While what you say is technicaly correct, the amount of money does give a very large clue as to the merits of the current expenditures.
That is, because we already spent hundreds of millions on voyager, the four million we are currently spending gives us a disproportionate value, in terms of scientific data.
To put in other words -- once NASA lets voyager go it cannot expect to be able to pay 4 million to examine the outside of our solar system. They will have to once again pay the hundreds of millions (or probably billions) to get another craft in space.
There is no way NASA can built ANY interplanatry craft for less than what would cost to keep voyager operational.
I mean we are talking only about $40 million dollars here (until 2015). Designing any kind of new craft will be at least 100 mil, probably half a bil.
And if you do build the interplanetary craft you would not really save the $40 million because you would still have to pay $4 million a year to monitor the new craft and collect dta as it flies trough space.
This is like buying a new mercedes for $80 000 dollars and then throwing it away because you cannot afford the $200/year insurance payment.
You have a good point re the carbon cycle. What we really need is to engineer or an airborne bacteria that eats carbon from the atmosphere then dies on the ground.
Reagan's "hardcore stance" was created solely to give hard-ons to his uninformed halfwit voters in the states. Reagan did not bother the "commies" one bit.
And your cute little fantasy about the CIA knocking off leaders is ridiculous -- they were just old.
Anyways if you have to think of grand theories about how the Soviet union fell you might be better served to actually learn something about the soviet union. For example, SDI could not magically remotely bankrupt the soviets -- they must do something in response to SDI which bankrupted them. So what was it? What did they do in response? If you actually do the research you will find that they did more or less nothing in response to SDI... i.e. they had correctly identified it as a lie to begin with.
Comunism ended because most people that cared about communism at all got old and died. Thats pretty much it.
"It's against the people who destroyed the twin towers and all those who sympathize with them and their ideologies."
The people that destroyed the twin towers are dead. The current war in Iraq has exactly nothing to do with them. As far as "sympathizers", we may want to wait until DARPA discovers a device for reading minds before we start figthing people based on their states of mind.
"Also, we fought and won a cold ideological war of a much starker, more manichaean nature against communism that lasted fifty years. And the commies had nucular weapons. If you're old enough to recall, the arguments among the allies were much the same ("cowboy" president, "reckless" policies, the British PM being a "lackey" or "poodle", etc), and they're as stupid now as they turned out to be then."
As somebody who lived in the Eastern block I can tell you that the idea that Reagan and his poodle (Thatcher was it?) somehow won the cold war is a hilarious fantasy. If you want to give credit to one person you will be much more accurate to credit Madonna.
Because during Vietnam there was the Soviet Union. People in the government were genuinely affraid of the Soviet Union and that forced them to get things done.
After the Soviet Union fell there is nothing to be affraid of anymore so everyone now treats government as a way of getting rich.
The only way we can help the troops in Iraq at this point has nothing to do with science but a lot to do with politics -- i.e. just force the politicians to send them home.
As far as DARPA helping the troops, the few DARPA research projects I have heard about do not sound very pleasant for the trrops. For example they are doing research into keeping people awake for several days that involves putting electrodes in their brains and administering shocks to specific brain areas. Well if I were in the military I would really hope this particular research project does not succeed.
As any good starcraft player will tell you you are much better opff upgrading your zealots on most maps. Carriers are only usefull in limited circumstances -- in games that have lasted a while and reached an impasse, or against an opponent that completely ignores anti-air capabilities.
But zealots usually win 10 games for every one won by carriers, so you are much better off spending on your zealots. So you have got a false analogy there.
Sorry, don't mean to be an asshole, but I just miss Starcraft so much:).
When exactly did the above poster say he hated God? He merely said he did not like certain religous people. Now you may think that not liking certain religous people is a bad thing... but then again you probably don't because I just had a look at your blog and found about 5 screen lengths of Catholic bashing. Just in time for Lent, I see.
"If a noun owns something or is closely associated with it, it's possessive. Use an apostrophe."
This is not entirely correct because "its" is in fact possessive and no appostrophe is to be used.
The simple rules is this -- if you are trying to say "it is" then you can use "it's" with an apostrophe. Otherwise DO NOT use an apostrophe on "its".
Now I am really pissed, but to think of it, I deserve everything that I get because I got into an internet argument with an idiot. And as it often happens in these situations, apparently everything that I am saying has been proven wrong by various random blanket assertions (with no support).
And now I have two choices (i) shut up and thus indirectly admit that every thing I say is wrong, or (b) spend countless hours reasearching the white house press handling procedures on the internet in order to come back with a well reasoned argument. And what is the reward for these countless hours -- winning an argument with an idiot.
So Instead I will just repeat things that I already know. I already know that at least one AP journalist says that they saw gannon wearing apress pass that said gannon. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/02/10/ganno n_affair/
I also know that given obvious consideration to the way the real world operates it cannot possibly be true that every person that wishes to ask Bush a question gets to ask him a question. According to you, anybody from any kind of news website can get into the white house and once there, Bush will answer everyone's question. I REALLY doubt this is true. Because if it were true considering the sheer number of news organizations in the states, Bush would never stop answering questions. In fact from what I have seen from the White house press coverage bush answers only a few questions. So naturally there is some filtering going on, and Jeff Gannon passed that filter even though he has minimal journalistic credentials.
I knew you would accuse me of gay bashing. I only pointed this out to show Jeff's obvious lack of journalistic experience. Also, prostitution gay or straight is illegal and, in my opinion, highly immoral. I also mentioned this because it is a nice irony -- the guy used to literally suck cock for a living and now he does it figuratively.
As far as you correcting my capitalization on an Internet post, the only thing I can say is I hope it makes you feel good about yourself.
Concerning Helen Thomas -- I guess thats what they call good journalist nowadays, abusive. Well you may call her abusive but I call her a journalist that knows how to do her job. Journalists are not there to make their interviewee's feel good. Of course I can understand how a former gay whore can be confused about that last point.
Right, and that's why he was identified in C-Span under a fake name, because he "gave his real name". Publishing under a pseudonim means exactly that -- publishing under a pseudonim, not providing a pseudonim instead of your real name in real life situations.
And not any reporter can get into the whitehouse. There are hundreds of good reporters that do not get into the white house no matter how much they ask. And those are reporters who can show better journalistic experience than being gay whores (see http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/02/man-called -jeff.html)
And from the reporters that are allowed at the white house there are many experienced reporters that are not allowed to ask the president questions (including helen thomas who has been reporting at the white house for 40 years and was recently sent to the back row and ignored by bush).
Of course it has nothing to do with the republican party. Any idiot with a fake name can get into the White house and ask the president questions at news briefings.
Oh, believe me, the VCs will come out on top of this. Remember they are not invested in these blogging companies for the duration, only until a "liquidity event" occurs.
All they need to do is pubblicize the companies until an IPO or a buyout and then they can walk away. Eventually people will realize that blogging software is not that hard to write and that these super high priced companies have very little advantage over any competent developer in their basement. But by that time the VCs will have walked away with their money.
You forgot the part where we rebuild the thousands of factories required to build the mars vehicle on the moon. And ship over the thousands of needed workers to the moon.
I am sure that will all be very efficient.
Using the moon as a launching pad is a braindead idea, because anything that you "manufacture" on the moon you will have manufacture on earth and then ship it in parts and assemble it on the moon. Which means that you will still pay just as much for lifting every single ounce out of the earth, but you will put it all in yet another gravity well (the Moon's), which will result in additional cost to get out of.
That scheme will be a good idea when we can make miniaturized chemical and manufacturing factories that can construct a spaceship and its fuel out of moon sand, but we are SOOO far away from that point, it is not even worth planning a spacemission yet.
Which of course brings us to the whole central purpose of the Mars initiative -- to have some vague goal that is practicaly unreachable, as to ensure that the billions keep flowing into contractors' coffers, without them actually having to do much work at all.
It is a really bad idea to destroy the poptop brand. I for one always check out every game (i.e. play the demo) that comes out of poptop. That is mostly the case because I had so much fun playing Railroad tycoon 2. And I am the kind of person that actually buys games.
In fact, a good sign why the poptop brand is so good is that it is already being immitated. I am talking about Popcap software who make cheesy java games (among them insaniquarium which is quite adictive).
For me the only good thing about working late nights is not having a chance to see any prime time TV.
Some days I will have a day off or return early, and will torn on the TV around 8 pm and will be completely shocked at the awfullness of the shows. Or the fact that now commercials are actually inserted in the programming.
But when I watch at night i can always get a seinfeld, simpsons or that 70s show rerun. So I get go to sleep without witnessing the next stage of commercialization of popular culture -- tv shows that are mostly commercials but are still interrupted for regular commercial breaks.
Actually an imperfect shield is very dangerous because it makes people think they have a are protected and they tend to do stupid things.
There is one and only one proven way to prevent nuclear ICBM hits and that is mutually assured destruction. I know it does not sound nice but that is the only proven way. Remember missile defense systems are not new. The russians used build them long time ago, but soon they realized that they are a very unreliable shield and signed the ABM treaty and settled on mutually assured destruction.
The one good thing about an ICBM is that it can always be traced to its origin after it has been fired. So you cannot really fire them anonymously. That is why mutually asured destruction works.
Of course you do not want to always rely on MAD so eventually you will have to diffuse the situation, and you do that through politics. That seems to be very unpopular nowadays, because everyone seems to like a president that puffs up his chest and tells everyone off... but the fact is that neither Iran or North Korea are irrational, or able to exist independently from the rest of the world. Some smart politics could easily diffuse either threat.
North Korea's nuclear program could have been stopped with some smart negotiations for some wheat and rice (which Japan and south korea would gladly pay for). That of course is before Bush made the axis of evil speech which made negotiation impossible.
Iran can also be puruaded to stop its nuclear program. Of course the axis of evil speech did not help there either. But basicly if Iran can be sufficiently asured that they will not be attacked by other nuclear powers they will probably scub their program.
"Since we don't know the cause of the anomaly, we won't speculate on potential impacts to either beginning initial operations or conducting future tests," said Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency.
You notice that the spokesman for the missile defense agency is saying that they don't know the cause of the anomaly. Is he a liar? Or are the yahoo reporters misquoting him? Or are you just making stuff up?
it is always much much easier to throw a ballistic missile in the air than to intercept it. Ballistic missiles don't need any fancy electronics, they are essentially unguided.
and you dont have to triple strategic force... all you have to do is over load a particular sector.
really all you have to do is cram more junk in a multiple warhead missile. Still relatively cheap compared to the effort required to detect all the junk and determine which piece of junk is a nuke and which is merely junk.
Huh? so what exactly did the wire reporters get wrong? I am especially eager to know since they are quoting a statement from the Defense Department's Missile Defense Agency.
I guess now any barely coherent rant on how the so called "liberal media" don't know anything is bound to be marked "informative".
This is evidence of the Bush's administration new policy of testing and deplying at the same time. The idea is that when the government used to test before deployment, Boeing would actually have to create a working system in order to get the bulk of their money. But they would much prefer it if they start getting their money before their system even works.
There were several tests of the missile defense system some of them succesful some not, but there were certainly not enough tests to ensure that the system would be operational. Yet the DoD decided to go ahead with building the system before testing was complete.
Now we know there is some kind of problem but we can't make major design changes because the whole thing is already being build. Lets just hope it is a software glitch.
Now everyone knows that a system as complex as that cannot work on the first time, but that is why you do tersting before you actually start depoying. This way you can iron out the bugs before you spend several billion dollars on a bunch of hardware that might turn out to be useless.
Slashdot Mirror
While what you say is technicaly correct, the amount of money does give a very large clue as to the merits of the current expenditures.
That is, because we already spent hundreds of millions on voyager, the four million we are currently spending gives us a disproportionate value, in terms of scientific data.
To put in other words -- once NASA lets voyager go it cannot expect to be able to pay 4 million to examine the outside of our solar system. They will have to once again pay the hundreds of millions (or probably billions) to get another craft in space.
There is no way NASA can built ANY interplanatry craft for less than what would cost to keep voyager operational.
I mean we are talking only about $40 million dollars here (until 2015). Designing any kind of new craft will be at least 100 mil, probably half a bil.
And if you do build the interplanetary craft you would not really save the $40 million because you would still have to pay $4 million a year to monitor the new craft and collect dta as it flies trough space.
This is like buying a new mercedes for $80 000 dollars and then throwing it away because you cannot afford the $200/year insurance payment.
You have a good point re the carbon cycle. What we really need is to engineer or an airborne bacteria that eats carbon from the atmosphere then dies on the ground.
That will solve all our problems !!!
Reagan's "hardcore stance" was created solely to give hard-ons to his uninformed halfwit voters in the states. Reagan did not bother the "commies" one bit.
... i.e. they had correctly identified it as a lie to begin with.
And your cute little fantasy about the CIA knocking off leaders is ridiculous -- they were just old.
Anyways if you have to think of grand theories about how the Soviet union fell you might be better served to actually learn something about the soviet union. For example, SDI could not magically remotely bankrupt the soviets -- they must do something in response to SDI which bankrupted them. So what was it? What did they do in response? If you actually do the research you will find that they did more or less nothing in response to SDI
Comunism ended because most people that cared about communism at all got old and died. Thats pretty much it.
"It's against the people who destroyed the twin towers and all those who sympathize with them and their ideologies."
The people that destroyed the twin towers are dead. The current war in Iraq has exactly nothing to do with them. As far as "sympathizers", we may want to wait until DARPA discovers a device for reading minds before we start figthing people based on their states of mind.
"Also, we fought and won a cold ideological war of a much starker, more manichaean nature against communism that lasted fifty years. And the commies had nucular weapons. If you're old enough to recall, the arguments among the allies were much the same ("cowboy" president, "reckless" policies, the British PM being a "lackey" or "poodle", etc), and they're as stupid now as they turned out to be then."
As somebody who lived in the Eastern block I can tell you that the idea that Reagan and his poodle (Thatcher was it?) somehow won the cold war is a hilarious fantasy. If you want to give credit to one person you will be much more accurate to credit Madonna.
Because during Vietnam there was the Soviet Union. People in the government were genuinely affraid of the Soviet Union and that forced them to get things done.
After the Soviet Union fell there is nothing to be affraid of anymore so everyone now treats government as a way of getting rich.
The only way we can help the troops in Iraq at this point has nothing to do with science but a lot to do with politics -- i.e. just force the politicians to send them home. As far as DARPA helping the troops, the few DARPA research projects I have heard about do not sound very pleasant for the trrops. For example they are doing research into keeping people awake for several days that involves putting electrodes in their brains and administering shocks to specific brain areas. Well if I were in the military I would really hope this particular research project does not succeed.
As any good starcraft player will tell you you are much better opff upgrading your zealots on most maps. Carriers are only usefull in limited circumstances -- in games that have lasted a while and reached an impasse, or against an opponent that completely ignores anti-air capabilities.
:).
But zealots usually win 10 games for every one won by carriers, so you are much better off spending on your zealots. So you have got a false analogy there.
Sorry, don't mean to be an asshole, but I just miss Starcraft so much
When exactly did the above poster say he hated God? He merely said he did not like certain religous people. Now you may think that not liking certain religous people is a bad thing ... but then again you probably don't because I just had a look at your blog and found about 5 screen lengths of Catholic bashing. Just in time for Lent, I see.
I agree, I have noticed this as well. Nowadays, when I read a slashdot story I immediately imagine what the apple plugs would be.
"If a noun owns something or is closely associated with it, it's possessive. Use an apostrophe." This is not entirely correct because "its" is in fact possessive and no appostrophe is to be used. The simple rules is this -- if you are trying to say "it is" then you can use "it's" with an apostrophe. Otherwise DO NOT use an apostrophe on "its".
You invented dt + corsair?
What is your Starcraft name?
Now I am really pissed, but to think of it, I deserve everything that I get because I got into an internet argument with an idiot. And as it often happens in these situations, apparently everything that I am saying has been proven wrong by various random blanket assertions (with no support).
o n_affair/
And now I have two choices (i) shut up and thus indirectly admit that every thing I say is wrong, or (b) spend countless hours reasearching the white house press handling procedures on the internet in order to come back with a well reasoned argument. And what is the reward for these countless hours -- winning an argument with an idiot.
So Instead I will just repeat things that I already know. I already know that at least one AP journalist says that they saw gannon wearing apress pass that said gannon. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/02/10/gann
I also know that given obvious consideration to the way the real world operates it cannot possibly be true that every person that wishes to ask Bush a question gets to ask him a question. According to you, anybody from any kind of news website can get into the white house and once there, Bush will answer everyone's question. I REALLY doubt this is true. Because if it were true considering the sheer number of news organizations in the states, Bush would never stop answering questions. In fact from what I have seen from the White house press coverage bush answers only a few questions. So naturally there is some filtering going on, and Jeff Gannon passed that filter even though he has minimal journalistic credentials.
I knew you would accuse me of gay bashing. I only pointed this out to show Jeff's obvious lack of journalistic experience. Also, prostitution gay or straight is illegal and, in my opinion, highly immoral. I also mentioned this because it is a nice irony -- the guy used to literally suck cock for a living and now he does it figuratively.
As far as you correcting my capitalization on an Internet post, the only thing I can say is I hope it makes you feel good about yourself.
Concerning Helen Thomas -- I guess thats what they call good journalist nowadays, abusive. Well you may call her abusive but I call her a journalist that knows how to do her job. Journalists are not there to make their interviewee's feel good. Of course I can understand how a former gay whore can be confused about that last point.
Right, and that's why he was identified in C-Span under a fake name, because he "gave his real name". Publishing under a pseudonim means exactly that -- publishing under a pseudonim, not providing a pseudonim instead of your real name in real life situations.
d -jeff.html)
And not any reporter can get into the whitehouse. There are hundreds of good reporters that do not get into the white house no matter how much they ask. And those are reporters who can show better journalistic experience than being gay whores (see http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/02/man-calle
And from the reporters that are allowed at the white house there are many experienced reporters that are not allowed to ask the president questions (including helen thomas who has been reporting at the white house for 40 years and was recently sent to the back row and ignored by bush).
Of course it has nothing to do with the republican party. Any idiot with a fake name can get into the White house and ask the president questions at news briefings.
Oh, believe me, the VCs will come out on top of this. Remember they are not invested in these blogging companies for the duration, only until a "liquidity event" occurs.
All they need to do is pubblicize the companies until an IPO or a buyout and then they can walk away. Eventually people will realize that blogging software is not that hard to write and that these super high priced companies have very little advantage over any competent developer in their basement. But by that time the VCs will have walked away with their money.
You forgot the part where we rebuild the thousands of factories required to build the mars vehicle on the moon. And ship over the thousands of needed workers to the moon.
I am sure that will all be very efficient.
Using the moon as a launching pad is a braindead idea, because anything that you "manufacture" on the moon you will have manufacture on earth and then ship it in parts and assemble it on the moon. Which means that you will still pay just as much for lifting every single ounce out of the earth, but you will put it all in yet another gravity well (the Moon's), which will result in additional cost to get out of.
That scheme will be a good idea when we can make miniaturized chemical and manufacturing factories that can construct a spaceship and its fuel out of moon sand, but we are SOOO far away from that point, it is not even worth planning a spacemission yet.
Which of course brings us to the whole central purpose of the Mars initiative -- to have some vague goal that is practicaly unreachable, as to ensure that the billions keep flowing into contractors' coffers, without them actually having to do much work at all.
It is a really bad idea to destroy the poptop brand. I for one always check out every game (i.e. play the demo) that comes out of poptop. That is mostly the case because I had so much fun playing Railroad tycoon 2. And I am the kind of person that actually buys games.
In fact, a good sign why the poptop brand is so good is that it is already being immitated. I am talking about Popcap software who make cheesy java games (among them insaniquarium which is quite adictive).
For me the only good thing about working late nights is not having a chance to see any prime time TV.
Some days I will have a day off or return early, and will torn on the TV around 8 pm and will be completely shocked at the awfullness of the shows. Or the fact that now commercials are actually inserted in the programming.
But when I watch at night i can always get a seinfeld, simpsons or that 70s show rerun. So I get go to sleep without witnessing the next stage of commercialization of popular culture -- tv shows that are mostly commercials but are still interrupted for regular commercial breaks.
People do not like SUV's because they cause too much pollution and waste too much resources for the emount of useful work they do.
This plane will actually use less fuel and cause less pollution per passenger than the smaller planes.
As far as "spitting on the graves" why does everyone assume that the soldiers that died in ww2 are guaranteed to love Bush's imperialism?
Actually an imperfect shield is very dangerous because it makes people think they have a are protected and they tend to do stupid things.
... but the fact is that neither Iran or North Korea are irrational, or able to exist independently from the rest of the world. Some smart politics could easily diffuse either threat.
There is one and only one proven way to prevent nuclear ICBM hits and that is mutually assured destruction. I know it does not sound nice but that is the only proven way. Remember missile defense systems are not new. The russians used build them long time ago, but soon they realized that they are a very unreliable shield and signed the ABM treaty and settled on mutually assured destruction.
The one good thing about an ICBM is that it can always be traced to its origin after it has been fired. So you cannot really fire them anonymously. That is why mutually asured destruction works.
Of course you do not want to always rely on MAD so eventually you will have to diffuse the situation, and you do that through politics. That seems to be very unpopular nowadays, because everyone seems to like a president that puffs up his chest and tells everyone off
North Korea's nuclear program could have been stopped with some smart negotiations for some wheat and rice (which Japan and south korea would gladly pay for). That of course is before Bush made the axis of evil speech which made negotiation impossible.
Iran can also be puruaded to stop its nuclear program. Of course the axis of evil speech did not help there either. But basicly if Iran can be sufficiently asured that they will not be attacked by other nuclear powers they will probably scub their program.
Ok, I am quopting the yahoo story:
"Since we don't know the cause of the anomaly, we won't speculate on potential impacts to either beginning initial operations or conducting future tests," said Rick Lehner, a spokesman for the Missile Defense Agency.
You notice that the spokesman for the missile defense agency is saying that they don't know the cause of the anomaly. Is he a liar? Or are the yahoo reporters misquoting him? Or are you just making stuff up?
it is always much much easier to throw a ballistic missile in the air than to intercept it. Ballistic missiles don't need any fancy electronics, they are essentially unguided.
... all you have to do is over load a particular sector.
and you dont have to triple strategic force
really all you have to do is cram more junk in a multiple warhead missile. Still relatively cheap compared to the effort required to detect all the junk and determine which piece of junk is a nuke and which is merely junk.
Huh? so what exactly did the wire reporters get wrong? I am especially eager to know since they are quoting a statement from the Defense Department's Missile Defense Agency.
I guess now any barely coherent rant on how the so called "liberal media" don't know anything is bound to be marked "informative".
This is evidence of the Bush's administration new policy of testing and deplying at the same time. The idea is that when the government used to test before deployment, Boeing would actually have to create a working system in order to get the bulk of their money. But they would much prefer it if they start getting their money before their system even works.
There were several tests of the missile defense system some of them succesful some not, but there were certainly not enough tests to ensure that the system would be operational. Yet the DoD decided to go ahead with building the system before testing was complete.
Now we know there is some kind of problem but we can't make major design changes because the whole thing is already being build. Lets just hope it is a software glitch.
Now everyone knows that a system as complex as that cannot work on the first time, but that is why you do tersting before you actually start depoying. This way you can iron out the bugs before you spend several billion dollars on a bunch of hardware that might turn out to be useless.