Is it just me, or does anyone else see any similarities between the DMCA and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act? Both are very broad, very indecisive, and ultimately are as powerful or as weak as the body enforcing them.
For example, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act gave the power to the government to break up trusts 9a.k.a.) monopolies, but never specified any regulations for determining what is and is not a monopoly. The DMCA outlaws the use of circumvention devices, but never really nails down exactly what a circumvention device is.
Both laws give God-like power to the person enforcing the law, if they wish to do so. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act allowed President Theodore Roosevelt to break up many monopolies in the early 1900s. The DMCA gives the government the ability to throw you under the jail for infringing on some one's copyright in a minor way, even for "fair use".
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act has long been criticized for its failures by historians and political scientists. Perhaps someday soon they'll see the DMCA in that same light?
At least most illegal immigrants are doing jobs that few citizens will take
Slightly off-topic, but have to ever stopped to ask yourself, who had those jobs before the immigrants got them? To be fair that's a broad generalization, but it's true. If immigrants are working as garbage collectors, sewage workers, or other not-so-glamorous occupations, they certainly are taking a job away from a native born worker who would do it, because native born Americans have done those jobs before (and some continue to do so despite illegal immigrant competition).
This is an oversimplification, but I hope it serves to make some people think.
I am a redneck geek and damned proud of it! I prefer to catch my bait at home or raise it myself. If that's not feasible I buy it at a store, but most of those "live bait" vending machines just suck. I wanna see the red-wigglers or Luissianna Pinks before I choose the can I'm gonna buy.
This is all well and good in theory but ain't gonna fly in practice. Everyone who has posted in the last few months about caching websites to avoid the slashdot effect has illustrated a fundamental flaw. Slashdot.org does not have unlimited bandwidth.
Suppose for a moment that slashdot does cache all these web articles, and that the legality of this is never questioned. Slashdot's bandwidth usage would increase perhaps tenfold (arbitrary number pulled out of the air). In effect, Malda would be slashdoting slashdot.
Like you, I wish there was some simple feasible way to reduce slashdotings, but there isn't. Let this talk die; extending its life will do no good.
"Oh no, 3 horny women and only 2 condoms...Thank god I read slashdot"
It took me awhile to figure that one out. When I did, I was all alone camped on top of a mountain in north east Tennessee. No horny women around. Story of my life.
Re:Here's the Situation as I see it...
on
LWN.net Closing Down
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
When did Linux suddenly spawn this goal to eliminate Microsoft? I'm glad I wasn't around to see it. I always thought Linux was a kernel, and GNU/Linux distros were cool things geeks played with. Linux was successful before Redhat and before SuSE. It was successful and fun before Mandrake and before lwn.net. It will survive simply because it is open source. You can't kill it, so why does it need to compete with Microsoft?
You don't like MS, fine... I don't either. But please, please don't use Linux as a weapon against MS because you don't like MS. Use Linux because you like Linux.
The problem, if you read the article, isn't lack of money to buy bandwidth, but rather lack of money to pay writers. Just like salon.com, lwn.net has writers that want money. They haven't been paid for awhile, and so isntead of going WAY in debt, they're folding before the ship completely sinks.
What were the initial goals??? And here I tought the goal of all businesses was to make money.
Business (especially big business) forgot that in the 90s. There's an old mantra that says, "Make a little profit everyday." Many businesses in the tech sector spend huge ammounts of money when they start-up, then find themselves playing catch-up for the rest of their (short) lives. This is IMO what happened with the dot-coms.
Myself, I understand there is a need to sink money into developing technologies early in their lives so you can control how they mature and then control how you bring them to market so that the result is best for your company. With that said, if you're constantly borrowing money to make payroll while waiting on that next big break to come along, you're never going to make it.
Disclaimer:I an not a fortune 500 comapny's CEO, an economics teacher, or (currently) a heavy investor in the market. Take everything Is ay with a grain of salt.
...without a front-page type or two? Xenon machines, FotR... I understand typos happen everywhere, but when you're putting out a product like slashdot.org, even asking people for money for ad-free browsing, you would think you could expect some basic editing of the stories. Is it that much to ask to have some one read over the story once or twice before it's posted?
Out of 10 or 12 stories a day, there are always one or two with bad grammar and/or spelling. This definately takes away from any sense of professionalism slashdot.org presents on itself. Consider this editors, everyday this website is your best resume`. You wouldn't submit a resume` that has grammatical errors on it, would you?
Most of the security updates you see floating around are not applicable to slackware anyhow. The last time I checked the Changelog, Pat had posted new builds for apache and OpenSSH. Neither one seemed particularly devestating to Slackware. Take a look at it for yourself here.
Of particular note is the OpenSSH vulnerability, which had many people worried for very good reasons; however, since Pat never built OpenSHH with the questionable pieces of code, Slackware systems were exempt from this problem. (NOTE: Generally whenever this happens Pat upgrades the packages anyway to keep up to date and eliminate any holes that might later be found in those older builds.)
easiness (I can install new packages or upgrade already installed ones in a snap)
In my (albeit limited) experience with Debian, it is only marginally faster, because it automates the downlaod of binaries. While apt-get is wonderful for upgrading an entire system to say... Gnome 2.0 with relatively few headaches, it looses that edge when you're only upgrading a few carefully selected pacakges for security reasons.
If you're stuck using RedHat, Mandrake, Slackware, etc., why don't you consider giving Debian a try? A full install is still unnecessary, because you can easily select exactly what you want, and change that selection at a whim.
I gave Debian a try about a year ago and used it for a few weeks. Apt-get is nice I suppose, for people who want to live on the bleeding edge, or routinely change large parts of their OS that require dependencies. I'd probably rank it as my 3rd favorite linux distro (behind Gentoo and Slackware), but if those two were to drop off the face of the world tommorrow, I'd probably switch to FreeBSD for my workstation and OpenBSD for my home servers.
Browsers look horrible until you install xfstt and decent fonts
I disagree. Two years ago when I was running Slackware 7.1 I would not have argued with you, but ever since 8.0 (and now 8.1), my fonts look better than the same fonts on a Windows box. I'm using the Gnome 1.4 desktop and a simple full, stock install. Webpages are rendered perfectly almost 100% of the time with Galeon (the other times are those 'IE-only' sites). StarOffice (ok, it's not a 100% stock box anymore) is just as pretty, having no trouble creating or reading TrueType fonts.
Traditionally Slackware isn't a heavily graphical OS, but over the last two years their desktops (both Gnome and KDE, and most recently xfce) and windows managers (FVWM, IceWM, Blackbox) have been both beautiful and responsive.
If you're stuck using RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, etc., why don't you consider giving Slackware a try? A full install is still just over 2 Gigs. I'm sure you can find somewhere on your harddrive for that.
Don't believe me? Come get in a race car with me sometime and find out. True, I don't run NASCAR, but auto racing is allot more strenuous than most computer programmers think.
And while we're at it, stop the stereotypical comments. Most Southerners enjoy NASCAR; that does not make them stupid. The fact that I enjoy NASCAR doesn't mean that virtual desktops are confusing to me no more than raising hogs and chewing tobacco makes it more difficult on me to grep a source tree.
But it is not what creates a product or a solution that businesses have to deploy.
You missed what the OP was saying. The GPL is a liscense that is very responsible for the creation (or at least the inspiration for the creation) of much software that Caldera is now based upon. The linux kernel itself started as a hobby, but who believes it would be where it is today without the GPL?
The GPL made programmers able to freely distribute their code without fear of some corporation walking in, stealing their code, masking it as their own, and propogating it. The GPL is at least partially responsible for the creation of much OSS and is something that businesses that use GPL software have to deploy, no matter what Ransom Love says or thinks.
I see allot of comment here on slashdot about how linux users don't understand big business. I would say this is false. True, we are not CEO's, but many of us have worked for big business before and we have seen first hand the inadequecies of a "top-down" business model. OSS is a "down-top" software development model in which the community makes what the community wants. There are no bosses ins OSS, no supervisors, only hackers who've attained the respect of the community for their work.
Enter into this picture Caldera. They lie to us and say "we're a linux company", then turn around and write completely proprietary software. Example, Caldera Volution Messaging Server. It is basically MySql, LDAP, Horde, Imp, and Cyrus (I think it's Cyrus) with a proprietary GUI interface. They say this will only run on Caldera OpenServer (and indeed their little GUI only will) and have personally lied saying their software was completely proprietary. Really, do you trust them?
Damn you! You took my question! I'm mod you up if I could.
I agree with you. Recently Caldera released Volution Messaging Server (please correct me if my spelling is wrong, too damn lazy to do a google search right now). Coworkers of mine attended a free training seminar for the software in hopes it would be a drop-in replacement for MS Exchange, supporting shared contacts being a primary goal. After discussing this in the training course we were assured that Volution supported shared contacts "out of the box".
We were told this Voltion Messaging Server would only run on Caldera OpenLinux Server, so we installed it. After hours on the phone with Caldera support, they explained to us why Volution Messaging Server did not/could not support shared contacts.
Also, after speaking with engineers on this project, we discovered that Volution Messaging Server is basically written from GPL software that will run on any Linux Distro; Caldera had simply written a GUI front-end for all these assembled pieces that would only run on OpenLinux.
Now, I understand that Caldera is in dire straights and needs to make money. Every linux company (indeed most any software company) is in that position right now, however they are not outright lying to their customers, nor are they seeking profit to the point that it alienates their customers.
In my discussions with SuSE, they have explained to me this per-seat liscensing requirement for United Linux is all your doing, Ransom Love. How do you respond to that, and wouldn't it make more sense to ressurect SCO with the proprietary extensions you've given to Caldera OpenLinux, then sell it as a server with Caldera OpenLinux workstation as its client OS?
I simply do not see the logic behind your decisions, nor the truth behind the words Caldera keeps speaking.
As always/. readers, YMMV, but in this case I don't think it will.
Since I'm not on my Windows machine right now, I can't quote the liscense directly, but it is one of the most open liscenses out there. IIRC, it's liscense gives you complete control to edit, modify, compile, modularize, give away, and/or SELL PuTTY. It's not GPL, nor LGPL, but rather a very BSDish liscense. It was the first openly liscensed application I ever saw for a Windows machine.
That ain't funny! One time, I installed AOL's aim program for linux (back before I knew there was gaim) and gave it a try. Unfortunately it's just a simple tar.gz so I untarred it in my home directory. There was no compilation. It installed everything under/home/alan/usr/local. I decided it sucked (and it does) so I was going to remove it.
Well.... I for one have no idea who this Ted Nugent fella is, but I am what you might call a gun-tottin', coon-hutin' redneck. Doesn't mean I don't know my way around a computer though.
Gotta hand it to RedHat, they may have finally found a way to make money. In a world where most every commercial distro is loosing money (or barely floating along) by playing ball the old way, RedHat has turned to a new game it would seem. Here we basically have far and away the largest commercial linux distro. They have appeared to many to be the hero of the commercial linux world. Now they are showing they're not in this business to be anyone's hero (unlike Loki). They are in it to make money.
It reminds me of how MS came along in the very early days with dirt cheap prices and was basically the savior of the microcomputer world. before then nothing existed beyond Unix. Unix was EXPENSIVE! DOS was comparatively cheap. Microsoft seemed like everyone's buddy back then, before they started to charge exorbitant fees and put an iron-tight contract in their software in the form of a EULA.
Since RedHat is in this world to turn a profit (and make no mistake about it, offering your products for free isn't very profitable), they are looking at an alternative way to produce. Will they be the next restrictive MS, or is this simply a neccessary "evil"?
the apallo astronauts took risks, the mercury astronauts took risks, the wright bros took risks, we've got to take a risk -which means we have to be able to deal if something goes wrong.
I agree whole-heartedly that we need to be able to take these such risks, but really, what boon would we receive from a small, self-contained dome on Mars that needs resupply every so often from Earth? What could possibly justify the risks?
Assuming some one answers that question satisfactorily (sp?), we'll have to figure out some way to do this enormous feet. History is filled with instances where grit determination, hard work, and a vision achieved great, seemingly miraculous things (Great Pyramids, anyone?). However, this will require much more than grit determination, hard work, and vision. It will require technology that simply does not exist in this day and age. There is no quick way to relay information from Mars to Earth, much less water, food, and oxygen.
but this will probably turn out like that manned space station we were going to be using in 1980. Plans for it were drawn in what, '64? The logistics of this are unreasonable and currently impracticle. Self-sufficient environments on other planets will remain the realm of science fiction for years to come. The largest problem to overcome IMO is distance. The distance between Mars and Earth is phenominal. Like the English who first came to America, this would be almost doomed to failure. There will be many Roanokes before one Jamestown.
Slashdot Mirror
In furhter [sic] cases against the DMCA, this ruling can be used to fight for fair use! Providing the appeals hold up of course...
RTFA (Read the Fsckin' Article!
The judge said he would try to rule quickly, but lawyers on both sides could not estimate when a decision might arrive.
No ruling has been reached yet. The judge doesn't even really seem to be leaning one way or the other.
Is it just me, or does anyone else see any similarities between the DMCA and the Sherman Anti-Trust Act? Both are very broad, very indecisive, and ultimately are as powerful or as weak as the body enforcing them.
For example, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act gave the power to the government to break up trusts 9a.k.a.) monopolies, but never specified any regulations for determining what is and is not a monopoly. The DMCA outlaws the use of circumvention devices, but never really nails down exactly what a circumvention device is.
Both laws give God-like power to the person enforcing the law, if they wish to do so. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act allowed President Theodore Roosevelt to break up many monopolies in the early 1900s. The DMCA gives the government the ability to throw you under the jail for infringing on some one's copyright in a minor way, even for "fair use".
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act has long been criticized for its failures by historians and political scientists. Perhaps someday soon they'll see the DMCA in that same light?
At least most illegal immigrants are doing jobs that few citizens will take
Slightly off-topic, but have to ever stopped to ask yourself, who had those jobs before the immigrants got them? To be fair that's a broad generalization, but it's true. If immigrants are working as garbage collectors, sewage workers, or other not-so-glamorous occupations, they certainly are taking a job away from a native born worker who would do it, because native born Americans have done those jobs before (and some continue to do so despite illegal immigrant competition).
This is an oversimplification, but I hope it serves to make some people think.
I am a redneck geek and damned proud of it! I prefer to catch my bait at home or raise it myself. If that's not feasible I buy it at a store, but most of those "live bait" vending machines just suck. I wanna see the red-wigglers or Luissianna Pinks before I choose the can I'm gonna buy.
This is all well and good in theory but ain't gonna fly in practice. Everyone who has posted in the last few months about caching websites to avoid the slashdot effect has illustrated a fundamental flaw. Slashdot.org does not have unlimited bandwidth.
Suppose for a moment that slashdot does cache all these web articles, and that the legality of this is never questioned. Slashdot's bandwidth usage would increase perhaps tenfold (arbitrary number pulled out of the air). In effect, Malda would be slashdoting slashdot.
Like you, I wish there was some simple feasible way to reduce slashdotings, but there isn't. Let this talk die; extending its life will do no good.
"Oh no, 3 horny women and only 2 condoms...Thank god I read slashdot"
It took me awhile to figure that one out. When I did, I was all alone camped on top of a mountain in north east Tennessee. No horny women around. Story of my life.
When did Linux suddenly spawn this goal to eliminate Microsoft? I'm glad I wasn't around to see it. I always thought Linux was a kernel, and GNU/Linux distros were cool things geeks played with. Linux was successful before Redhat and before SuSE. It was successful and fun before Mandrake and before lwn.net. It will survive simply because it is open source. You can't kill it, so why does it need to compete with Microsoft?
You don't like MS, fine... I don't either. But please, please don't use Linux as a weapon against MS because you don't like MS. Use Linux because you like Linux.
The problem, if you read the article, isn't lack of money to buy bandwidth, but rather lack of money to pay writers. Just like salon.com, lwn.net has writers that want money. They haven't been paid for awhile, and so isntead of going WAY in debt, they're folding before the ship completely sinks.
What were the initial goals??? And here I tought the goal of all businesses was to make money.
Business (especially big business) forgot that in the 90s. There's an old mantra that says, "Make a little profit everyday." Many businesses in the tech sector spend huge ammounts of money when they start-up, then find themselves playing catch-up for the rest of their (short) lives. This is IMO what happened with the dot-coms.
Myself, I understand there is a need to sink money into developing technologies early in their lives so you can control how they mature and then control how you bring them to market so that the result is best for your company. With that said, if you're constantly borrowing money to make payroll while waiting on that next big break to come along, you're never going to make it.
Disclaimer: I an not a fortune 500 comapny's CEO, an economics teacher, or (currently) a heavy investor in the market. Take everything Is ay with a grain of salt.
...without a front-page type or two? Xenon machines, FotR... I understand typos happen everywhere, but when you're putting out a product like slashdot.org, even asking people for money for ad-free browsing, you would think you could expect some basic editing of the stories. Is it that much to ask to have some one read over the story once or twice before it's posted?
Out of 10 or 12 stories a day, there are always one or two with bad grammar and/or spelling. This definately takes away from any sense of professionalism slashdot.org presents on itself. Consider this editors, everyday this website is your best resume`. You wouldn't submit a resume` that has grammatical errors on it, would you?
I would hardly consider the following an "administrative nightmare".
root@darkstar~$ upgradepkg somepackage-vesionnumber.tgz
Most of the security updates you see floating around are not applicable to slackware anyhow. The last time I checked the Changelog, Pat had posted new builds for apache and OpenSSH. Neither one seemed particularly devestating to Slackware. Take a look at it for yourself here.
Of particular note is the OpenSSH vulnerability, which had many people worried for very good reasons; however, since Pat never built OpenSHH with the questionable pieces of code, Slackware systems were exempt from this problem. (NOTE: Generally whenever this happens Pat upgrades the packages anyway to keep up to date and eliminate any holes that might later be found in those older builds.)
easiness (I can install new packages or upgrade already installed ones in a snap)
In my (albeit limited) experience with Debian, it is only marginally faster, because it automates the downlaod of binaries. While apt-get is wonderful for upgrading an entire system to say... Gnome 2.0 with relatively few headaches, it looses that edge when you're only upgrading a few carefully selected pacakges for security reasons.
If you're stuck using RedHat, Mandrake, Slackware, etc., why don't you consider giving Debian a try? A full install is still unnecessary, because you can easily select exactly what you want, and change that selection at a whim.
I gave Debian a try about a year ago and used it for a few weeks. Apt-get is nice I suppose, for people who want to live on the bleeding edge, or routinely change large parts of their OS that require dependencies. I'd probably rank it as my 3rd favorite linux distro (behind Gentoo and Slackware), but if those two were to drop off the face of the world tommorrow, I'd probably switch to FreeBSD for my workstation and OpenBSD for my home servers.
Not at all.
screenshot
Browsers look horrible until you install xfstt and decent fonts
I disagree. Two years ago when I was running Slackware 7.1 I would not have argued with you, but ever since 8.0 (and now 8.1), my fonts look better than the same fonts on a Windows box. I'm using the Gnome 1.4 desktop and a simple full, stock install. Webpages are rendered perfectly almost 100% of the time with Galeon (the other times are those 'IE-only' sites). StarOffice (ok, it's not a 100% stock box anymore) is just as pretty, having no trouble creating or reading TrueType fonts.
Traditionally Slackware isn't a heavily graphical OS, but over the last two years their desktops (both Gnome and KDE, and most recently xfce) and windows managers (FVWM, IceWM, Blackbox) have been both beautiful and responsive.
If you're stuck using RedHat, Mandrake, Debian, etc., why don't you consider giving Slackware a try? A full install is still just over 2 Gigs. I'm sure you can find somewhere on your harddrive for that.
IIRC, Speilberg directed E5, "The Empire Strikes Back".
No, george doesn't owe it to him, but I certainly think Speilberg would do a much better job than Lucas at this. Just my $0.02.
LOL! Some one mod this parent up!
Don't believe me? Come get in a race car with me sometime and find out. True, I don't run NASCAR, but auto racing is allot more strenuous than most computer programmers think.
And while we're at it, stop the stereotypical comments. Most Southerners enjoy NASCAR; that does not make them stupid. The fact that I enjoy NASCAR doesn't mean that virtual desktops are confusing to me no more than raising hogs and chewing tobacco makes it more difficult on me to grep a source tree.
You missed what the OP was saying. The GPL is a liscense that is very responsible for the creation (or at least the inspiration for the creation) of much software that Caldera is now based upon. The linux kernel itself started as a hobby, but who believes it would be where it is today without the GPL?
The GPL made programmers able to freely distribute their code without fear of some corporation walking in, stealing their code, masking it as their own, and propogating it. The GPL is at least partially responsible for the creation of much OSS and is something that businesses that use GPL software have to deploy, no matter what Ransom Love says or thinks.
I see allot of comment here on slashdot about how linux users don't understand big business. I would say this is false. True, we are not CEO's, but many of us have worked for big business before and we have seen first hand the inadequecies of a "top-down" business model. OSS is a "down-top" software development model in which the community makes what the community wants. There are no bosses ins OSS, no supervisors, only hackers who've attained the respect of the community for their work.
Enter into this picture Caldera. They lie to us and say "we're a linux company", then turn around and write completely proprietary software. Example, Caldera Volution Messaging Server. It is basically MySql, LDAP, Horde, Imp, and Cyrus (I think it's Cyrus) with a proprietary GUI interface. They say this will only run on Caldera OpenServer (and indeed their little GUI only will) and have personally lied saying their software was completely proprietary. Really, do you trust them?
Sounds an awfull lot like "One Microsoft Way".
One window manager, one mdia player, one web browser, one video app....
Damn you! You took my question! I'm mod you up if I could.
/. readers, YMMV, but in this case I don't think it will.
I agree with you. Recently Caldera released Volution Messaging Server (please correct me if my spelling is wrong, too damn lazy to do a google search right now). Coworkers of mine attended a free training seminar for the software in hopes it would be a drop-in replacement for MS Exchange, supporting shared contacts being a primary goal. After discussing this in the training course we were assured that Volution supported shared contacts "out of the box".
We were told this Voltion Messaging Server would only run on Caldera OpenLinux Server, so we installed it. After hours on the phone with Caldera support, they explained to us why Volution Messaging Server did not/could not support shared contacts.
Also, after speaking with engineers on this project, we discovered that Volution Messaging Server is basically written from GPL software that will run on any Linux Distro; Caldera had simply written a GUI front-end for all these assembled pieces that would only run on OpenLinux.
Now, I understand that Caldera is in dire straights and needs to make money. Every linux company (indeed most any software company) is in that position right now, however they are not outright lying to their customers, nor are they seeking profit to the point that it alienates their customers.
In my discussions with SuSE, they have explained to me this per-seat liscensing requirement for United Linux is all your doing, Ransom Love. How do you respond to that, and wouldn't it make more sense to ressurect SCO with the proprietary extensions you've given to Caldera OpenLinux, then sell it as a server with Caldera OpenLinux workstation as its client OS?
I simply do not see the logic behind your decisions, nor the truth behind the words Caldera keeps speaking.
As always
Since I'm not on my Windows machine right now, I can't quote the liscense directly, but it is one of the most open liscenses out there. IIRC, it's liscense gives you complete control to edit, modify, compile, modularize, give away, and/or SELL PuTTY. It's not GPL, nor LGPL, but rather a very BSDish liscense. It was the first openly liscensed application I ever saw for a Windows machine.
That ain't funny! One time, I installed AOL's aim program for linux (back before I knew there was gaim) and gave it a try. Unfortunately it's just a simple tar.gz so I untarred it in my home directory. There was no compilation. It installed everything under /home/alan/usr/local. I decided it sucked (and it does) so I was going to remove it.
/usr
alan@darkstar~$su
root@darkstar:/home/alan#rm -fr
DOH!
Well.... I for one have no idea who this Ted Nugent fella is, but I am what you might call a gun-tottin', coon-hutin' redneck. Doesn't mean I don't know my way around a computer though.
Gotta hand it to RedHat, they may have finally found a way to make money. In a world where most every commercial distro is loosing money (or barely floating along) by playing ball the old way, RedHat has turned to a new game it would seem. Here we basically have far and away the largest commercial linux distro. They have appeared to many to be the hero of the commercial linux world. Now they are showing they're not in this business to be anyone's hero (unlike Loki). They are in it to make money.
It reminds me of how MS came along in the very early days with dirt cheap prices and was basically the savior of the microcomputer world. before then nothing existed beyond Unix. Unix was EXPENSIVE! DOS was comparatively cheap. Microsoft seemed like everyone's buddy back then, before they started to charge exorbitant fees and put an iron-tight contract in their software in the form of a EULA.
Since RedHat is in this world to turn a profit (and make no mistake about it, offering your products for free isn't very profitable), they are looking at an alternative way to produce. Will they be the next restrictive MS, or is this simply a neccessary "evil"?
I agree whole-heartedly that we need to be able to take these such risks, but really, what boon would we receive from a small, self-contained dome on Mars that needs resupply every so often from Earth? What could possibly justify the risks?
Assuming some one answers that question satisfactorily (sp?), we'll have to figure out some way to do this enormous feet. History is filled with instances where grit determination, hard work, and a vision achieved great, seemingly miraculous things (Great Pyramids, anyone?). However, this will require much more than grit determination, hard work, and vision. It will require technology that simply does not exist in this day and age. There is no quick way to relay information from Mars to Earth, much less water, food, and oxygen.
but this will probably turn out like that manned space station we were going to be using in 1980. Plans for it were drawn in what, '64? The logistics of this are unreasonable and currently impracticle. Self-sufficient environments on other planets will remain the realm of science fiction for years to come. The largest problem to overcome IMO is distance. The distance between Mars and Earth is phenominal. Like the English who first came to America, this would be almost doomed to failure. There will be many Roanokes before one Jamestown.
Just my $0.02.
P.S. First post?