created .NET. And Microsoft pretty quickly tried to put the legal framework in place to guarantee that .NET was a free and open platform, but because of Microsoft's rotten history, people didn't trust them.
I don't think this should make your head explode, it's just companies reacting to their past experiences, and people acting with rational self interest, even if their self-interest is really harmful to the community (like people who advocated Java as a free and open platform after around 2000).
Here is what the copyright case was about:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O....
No matter what Google may have copied, according to Oracle's own court case and allegations, they did not create a single API by copy-and-paste, as you allege.
The only "actual Java source code" copied is these nine lines:
But, actually, these lines pretty much follow from normal Java programming conventions; whether or not Google actually copied them, they should not be covered by copyright law since they are not creative.
So, in different words, you're a liar.
Google probably does copy/paste of the Java source code all the time, like lots of other people, because it's open source, so that is a meaningless accusation.
Google distributed interface definitions that look very similar to Oracle's. That's probably because in Java, there really aren't a lot of different ways of describing the same interface. Furthermore, interfaces should not usually be considered copyrightable.
Google also distributed some copyrighted Java source files. That was stupid, but those files appear to have been test cases, not code that ships on handsets, and it appears to have been unintentional. It's hard to argue that Oracle suffered any harm from that and Google came into compliance.
Looks like Obama's primary legacy may be to enshrine API copyrights in law. If this had been the law of the land in the 80's and 90's, Linux and FOSS would never have gotten off the ground.
The word "free" means "not in bondage" and "unrestrained in movement". It stands for "free" in the sense of liberty and free software.
The term "for free" in the sense of "at no charge" is meaningless, confusing, and manipulative. The sooner we get rid of that sense from the English language, the better.
The state giveth, the state taketh, all hail the state!
We need to elect someone who puts an end to this nonsense. Maybe the guy who said this would be a good candidate:
Oh, wait...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The simplest change would be (as I said) simply to strike the term "marriage" from the laws and replace it by "civil union"; that wouldn't change anybody's rights, but it would get rid of the stupid discussions around the state redefining religious marriage.
Converting marriage into a private contractual arrangement and unbundling it is harder. Nevertheless, what you are worried about isn't a big problem: old marriages would simply be deemed equivalent to a specific modern contract.
Finally, your reasoning about "two classes of citizens" is so bizarre and scary that I'm not sure I want to live on this planet anymore.
Summary from TFA:
(1) The car isn't self-parking, it's under driver control.
(2) Pedestrian detection wouldn't have helped because the driver was overriding the automatic features of the car.
Pedestrian detection costs extra money because it requires installing a radar and camera.
No, I didn't. Learn to read and understand English before you start having a debate in it.
Of course it matters! Did I say otherwise anywhere?
And why should you have to get a marriage certificate in order to get these legal rights? Why shouldn't everybody (straight or gay) be able to make these arrangements for their partnerships without labeling it "marriage" or get them as part of a "take-it-or-leave-it" package?