While the parent post is disturbing, I will respond regarding this post. Sub-sonic ammo with silencers take care of most of that problem with traditional guns, while coil guns are tunable with the desired weight and size of the projectile used in them to keep the round sub-sonic
Of course it is possible to keep the bullet subsonic, but then your weapon is pretty useless as a sniper rifle.
There are very active research programs going on in a number of defense groups concerning rail guns at all scales from personal defense to large scale cannons.
Yes, and of these I think the cannon are promising but the personal not. For example, by putting the this into artillery on an aircraft carrier you can shoot further and more accurately and you get power from the nuclear plant.
But for a personal weapon, you have just exchanged a small case of gunpowder for a big battery, and you have gained...what? Not range and accuracy; these are limited by the markmanship of the user and not by the speed of the bullet.
I think there will be quite some time before we get Gauss handguns. In terms of energy content, batteries are much more cumbersome than gunpowder.
Artillery is another matter, the next generation carriers (in 10-15 years) are planned to be equipped with Gauss cannon, with superior range and accuracy. Then of course you have the energy from a nuclear power plant.
Couldn't the same thing be achived by simply not driving in the ruts?
The engineering practice of only measuring differences from a starting position is dangerous because in the way errors build up. For example, if your 'route recorder' makes a 2 inch error every time the tractor turns around for a new run, these errors add up so that the at the end of the day your robot tractor may be a couple of feet outside of the field. In other words, you have no control of where you are, other than a long series of measured differences from a starting position.
Also now you have the labor-intensive step of driving around across the field, rather than letting the computer lay perfectly spaced tracks.
This seems very cool and everything but I wonder how "automatic" these are and do they have any collision detection. I can't help but picture the tractor going along, hitting a kangeroo and then all hell break loose.
And hitting a kangaroo is of course impossible with a human driver?
Even at Slashdot the demand for security in new technology seems to be 100%. The much more reasonable standard is to demand of new technology that it demands on par with humans. I bet a relatively simple motion detector could do the job of stopping if something unexpected shows up. At least to the point where they are as likely to stop as humans, which can perform relatively poorly when pulling long hours of monotonous work.
But maybe I hold warmongers to too high of a standard? Ya know, thinking the onus should be on them to justify their actions, inisting they be truthfull in their assertions and even to back them up.
Yes, I think you do hold them to too high standards. It would be fantastic if we would always have perfect information and always can back up everything. But we live in a world of uncertainty. Leaders have to make decisions anyway. Hard decisions, like going to war or not going to war. In the case of Iraq, many predictions turned out to be false: for example the claims of uranium purchases or the ones about millions of civilian deaths. I agree with the telling the truth part, but I don't think either side in the Iraq debate has been lying outright, they have just made different assessments based on incomplete information.
I don't think leading the troops is too much to ask. Afterall, How can you give an order that would cause people to die if your not willing and ready to be counted among the dead?
Again, I disagree. It is just that warfare has changed quite a bit since the old days. No longer do you take everyone to a big field, and the side with the more people and the better morale wins the day (in which case it makes perfect sense for the top guy to sit on a horse furthest ahead).
Having the top general on the front line is romantic but not efficient. He does more good in an airconditioned command center. This is in the interest of the grunts as well, unless they prioritize the general's unsafety over their own safety. The Iraqi generals did often follow their men to the front line. It did not do their men much good.
You might have wondered why B-wings are called B-wings, they certainly don't look like a B...
Well, aparently they developed two new prototypes for George Lucas to take a look at, and they called one A and one B. They realized that the A model actually looked like an A, so A-wing felt very natural.
Whne George picked both, the B sort of stuck to the other one also.
DirecTV is suing anyone known to have purchased a smartcard programmer, regardless of whether or not they're actually using the device to enable stealing their programming.
Many will probably settle out of court.
Of the remainder, they may not win the suit if somebody has not used the equipment and can prove this. I guess in this case it is not "beyond reasonable doubt" but rather which side has the more compelling evidence. I can be argued that most people taht buy decoders use them, thus if you haven't you need some sort of evidence to back up your claim.
After a while there might emerge a pattern which makes it clear that most people that actually go to court win (or lose).
Read "The Economics of Empire" in the May Harper's. Excellent piece.
How about instead reading some mainstream books on basic ecomomy as understood by our foremost economists and as taught by universities all over the world.
Then you would learn the extreme benefits that trade have brought to everyone. You would learn how the nations that have pursued trade are prosperous, and those who have not impoverished.
can be reversed with rational policies that foster local investment at the expense of unchecked corporate profits
If it really were true that all free trade lead to was extreme profits for the few and lower wages for the many then I would totally agree with your conclusion. But if you look around you will find that wages all over the world are steadingly increasing, and corporate proifts are constant or falling. The reason that profits are not generally increasing is that international business is extremely competitive; savings are passed on to the consumer.
It happened to textile workers long ago. It's happening to us now.
Yes, and this development has been good. It has not caused mass unemployment. It has not caused extreme profits or uneven distribution of wealth. If you read economic history you will see that current unemployment is historically typical, that profits are typical or low - the only thing that is changing is ever increasing living standards. I am very glad that people like you were not successful in destroying all the Spinning Jenny's and stop economic development.
Hey I realize that this is a tough sell among American IT workers. My message is this:
if you want to keep coding and make twice as much as the guy in India, you better learn the latest tools and techniques and be twice as productive. Americans have done this many times before. That is why our standards of living is higher than almost anywhere else.
Trying to prevent the guy in India from coding for half the price is futile. We know from history what happens if you try - it just leads to economic misery for everyone.
A closer look at the webcast rates shows that it charges.07 cents per song per listener. For the math challenged, if you have 100,000 listeners, you pay 70 cents per song.
For the not math challenged, you pay $70 per song.
Maybe some fancy gravity trickery... deaccelerate as a star's gravity starts to whip you around. Other than that, I don't see how you could do it
Well, it was widely believed to be impossible. When there is no friction you can always invert the trip - in other words if such trickery were possible it could be used to accelerate you in the first place.
Actually you can do a little bit of this in three body systems (e.g., sun, planet, craft); perhaps you have heard of sling-shot manouvers. But again, they are equally useful for accelerating as for deaccelerating.
However, recently they have started use the technology of aero-breaking. The idea is to dip into the athmosphere and friction will slow you down. This is being used by the robots going to Mars, but could in principle be used for much higher speeds by ships going to other solar systems.
All in all though, I don't think much of these sails. There may be niche applications near the sun but for most trips there are more realistic alternatives. Especially for long trips the only viable option is to go nuclear (or anti-matter). There simply isn't enough juice coming from the sun at the outer solar system and beyond.
Maybe to provide an excuse to invade yet another country?
Except it is a relatively easy matter to figure out exactly where the transmissions came from - thus if it came from G. Bay and not from a Soviet-built site outside Havanna then everybody could tell that that was the case.
Look, I am not a big fan of everything what the US government does either. But I just don't understand when people get so bitter that they are willing to speak in favor of regimes that by all acounts are 100 times worse (like Cuba, Iran).
worse, send a really powerful signal (read- military radar magnetron hooked up to mondo dish) and you can permanently fry that transponder,
Of course, even if this were possible it wouldn't really be an option for the Cuban-Iranians. It is one thing jamming a transmission; it is quite another destroying a satellite from a foreign country - even a commercial one.
The US could respond in kind with a missile on the source.
BTW, what are the legal implications of just jamming... are there any international treaties that apply...? Of course the Iranians may feel that they are doing exactly what their expatriots are doing - transmitting something that annoys the other party. Personally I see a difference in jamming somebody else's equipment and sending signals in previously unused (?) spectrums.
three sources associated with the broadcast services confirmed that Loral Skynet, the operator of the Telstar-12 satellite used by the broadcasters, had determined the jamming was probably emanating from "the vicinity of Havana, Cuba."
One of the sources said that Loral, working with transmitter location expert TLS Inc. of Chantilly, Va., had further fixed the location as "20 miles outside of Havana." Cuba's main electronic eavesdropping base, at Bejucal, is about 20 miles outside of the Cuban capital. The base, built for Cuba by the Russians in the early 1990's, monitors and intercepts satellite communications.
5, Interesting, eh? More like 0, Stupid. The broadcasts are done by regime-critical expatriots in the US. Why would the US jam anti-iraninan broadcasts based on its own soil?
The idea of having programs evolve and fight each other for computational resources is not new. It has been used for 5-10 years in Avida, software used in evolutionary research.
The approach has been very successful, resulting in a better understanding of complicated topics such as the evolution of complex organs.
Let me ask you this. Who in Cuba has easy access to the kind of technology required to do this, and has a motive? Go to Cuba and take a look around, the Cubans have nothing, and they have no reason to jam Iranian satellites.
I would guess that that signal came from the maniacs at Guantanamo Bay. It's not like they have a particularly good record to begin with: torture, holding prisonners illegally, surrounding themselves with the biggest minefield in the western hemisphere.
Please RTFA. The satellite transmissions are pro-student, anti-iranian-government programs based in the USA. The US is publically and privately lauding these transmissions and voicing their support for the student movement.
You conspiracy theorists are really funny, but this really takes the cake. So the US decided to take out the anti-iranian broadcasts based on its own soil, and it did so by taking jammers to a remote prison camp.
If you had RTFA you would have also learned that the technology to do this is very simple - well within reach of the Cuban government.
No, my original point still holds. The few remaining extremely totalitarian states are holding each others hands - it is the only support they can find.
This is indicative of the moral bancrupcy of these regimes.
Their supposed ideologies are the very opposite. This makes it clear to everyone that they are really the same. They rally around the flag of protecting the dictators, and supressing free speech. That is the true essence of their ideologies.
I agree, and would like to mention one more benefit of rail guns.
The typical inaccuracy of a traditional 30-mile shell is a couple of hundred yards. The greatest contributor to this is uncertainty of the exact velocity of the shell when it leaves the gun - there are always slight variations in the amount, composition, and temperature of the gun-powder, and the weight of the shell.
In principle, you can dynamically regulate the exact velocity with a rail gun, thus getting a much accurate shot.
I don't know about the GPS-guided shells though; these certainly aren't used in large scale. It sounds very expensive. After all, one of the main points with artillery is that it is so much cheaper than guided missiles.
So it is a good thing to be a virgin.
Time to go back to the high school jocks and teach 'em who was right afterall.
They thought I couldn't get sex.... I was simply trying to maintain my genius.
Woah. Nobody said there was anything bad about having sex... it can be inspirational.
And nobody said that family was bad for other activities than discoveries. Maybe the jocks are successful pointed-hair-bosses and football players.
We are beginning to see the uses of directed energy weapons; you might remember the slashdot story of an artillery shell shot down with a laser.
The first ship of the next generation is expected to hit the seas in 2014 (I did RTFA). The basic design will probably stay the same for another 25-50 years (Nimitz did) after that.
Now is the time to design the underlying infrastructure to be prepared to quickly install the latest laser cannon in 2037.
However, it is not immediately clear to me why it is preferable to accelerate the ships with EM catapults. Remember, the electricity is generated by pushing steam through a turbin - it is seems likely that using the expanding steam directly is more efficient... maybe I missed something.
Ah yes.... in the time you read this posting, a thousand children died from not having clean water. Think about where we are spending our money!
I read this in about 3 seconds. That would indicate that about a million kids die from bad water every hour, and 1.5 billion -all the children in the world - die from poor water every year. You just made that up, didn't you?
As much as I would also like to see better living conditions in the third world, it appears to me (and most economists who have studied the problem) that what they need the most is not piles of money coming from the US and Europe.
It is not at all the case that the developing countries that get the most money also develop the fastest. Rather, it seems like those who successfully allow for greater economic freedom and fight corruption do the best in improving living conditions.
To help people in the third world we would thus do best to encourage that sort of development in their governments. This can be done with a carrot and a stick. USS Reagan is a stick.
Another interesting aspect of this is security. In one of Gibson's novels, Mona Lisa Overdrive(?), bicycle couriers do good business physically transporting discs from one place to another.
The idea is that if you transmit something over the internet, you can never feel quite sure that no-one else managed to get a hold of your data.
There is an ironic sense of security in having a person physically move the data on discs.
Throwing together a quick app convert some data from one format to another, for one time use, is very different from building mission critical applications.
Yes, but it is amazing how often the one-time-use data conversion app evolves into something mission critical used all the time.
My answer to this is that doing solid foundation work almost always pays off. However, a lot of developers have a tendency to want to add extra features and functionality that is cool and interesting. In this sense the market-bots are sometimes right; one must ask what features really make business sense.
Slashdot Mirror
mention something covered in a howstuffworks article and sudenly every geek is an expert on gun silencers
:)
I served in the Swedish artillery, so I actually know my stuff.
Tor
While the parent post is disturbing, I will respond regarding this post. Sub-sonic ammo with silencers take care of most of that problem with traditional guns, while coil guns are tunable with the desired weight and size of the projectile used in them to keep the round sub-sonic
Of course it is possible to keep the bullet subsonic, but then your weapon is pretty useless as a sniper rifle.
There are very active research programs going on in a number of defense groups concerning rail guns at all scales from personal defense to large scale cannons.
Yes, and of these I think the cannon are promising but the personal not. For example, by putting the this into artillery on an aircraft carrier you can shoot further and more accurately and you get power from the nuclear plant.
But for a personal weapon, you have just exchanged a small case of gunpowder for a big battery, and you have gained...what? Not range and accuracy; these are limited by the markmanship of the user and not by the speed of the bullet.
Tor
I think there will be quite some time before we get Gauss handguns. In terms of energy content, batteries are much more cumbersome than gunpowder.
Artillery is another matter, the next generation carriers (in 10-15 years) are planned to be equipped with Gauss cannon, with superior range and accuracy. Then of course you have the energy from a nuclear power plant.
Tor
No sound! Niiiiiice. Ramp up the power a bit more and you have the perfect sniper gun
Except for the fact that the bullet (~1000m/s in most rifles) will break the sound barrier (~340 m/s).
Tor
Or by having a robot eye follow a white line.
...painted directly on the ground -> Easily washes away and is impossible to see when the crops are grown.
...Laid out on top of the crops each season -> wasn't the whole point of this to save labor by not having to drive around the field every year?
Which is...
Tor
Couldn't the same thing be achived by simply not driving in the ruts?
The engineering practice of only measuring differences from a starting position is dangerous because in the way errors build up. For example, if your 'route recorder' makes a 2 inch error every time the tractor turns around for a new run, these errors add up so that the at the end of the day your robot tractor may be a couple of feet outside of the field. In other words, you have no control of where you are, other than a long series of measured differences from a starting position.
Also now you have the labor-intensive step of driving around across the field, rather than letting the computer lay perfectly spaced tracks.
Tor
This seems very cool and everything but I wonder how "automatic" these are and do they have any collision detection. I can't help but picture the tractor going along, hitting a kangeroo and then all hell break loose.
And hitting a kangaroo is of course impossible with a human driver?
Even at Slashdot the demand for security in new technology seems to be 100%. The much more reasonable standard is to demand of new technology that it demands on par with humans. I bet a relatively simple motion detector could do the job of stopping if something unexpected shows up. At least to the point where they are as likely to stop as humans, which can perform relatively poorly when pulling long hours of monotonous work.
Tor
But maybe I hold warmongers to too high of a standard? Ya know, thinking the onus should be on them to justify their actions, inisting they be truthfull in their assertions and even to back them up.
Yes, I think you do hold them to too high standards. It would be fantastic if we would always have perfect information and always can back up everything. But we live in a world of uncertainty. Leaders have to make decisions anyway. Hard decisions, like going to war or not going to war. In the case of Iraq, many predictions turned out to be false: for example the claims of uranium purchases or the ones about millions of civilian deaths. I agree with the telling the truth part, but I don't think either side in the Iraq debate has been lying outright, they have just made different assessments based on incomplete information.
I don't think leading the troops is too much to ask. Afterall, How can you give an order that would cause people to die if your not willing and ready to be counted among the dead?
Again, I disagree. It is just that warfare has changed quite a bit since the old days. No longer do you take everyone to a big field, and the side with the more people and the better morale wins the day (in which case it makes perfect sense for the top guy to sit on a horse furthest ahead).
Having the top general on the front line is romantic but not efficient. He does more good in an airconditioned command center. This is in the interest of the grunts as well, unless they prioritize the general's unsafety over their own safety. The Iraqi generals did often follow their men to the front line. It did not do their men much good.
Tor
You might have wondered why B-wings are called B-wings, they certainly don't look like a B...
Well, aparently they developed two new prototypes for George Lucas to take a look at, and they called one A and one B. They realized that the A model actually looked like an A, so A-wing felt very natural.
Whne George picked both, the B sort of stuck to the other one also.
Tor
DirecTV is suing anyone known to have purchased a smartcard programmer, regardless of whether or not they're actually using the device to enable stealing their programming.
Many will probably settle out of court.
Of the remainder, they may not win the suit if somebody has not used the equipment and can prove this. I guess in this case it is not "beyond reasonable doubt" but rather which side has the more compelling evidence. I can be argued that most people taht buy decoders use them, thus if you haven't you need some sort of evidence to back up your claim.
After a while there might emerge a pattern which makes it clear that most people that actually go to court win (or lose).
Tor
Read "The Economics of Empire" in the May Harper's. Excellent piece.
How about instead reading some mainstream books on basic ecomomy as understood by our foremost economists and as taught by universities all over the world.
Then you would learn the extreme benefits that trade have brought to everyone. You would learn how the nations that have pursued trade are prosperous, and those who have not impoverished.
can be reversed with rational policies that foster local investment at the expense of unchecked corporate profits
If it really were true that all free trade lead to was extreme profits for the few and lower wages for the many then I would totally agree with your conclusion. But if you look around you will find that wages all over the world are steadingly increasing, and corporate proifts are constant or falling. The reason that profits are not generally increasing is that international business is extremely competitive; savings are passed on to the consumer.
It happened to textile workers long ago. It's happening to us now.
Yes, and this development has been good. It has not caused mass unemployment. It has not caused extreme profits or uneven distribution of wealth. If you read economic history you will see that current unemployment is historically typical, that profits are typical or low - the only thing that is changing is ever increasing living standards. I am very glad that people like you were not successful in destroying all the Spinning Jenny's and stop economic development.
Hey I realize that this is a tough sell among American IT workers. My message is this: if you want to keep coding and make twice as much as the guy in India, you better learn the latest tools and techniques and be twice as productive. Americans have done this many times before. That is why our standards of living is higher than almost anywhere else.
Trying to prevent the guy in India from coding for half the price is futile. We know from history what happens if you try - it just leads to economic misery for everyone.
Tor
From the article:
.07 cents per song per listener. For the math challenged, if you have 100,000 listeners, you pay 70 cents per song.
A closer look at the webcast rates shows that it charges
For the not math challenged, you pay $70 per song.
Tor
Maybe some fancy gravity trickery... deaccelerate as a star's gravity starts to whip you around. Other than that, I don't see how you could do it
Well, it was widely believed to be impossible. When there is no friction you can always invert the trip - in other words if such trickery were possible it could be used to accelerate you in the first place.
Actually you can do a little bit of this in three body systems (e.g., sun, planet, craft); perhaps you have heard of sling-shot manouvers. But again, they are equally useful for accelerating as for deaccelerating.
However, recently they have started use the technology of aero-breaking. The idea is to dip into the athmosphere and friction will slow you down. This is being used by the robots going to Mars, but could in principle be used for much higher speeds by ships going to other solar systems.
All in all though, I don't think much of these sails. There may be niche applications near the sun but for most trips there are more realistic alternatives. Especially for long trips the only viable option is to go nuclear (or anti-matter). There simply isn't enough juice coming from the sun at the outer solar system and beyond.
Tor
Maybe to provide an excuse to invade yet another country?
Except it is a relatively easy matter to figure out exactly where the transmissions came from - thus if it came from G. Bay and not from a Soviet-built site outside Havanna then everybody could tell that that was the case.
Look, I am not a big fan of everything what the US government does either. But I just don't understand when people get so bitter that they are willing to speak in favor of regimes that by all acounts are 100 times worse (like Cuba, Iran).
Tor
worse, send a really powerful signal (read- military radar magnetron hooked up to mondo dish) and you can permanently fry that transponder,
Of course, even if this were possible it wouldn't really be an option for the Cuban-Iranians. It is one thing jamming a transmission; it is quite another destroying a satellite from a foreign country - even a commercial one.
The US could respond in kind with a missile on the source.
BTW, what are the legal implications of just jamming... are there any international treaties that apply...? Of course the Iranians may feel that they are doing exactly what their expatriots are doing - transmitting something that annoys the other party. Personally I see a difference in jamming somebody else's equipment and sending signals in previously unused (?) spectrums.
Tor
From the article:
three sources associated with the broadcast services confirmed that Loral Skynet, the operator of the Telstar-12 satellite used by the broadcasters, had determined the jamming was probably emanating from "the vicinity of Havana, Cuba."
One of the sources said that Loral, working with transmitter location expert TLS Inc. of Chantilly, Va., had further fixed the location as "20 miles outside of Havana." Cuba's main electronic eavesdropping base, at Bejucal, is about 20 miles outside of the Cuban capital. The base, built for Cuba by the Russians in the early 1990's, monitors and intercepts satellite communications.
5, Interesting, eh? More like 0, Stupid. The broadcasts are done by regime-critical expatriots in the US. Why would the US jam anti-iraninan broadcasts based on its own soil?
Tor
The idea of having programs evolve and fight each other for computational resources is not new. It has been used for 5-10 years in Avida, software used in evolutionary research.
The approach has been very successful, resulting in a better understanding of complicated topics such as the evolution of complex organs.
Tor
Let me ask you this. Who in Cuba has easy access to the kind of technology required to do this, and has a motive? Go to Cuba and take a look around, the Cubans have nothing, and they have no reason to jam Iranian satellites.
I would guess that that signal came from the maniacs at Guantanamo Bay. It's not like they have a particularly good record to begin with: torture, holding prisonners illegally, surrounding themselves with the biggest minefield in the western hemisphere.
Please RTFA. The satellite transmissions are pro-student, anti-iranian-government programs based in the USA. The US is publically and privately lauding these transmissions and voicing their support for the student movement.
You conspiracy theorists are really funny, but this really takes the cake. So the US decided to take out the anti-iranian broadcasts based on its own soil, and it did so by taking jammers to a remote prison camp.
If you had RTFA you would have also learned that the technology to do this is very simple - well within reach of the Cuban government.
No, my original point still holds. The few remaining extremely totalitarian states are holding each others hands - it is the only support they can find.
Tor
This is indicative of the moral bancrupcy of these regimes.
Their supposed ideologies are the very opposite. This makes it clear to everyone that they are really the same. They rally around the flag of protecting the dictators, and supressing free speech. That is the true essence of their ideologies.
Tor
I agree, and would like to mention one more benefit of rail guns.
The typical inaccuracy of a traditional 30-mile shell is a couple of hundred yards. The greatest contributor to this is uncertainty of the exact velocity of the shell when it leaves the gun - there are always slight variations in the amount, composition, and temperature of the gun-powder, and the weight of the shell.
In principle, you can dynamically regulate the exact velocity with a rail gun, thus getting a much accurate shot.
I don't know about the GPS-guided shells though; these certainly aren't used in large scale. It sounds very expensive. After all, one of the main points with artillery is that it is so much cheaper than guided missiles.
Tor
So it is a good thing to be a virgin.
Time to go back to the high school jocks and teach 'em who was right afterall.
They thought I couldn't get sex.... I was simply trying to maintain my genius.
Woah. Nobody said there was anything bad about having sex... it can be inspirational.
And nobody said that family was bad for other activities than discoveries. Maybe the jocks are successful pointed-hair-bosses and football players.
Tor
We are beginning to see the uses of directed energy weapons; you might remember the slashdot story of an artillery shell shot down with a laser.
The first ship of the next generation is expected to hit the seas in 2014 (I did RTFA). The basic design will probably stay the same for another 25-50 years (Nimitz did) after that.
Now is the time to design the underlying infrastructure to be prepared to quickly install the latest laser cannon in 2037.
However, it is not immediately clear to me why it is preferable to accelerate the ships with EM catapults. Remember, the electricity is generated by pushing steam through a turbin - it is seems likely that using the expanding steam directly is more efficient... maybe I missed something.
Tor
Ah yes .... in the time you read this posting, a thousand children died from not having clean water. Think about where we are spending our money!
I read this in about 3 seconds. That would indicate that about a million kids die from bad water every hour, and 1.5 billion -all the children in the world - die from poor water every year. You just made that up, didn't you?
As much as I would also like to see better living conditions in the third world, it appears to me (and most economists who have studied the problem) that what they need the most is not piles of money coming from the US and Europe.
It is not at all the case that the developing countries that get the most money also develop the fastest. Rather, it seems like those who successfully allow for greater economic freedom and fight corruption do the best in improving living conditions.
To help people in the third world we would thus do best to encourage that sort of development in their governments. This can be done with a carrot and a stick. USS Reagan is a stick.
Tor
Another interesting aspect of this is security. In one of Gibson's novels, Mona Lisa Overdrive(?), bicycle couriers do good business physically transporting discs from one place to another.
The idea is that if you transmit something over the internet, you can never feel quite sure that no-one else managed to get a hold of your data.
There is an ironic sense of security in having a person physically move the data on discs.
Tor
Throwing together a quick app convert some data from one format to another, for one time use, is very different from building mission critical applications.
Yes, but it is amazing how often the one-time-use data conversion app evolves into something mission critical used all the time.
My answer to this is that doing solid foundation work almost always pays off. However, a lot of developers have a tendency to want to add extra features and functionality that is cool and interesting. In this sense the market-bots are sometimes right; one must ask what features really make business sense.
Tor