Yeah, that kinda sounds like a chicken and egg question right. Well, the market works like this.
Rich fucks invest to make even more money.
The more money they make, the poorer their workers get.
When they've extracted all the wealth of the nation, they STOP investing. Why???? Simple, there are no more gains to be had.
The way we crawled our way out of depression was taxing the rich and employing the poor. The WWII really helped because we absoluetly HAD to extract wealth from rich folk to pay for the production of war goods.
The taxes on the filthy rich in post WWII America were absoluetly oppressive. When Kennedy "Cut taxes on the rich", he dropped the top rate from 90% to 70%. The Repukelikans didn't mention that did they?????
Sof if you want to avoid depression, you must maintain a VERY LARGE middle class. You must TAX the ever living fuck out of the rich. The resulting balance in wealth distribution keeps the system from devolving into feudalism where labor costs nothing so PEOPLE are disposable.
The Reagan and Bush tax cuts are pushing this country back into depression economics. WTO and NAFTA is causing wealth and jobs to hemorrage from this nation.
Guess what, foreigners from those "brown" nations hate free trade even more than we do. The REALLY big winner in the US is agribusiness. No, not the mom and pop shops. GIANT factory farms that are government subsidized. It makes it IMPOSSIBLE for a farmer to earn a decent living overseas. As a result, there is no practical methodology to independently earn a living. So they must go to factories and be treated like a dog.
NAFTA and WTO is effectively a way for international corporations to erode the power of nation states and impose an international form of feudalism. Hail Lord Halliburton, Lord Enron, the Duke of British Petroleum. These will be your Masters.
Your "voting power" will mean NOTHING if you must stand in bread lines for food. When the vital means of production are transferred to Communist China, the US will no longer be an independent nation. And modern China, that's an uber-capitalists DREAM COME TRUE. Limitless labor and life is cheap.
I am 100% AGAINST free trade. Unilateral trade deals with nations until we've sorted out a FAIR way to trade that respects differences in wages, human rights and enviromental protection.
iTunes (which runs QuickTime underneath) streams Sean Hannity (in MP3) for me without a hitch on WinXP and Win2K. That's three hours a day with no glitches, unless there's a problem on the server side.
Yes,
There is definitely a problem on the server side. Sean Hannity;-)
Every time I remove "realsched.exe" from my startup group, it simply reinserts itself next time I run a Real Media file. For this reason, I always click Windows Media now.
I don't want to see Real Player's stupid popups. I HATE their website. It's takes 20 minutes to find the "free" download as opposed to all their "fake" free download links.
I can understand that they probably have revenue issues when pitted against the Microsoft juggernaught as well as Apple's popular Quicktime. They have to sell something that other companies largely give away as part of their platforms. Real Media's best bet is probably merger with another software company that has lived it's life under Microsofts shadow whether that be Quicken, IBM or Corel. Otherwise, they are doomed to go the way of Netscape.
"Horizontal drilling" increased continental Natural Gas reserves by huge amounts over the past decade or two. It's why you can still afford to waste the stuff heating your house, rather than just cooking with it.
Geez, and they didn't need a single money of federal money for their R&D. Did they? It's called investment on return. If Halliburton wants advanced laser drills, they can develop them independent of NASA. One thing is for sure, they aren't going to pay the taxpayers back for their "investment" (pork).
And we'll have a moonbase, where we'll be starting to mine Helium-3, or fuse all that silicate stuff into solar panels, and beam the power back to Earth. Planetary energy independence.
Assuming that a practical fusion technique for Helium-3 is invented, it will still be cheaper to use robots to get it. Assuming that a long range microwave power transmission system is feasible, it will still be way cheaper to send robots to set everything up.
The only reason for those smaller, more expensive gadgets, is so that better guidance "computers" can be crammed into the spatial constraints of the nose cones of missiles. Nobody will ever benefit from those technologies, because vaccuum tubes are just fine for radios and televisions, and business can do all the "computing" it need with a room full of clerks and hand-operated mechanical calculators, thank you very much! We should never have gone to the moon in 1969.
Yes, I realize that this is sarcasm. But it's stupid. The need for integrated circuits is from reduced costs of fabrication. Minitiarization is a natural cost function since it costs less to fabricate into smaller chips.
NASA has about as much to do with our modern technology as they have to do with developing Sunny D.
This whole "can't reach the space station" issue is all trumped up. All NASA need do is design an orbital fuel pod system.
Basically, they would design a spigot that fits into the back of the existing shuttles. NASA would launch one ore more simple orbiting "fuel pods" at various orbital heights. The fuel pod walls would be armored against orbital debris. It's mission is to sit happily in orbit until needed.
If the shuttle runs into a fuel problem during a mission. They would simply rendevouz with the fuel container and refuel. At that point they could move up into ISS orbit.
A fuel pod in low earth orbit shouldn't be a problem. If it de-orbits, it will simply explode since it would be 90% fuel. There would be no risk of flying debris hitting the earth.
These things shouldn't be that expensive to develop. They are a good idea for ANY future manned NASA program. They would be good for the future "commuter" space vehicles as well.
At the very least, Hubble should be boosted to a higher orbit. If the Webb telescope fails for some reason (blows up during launch) then we will have lost our "eyes in the sky".
Ground based telescopes are improving with adaptive optics. However, does anyone believe that they can ever correct 100% for atmospheric disturbance?? The deeper you look into space, the more pronounced those errors will be.
The old saying says that a bird in the hand is worth two in the Bush. Well, an orbiting, working Hubble is probably worth two Webbs that are still on Terra Firma.
The scientific missions of NASA are now under assault by the Bush adminstration. He wants to turn NASA into pure pork-barrel for industry at the expense of the cheaper, pure scientific endeavours.
I can deal with developing cheaper, less elaborate orbital transport, but what they are proposing is ridiculous. They ridicule the ISS for it's cost. Yet they want to build a MOON BASE to replace it which will cost ten times as much to build and maintain as something that already exists.
Of course, they won't be able to test "advanced drilling technology" on the ISS. Here is part that is pure porky corporate welfare. They want taxpayer money to subsidize R&D for Bushy's crony CEOs. A budget as large as a moonbase is harder to scrutinize and will contain all kinds of handouts for corportations.
We'll see if Prince George elaborates tonight in his "State of a Decaying Nation/Economy" speech.
I eagerly await the day when TV is purely on a pay per view basis. No more fucking commercials. No more excellent series being cancelled because the intellectually deficient Nielsen households don't like good TV.
What truly gets watched stays on TV. People don't watch crap TV because they don't want to pay for it. Advertisers get knocked down several pegs because they are essentially professional liers.
There is a association of federations. They are now going out to explore new galaxies.
-------------------
Briefly into the future. Star Trek: Alliance
The federation is coming under such hostile attack from Romulans, Borg and whoever is in the other quadrant that it decides to form a pure "military" service. Limited by that nasty treaty forbidding cloaking devices, the federation forms a new purely military force in direct alliance with the Klingons.
The force is composed of people too hostile for StarFleet and Klingons who are just plain hostile. The show would be dirty, gritty and have lots of action.
We would see characters from DS9 and occasionally see the Picard commanded Enterprise. Perhaps they could even make Janeway Admiral of this fleet which would cause great tension. Not only would the Klingons hate her, but the audience would hate her as well.
Our old friend Wharf will command the vessel that we will follow. We would also follow other vessels from time to time. These ships would be real nasties.
The species that I have loved the most is the Ferengi. The overtones were very clear. These were a race of value-less corporate executives. They valued nothing over their own self enrichment.
Our current collective struggle is against the Ferengi. They are threatening to eliminate the power of the nation states and replace them with international corporate governance. People will be less valuable then equipment to them. Feudalism would once again fall upon the Earth.
If bad guys from the future can play with time, whats the point???? They can always keep going back and trying again until they defeat their opposition. It's like playing Myst over and over again until you find the winning combinations.
If they have time travel technology, you can be assured they have far superior technology overall. That is, unless they found the "City on the Edge of Forever" and are playing with some ancient relic.
As campy as Dr Who was, they had the right idea about time travel. Anyone who controlled it would have to be forever responsible for gaurding it against malevolence. Otherwise everything would become chaos. For a full explanation, check out the X-Files episode with the time traveler which is one of the best pieces of science fiction that telivision has ever offered up.
Hehe, kinda sounds like Carnivale a bit. Though, that show is simply too complicated to be summarized in any way.
Beyond this, the afore-mentioned entity can be a SERIOUS enemy if they supplied the Federation with 70% of it's dilithium supply. You get my meaning here???
If it wasn't for oil, the Middle East would be 100% irrelevant. There would be no great wars there beyond the usual inter-tribe warfare amongst nomadic desert peoples.
People are briefly excited about probes. Then they go back to what they were doing once the novelty wears off.
Same thing goes for manned space travel. Remember the plot line in Apollo 13 which was taken from the real thing. After just three moon landings, nobody cared anymore. It took a crew potentially dying to get people interested in Apollo 13.
Fortuantely, I think there are some Congressman and Senators who know this lesson and will try hard to kill another set of manned interplanetary expiditions.
They definitely should NOT have used teleporters AT ALL. Those shuttle journeys can make for some interesting character interactions.
The problem with teleporters is that they are a cool gimmick at best and a poor plot device at worse. When episodes are written solely concerning teleporters, you know things are going wrong.
Beyond this, Trek does teleportation wrong. The matter and state within a human being is far too BIG to take apart and put together again. You are effectively killing the person being teleported and creating a duplicate someplace else (There was a great "Outer Limits" on this starring the bald photographer from "Just Shoot Me").
Rather, the method that the terrorists used on some fictional Palestine-Israel world be the practical method. Basically you just swap to pieces of space wholesale.
ANYONE can write a script without constraints. It takes talent to write cohesive scripts that follow basic rules and premises of a given fictional universe.
This is why Trek started getting so bad. They would create unsolvable plot lines and then invent new forms of energy to get them out.
The point of a prequel (Episode I, Enterprise) isn't showing what WILL happen. We already know what the outcome will be. The point is to show HOW it happened. And that can be just as fun when done properly.
A miniseries would be the preferred method to translate most books. It's simply to difficult to squish a good novel into a movie.
Short stories make the best movie adaptations becuase their stories easily encompass the depth of a movie. Plus, there is plenty of room for producers to "add" without displacing the author's original ideas.
Next Generation really went down hill after Gene died. It became a corporate product to be stamped and mass-produced. Gene was no longer there to do the quality control.
The beauty of the original Trek WASN'T space ships and alien races. Every episode was a social statement about how humans had evolved. Most of humanities "bad" characteristics were manifested in aliens (except hyper sex drives (Kirk as Bill Clinton;-)). The show portrayed these idiosynchrosies in a way external to human beings. It allowed people to see their arbitrary petty behavior in a way alien to their own condition and thus more easily digested.
Alien: Yes but he's black on the left side, I'm white on the left side. So he's clearly an inferior race.
Trek needs to take a "break". Too many bad ideas have been put on screen for the sake of getting something on screen.
Personally, I considered Voyager unwatchable. There sheer stupidity of the writing compelled me to scream. Likewise, I saw NOTHING on Enterprise that would compel me to keep watching.
Farscape kicked ass because it was new and different. They didn't shy away from characters with personal flaws. To borrow from the seminar from "Adaptation". Conflict is what makes something interesting. All those well adjusted Star Trek characters make for no internal conflict and predictable enemies: White hats and Black hats.
No. Raw Capitalism is about taking those choices away from those least able to defend themselves economically. This is called "getting filthy rich".
Unregulated capitalism eventually devolves into feudalism. Capitalistic forces work in direct opposition to the principles of the free market. Capitalists seek to control and manipulate. Once they have control, they stop competing unless absoluetly necessary.
Any argument to the contrary should carefully study the following capital empires:
Wal-Mart, Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel
Once they get big and fat and take over the market, competition stops. It simply becomes an exercise of stomping out any emerging threats with sheer marketing brute force.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that kinda sounds like a chicken and egg question right. Well, the market works like this.
Rich fucks invest to make even more money.
The more money they make, the poorer their workers get.
When they've extracted all the wealth of the nation, they STOP investing. Why???? Simple, there are no more gains to be had.
The way we crawled our way out of depression was taxing the rich and employing the poor. The WWII really helped because we absoluetly HAD to extract wealth from rich folk to pay for the production of war goods.
The taxes on the filthy rich in post WWII America were absoluetly oppressive. When Kennedy "Cut taxes on the rich", he dropped the top rate from 90% to 70%. The Repukelikans didn't mention that did they?????
Sof if you want to avoid depression, you must maintain a VERY LARGE middle class. You must TAX the ever living fuck out of the rich. The resulting balance in wealth distribution keeps the system from devolving into feudalism where labor costs nothing so PEOPLE are disposable.
The Reagan and Bush tax cuts are pushing this country back into depression economics. WTO and NAFTA is causing wealth and jobs to hemorrage from this nation.
Guess what, foreigners from those "brown" nations hate free trade even more than we do. The REALLY big winner in the US is agribusiness. No, not the mom and pop shops. GIANT factory farms that are government subsidized. It makes it IMPOSSIBLE for a farmer to earn a decent living overseas. As a result, there is no practical methodology to independently earn a living. So they must go to factories and be treated like a dog.
NAFTA and WTO is effectively a way for international corporations to erode the power of nation states and impose an international form of feudalism. Hail Lord Halliburton, Lord Enron, the Duke of British Petroleum. These will be your Masters.
Your "voting power" will mean NOTHING if you must stand in bread lines for food. When the vital means of production are transferred to Communist China, the US will no longer be an independent nation. And modern China, that's an uber-capitalists DREAM COME TRUE. Limitless labor and life is cheap.
I am 100% AGAINST free trade. Unilateral trade deals with nations until we've sorted out a FAIR way to trade that respects differences in wages, human rights and enviromental protection.
NAFTA AND WTO MUST GO!!!!!
iTunes (which runs QuickTime underneath) streams Sean Hannity (in MP3) for me without a hitch on WinXP and Win2K. That's three hours a day with no glitches, unless there's a problem on the server side.
;-)
Yes,
There is definitely a problem on the server side. Sean Hannity
Every time I remove "realsched.exe" from my startup group, it simply reinserts itself next time I run a Real Media file. For this reason, I always click Windows Media now.
I don't want to see Real Player's stupid popups. I HATE their website. It's takes 20 minutes to find the "free" download as opposed to all their "fake" free download links.
I can understand that they probably have revenue issues when pitted against the Microsoft juggernaught as well as Apple's popular Quicktime. They have to sell something that other companies largely give away as part of their platforms. Real Media's best bet is probably merger with another software company that has lived it's life under Microsofts shadow whether that be Quicken, IBM or Corel. Otherwise, they are doomed to go the way of Netscape.
Another NASA invention that wasn't invented by NASA. After all is said and done, it's just Tang
The same could be said for pointing a multi kilowatt MICROWAVE BEAM at the earth.
No, it doesn't. Because you DON'T KNOW if it will ever work.
Why don't we mine it AFTER we know it will justify the trillions of dollars it will take to get it!!!!!!
Yes. Yes it is.
Manned space exploration is 100% for entertaining voters since it has no other tangible benefit over robots.
"Horizontal drilling" increased continental Natural Gas reserves by huge amounts over the past decade or two. It's why you can still afford to waste the stuff heating your house, rather than just cooking with it.
Geez, and they didn't need a single money of federal money for their R&D. Did they? It's called investment on return. If Halliburton wants advanced laser drills, they can develop them independent of NASA. One thing is for sure, they aren't going to pay the taxpayers back for their "investment" (pork).
And we'll have a moonbase, where we'll be starting to mine Helium-3, or fuse all that silicate stuff into solar panels, and beam the power back to Earth. Planetary energy independence.
Assuming that a practical fusion technique for Helium-3 is invented, it will still be cheaper to use robots to get it. Assuming that a long range microwave power transmission system is feasible, it will still be way cheaper to send robots to set everything up.
The only reason for those smaller, more expensive gadgets, is so that better guidance "computers" can be crammed into the spatial constraints of the nose cones of missiles. Nobody will ever benefit from those technologies, because vaccuum tubes are just fine for radios and televisions, and business can do all the "computing" it need with a room full of clerks and hand-operated mechanical calculators, thank you very much! We should never have gone to the moon in 1969.
Yes, I realize that this is sarcasm. But it's stupid. The need for integrated circuits is from reduced costs of fabrication. Minitiarization is a natural cost function since it costs less to fabricate into smaller chips.
NASA has about as much to do with our modern technology as they have to do with developing Sunny D.
This whole "can't reach the space station" issue is all trumped up. All NASA need do is design an orbital fuel pod system.
Basically, they would design a spigot that fits into the back of the existing shuttles. NASA would launch one ore more simple orbiting "fuel pods" at various orbital heights. The fuel pod walls would be armored against orbital debris. It's mission is to sit happily in orbit until needed.
If the shuttle runs into a fuel problem during a mission. They would simply rendevouz with the fuel container and refuel. At that point they could move up into ISS orbit.
A fuel pod in low earth orbit shouldn't be a problem. If it de-orbits, it will simply explode since it would be 90% fuel. There would be no risk of flying debris hitting the earth.
These things shouldn't be that expensive to develop. They are a good idea for ANY future manned NASA program. They would be good for the future "commuter" space vehicles as well.
Agreed.
At the very least, Hubble should be boosted to a higher orbit. If the Webb telescope fails for some reason (blows up during launch) then we will have lost our "eyes in the sky".
Ground based telescopes are improving with adaptive optics. However, does anyone believe that they can ever correct 100% for atmospheric disturbance?? The deeper you look into space, the more pronounced those errors will be.
The old saying says that a bird in the hand is worth two in the Bush. Well, an orbiting, working Hubble is probably worth two Webbs that are still on Terra Firma.
The scientific missions of NASA are now under assault by the Bush adminstration. He wants to turn NASA into pure pork-barrel for industry at the expense of the cheaper, pure scientific endeavours.
I can deal with developing cheaper, less elaborate orbital transport, but what they are proposing is ridiculous. They ridicule the ISS for it's cost. Yet they want to build a MOON BASE to replace it which will cost ten times as much to build and maintain as something that already exists.
Of course, they won't be able to test "advanced drilling technology" on the ISS. Here is part that is pure porky corporate welfare. They want taxpayer money to subsidize R&D for Bushy's crony CEOs. A budget as large as a moonbase is harder to scrutinize and will contain all kinds of handouts for corportations.
We'll see if Prince George elaborates tonight in his "State of a Decaying Nation/Economy" speech.
I think Neilsen is on the path to obsolesence.
I eagerly await the day when TV is purely on a pay per view basis. No more fucking commercials. No more excellent series being cancelled because the intellectually deficient Nielsen households don't like good TV.
What truly gets watched stays on TV. People don't watch crap TV because they don't want to pay for it. Advertisers get knocked down several pegs because they are essentially professional liers.
Jump forward WAY!!! into the future.
There is a association of federations. They are now going out to explore new galaxies.
-------------------
Briefly into the future. Star Trek: Alliance
The federation is coming under such hostile attack from Romulans, Borg and whoever is in the other quadrant that it decides to form a pure "military" service. Limited by that nasty treaty forbidding cloaking devices, the federation forms a new purely military force in direct alliance with the Klingons.
The force is composed of people too hostile for StarFleet and Klingons who are just plain hostile. The show would be dirty, gritty and have lots of action.
We would see characters from DS9 and occasionally see the Picard commanded Enterprise. Perhaps they could even make Janeway Admiral of this fleet which would cause great tension. Not only would the Klingons hate her, but the audience would hate her as well.
Our old friend Wharf will command the vessel that we will follow. We would also follow other vessels from time to time. These ships would be real nasties.
The species that I have loved the most is the Ferengi. The overtones were very clear. These were a race of value-less corporate executives. They valued nothing over their own self enrichment.
Our current collective struggle is against the Ferengi. They are threatening to eliminate the power of the nation states and replace them with international corporate governance. People will be less valuable then equipment to them. Feudalism would once again fall upon the Earth.
If bad guys from the future can play with time, whats the point???? They can always keep going back and trying again until they defeat their opposition. It's like playing Myst over and over again until you find the winning combinations.
If they have time travel technology, you can be assured they have far superior technology overall. That is, unless they found the "City on the Edge of Forever" and are playing with some ancient relic.
As campy as Dr Who was, they had the right idea about time travel. Anyone who controlled it would have to be forever responsible for gaurding it against malevolence. Otherwise everything would become chaos. For a full explanation, check out the X-Files episode with the time traveler which is one of the best pieces of science fiction that telivision has ever offered up.
Hehe, kinda sounds like Carnivale a bit. Though, that show is simply too complicated to be summarized in any way.
Beyond this, the afore-mentioned entity can be a SERIOUS enemy if they supplied the Federation with 70% of it's dilithium supply. You get my meaning here???
If it wasn't for oil, the Middle East would be 100% irrelevant. There would be no great wars there beyond the usual inter-tribe warfare amongst nomadic desert peoples.
People are briefly excited about probes. Then they go back to what they were doing once the novelty wears off.
Same thing goes for manned space travel. Remember the plot line in Apollo 13 which was taken from the real thing. After just three moon landings, nobody cared anymore. It took a crew potentially dying to get people interested in Apollo 13.
Fortuantely, I think there are some Congressman and Senators who know this lesson and will try hard to kill another set of manned interplanetary expiditions.
They definitely should NOT have used teleporters AT ALL. Those shuttle journeys can make for some interesting character interactions.
The problem with teleporters is that they are a cool gimmick at best and a poor plot device at worse. When episodes are written solely concerning teleporters, you know things are going wrong.
Beyond this, Trek does teleportation wrong. The matter and state within a human being is far too BIG to take apart and put together again. You are effectively killing the person being teleported and creating a duplicate someplace else (There was a great "Outer Limits" on this starring the bald photographer from "Just Shoot Me").
Rather, the method that the terrorists used on some fictional Palestine-Israel world be the practical method. Basically you just swap to pieces of space wholesale.
ANYONE can write a script without constraints. It takes talent to write cohesive scripts that follow basic rules and premises of a given fictional universe.
This is why Trek started getting so bad. They would create unsolvable plot lines and then invent new forms of energy to get them out.
The point of a prequel (Episode I, Enterprise) isn't showing what WILL happen. We already know what the outcome will be. The point is to show HOW it happened. And that can be just as fun when done properly.
Dissing Voyager, Sg-1 and DS9 is one thing.
;-)
You must be a BRAVE person to diss Babylon 5
Excellent ideas.
Though, I really want the folks at Battlestar to get rid of the clothes that look like they came from thrift stores.
A miniseries would be the preferred method to translate most books. It's simply to difficult to squish a good novel into a movie.
Short stories make the best movie adaptations becuase their stories easily encompass the depth of a movie. Plus, there is plenty of room for producers to "add" without displacing the author's original ideas.
I would expect more Next Gen movies.
But I would really like to see a DS9 sequel movie. Put together a couple really good stories and film them back to back.
They shouldn't produce Trek "just because". They should produce Trek because they have a meaningful, quality story.
Next Generation really went down hill after Gene died. It became a corporate product to be stamped and mass-produced. Gene was no longer there to do the quality control.
;-)). The show portrayed these idiosynchrosies in a way external to human beings. It allowed people to see their arbitrary petty behavior in a way alien to their own condition and thus more easily digested.
The beauty of the original Trek WASN'T space ships and alien races. Every episode was a social statement about how humans had evolved. Most of humanities "bad" characteristics were manifested in aliens (except hyper sex drives (Kirk as Bill Clinton
Alien: Yes but he's black on the left side, I'm white on the left side. So he's clearly an inferior race.
Trek needs to take a "break". Too many bad ideas have been put on screen for the sake of getting something on screen.
Personally, I considered Voyager unwatchable. There sheer stupidity of the writing compelled me to scream. Likewise, I saw NOTHING on Enterprise that would compel me to keep watching.
Farscape kicked ass because it was new and different. They didn't shy away from characters with personal flaws. To borrow from the seminar from "Adaptation". Conflict is what makes something interesting. All those well adjusted Star Trek characters make for no internal conflict and predictable enemies: White hats and Black hats.
No. Raw Capitalism is about taking those choices away from those least able to defend themselves economically. This is called "getting filthy rich".
Unregulated capitalism eventually devolves into feudalism. Capitalistic forces work in direct opposition to the principles of the free market. Capitalists seek to control and manipulate. Once they have control, they stop competing unless absoluetly necessary.
Any argument to the contrary should carefully study the following capital empires:
Wal-Mart, Microsoft, IBM, AT&T, Standard Oil, Carnegie Steel
Once they get big and fat and take over the market, competition stops. It simply becomes an exercise of stomping out any emerging threats with sheer marketing brute force.