There was an interview with William Gates Sr (Bill's dad). a front page story in the New York Times some months back. about the management of the big Gates charity umbrella organisation. He told of traveling to an African village with exactly one powerline and one outlet to it's name, essentially the totality of the village's electrical supply being used to run one desktop computer. It convinced him that we need to do more thinking in depth when it comes to working in situations like this.
There is an appropriate time to send the Geeks in. After you've gotten people decently fed, housed, and on the road to feeding or at least taking proper care of themselves. And there is probably at least one or more places in Africa that have reached that stage already and are ready for that next level. That's hopefully where the "Geek Team" are being sent.
Suppose the shoe was on the other foot with the Russians building the space station and the Americans "holding up the show". Would you be sympathetic to calls from Russian "rednecks" to shutdown Skylab? (Assuming of course that it hadn't already dropped out of orbit)
As far as "commercialisation", I thought this was the start of what American space libertarians have been pushing all along, i.e. let the corporates save us from NASA et. al.
As far as Chechnya is concerned... do some more reading. The story isn't quite as black and white as a 60 second TV blurb on NBC would have you believe.
Simply, the Russian space program has a lot more experience with building (and using) long duration life support systems than we do. They've also had more experience in boosting large payloads to orbit including a couple of other space stations (The Salyuts) preceding Mir.
And remember that the Proton series was designed when we were building big and fast rockets (rememberr Saturn) for the moon race. Unlike the U.S. however they didn't just throw away that technology once the moon race was over. They also didn't waste it on a clearly pointless stunt like being the "2nd men on the moon."
Think about this, there are Russian crews that have already spent enough time in space equivalent to one of the more optimistic missions to Mars.
It makes sense to include the pioneering nation in space travel for an International Space Station. And it also makes sense to include a nation which has done time and develop technology that you haven't.
There are people who have stayed up at Mir for as long as a year. One of them was a female NASA astronaut who made the cover of Time when she came back. I don't think that anyone could survive in micrograivity for a decade and be viable Earthside.
It's not a matter of waiting to solve the problems on Earth before we reach the stars. After all, there's no way in heaven we're going to be around long enough to solve that formidable problem unless we do.
It's not politics it's physics. You've got to throw away about nine times reaction mass just to get into orbit. Whether you do it all from your ship or from tanker ships that are suppling fuel at high altitude for the orbit boost, it's what takes to get to orbit baring magic. For this discussion I'm defining magic as technology needed to pursue a goal that does not have a foundation in practical or theorectical science. i.e. usable anti-gravity, FTL, etc. And the problem is we're damm short on that magic the Star Trek guys have bleeding from their ears.
Space is NOT the answer to Earth's problems. It may contribute our solutions but it's not the foundation of such.
We launch from Canaveral instead of Pikes Peak also because of all that handy ocean nearby when our ships blow up in the sky makes it less likely that we'll rain debris down on some city.
ISS was never meant as a stopover for Collier type fantasies. ISS is an end of itself, where the next batch of space work is going to be done. Right now we simply can't be casual enough in space to build stopovers to nonexistant lunar colonies nor nonexistant planetary missions.
What do I mean by "casual". When it gets to the point where we can have our station bumped by a supply module at a few feet per second, dent a wall and not need a few months of Mission Control trying to figure out how we're going to fix it.
The PRACTICAL technology does not exist yet, and probably won't for another century. And the corps you space libertarians think will get us into space instead of NASA won't do squat until someone ELSE has spent the money, done the research, pulled all the tests for them.
What longfalcon doesn't seem to understand is that Apple survives on those people who use QuarkXpress, Illustrator, Freehand, and Photoshop et. al. The recognition of this fact was the creation of the Carbon interface when developers balked at the total rewrite that would be neccessary for Yellowbox/Cocoa. And Apple simply doesn't have the clout to force the issue beyond a given point.
If Apple was just a startup company with a small die-hard community of users who were primarily developers/programmers than what you suggest would be valid. But the Apple of today simply can not take that approach they are where they are today, for good or ill and have to work from there.
I myself will purchase OS X when it comes out but deploying it on Copytone's machines is largely out of the question until what we use on a daily basis is Carbonised. That also includes the question of our substantial investment in the Adobe font library.
Darwin is out there, with an open source license that the OSF has given at leaset a grudging approval. Apple has dls for PowerPC and Intel platforms. Now if those ex-Apple guys at Eazel come up with something who knows?
OS 9 has the start of this. Multiple Users allows desktop customisations for each user as well as a shadow extension of the preferences folders for each one. Applications which support this like Internet Explorer will have unique preferences for each user.
It at least Newswatcher's case, you're severely mistaken. There were variants long before development on Newswatcher itself ceased. One of them, MT-Newswatcher added multi-threading.
Comparing the open source environment between Linux/BSD and the Mac (or Windows,Amiga etc.) is strongly in the apples/oranges style of idiocy. On the one hand you have an OS that for most of it's life was simply handed around and remained usable for only the brave and technically well-healed.
On the other you had shrinkwrapped consumer releases which evolved with conventional business strategies. Indeed one of the main source of tension within the Linux movements today is the conflict between the hardcore anarchistic crowd and the up and coming IPO's who are going to have to show serious profit RSN.
There's also the fact that these two communities developed very much in isolation. Eric Raymond is probably among many Linux advocates who've remained unaware of the existence of the Mac breed of hackers. The significance of the reception of his speech at MacHack 2000 proves that both groups can and do need to learn from each other.
Amelio probably deserves more credit than he's generally given, although probably not as much as he'd want to claim. He accomplished a lot of the turniquet stop-the-bleeding moves needed bring Apple from the brink. I'd say it's a fair assessement that Steve Jobs benefited considerably from the hard decisions that Amelio made before he left the company.
The purpose of OS X is not to sell a package for Linux gearheads, it's to provide an improved OS for the existing Mac market. It's to provide an OS that's first and foremost easy to use with the inherent advantages of a 'Nix based operating system, mainly protected memory and multitasking, something that Apple tried and failed to accomplish by merely updating MacOS as the Copland project sought to do.
To do what you want, all they needed to do was to buy Yellowdog or LinuxPPC and make an appropriate theme for a window manager of choice.
The problem would of course that this would effectively maroon the existing Mac community and ultimately bury Apple as well. Like they say on Pokemon, a lot of dotters don't seem to "get it." Right now, for the most part the only people who use Linux, are sysadmins, programmers, and other types of gearheads who live to take apart their OS day to day. Apple's core market are people who USE computers, primarily for creative/publishing work. OS X is going to have to sell to the people who've used Quark, Photoshop, SoundEdit, and a bit of Office. They're not particurlarly interested in gcc or the Gimp, nor would they look forward to recompiling a system kernal just to make network changes.
There are things that need to be done with Aqua and the public beta should generate some useful feedback in tuning the Consumer Release.
Quite literally over Apple's deceased corporate corpus.
Apple's in the hardware buisness. Just like iTools main purpose was to sell OS 9. OS X's main and sole reason for existence is a sustainable market share for Apple hardware.
For Intel and maybe some other hardware platforms in the future the most you'll ever see is Darwin.
Actually those themes were never publicly released but leaked out, probably by unnamed Apple developers violating their NDAs. I've used them myself and I can see why they were steved. The Platinum theme was designed so that applications that weren't Appearance savvy wouldn't look too ugly within the environment. However put those non-Appearance savvy applications in with the more extreme themes like DSG or Hi-tech and things get ugly very fast. Jobs made the then sensible assesement that it would take at the very least a total rengineering of to beat this problem, which would take resources needed elsewhere.
This problem shows up to a lesser extent when running Classic apps with Aqua. When OS X does come out, I wouldn't recommend running Kaliedescope in the Classic environment until a complementary X version of it comes out.
Apple's modified BSD i.e. Darwin is the core underpinnings of the OS. What Apple aims to do is to insure that the average user will never have to deal with the command line unless they want to. As I understand it Terminal.app itself won't be installed but will either be an extras type item on the CD or downloadable.
Intel Darwin is out. And I beleive there's at least one person working on an X11 server for it. Whether your run your Diamond Video will depend upon someone coming up with a driver. Diamond has had a history of being uncooperative with alternative os coders though, so don't hold your breath.
Everyone keeps talking capitalism vs. socialism/marxism/whatever as those terms still meant the same thing they did in the 19th century, as if the "tenets" were some kind of Ten Commandments that "smart" or "responsible" capitalists would always follow without any outside intervention. or that the system itself doesn't encourage foolishness.
Fact is not only does the system encourage "foolishness" as you would describe it, it's MANDATORY. The people who set corporate policy answer to shareholders and the current stock prices, not to the longterm. If "dragfishing" (a term invented for the sake of this post) were going to wipe out the Maine stocks in 5 years, dragfishing it's going to be if the results push up the stock and dividends for the next few quarters.
Capitalism as a system can't be trusted to "behave" itself as it were as those who do mean to act "responsibly" will always lose out to those who will cut any corner to make another buck.
The "get off the planet" which seems to be the anthem of the space set these days really disturbs me. Historically when we make a mess of an area, like the desertification of North Africa and the Mediterreanean coasts, our answer has always been to go elsewhere.
But there is no elsewhere in this case. No Class M planet for us to "escape" to and bypass learning to deal with how we manage our ecospheres.
My rebuttal is this.
Here you are, Mankind it's this place or noplace.
It's becoming increasingly clear that Space is not a very healthy place for the human body, as among other reasons, microgravity is hell for the immune system. Our long-term survival rests upon thinking of Earth as our long-term home. The other planets are either frozen hells, boiling hells, or radioactive frozen, burning hells. And given how improbable a planet like Earth seems to be, it just might be truly unique so don't dis it.
"But I wish the US had launced an Orion in the 1960's when the US was still doing atmosphereic tests, just so we knew it was possible."
Small scale models of Orion were launched, using chemical explosions as a proof of concept tests, as told in "The Starship and the Canoe", a biography on F. Dyson and son.
Two things to note however.
1. The Orion system was not conceived as a surface to orbit, but mainly space to space traveling system.
2. Not even Dyson, Orion's creator considers it acceptable to detonate nukes in the atmosphere at this time.
Like it or not, Chem propulsion is what we have. The trick is to use our atmosphere as an advantage instead of a hindrance. The most interesting idea right now for an SSTO is an aircraft like ship that takes off from a runway, and then refueled in flight for a boost to orbit.
It's not that they really had much choice. The economy is in a total shambles and the Russian Space Agency today only survives because of support from the ISS project.
Remember the Russian shuttle prototype? It's now a children's ride somewhere in Siberia according to a PBS program on the Russian space program I watched a couple of years ago.
China? An interesting possibility, mainly in science fiction so far, but it doesn't seem that they're going for a Cold War-style race for "firsts".
1. There's no point in returning Gailileo, the value of the mission is in the data returned not some old radioactive piece of hardware.
2. Making it return-capable would have driven up costs quite literally astronomically, besides see 1.
3. The lifetime of any probe craft has a number of limits including wear and tear. But the most inescapable is the finite amount of propellant fuel. Eventually no matter what's done, Galileo would simply run out of the fuel needed to change it's orientation and keep it stable, much less directing itself anywhere.
Crashing Galileo makes a lot of sense. It's in an area no human would ever be able to go, and eliminates it as a source of possible interference and contamination. (None of Jupiter's known moons has an atmosphere to speak of, so Jupiter itself provides the most through method of disposal.) If you want something for a museumj, there's always the backup craft NASA probably still has in storage somewhere.
Smaug was brought down with one arrow, albeit a special one. One assumes that if you're in the dragon-slaying buisness you're going to be equipped with something above average.
p.s. If you want an excellent series of fantasy stories about swords, you can't do better than Fred Saberhagen's books revolving around the Twelve Swords, of whome one of course was DragonSlayer, the Sword of Heroes.
A problem that no one really wants solved
on
Frankenstein Time
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· Score: 1
MattW has unfortunately drawn himself into a common fallacy. The poor in third world countries don't have lots of children because they're idiots or ignorant. (Granted there is a general lack of education and health care which certainly doesn't help things.) They have lots of children because of in such harsh conditions it's actually a pro-survival move for the family or society in general. In agrarian pre-industrial societies, children are needed to help work the land, and the so-called "nuclear family" model simply does not work in conditions frequently found in places like Rwanda.
Birthrates in America in the mid 19th century and prior were also frequently high as it was a general assumption that over half your children would not live to see their majority. (Abraham and Mary Lincoln had 6 children, only one, Robert lived to adulthood and they were the First Family of their time.)
The problem of poverty is not resource scarcity it's resource mismanagement, waste, and outright greed. It's also pretty much a given that the main reason that these hellholes are pretty much going to stay the way they are is that it is too much to corporate benefit that they do so.
Case in point; Some years ago a Union Carbide plant exploded in India killing hundreds both in the plant and in the nearby village as well as poisoning a considerable chunk of the surrounding area. The UC plant was slipshod and ran without many of the safeguards and guidelines that would be mandatory in countries like the U.S. If the area was not a poverty-stricken famine prone area like the ones described, Union Carbide would never have been able to both build death trap plants like that one nor have been able to hire the locals at pretty much slave wages to work in them.
To you and me these conditions may look like problems, self-made hells. To the major corporates they're opportunities made in heaven and by thunder no one's going to be allowed to make any real progress in changing them.
Why are they using "there ain't no" ? Simple, they just want to show everyone that they've read at least one book by Robert Heinlein, one of the most over-hyped, militantly anarchistic, (on paper) misogynistic authors our US of A has ever produced.
Transmeta was there in a big way. Had a large booth with an audience section on one side, comfy office simulation on another and an aircraft area demoing Crusoe-powered pieces of hardware with scattered Linus sightings.
There was a small linux pavillion in which LinuxMall had a sizable booth. I came to the rescue of one of their salesguys who was mystified by the package on one of his own shelves labled "Yellow Dog Linux".
DVD was a big item this year with everything from jukeboxes to portable vid players being hyped. Another item in the funky neat area was the Pocket PC, whose main unit with the combo CD/floppy undocked was about the size of those old neon plastic nine-volt radios of the '70s. It's a mini Pentium running Windows but the booth exihibitors are pretty hot on Linux as apparantly they've made a licensing deal with Corel to get $300 ready-to run desktop kits.
No Mac action per se, but here and there the odd G4 with Cinema display for video demo and the scattering of imacs. The bulk of those network drives like Snap! have finally discovered the world beyond Windows. They've added support for both Linux and Appleshare/Appleshare over IP.
It was a relatively tonedowned show compared to PC/Expos of late but busy nonetheless.
Actually that's exactly the way Robbert (the father of modern rocketry) Goddard's first working prototype was constructed. A rocket nozzle on top connected to fuel tanks underneath.
Kyobu, your argument makes sense except for one thing. Clinton has frequently gone out of his way to buck the traditional mission of the Democratic party and Gore seems poised to go even farther. The Democrats have used the "either us or the Republican/conservative/xxx for the last two elections. Yet Clinton has virtually betrayed the progressives who voted him into office. While Al Gore seems to be bent on outBushing Bush when it comes to the sterotypical right-wing issues such as the death penalty. And he does have that history of censorship in his background.
Yes, voting for Nader may very well give Bush the White House. But if so, then the handlers of the GoreBots will know EXACTLY why their spin-programmed candidate lost their election and that they can not take us for granted any more.
In the area of liberal/progressive causes, Nixon acheived more unwillingly than Clinton had the guts for pushed for. In his whole presidency he pushed 2 issues. 1. Health care which he delegated to his wife and did practically nothing to stop its foundering. and 2. Gays in the military in which he didn't have the cojones to use his full authority as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of this Nation. With Reagan's landslide victory over Carter in '80 the Democrats began a new career as Republicans in donkey suits. They have yet to fully learn the folly of this practise. Voting for Nader may very well give Bush a victory. Perhaps. But it looks like nothing less will give the Dems the shot in the rear end they so desperately need.
Slashdot Mirror
There was an interview with William Gates Sr (Bill's dad). a front page story in the New York Times some months back. about the management of the big Gates charity umbrella organisation. He told of traveling to an African village with exactly one powerline and one outlet to it's name, essentially the totality of the village's electrical supply being used to run one desktop computer. It convinced him that we need to do more thinking in depth when it comes to working in situations like this.
There is an appropriate time to send the Geeks in. After you've gotten people decently fed, housed, and on the road to feeding or at least taking proper care of themselves. And there is probably at least one or more places in Africa that have reached that stage already and are ready for that next level. That's hopefully where the "Geek Team" are being sent.
Suppose the shoe was on the other foot with the Russians building the space station and the Americans "holding up the show". Would you be sympathetic to calls from Russian "rednecks" to shutdown Skylab? (Assuming of course that it hadn't already dropped out of orbit)
As far as "commercialisation", I thought this was the start of what American space libertarians have been pushing all along, i.e. let the corporates save us from NASA et. al.
As far as Chechnya is concerned... do some more reading. The story isn't quite as black and white as a 60 second TV blurb on NBC would have you believe.
Simply, the Russian space program has a lot more experience with building (and using) long duration life support systems than we do. They've also had more experience in boosting large payloads to orbit including a couple of other space stations (The Salyuts) preceding Mir.
And remember that the Proton series was designed when we were building big and fast rockets (rememberr Saturn) for the moon race. Unlike the U.S. however they didn't just throw away that technology once the moon race was over. They also didn't waste it on a clearly pointless stunt like being the "2nd men on the moon."
Think about this, there are Russian crews that have already spent enough time in space equivalent to one of the more optimistic missions to Mars.
It makes sense to include the pioneering nation in space travel for an International Space Station. And it also makes sense to include a nation which has done time and develop technology that you haven't.
There are people who have stayed up at Mir for as long as a year. One of them was a female NASA astronaut who made the cover of Time when she came back. I don't think that anyone could survive in micrograivity for a decade and be viable Earthside.
It's not a matter of waiting to solve the problems on Earth before we reach the stars. After all, there's no way in heaven we're going to be around long enough to solve that formidable problem unless we do.
It's not politics it's physics. You've got to throw away about nine times reaction mass just to get into orbit. Whether you do it all from your ship or from tanker ships that are suppling fuel at high altitude for the orbit boost, it's what takes to get to orbit baring magic.
For this discussion I'm defining magic as technology needed to pursue a goal that does not have a foundation in practical or theorectical science. i.e. usable anti-gravity, FTL, etc. And the problem is we're damm short on that magic the Star Trek guys have bleeding from their ears.
Space is NOT the answer to Earth's problems. It may contribute our solutions but it's not the foundation of such.
We launch from Canaveral instead of Pikes Peak also because of all that handy ocean nearby when our ships blow up in the sky makes it less likely that we'll rain debris down on some city.
ISS was never meant as a stopover for Collier type fantasies. ISS is an end of itself, where the next batch of space work is going to be done. Right now we simply can't be casual enough in space to build stopovers to nonexistant lunar colonies nor nonexistant planetary missions.
What do I mean by "casual". When it gets to the point where we can have our station bumped by a supply module at a few feet per second, dent a wall and not need a few months of Mission Control trying to figure out how we're going to fix it.
The PRACTICAL technology does not exist yet, and probably won't for another century. And the corps you space libertarians think will get us into space instead of NASA won't do squat until someone ELSE has spent the money, done the research, pulled all the tests for them.
What longfalcon doesn't seem to understand is that Apple survives on those people who use QuarkXpress, Illustrator, Freehand, and Photoshop et. al. The recognition of this fact was the creation of the Carbon interface when developers balked at the total rewrite that would be neccessary for Yellowbox/Cocoa. And Apple simply doesn't have the clout to force the issue beyond a given point.
If Apple was just a startup company with a small die-hard community of users who were primarily developers/programmers than what you suggest would be valid. But the Apple of today simply can not take that approach they are where they are today, for good or ill and have to work from there.
I myself will purchase OS X when it comes out but deploying it on Copytone's machines is largely out of the question until what we use on a daily basis is Carbonised. That also includes the question of our substantial investment in the Adobe font library.
Darwin is out there, with an open source license that the OSF has given at leaset a grudging approval. Apple has dls for PowerPC and Intel platforms. Now if those ex-Apple guys at Eazel come up with something who knows?
OS 9 has the start of this. Multiple Users allows desktop customisations for each user as well as a shadow extension of the preferences folders for each one. Applications which support this like Internet Explorer will have unique preferences for each user.
It at least Newswatcher's case, you're severely mistaken. There were variants long before development on Newswatcher itself ceased. One of them, MT-Newswatcher added multi-threading.
Comparing the open source environment between Linux/BSD and the Mac (or Windows,Amiga etc.) is strongly in the apples/oranges style of idiocy. On the one hand you have an OS that for most of it's life was simply handed around and remained usable for only the brave and technically well-healed.
On the other you had shrinkwrapped consumer releases which evolved with conventional business strategies. Indeed one of the main source of tension within the Linux movements today is the conflict between the hardcore anarchistic crowd and the up and coming IPO's who are going to have to show serious profit RSN.
There's also the fact that these two communities developed very much in isolation. Eric Raymond is probably among many Linux advocates who've remained unaware of the existence of the Mac breed of hackers. The significance of the reception of his speech at MacHack 2000 proves that both groups can and do need to learn from each other.
Amelio probably deserves more credit than he's generally given, although probably not as much as he'd want to claim. He accomplished a lot of the turniquet stop-the-bleeding moves needed bring Apple from the brink. I'd say it's a fair assessement that Steve Jobs benefited considerably from the hard decisions that Amelio made before he left the company.
The purpose of OS X is not to sell a package for Linux gearheads, it's to provide an improved OS for the existing Mac market. It's to provide an OS that's first and foremost easy to use with the inherent advantages of a 'Nix based operating system, mainly protected memory and multitasking, something that Apple tried and failed to accomplish by merely updating MacOS as the Copland project sought to do.
To do what you want, all they needed to do was to buy Yellowdog or LinuxPPC and make an appropriate theme for a window manager of choice.
The problem would of course that this would effectively maroon the existing Mac community and ultimately bury Apple as well. Like they say on Pokemon, a lot of dotters don't seem to "get it." Right now, for the most part the only people who use Linux, are sysadmins, programmers, and other types of gearheads who live to take apart their OS day to day. Apple's core market are people who USE computers, primarily for creative/publishing work. OS X is going to have to sell to the people who've used Quark, Photoshop, SoundEdit, and a bit of Office. They're not particurlarly interested in gcc or the Gimp, nor would they look forward to recompiling a system kernal just to make network changes.
There are things that need to be done with Aqua and the public beta should generate some useful feedback in tuning the Consumer Release.
Quite literally over Apple's deceased corporate corpus.
Apple's in the hardware buisness. Just like iTools main purpose was to sell OS 9. OS X's main and sole reason for existence is a sustainable market share for Apple hardware.
For Intel and maybe some other hardware platforms in the future the most you'll ever see is Darwin.
Actually those themes were never publicly released but leaked out, probably by unnamed Apple developers violating their NDAs. I've used them myself and I can see why they were steved. The Platinum theme was designed so that applications that weren't Appearance savvy wouldn't look too ugly within the environment. However put those non-Appearance savvy applications in with the more extreme themes like DSG or Hi-tech and things get ugly very fast. Jobs made the then sensible assesement that it would take at the very least a total rengineering of to beat this problem, which would take resources needed elsewhere.
This problem shows up to a lesser extent when running Classic apps with Aqua. When OS X does come out, I wouldn't recommend running Kaliedescope in the Classic environment until a complementary X version of it comes out.
Apple's modified BSD i.e. Darwin is the core underpinnings of the OS. What Apple aims to do is to insure that the average user will never have to deal with the command line unless they want to. As I understand it Terminal.app itself won't be installed but will either be an extras type item on the CD or downloadable.
Intel Darwin is out. And I beleive there's at least one person working on an X11 server for it. Whether your run your Diamond Video will depend upon someone coming up with a driver. Diamond has had a history of being uncooperative with alternative os coders though, so don't hold your breath.
Everyone keeps talking capitalism vs. socialism/marxism/whatever as those terms still meant the same thing they did in the 19th century, as if the "tenets" were some kind of Ten Commandments that "smart" or "responsible" capitalists would always follow without any outside intervention. or that the system itself doesn't encourage foolishness.
Fact is not only does the system encourage "foolishness" as you would describe it, it's MANDATORY. The people who set corporate policy answer to shareholders and the current stock prices, not to the longterm. If "dragfishing" (a term invented for the sake of this post) were going to wipe out the Maine stocks in 5 years, dragfishing it's going to be if the results push up the stock and dividends for the next few quarters.
Capitalism as a system can't be trusted to "behave" itself as it were as those who do mean to act "responsibly" will always lose out to those who will cut any corner to make another buck.
The "get off the planet" which seems to be the anthem of the space set these days really disturbs me. Historically when we make a mess of an area, like the desertification of North Africa and the Mediterreanean coasts, our answer has always been to go elsewhere.
But there is no elsewhere in this case. No Class M planet for us to "escape" to and bypass learning to deal with how we manage our ecospheres.
My rebuttal is this.
Here you are, Mankind it's this place or noplace.
It's becoming increasingly clear that Space is not a very healthy place for the human body, as among other reasons, microgravity is hell for the immune system. Our long-term survival rests upon thinking of Earth as our long-term home. The other planets are either frozen hells, boiling hells, or radioactive frozen, burning hells. And given how improbable a planet like Earth seems to be, it just might be truly unique so don't dis it.
Animats writes:
"But I wish the US had launced an Orion in the 1960's when the US was still doing atmosphereic tests, just so we knew it was possible."
Small scale models of Orion were launched, using chemical explosions as a proof of concept tests, as told in "The Starship and the Canoe", a biography on F. Dyson and son.
Two things to note however.
1. The Orion system was not conceived as a surface to orbit, but mainly space to space traveling system.
2. Not even Dyson, Orion's creator considers it acceptable to detonate nukes in the atmosphere at this time.
Like it or not, Chem propulsion is what we have. The trick is to use our atmosphere as an advantage instead of a hindrance. The most interesting idea right now for an SSTO is an aircraft like ship that takes off from a runway, and then refueled in flight for a boost to orbit.
It's not that they really had much choice. The economy is in a total shambles and the Russian Space Agency today only survives because of support from the ISS project.
Remember the Russian shuttle prototype? It's now a children's ride somewhere in Siberia according to a PBS program on the Russian space program I watched a couple of years ago.
China? An interesting possibility, mainly in science fiction so far, but it doesn't seem that they're going for a Cold War-style race for "firsts".
1. There's no point in returning Gailileo, the value of the mission is in the data returned not some old radioactive piece of hardware.
2. Making it return-capable would have driven up costs quite literally astronomically, besides see 1.
3. The lifetime of any probe craft has a number of limits including wear and tear. But the most inescapable is the finite amount of propellant fuel. Eventually no matter what's done, Galileo would simply run out of the fuel needed to change it's orientation and keep it stable, much less directing itself anywhere.
Crashing Galileo makes a lot of sense. It's in an area no human would ever be able to go, and eliminates it as a source of possible interference and contamination. (None of Jupiter's known moons has an atmosphere to speak of, so Jupiter itself provides the most through method of disposal.) If you want something for a museumj, there's always the backup craft NASA probably still has in storage somewhere.
Smaug was brought down with one arrow, albeit a special one. One assumes that if you're in the dragon-slaying buisness you're going to be equipped with something above average.
p.s. If you want an excellent series of fantasy stories about swords, you can't do better than Fred Saberhagen's books revolving around the Twelve Swords, of whome one of course was DragonSlayer, the Sword of Heroes.
MattW has unfortunately drawn himself into a common fallacy. The poor in third world countries don't have lots of children because they're idiots or ignorant. (Granted there is a general lack of education and health care which certainly doesn't help things.) They have lots of children because of in such harsh conditions it's actually a pro-survival move for the family or society in general. In agrarian pre-industrial societies, children are needed to help work the land, and the so-called "nuclear family" model simply does not work in conditions frequently found in places like Rwanda.
Birthrates in America in the mid 19th century and prior were also frequently high as it was a general assumption that over half your children would not live to see their majority. (Abraham and Mary Lincoln had 6 children, only one, Robert lived to adulthood and they were the First Family of their time.)
The problem of poverty is not resource scarcity it's resource mismanagement, waste, and outright greed. It's also pretty much a given that the main reason that these hellholes are pretty much going to stay the way they are is that it is too much to corporate benefit that they do so.
Case in point; Some years ago a Union Carbide plant exploded in India killing hundreds both in the plant and in the nearby village as well as poisoning a considerable chunk of the surrounding area. The UC plant was slipshod and ran without many of the safeguards and guidelines that would be mandatory in countries like the U.S. If the area was not a poverty-stricken famine prone area like the ones described, Union Carbide would never have been able to both build death trap plants like that one nor have been able to hire the locals at pretty much slave wages to work in them.
To you and me these conditions may look like problems, self-made hells. To the major corporates they're opportunities made in heaven and by thunder no one's going to be allowed to make any real progress in changing them.
Why are they using "there ain't no" ? Simple, they just want to show everyone that they've read at least one book by Robert Heinlein, one of the most over-hyped, militantly anarchistic, (on paper) misogynistic authors our US of A has ever produced.
Transmeta was there in a big way. Had a large booth with an audience section on one side, comfy office simulation on another and an aircraft area demoing Crusoe-powered pieces of hardware with scattered Linus sightings.
There was a small linux pavillion in which LinuxMall had a sizable booth. I came to the rescue of one of their salesguys who was mystified by the package on one of his own shelves labled "Yellow Dog Linux".
DVD was a big item this year with everything from jukeboxes to portable vid players being hyped. Another item in the funky neat area was the Pocket PC, whose main unit with the combo CD/floppy undocked was about the size of those old neon plastic nine-volt radios of the '70s. It's a mini Pentium running Windows but the booth exihibitors are pretty hot on Linux as apparantly they've made a licensing deal with Corel to get $300 ready-to run desktop kits.
No Mac action per se, but here and there the odd G4 with Cinema display for video demo and the scattering of imacs. The bulk of those network drives like Snap! have finally discovered the world beyond Windows. They've added support for both Linux and Appleshare/Appleshare over IP.
It was a relatively tonedowned show compared to PC/Expos of late but busy nonetheless.
Actually that's exactly the way Robbert (the father of modern rocketry) Goddard's first working prototype was constructed. A rocket nozzle on top connected to fuel tanks underneath.
Kyobu, your argument makes sense except for one thing. Clinton has frequently gone out of his way to buck the traditional mission of the Democratic party and Gore seems poised to go even farther. The Democrats have used the "either us or the Republican/conservative/xxx for the last two elections. Yet Clinton has virtually betrayed the progressives who voted him into office. While Al Gore seems to be bent on outBushing Bush when it comes to the sterotypical right-wing issues such as the death penalty. And he does have that history of censorship in his background.
Yes, voting for Nader may very well give Bush the White House. But if so, then the handlers of the GoreBots will know EXACTLY why their spin-programmed candidate lost their election and that they can not take us for granted any more.
In the area of liberal/progressive causes, Nixon acheived more unwillingly than Clinton had the guts for pushed for. In his whole presidency he pushed 2 issues. 1. Health care which he delegated to his wife and did practically nothing to stop its foundering. and 2. Gays in the military in which he didn't have the cojones to use his full authority as Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of this Nation.
With Reagan's landslide victory over Carter in '80 the Democrats began a new career as Republicans in donkey suits. They have yet to fully learn the folly of this practise.
Voting for Nader may very well give Bush a victory. Perhaps. But it looks like nothing less will give the Dems the shot in the rear end they so desperately need.