Plus, from what I've heard, most people come back from space with a much better attitude toward our world, which would be a positive. I don't know if sub-orbital flight would really do the attitude adjustment as well as orbital, or if orbital is as effective as lunar (see the whole Earth, small) orbit was.
So what you are saying is: we need to fix this world by sending some particular people into space.:) (Of course, you probably meant for them to return.;)
I wasn't offering private donations, merely that there are places that my involuntary donations go that I disapprove of much more than NASA.
I know. Same here. I'd rather not pay the taxes, and if I didn't I guarantee you the money would be going to what I consider to be a better distribution of good causes, but as long as they are taking the money I'd rather it be there than many other places. But I think long-term having a commercial interest is what will finally cause space exploration to take off.
Space tourism itself will have little benefit to society, other than to make a few people happy.
On the contrary, space tourism is an excellent way to transfer money out of the hands of those rich enough to afford it and pump it into the economy. It's like a voluntary tax! If this industry takes off it could create many new jobs, technical jobs like we slashdotters like, here on our shores. How exactly is this a problem?
Besides, we (virtually) don't get a say in it, anyway. Frankly, people have the right to spend their money on what they want to. If they want to blow $20 mil on a few moments in space, that's their prerogative. If an insanely rich person wants to fund expeditions into space with new equipment in addition to what NASA is already doing, it's his money, and what could be wrong with that? If you saved for something you really wanted that was expensive, how would you like it if suddenly the world was trying to tell you what you were spending was a waste?
I'd rather see that money go to NASA than many of the things it does go to.
I'm sure both NASA and the SpaceShipOne project would happily accept any private donations you have to offer, if you believe in it that much.
Why is it that when companies step into public domain scientific fields the results are inevitably viagra when there is still no cure for cancer, aids... etc.
If voluntary contribution and sponsorship by private individuals and companies cannot cure cancer, then I want to put a stop to all these incessant breast cancer marathons.
I like the way Raymond asserts that arguing over the exact meaning of "free" in "free software" is meaningless, but then takes care to use the word "cracked" instead of "hacked" when referring to MS IIS websites.:)
In Kim Stanley Robinson's spectacular trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, the word "areoforming" was used to describe Mars' effect on humans, or more specifically, the effect of living on Mars in isolation from earth on human society.
Going for Linux is a no-brainer at least for us US-ians. It frees us from an oppressive US monopolist, creates local jobs and generally opens up new business opportunities because, well, Linux doesn't yet have all the software Windows has.
It's time to be a little bit patriotic, people!
I'm glad he asked. I benefit from reading the discussion, including the various tangents. This gives me another opportunity to consider using RAID at home and benefit from some "war stories" folks might offer. My needs aren't exactly the same as his, but fortunately people never stick to the exact question asked, anyway. The free information people give out is invaluable, especially the stories of personal experiences and descriptions of people's personal setups at home.
Is use of the plural term "maths" a Britishism? I have never heard it in America but see it all the time on the Internet.
The only time we would use the plural, maths, is in reference to several types of math: "Geometry, Algebra, and Calculus are all maths," or something like that. But everyone from anywhere else seems to speak as if the word must be plural when it refers to the general educational subject of math. Can anyone explain this for me?
... then shouldn't it be a "Big Crunch" instead of a "Big Bang"?
I'm about as enthusiastic about merging my cellphone and refrigerator with my PDA and electric blanket as I am about living through the Big Crunch, so maybe it's an appropriate name, too...
The way I see it, pay sites will always have free competition. And registration sites will always have free competition. To me, it's inevitable that the registration model will fail. When I see (subscription) links in Google news, I ignore them. When I absolutely "have" to see something on a registration site, I use bugmenot or an alternative. Eventually they will either have no viewers or the data they are gathering will be so useless the model will have to die.
If it turns out that free sources on the Internet are infeasible, I'd prefer to wind up on sites that are voluntarily supported. Slashdot counts in this, actually. I'm not a subscriber, but many are. If I found out slashdot were in danger of tanking, I'd consider subscribing.
I met my wife on a singles' website. Both of us signed up in around 2000, and the site was free. But the site got so popular the owner had to start charging. He was nice, though, and let the existing accounts remain free.
Now this site was a real community. In addition to singles' profiles and a way to anonymously email one another, there was a message board and a chatroom. Lots of folks spent a lot of time in there, and I know I for one made many friends.
Eventually there got to be so many complaints about us married folks hanging around that we were banned from the site. So my wife and I went off and started our own message board/chatroom site, and invited everyone we knew to come check it out. Now we've got a similar community with 75 members (since February), and we're growing by leaps and bounds. What's interesting is that almost immediately, people started volunteering to help support the site financially. One lady sent us a big enough contribution to support the site for the rest of the year, assuming we don't have a huge surge in membership or usage. And if we do, several others have lined up to contribute.
It is amazing to me that something like this can exist, solely on voluntary donations. Yes, there are a lot of "free riders," and some people might see that as "unfair" -- but those who are willing to pay apparently do so because they like those free riders. If the site ever gets really big we'll probably just post our financials accounting for every dollar spent and every donation received, and allow people to keep the site going as they see it is needed.
To me, free sites and voluntarily-supported sites are all that are interesting on the net. The registration sites and pay sites can (and I believe will) wither. I see the death of that model as inevitable.
Wait a sec. I don't believe government employees and the military can lay claim to your property, either, because their powers are simply delegated from the people. Since I and the rest of this country do not have the right to lay claim to your property, the government cannot do it. In a democracy, if government employees lay claim to your property, it is because the common people voted it so (directly or indirectly). There is no distinction between government employees and the common people when the government is "we the people."
Many libertarians, like myself, came to the philosophy from the right side of politics: a belief in strong economic liberty as the best (and only ethical) policy led to a belief in strong social liberty. I personally still identify as "right wing," and "conservative," although the more libertarian I become the more problems I have with those I formerly identified as "my side."
Meanwhile, many libertarians came to the philosophy from the left side of politics, and I presume ESR is probably one of them: a belief in strong social liberty led to a belief in strong economic liberty. I was shocked when I started reading libertarian forums and discovered these people even existed; it seemed so wrong to me that there were people who thought legalizing drugs was more important than deregulating industries. But they are out there, and they do not appreciate being identified as right wing.
And in the end us "right-wing libertarians" and those "left-wing libertarians" are far more similar to each other than to any other group. Some of us are still having trouble wrapping our brains around the beliefs further from where we started, but for the most part, we all agree. Thus libertarianism is a different animal from the right wing, left wing spectrum. You might google for the "world's smallest political quiz," which is less useful as a quiz and more useful as a graph to show how libertarians envision the political "spectrum."
Incidentally, it was the very ESR you replied to who was mostly responsible for my shift from conservative, laissez-faire capitalist to anarcho-libertarian.
Just piping up here to be counted: put me down as a religious libertarian. In fact, the way my politics have been going, lately, I think you can start calling me an anarchist.
And, yes, I honestly believe it is wrong to use governmental force (or any force) to compel acceptance of my religion or adherence to its precepts.
Further evidence that Google has not been negligent in dealing with googlebombing and spamming: Google's Spam report page. For those of you who whine that Google is doing nothing about "poor results" (usually those of you hawking junk we don't want to buy, I notice), you might want to reevaluate reality.
Hear, hear! I think it's pretty clear from his marketing speak ("popular consumer product") that he is trying to sell something that people do NOT find useful or interesting enough to link to and that thus does not come up high enough on Google for his liking.
Move along; it's obvious from his dialect that this man is not one of us.
BTW, no marketing or advertising has ever been able to replace or even approach the effectiveness of "word of mouth." This is one reason Google is so great (though of course not perfect); it's like aggregating everyone's opinions to assign a relative weight. The main people we see whining about it are usually those who's product or whatever does NOT have the kind of interest from the public that they want. They should be ranting against the entire public instead (or maybe against the laws of economics); Google is not at fault.
It would have been in this guy's interest to actually provide the example you ask for; at least then we could see his product. However, he must be scared that we wouldn't be interested. Always be wary of advertisers who seem to fear public opinion.
So at any rate, to sum up, I find the whining about Google "finally" doing something about this to be very unfair, since Google actively works on this kind of problem. It is disingenuous to dismiss their hard work and suggest that they have done nothing.
I checked, and I've got documented evidence of this. On April 25 last year, I reported that earthlink.net was showing up as the top search result for queries involving various religious words, including "Bear Valley Bible Institute." The Church of Scientology (which owns Earthlink) was clearly engaging in something to distort the page rank of earthlink. I had noticed this for a long time before I recorded it.
On that same day, I reported the problem to Google via their feedback mechanism. I note today that the problem is gone.
Now if I can just do something about the "Church Of Christ at eBay
Low Priced Church Of Christ.
Huge Selection! (aff)" ads I keep getting on Google, I'll be happy...;)
Isn't it time for Google finally to put some work into refining their results to exclude tricks like this?
I take extreme issue with that statement, and I'm surprised noone else has challenged it. Google does in fact put quite a bit of work into making themselves less vulnerable to these kinds of stunts. They even have a link on every results page where you can tell them if you got results you didn't expect, so they can hunt down the cause and refine their algorithm.
The system will never be perfect, and this is the latest issue that has not (yet) been dealt with. Quit your griping.
In the U.S. the accepted reference is (or ought to be) Merriam Webster's Third Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. I doubt it lists thru or nite; these are still not considered common. Burglarize, on the other hand, is probably listed.
BTW, the -ish suffix in English just means it's like your language, right? So it doesn't have to be exact. Maybe we could call it "Englandish" to clarify.:)
Slashdot Mirror
Plus, from what I've heard, most people come back from space with a much better attitude toward our world, which would be a positive. I don't know if sub-orbital flight would really do the attitude adjustment as well as orbital, or if orbital is as effective as lunar (see the whole Earth, small) orbit was.
So what you are saying is: we need to fix this world by sending some particular people into space. :) (Of course, you probably meant for them to return. ;)
I wasn't offering private donations, merely that there are places that my involuntary donations go that I disapprove of much more than NASA.
I know. Same here. I'd rather not pay the taxes, and if I didn't I guarantee you the money would be going to what I consider to be a better distribution of good causes, but as long as they are taking the money I'd rather it be there than many other places. But I think long-term having a commercial interest is what will finally cause space exploration to take off.
Space tourism itself will have little benefit to society, other than to make a few people happy.
On the contrary, space tourism is an excellent way to transfer money out of the hands of those rich enough to afford it and pump it into the economy. It's like a voluntary tax! If this industry takes off it could create many new jobs, technical jobs like we slashdotters like, here on our shores. How exactly is this a problem?
Besides, we (virtually) don't get a say in it, anyway. Frankly, people have the right to spend their money on what they want to. If they want to blow $20 mil on a few moments in space, that's their prerogative. If an insanely rich person wants to fund expeditions into space with new equipment in addition to what NASA is already doing, it's his money, and what could be wrong with that? If you saved for something you really wanted that was expensive, how would you like it if suddenly the world was trying to tell you what you were spending was a waste?
I'd rather see that money go to NASA than many of the things it does go to.
I'm sure both NASA and the SpaceShipOne project would happily accept any private donations you have to offer, if you believe in it that much.
Why is it that when companies step into public domain scientific fields the results are inevitably viagra when there is still no cure for cancer, aids... etc.
If voluntary contribution and sponsorship by private individuals and companies cannot cure cancer, then I want to put a stop to all these incessant breast cancer marathons.
I like the way Raymond asserts that arguing over the exact meaning of "free" in "free software" is meaningless, but then takes care to use the word "cracked" instead of "hacked" when referring to MS IIS websites. :)
In Kim Stanley Robinson's spectacular trilogy, Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars, the word "areoforming" was used to describe Mars' effect on humans, or more specifically, the effect of living on Mars in isolation from earth on human society.
I love your post, and I love that I can do this:
Going for Linux is a no-brainer at least for us US-ians. It frees us from an oppressive US monopolist, creates local jobs and generally opens up new business opportunities because, well, Linux doesn't yet have all the software Windows has. It's time to be a little bit patriotic, people!
I'm glad he asked. I benefit from reading the discussion, including the various tangents. This gives me another opportunity to consider using RAID at home and benefit from some "war stories" folks might offer. My needs aren't exactly the same as his, but fortunately people never stick to the exact question asked, anyway. The free information people give out is invaluable, especially the stories of personal experiences and descriptions of people's personal setups at home.
Never mind; I got my own answer.
In case anyone was wondering, from Wikipedia: Mathematics is often abbreviated to math (in American English) or maths (in British English).
It makes sense if you see it as an abbreviation of mathematics.
Is use of the plural term "maths" a Britishism? I have never heard it in America but see it all the time on the Internet.
The only time we would use the plural, maths, is in reference to several types of math: "Geometry, Algebra, and Calculus are all maths," or something like that. But everyone from anywhere else seems to speak as if the word must be plural when it refers to the general educational subject of math. Can anyone explain this for me?
... then shouldn't it be a "Big Crunch" instead of a "Big Bang"?
I'm about as enthusiastic about merging my cellphone and refrigerator with my PDA and electric blanket as I am about living through the Big Crunch, so maybe it's an appropriate name, too...
The way I see it, pay sites will always have free competition. And registration sites will always have free competition. To me, it's inevitable that the registration model will fail. When I see (subscription) links in Google news, I ignore them. When I absolutely "have" to see something on a registration site, I use bugmenot or an alternative. Eventually they will either have no viewers or the data they are gathering will be so useless the model will have to die.
If it turns out that free sources on the Internet are infeasible, I'd prefer to wind up on sites that are voluntarily supported. Slashdot counts in this, actually. I'm not a subscriber, but many are. If I found out slashdot were in danger of tanking, I'd consider subscribing.
I met my wife on a singles' website. Both of us signed up in around 2000, and the site was free. But the site got so popular the owner had to start charging. He was nice, though, and let the existing accounts remain free.
Now this site was a real community. In addition to singles' profiles and a way to anonymously email one another, there was a message board and a chatroom. Lots of folks spent a lot of time in there, and I know I for one made many friends.
Eventually there got to be so many complaints about us married folks hanging around that we were banned from the site. So my wife and I went off and started our own message board/chatroom site, and invited everyone we knew to come check it out. Now we've got a similar community with 75 members (since February), and we're growing by leaps and bounds. What's interesting is that almost immediately, people started volunteering to help support the site financially. One lady sent us a big enough contribution to support the site for the rest of the year, assuming we don't have a huge surge in membership or usage. And if we do, several others have lined up to contribute.
It is amazing to me that something like this can exist, solely on voluntary donations. Yes, there are a lot of "free riders," and some people might see that as "unfair" -- but those who are willing to pay apparently do so because they like those free riders. If the site ever gets really big we'll probably just post our financials accounting for every dollar spent and every donation received, and allow people to keep the site going as they see it is needed.
To me, free sites and voluntarily-supported sites are all that are interesting on the net. The registration sites and pay sites can (and I believe will) wither. I see the death of that model as inevitable.
Ah, but if you watch it a second time, they want you to pay twice!
Somebody should mention that this site is running MediaWiki, the same software that powers Wikipedia and several related projects.
Wait a sec. I don't believe government employees and the military can lay claim to your property, either, because their powers are simply delegated from the people. Since I and the rest of this country do not have the right to lay claim to your property, the government cannot do it. In a democracy, if government employees lay claim to your property, it is because the common people voted it so (directly or indirectly). There is no distinction between government employees and the common people when the government is "we the people."
Er, right. I'm not sure why you feel the need to convince me of this, which I already believe.
Many libertarians, like myself, came to the philosophy from the right side of politics: a belief in strong economic liberty as the best (and only ethical) policy led to a belief in strong social liberty. I personally still identify as "right wing," and "conservative," although the more libertarian I become the more problems I have with those I formerly identified as "my side."
Meanwhile, many libertarians came to the philosophy from the left side of politics, and I presume ESR is probably one of them: a belief in strong social liberty led to a belief in strong economic liberty. I was shocked when I started reading libertarian forums and discovered these people even existed; it seemed so wrong to me that there were people who thought legalizing drugs was more important than deregulating industries. But they are out there, and they do not appreciate being identified as right wing.
And in the end us "right-wing libertarians" and those "left-wing libertarians" are far more similar to each other than to any other group. Some of us are still having trouble wrapping our brains around the beliefs further from where we started, but for the most part, we all agree. Thus libertarianism is a different animal from the right wing, left wing spectrum. You might google for the "world's smallest political quiz," which is less useful as a quiz and more useful as a graph to show how libertarians envision the political "spectrum."
Incidentally, it was the very ESR you replied to who was mostly responsible for my shift from conservative, laissez-faire capitalist to anarcho-libertarian.
Just piping up here to be counted: put me down as a religious libertarian. In fact, the way my politics have been going, lately, I think you can start calling me an anarchist.
And, yes, I honestly believe it is wrong to use governmental force (or any force) to compel acceptance of my religion or adherence to its precepts.
So how often does the Mercury transit occur?
Further evidence that Google has not been negligent in dealing with googlebombing and spamming: Google's Spam report page. For those of you who whine that Google is doing nothing about "poor results" (usually those of you hawking junk we don't want to buy, I notice), you might want to reevaluate reality.
Hear, hear! I think it's pretty clear from his marketing speak ("popular consumer product") that he is trying to sell something that people do NOT find useful or interesting enough to link to and that thus does not come up high enough on Google for his liking.
Move along; it's obvious from his dialect that this man is not one of us.
BTW, no marketing or advertising has ever been able to replace or even approach the effectiveness of "word of mouth." This is one reason Google is so great (though of course not perfect); it's like aggregating everyone's opinions to assign a relative weight. The main people we see whining about it are usually those who's product or whatever does NOT have the kind of interest from the public that they want. They should be ranting against the entire public instead (or maybe against the laws of economics); Google is not at fault.
It would have been in this guy's interest to actually provide the example you ask for; at least then we could see his product. However, he must be scared that we wouldn't be interested. Always be wary of advertisers who seem to fear public opinion.
So at any rate, to sum up, I find the whining about Google "finally" doing something about this to be very unfair, since Google actively works on this kind of problem. It is disingenuous to dismiss their hard work and suggest that they have done nothing.
I checked, and I've got documented evidence of this. On April 25 last year, I reported that earthlink.net was showing up as the top search result for queries involving various religious words, including "Bear Valley Bible Institute." The Church of Scientology (which owns Earthlink) was clearly engaging in something to distort the page rank of earthlink. I had noticed this for a long time before I recorded it.
On that same day, I reported the problem to Google via their feedback mechanism. I note today that the problem is gone.
Now if I can just do something about the "Church Of Christ at eBay Low Priced Church Of Christ. Huge Selection! (aff)" ads I keep getting on Google, I'll be happy... ;)
Isn't it time for Google finally to put some work into refining their results to exclude tricks like this?
I take extreme issue with that statement, and I'm surprised noone else has challenged it. Google does in fact put quite a bit of work into making themselves less vulnerable to these kinds of stunts. They even have a link on every results page where you can tell them if you got results you didn't expect, so they can hunt down the cause and refine their algorithm.
The system will never be perfect, and this is the latest issue that has not (yet) been dealt with. Quit your griping.
Uh, it seems to be (although that's not necessarily the 3rd unabriged Webster).
Hey, it's not our fault the language is so inconsistent. :)
How does the word "burglary" fit in, anyway?
In the U.S. the accepted reference is (or ought to be) Merriam Webster's Third Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language. I doubt it lists thru or nite; these are still not considered common. Burglarize, on the other hand, is probably listed.
BTW, the -ish suffix in English just means it's like your language, right? So it doesn't have to be exact. Maybe we could call it "Englandish" to clarify. :)