The solution is to simply coat the glass envelope of the compact bulb with a clear/flexible plastic coating (just like the flourescent bulb manufacturers do with some commercial 8-foot tubes), so that if you drop it and it breaks, then the mercury does not escape. Then all you have to do is make a manditory recycle program for all flourescent tubes. (there is a company here in
bc canada that recycles tubes, but its not manditory, but is should be because mercury is very toxic). Greenpeace uk says that about half of the manufacturers in Europe are coating bulbs..
I hope that with the coming breakthroughs in cheaper fiber optic/scilicon chips, we can finally get really fast/cheap internet access (with fiber into the house) at realistic rates...(no more 2 gig(or inthe case of Telus here in canada) what, 5 gigs a month data caps?)????????? One can only hope....
That buzzing you hear when you stand near those big high-voltage towers is the coronal discharge eminating from the wires..it's obvious that when you are standing near these big power lines that you are in an electric field and that we are not evolved to handle these eviroments...it's probably better to keep as far away from these power transmissions systems as possible. I remember that 20 odd years ago some people theorized that the 60Hz (50Hz in europe) frequency affected internal cellular signaling systems (ion channels) in animal cells..it's common sense to avoid being exposed to uneeded electromagnetic fields of any sort. Example: being lazy and opening a microwave when it's running, sure, the door switch will eventually work (it may not), but that initial dose you get will cause early cateracts in your eyes...
When I worked at a local high-tech company here in canada (many years ago), they made the fisrt computerized taximeters and the owner had world-wide patents, naturally, the hiring contract stated that anything you invented automaticaly became thier property (I needed the job, who wants to work at a Mcjob, so I signed), so yeah, it's natural for these bastards to want to glomm onto any free stuff they can. Thats how the nature of the IP system was invented from back in the days of Edison and IBM, I think that the current mess in IP land is just a natural evolution of this process.
Who knows what else went on during the cold war, after all, once countries start to enable "big systems failiures" in other countries, perhaps there are all sorts of time bombs waiting out there (chips/software in Nukes)...I can't wait until some current and future nuclear millitary power accidentally causes an explosion which could lead to a small nuclear war somewhere on the planet...I can't wait to end up breathing the resulting nuke fallout that that "arranged accident" could produce...oh, wait a minuite, didn't chernobell result from a cold war experiment gone wrong?
Here we go again, why are we having an argument about ISP's, we should be talking about how the whole current structure of what we pay for internet service is based upon some out-dated teleco pricing of internet access based upon demand models of 10 years ago!!!! We should be paying less and getting more bandwidth and times goes by... moor's law as applied to computer chip/technology growth should also apply to the cost of sending N number of bits down a given data distribution system...the explosion of growth we are experiencing in speed of computers and the ever lowering of cost of storage and the increased bandwith of the modems we use, imagine the speed in say 10 or 15 years, we probabbly will be using cheap fiber optic modems, will we be paying the same overpriced, outdated pricing structure we pay now? We had better be paying 100,000 times less in that future date or something in the universe is very very wrong...(same thing as Microsoft charging wayy too much for their crappy OS's, Go Linux!!!...(what we need is an equivallent of Cntl-Alt-Del for the teleco/cable/sat industry)
I guess the increased acidic rain, not only causing your local water supply to become more toxic (increased heavy metal content (like copper, which is toxic and mercury etc..), an article recently on the BBC's web site stated that the oceans are getting more acidic....okay, I guess that's going to really screw up the planet and make the earth uninhabital...and most of the twits in power are fussing about WMD?
Will never, ever buy microsoft stuff ever
on
United Linux Dead
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
In the long past, I have boughtt different versions of Microsoft OS's (the last one being win 98SE a long time ago), but microsoft's behaviour in that: 1)FUD concerning Linux and Open Source software and 2)MS's funding of SCO to cause all this grief is just too much...I will never buy a MS product again and I will recommend to everyone I know, all about MS dirty tricks. When I workded as an assembler at a small PC builder (14 years ago) you couldn't buy a PC without windows and intel on it, (it was basically considered illegal to do so), and most PC builders could lose their liscence and get procecuted by doing so, same when the CPU competition started to appear, the company I worked at (small PC builder) had contracts with intel and MS, and I accidentally used their address to send away for AMD chip info, needless to say, the company had a bird, because they told me, if Intel found out, Intel could cut them out (and mabey do worse) and they would be really screwed...when you are dealing with two 600 pound gorillas (intel and MS (back then)), you had to be aware of what you did and said.
Boy, does that patent sound stupid, my old monitor has a scroll wheel for monitor adjustments...press it to bring up adjustments screen, rotate to desired icon, press again to adjust, adjust, press again to select exit icon, press again to exit.
Also, what about 20 odd years ago when those big supercomputer cad consoles had those prgrammable panel of round knobs that could be programmed to adjust cad drawings (i assume)???? Is the patent office stupid...you shouuld check out the article on the register www.thregister.co.uk about the UK patent office changes to small co. patent law where the patent office (themselves) can now determin the outcome of disputes...
That's an excellent use for new space technology...we do need the capabillity of retrieving and fixing present and future space craft...the Hubble still has some life left in it and the upgraded instruments need to be installed, it's a good use for the international space station (fixing other spacecraft), besides, the replacement telescope lacks some of the instruments in the Hubble, so we would lose that capability... and the way future military "posing" by future superpowers (china, india), the scientific community probablly won't get any replacement telescopes for many decades because we are going to see the military/industrial complex (worlwide) waste trillions on massive space military arms races (and future wars) in the next 100 years.
It seems that the TV land herd mentality is at work again. Too many people accept the crap that is what you find on tv these days, which is put there to take up the space between what ammounts to thousands of continuous adds. (how many car chases/dumber that the dumbest last flavour of the month, tastless (non) comedy programs and lame talk shows can they produce (apparently, vast, vast amounts)). At least Enterprise is trying to produce a show that has a long term plot. Enterprise has produced some shows that have differnt plots from the rest of the star trech franchise...thats good, why should we pay attention to some mis-guided corporations that proabably couldn't market food to staving people (yes, our corporate foucus groups reports have determined that starving people need concrete not food). That sort of thinking cancelled Futurama and Farscape, star treck TNG plus lots of other shows...the entertainment magazines are just as bad, they exist primarilly to report conflict and upheavill, gossip etc.. if thing ran smoothly, they would not have anything to publish...I am not really amazed, it's very easy for people to be manipulated by the print and electronic media.
One way to use the internet more is to develop hopefully free uses (free voip) applications and applications where you can interface your windoz and linux boxes to all the other items in your house to the internet...it would be nice also, if people would complain that they can't have their machines serve as web servers themselves..doesn't the new internet standard do this?
Yes, of course EETimes is going to push articles that promote proprietory OS's from people who advertise in thier magazines, why else would corporate america not want to sell you stuff, the more high-quality software you can get for free, the less money corporate america can get for thier propriatary OS's (microsoft is an excellent example of what the rest of the corporate world can look forward to (ie: haveing to charge less, more realistic prices for their products,...they like to use the free tools (MS's hypocritical use of Linux is a good example), but they want you to buy thier software, not use free software).
The way telco and cable co's are now-a-days (here in canada, Telus ASDL has a 2 gig cap (?) on the monthly download total), I would be surprised if you could get away (in the future), with a lot of people downloading big games, (yes, games probablly will be terrabyte size and have really big AI engines and require massive data rate access to the inernet), the whole internet pricing structure will have to change (get a magnitude cheaper, more realistic charges for pushing bits around, better, cheaper fiber to the home, ultra miniature (nano-electronic/optical). The server technology will be built into the cables themselves, no more rack mounted ancient dinosaur tech (imagin if your computer was implemented with 70's tech, you'ed be sitting on a 25 million dollar cray machine trying to run doom 1 and windoze 3.1 with a crappy ega type interface and no sound), so future net tech will probablly just server on a small box on a pole somewhere). The only trouble will super advanced net tech (in the future) is the capability of super advanced net monitoring by future companies looking for p2p and copying, open source non-corporate (not MS or Disney controlled software, pc systems etc)
The basic science that hubble produces is important..countries that cannot stay the course (contunuity of long term science funding) cannot continue developing and will eventually surrender to other countries that are more progressive and can stay the course in funding of basic science and everything that derives from that. If mankind is to create fully operational space programs, we have to use new technologies like nanotech (which NASA is developing, amongst everybody else in the world). The simple fact that it is so expensive to get to space means that technologies like nano can eventually make space elevators possible and cheaply manufactured items like moon bases, truly re-generative (ageles, robotic assembles repairing cells) biotech, eventually specialized assemblers to crank out all our every-day items like houses, tv's computers, brain interfaces, true AI neural networks etc...everything we will need to survive in the future...too bad if these proposals are just cheap pollitical PR to get re-elected...what about NASA's SETI/astrobiological (contribution) programs..how will these announcements affect them?
Wthis all these payment systems, if you have no credit card, that's it..you can't use these systems...what abiut the future, when there will be pressure to add all sorts of extra charges for things like cross-border transactions etc..size of transactions etc time of day etc..
We must use nanotechnology to construct the spaceships, the supply vehicles, the lander sites (colonies etc.). otherwise, we will repeat the $very expensive$ trips we had to the moon in the early 70's. Advanced nanotechnology will let us basicly take our whole culture (lib of congress and the whole internet there and build (grow) evrything from scratch wehn we get there. Something that would have cost hundreds of billions to do now probablly will cost hundreds of millions and we can then have the programmable nanoech computer code to grow any other space colonies we want or orbiting space colonies/hotels. We should also by then have working neural networks that run on advanced nanoprocessors to get real evolutionary-induced neural nets that are cheap and powerfull
I remember 10 years ago I asked my local tlelphone co. about isdn and they said that 1)It was for business user (64k at like $1000us/month) and why would I want it...these tel companies have determined the current rate we pay for internet access (just prove to me the $/bit we currentlly pay for broadband was not based on old business models that came from 10 or so years ago). The simple thing is that ISP's equipment is gettin smaller (moors law), fiber speeds are getting faster, cpu's/memory/hard drives are following the same trend...even Tel co.'s are going to switch the phone system to internet packet switching, so they cannot tell me some arbitrairy "NORMAL" bandwith user is the norm and I must abide by this norm (while they make tons of money). A good example is 10 years ago in the provice of ontario in central canada when a small community owned cable company was selling cable services for about $2us/month when the artificiall high commercial companies (Shaw and Rogers) were charging $20+, these comapanies got the federal gov. to squash this and tell the community cable co. to raise it's rates to this $20+ figure. This sort of crap is what MS and these cable firms want us to believe it costs them to provide these serveces...so here we are in 2004 with all these companies saying that we have to pay all this $ for services which should be getting cheaper, not more $....???
Stem cell research is going to be the most important research this century and to limit it for idealogical (religion) is about about as stupid as thinking the earth is flat. One of the biggest problems with health (as you get older), is the problem of certain cells to have the ability to regerate. Once we have mastered the technology to generate stem cells on demand, then things like spinal-cord injuries will be easy to repair, or when you lose a limb to an accident, you could get a new one make and attached or grown-in-place. A bunch if idealogical zellots are not going to derail this technological advancement.
It's about time. lets use nanotechnology to get there faster, cheaper and better. It would also be good for those nasty times when solar flares could make life miserable on the moons surface and you need to get all your biologics put back together from all that radiation damage.
I have worked at home, (with my parents and brother, we had the same company), it can lead to your company life taking over your whole social life, and if things are rough, it can be like a living hell. There is a saying that working for a family run company can be like working in hell, this is true...as problems happen, people can get really pissed-off with each other...working at a company with "strangers" means that you have to be at least proffessional and civl to each other. I have also worked a my cousins firm...that was okay as they had their owm offices/warehouse/manufacturing, but they tended to expect more because I was "family" and expected a lot of free stuff like I was a partner in the firm without the equivalent reward (I did like working there, I just wish it had paid more). I do agree that working for your self means that you can get lazy and out-of-touch with the real world..you have to be diciplined (not me, I'm afraid) to keep it together...also, a big important thing about working at a company is that you get to bounce ideas off your co-workers, likewise, they can suggest ideas to you which is important (or point out how much your latest great brain-wave is nuts). This is important in any creative endevour like high-tech where ideas drive that industry. Another important item is that humans are social animals, most of us go stir-crazy in isolation...
Mayby someday when we have workable nanotech assemblers and a whole host of compile tools etc, we will get a truly down-loadable hardware culture. It would be nice to do away with the Intels of the world and "grow" your next PC. It may even be a better society were people don't know the meaning of material greed and control, driven by a materialistic based culture that rewards "how you play the game" (sales and power control trips) rather than "its more interesting to develop and invent new stuff"
Perhaps a combined international mission where all parties contribute (after all, everybody benefits from the research of hubble). In the long term (20 to 30 years), china is going to space anyway, might as well service the telescope. Look at the long term..50 years from now, china and india are going to be the new superpowers on the block where all the cutting-edge nanotechnologies are going to be developed, because they simply have the most population of this planet. All they need is a large manufacturing base (made in china?) and high-tech sector, and since both of these countries are racing to develop those sectores, the west and the EU doesn't stand a chance in the long term. One thing that really bugs me is that, here in the west, we throw away perfectly good equipment all the time, or alternativly, we desing products (like the hubble), to be not easily servicable. Perhaps developing robotic remote-servicing (telerobotics) robots for the hubble may be the way to go if you don't want the cost of sending a person up there.
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The solution is to simply coat the glass envelope of the compact bulb with a clear/flexible plastic coating (just like the flourescent bulb manufacturers do with some commercial 8-foot tubes), so that if you drop it and it breaks, then the mercury does not escape. Then all you have to do is make a manditory recycle program for all flourescent tubes. (there is a company here in bc canada that recycles tubes, but its not manditory, but is should be because mercury is very toxic). Greenpeace uk says that about half of the manufacturers in Europe are coating bulbs..
I hope that with the coming breakthroughs in cheaper fiber optic/scilicon chips, we can finally get really fast/cheap internet access (with fiber into the house) at realistic rates...(no more 2 gig(or inthe case of Telus here in canada) what, 5 gigs a month data caps?)????????? One can only hope....
That buzzing you hear when you stand near those big high-voltage towers is the coronal discharge eminating from the wires..it's obvious that when you are standing near these big power lines that you are in an electric field and that we are not evolved to handle these eviroments...it's probably better to keep as far away from these power transmissions systems as possible. I remember that 20 odd years ago some people theorized that the 60Hz (50Hz in europe) frequency affected internal cellular signaling systems (ion channels) in animal cells..it's common sense to avoid being exposed to uneeded electromagnetic fields of any sort. Example: being lazy and opening a microwave when it's running, sure, the door switch will eventually work (it may not), but that initial dose you get will cause early cateracts in your eyes...
When I worked at a local high-tech company here in canada (many years ago), they made the fisrt computerized taximeters and the owner had world-wide patents, naturally, the hiring contract stated that anything you invented automaticaly became thier property (I needed the job, who wants to work at a Mcjob, so I signed), so yeah, it's natural for these bastards to want to glomm onto any free stuff they can. Thats how the nature of the IP system was invented from back in the days of Edison and IBM, I think that the current mess in IP land is just a natural evolution of this process.
Who knows what else went on during the cold war, after all, once countries start to enable "big systems failiures" in other countries, perhaps there are all sorts of time bombs waiting out there (chips/software in Nukes)...I can't wait until some current and future nuclear millitary power accidentally causes an explosion which could lead to a small nuclear war somewhere on the planet...I can't wait to end up breathing the resulting nuke fallout that that "arranged accident" could produce...oh, wait a minuite, didn't chernobell result from a cold war experiment gone wrong?
Here we go again, why are we having an argument about ISP's, we should be talking about how the whole current structure of what we pay for internet service is based upon some out-dated teleco pricing of internet access based upon demand models of 10 years ago!!!! We should be paying less and getting more bandwidth and times goes by... moor's law as applied to computer chip/technology growth should also apply to the cost of sending N number of bits down a given data distribution system...the explosion of growth we are experiencing in speed of computers and the ever lowering of cost of storage and the increased bandwith of the modems we use, imagine the speed in say 10 or 15 years, we probabbly will be using cheap fiber optic modems, will we be paying the same overpriced, outdated pricing structure we pay now? We had better be paying 100,000 times less in that future date or something in the universe is very very wrong...(same thing as Microsoft charging wayy too much for their crappy OS's, Go Linux!!!...(what we need is an equivallent of Cntl-Alt-Del for the teleco/cable/sat industry)
I guess the increased acidic rain, not only causing your local water supply to become more toxic (increased heavy metal content (like copper, which is toxic and mercury etc..), an article recently on the BBC's web site stated that the oceans are getting more acidic....okay, I guess that's going to really screw up the planet and make the earth uninhabital...and most of the twits in power are fussing about WMD?
In the long past, I have boughtt different versions of Microsoft OS's (the last one being win 98SE a long time ago), but microsoft's behaviour in that: 1)FUD concerning Linux and Open Source software and 2)MS's funding of SCO to cause all this grief is just too much...I will never buy a MS product again and I will recommend to everyone I know, all about MS dirty tricks. When I workded as an assembler at a small PC builder (14 years ago) you couldn't buy a PC without windows and intel on it, (it was basically considered illegal to do so), and most PC builders could lose their liscence and get procecuted by doing so, same when the CPU competition started to appear, the company I worked at (small PC builder) had contracts with intel and MS, and I accidentally used their address to send away for AMD chip info, needless to say, the company had a bird, because they told me, if Intel found out, Intel could cut them out (and mabey do worse) and they would be really screwed...when you are dealing with two 600 pound gorillas (intel and MS (back then)), you had to be aware of what you did and said.
"Brrrr, "I am...," ..(oops, sorry), "Brrr, We are not crooks"
Boy, does that patent sound stupid, my old monitor has a scroll wheel for monitor adjustments...press it to bring up adjustments screen, rotate to desired icon, press again to adjust, adjust, press again to select exit icon, press again to exit. Also, what about 20 odd years ago when those big supercomputer cad consoles had those prgrammable panel of round knobs that could be programmed to adjust cad drawings (i assume)???? Is the patent office stupid...you shouuld check out the article on the register www.thregister.co.uk about the UK patent office changes to small co. patent law where the patent office (themselves) can now determin the outcome of disputes...
That's an excellent use for new space technology...we do need the capabillity of retrieving and fixing present and future space craft...the Hubble still has some life left in it and the upgraded instruments need to be installed, it's a good use for the international space station (fixing other spacecraft), besides, the replacement telescope lacks some of the instruments in the Hubble, so we would lose that capability... and the way future military "posing" by future superpowers (china, india), the scientific community probablly won't get any replacement telescopes for many decades because we are going to see the military/industrial complex (worlwide) waste trillions on massive space military arms races (and future wars) in the next 100 years.
It seems that the TV land herd mentality is at work again. Too many people accept the crap that is what you find on tv these days, which is put there to take up the space between what ammounts to thousands of continuous adds. (how many car chases/dumber that the dumbest last flavour of the month, tastless (non) comedy programs and lame talk shows can they produce (apparently, vast, vast amounts)). At least Enterprise is trying to produce a show that has a long term plot. Enterprise has produced some shows that have differnt plots from the rest of the star trech franchise...thats good, why should we pay attention to some mis-guided corporations that proabably couldn't market food to staving people (yes, our corporate foucus groups reports have determined that starving people need concrete not food). That sort of thinking cancelled Futurama and Farscape, star treck TNG plus lots of other shows...the entertainment magazines are just as bad, they exist primarilly to report conflict and upheavill, gossip etc.. if thing ran smoothly, they would not have anything to publish...I am not really amazed, it's very easy for people to be manipulated by the print and electronic media.
One way to use the internet more is to develop hopefully free uses (free voip) applications and applications where you can interface your windoz and linux boxes to all the other items in your house to the internet...it would be nice also, if people would complain that they can't have their machines serve as web servers themselves..doesn't the new internet standard do this?
Yes, of course EETimes is going to push articles that promote proprietory OS's from people who advertise in thier magazines, why else would corporate america not want to sell you stuff, the more high-quality software you can get for free, the less money corporate america can get for thier propriatary OS's (microsoft is an excellent example of what the rest of the corporate world can look forward to (ie: haveing to charge less, more realistic prices for their products,...they like to use the free tools (MS's hypocritical use of Linux is a good example), but they want you to buy thier software, not use free software).
The way telco and cable co's are now-a-days (here in canada, Telus ASDL has a 2 gig cap (?) on the monthly download total), I would be surprised if you could get away (in the future), with a lot of people downloading big games, (yes, games probablly will be terrabyte size and have really big AI engines and require massive data rate access to the inernet), the whole internet pricing structure will have to change (get a magnitude cheaper, more realistic charges for pushing bits around, better, cheaper fiber to the home, ultra miniature (nano-electronic/optical). The server technology will be built into the cables themselves, no more rack mounted ancient dinosaur tech (imagin if your computer was implemented with 70's tech, you'ed be sitting on a 25 million dollar cray machine trying to run doom 1 and windoze 3.1 with a crappy ega type interface and no sound), so future net tech will probablly just server on a small box on a pole somewhere). The only trouble will super advanced net tech (in the future) is the capability of super advanced net monitoring by future companies looking for p2p and copying, open source non-corporate (not MS or Disney controlled software, pc systems etc)
The basic science that hubble produces is important..countries that cannot stay the course (contunuity of long term science funding) cannot continue developing and will eventually surrender to other countries that are more progressive and can stay the course in funding of basic science and everything that derives from that. If mankind is to create fully operational space programs, we have to use new technologies like nanotech (which NASA is developing, amongst everybody else in the world). The simple fact that it is so expensive to get to space means that technologies like nano can eventually make space elevators possible and cheaply manufactured items like moon bases, truly re-generative (ageles, robotic assembles repairing cells) biotech, eventually specialized assemblers to crank out all our every-day items like houses, tv's computers, brain interfaces, true AI neural networks etc...everything we will need to survive in the future...too bad if these proposals are just cheap pollitical PR to get re-elected...what about NASA's SETI/astrobiological (contribution) programs..how will these announcements affect them?
Wthis all these payment systems, if you have no credit card, that's it..you can't use these systems...what abiut the future, when there will be pressure to add all sorts of extra charges for things like cross-border transactions etc..size of transactions etc time of day etc..
Do it, and make sure the map shows the data cap rate (if any) and make a service complaint index too..
We must use nanotechnology to construct the spaceships, the supply vehicles, the lander sites (colonies etc.). otherwise, we will repeat the $very expensive$ trips we had to the moon in the early 70's. Advanced nanotechnology will let us basicly take our whole culture (lib of congress and the whole internet there and build (grow) evrything from scratch wehn we get there. Something that would have cost hundreds of billions to do now probablly will cost hundreds of millions and we can then have the programmable nanoech computer code to grow any other space colonies we want or orbiting space colonies/hotels. We should also by then have working neural networks that run on advanced nanoprocessors to get real evolutionary-induced neural nets that are cheap and powerfull
I remember 10 years ago I asked my local tlelphone co. about isdn and they said that 1)It was for business user (64k at like $1000us/month) and why would I want it...these tel companies have determined the current rate we pay for internet access (just prove to me the $/bit we currentlly pay for broadband was not based on old business models that came from 10 or so years ago). The simple thing is that ISP's equipment is gettin smaller (moors law), fiber speeds are getting faster, cpu's/memory/hard drives are following the same trend...even Tel co.'s are going to switch the phone system to internet packet switching, so they cannot tell me some arbitrairy "NORMAL" bandwith user is the norm and I must abide by this norm (while they make tons of money). A good example is 10 years ago in the provice of ontario in central canada when a small community owned cable company was selling cable services for about $2us/month when the artificiall high commercial companies (Shaw and Rogers) were charging $20+, these comapanies got the federal gov. to squash this and tell the community cable co. to raise it's rates to this $20+ figure. This sort of crap is what MS and these cable firms want us to believe it costs them to provide these serveces...so here we are in 2004 with all these companies saying that we have to pay all this $ for services which should be getting cheaper, not more $....???
Stem cell research is going to be the most important research this century and to limit it for idealogical (religion) is about about as stupid as thinking the earth is flat. One of the biggest problems with health (as you get older), is the problem of certain cells to have the ability to regerate. Once we have mastered the technology to generate stem cells on demand, then things like spinal-cord injuries will be easy to repair, or when you lose a limb to an accident, you could get a new one make and attached or grown-in-place. A bunch if idealogical zellots are not going to derail this technological advancement.
It's about time. lets use nanotechnology to get there faster, cheaper and better. It would also be good for those nasty times when solar flares could make life miserable on the moons surface and you need to get all your biologics put back together from all that radiation damage.
I have worked at home, (with my parents and brother, we had the same company), it can lead to your company life taking over your whole social life, and if things are rough, it can be like a living hell. There is a saying that working for a family run company can be like working in hell, this is true...as problems happen, people can get really pissed-off with each other...working at a company with "strangers" means that you have to be at least proffessional and civl to each other. I have also worked a my cousins firm...that was okay as they had their owm offices/warehouse/manufacturing, but they tended to expect more because I was "family" and expected a lot of free stuff like I was a partner in the firm without the equivalent reward (I did like working there, I just wish it had paid more). I do agree that working for your self means that you can get lazy and out-of-touch with the real world..you have to be diciplined (not me, I'm afraid) to keep it together...also, a big important thing about working at a company is that you get to bounce ideas off your co-workers, likewise, they can suggest ideas to you which is important (or point out how much your latest great brain-wave is nuts). This is important in any creative endevour like high-tech where ideas drive that industry. Another important item is that humans are social animals, most of us go stir-crazy in isolation...
Mayby someday when we have workable nanotech assemblers and a whole host of compile tools etc, we will get a truly down-loadable hardware culture. It would be nice to do away with the Intels of the world and "grow" your next PC. It may even be a better society were people don't know the meaning of material greed and control, driven by a materialistic based culture that rewards "how you play the game" (sales and power control trips) rather than "its more interesting to develop and invent new stuff"
Perhaps a combined international mission where all parties contribute (after all, everybody benefits from the research of hubble). In the long term (20 to 30 years), china is going to space anyway, might as well service the telescope. Look at the long term..50 years from now, china and india are going to be the new superpowers on the block where all the cutting-edge nanotechnologies are going to be developed, because they simply have the most population of this planet. All they need is a large manufacturing base (made in china?) and high-tech sector, and since both of these countries are racing to develop those sectores, the west and the EU doesn't stand a chance in the long term. One thing that really bugs me is that, here in the west, we throw away perfectly good equipment all the time, or alternativly, we desing products (like the hubble), to be not easily servicable. Perhaps developing robotic remote-servicing (telerobotics) robots for the hubble may be the way to go if you don't want the cost of sending a person up there.