Well, I suppose this should settle this issue for all of those people who call Free Software users "communists". If the communists are beating Free Software advocates, the Free Software advocates cannot very well be communists, can they?
Spoken like a man who's never spoken to a Communist.
Remember 'The Life of Brian'? Remember the many revolutionary factions who hated each other worse than they did the Romans? Those were a parody of the various groups of the British Left in the seventies and early eighties, who generally spent far more time berating each other for ideological impurity than they did actually doing anything about the capitalist imperialist state that was their official enemy. There's nothing a Communist hates more than a slightly different kind of Communist.
Then you get to enjoy a free trip in the back of a truck to somewhere with a net connection, and then you get pushed in front of a monitor and keyboard and told to log in and delete the photos by men with guns.
The joke's on them. rm on my box is a script that ftp's everything out of the country. Except it isn't, because my phone was running an nntp client that posted everything it took to alt.binaries.images.revolutionary.
Point being, they have no way of proving I actually did delete everything, and no way of knowing that the pictures haven't been automatically forwarded to a thousand locations scattered all over the net. If I'm a truly paranoid sousveillance activist, I'd have arranged matters so that I simply couldn't delete the images, even with a gun to my head.
Communism and socialism can only be imposed by force of arms, unlike capitalism.
Capitalism is also imposed by force of arms. In this case the force in question is the police force, which enforces capitalist notions like 'private property'.
Is there a reason you're mentioning SpaceShip One (which was never designed for orbital capability) while ignoring Falcon (which was)? Granted, Falcon didn't carry any people, but a claim that this capability "is far beyond them" is ridiculously false. Dragon should be ready to go by the time the shuttle retires.
SpaceShip One has in fact flown with an astronaut. Dragon has not. Falcon is a rocket, not a crewed vehicle, and only the satellite launcher has reached orbit - Falcon 9 is still in ground testing. SpaceShip One is the current high water mark of private manned spaceflight, such as it is. At that end of the post, discussing present options for a shuttle rescue, neither is an option, because neither right now are remotely capable of the task.
And they already did. You seem to be treating an ongoing program, started years ago, as if it's a hypothetical...
At this end of the post, discussing options for Shuttle replacements, Dragon might be a competitor. I don't see, however, that the government have simply said 'we will pay you to build us a spacecraft'. SpaceX was founded with dotcom wealth. They've received contracts for launches from NASA and the USAF - but neither commit to any great funding. According to Wikipedia,
On May 2, 2005, SpaceX announced that it had been awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract for Responsive Small Spacelift (RSS) launch services by the United States Air Force, which could allow the Air Force to purchase up to $100,000,000 worth of launches from the company.[4] On April 22, 2008, NASA announced that it had awarded an IDIQ Launch Services contract to SpaceX for Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launches. The contract will be worth between $20,000 and $1 billion, depending on the number of missions awarded. The contract covers launch services ordered by June 30, 2010, for launches through December 2012.
So NASA and the USAF have options to buy launches from SpaceX. Doesn't look like either have committed to any specifics, though. Orbit a Falcon 9 with a manned Dragon and bring it safely back to Earth and NASA may very well buy up all that billion dollars' worth and then some, but not before. Scaling up from one rocket to a cluster of rockets while maintaining man-rated reliability is a hard problem. Ask the engineers who built the N1.
Is it that hard to ask the russians or a private company to get your astronauts down?
To get them down, as in from a crippled Shuttle? Yes, it is.
A Shuttle crew is typically seven astronauts. Soyuz carries three. Launching with only a pilot, that's room for two rescued astronauts. To evacuate a Shuttle would need four Soyuz launches, in quick succession. And that's if and only if the Shuttle is in an orbit that the Russians can reach; Florida is a better launch site than Kazakhstan, receiving more of a boost from the Earth's rotation. And if the Russians can arrange for four rockets and four capsules to be ready to go before the Shuttle's air runs out. That's one hell of a tall order. Given a blank cheque, they might try to do it, but it would be such a rush job you'd likely end up with even more crippled spacecraft in orbit.
As for private enterprise? No chance. No private enterprise has ever launched a person into orbit. SpaceShip One was a major achievement for them, but didn't even reach Alan Shepard levels of spaceflight; a Gagarin is far beyond them.
This is why the last Hubble repair mission was a worry, and why a second orbiter was readied for launch if rescue were needed. If that Shuttle had taken Columbia-style damage on launch, it wouldn't have been safe to return to Earth, and it wouldn't have been able (from that orbit) to reach the space station either. The astronauts would have been be in deep trouble.
If you mean could the government write a cheque to a private firm to build them a spacecraft, yes, they could. I'm not convinced, however, that a private contractor would be much better than NASA - the same political demands would be placed upon them, and the chief advantage of a free market, competition leading to efficiency gains and low cost, is lost in a market consisting of one customer who makes one colossal order every few decades. NASA contracts out the actual building to private enterprise anyway, firms like Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Morton Thiokol.
And yes, they could buy Soyuz capsules as needed, and even engage the Russians to develop them an entire spaceflight system. That's what they did post-Columbia when the Shuttles were grounded. They'd probably get entirely acceptable results at a very low cost. US governments don't like to buy foreign hardware if they can avoid it, though - taxpayers don't like to see their money leaving the country. They prefer to distribute the pork to firms in crucial swing states.
Imperial units, which are used in England, aren't the same as English units, which are used in America. All pints in America are 95ml short, although given what's in them that's probably a mercy.
Of course, because FARC, Pablo Escobar, and the Taliban are all swell guys who are just trying to make an honest buck if only we weren't so hard on them.
As I recall, when the Taliban were in charge of Afghanistan they did a pretty good job of reducing opium production. Our own occupation forces are not so effective. Our invasion of the Middle East may not have secured us the oil supplies we were after, but the supply of heroin to Britain and America is now plentiful and inexpensive.
It's only delusional when 'normal' people do not believe what you do, or there is "indisputable evidence to the contrary" which clearly makes you wrong.
You are standing still, and I am travelling past you at 200,000 km/s. I fire a gun forwards and watch the bullet move away from me at 200,000 km/s. From your point of view, how fast is the bullet moving?
If your answer is 400,000 km/s, are you delusional? Because there is indisputable evidence to the contrary. That's faster than light. No, of course not: you're not deluded, only ignorant.
Remember that it is admitted that the Army has spent millions of dollars on ESP and "remote viewing" research.
Let a researcher cost $50,000pa. For 'millions of dollars', meaning at least two million, you're looking at 40 man-years. Or a team of 10 for four years. Or sponsorships for a couple of dozen grad students.
I think this sort of thing is to be encouraged. These are people who would otherwise be inventing new and interesting ways to kill. If instead they're sitting in darkened rooms staring at the backs of cards and saying 'Er... triangle?' then isn't that a considerable improvement?
when i play the aztecs, i can usually get my obelisk built before my starting worker even finishes his first few roads, nevermind that i haven't even discovered agriculture yet. of course, this is because the aztecs have mysticism as a starting tech, and assumes i'm not cranking out warriors to combat barbarian threats so...
Expanding your capital's culture isn't so important at the very beginning, unless there's a really juicy resource outside your initial nine squares. Better to produce an extra scout or warrior, to boost your chances of grabbing free techs from goody huts. Your palace produces culture and will get you the expansion soon enough anyway. Obelisks become important when you're founding cities and want to establish a continuous territory, to obstruct rivals' expansion.
If you start with Mysticism, make a dash for Buddhism. If you don't, then research Mysticism then go for Hinduism. Grab a religion early on and you often won't need to build obelisks.
What I want to know is how anyone managed to build a temple so early. Priesthood is several techs in.
That implies that some of todays theories are wrong!... This also implies that we are acting with a good deal of faith in scientific theories which are not yet proven.
Pretty much all of today's theories are wrong, in the sense that they are inaccurate and incomplete. General relativity fails us at the beginning of the Universe and at the centre of a black hole. Quantum mechanics gives us no description at all of gravitational effects. In cases where we need to use both theories together we end up with infinities and singularities and contradictions all over the place.
A new theory will dramatically change our description of these exotic systems. But in order to work, such a theory must agree with the current theories in domains where those theories are known to be valid. General relativity replaced Newtonian gravity, but it could only do so because it made nearly the same predictions in conditions where Newtonian gravity worked. Newton's theory is still used for interplanetary navigation, because the calculations are so much simpler and the error is small - but if you had to do a gravitational slingshot round a neutron star you'd go to Einstein.
I'd just add that no scientific theory is ever proved. You want proof, the mathematics department is next door. You want certainty, there's a church down the road. In science we accumulate evidence, and the more evidence agrees with our predictions, the more confident in the theory we become - but you can never test every possible case.
I'd like to see a game, for instance, which starts from trying to *stop* a war and goes from there.
Baldur's Gate. The Big Bad is trying to engineer a war by manipulating local power blocs; your mission is to prevent this. Among a few other things.
There's a mod for Baldur's Gate 2 which imports the game data from the original and lets you play it using the BG2 engine. Much better, since BG2 supports higher screen resolutions. You should be able to find the whole saga right through to Throne of Bhaal for pretty cheap now. See you in, oh... April.
As far as I'm concerned, if free will exists, then there are no psychological addictions, just people who refuse to take responsibility for bad choices. If, on the other hand, free will doesn't exist, then the question is pointless, since we're all just automata, and both our comments are predestined, and so are our opinions.
Fallacy of the excluded middle. What if free will doesn't always exist? What if there was a disease of the mind that impaired or eliminated freedom of choice? We could call that disease something like, oh, 'addiction', and then we might think about how it ought to be treated.
No one (or at least, very few) rents or buys used games all the time. The average customer likely buys used sometimes, and buys new sometimes. Now they're screwing him over, and he'll never buy from them again.
Actually, he'll just buy less often. The price of a new game is £X. The expected return when it is sold on the second-hand market is £Y. Then the cost to the customer is £(X - Y). If you eliminate the second-hand market, then you have effectively jacked up the price of your game by £Y. That will put off customers, who will therefore buy fewer games. Until you cut prices by, oh, about £Y, leaving you right back where you started.
The publishers are being paid for second-hand sales, because the existence of a second-hand market allows them to charge more for a new product than they could otherwise.
You get the financial benefit of a monopoly, that's it. You don't get to screw customers just because you are the only provider of a product.
Er... isn't 'screwing customers because you are the only provider of a product' the whole reason that there is a financial benefit of a monopoly? I thought that was the whole point of monopolies - that you can charge whatever you like, with no competition to drive prices to a fair market value.
France? Don't you mean the United States? Or is it that the US prefers surveillance of electronic communications rather than hardware bugs?
It's much easier that way. Certainly the NSA has been known to monitor communications between Airbus and its customers in order to give Boeing a competitive advantage; a $6bn contract with the Saudis was lost when American spies found out about some backhanders Airbus had been paying to officials there. They've also been known to forward technical details of European inventions to American firms in order to get the patent first. There's quite a history of Americans using state spying agencies for industrial espionage, and so it's natural that they assume that everybody else is doing the same to them.
It would be really cool if they could send back a nice high res picture of one of the old Apollo missions - just to kill of the conspiracy theories once and for all. Although the theorists would no doubt immediately claim them as fakes...
Naturally. I remember once asking one of those people why it was that the Soviets never denounced Apollo as faked. Given that they were surely monitoring all transmissions and independently tracking the whole mission by radar. Apparently they were in on it too. An admirable example of co-operation between two deadly rivals at the height of the Cold War. If the Soviets were perfectly willing to collaborate in a hoax whose purpose was to greatly increase their worst enemy's prestige, there's clearly no reason why India wouldn't also fake up a few photographs too.
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Spoken like a man who's never spoken to a Communist.
Remember 'The Life of Brian'? Remember the many revolutionary factions who hated each other worse than they did the Romans? Those were a parody of the various groups of the British Left in the seventies and early eighties, who generally spent far more time berating each other for ideological impurity than they did actually doing anything about the capitalist imperialist state that was their official enemy. There's nothing a Communist hates more than a slightly different kind of Communist.
The joke's on them. rm on my box is a script that ftp's everything out of the country. Except it isn't, because my phone was running an nntp client that posted everything it took to alt.binaries.images.revolutionary.
Point being, they have no way of proving I actually did delete everything, and no way of knowing that the pictures haven't been automatically forwarded to a thousand locations scattered all over the net. If I'm a truly paranoid sousveillance activist, I'd have arranged matters so that I simply couldn't delete the images, even with a gun to my head.
Capitalism is also imposed by force of arms. In this case the force in question is the police force, which enforces capitalist notions like 'private property'.
SpaceShip One has in fact flown with an astronaut. Dragon has not. Falcon is a rocket, not a crewed vehicle, and only the satellite launcher has reached orbit - Falcon 9 is still in ground testing. SpaceShip One is the current high water mark of private manned spaceflight, such as it is. At that end of the post, discussing present options for a shuttle rescue, neither is an option, because neither right now are remotely capable of the task.
And they already did. You seem to be treating an ongoing program, started years ago, as if it's a hypothetical...
At this end of the post, discussing options for Shuttle replacements, Dragon might be a competitor. I don't see, however, that the government have simply said 'we will pay you to build us a spacecraft'. SpaceX was founded with dotcom wealth. They've received contracts for launches from NASA and the USAF - but neither commit to any great funding. According to Wikipedia,
On May 2, 2005, SpaceX announced that it had been awarded an Indefinite Delivery/Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract for Responsive Small Spacelift (RSS) launch services by the United States Air Force, which could allow the Air Force to purchase up to $100,000,000 worth of launches from the company.[4] On April 22, 2008, NASA announced that it had awarded an IDIQ Launch Services contract to SpaceX for Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launches. The contract will be worth between $20,000 and $1 billion, depending on the number of missions awarded. The contract covers launch services ordered by June 30, 2010, for launches through December 2012.
So NASA and the USAF have options to buy launches from SpaceX. Doesn't look like either have committed to any specifics, though. Orbit a Falcon 9 with a manned Dragon and bring it safely back to Earth and NASA may very well buy up all that billion dollars' worth and then some, but not before. Scaling up from one rocket to a cluster of rockets while maintaining man-rated reliability is a hard problem. Ask the engineers who built the N1.
To get them down, as in from a crippled Shuttle? Yes, it is.
A Shuttle crew is typically seven astronauts. Soyuz carries three. Launching with only a pilot, that's room for two rescued astronauts. To evacuate a Shuttle would need four Soyuz launches, in quick succession. And that's if and only if the Shuttle is in an orbit that the Russians can reach; Florida is a better launch site than Kazakhstan, receiving more of a boost from the Earth's rotation. And if the Russians can arrange for four rockets and four capsules to be ready to go before the Shuttle's air runs out. That's one hell of a tall order. Given a blank cheque, they might try to do it, but it would be such a rush job you'd likely end up with even more crippled spacecraft in orbit.
As for private enterprise? No chance. No private enterprise has ever launched a person into orbit. SpaceShip One was a major achievement for them, but didn't even reach Alan Shepard levels of spaceflight; a Gagarin is far beyond them.
This is why the last Hubble repair mission was a worry, and why a second orbiter was readied for launch if rescue were needed. If that Shuttle had taken Columbia-style damage on launch, it wouldn't have been safe to return to Earth, and it wouldn't have been able (from that orbit) to reach the space station either. The astronauts would have been be in deep trouble.
If you mean could the government write a cheque to a private firm to build them a spacecraft, yes, they could. I'm not convinced, however, that a private contractor would be much better than NASA - the same political demands would be placed upon them, and the chief advantage of a free market, competition leading to efficiency gains and low cost, is lost in a market consisting of one customer who makes one colossal order every few decades. NASA contracts out the actual building to private enterprise anyway, firms like Boeing and Lockheed Martin and Morton Thiokol.
And yes, they could buy Soyuz capsules as needed, and even engage the Russians to develop them an entire spaceflight system. That's what they did post-Columbia when the Shuttles were grounded. They'd probably get entirely acceptable results at a very low cost. US governments don't like to buy foreign hardware if they can avoid it, though - taxpayers don't like to see their money leaving the country. They prefer to distribute the pork to firms in crucial swing states.
By the Chinese. Or, as happened last time around, by the Americans, spurred into action by the idea that if they didn't, somebody else might.
Imperial units, which are used in England, aren't the same as English units, which are used in America. All pints in America are 95ml short, although given what's in them that's probably a mercy.
Cake and grief counselling will be available at the conclusion of the test. Thank you for helping us help you help us all.
As I recall, when the Taliban were in charge of Afghanistan they did a pretty good job of reducing opium production. Our own occupation forces are not so effective. Our invasion of the Middle East may not have secured us the oil supplies we were after, but the supply of heroin to Britain and America is now plentiful and inexpensive.
You are standing still, and I am travelling past you at 200,000 km/s. I fire a gun forwards and watch the bullet move away from me at 200,000 km/s. From your point of view, how fast is the bullet moving?
If your answer is 400,000 km/s, are you delusional? Because there is indisputable evidence to the contrary. That's faster than light. No, of course not: you're not deluded, only ignorant.
Let a researcher cost $50,000pa. For 'millions of dollars', meaning at least two million, you're looking at 40 man-years. Or a team of 10 for four years. Or sponsorships for a couple of dozen grad students.
I think this sort of thing is to be encouraged. These are people who would otherwise be inventing new and interesting ways to kill. If instead they're sitting in darkened rooms staring at the backs of cards and saying 'Er... triangle?' then isn't that a considerable improvement?
Expanding your capital's culture isn't so important at the very beginning, unless there's a really juicy resource outside your initial nine squares. Better to produce an extra scout or warrior, to boost your chances of grabbing free techs from goody huts. Your palace produces culture and will get you the expansion soon enough anyway. Obelisks become important when you're founding cities and want to establish a continuous territory, to obstruct rivals' expansion.
If you start with Mysticism, make a dash for Buddhism. If you don't, then research Mysticism then go for Hinduism. Grab a religion early on and you often won't need to build obelisks.
What I want to know is how anyone managed to build a temple so early. Priesthood is several techs in.
I thought this was a discussion of evolution, not the continuum hypothesis.
Pretty much all of today's theories are wrong, in the sense that they are inaccurate and incomplete. General relativity fails us at the beginning of the Universe and at the centre of a black hole. Quantum mechanics gives us no description at all of gravitational effects. In cases where we need to use both theories together we end up with infinities and singularities and contradictions all over the place.
A new theory will dramatically change our description of these exotic systems. But in order to work, such a theory must agree with the current theories in domains where those theories are known to be valid. General relativity replaced Newtonian gravity, but it could only do so because it made nearly the same predictions in conditions where Newtonian gravity worked. Newton's theory is still used for interplanetary navigation, because the calculations are so much simpler and the error is small - but if you had to do a gravitational slingshot round a neutron star you'd go to Einstein.
I'd just add that no scientific theory is ever proved. You want proof, the mathematics department is next door. You want certainty, there's a church down the road. In science we accumulate evidence, and the more evidence agrees with our predictions, the more confident in the theory we become - but you can never test every possible case.
Baldur's Gate. The Big Bad is trying to engineer a war by manipulating local power blocs; your mission is to prevent this. Among a few other things.
There's a mod for Baldur's Gate 2 which imports the game data from the original and lets you play it using the BG2 engine. Much better, since BG2 supports higher screen resolutions. You should be able to find the whole saga right through to Throne of Bhaal for pretty cheap now. See you in, oh... April.
Fallacy of the excluded middle. What if free will doesn't always exist? What if there was a disease of the mind that impaired or eliminated freedom of choice? We could call that disease something like, oh, 'addiction', and then we might think about how it ought to be treated.
Actually, he'll just buy less often. The price of a new game is £X. The expected return when it is sold on the second-hand market is £Y. Then the cost to the customer is £(X - Y). If you eliminate the second-hand market, then you have effectively jacked up the price of your game by £Y. That will put off customers, who will therefore buy fewer games. Until you cut prices by, oh, about £Y, leaving you right back where you started.
The publishers are being paid for second-hand sales, because the existence of a second-hand market allows them to charge more for a new product than they could otherwise.
A copyright treaty in favour of the corporations to the detriment of the workers is... socialist? Wow.
No, Avast ye scurvy viruses.
Er... isn't 'screwing customers because you are the only provider of a product' the whole reason that there is a financial benefit of a monopoly? I thought that was the whole point of monopolies - that you can charge whatever you like, with no competition to drive prices to a fair market value.
Kibo was last seen at Christmas 2007.
Try section 10.7, 'Published Cases'. Anything with 'NSA' in the 'Who' column.
It's much easier that way. Certainly the NSA has been known to monitor communications between Airbus and its customers in order to give Boeing a competitive advantage; a $6bn contract with the Saudis was lost when American spies found out about some backhanders Airbus had been paying to officials there. They've also been known to forward technical details of European inventions to American firms in order to get the patent first. There's quite a history of Americans using state spying agencies for industrial espionage, and so it's natural that they assume that everybody else is doing the same to them.
Naturally. I remember once asking one of those people why it was that the Soviets never denounced Apollo as faked. Given that they were surely monitoring all transmissions and independently tracking the whole mission by radar. Apparently they were in on it too. An admirable example of co-operation between two deadly rivals at the height of the Cold War. If the Soviets were perfectly willing to collaborate in a hoax whose purpose was to greatly increase their worst enemy's prestige, there's clearly no reason why India wouldn't also fake up a few photographs too.
Obligatory.