Up to here, I agree. If you put in a good day's worth of work, you should get a good day's worth of pay out of it. Heck, if you can negotiate a decent deal, you can get two or even three days pay out of your one day's work.
But if you want to get paid next year, you should have to work next year. My plumber has to. My dentist has to. My lawyer has to. My barber has to. Why should YOU get to retire on the one good day of work you put in ten years ago?
This whole argument assumes you're working for an established company or someone who is paying you a wage. What if you're not? What if you're the guy with a lab in his basement, or a computer farm in his garage, and you come up with something new and novel? Who is going to pay you for it? How are you going to get it to market without some already established entity swooping in and scooping the whole thing out from under you and leaving you with nothing? The entire idea of copyrights and patents in the first place was to protect the little guy from the big guy. Just because the big guys are now using them to rape and pillage doesn't mean the entire system needs to be scrapped.
And frankly, I'm tired of the "I have to work, so you should have to work too!" argument. It smacks of Marxist "everybody is equal, and if they're not, we'll damn well cripple those who excel in order to make everybody equal!" bullshit. If somebody is willing to still pay money for something you produced ten years ago, you damn well *should* still be able to collect that money. It also implies that inventors and creators get one lucky break and then live in the lap of luxury their entire lives after that, without any work required on their part. That's total crap, as most of these people work harder than the average 9-5 wage slave for less money--yet people seem to want to punish them when they do finally get a break and get some return on all the work they put in over the years. Screw that. Keep your sour grapes to yourself.
Fiber is actually surprisingly tough. Yeah, it's glass, but as long as the light gets through, you've got a good signal. Where I work we once accidentally rolled a 700 pound cabinet over a fiber run. The fiber rolled up under the caster and got crunched a second time (once from the wheel going over it, once from it curling over the wheel and getting jammed in the housing) and we had to slowly back the cabinet off the fiber while gently tugging on the free end to get it out of the wheel housing. It came out all mangled looking, and we thought there was no way they would still work. But we got the cabinet in place, plugged the fiber in, and what do you know? It worked fine. We used those mangled cables for four years, and they were still working when we retired those boxes this year.
So yeah, in general fiber is less sturdy than standard copper cables. But they're not as brittle as all that.
To you, maybe. The beauty of capitalism, though, is that neither you nor anybody else gets to decide what something is worth for everybody else. It's worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. In this case, apparently the judge decided it was worth about $20k to the company that tried to pirate it.
According to my admittedly cursory examination, the share price of SCOX (now SCOXQ.PK) peaked at around $17 a share sometime in 2003. At the time, they had close to 14,000,000 shares outstanding.
So that's approximately $238,000,000 of shareholder value reduced to just about nothing in five years. And that's just shareholder value. No telling what they cost other companies such as IBM in legal fees, what they cost taxpayers tying up the court system for years with their spurious lawsuits, or what they've cost Slashdot in bandwidth hosting these articles.;-)
I can't even imagine who still holds shares of SCO. They were de-listed from the NASDAQ and now trade on the OTCBB (over the counter bulletin board, or "pink sheets"). If you held shares of SCO before de-listing, you likely lost everything if you didn't sell (that's generally what happens to holders of common stock once a company goes into Chapter 11).
But you're right, you can't sell a stock if you can't find someone to buy it from you. For most common stocks traded on the big exchanges, this is almost never an issue--the volume is high enough that you'll find a buyer almost instantly. But OTC stocks can go weeks or months without a buy/sell transaction.
Please explain to me which societies these are that realize rights to be ridiculous constructs. I guess I don't get what the hell you're talking about. Are you saying you don't have an absolute right to life? Well, yeah, someone can come along and kill you, so I guess you didn't actually have a perfect right to life. But that's pretty much the point. Governments are there to protect these rights we see ourselves as having. Without certain basic assumptions about the rights of humans, there's no point to government at all.
You better not move to New Hampshire, Kentucky, Tennessee, or North Carolina then. The Right of revolution is protected in the Constitution of those states.
Kentucky's constitution states: "All power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their peace, safety, happiness and the protection of property. For the advancement of these ends, they have at all times an inalienable and indefeasible right to alter, reform or abolish their government in such manner as they may deem proper."
The other three go a bit farther, and include the statement "The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.".
See, once upon a time in the USA, people understood what the proper role of government is and where the authority of the government comes from. It comes from the people, in the form of delegated rights. You do not have the right to use force against me arbitrarily, so you cannot delegate this "right" to someone else (i.e. the government) to do it for you.
Furthermore, the US Declaration of Independence clearly states "...That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Maybe the western world supports you nearly universally, but the founding documents of the United States and several of its states clearly do not. The government is "of the people, by the people, for the people", or at least should be. And if it isn't, it is the "Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."
Going straight up gets you past the thickest part of the atmosphere the fastest. You want to get out of the lower atmosphere as quickly as possible to avoid having to plow through it with your engines blazing and eating fuel. So all rockets launched go basically straight up for a bit, then bank east to build up orbital velocity. It's not as direct as all that--you don't go straight up and then turn 90 degrees and go east, obviously. But that's the basics of it.
If you watch the shuttle launch, it performs a roll and heads out east over the Atlantic a few seconds into the flight, but the angle off vertical is fairly small until it gets through the dense part of the atmosphere, then it flattens out for the run to orbit.
SpaceShip One launched from the underbelly of White Knight at an altitude that was high enough so that it's comparatively tiny rocket engine would have enough power to get the craft to the edge of space. This works great for sub-orbital flights, but I guess we'll have to wait and see how well it scales up for orbital flight.
Interesting factoid that may only interest me and has little relevance to this topic: One of the shuttle's abort modes during takeoff takes the shuttle out over the Atlantic and lands it in Europe or Africa without reaching orbit. It's never been used, but with the velocity the shuttle achieves during takeoff, total flight time Florida to, say, Spain or Morocco would be about 20 minutes.
Remember when we were going to have sub-orbital commercial flights like that by now? Man, the future isn't as cool as the past would have me believe it should be.
Unfortunately "Corporate Policy" is the root of most of the evils in IT Support. If Corporate Policy says you need to have "on access" scan running, you damn well better get your manager to put in writing that he approved this change and he'll take full responsibility for any viruses that you bring into the environment before I'll disable it. It's not that I don't understand why it's slowing you down. It's that if I have to choose between you doing your job a little faster or me getting bitch-slapped when someone finds out I violated the sacred policy to help you out, you can probably guess which one I'm choosing.
There's plenty of rules-loving Nazis in IT who truly love enforcing policies. But there's also plenty of us who do it just because we hate the alternative more. Unless you're an executive I'm not getting myself in trouble by bending rules for you. I'm happy to explain to someone with the power to actually do something about "the policy" why you'd be more productive if we made this change for you, and what the risks associated with that change are, but I'm sure as shit not going to just change it for you on the sly.
I think you need to think more critically about what you believe. "Just because" isn't an answer. It's just an assertion based on nothing more than your gut telling you something isn't right. Think with your head, give me a rational reason why art is cheapened by money. "It's supposed to mean something" isn't an answer either. It can still mean something and still be motivated mostly by money.
If you're going to call me out for a lack of understanding of my "fellow human beings", at least act like a human being and give me a rational argument as to why I'm wrong. Animals act on instinct and gut reactions--humans are supposed to be able to trancend that.
When it comes to art and music, then the money shouldn't be everything.
Why not? I guess this is the part I don't understand. People do a lot of things for a lot of different reasons, and money is certainly one of the biggest reasons of all to do many things. What's so horrible about someone creating art strictly because it makes them money?
But there's no reason for Gene Simmons to make any more money than he already has.
Well, it's not up to you or anybody else to decide when Gene Simmons "has enough money", thankfully. I rather enjoy the freedoms of capitalism that way. But honestly, why is it that if you say your main reason for doing something is "making money", that somehow cheapens it? If Gene makes music strictly because it makes him rich, and now he doesn't want to make any more music because he feels he can't make money off it anymore, why is that bad? Regardless of what your opinion is about Gene's music, I don't see why money as a motivation is so repugnant to some people, especially people in creative fields. Sure, it's not the easiest way to make lots of cash for most people. But it worked for Gene, and I don't see why that's a bad thing.
2 boxed sets of unreleased music - at best second rate crap that was not good enough to put out the first time - coming. All to just make money as he admitted in the first sentence was his main motivation since making music for it's own sake or attracting new fans isn't enough by itself.
Why should it be? Would you still do *your* job if nobody paid you to do it, just for the love of doing it? I sure wouldn't. If nobody paid me to do what I do, it wouldn't get done.
I don't get why artists are held to a different standard? Why do they have to just do it for the love of doing it then give it away? Why shouldn't they get paid too?
Yeah, fine, they shouldn't be able to live forever on the proceeds of one popular song they produced. But fuck me if I can see why they're supposed to just give shit away.
No, he probably means "people who refuse to acknowledge that human languages are ever-evolving and think grammar should be prescriptive rather than descriptive."
Your analogy is flawed because you are trying to compare something with an obvious physical reality (the Earth) with something that exists only in the minds of humans (language). Enough people saying the Earth is flat won't make it so, but enough people saying "this begs the question" and meaning "this begs for the question to be asked" *will* change what the phrase means. People like you (and me--I cringe at this too) can fight against it, and perhaps even sway common usage back to the "correct" meaning, but that doesn't change the fact that, yes, if enough people use it "incorrectly", the incorrect usage will eventually become correct. It has happened plenty of times in the past, and will continue to happen, because languages change as people change. You can point to your grammar book and rail against the incorrect usage, but it wont make you any more right or wrong.
The only reason language has rules of grammar is because people agreed on those rules in order for communication to be as clear as possible. But the rules change as meanings and usage change. It's arguably more clear to people today that "begging the question" means "raises the question" rather than "assumes the question is true".
I admire your attempts at retaining the original meaning of "begs the question", but don't misunderstand how language works, and don't commit another logical fallacy (appeal to authority) in order to defend it. There *is* no authority on language other than the users of that language. And if they say "begs the question" means "raises the question", then they're right.
They get to decide because it's their party. Nothing is stopping Colbert from running as an Independent in the national election. He just can't be a part of the Democratic primary. The Democrats don't even need to hold primaries anyway if they don't want to, or they can completely ignore the results of the primaries and just say "Hillary is our candidate" if they wish. That doesn't stop anybody else from running in the general election as an Independent, though.
The Democratic party gets to decide who runs as a Democrat. If you want Colbert on the ballot, write him in yourself or get him to run as an Independent.
The article is a lot of tinfoil hat nonsense built up around one kernel of truth: The Eisenhower administration *did* want the Soviets to launch the first satellite, or at least did not want the US to be first with what was clearly a military booster. von Braun was ordered to fill the payload stage of his Jupiter C missile tests with sand (or cement--I can't recall) in order to insure that they could *not* achieve orbit.
The reason for this, though, was not some tinfoil hat scheme to allow the government to intrude on education or somesuch, though. Simply put, Eisenhower wanted the Soviets to solve the issue of overflights in space. Today we think of orbital space as a pretty much open area for all, and although many countries have the capability to take down "enemy" satellites, nobody yet has to my knowledge. But back in those days, the idea of sending an orbital payload over the Soviet Union was a worrisome one, as it wasn't clear how the Soviets would respond to this violation of their "airspace". Would they see it as an aggressive act, especially if the payload was clearly a military one?
Eisenhower wanted to avoid the issue more than anything. He wanted for the first satellite to either be the Navy's Vanguard (although still a military program, Vanguard was portrayed as a scientific payload and was part of the United State's contribution to the International Geophysical Year) or for the Soviets to take the first step so he himself could set the precedent of not reacting to an "overflight" with hostility.
The whole "WE HAVE TO CATCH UP TO THE RUSSIANS!!" thing that came after the sputnik launch was one neither Eisenhower nor Khrushchev expected. Neither leader realized what they were touching off with this new space race. But the public was stunned by the Soviet satellite accomplishment, and reacted accordingly. So to did the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower warned us of later. But the Eisenhower administration themselves didn't engineer this so they could interfere with education or anything. They simply wanted for the first satellite to either be a clearly scientific payload, or have the Soviets settle the issue of orbital overflights for them. He simply did not foresee the reaction such a Soviet triumph would produce.
Gravity, for one. If you want to have people live there to man your production facilities that require a hard vacuum, having it on the moon is more betterer than having it in orbit.
Also, the bulk of the moon itself is useful for things like radio astronomy. A radio telescope on the lunar far side would be able to use the entire mass of the moon as a shield against the background noise of the Earth.
Other than that... It's just damn cool! Go outside some night and really take a look at the moon. It's the only thing in the sky that is so close to us that we actually see it as a great big disc and can see features on it with the naked eye. That's another WORLD you're looking at! And it's RIGHT THERE! Tell me you wouldn't give just about anything to walk on it.
I drank from rivers and streams constantly when I was young, and never got sick. Never from standing water, as I'm not *that* dumb, but I must have drank from the river outside our house hundreds of times growing up and never recall getting sick. Did I just get lucky then?
The article itself makes this very point. Of course, nobody else on/. actually read the article--they just started another "ZOMG COPYRIGHT!!!!" flamefest.
Slashdot Mirror
We have fscked this world over...
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Up to here, I agree. If you put in a good day's worth of work, you should get a good day's worth of pay out of it. Heck, if you can negotiate a decent deal, you can get two or even three days pay out of your one day's work.
But if you want to get paid next year, you should have to work next year. My plumber has to. My dentist has to. My lawyer has to. My barber has to. Why should YOU get to retire on the one good day of work you put in ten years ago?
This whole argument assumes you're working for an established company or someone who is paying you a wage. What if you're not? What if you're the guy with a lab in his basement, or a computer farm in his garage, and you come up with something new and novel? Who is going to pay you for it? How are you going to get it to market without some already established entity swooping in and scooping the whole thing out from under you and leaving you with nothing? The entire idea of copyrights and patents in the first place was to protect the little guy from the big guy. Just because the big guys are now using them to rape and pillage doesn't mean the entire system needs to be scrapped.
And frankly, I'm tired of the "I have to work, so you should have to work too!" argument. It smacks of Marxist "everybody is equal, and if they're not, we'll damn well cripple those who excel in order to make everybody equal!" bullshit. If somebody is willing to still pay money for something you produced ten years ago, you damn well *should* still be able to collect that money. It also implies that inventors and creators get one lucky break and then live in the lap of luxury their entire lives after that, without any work required on their part. That's total crap, as most of these people work harder than the average 9-5 wage slave for less money--yet people seem to want to punish them when they do finally get a break and get some return on all the work they put in over the years. Screw that. Keep your sour grapes to yourself.
Fiber is actually surprisingly tough. Yeah, it's glass, but as long as the light gets through, you've got a good signal. Where I work we once accidentally rolled a 700 pound cabinet over a fiber run. The fiber rolled up under the caster and got crunched a second time (once from the wheel going over it, once from it curling over the wheel and getting jammed in the housing) and we had to slowly back the cabinet off the fiber while gently tugging on the free end to get it out of the wheel housing. It came out all mangled looking, and we thought there was no way they would still work. But we got the cabinet in place, plugged the fiber in, and what do you know? It worked fine. We used those mangled cables for four years, and they were still working when we retired those boxes this year.
So yeah, in general fiber is less sturdy than standard copper cables. But they're not as brittle as all that.
To you, maybe. The beauty of capitalism, though, is that neither you nor anybody else gets to decide what something is worth for everybody else. It's worth whatever someone is willing to pay for it. In this case, apparently the judge decided it was worth about $20k to the company that tried to pirate it.
According to my admittedly cursory examination, the share price of SCOX (now SCOXQ.PK) peaked at around $17 a share sometime in 2003. At the time, they had close to 14,000,000 shares outstanding.
;-)
So that's approximately $238,000,000 of shareholder value reduced to just about nothing in five years. And that's just shareholder value. No telling what they cost other companies such as IBM in legal fees, what they cost taxpayers tying up the court system for years with their spurious lawsuits, or what they've cost Slashdot in bandwidth hosting these articles.
I can't even imagine who still holds shares of SCO. They were de-listed from the NASDAQ and now trade on the OTCBB (over the counter bulletin board, or "pink sheets"). If you held shares of SCO before de-listing, you likely lost everything if you didn't sell (that's generally what happens to holders of common stock once a company goes into Chapter 11).
But you're right, you can't sell a stock if you can't find someone to buy it from you. For most common stocks traded on the big exchanges, this is almost never an issue--the volume is high enough that you'll find a buyer almost instantly. But OTC stocks can go weeks or months without a buy/sell transaction.
Could you try restating your argument, but this time with less anti-corporate teen angst and more actual thought? Thanks.
Please explain to me which societies these are that realize rights to be ridiculous constructs. I guess I don't get what the hell you're talking about. Are you saying you don't have an absolute right to life? Well, yeah, someone can come along and kill you, so I guess you didn't actually have a perfect right to life. But that's pretty much the point. Governments are there to protect these rights we see ourselves as having. Without certain basic assumptions about the rights of humans, there's no point to government at all.
You better not move to New Hampshire, Kentucky, Tennessee, or North Carolina then. The Right of revolution is protected in the Constitution of those states.
Kentucky's constitution states: "All power is inherent in the people, and all free governments are founded on their authority and instituted for their peace, safety, happiness and the protection of property. For the advancement of these ends, they have at all times an inalienable and indefeasible right to alter, reform or abolish their government in such manner as they may deem proper."
The other three go a bit farther, and include the statement "The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.".
See, once upon a time in the USA, people understood what the proper role of government is and where the authority of the government comes from. It comes from the people, in the form of delegated rights. You do not have the right to use force against me arbitrarily, so you cannot delegate this "right" to someone else (i.e. the government) to do it for you.
Furthermore, the US Declaration of Independence clearly states "...That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
Maybe the western world supports you nearly universally, but the founding documents of the United States and several of its states clearly do not. The government is "of the people, by the people, for the people", or at least should be. And if it isn't, it is the "Right of the People to alter or to abolish it."
Going straight up gets you past the thickest part of the atmosphere the fastest. You want to get out of the lower atmosphere as quickly as possible to avoid having to plow through it with your engines blazing and eating fuel. So all rockets launched go basically straight up for a bit, then bank east to build up orbital velocity. It's not as direct as all that--you don't go straight up and then turn 90 degrees and go east, obviously. But that's the basics of it.
If you watch the shuttle launch, it performs a roll and heads out east over the Atlantic a few seconds into the flight, but the angle off vertical is fairly small until it gets through the dense part of the atmosphere, then it flattens out for the run to orbit.
SpaceShip One launched from the underbelly of White Knight at an altitude that was high enough so that it's comparatively tiny rocket engine would have enough power to get the craft to the edge of space. This works great for sub-orbital flights, but I guess we'll have to wait and see how well it scales up for orbital flight.
Interesting factoid that may only interest me and has little relevance to this topic: One of the shuttle's abort modes during takeoff takes the shuttle out over the Atlantic and lands it in Europe or Africa without reaching orbit. It's never been used, but with the velocity the shuttle achieves during takeoff, total flight time Florida to, say, Spain or Morocco would be about 20 minutes.
Remember when we were going to have sub-orbital commercial flights like that by now? Man, the future isn't as cool as the past would have me believe it should be.
vi?
Unfortunately "Corporate Policy" is the root of most of the evils in IT Support. If Corporate Policy says you need to have "on access" scan running, you damn well better get your manager to put in writing that he approved this change and he'll take full responsibility for any viruses that you bring into the environment before I'll disable it. It's not that I don't understand why it's slowing you down. It's that if I have to choose between you doing your job a little faster or me getting bitch-slapped when someone finds out I violated the sacred policy to help you out, you can probably guess which one I'm choosing.
There's plenty of rules-loving Nazis in IT who truly love enforcing policies. But there's also plenty of us who do it just because we hate the alternative more. Unless you're an executive I'm not getting myself in trouble by bending rules for you. I'm happy to explain to someone with the power to actually do something about "the policy" why you'd be more productive if we made this change for you, and what the risks associated with that change are, but I'm sure as shit not going to just change it for you on the sly.
I think you need to think more critically about what you believe. "Just because" isn't an answer. It's just an assertion based on nothing more than your gut telling you something isn't right. Think with your head, give me a rational reason why art is cheapened by money. "It's supposed to mean something" isn't an answer either. It can still mean something and still be motivated mostly by money.
If you're going to call me out for a lack of understanding of my "fellow human beings", at least act like a human being and give me a rational argument as to why I'm wrong. Animals act on instinct and gut reactions--humans are supposed to be able to trancend that.
When it comes to art and music, then the money shouldn't be everything.
Why not? I guess this is the part I don't understand. People do a lot of things for a lot of different reasons, and money is certainly one of the biggest reasons of all to do many things. What's so horrible about someone creating art strictly because it makes them money?
But there's no reason for Gene Simmons to make any more money than he already has.
Well, it's not up to you or anybody else to decide when Gene Simmons "has enough money", thankfully. I rather enjoy the freedoms of capitalism that way. But honestly, why is it that if you say your main reason for doing something is "making money", that somehow cheapens it? If Gene makes music strictly because it makes him rich, and now he doesn't want to make any more music because he feels he can't make money off it anymore, why is that bad? Regardless of what your opinion is about Gene's music, I don't see why money as a motivation is so repugnant to some people, especially people in creative fields. Sure, it's not the easiest way to make lots of cash for most people. But it worked for Gene, and I don't see why that's a bad thing.
2 boxed sets of unreleased music - at best second rate crap that was not good enough to put out the first time - coming. All to just make money as he admitted in the first sentence was his main motivation since making music for it's own sake or attracting new fans isn't enough by itself.
Why should it be? Would you still do *your* job if nobody paid you to do it, just for the love of doing it? I sure wouldn't. If nobody paid me to do what I do, it wouldn't get done.
I don't get why artists are held to a different standard? Why do they have to just do it for the love of doing it then give it away? Why shouldn't they get paid too?
Yeah, fine, they shouldn't be able to live forever on the proceeds of one popular song they produced. But fuck me if I can see why they're supposed to just give shit away.
No, he probably means "people who refuse to acknowledge that human languages are ever-evolving and think grammar should be prescriptive rather than descriptive."
Your analogy is flawed because you are trying to compare something with an obvious physical reality (the Earth) with something that exists only in the minds of humans (language). Enough people saying the Earth is flat won't make it so, but enough people saying "this begs the question" and meaning "this begs for the question to be asked" *will* change what the phrase means. People like you (and me--I cringe at this too) can fight against it, and perhaps even sway common usage back to the "correct" meaning, but that doesn't change the fact that, yes, if enough people use it "incorrectly", the incorrect usage will eventually become correct. It has happened plenty of times in the past, and will continue to happen, because languages change as people change. You can point to your grammar book and rail against the incorrect usage, but it wont make you any more right or wrong.
The only reason language has rules of grammar is because people agreed on those rules in order for communication to be as clear as possible. But the rules change as meanings and usage change. It's arguably more clear to people today that "begging the question" means "raises the question" rather than "assumes the question is true".
I admire your attempts at retaining the original meaning of "begs the question", but don't misunderstand how language works, and don't commit another logical fallacy (appeal to authority) in order to defend it. There *is* no authority on language other than the users of that language. And if they say "begs the question" means "raises the question", then they're right.
They get to decide because it's their party. Nothing is stopping Colbert from running as an Independent in the national election. He just can't be a part of the Democratic primary. The Democrats don't even need to hold primaries anyway if they don't want to, or they can completely ignore the results of the primaries and just say "Hillary is our candidate" if they wish. That doesn't stop anybody else from running in the general election as an Independent, though.
The Democratic party gets to decide who runs as a Democrat. If you want Colbert on the ballot, write him in yourself or get him to run as an Independent.
Living on Mars is desirable for the same reason offsite backups are desirable.
The article is a lot of tinfoil hat nonsense built up around one kernel of truth: The Eisenhower administration *did* want the Soviets to launch the first satellite, or at least did not want the US to be first with what was clearly a military booster. von Braun was ordered to fill the payload stage of his Jupiter C missile tests with sand (or cement--I can't recall) in order to insure that they could *not* achieve orbit.
The reason for this, though, was not some tinfoil hat scheme to allow the government to intrude on education or somesuch, though. Simply put, Eisenhower wanted the Soviets to solve the issue of overflights in space. Today we think of orbital space as a pretty much open area for all, and although many countries have the capability to take down "enemy" satellites, nobody yet has to my knowledge. But back in those days, the idea of sending an orbital payload over the Soviet Union was a worrisome one, as it wasn't clear how the Soviets would respond to this violation of their "airspace". Would they see it as an aggressive act, especially if the payload was clearly a military one?
Eisenhower wanted to avoid the issue more than anything. He wanted for the first satellite to either be the Navy's Vanguard (although still a military program, Vanguard was portrayed as a scientific payload and was part of the United State's contribution to the International Geophysical Year) or for the Soviets to take the first step so he himself could set the precedent of not reacting to an "overflight" with hostility.
The whole "WE HAVE TO CATCH UP TO THE RUSSIANS!!" thing that came after the sputnik launch was one neither Eisenhower nor Khrushchev expected. Neither leader realized what they were touching off with this new space race. But the public was stunned by the Soviet satellite accomplishment, and reacted accordingly. So to did the "military-industrial complex" that Eisenhower warned us of later. But the Eisenhower administration themselves didn't engineer this so they could interfere with education or anything. They simply wanted for the first satellite to either be a clearly scientific payload, or have the Soviets settle the issue of orbital overflights for them. He simply did not foresee the reaction such a Soviet triumph would produce.
Gravity, for one. If you want to have people live there to man your production facilities that require a hard vacuum, having it on the moon is more betterer than having it in orbit.
Also, the bulk of the moon itself is useful for things like radio astronomy. A radio telescope on the lunar far side would be able to use the entire mass of the moon as a shield against the background noise of the Earth.
Other than that... It's just damn cool! Go outside some night and really take a look at the moon. It's the only thing in the sky that is so close to us that we actually see it as a great big disc and can see features on it with the naked eye. That's another WORLD you're looking at! And it's RIGHT THERE! Tell me you wouldn't give just about anything to walk on it.
I drank from rivers and streams constantly when I was young, and never got sick. Never from standing water, as I'm not *that* dumb, but I must have drank from the river outside our house hundreds of times growing up and never recall getting sick. Did I just get lucky then?
Hey, looks like somebody actually RTFA! Nice job!
/. actually read the article--they just started another "ZOMG COPYRIGHT!!!!" flamefest.
The article itself makes this very point. Of course, nobody else on
You switched because of low market share numbers? Why?
I just wish more people would learn what the phrase "margin of error" means.