"We need to separate those whose real agenda is socio-economic change from the environmental argument. They aren't really interested in the environment, anyway."
Um, I think you'll find the Green movement has *always* been interested in both socio-economic change *and* in the environment. It's a holistic worldview. Maybe they push the connections a little bluntly sometimes, and seize on Big Events like climat change as 'teaching tools' because they're really, really frustrated with how many people don't see what are the, to a Green, pervasive but very deep and sometimes non-obvious links between everything.
Not that hard to understand, really.
What I find hard to understand is why people who are opposed to Green views somehow thinking that merely saying "but you want to CHANGE our SOCIO-ECONOMIC BASE!" as if that automatically damns the cause beyond redemption.
Well, yeah. Duh. Of course. And do you have a specific criticism *of* that change?
"3) What's wrong with learning about Baseball, Basketball, Hockey, Football, Lacrosse, Archery, Wrestling, track, tennis, softball, volleyball, bowling, or Badminton? If we shouldn't learn about these activities, then we shouldn't anything past the 6th grade. If this isn't important, then Shakespeare, Calculus, world history, and Chemistry aren't important."
I'm sorry - how does that follow at all?
You can, eg, help build a bridge or design a 747 if you know Calculus. Can you use knowledge of Badminton to do anything comparable?
World history can tell you about politics and how to predict what is likely to happen if, eg, a fascist dictator takes control of your country. Can knowledge of Bowling do anything comparable?
I'm sure learning about the history of sports is useful - but is it *that* useful?
How about if we substituted the names of games for sports in your statement:
"If we shouldn't learn about World of Warcraft and Lego Star Wars II, then we shouldn't anything past the 6th grade. If Galaxians, Super Mario Bros and Hungry Hungry Hippos aren't important, then Shakespeare, Calculus, world history, and Chemistry aren't important."
I use Evolution at home, and while I think it's a nice email client, I find myself avoiding it as a calendar and writing contact numbers in text files in Gedit rather than trusting them to its contact system. That probably says something.
I really, really wish it did not use '.evolution' as its main folder. I have a couple of gigabytes of email in there. Who was it who thought I want that folder to be hidden when I go to copy my essential documents out of my home directory? (say when the next release of Ubuntu comes out)?
Last I recall, it did not have a good way of bulk importing and exporting appointments, or bulk erasing my calendar so I can synchronise my Palm with it without getting duplicates. Eventually I jus gave up trying to get my Palm to sync with it cleanly, and therefore abandoned it as a calendar. Anything less than absolutely 100% perfect syncing, every time, means data loss, and data loss in a calendar/PIM means you either miss an important meeting or lose a friend's contact details forever. My Palm is my life. It's not worth the risk.
3. Why did Novell abandon the Netware range of products?
What an odd question. They didn't. They ported it to Linux. That's what Open Enterprise Server is. SuSE + Netware. And at the same time they built a whole lot more web-service type services off to the side of the 'Netware' box.
By 'Netware' I mean the bundle of core file-and-print technologies that date back to the old-school Netware 4.x/5.x/6.x days: Novell Storage Services file system, Novell Core Protocol for file access, Novell Distributed Printer Services, the Novell Client for Windows, ConsoleOne for administration. They're all still there. As is Groupwise, only now it runs on OES.
There's also a bunch of 'Novell' rather than 'Netware'-branded services such as eDirectory (the directory formerly known as Novell Directory Services), ZEN Desktop Management, ZEN Imaging, ZEN Asset Management, exteNd Composer/Director portal/webservices platform, and Identity Manager, which from the start were not written with dependencies on Netware but in Java or.NET/Mono or as crossplatform binaries (eDirectory for example runs on Linux, Solaris, Windows and Netware).
Netware itself was basically just a low level kernel/OS with a fair few limitations (though it was simple... NLMs were like a hybrid of EXEs and DLLs), and was showing its age, so replacing Netware with SuSE was a huge step forward.
Granted, Novell is really bad for constantly changing the names of its products just for the sake of trendiness (Identity Manager, formerly Novell Account Manager, formerly DirXML...), so I suppose it's not surprising people constantly get confused - but it's not like Novell has stopped shipping Netware any more than Microsoft has stopped shipping, say, Win32 or SMB.
"Using that logic, we should all be using horses as our primary mode of transportation. Just look how proven and older that locomotion model is!"
And when the oil runs out, we'll find out just how durable our 100 year love affair with wheeled internal-combustion transport was, and just how dumb our plodding old ancestors were with their renewable bio-technologies.
It would be nice if us IT types learned to have maybe a slightly more long-term view of the world than the next Patch Tuesday.
"By the "world is not poorer" logic, we might as well all ride horses, since we'd be paying oat producers and horseshoe manufacturers instead of the auto industry, so the world as a whole wouldn't be poorer."
Given that horses run on renewable carbon-neutral fuels, are nanoscale self-assemblers, emit fully biodegradable wastes, and can operate efficiently on a far wider scale of terrain than any four-wheeled vehicle: I'm not so sure that's a particular good example of a technology change that made the world richer.
"A massive veil of 'turn-the-other-cheek' was set in place in order to ensure that financial gain could be had."
I do not think that phrase means what you think it means.
'Turn the other cheek' means to refrain from vindictiveness towards one's opponents. Not a feature particularly associated with the Bush administration.
Pretending not to see something one knows is there would be 'turning a blind eye'.
Yes! I don't understand why more people don't understand this. It always boggles me when people use terms like "pandering to public opinion" like it's a bad thing.
You *want* your representatives in government to *represent* you. If the electorate changes its mind, the representative better change their vote too, or they're not doing their job.
If you want to elect someone who holds strong, principled opinions (remembering that strongly held does not automatically equal correct, and that deriving all your political stances from philosophical principles doesn't mean your principles themselves are correct), that's fine. But make sure that's also what the majority want, and what the majority continues to want, otherwise what you've got yourself is no longer a democracy but an authoritarian state.
If you still believe that people in public office are there to *lead* the people by implementing unpopular decisions, rather than *represent* them by implementing popular ones, and that a country is best run by gathering a small select group of "good people" and giving them unlimited power, then what you really need to be having is a discussion about whether democracy itself is a good thing. It might not be. There's no good logical argument that popular will knows best. On historical scales it's not been around that long. And there've been some spectacular examples of democratic states doing bad things. But at least be honest about the full implications of what you're arguing.
Growing up a Kiwi one tends to forget that James Cook wasn't just our little local hero.
Also, watching 'Master and Commander' brought home to me just how much Star Trek is 18th/19th naval colonialism in space. Aubrey = Kirk, Maturin = a combined Spock/McCoy. Phasers = cannon broadside in the face at point-blank range.
Now, a TV SF series that dealt with what *actual* space is like, not windjammers and WW2 dogfights... would be something to see. Planetes is probably the best we've got so far.
> Christian tolerance teaches me to tolerate people's rights to choose whatever religious belief they want, even if they are wrong.
>>Let me point it out for you: you're assuming you're right and that non-christians are wrong. That's not tolerance, that's religious blindness.
Huh? What you're proposing isn't tolerance either, by that definition, it's... some weird kind of ultra-strong relativism that assumes that *all beliefs* are somehow beyond notions of right and wrong. I don't think even hardcore postmodernists really hold to that.
See -- *anyone* who holds *any* belief *by definition* believes that belief to be true (and also by definition, any belief contradicting that belief to be false). That's, like, what belief *means*. Whether the subject of that belief is religion or, eg, acceleration due to gravity on Earth, is immaterial. There are true beliefs and there are false beliefs. This is not blindness, this is fact.
The only way such an idea of total equivalence could make sense to me would be if you thought that it was just specifically *religious* beliefs that are so far removed from reality as to be all equally *not worth* debating. That would makes one 'tolerant' of religion, but only in the sense of considering all forms of it *completely* useless and faulty and wrong. Kind of a cheap way out.
If you already agree with someone, you don't "tolerate" them, you support and enthusiastically endorse them. If you want *real* tolerance, you have to be willing to realise that you are advocating tolerating the beliefs and actions of people you *know* to be wrong, harmful, and misguided - because you believe the harm done by their wrong beliefs is less than what would be done by limiting their freedom. That's what tolerance *is*.
A lot of people here are jumping on the idea that 'obviously Space Invaders and Pac-Man aren't violent!' But when you look at these games - like most games in Western culture - it's obvious they are. What they're not is *graphically* violent, but that's a whole different thing.
When you look at the vast majority of games Westerners play (and I suspect this is also the same for non-Western cultures, but I'd be interested to see counterexamples), almost without exception they are stylised battle scenarios. Chess: stylised field warfare with objectives (capture the king). Poker and Monopoly: economic warfare (bankrupt your opponent). Tennis, volleyball: stylised duel. Cricket and baseball: stylised siege (defend your base from incoming projectiles).
There are a very few number of classic games, either electronic or traditional, which don't fit into a military kind of metaphor. Those that aren't about some form of stylised combat, often tend to be either boring to play or aimed at children. A few notable exceptions: Tetris. Hackey-sack.
One could draw a number of interesting and possibly contradictory conclusions from this fact. One, that humans are naturally wired to be violent. Two, that if we find the greatest pleasure in play-fighting, should we actually be working to minimise violence? Three, alternatively, if violence in real lfie is not in fact as much fun as we pretend it is in our games, perhaps we've inherited a huge cultural blind spot, through programming via millenia of games and warlike entertainments, that twists us toward violent confrontation rather than beneficial cooperation - and maybe this also infects our attitudes toward economics, religion, gender relations, and practically everything else we do.
"It reminds me of actors who give political speeches. It's not their field of expertise, but people listen to them anyway."
Good grief. Is this what gets taught in civics nowadays?
What is with this idea that keeps cropping up in public discourse, and on the Internet, that of all places should know better? That somehow "non-experts" are not allowed to be politically active?
In a democratic republic, politics is and should be *everyone's* area of expertise. *Especially* if you're not an expert. That's what democracy means.
Requiring politics to only be conducted by experts has been tried before, and still is the default option in many places of the world. It's gone by various names: monarchy, aristocracy, dictatorship.
"What's more important to linux, the "open-source spirit" that prevents you from distributing one hell of an impressive Live CD, or a wider adoption of linux due to it's advanced technology"
The open-source spirit, obviously. What's use of wider adoption of one particular brand name due to advanced technology if that technology removes the freedom that made that brand name great? That's kind of the opposite of useful. See also: America today.
Can you imagine a natural selection paper written by the masses?
Because of course something as irreducibly complex as Darwinian theory could never arise from the competitive random chance interactions of a normally-distributed population.
"America's leadership in the semiconductor industry in general and the CPU industry in perticular is direct result of the space race and the arms race. I prefare the former rather then the latter."
You may prefer to think of the Space Race as purely civilian and scientific, but that's a sepia-toned fiction. It was actually a side project of the missile race. The Mercury shots were on Atlas/Redstone ICBMs. The design of the Space Shuttle was driven by Air Force requirements. Admittedly the Saturn heavy-lifters were an anomaly since they were never used for military payloads - but I think that's because the payloads shrunk, and automation got unexpectedly good enough fast enough that the need for having humans in space to control functional military hardware vanished even as the capability for human-rated launchers was achieved.
The goal of the Space Race was to gain the military high ground for reconaissance, communications and strategic bombing. Science, propaganda and civilian communications was a bonus on the side, not the main reason for funding. In typical 1950s-60s DARPA fashion, there were multiple parallel projects to accomplish these goals. By the end of the 1960s, the third wave of ground-based ICBMs - Minuteman - had pretty much locked up the strategic nuke goal. Apollo had demonstrated the ability to get humans to the moon, but despite being spectacular that turned out to be a pretty useless capability. The Air Force's Manned Orbital Laboratory was scrapped because automated satellites could do the job more cheaply.
The Shuttle carried on the legacy of Apollo in a vastly cut-down form sort of as a "just in case" measure, because the 1970s military simply didn't need the whole Von Braun heavylifter fleet / 2001 doughnut station dream now that it had transistorised / integrated circuit guidance computers and the work of launching missiles and satellites could be mostly done remotely from ground stations. That's why the post-Apollo human spaceflight program has constantly struggled against funding cuts and weird conflicting requirements - because nobody wants to kill it completely, but it's doing a job that doesn't actually fill a major strategic military role.
"We come in peace for all mankind" was a diplomatic little white lie. "We have dominance of cislunar space, we don't know what to do with it, but damned if anyone else will get there first" is a better translation.
I wish people would realise that share-alike open source licences are 'infectious' or 'viral' in exactly the same way that all copyright licences are.
If I merge GPL/CC-BY-SA licenced material into my work, the derivative work is not entirely under my control any more. I can still use and propagate the derivative work, but the original licence 'infects' my code with its terms.
But if I merge a standard copyright file into my work, suddenly - depending on the exact licence terms - I may have no rights to do *anything* with the derivative work at all, and instantly become a criminal. Or I may be restricted in all sorts of weird ways - perhaps I am not allowed to write a competing product, perhaps I have to pay royalties. Perhaps the original contract I signed will be purchased by a whole chain of corporate entities who have different views as to what my obligations are, and will come back to me in ten years time looking for half of my profits.
See the SCO lawsuit for how this works.
In any case, as soon as I merge any copyrighted material into a derivative work, my work is 'infected' by the original's licencing terms. This is the nature of copyright.
Slashdot Mirror
"We need to separate those whose real agenda is socio-economic change from the environmental argument. They aren't really interested in the environment, anyway."
Um, I think you'll find the Green movement has *always* been interested in both socio-economic change *and* in the environment. It's a holistic worldview. Maybe they push the connections a little bluntly sometimes, and seize on Big Events like climat change as 'teaching tools' because they're really, really frustrated with how many people don't see what are the, to a Green, pervasive but very deep and sometimes non-obvious links between everything.
Not that hard to understand, really.
What I find hard to understand is why people who are opposed to Green views somehow thinking that merely saying "but you want to CHANGE our SOCIO-ECONOMIC BASE!" as if that automatically damns the cause beyond redemption.
Well, yeah. Duh. Of course. And do you have a specific criticism *of* that change?
"Due to others lack of planning, we're constantly having to pull micicles out of our asses."
Like, frozen mice? On a stick?
I stared at that word for the longest time, wondering what new hip slang term it was.
"3) What's wrong with learning about Baseball, Basketball, Hockey, Football, Lacrosse, Archery, Wrestling, track, tennis, softball, volleyball, bowling, or Badminton? If we shouldn't learn about these activities, then we shouldn't anything past the 6th grade. If this isn't important, then Shakespeare, Calculus, world history, and Chemistry aren't important."
I'm sorry - how does that follow at all?
You can, eg, help build a bridge or design a 747 if you know Calculus. Can you use knowledge of Badminton to do anything comparable?
World history can tell you about politics and how to predict what is likely to happen if, eg, a fascist dictator takes control of your country. Can knowledge of Bowling do anything comparable?
I'm sure learning about the history of sports is useful - but is it *that* useful?
How about if we substituted the names of games for sports in your statement:
"If we shouldn't learn about World of Warcraft and Lego Star Wars II, then we shouldn't anything past the 6th grade. If Galaxians, Super Mario Bros and Hungry Hungry Hippos aren't important, then Shakespeare, Calculus, world history, and Chemistry aren't important."
Hmm, you think?
I use Evolution at home, and while I think it's a nice email client, I find myself avoiding it as a calendar and writing contact numbers in text files in Gedit rather than trusting them to its contact system. That probably says something.
I really, really wish it did not use '.evolution' as its main folder. I have a couple of gigabytes of email in there. Who was it who thought I want that folder to be hidden when I go to copy my essential documents out of my home directory? (say when the next release of Ubuntu comes out)?
Last I recall, it did not have a good way of bulk importing and exporting appointments, or bulk erasing my calendar so I can synchronise my Palm with it without getting duplicates. Eventually I jus gave up trying to get my Palm to sync with it cleanly, and therefore abandoned it as a calendar. Anything less than absolutely 100% perfect syncing, every time, means data loss, and data loss in a calendar/PIM means you either miss an important meeting or lose a friend's contact details forever. My Palm is my life. It's not worth the risk.
3. Why did Novell abandon the Netware range of products?
.NET/Mono or as crossplatform binaries (eDirectory for example runs on Linux, Solaris, Windows and Netware).
What an odd question. They didn't. They ported it to Linux. That's what Open Enterprise Server is. SuSE + Netware. And at the same time they built a whole lot more web-service type services off to the side of the 'Netware' box.
By 'Netware' I mean the bundle of core file-and-print technologies that date back to the old-school Netware 4.x/5.x/6.x days: Novell Storage Services file system, Novell Core Protocol for file access, Novell Distributed Printer Services, the Novell Client for Windows, ConsoleOne for administration. They're all still there. As is Groupwise, only now it runs on OES.
There's also a bunch of 'Novell' rather than 'Netware'-branded services such as eDirectory (the directory formerly known as Novell Directory Services), ZEN Desktop Management, ZEN Imaging, ZEN Asset Management, exteNd Composer/Director portal/webservices platform, and Identity Manager, which from the start were not written with dependencies on Netware but in Java or
Netware itself was basically just a low level kernel/OS with a fair few limitations (though it was simple... NLMs were like a hybrid of EXEs and DLLs), and was showing its age, so replacing Netware with SuSE was a huge step forward.
Granted, Novell is really bad for constantly changing the names of its products just for the sake of trendiness (Identity Manager, formerly Novell Account Manager, formerly DirXML...), so I suppose it's not surprising people constantly get confused - but it's not like Novell has stopped shipping Netware any more than Microsoft has stopped shipping, say, Win32 or SMB.
"Using that logic, we should all be using horses as our primary mode of transportation. Just look how proven and older that locomotion model is!"
And when the oil runs out, we'll find out just how durable our 100 year love affair with wheeled internal-combustion transport was, and just how dumb our plodding old ancestors were with their renewable bio-technologies.
It would be nice if us IT types learned to have maybe a slightly more long-term view of the world than the next Patch Tuesday.
"By the "world is not poorer" logic, we might as well all ride horses, since we'd be paying oat producers and horseshoe manufacturers instead of the auto industry, so the world as a whole wouldn't be poorer."
Given that horses run on renewable carbon-neutral fuels, are nanoscale self-assemblers, emit fully biodegradable wastes, and can operate efficiently on a far wider scale of terrain than any four-wheeled vehicle: I'm not so sure that's a particular good example of a technology change that made the world richer.
Just sayin'.
"A massive veil of 'turn-the-other-cheek' was set in place in order to ensure that financial gain could be had."
I do not think that phrase means what you think it means.
'Turn the other cheek' means to refrain from vindictiveness towards one's opponents. Not a feature particularly associated with the Bush administration.
Pretending not to see something one knows is there would be 'turning a blind eye'.
Yes! I don't understand why more people don't understand this. It always boggles me when people use terms like "pandering to public opinion" like it's a bad thing.
You *want* your representatives in government to *represent* you. If the electorate changes its mind, the representative better change their vote too, or they're not doing their job.
If you want to elect someone who holds strong, principled opinions (remembering that strongly held does not automatically equal correct, and that deriving all your political stances from philosophical principles doesn't mean your principles themselves are correct), that's fine. But make sure that's also what the majority want, and what the majority continues to want, otherwise what you've got yourself is no longer a democracy but an authoritarian state.
If you still believe that people in public office are there to *lead* the people by implementing unpopular decisions, rather than *represent* them by implementing popular ones, and that a country is best run by gathering a small select group of "good people" and giving them unlimited power, then what you really need to be having is a discussion about whether democracy itself is a good thing. It might not be. There's no good logical argument that popular will knows best. On historical scales it's not been around that long. And there've been some spectacular examples of democratic states doing bad things. But at least be honest about the full implications of what you're arguing.
Growing up a Kiwi one tends to forget that James Cook wasn't just our little local hero.
Also, watching 'Master and Commander' brought home to me just how much Star Trek is 18th/19th naval colonialism in space. Aubrey = Kirk, Maturin = a combined Spock/McCoy. Phasers = cannon broadside in the face at point-blank range.
Now, a TV SF series that dealt with what *actual* space is like, not windjammers and WW2 dogfights... would be something to see. Planetes is probably the best we've got so far.
Except with the frequency of Windows updates, reinstalling from shipped CDs is likely to make it *more* vulnerable to exploits.
> Christian tolerance teaches me to tolerate people's rights to choose whatever religious belief they want, even if they are wrong.
>>Let me point it out for you: you're assuming you're right and that non-christians are wrong. That's not tolerance, that's religious blindness.
Huh? What you're proposing isn't tolerance either, by that definition, it's... some weird kind of ultra-strong relativism that assumes that *all beliefs* are somehow beyond notions of right and wrong. I don't think even hardcore postmodernists really hold to that.
See -- *anyone* who holds *any* belief *by definition* believes that belief to be true (and also by definition, any belief contradicting that belief to be false). That's, like, what belief *means*. Whether the subject of that belief is religion or, eg, acceleration due to gravity on Earth, is immaterial. There are true beliefs and there are false beliefs. This is not blindness, this is fact.
The only way such an idea of total equivalence could make sense to me would be if you thought that it was just specifically *religious* beliefs that are so far removed from reality as to be all equally *not worth* debating. That would makes one 'tolerant' of religion, but only in the sense of considering all forms of it *completely* useless and faulty and wrong. Kind of a cheap way out.
If you already agree with someone, you don't "tolerate" them, you support and enthusiastically endorse them. If you want *real* tolerance, you have to be willing to realise that you are advocating tolerating the beliefs and actions of people you *know* to be wrong, harmful, and misguided - because you believe the harm done by their wrong beliefs is less than what would be done by limiting their freedom. That's what tolerance *is*.
$1-2 million per episode, I believe. And that's done cheap.
This is an important observation.
A lot of people here are jumping on the idea that 'obviously Space Invaders and Pac-Man aren't violent!' But when you look at these games - like most games in Western culture - it's obvious they are. What they're not is *graphically* violent, but that's a whole different thing.
When you look at the vast majority of games Westerners play (and I suspect this is also the same for non-Western cultures, but I'd be interested to see counterexamples), almost without exception they are stylised battle scenarios. Chess: stylised field warfare with objectives (capture the king). Poker and Monopoly: economic warfare (bankrupt your opponent). Tennis, volleyball: stylised duel. Cricket and baseball: stylised siege (defend your base from incoming projectiles).
There are a very few number of classic games, either electronic or traditional, which don't fit into a military kind of metaphor. Those that aren't about some form of stylised combat, often tend to be either boring to play or aimed at children. A few notable exceptions: Tetris. Hackey-sack.
One could draw a number of interesting and possibly contradictory conclusions from this fact. One, that humans are naturally wired to be violent. Two, that if we find the greatest pleasure in play-fighting, should we actually be working to minimise violence? Three, alternatively, if violence in real lfie is not in fact as much fun as we pretend it is in our games, perhaps we've inherited a huge cultural blind spot, through programming via millenia of games and warlike entertainments, that twists us toward violent confrontation rather than beneficial cooperation - and maybe this also infects our attitudes toward economics, religion, gender relations, and practically everything else we do.
Not chess, Mr Spock. Poker. Do you know the game?
I knew it was only a matter of time.
http://www.ohloh.net/opensource/software/coppermin e
Project Started 2 years ago
Active Developers 2
Codebase 189,002 LOC
Effort (est.) 49 Man Years
2 x 2 = 49. Hmmm.
"It reminds me of actors who give political speeches. It's not their field of expertise, but people listen to them anyway."
Good grief. Is this what gets taught in civics nowadays?
What is with this idea that keeps cropping up in public discourse, and on the Internet, that of all places should know better? That somehow "non-experts" are not allowed to be politically active?
In a democratic republic, politics is and should be *everyone's* area of expertise. *Especially* if you're not an expert. That's what democracy means.
Requiring politics to only be conducted by experts has been tried before, and still is the default option in many places of the world. It's gone by various names: monarchy, aristocracy, dictatorship.
Good luck with that.
Inside of a cow, no-one can hear you scream.
Well, other than the cow.
"What's more important to linux, the "open-source spirit" that prevents you from distributing one hell of an impressive Live CD, or a wider adoption of linux due to it's advanced technology"
The open-source spirit, obviously. What's use of wider adoption of one particular brand name due to advanced technology if that technology removes the freedom that made that brand name great? That's kind of the opposite of useful. See also: America today.
Can you imagine a natural selection paper written by the masses?
Because of course something as irreducibly complex as Darwinian theory could never arise from the competitive random chance interactions of a normally-distributed population.
They're perfectly safe.
"America's leadership in the semiconductor industry in general and the CPU industry in perticular is direct result of the space race and the arms race. I prefare the former rather then the latter."
You may prefer to think of the Space Race as purely civilian and scientific, but that's a sepia-toned fiction. It was actually a side project of the missile race. The Mercury shots were on Atlas/Redstone ICBMs. The design of the Space Shuttle was driven by Air Force requirements. Admittedly the Saturn heavy-lifters were an anomaly since they were never used for military payloads - but I think that's because the payloads shrunk, and automation got unexpectedly good enough fast enough that the need for having humans in space to control functional military hardware vanished even as the capability for human-rated launchers was achieved.
The goal of the Space Race was to gain the military high ground for reconaissance, communications and strategic bombing. Science, propaganda and civilian communications was a bonus on the side, not the main reason for funding. In typical 1950s-60s DARPA fashion, there were multiple parallel projects to accomplish these goals. By the end of the 1960s, the third wave of ground-based ICBMs - Minuteman - had pretty much locked up the strategic nuke goal. Apollo had demonstrated the ability to get humans to the moon, but despite being spectacular that turned out to be a pretty useless capability. The Air Force's Manned Orbital Laboratory was scrapped because automated satellites could do the job more cheaply.
The Shuttle carried on the legacy of Apollo in a vastly cut-down form sort of as a "just in case" measure, because the 1970s military simply didn't need the whole Von Braun heavylifter fleet / 2001 doughnut station dream now that it had transistorised / integrated circuit guidance computers and the work of launching missiles and satellites could be mostly done remotely from ground stations. That's why the post-Apollo human spaceflight program has constantly struggled against funding cuts and weird conflicting requirements - because nobody wants to kill it completely, but it's doing a job that doesn't actually fill a major strategic military role.
"We come in peace for all mankind" was a diplomatic little white lie. "We have dominance of cislunar space, we don't know what to do with it, but damned if anyone else will get there first" is a better translation.
I wish people would realise that share-alike open source licences are 'infectious' or 'viral' in exactly the same way that all copyright licences are.
If I merge GPL/CC-BY-SA licenced material into my work, the derivative work is not entirely under my control any more. I can still use and propagate the derivative work, but the original licence 'infects' my code with its terms.
But if I merge a standard copyright file into my work, suddenly - depending on the exact licence terms - I may have no rights to do *anything* with the derivative work at all, and instantly become a criminal. Or I may be restricted in all sorts of weird ways - perhaps I am not allowed to write a competing product, perhaps I have to pay royalties. Perhaps the original contract I signed will be purchased by a whole chain of corporate entities who have different views as to what my obligations are, and will come back to me in ten years time looking for half of my profits.
See the SCO lawsuit for how this works.
In any case, as soon as I merge any copyrighted material into a derivative work, my work is 'infected' by the original's licencing terms. This is the nature of copyright.
>sheer immensitity
Oh, crap.