Doing manned missions for PR purposes seems pretty silly.
Not doing PR will guarantee that the entire Space Program ends up being nothing but a bunch of expensive lawn ornaments and a theme park in Florida.
It's only because of the public interest in space, and their willingless to spend a shitload of money on it, that there is the opportunity to conduct scientific research up there at all. Private industry isn't going to pay for it; at least not on anything like the scale that we've come to enjoy today.
The primary goal of the space program should be to ensure its own future existence, and that means keeping the public interested. If that means going and sending some guy up to stand on an asteroid for a photo op next to a flag, so be it. It's that sort of thing which will keep the money flowing.
I think that "poke it with a stick" here is a substitute for "deliver unto the asteroid a large nuclear weapon."
If you can land on it, then you can probably drop a nuke there. That's the scientific part. However, actually putting a person there also satisfies the equally important goal of continuing NASA's public relations campaign and spurring public interest in space exploration.
Need a continuous series of 'firsts.'
on
NASA Weighs Moon Plans
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Sorta proves my point. They were inspired the first time we put a man on the moon. Not quite so much the second, and by the third, they weren't interested until something got screwed up.
It's the firsts that are important, and that's what NASA has to be continually aiming for. It has to constantly be extending our reach; pushing us further and further out.
I can guarantee you that the first time a person walks on Mars, while it may not be quite the same event as the Moon landing, that will get people to stop what they're doing and care, if only for a little while.
The idea is that you have to be the first to do something, and thereby capture the public's imagination; then, when you have their attention, use it to get the resources you need to consolidate that achievement, and start moving on to the next 'first.'
If NASA wants to keep going, it basically needs to give every generation a moon landing (and preferably more frequently than that). If people don't perceive that the money we're spending is taking us to new places, then they're going to take it and fritter it away elsewhere.
There's a good reason for manned exploration: people -- otherwise known as 'taxpayers' -- don't care about and aren't inspired by robotic exploration. When the Mars Rover does something, it's lucky to get a 5 second mention on CNN. Putting a robot on another planet isn't nearly as tangible an accomplishment as putting a person somewhere.
When people want a measuring stick to judge the successfulness of our technology, they still say "we put a man on the moon..." (generally followed by "...and we still can't do [something]"); you don't hear people saying "we put a robot on Mars" or "we put launched a deep-space probe beyond our Solar System..." While important, virtually everything NASA has done since the moon landing, with the possible exception of the Hubble Space Telescope (because of the neat pictures it sent back), has failed to capture the public's interest. And as a result, they have seen their funding grow slimmer and slimmer.
To be honest, doing exploration that doesn't get the average people excited is shortsighted, because it's ultimately those people, apathetic and ignorant as they may be, who control the purse strings that are the lifeblood of the space program. If they don't care about NASA, then NASA gets its budget cut by the Congresscritters next time they're looking for money to fund their Bridge to Nowhere. And that means no money for 'real' scientific research.
Putting people back on the moon ASAP is essential to restore interest in the Space Program to a country that has, by and large, forgotten it. Manned space exploration today is a joke: it's tourism. The adventure of space is something mostly reserved for a generation that's obsessing over the costs of prescription drugs, and has stopped looking outwards for new frontiers. The younger generation hasn't been given any reason by NASA to be interested. I haven't even seen as many kids these days saying that they want to be astronauts as used to. (And why would they -- ride up into space on a vehicle that would be cat food cans already, if it had been an automobile; have basically nowhere to go when you get up there; and there's always the risk of the whole thing falling apart on the way down.)
NASA is a far cry from the national inspiration that it was to previous generations, and unless it can demonstrate some ability to capture the imaginations of today's citizens, it's going to be budget-cut into nonexistence.
Bingo. Actually, an Apple iPhone could be the thing that might wake a few people up, and get them to break out of the subsidized-phone indentured servitude.
I left Verizon for TMobile and haven't ever looked back. My girlfriend actually has an even better deal -- she has a legacy AT&T Wireless billing plan that predates their buyout by Cingular (it's ridiculously cheap, for 4 lines I think it's $80). If she changed the plan, or got a new phone through them, or generally did anything except pay her bill every month and shut the heck up, they'd bump her to a Cingular plan that would cost almost double. So what does she do? She just buys European GSM phones from eBay and puts the SIM cards in. Works fine, and Cingular's none the wiser. (Well, I suppose they could tell from the IMEI changing, but they seem not to care.)
If you're TMobile or Cingular (or leftover AT&T/Cingular), I don't think there's anything stopping you from buying an iPhone and popping in your SIM. Welcome to what the rest of the world has been enjoying for some time now: phones that aren't locked to a particular carrier or phone line.
I don't know whether it's a difference in our billing structure here or what, but SMSing just isn't nearly as big a deal here as it seems to be in Europe. I use my cellphone heavily, and I rarely use text messages. Maybe a few times a week, tops. In the time it takes to compose an SMS, I can generally just call someone and leave a message, or just let it ring and let them call me back when they see the missed call. On most phone plans, that's cheaper, too. (I have more voice minutes than I could ever use, but text messages set me back about $0.10 a piece. This is on a pretty basic TMobile plan.) Plus, I can do voice calls from a BT headset with VAD while in the car; I can barely walk in a straight line when I'm trying to type text messages.
They just don't seem like they're worth the trouble and expense. If I was going to type on my cellphone, I'd just go into the Gmail mobile app and send a real email.
I'm probably on the low end of text-message use, but I really don't think they're used here in the States very much, comparatively, and I think as email gets further integrated into phones, that's just going to take over.
The system utilizes a mixture of fixed and mobile ground radar, as well as airborne surveillance using the Embraer ERJ 145. The combined platform is called the R-99. The U.S. military contractor Raytheon, the Brazilian firm ATECH, and Embraer won the tender to build the SIVAM system. Today, the project has delivered its equipment to the government, creating the SIPAM (Amazonian Protection System) and enhancing the Brazilian Airspace Control System. SIPAM headquarters are located in Brasília, Brazil.
GPG not integrated into Mail by default.
on
PGP Is 15 Years Old
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· Score: 1
Just a small correction. The Mail client for OS X (aka "Apple Mail" or whatever you want to call it) doesn't have PGP capabilities built in.
It has some S/MIME capabilities built in (and almost totally undocumented, as far as I can tell, and it's a bit of a bear to set up), but to get anything related to PGP, you need to install the excellent set of plugins from Sente, called GPGMail. It is basically an interface between Apple Mail, and the CLI gpg tools.
It relies on some undocumented and unsupported APIs in Mail, so it could (and has, in the past) broken whenever Apple decides to change anything.
I've always thought it was too bad that Apple didn't actually provide some real PGP support in Mail; if they just bought GPGMail and built it in, it would be a nice start, and one less step I'd have to walk my friends through. My suspicion is that it's not built in, because at Apple HQ they use S/MIME and are happy with that, thus there's no motivation to include PGP features. The only reference I've ever seen by Apple to PGP is on their Product Security page, where they publish a public key that they use to sign official security-related documents.
(Incidentally, Apple's iChat also has encryption support. But again, sadly, it's not using the very nice, open source OTR system, it's done using an Apple plugin only good for talking to other iChat users. I think this also was something developed for internal use that they decided to release to the public, and since they have something that works for them internally, there's little chance of them ever implementing OTR.)
The common person may not stand up against "copyright controls," but they won't deal with a lot of inconvenience in doing what they want to do.
The past is littered with the corpses of formats that have failed for one reason or another, because they were either too complicated, or didn't solve a problem people actually had, or were too expensive, or a variety of other reasons. For one that failed purely due to DRM, you can look back to Divx: that went nowhere in a hurry.
I'm not sure that HD-DVD and BluRay will be a whole lot better. They're not quite as obnoxious as Divx was, but to the average consumer they're almost as devoid of advantages when compared to existing formats (in the case of BluRay, DVD).
I'm generally a fan of any theory that premises itself on the 'average consumer' being nothing but a fat, alcoholic, lazy, debt-ridden weasel, since 90% of the time this is a fairly good model for our collective behavior. However, much as consumers will go to ridiculous lengths to get something for nothing, they usually won't pay to get nothing, either. The value proposition of many new DRM-heavy technologies just isn't there.
Selling the same bits over and over again is a viable business model, and it's the only reason the software industry, the movie industry and the music industry exist.
I agree. It's why they exist right now. And up until a few years ago, copying bits was pretty hard -- it was the era of stone tablets as far as computerized information technologies go. However, as copying those bits becomes easier and easier, it becomes harder and harder to guarantee that you can recoup the cost of the initial investment by selling copies.
So yes, I think that ultimately, when copying becomes easy enough and widespread enough, the only software that will be written, is that which is paid for up front and in advance. It's not as though this doesn't happen all the time, right now. In fact, I suspect in terms of lines of code written, far more 'software' has been written on contract than on speculation. (Think of all the business software, billions of lines of customized stuff.) I make my living this way, as do a whole lot of other people. (Granted, a lot of what we do involves implementing and working with already-written software, but the cost of that is usually small compared to the cost of implementation and customization, and the latter are also where the value is added.) In this model, you don't even try to "sell" software, or any sort of "products" at all -- you sell services. Essentially, what the client buys is the time of a bunch of skilled people, to accomplish a specific task.
I'm not really engaging in any value judgments here. I don't think software "should" be sold in one way or the other. That's a meaningless argument. I think it's inevitable; DRM and other copy-control technologies are a finger in a dike that's already broken. It'll probably always be hard or annoying enough to copy information, notwithstanding the ever-present bludgeon of Copyright, that some commercial development will always continue because it looks lucrative enough on paper that people will try it ("write one piece of code, and sell it a thousand times over?"), I just don't think that's where the majority of the money is, in the long term.
Assume you're the tradesman, and I'm just some guy who's bored and wants something new. I come to you, and say I want a widget unlike any other, built just for me, for my particular requirements. You tell me how long that will take to make, and calculate your price. I agree to pay you (we find some mutually agreeable terms for conducting payment, in a currency we both perceive as having value). You make the thing, give it to me, and I pay you.
Now, I have the only copy of my widget. I can take it, use it, and do whatever I want with it. I can copy it and give it to my friends, who might then give it to their friends, and to everybody else, at which point it might cease to be unique, or I can destroy it. Or I can just keep it a secret and look at it myself.
It's the difference between getting a picture of yourself, or your family, and the little sample picture that comes in a picture frame when you buy it at WalMart. Why do people bother going to the expense of getting pictures of themselves (cameras, film, processing) if they can just get a picture for free in the frame? Well obviously it's because their picture has special value to them. That value is not easily copyable from one person to another. Because I can get a photo of you, isn't going to stop me from still getting my unique picture made of my family, to go in my frame. There are a whole range of goods like that, where having 'a copy' (or a million copies) available doesn't make you less likely to buy one of your own, that's customized to your liking.
You don't just have to use something that's as personal or emotionally connected as family photos. A similar market could exist for anything from coffee cups to weapons (although I don't know if it would in SL, not knowing the mechanics of the game world). Anyone could get a "generic" coffee cup, or a coffee cup designed for somebody else, but if you had money, you could get one that was uniquely yours. Over time, I am confident that there would be strong social pressures, borne out of our need to demonstrate our relative wealth to each other, to possess things designed specially for you. Over time, it would probably seem as chintzy to have a coffee cup that wasn't designed for you, as it would to have the generic "WalMart Family" in the frame on your desk. And like the family photos, yours would have only limited value to anyone else; though you could copy it, it wouldn't have value to anyone else and thus they probably wouldn't bother.
Yup. To the highest bidder, that is, the local prince or bishop. Just like in the old days. Tough luck for us lowly Third Estate villains.
Your point is correct on the surface, but you're missing an important piece. Right now, us "lowly Third Estate villains" aren't purchasing customized, bespoke pieces of art anyway. We can't afford it. So it's not as though anything you are purchasing now would suddenly become un-affordable. On the contrary, it would become dirt cheap. (Cheaper, actually -- you can't copy dirt.)
True, a single 'average person' probably wouldn't be able to commission the making of a new Star Wars megamovie, but they can't do that right now anyway. So they're not losing anything.
However, also consider the amount of money that an average person in the Third Estate pays for "entertainment," which in today's world, basically means purchasing copies of things -- copies that would cost virtually nothing if they weren't kept artificially expensive. All that money would be available to be spent on other things. Add up the amount of money you spend on entertainment in a year -- it's a pretty significant amount. Still, it's not going to buy you Star Wars by yourself. Put a few people (or more likely, a few thousand people) together, and their disposable income becomes Real Money, comparable to the "local prince or bishop."
People say there wouldn't be enough public interest to make movies in the absence of corporate capital funding. I say that's not true. Even today, with the artificial scarcity of previously-created works, there's still a huge demand for new content. If every movie ever made was available on tap, once people got used to (read: bored) with it, the demand for new content would skyrocket. Rather than just writing letters to studio owners, begging them to make a movie for you (Firefly, Star Trek, etc.), if you could get enough people to contribute, you'd have enough money to fund its creation. It's not hard, it's just expensive. The capital would still all be there, it would just be where people decided to direct it.
And even if people didn't fund that many new movies, it's not like the money currently spent on duplicate copies of the same information disappears. They're going to spend it in other places, and that means job creation somewhere else.
Although the media companies would like you to think that a DRM-free world would somehow be disempowering to average folks, in truth it would be the opposite; even the poorest person would have access to all the previously-created works, and people with disposable income could have a direct effect on the creation of new works, if they chose to have it. Right now, you have virtually no influence over the creation of work anyway (except indirectly, via how the heads of the entertainment companies -- the bishops and prices of our age -- think you'll be willing to spend your money, and frankly they're not even that good at it).
As to your other point:
By the way, if copies "cease to have value", why do people still download them? Perhaps you meant "copies cease to be a source of subsistence for authors, regardless of their value", which is not exactly the same thing. You might want to ponder the implications.
You are correct, instead of value, I should have said "price."
I have considered the implications a fair bit, actually. For every good, there is a spread, between what it actually costs to produce, and what people perceive it as being worth. Generally, according to classical economics (which aren't perfect, but work fairly well in some cases), in a competitive market, competition between producers should drive the price of the good down to the cost of its inputs. In the absence of competition, the price rises, until it hits the maximum perceived value of the good by consumers -- any higher than that, and they won't buy it. Right now, the cost of 'entertainment' is pretty much pegged at the top end of that spread. In a nonconservative informational realm, the
If they think their time is worth $1,000 (or whatever, some arbitrarily high value) an hour, they can certainly try to sell themselves at that rate. I doubt they'll get any takers, though.
And yes, the photographer should price their time irregardless of the number of photos the customer will print later. How many they'll make is not relevant to the sales transaction, once you rule out the possibility of pay-per-copy (as in the case of a nonconservative informational realm without DRM). You can't view it as a 'loss' when it's not possible to make money that way in the first place.
I suspect that although there would be initial resistance to the business model, you would find that many photographers would be willing to turn over reproduction rights for slightly less than a hundred dollars an hour, depending on their reputation and skills. (Actually I used to know a good local wedding photographer who worked this way, although he catered mostly to other photographers.)
So anyway, I guess I'll agree with you: the photographer would price their time with the assumption built-in that you would make a lot of copies (or at least, that you wouldn't provide any further income to them by buying more copies). So their rate would be basically the rate they charge now, plus an amount equal to the income they obtain from further print sales, divided out per hour of labor. E.g., if right now they charge a base rate of $50/hr take the photos, an average shoot lasts 5 hours, and then charge $10 per print, and on average sell 10 prints per shoot, then they'd probably want to charge about $70/hr if they were going to turn over all the negatives to you afterwards instead of holding onto them. There's nothing unfair about that, and it's not even clear that the customer is getting a bad deal: if the customer makes more prints than average, then they actually save money.
My point is that this pricing is basically inevitable: without onerous DRM, you can't give someone a photo in a digital format without also allowing them to copy it. So if you want to stay in business, you're going to want to charge the "prints included" rate, rather than the lower one. If I was going to open up shop as a wedding photographer (shudder) tomorrow, given that people are going to want their photos in some sort of digital format -- to send to relatives, make into DVDs/books/whatever -- I would certainly not try to keep myself afloat by artificially lowering my rate, hoping that I'd make it up later on "in volume." Trying to sell the same string of numbers more than once (particularly to the same person!) is a mistake.
How is this +4 Insightful? You're arguing that items need to be unique in order to be desirable or profitable. Rolex, Mercedes Benz, heck, even McDonalds has "a sustainable, proven business model" of selling identical wares over and over again. Artisians enjoy making unique contributions to the world. Some of them make a very good living, but that's rare. Businesses, on the other hand, strive to make money the in most efficent manner possible. Despite being uncool, both have their place in the world. How much do you think your computer would cost if each one had to be hand-crafted?
I guess I wasn't clear: I was only talking about in the digital, nonconservative realm, where you can duplicate an object that's already been created with virtually no effort or energy expenditure (well, there is some, but it's trivial).
McDonalds and Mercedes sell identical items over and over, because if I have a Mercedes, I can't just copy it and give you a Mercedes, too -- the real world doesn't work that way, because of pesky things like conservation of mass and energy. However, in the realm of information, if I have an "item" (and I would say that the term 'knowing' it is preferable and more appropriate to 'owning' it), I can give ('tell') it to you, without affecting the original. In this realm, the copies have virtually no value; in time, their cost will drop down to the marginal production cost (which is very low). So it's silly to try to have a business model that revolves around amortizing the cost of production out over not-yet-sold copies.
Anyway, I hope that clears it up. I was not implying that manufacturing identical goods and selling them was an unfeasible business model in the real world; it's not and won't be. However, selling the same piece of information over and over, is not, in my estimation, sustainable without a lot of heavy-handed controls on the market.
Zune is much more controversial, however, because Microsoft's pre-existing hardware and service partners are left high and dry. "I've never seen a business so blatantly screw its business partners," says Peter Sealey, a professor at Berkeley's Haas School of Business.
Let me be the first to say: "You must be new here."
except that it was never difficult to copy/clone their models to begin with... all digital remember... so why would anyone go to the effort of making anything new (excepting personal joy in doing so) if everyone can have one just like it instantly.
Maybe not everyone wants to have the same thing? Seems like there would be a market, over time, for custom-made stuff; where you knew that you were the only person in the game to have this particular item, and have complete control over it (to give, copy, destroy it).
"Manufacturing" goods doesn't make sense in a virtual world. I always thought it was silly in WoW, but there it works because they essentially have extremely stringent controls that prevent you from using the natural advantages of digitization (non-conservativeness of information). However, labor-based trades still do. They're just not money machines: you can't make something cool and then watch the cash roll in, as people buy it over and over. Even if you're really good at your trade, you have to constantly work and sell your time, if you want a continuous income stream.
This isn't mass prodution versus custom creation. It is buying CDs versus DLing them for free on Napster.
I don't see why it's either-or. You're talking about two sides of the same coin.
When it's impossible to make money by selling the same work over and over, you must necessarily switch to a business model which demands payment for the entire work's creation up front (because you can't depend on being paid piecemeal by selling copies of the work later). Essentially, the artist becomes a tradesman, just like a plumber or electrician: pay me for my time and I'll make something for you.
DRM exists to prevent this, and preserve the manufacturing-type (payment per 'unit' or copy) business model, where the cost of production of a work is amortized out over the sale of many identical copies. Rather than charging what the copies cost to produce, it creates an artificial scarcity that allows their cost to be increased up to the maximum that consumers are willing to pay.
Without DRM, the copies cease to have value, but the skilled labor that goes into their creation still does, and could be sold even in the absence of DRM (or copyright).
The copies are worthless, probably, but the original is not.
Let's assume we live in an all-digital, completely non-conservative world, where any object or piece of information can be duplicated instantly, at zero cost or energy expenditure.
You might think that this makes a lot of professions impossible. How could you be a photographer? Quite easily. Rather than trying to sell content that has already been created, you sell your ability to create new content. E.g., I would still pay you to take a portrait of me, because no pictures of me exist already (or none that I want / don't have already). After you take the picture, and I pay you for your time, I can then go and make a billion copies of it -- but you were already paid for your time. Rather than trying to be shady about it, and amortize the value of your time over 100 copies that you might sell me in the future, you demand the payment up front, you get it, and I take my new picture and you take your money. The transaction is complete.
In short, if you can copy goods already extant at zero cost, the demand that remains is for customized goods, or goods which don't already exist. Rather than looking at an artistic occupation as essentially a production/manufacturing job, turning out identical intellectual-property widgets, you have to view it as a service job, selling your time and skills in order to produce something which meets a customer's specifications.
The businesses that are closing were all operating on the wrong business model. Rather than try to make money selling the same object over and over, as if each copy had some value, they should have been figuring out ways to make money selling unique, individually created, bespoke objects. Selling the same stream of bits over and over is stupid. But if you could create something new for each person, then you'd not be selling bits, but your creative labor and skills -- it's not "bits" that you're selling anymore, but "service." That's a sustainable, proven business model.
I hope that Linden keeps the copying devices around, and lets people have free reign with them, because I think in time, you'll see the SL economy recover, and it would be a good demonstration of an 'information economy' that's not based on artificial scarcity or restrictions on information, but rather on mutually beneficial services.
Conspiratol, another product of I.G. Farben Pharmaceuticals. Possible side effects include nausea, sweating, paranoia, diarrhea, constipation, headaches, toothaches, and death by firing squad. Talk to your doctor today!
I used to play WoW via Cedega, before I just decided I didn't have enough time for games entirely, and I think this is too bad. If they had stopped me from using Cedega, it would have been my subscription.
Actually, using it via Cedega worked really well once you got it working. I can't say it was "better than Windows," because I've never run Windows on that hardware (at least, not as the bare-metal OS, only in VMs), but it was a lot better than I imagined it would be when I started messing around with it.
I think there are quite a few people who only use Cedega because of WoW, so I expect that the Cedega people will fix stuff pretty quickly, if the Blizzard folks will even tell them what the problem is and what Cedega is doing that Warden doesn't like.
I think it's going to get to the point where "anti-cheats" and "copy protection" are the major things tying games to the Windows platform, because they're fundamentally hard (if not impossible) to implement on a Free OS, because the user -- by design -- can basically modify whatever they want, run debuggers, memory editors, etc.
Only a very small minority of people, even among open-source-software users, are capable of interpreting source code and modifying it.
Also, even a person that did know code, would need to be very comfortable (I would think) to write or change something that could potentially brick their mobo.
So whether the code is modifiable or not, really isn't relevant to all but a few users, at least in the direct sense. There are indirect benefits of having code available (see my other post in this thread concerning the indirect benefits of OSS to non-coders), but most people are going to look at the piece of software as a unit, and ask whether it works, and if it doesn't, they're going to move on to something else. The benefits of OSS are rarely so great as to make hiring a skilled programmer to modify it for you worthwhile.
It sounds from TFA that they have a nice automated QA system set up, where new revisions get tested against actual hardware automatically, but they're going to have to sustain an awfully high level of effort, in order to keep creating and testing new software revisions to cope with all the new boards that get released to the market every month.
I'm not panning the project; I really hope they succeed. It just seems like yet another project that probably won't have direct support from the hardware manufacturers, and as a result will always be one step behind mainstream usability. Perhaps that's okay -- maybe "mainstream usability" is overrated. But it's something worth considering.
End users aren't going to modify their processors and have them fabricated, but then again, "end users" for the most part, aren't going to open up the source code to their applications and make any sort of nontrivial adjustments to them, and recompile them.
Writing code and recompiling a piece of software is almost as much a black art to most people, as designing a microprocessor and fabricating a chip is.
Source code is meaningless gibberish to most users, regardless of whether that source code describes hardware or software. Code written in VHDL is just a slightly more arcane strain of gibberish than C, but still meaningless.
Most people (who have even the foggiest idea of open source) benefit from it indirectly: by having higher-quality products to begin with, and having them available from more vendors, and having a guarantee that if a vendor tanks, that their product stands a better chance of being supported by somebody else (because another company or organization can take it over). This would also be true with hardware. An open and well-documented chip design would be available, were it popular, from a variety of vendors, and even if one vendor went out of business, the design would survive. These benefits exist even to people who cannot understand code, and exist for both hardware and software.
Slashdot Mirror
Doing manned missions for PR purposes seems pretty silly.
Not doing PR will guarantee that the entire Space Program ends up being nothing but a bunch of expensive lawn ornaments and a theme park in Florida.
It's only because of the public interest in space, and their willingless to spend a shitload of money on it, that there is the opportunity to conduct scientific research up there at all. Private industry isn't going to pay for it; at least not on anything like the scale that we've come to enjoy today.
The primary goal of the space program should be to ensure its own future existence, and that means keeping the public interested. If that means going and sending some guy up to stand on an asteroid for a photo op next to a flag, so be it. It's that sort of thing which will keep the money flowing.
I think that "poke it with a stick" here is a substitute for "deliver unto the asteroid a large nuclear weapon."
If you can land on it, then you can probably drop a nuke there. That's the scientific part. However, actually putting a person there also satisfies the equally important goal of continuing NASA's public relations campaign and spurring public interest in space exploration.
Sorta proves my point. They were inspired the first time we put a man on the moon. Not quite so much the second, and by the third, they weren't interested until something got screwed up.
It's the firsts that are important, and that's what NASA has to be continually aiming for. It has to constantly be extending our reach; pushing us further and further out.
I can guarantee you that the first time a person walks on Mars, while it may not be quite the same event as the Moon landing, that will get people to stop what they're doing and care, if only for a little while.
The idea is that you have to be the first to do something, and thereby capture the public's imagination; then, when you have their attention, use it to get the resources you need to consolidate that achievement, and start moving on to the next 'first.'
If NASA wants to keep going, it basically needs to give every generation a moon landing (and preferably more frequently than that). If people don't perceive that the money we're spending is taking us to new places, then they're going to take it and fritter it away elsewhere.
There's a good reason for manned exploration: people -- otherwise known as 'taxpayers' -- don't care about and aren't inspired by robotic exploration. When the Mars Rover does something, it's lucky to get a 5 second mention on CNN. Putting a robot on another planet isn't nearly as tangible an accomplishment as putting a person somewhere.
When people want a measuring stick to judge the successfulness of our technology, they still say "we put a man on the moon..." (generally followed by "...and we still can't do [something]"); you don't hear people saying "we put a robot on Mars" or "we put launched a deep-space probe beyond our Solar System..." While important, virtually everything NASA has done since the moon landing, with the possible exception of the Hubble Space Telescope (because of the neat pictures it sent back), has failed to capture the public's interest. And as a result, they have seen their funding grow slimmer and slimmer.
To be honest, doing exploration that doesn't get the average people excited is shortsighted, because it's ultimately those people, apathetic and ignorant as they may be, who control the purse strings that are the lifeblood of the space program. If they don't care about NASA, then NASA gets its budget cut by the Congresscritters next time they're looking for money to fund their Bridge to Nowhere. And that means no money for 'real' scientific research.
Putting people back on the moon ASAP is essential to restore interest in the Space Program to a country that has, by and large, forgotten it. Manned space exploration today is a joke: it's tourism. The adventure of space is something mostly reserved for a generation that's obsessing over the costs of prescription drugs, and has stopped looking outwards for new frontiers. The younger generation hasn't been given any reason by NASA to be interested. I haven't even seen as many kids these days saying that they want to be astronauts as used to. (And why would they -- ride up into space on a vehicle that would be cat food cans already, if it had been an automobile; have basically nowhere to go when you get up there; and there's always the risk of the whole thing falling apart on the way down.)
NASA is a far cry from the national inspiration that it was to previous generations, and unless it can demonstrate some ability to capture the imaginations of today's citizens, it's going to be budget-cut into nonexistence.
Bingo. Actually, an Apple iPhone could be the thing that might wake a few people up, and get them to break out of the subsidized-phone indentured servitude.
I left Verizon for TMobile and haven't ever looked back. My girlfriend actually has an even better deal -- she has a legacy AT&T Wireless billing plan that predates their buyout by Cingular (it's ridiculously cheap, for 4 lines I think it's $80). If she changed the plan, or got a new phone through them, or generally did anything except pay her bill every month and shut the heck up, they'd bump her to a Cingular plan that would cost almost double. So what does she do? She just buys European GSM phones from eBay and puts the SIM cards in. Works fine, and Cingular's none the wiser. (Well, I suppose they could tell from the IMEI changing, but they seem not to care.)
If you're TMobile or Cingular (or leftover AT&T/Cingular), I don't think there's anything stopping you from buying an iPhone and popping in your SIM. Welcome to what the rest of the world has been enjoying for some time now: phones that aren't locked to a particular carrier or phone line.
I don't know whether it's a difference in our billing structure here or what, but SMSing just isn't nearly as big a deal here as it seems to be in Europe. I use my cellphone heavily, and I rarely use text messages. Maybe a few times a week, tops. In the time it takes to compose an SMS, I can generally just call someone and leave a message, or just let it ring and let them call me back when they see the missed call. On most phone plans, that's cheaper, too. (I have more voice minutes than I could ever use, but text messages set me back about $0.10 a piece. This is on a pretty basic TMobile plan.) Plus, I can do voice calls from a BT headset with VAD while in the car; I can barely walk in a straight line when I'm trying to type text messages.
They just don't seem like they're worth the trouble and expense. If I was going to type on my cellphone, I'd just go into the Gmail mobile app and send a real email.
I'm probably on the low end of text-message use, but I really don't think they're used here in the States very much, comparatively, and I think as email gets further integrated into phones, that's just going to take over.
Just a small correction. The Mail client for OS X (aka "Apple Mail" or whatever you want to call it) doesn't have PGP capabilities built in.
It has some S/MIME capabilities built in (and almost totally undocumented, as far as I can tell, and it's a bit of a bear to set up), but to get anything related to PGP, you need to install the excellent set of plugins from Sente, called GPGMail. It is basically an interface between Apple Mail, and the CLI gpg tools.
It relies on some undocumented and unsupported APIs in Mail, so it could (and has, in the past) broken whenever Apple decides to change anything.
I've always thought it was too bad that Apple didn't actually provide some real PGP support in Mail; if they just bought GPGMail and built it in, it would be a nice start, and one less step I'd have to walk my friends through. My suspicion is that it's not built in, because at Apple HQ they use S/MIME and are happy with that, thus there's no motivation to include PGP features. The only reference I've ever seen by Apple to PGP is on their Product Security page, where they publish a public key that they use to sign official security-related documents.
(Incidentally, Apple's iChat also has encryption support. But again, sadly, it's not using the very nice, open source OTR system, it's done using an Apple plugin only good for talking to other iChat users. I think this also was something developed for internal use that they decided to release to the public, and since they have something that works for them internally, there's little chance of them ever implementing OTR.)
The common person may not stand up against "copyright controls," but they won't deal with a lot of inconvenience in doing what they want to do.
The past is littered with the corpses of formats that have failed for one reason or another, because they were either too complicated, or didn't solve a problem people actually had, or were too expensive, or a variety of other reasons. For one that failed purely due to DRM, you can look back to Divx: that went nowhere in a hurry.
I'm not sure that HD-DVD and BluRay will be a whole lot better. They're not quite as obnoxious as Divx was, but to the average consumer they're almost as devoid of advantages when compared to existing formats (in the case of BluRay, DVD).
I'm generally a fan of any theory that premises itself on the 'average consumer' being nothing but a fat, alcoholic, lazy, debt-ridden weasel, since 90% of the time this is a fairly good model for our collective behavior. However, much as consumers will go to ridiculous lengths to get something for nothing, they usually won't pay to get nothing, either. The value proposition of many new DRM-heavy technologies just isn't there.
thus one can no longer sustain the economy on sales of a product, thus it must be sustained with services.
This is exactly the point I was trying to make.
So yes, I think that ultimately, when copying becomes easy enough and widespread enough, the only software that will be written, is that which is paid for up front and in advance. It's not as though this doesn't happen all the time, right now. In fact, I suspect in terms of lines of code written, far more 'software' has been written on contract than on speculation. (Think of all the business software, billions of lines of customized stuff.) I make my living this way, as do a whole lot of other people. (Granted, a lot of what we do involves implementing and working with already-written software, but the cost of that is usually small compared to the cost of implementation and customization, and the latter are also where the value is added.) In this model, you don't even try to "sell" software, or any sort of "products" at all -- you sell services. Essentially, what the client buys is the time of a bunch of skilled people, to accomplish a specific task.
I'm not really engaging in any value judgments here. I don't think software "should" be sold in one way or the other. That's a meaningless argument. I think it's inevitable; DRM and other copy-control technologies are a finger in a dike that's already broken. It'll probably always be hard or annoying enough to copy information, notwithstanding the ever-present bludgeon of Copyright, that some commercial development will always continue because it looks lucrative enough on paper that people will try it ("write one piece of code, and sell it a thousand times over?"), I just don't think that's where the majority of the money is, in the long term.
Yes, it can.
Assume you're the tradesman, and I'm just some guy who's bored and wants something new. I come to you, and say I want a widget unlike any other, built just for me, for my particular requirements. You tell me how long that will take to make, and calculate your price. I agree to pay you (we find some mutually agreeable terms for conducting payment, in a currency we both perceive as having value). You make the thing, give it to me, and I pay you.
Now, I have the only copy of my widget. I can take it, use it, and do whatever I want with it. I can copy it and give it to my friends, who might then give it to their friends, and to everybody else, at which point it might cease to be unique, or I can destroy it. Or I can just keep it a secret and look at it myself.
It's the difference between getting a picture of yourself, or your family, and the little sample picture that comes in a picture frame when you buy it at WalMart. Why do people bother going to the expense of getting pictures of themselves (cameras, film, processing) if they can just get a picture for free in the frame? Well obviously it's because their picture has special value to them. That value is not easily copyable from one person to another. Because I can get a photo of you, isn't going to stop me from still getting my unique picture made of my family, to go in my frame. There are a whole range of goods like that, where having 'a copy' (or a million copies) available doesn't make you less likely to buy one of your own, that's customized to your liking.
You don't just have to use something that's as personal or emotionally connected as family photos. A similar market could exist for anything from coffee cups to weapons (although I don't know if it would in SL, not knowing the mechanics of the game world). Anyone could get a "generic" coffee cup, or a coffee cup designed for somebody else, but if you had money, you could get one that was uniquely yours. Over time, I am confident that there would be strong social pressures, borne out of our need to demonstrate our relative wealth to each other, to possess things designed specially for you. Over time, it would probably seem as chintzy to have a coffee cup that wasn't designed for you, as it would to have the generic "WalMart Family" in the frame on your desk. And like the family photos, yours would have only limited value to anyone else; though you could copy it, it wouldn't have value to anyone else and thus they probably wouldn't bother.
Your point is correct on the surface, but you're missing an important piece. Right now, us "lowly Third Estate villains" aren't purchasing customized, bespoke pieces of art anyway. We can't afford it. So it's not as though anything you are purchasing now would suddenly become un-affordable. On the contrary, it would become dirt cheap. (Cheaper, actually -- you can't copy dirt.)
True, a single 'average person' probably wouldn't be able to commission the making of a new Star Wars megamovie, but they can't do that right now anyway. So they're not losing anything.
However, also consider the amount of money that an average person in the Third Estate pays for "entertainment," which in today's world, basically means purchasing copies of things -- copies that would cost virtually nothing if they weren't kept artificially expensive. All that money would be available to be spent on other things. Add up the amount of money you spend on entertainment in a year -- it's a pretty significant amount. Still, it's not going to buy you Star Wars by yourself. Put a few people (or more likely, a few thousand people) together, and their disposable income becomes Real Money, comparable to the "local prince or bishop."
People say there wouldn't be enough public interest to make movies in the absence of corporate capital funding. I say that's not true. Even today, with the artificial scarcity of previously-created works, there's still a huge demand for new content. If every movie ever made was available on tap, once people got used to (read: bored) with it, the demand for new content would skyrocket. Rather than just writing letters to studio owners, begging them to make a movie for you (Firefly, Star Trek, etc.), if you could get enough people to contribute, you'd have enough money to fund its creation. It's not hard, it's just expensive. The capital would still all be there, it would just be where people decided to direct it.
And even if people didn't fund that many new movies, it's not like the money currently spent on duplicate copies of the same information disappears. They're going to spend it in other places, and that means job creation somewhere else.
Although the media companies would like you to think that a DRM-free world would somehow be disempowering to average folks, in truth it would be the opposite; even the poorest person would have access to all the previously-created works, and people with disposable income could have a direct effect on the creation of new works, if they chose to have it. Right now, you have virtually no influence over the creation of work anyway (except indirectly, via how the heads of the entertainment companies -- the bishops and prices of our age -- think you'll be willing to spend your money, and frankly they're not even that good at it).
As to your other point:
You are correct, instead of value, I should have said "price."
I have considered the implications a fair bit, actually. For every good, there is a spread, between what it actually costs to produce, and what people perceive it as being worth. Generally, according to classical economics (which aren't perfect, but work fairly well in some cases), in a competitive market, competition between producers should drive the price of the good down to the cost of its inputs. In the absence of competition, the price rises, until it hits the maximum perceived value of the good by consumers -- any higher than that, and they won't buy it. Right now, the cost of 'entertainment' is pretty much pegged at the top end of that spread. In a nonconservative informational realm, the
If they think their time is worth $1,000 (or whatever, some arbitrarily high value) an hour, they can certainly try to sell themselves at that rate. I doubt they'll get any takers, though.
And yes, the photographer should price their time irregardless of the number of photos the customer will print later. How many they'll make is not relevant to the sales transaction, once you rule out the possibility of pay-per-copy (as in the case of a nonconservative informational realm without DRM). You can't view it as a 'loss' when it's not possible to make money that way in the first place.
I suspect that although there would be initial resistance to the business model, you would find that many photographers would be willing to turn over reproduction rights for slightly less than a hundred dollars an hour, depending on their reputation and skills. (Actually I used to know a good local wedding photographer who worked this way, although he catered mostly to other photographers.)
So anyway, I guess I'll agree with you: the photographer would price their time with the assumption built-in that you would make a lot of copies (or at least, that you wouldn't provide any further income to them by buying more copies). So their rate would be basically the rate they charge now, plus an amount equal to the income they obtain from further print sales, divided out per hour of labor. E.g., if right now they charge a base rate of $50/hr take the photos, an average shoot lasts 5 hours, and then charge $10 per print, and on average sell 10 prints per shoot, then they'd probably want to charge about $70/hr if they were going to turn over all the negatives to you afterwards instead of holding onto them. There's nothing unfair about that, and it's not even clear that the customer is getting a bad deal: if the customer makes more prints than average, then they actually save money.
My point is that this pricing is basically inevitable: without onerous DRM, you can't give someone a photo in a digital format without also allowing them to copy it. So if you want to stay in business, you're going to want to charge the "prints included" rate, rather than the lower one. If I was going to open up shop as a wedding photographer (shudder) tomorrow, given that people are going to want their photos in some sort of digital format -- to send to relatives, make into DVDs/books/whatever -- I would certainly not try to keep myself afloat by artificially lowering my rate, hoping that I'd make it up later on "in volume." Trying to sell the same string of numbers more than once (particularly to the same person!) is a mistake.
McDonalds and Mercedes sell identical items over and over, because if I have a Mercedes, I can't just copy it and give you a Mercedes, too -- the real world doesn't work that way, because of pesky things like conservation of mass and energy. However, in the realm of information, if I have an "item" (and I would say that the term 'knowing' it is preferable and more appropriate to 'owning' it), I can give ('tell') it to you, without affecting the original. In this realm, the copies have virtually no value; in time, their cost will drop down to the marginal production cost (which is very low). So it's silly to try to have a business model that revolves around amortizing the cost of production out over not-yet-sold copies.
Anyway, I hope that clears it up. I was not implying that manufacturing identical goods and selling them was an unfeasible business model in the real world; it's not and won't be. However, selling the same piece of information over and over, is not, in my estimation, sustainable without a lot of heavy-handed controls on the market.
except that it was never difficult to copy/clone their models to begin with... all digital remember... so why would anyone go to the effort of making anything new (excepting personal joy in doing so) if everyone can have one just like it instantly.
Maybe not everyone wants to have the same thing? Seems like there would be a market, over time, for custom-made stuff; where you knew that you were the only person in the game to have this particular item, and have complete control over it (to give, copy, destroy it).
"Manufacturing" goods doesn't make sense in a virtual world. I always thought it was silly in WoW, but there it works because they essentially have extremely stringent controls that prevent you from using the natural advantages of digitization (non-conservativeness of information). However, labor-based trades still do. They're just not money machines: you can't make something cool and then watch the cash roll in, as people buy it over and over. Even if you're really good at your trade, you have to constantly work and sell your time, if you want a continuous income stream.
This isn't mass prodution versus custom creation. It is buying CDs versus DLing them for free on Napster.
I don't see why it's either-or. You're talking about two sides of the same coin.
When it's impossible to make money by selling the same work over and over, you must necessarily switch to a business model which demands payment for the entire work's creation up front (because you can't depend on being paid piecemeal by selling copies of the work later). Essentially, the artist becomes a tradesman, just like a plumber or electrician: pay me for my time and I'll make something for you.
DRM exists to prevent this, and preserve the manufacturing-type (payment per 'unit' or copy) business model, where the cost of production of a work is amortized out over the sale of many identical copies. Rather than charging what the copies cost to produce, it creates an artificial scarcity that allows their cost to be increased up to the maximum that consumers are willing to pay.
Without DRM, the copies cease to have value, but the skilled labor that goes into their creation still does, and could be sold even in the absence of DRM (or copyright).
The copies are worthless, probably, but the original is not.
Let's assume we live in an all-digital, completely non-conservative world, where any object or piece of information can be duplicated instantly, at zero cost or energy expenditure.
You might think that this makes a lot of professions impossible. How could you be a photographer? Quite easily. Rather than trying to sell content that has already been created, you sell your ability to create new content. E.g., I would still pay you to take a portrait of me, because no pictures of me exist already (or none that I want / don't have already). After you take the picture, and I pay you for your time, I can then go and make a billion copies of it -- but you were already paid for your time. Rather than trying to be shady about it, and amortize the value of your time over 100 copies that you might sell me in the future, you demand the payment up front, you get it, and I take my new picture and you take your money. The transaction is complete.
In short, if you can copy goods already extant at zero cost, the demand that remains is for customized goods, or goods which don't already exist. Rather than looking at an artistic occupation as essentially a production/manufacturing job, turning out identical intellectual-property widgets, you have to view it as a service job, selling your time and skills in order to produce something which meets a customer's specifications.
I think you nailed it.
The businesses that are closing were all operating on the wrong business model. Rather than try to make money selling the same object over and over, as if each copy had some value, they should have been figuring out ways to make money selling unique, individually created, bespoke objects. Selling the same stream of bits over and over is stupid. But if you could create something new for each person, then you'd not be selling bits, but your creative labor and skills -- it's not "bits" that you're selling anymore, but "service." That's a sustainable, proven business model.
I hope that Linden keeps the copying devices around, and lets people have free reign with them, because I think in time, you'll see the SL economy recover, and it would be a good demonstration of an 'information economy' that's not based on artificial scarcity or restrictions on information, but rather on mutually beneficial services.
Water goes in cargo container, cargo container goes in rocket, shark goes in water. Our shark.
We're gonna need a bigger rocket.
Conspiratol, another product of I.G. Farben Pharmaceuticals. Possible side effects include nausea, sweating, paranoia, diarrhea, constipation, headaches, toothaches, and death by firing squad. Talk to your doctor today!
I used to play WoW via Cedega, before I just decided I didn't have enough time for games entirely, and I think this is too bad. If they had stopped me from using Cedega, it would have been my subscription.
Actually, using it via Cedega worked really well once you got it working. I can't say it was "better than Windows," because I've never run Windows on that hardware (at least, not as the bare-metal OS, only in VMs), but it was a lot better than I imagined it would be when I started messing around with it.
I think there are quite a few people who only use Cedega because of WoW, so I expect that the Cedega people will fix stuff pretty quickly, if the Blizzard folks will even tell them what the problem is and what Cedega is doing that Warden doesn't like.
I think it's going to get to the point where "anti-cheats" and "copy protection" are the major things tying games to the Windows platform, because they're fundamentally hard (if not impossible) to implement on a Free OS, because the user -- by design -- can basically modify whatever they want, run debuggers, memory editors, etc.
Only a very small minority of people, even among open-source-software users, are capable of interpreting source code and modifying it.
Also, even a person that did know code, would need to be very comfortable (I would think) to write or change something that could potentially brick their mobo.
So whether the code is modifiable or not, really isn't relevant to all but a few users, at least in the direct sense. There are indirect benefits of having code available (see my other post in this thread concerning the indirect benefits of OSS to non-coders), but most people are going to look at the piece of software as a unit, and ask whether it works, and if it doesn't, they're going to move on to something else. The benefits of OSS are rarely so great as to make hiring a skilled programmer to modify it for you worthwhile.
It sounds from TFA that they have a nice automated QA system set up, where new revisions get tested against actual hardware automatically, but they're going to have to sustain an awfully high level of effort, in order to keep creating and testing new software revisions to cope with all the new boards that get released to the market every month.
I'm not panning the project; I really hope they succeed. It just seems like yet another project that probably won't have direct support from the hardware manufacturers, and as a result will always be one step behind mainstream usability. Perhaps that's okay -- maybe "mainstream usability" is overrated. But it's something worth considering.
End users aren't going to modify their processors and have them fabricated, but then again, "end users" for the most part, aren't going to open up the source code to their applications and make any sort of nontrivial adjustments to them, and recompile them.
Writing code and recompiling a piece of software is almost as much a black art to most people, as designing a microprocessor and fabricating a chip is.
Source code is meaningless gibberish to most users, regardless of whether that source code describes hardware or software. Code written in VHDL is just a slightly more arcane strain of gibberish than C, but still meaningless.
Most people (who have even the foggiest idea of open source) benefit from it indirectly: by having higher-quality products to begin with, and having them available from more vendors, and having a guarantee that if a vendor tanks, that their product stands a better chance of being supported by somebody else (because another company or organization can take it over). This would also be true with hardware. An open and well-documented chip design would be available, were it popular, from a variety of vendors, and even if one vendor went out of business, the design would survive. These benefits exist even to people who cannot understand code, and exist for both hardware and software.