To put it bluntly, without NASA that money would have been spent by the rich on luxury yachts and there would be no benefit to technology at all.
I dunno, I think you could make exactly the same spin-off arguments as have been made for NASA, and argue that if the money was spent on luxury yachts there would have been huge strides in luxury-yacht technology. Why, the improvements to waterproofed, salt-resistant cigars and cognac alone would have advanced human knowledge in the cigars-and-cognac field immeasurably. And those improvements would have trickled down into the wider technological base, wouldn't they?
(Not entirely joking here; the America's Cup yacht races, which are kind of the definition of "private spending by the rich on luxury yachts" have indeed advanced materials science, hull design, sail design, CAD, simulation, etc. Plus, it's all wind-powered so there's direct eco-benefits. There's some heavy science going into those yachts and it's on a similar order to rocket science. Why is one kind of innovation just "play" and another kind a public good?)
Yes, and if space exploration has taught us one thing in the last 50 years, it's that we've still only got one planet no matter how hard we might wish that it's a Star Trek M-class-around-every-corner universe out there.
We can put temporary tin cans in orbit, yes. Given some kind of handwavium alien ubertech a million years advanced from now, we might be able to terraform Mars or engineer humans to survive the sulphuric acid storms of Venus and the radiation belts of Jupiter's moons. But there's no very plausible midfuture where we could get from here to there - the best we could do with today's rockets gets us about 0.00001 of the way to a future of cold, dark, isolated and sick military-science outposts doing nothing that robots couldn't do better.
Manned spaceflight hasn't panned out. We pushed it as far as we could. It didn't deliver what was promised. It's not going to, unless we invent warp drive, and our best physicists have given up on that. It's time we admitted that the Space Age was about ICBMs, satellites, and robot probes, and those are nice, but it's not a human-habitable solar system and it's never going to be.
Because congress already thought the had the answer to those problems (or more important problems) with their social programs they were about to create.
Also, in the 1960s, everyone was pretty sure that the cure to cancer had been narrowed down to of 1) asbestos, 2) thalidomide, 3) Agent Orange, or 4) nuclear waste. They just didn't know which, and figured it would be fairly simple to find out...
I saw NASA get disbanded at the end of Apollo and wondered why we didn't take the talent and brains assembled and say "ok, now go cure cancer" or "solve world hunger". I bet they could do it.
Sure. The project plan would go like this:
1. Put cancer cells / hungry people in Saturn rocket. 2. Launch rocket to the moon 3.... 4. World peace!
The thing that makes NASA's programs and resources so important is that the challenges they face are unique, daunting, and require out-of-the-box thinking that you'd never get in materials and medical research.
Yes. But the problem with doing space research is also that it is unique. NASA can design a one-off space thermal expansion insulation widget which solves Problem X45 for Program Z23, accommodates only the Program Z23-J power connectors, is built to fit inside the Z23-Delta launcher, and enables Experiment Y14 to run. Great, that'll cost you $10 billion. Here's your Z23 program and your X45 widget. Now the Z23 program is over, what do I use an X45 for? Um.... well, we could pull out the K29 sub-chassis assembly and maybe try to repurpose it as a frying pan? But all the rest is now a very expensive paperweight.
Unique challenges demand unique solutions which don't necessarily translate into general, industry-wide progress.
I'd be grateful is someone could translate this gobbledegook into English:
Neat! Framework, like the original Lotus Symphony (not the current IBM OO.org-derived suite which is entirely unrelated) and then Lotus Notes, was a very cool idea in integrated applications which sadly, the world didn't follow. Basically, as far as I can grok that text, it's a one-tool-to-rule-the-world kind of application (of the kind that EMACS only dreams of being). I still hold out hopes that this is the direction the Web will eventually evolve into - something more like Ted Nelson's Xanadu than the multi-tier monstrosity we have today.
You have "frames" or windows representing datasets and views/transformations over that data; you link them together again and again until you get one big distributed dataspace showing all your stuff, and all your views of your stuff. Like a spreadsheet, but not limited to rows and columns. Like SQL views, but not limited to one database at a time.
An architecture like this, like Lotus Notes, might look like an "office application" but really it's something much more powerful; more of a kind of a generalised model of a computing network. As such, it would be the logical candidate for making run on parallel hardware, which I think is what they're talking about here. Since each "frame" is really a parallel function, and your application is your database is also a dataflow network, you could split chunks of your database onto separate machines, and keep doing that indefinitely. At least that's my guess.
I really, really wanted Framework to succeed in the 1980s. It was about the only "office" type program which I believed in and saw as the future of computing. But it wasn't to be, at least not then.
I would be interested to know what customers would actually buy something like this today, because it woud probably be incompatible with most ordinary databases. It would maybe have to be something very large that you would want to run on this. Governmental/military apps, maybe? Just a thought, possibly wrong.
No, of course not. The final Half-Life sequel would be a "creative reimagining to recapture the true essence of the original" called simply "Half-Life".
It would be an isometric third-person puzzler set on Mars during WW2 and involve Zeppelins. Gordon Freeman would be GladOS' daughter and she'd constantly make wisecracks.
HST was a wonderful instrument, but it is simply not capable of doing the science that needs doing next, for example constraining the properties of Dark Energy or exploring the end of the cosmic "dark ages" at redshifts of 5-10.
And this science "needs doing" because it will lead to... what breakthroughs, exactly?
Given that space is big, and we will never get to even the closest star within anyone's lifetime, meanwhile the Earth is going through an existential weather and economic crisis... exactly why does this science matter?
Saying "because knowledge, no matter how arcane and without application, is its own reward!" doesn't quite seem to cut it. Why is this kind of science more immediately useful than cataloguing Pokemon?
Compelling Private Commercial Reasons To Observe Million-Light-Year Distant Stars In Higher Resolution:
1. Invest $1,000,000,000 in new hi-def ubertelescope 2. Wait 10 million years for first contact, sell star maps to Andromedan Consulate 3. Watch for galactic collisions which might affect us in 10 million years, sell galactic collision insurance 4. Observe supermassive galactic black holes colliding, learn how to slow time by 5% if we had two supermassive galactic black holes, sell blueprints 5. Postulate a new speculative theory about the early universe which we could perhaps test in 10 billion years' time, maybe, sell preprints 6. Detect 1000 possibly Earthlike planets which we will never be able to visit until long after they have decayed to dust, sell dust insurance to future colonists 7. Catalog 1,000,000 new stars which nobody except scientists will know or about, sell naming rights to a university 8. Create a "space bubble", convince the general public that they'll live in moon domes within 20 years if they invest in space, get out before the collapse. 9.... 10. Profit!
Or
1. Don't invest $1,000,000,000, make $0 profit in the next millennium compared to $-1,000,000,000 profit in the next millennium, be $1,000,000,000 better off.
It's like I'm watching my generation drop the ball despite all the obvious reasons in my mind to establish a presence off this rock.
List Of Obvious Reasons To Put A Permanent Human Presence In Space:
1. No air 2. No water 3. No food 4. No fuel 5. No gravity 6. No biosphere 7. No marketable commodities 8. No native population 9. No trade routes 10. No military objective 11. No faster-than-light travel 12. Lethal quantities of radiation 13. No advantage to preserving human survival that can't be achieved with cheap mineshafts on Earth 14.... 15. Star Trek!
And since you were talking about the Cold War, the same was true even for Apollo. Are the Saturn boosters in use today for satellites? Nope. So how much of what was achieved in Apollo was transferred out of NASA? Are there any objective figures?
Citation needed. The money spent on the US manned space program has certainly funded a lot of US engineers working hard back on the good ol' Earth... to produce one-off, special-purpose parts with no commercial application outside NASA, which then get completely trashed once a program like Shuttle finishes. That's a win?
wouldn't believe a word on Slashdot anyways. Slanted Stories, Comments from numbskulls like me who just debate people and often will just play devils advocate
So... you're saying that since you're playing devil's advocate, Slashdot comments are perfectly trustworthy?
But that would mean that you're sincere, which would mean that... so, if I asked you which door the white knight would tell the black knight to go through that didn't lead to certain death... what would Douglas Hofstadter answer?
(Trick question! Douglas Hofstadter always answers "Douglas Hofstadter".)
NASA brings the images and information about things light years from earth right to our computers as they discover it. But the government doesn't care about that they know most people wont notice a one or two decade gap in any new information about the universe outside earth.
You know, it's cool that we get pretty sky pictures and all, but playing devil's advocate for a moment... if what we're seeing in the sky is thousands to millions of light years away... then realistically, even in the best case that it might affect our lives, our knowledge of the local universe won't begin to matter until thousands to millions of years' time, because we can't get there from here.
So why exactly do we need to know what's up there right now?
If NASA put in a request for how much a project would actually cost, then the project would never be funded because of [technocratic arrogance and disgust about the democratic process]. Thus, NASA would [blatantly misrepresent and lie to Congress to get a false budget approved, but if Congress calls them on this, that's politica corruption]
Would you trust a contractor who treated your company this way?
The newsflash that's hitting the business world now, and why they are abandoning the BlackBerry, is that if a phone is designed to be usable the employees will be able to "manage" it themselves.
Oh hey, 1981 called and wants to sell you this new thing called a "personal computer", which will make corporate "data processing departments" obsolete because every business unit in the company will be able to completely self-manage their own devices. There'll be no more of this "time sharing" business and those slow old IBM freaks with their mainframes who never let us run our own software will be run over by the dustbin of history! People power! Floppies forever!
Wait, sorry, 1991 just cut in on the line and wants to tell you about this new thing called a "LAN" which will let all those PCs connect to things called "servers". Um, yeah, and I guess all you business units will just have to install and configure LAN Manager, Banyan Vines, and Novell Netware by yourselves? You did read all the manuals and got the right 10base2 cable and enabled IPX/SPX... oh for the love of... look, we'll just get the corporate IT guys to do it, okay? They're all in the back muttering something about a "web" but I'm sure they be able to help. No no, just leave the floppies in the box, they'll do it all for you. But you're in charge, sure.
Ping! Hey, just got a text from 2001, it's all web web web 24/7 here! People power again! Gonna smash that NASDAQ record! Hey look an Outlook macro virus! Hey that's cool. Um, something about patches? And what are these things called firewalls? NO DON'T CLICK THE MONKEY!!! And that guy in Nigeria is NOT your friend! Okay, so maybe we do need an IT department for real now? Nope sorry, you can't install software yourself anymore, we've gotta tighten up our shop, especially after that stock crash. Just sit back
Beedle beedle boop! And now 2011's Skyping me on Facebook, and hey, Firefox iPad shiny shiny shiny all the time! People power! Consumer devices for the win! Business IT is slow and stupid! USB sticks forever! er, only hypothetically, don't actually plug in any USB devices you found in the car park or you'll get rooted by Stuxnet, everyone knows THAT... Oh, and yeah, "cloud" is the new hotness, it's just like "time sharing on a mainframe" except, um. it's cloudier!
If you license code that implements a patented invention under GPL 3.0 you have to give everyone using the source code a license to use the patent. Problem is: You have to give everyone a license to use the patent for any use of the software.
That's not a problem. That's exactly what the spirit of the GPL intends: the freedom for anyone to use GPL-licenced software for any purpose.
If you have a problem with software freedom, that's your choice, but don't expect to use GPL-licenced software to deny others the freedom to use that software. That, indeed, you can't deny that freedom using patents in GPL 3 is kinda exactly the whole point.
tl;dr: Why does American corporate capitalism hate freedom?
its a nice idea that 'some good guy' protects us, but we've plum run out of trustable good guys.
Tell me about it. Some flying boy scout in blue tights turns up and says he's championing the little guy, and next thing you know he's using X-ray surveillance and ultrasonics to violate five million citizens' privacy rights at once.
PS. For those of us oldies who remember the 1980s "online service" and BBS worlds, Facebook and the other social networks are very familiar. The BBS mail and chat scene had a similarly "cosy" feel which, for whatever reason, the Web and email doesn't. I think it has something to do with centralised identity and authentication, or with the ability for users to rapidly self-select chat communities and create ad-hoc groups in an environment like Facebook which in practice tend to be very small, localised and personal, while Web sites and mailing lists tend to be very large, impersonal, and slow and difficult to change. You can spin off a Facebook group or discussion within seconds, and almost overnight create a movement that can attract a huge number of followers. It's a lot harder to launch your own Web site or email listserv group, even if you have the IT knowledge to do it - it takes hours to days for DNS to synchronise, and there's no easy way to advertise a new mailing list - and that means you lose the moment of opportunity.
This is why Facebook and Twitter are being used in crises, revolutions and disasters, because they can respond almost instantly to changing circumstances. Could an open protocol do this? Yes, but DNS, SMTP and HTTP as currently designed and deployed weren't first thinking about mass grassroots flash-mob communication; they were built in the 1970s-80s assuming the major players would be corporate or university research departments, with a small number of large hadwired servers, operating on much slower timescales of months to years.
What we really need is a good open, fast publish-subscribe messaging and grouping protocol designed for today's highly mobile mass grassroots communication needs. But we don't have that, so Facebook and Twitter are the hacks to implement this over the Web.
if you already KNOW those people, what the hell's wrong with email?
Theoretically, email (or RSS) should be able to do everything social networks can, and I'd be in favour of it, because I dislike walled gardens when there are perfectly good open protocols. Practically, though, there are a couple things missing with email:
1. Social networking is many-to-many communication. You want to tell short things to "all your friends" or subgroups of friends at once, not have to send an email multiple times. Email can do this, but it needs mailing lists to be really useful - otherwise it's only one-on-one - but managing mailing lists for email is too darn hard for everyone to do. You have to either run your own listserv, which means you need a server on a static IP and DNS with MX, and good luck getting that on home broadband, or you have to juggle lists in your email client and then you can't export them and synchronise them to all your friends. Or you use a web email client and/or a web listserv. But all the special purpose free web listservs seem to have died the death. Social networks took their place.
Social networks are effectively just easy to use web email clients with integrated listservs that do unified central authentication so people can rapidly search for friends and add and remove groups (lists). Someone could build a web app to be a listserv that does what Facebook and Google+ do but does it over email. And that would rock. Anyone wanna volunteeer?
2. Hard privacy is not actually how people work, and "if you already know these people" is only part of the answer with email. You also need to know their email address, and it's a non-trivial problem to get from one to the other. The email spam plague has made people really shy about giving out their email address unless you already know it. But in real life, there's a lot of people you sort of half-know but would like to get to know more - what's called the "third place" or "front porch space" problem. This idea of semi-public, semi-private space is something missing in modern isolated society which was present in older village communities. Facebook proved that it's really useful to be able to search for a person you know by real name and verify their identity by the set of shared friends you have in common. Facebook also does semi-automatic matchmaking where it prompts you for friends you might not yet have added. This turns out to be a very nice social feature.
Again, there's no reason why a good free web-based email listserv couldn't do all this - simply be a repository of fullnames-to-email-addresses and do matchmaking. It's just that nobody has built one yet. Possibly because of privacy concerns. But you can't have society without giving up some privacy, and too much privacy means everyone is born isolated and stays friendless and alone their whole life.
3. One big thing that social networks offer is the ability to share standardised schemas of information - like links, photos or invites to calendar events - which email has not yet, for whatever reason, widely adopted. Yet again, there's no good reason why this is the case. We've got iCal, for instance, but how many mail clients automatically send and detect iCal in your emails and let you add them to your calendar? Apple iCalendar maybe? But there's no good reason why every client couldn't. Yet they don't, at least not consistently, so it gets so frustrating to deal with iCal that in practice, nobody does.
Social networks are, again, just web email clients with a single shared address book and a bit of content-specific smarts. Turns out that's often the tiny bit of functionality that people want.
But we could certainly do it so much better using standard IETF/Web protocols if someone bothered to try.
My name, email and home address are all over the net, and have been for years. I'm still alive.
But that's awful! It means just anyone could send you a letter, talk to you about work, or even pick up the phone and send their cootie-filled voice waves to you right in the privacy of your own home! And all your so-called "workmates" and "real life" "friends" could be tracking your reputation and status and fashion sense right now and could treat you horribly if you did something quirky and creative, like turn up naked and dump rancid dogfood on their lawn in the middle of the night. After all, this is America, and it's a man's right to hide from his neighbours and wear a Guy Fawkes mask on his head at all times! Without total anonymity, how could our forefathers have held town hall meetings? Could Barack Obama have ever gotten elected if people knew his real name and face and what his school grades were? Of course not!
Slashdot Mirror
To put it bluntly, without NASA that money would have been spent by the rich on luxury yachts and there would be no benefit to technology at all.
I dunno, I think you could make exactly the same spin-off arguments as have been made for NASA, and argue that if the money was spent on luxury yachts there would have been huge strides in luxury-yacht technology. Why, the improvements to waterproofed, salt-resistant cigars and cognac alone would have advanced human knowledge in the cigars-and-cognac field immeasurably. And those improvements would have trickled down into the wider technological base, wouldn't they?
(Not entirely joking here; the America's Cup yacht races, which are kind of the definition of "private spending by the rich on luxury yachts" have indeed advanced materials science, hull design, sail design, CAD, simulation, etc. Plus, it's all wind-powered so there's direct eco-benefits. There's some heavy science going into those yachts and it's on a similar order to rocket science. Why is one kind of innovation just "play" and another kind a public good?)
We have one planet. One home. No backup.
Yes, and if space exploration has taught us one thing in the last 50 years, it's that we've still only got one planet no matter how hard we might wish that it's a Star Trek M-class-around-every-corner universe out there.
We can put temporary tin cans in orbit, yes. Given some kind of handwavium alien ubertech a million years advanced from now, we might be able to terraform Mars or engineer humans to survive the sulphuric acid storms of Venus and the radiation belts of Jupiter's moons. But there's no very plausible midfuture where we could get from here to there - the best we could do with today's rockets gets us about 0.00001 of the way to a future of cold, dark, isolated and sick military-science outposts doing nothing that robots couldn't do better.
Manned spaceflight hasn't panned out. We pushed it as far as we could. It didn't deliver what was promised. It's not going to, unless we invent warp drive, and our best physicists have given up on that. It's time we admitted that the Space Age was about ICBMs, satellites, and robot probes, and those are nice, but it's not a human-habitable solar system and it's never going to be.
Because congress already thought the had the answer to those problems (or more important problems) with their social programs they were about to create.
Also, in the 1960s, everyone was pretty sure that the cure to cancer had been narrowed down to of 1) asbestos, 2) thalidomide, 3) Agent Orange, or 4) nuclear waste. They just didn't know which, and figured it would be fairly simple to find out...
I saw NASA get disbanded at the end of Apollo and wondered why we didn't take the talent and brains assembled and say "ok, now go cure cancer" or "solve world hunger". I bet they could do it.
Sure. The project plan would go like this:
1. Put cancer cells / hungry people in Saturn rocket. ...
2. Launch rocket to the moon
3.
4. World peace!
The thing that makes NASA's programs and resources so important is that the challenges they face are unique, daunting, and require out-of-the-box thinking that you'd never get in materials and medical research.
Yes. But the problem with doing space research is also that it is unique. NASA can design a one-off space thermal expansion insulation widget which solves Problem X45 for Program Z23, accommodates only the Program Z23-J power connectors, is built to fit inside the Z23-Delta launcher, and enables Experiment Y14 to run. Great, that'll cost you $10 billion. Here's your Z23 program and your X45 widget. Now the Z23 program is over, what do I use an X45 for? Um.... well, we could pull out the K29 sub-chassis assembly and maybe try to repurpose it as a frying pan? But all the rest is now a very expensive paperweight.
Unique challenges demand unique solutions which don't necessarily translate into general, industry-wide progress.
I'd be grateful is someone could translate this gobbledegook into English:
Neat! Framework, like the original Lotus Symphony (not the current IBM OO.org-derived suite which is entirely unrelated) and then Lotus Notes, was a very cool idea in integrated applications which sadly, the world didn't follow. Basically, as far as I can grok that text, it's a one-tool-to-rule-the-world kind of application (of the kind that EMACS only dreams of being). I still hold out hopes that this is the direction the Web will eventually evolve into - something more like Ted Nelson's Xanadu than the multi-tier monstrosity we have today.
You have "frames" or windows representing datasets and views/transformations over that data; you link them together again and again until you get one big distributed dataspace showing all your stuff, and all your views of your stuff. Like a spreadsheet, but not limited to rows and columns. Like SQL views, but not limited to one database at a time.
An architecture like this, like Lotus Notes, might look like an "office application" but really it's something much more powerful; more of a kind of a generalised model of a computing network. As such, it would be the logical candidate for making run on parallel hardware, which I think is what they're talking about here. Since each "frame" is really a parallel function, and your application is your database is also a dataflow network, you could split chunks of your database onto separate machines, and keep doing that indefinitely. At least that's my guess.
I really, really wanted Framework to succeed in the 1980s. It was about the only "office" type program which I believed in and saw as the future of computing. But it wasn't to be, at least not then.
I would be interested to know what customers would actually buy something like this today, because it woud probably be incompatible with most ordinary databases. It would maybe have to be something very large that you would want to run on this. Governmental/military apps, maybe? Just a thought, possibly wrong.
and finally Half-Life 3.
No, of course not. The final Half-Life sequel would be a "creative reimagining to recapture the true essence of the original" called simply "Half-Life".
It would be an isometric third-person puzzler set on Mars during WW2 and involve Zeppelins. Gordon Freeman would be GladOS' daughter and she'd constantly make wisecracks.
HST was a wonderful instrument, but it is simply not capable of doing the science that needs doing next, for example constraining the properties of Dark Energy or exploring the end of the cosmic "dark ages" at redshifts of 5-10.
And this science "needs doing" because it will lead to... what breakthroughs, exactly?
Given that space is big, and we will never get to even the closest star within anyone's lifetime, meanwhile the Earth is going through an existential weather and economic crisis... exactly why does this science matter?
Saying "because knowledge, no matter how arcane and without application, is its own reward!" doesn't quite seem to cut it. Why is this kind of science more immediately useful than cataloguing Pokemon?
yet we cannot afford to spend a few billion to complete the tool that will allow us to better understand the history of the universe?
And "better understanding the history of the universe" will help us do... what, exactly?
Fund it the old way, with private money.
Compelling Private Commercial Reasons To Observe Million-Light-Year Distant Stars In Higher Resolution:
1. Invest $1,000,000,000 in new hi-def ubertelescope ...
2. Wait 10 million years for first contact, sell star maps to Andromedan Consulate
3. Watch for galactic collisions which might affect us in 10 million years, sell galactic collision insurance
4. Observe supermassive galactic black holes colliding, learn how to slow time by 5% if we had two supermassive galactic black holes, sell blueprints
5. Postulate a new speculative theory about the early universe which we could perhaps test in 10 billion years' time, maybe, sell preprints
6. Detect 1000 possibly Earthlike planets which we will never be able to visit until long after they have decayed to dust, sell dust insurance to future colonists
7. Catalog 1,000,000 new stars which nobody except scientists will know or about, sell naming rights to a university
8. Create a "space bubble", convince the general public that they'll live in moon domes within 20 years if they invest in space, get out before the collapse.
9.
10. Profit!
Or
1. Don't invest $1,000,000,000, make $0 profit in the next millennium compared to $-1,000,000,000 profit in the next millennium, be $1,000,000,000 better off.
It's like I'm watching my generation drop the ball despite all the obvious reasons in my mind to establish a presence off this rock.
List Of Obvious Reasons To Put A Permanent Human Presence In Space:
1. No air ...
2. No water
3. No food
4. No fuel
5. No gravity
6. No biosphere
7. No marketable commodities
8. No native population
9. No trade routes
10. No military objective
11. No faster-than-light travel
12. Lethal quantities of radiation
13. No advantage to preserving human survival that can't be achieved with cheap mineshafts on Earth
14.
15. Star Trek!
One out of fifteen ain't bad I guess?
And since you were talking about the Cold War, the same was true even for Apollo. Are the Saturn boosters in use today for satellites? Nope. So how much of what was achieved in Apollo was transferred out of NASA? Are there any objective figures?
And has given us back far more than that!
Citation needed. The money spent on the US manned space program has certainly funded a lot of US engineers working hard back on the good ol' Earth... to produce one-off, special-purpose parts with no commercial application outside NASA, which then get completely trashed once a program like Shuttle finishes. That's a win?
For example NASA funded the long term bed rest study
Oh, so that's where John and Yoko got their funding from!
"What is your favourite integrated development environment?"
A Rotweiller-Labradoodle cross.
wouldn't believe a word on Slashdot anyways. Slanted Stories, Comments from numbskulls like me who just debate people and often will just play devils advocate
So... you're saying that since you're playing devil's advocate, Slashdot comments are perfectly trustworthy?
But that would mean that you're sincere, which would mean that... so, if I asked you which door the white knight would tell the black knight to go through that didn't lead to certain death... what would Douglas Hofstadter answer?
(Trick question! Douglas Hofstadter always answers "Douglas Hofstadter".)
NASA brings the images and information about things light years from earth right to our computers as they discover it. But the government doesn't care about that they know most people wont notice a one or two decade gap in any new information about the universe outside earth.
You know, it's cool that we get pretty sky pictures and all, but playing devil's advocate for a moment... if what we're seeing in the sky is thousands to millions of light years away... then realistically, even in the best case that it might affect our lives, our knowledge of the local universe won't begin to matter until thousands to millions of years' time, because we can't get there from here.
So why exactly do we need to know what's up there right now?
If NASA put in a request for how much a project would actually cost, then the project would never be funded because of [technocratic arrogance and disgust about the democratic process]. Thus, NASA would [blatantly misrepresent and lie to Congress to get a false budget approved, but if Congress calls them on this, that's politica corruption]
Would you trust a contractor who treated your company this way?
a special kind of hell that is filled with emo and scene kids who think MMORPG means "a web forum where people role-play that they're cool".
The really scary thing is that already sounds 15000% more interesting than World of Warcraft level grinding.
The newsflash that's hitting the business world now, and why they are abandoning the BlackBerry, is that if a phone is designed to be usable the employees will be able to "manage" it themselves.
Oh hey, 1981 called and wants to sell you this new thing called a "personal computer", which will make corporate "data processing departments" obsolete because every business unit in the company will be able to completely self-manage their own devices. There'll be no more of this "time sharing" business and those slow old IBM freaks with their mainframes who never let us run our own software will be run over by the dustbin of history! People power! Floppies forever!
Wait, sorry, 1991 just cut in on the line and wants to tell you about this new thing called a "LAN" which will let all those PCs connect to things called "servers". Um, yeah, and I guess all you business units will just have to install and configure LAN Manager, Banyan Vines, and Novell Netware by yourselves? You did read all the manuals and got the right 10base2 cable and enabled IPX/SPX... oh for the love of... look, we'll just get the corporate IT guys to do it, okay? They're all in the back muttering something about a "web" but I'm sure they be able to help. No no, just leave the floppies in the box, they'll do it all for you. But you're in charge, sure.
Ping! Hey, just got a text from 2001, it's all web web web 24/7 here! People power again! Gonna smash that NASDAQ record! Hey look an Outlook macro virus! Hey that's cool. Um, something about patches? And what are these things called firewalls? NO DON'T CLICK THE MONKEY!!! And that guy in Nigeria is NOT your friend! Okay, so maybe we do need an IT department for real now? Nope sorry, you can't install software yourself anymore, we've gotta tighten up our shop, especially after that stock crash. Just sit back
Beedle beedle boop! And now 2011's Skyping me on Facebook, and hey, Firefox iPad shiny shiny shiny all the time! People power! Consumer devices for the win! Business IT is slow and stupid! USB sticks forever! er, only hypothetically, don't actually plug in any USB devices you found in the car park or you'll get rooted by Stuxnet, everyone knows THAT... Oh, and yeah, "cloud" is the new hotness, it's just like "time sharing on a mainframe" except, um. it's cloudier!
Isn't it fun how fads go in circles?
If you license code that implements a patented invention under GPL 3.0 you have to give everyone using the source code a license to use the patent. Problem is: You have to give everyone a license to use the patent for any use of the software.
That's not a problem. That's exactly what the spirit of the GPL intends: the freedom for anyone to use GPL-licenced software for any purpose.
If you have a problem with software freedom, that's your choice, but don't expect to use GPL-licenced software to deny others the freedom to use that software. That, indeed, you can't deny that freedom using patents in GPL 3 is kinda exactly the whole point.
tl;dr: Why does American corporate capitalism hate freedom?
its a nice idea that 'some good guy' protects us, but we've plum run out of trustable good guys.
Tell me about it. Some flying boy scout in blue tights turns up and says he's championing the little guy, and next thing you know he's using X-ray surveillance and ultrasonics to violate five million citizens' privacy rights at once.
PS. For those of us oldies who remember the 1980s "online service" and BBS worlds, Facebook and the other social networks are very familiar. The BBS mail and chat scene had a similarly "cosy" feel which, for whatever reason, the Web and email doesn't. I think it has something to do with centralised identity and authentication, or with the ability for users to rapidly self-select chat communities and create ad-hoc groups in an environment like Facebook which in practice tend to be very small, localised and personal, while Web sites and mailing lists tend to be very large, impersonal, and slow and difficult to change. You can spin off a Facebook group or discussion within seconds, and almost overnight create a movement that can attract a huge number of followers. It's a lot harder to launch your own Web site or email listserv group, even if you have the IT knowledge to do it - it takes hours to days for DNS to synchronise, and there's no easy way to advertise a new mailing list - and that means you lose the moment of opportunity.
This is why Facebook and Twitter are being used in crises, revolutions and disasters, because they can respond almost instantly to changing circumstances. Could an open protocol do this? Yes, but DNS, SMTP and HTTP as currently designed and deployed weren't first thinking about mass grassroots flash-mob communication; they were built in the 1970s-80s assuming the major players would be corporate or university research departments, with a small number of large hadwired servers, operating on much slower timescales of months to years.
What we really need is a good open, fast publish-subscribe messaging and grouping protocol designed for today's highly mobile mass grassroots communication needs. But we don't have that, so Facebook and Twitter are the hacks to implement this over the Web.
if you already KNOW those people, what the hell's wrong with email?
Theoretically, email (or RSS) should be able to do everything social networks can, and I'd be in favour of it, because I dislike walled gardens when there are perfectly good open protocols. Practically, though, there are a couple things missing with email:
1. Social networking is many-to-many communication. You want to tell short things to "all your friends" or subgroups of friends at once, not have to send an email multiple times. Email can do this, but it needs mailing lists to be really useful - otherwise it's only one-on-one - but managing mailing lists for email is too darn hard for everyone to do. You have to either run your own listserv, which means you need a server on a static IP and DNS with MX, and good luck getting that on home broadband, or you have to juggle lists in your email client and then you can't export them and synchronise them to all your friends. Or you use a web email client and/or a web listserv. But all the special purpose free web listservs seem to have died the death. Social networks took their place.
Social networks are effectively just easy to use web email clients with integrated listservs that do unified central authentication so people can rapidly search for friends and add and remove groups (lists). Someone could build a web app to be a listserv that does what Facebook and Google+ do but does it over email. And that would rock. Anyone wanna volunteeer?
2. Hard privacy is not actually how people work, and "if you already know these people" is only part of the answer with email. You also need to know their email address, and it's a non-trivial problem to get from one to the other. The email spam plague has made people really shy about giving out their email address unless you already know it. But in real life, there's a lot of people you sort of half-know but would like to get to know more - what's called the "third place" or "front porch space" problem. This idea of semi-public, semi-private space is something missing in modern isolated society which was present in older village communities. Facebook proved that it's really useful to be able to search for a person you know by real name and verify their identity by the set of shared friends you have in common. Facebook also does semi-automatic matchmaking where it prompts you for friends you might not yet have added. This turns out to be a very nice social feature.
Again, there's no reason why a good free web-based email listserv couldn't do all this - simply be a repository of fullnames-to-email-addresses and do matchmaking. It's just that nobody has built one yet. Possibly because of privacy concerns. But you can't have society without giving up some privacy, and too much privacy means everyone is born isolated and stays friendless and alone their whole life.
3. One big thing that social networks offer is the ability to share standardised schemas of information - like links, photos or invites to calendar events - which email has not yet, for whatever reason, widely adopted. Yet again, there's no good reason why this is the case. We've got iCal, for instance, but how many mail clients automatically send and detect iCal in your emails and let you add them to your calendar? Apple iCalendar maybe? But there's no good reason why every client couldn't. Yet they don't, at least not consistently, so it gets so frustrating to deal with iCal that in practice, nobody does.
Social networks are, again, just web email clients with a single shared address book and a bit of content-specific smarts. Turns out that's often the tiny bit of functionality that people want.
But we could certainly do it so much better using standard IETF/Web protocols if someone bothered to try.
My name, email and home address are all over the net, and have been for years. I'm still alive.
But that's awful! It means just anyone could send you a letter, talk to you about work, or even pick up the phone and send their cootie-filled voice waves to you right in the privacy of your own home! And all your so-called "workmates" and "real life" "friends" could be tracking your reputation and status and fashion sense right now and could treat you horribly if you did something quirky and creative, like turn up naked and dump rancid dogfood on their lawn in the middle of the night. After all, this is America, and it's a man's right to hide from his neighbours and wear a Guy Fawkes mask on his head at all times! Without total anonymity, how could our forefathers have held town hall meetings? Could Barack Obama have ever gotten elected if people knew his real name and face and what his school grades were? Of course not!
Won't somebody please think of the privacies!