Getting eminent domain and municipal and state and enviromental and safety approval in hundreds of lawsuits... will bog you down for decades. Despotism - gets shit done.
Those who've read a bit of history know that this is the argument used in the '30s by Mussolini's admirers. And that other guy a few years later. Whatsisname, the german dude....
I suspect Musk doesn't intend to do one. He doesn't really need the money now (though that may change when it comes time to man-rate Dragon), and giving up control of his company to someone who is only concerned with the quarterly bottom line may not appeal to him.
Frankly, though I'd love to own some of SpaceX, I'd prefer to leave it in the control of a guy who isn't afraid to risk some of his own money for long-term gain. And don't see that it's too likely to stay that way once an IPO happens....
If that were true (and like all lottery wins, the odds are against it) I'd be more inclined to include that in the hostile-neighbourhood hypothesis. We've had several near extinction events over the course of Earth's history, which has delayed the introduction of sentient life by (possibly) anywhere up to 60 million years. If we're first, then other planets must have equally catastrophic histories. Which kind of sucks for life's chances.
We keep finding more evidence of big rocks hitting Earth in the past. In spite of that...
We've made no real preparations to deal with the next Extinction Level Event (yes, I watched Deep Impact again recently). It is very likely that if we detected an asteroid on a course to collide with Earth in ten years, we'd be able to do nothing to stop it.
There is no real reason to believe that any hypothetical aliens live in a "nicer" solar system than ours, or that they can plan for the future any better than we can.
So, yeah, we live in a hostile environment, and any other intelligent species out there lives in an environment at least as hostile. "Kind of sucks for life's chances" is a pretty decent way of looking at it.
With your last remark this sounds like an attack on doing research in general, every researcher has that interest even in the private industry, unless they're stock holders rather than normal wage takers. The mechanism to solve that is exactly the same too, there's not an infinite amount of research money neither in the private nor public sector.
Nah, I have no objections to research, either public or private. But I don't really expect that an organization dedicated to research is going to be necessarily motivated to develop products. Witness the various X-planes flown over the last couple decades.
As to "infinite amount of research money", what the government hands out like candy is essentially infinite, especially since every congress-critter will want to make sure that his/her district gets a piece of the research pie, whether they're doing something useful with it or not.
Note that Constellation wasn't axed because it was "lackluster". It was axed because it was the previous President's program. And because the congresscritter whose district was going to get a huge chunk of the Constellation budget/jobs changed Parties. Odd how that announcement came just after the guy switched to Republican, isn't it?
You could staff 30 SpaceX companies with the number of people downsized by the shuttle program ending. Or in other words, its not a good time to be an aerospace engineer. (Has it ever been a good time to be an aerospace engineer?)
Downsize 27000 jobs as regards the shuttle shut down. Note that is a delta, for the industry not just NASA.
I know its an industry wide figure because NASA only employs 17900 people per wikipedia.
SpaceX employs 900 people
Once they start work on man-rating Dragon, we'll get a clue to the actual extent bureaucracy is reduced. If NASA essentially requires 10,000 employees (of NASA or SpaceX) just to monitor the man-rating of Dragon (and another 10,000 for each of its competitors), then we won't have lost much bureaucracy, will we?
As far as unmanned cargo flights, no worries at all. But there aren't all that many NASA guys now who spend much time on unmanned cargo flights.
If, in fact, NASA just gets out of the way of the private companies doing the business, then I expect massive reductions in bureaucracy. But the chances of NASA just getting out of the way are slim....
...of getting to space by making incremental improvements in technology (and substantial cost reductions through cutting bureaucracy).
Let NASA do the high risk/high return investments in fundamentally new technologies (aerospike engines, composite fuel tanks, hypersonic ramjets hell even laser beamed launchers or space elevators!). That, in a nutshell, is Obama's plan isn't it? To me, just a space enthusiast, it sounds good if not ideal.
It sounds about perfect. Of course, the devil is in the details.
1) Will the bureaucracy actually be reduced? I suspect not.
2) Will NASA do the research on fundamentally new technologies? I suspect not here either, since that would require handing NASA money year after year with no real return. (when you're getting money to do research, you have a powerful incentive to never actually finish your research)
3) Will Obama's Congress actually vote out the money to do either of these things? Given past history, there's no "suspect not" here, just a "no".
However if you post that Senate Majority Leader *and* his family are killed in a car accident your information becomes believable. You will sow confusion, and it may give you (or your masters) some political advantage.
No.
If you posted something like that on/., the most likely result will be that people would go to some other news site for confirmation, then make fun of the guy who posted the false information.
No, no political party or individual politician in the USA is going to gain political advantage from misinformation posted on the web. Anymore than anyone gains political advantage from all the Obama/Oprah articles in the Enquirer and WWN.
You also seem to believe that anyone much even cares who the Senate Majority Leader is, much less whether he's been in an auto accident. We don't, for the most part. If the current were to get killed in an auto accident, the next most senior Senator (whoever he is) would be the new Senate Majority Leader....
Pi would even be the same in a different universe with different physical laws, because its value isn't dependent on anything physical.
Umm, no. Pi has different values in non-Euclidean geometries, depending on the curvature of the surface used in the particular non-Euclidean geometry in question.
2. Then the father LEFT A REAL LOADED GUN that looked eerily similar to the kid's game controller (by fucking design, I might add) ON THE COFFEE TABLE which is probably EXACTLY WHERE THE FUCKING THREE YEAR OLD KID TYPICALLY LEFT HER GAME CONTROLLER.
Well, no. Unless "eerily similar" means about the same shape. Note the picture in TFA. The controller was easily twice the size of the firearm in question.
To add on a bit to that thought, when my son turned three I showed him the guns and explained to him what guns do, what they are used for, and what they are capable of. I explained what would happen if someone got shot, and how mommy and daddy or anyone else would be dead.
I never had that talk with my daughter. Instead, I took her shooting one day. The noise was enough (even with hearing-protectors) to convince her that she didn't want to mess with the guns.
Plus the exploding watermelons helped a lot in graphically demonstrating what it was like to be on the receiving end....
It's fairly common to chamber a round when you are carrying, especially concealed. I don't carry with a round in the chamber, as it too dangerous and too easy to snag the trigger and shoot yourself.
What's the point of carrying a firearm with no round in the chamber? In any situation where you'll need a concealed handgun, having to take time to rack the slide will just get you killed.
Many current gen guns have a "palm safety" where you have to be gripping the gun correctly, which applies force to a pressure pad on the back of the grip and allows the trigger to be depressed into the firing position.
Would that be like the grip safety that a Colt 1911 has? 99 years old, and the rest of the world is still playing catchup to it....
Still though, too risky in my mind.
Most sensible way to carry a firearm if you're worried about this sort of thing is to get either a DAO (Double Action Only) firearm, or to drop the hammer after you chamber a round. Most modern handguns will automagically drop the hammer for you when you put them on safety, so this isn't usually a big problem. Either way, you have a very heavy trigger pull to overcome by accident (if you were to lift the gun out of the holster by the trigger, you'd exert nowhere near enough force to fire the thing).
There just happened to be a fully loaded gun with a bullet in the chamber that's exactly like a rare wii controller.
Well, no. TFA showed a picture of the wii controller and gun. They were both black, and pistol-shaped. The wii controller was considerably larger than the actual handgun in question - it looked to be a full-sized military handgun.
If the mother was just 'three feet' from her child when it happened, didn't she notice her climbing up on to the table and struggling with the heavy metal gun?
This is what bugs me. It's possible the mother noticed, but thought the kid had picked up the wii controller (assuming she wasn't terribly familiar with firearms, it's at least possible). Though the difference in size between the wii controller and the real gun should have been ringing alarm bells in her head.
Sorry, you obviously have no idea what that means. I don't know of any pistol made for home defense that is not semi-automatic.
My 87 year old mother-in-law keeps a revolver and a pump-action shotgun for home-defense.
Yea, I could understand forgetting about a loaded and primed muzzle loader, but a "SEMI-AUTOMATIC" Pistol!!! (big scare quotes)
"Semi-automatic" isn't a scary phrase, the way the gun control loons would like to make you think. It just means that when you pull the trigger, the gun fires, then reloads and recocks itself for the next shot.
Note, by the way, that your average muzzle loader is much less safe than your average semi-auto - it's easier to accidently discharge (dropping one will usually work), and fires a much larger bullet.
Whatever makes you think a license was required to own a gun? This happened in Tennessee, and last time I was there (a few months ago, I have relatives who live there), no license was required for anything other than concealed carry. And there's no mention of a concealed carry license in TFA.
I have a question: how much strength does it require to fire that gun?
What I want to know is why the safety wasn't set on the gun.
I'm also vaguely curious as to what sort of shooting game the kid was playing that involved pointing the gun at himself....
Can a 3 year old do it in the manner the mother described?
Not unless the gun was modified a bit, or the three-year-old was a teeny little Hulk Hogan. Trigger pull on otc firearms is high enough that your average small child won't be firing it.
I lost of huge amount of money buying things at cyberrebate.com . Do you guys remember that company? Pay an insane amount of money upfront and get it all back as rebate a few months later - it worked well for the first few things I bought and then, when I went all in for the big ticket items, the company went under.
It's called a pyramid scheme.
Useful clue: when someone offers you lots of money later if you'll give him lots of your money now, he's not your friend.
It's a real shame that nowhere in the modern education system do they teach you the fundamentals of the basic cons....
Slashdot Mirror
Those who've read a bit of history know that this is the argument used in the '30s by Mussolini's admirers. And that other guy a few years later. Whatsisname, the german dude....
And we swear, cross our hearts and hope to die, that we won't actually keep a copy of your entire genome on file.
----Signed
--------Your Friendly Federal Agency
I suspect Musk doesn't intend to do one. He doesn't really need the money now (though that may change when it comes time to man-rate Dragon), and giving up control of his company to someone who is only concerned with the quarterly bottom line may not appeal to him.
Frankly, though I'd love to own some of SpaceX, I'd prefer to leave it in the control of a guy who isn't afraid to risk some of his own money for long-term gain. And don't see that it's too likely to stay that way once an IPO happens....
We keep finding more evidence of big rocks hitting Earth in the past. In spite of that...
We've made no real preparations to deal with the next Extinction Level Event (yes, I watched Deep Impact again recently). It is very likely that if we detected an asteroid on a course to collide with Earth in ten years, we'd be able to do nothing to stop it.
There is no real reason to believe that any hypothetical aliens live in a "nicer" solar system than ours, or that they can plan for the future any better than we can.
So, yeah, we live in a hostile environment, and any other intelligent species out there lives in an environment at least as hostile. "Kind of sucks for life's chances" is a pretty decent way of looking at it.
Nah, I have no objections to research, either public or private. But I don't really expect that an organization dedicated to research is going to be necessarily motivated to develop products. Witness the various X-planes flown over the last couple decades.
As to "infinite amount of research money", what the government hands out like candy is essentially infinite, especially since every congress-critter will want to make sure that his/her district gets a piece of the research pie, whether they're doing something useful with it or not.
Note that Constellation wasn't axed because it was "lackluster". It was axed because it was the previous President's program. And because the congresscritter whose district was going to get a huge chunk of the Constellation budget/jobs changed Parties. Odd how that announcement came just after the guy switched to Republican, isn't it?
Once they start work on man-rating Dragon, we'll get a clue to the actual extent bureaucracy is reduced. If NASA essentially requires 10,000 employees (of NASA or SpaceX) just to monitor the man-rating of Dragon (and another 10,000 for each of its competitors), then we won't have lost much bureaucracy, will we?
As far as unmanned cargo flights, no worries at all. But there aren't all that many NASA guys now who spend much time on unmanned cargo flights.
If, in fact, NASA just gets out of the way of the private companies doing the business, then I expect massive reductions in bureaucracy. But the chances of NASA just getting out of the way are slim....
American article. On this side of the pond, the ground floor is the "first floor", so it would be included as one of the fifteen stories tall.
It sounds about perfect. Of course, the devil is in the details.
1) Will the bureaucracy actually be reduced? I suspect not.
2) Will NASA do the research on fundamentally new technologies? I suspect not here either, since that would require handing NASA money year after year with no real return. (when you're getting money to do research, you have a powerful incentive to never actually finish your research)
3) Will Obama's Congress actually vote out the money to do either of these things? Given past history, there's no "suspect not" here, just a "no".
4. We won the Galactic Lotto, and are the first intelligent race to evolve into a technolgical society.
No, if you achieve escape speed, then you can ESCAPE earth's orbit. Not only can you, but you will, by definition.
If you want to maintain an orbit, a good speed is "orbital speed", which is about Vesc * sqrt(0.5).
No.
If you posted something like that on /., the most likely result will be that people would go to some other news site for confirmation, then make fun of the guy who posted the false information.
No, no political party or individual politician in the USA is going to gain political advantage from misinformation posted on the web. Anymore than anyone gains political advantage from all the Obama/Oprah articles in the Enquirer and WWN.
You also seem to believe that anyone much even cares who the Senate Majority Leader is, much less whether he's been in an auto accident. We don't, for the most part. If the current were to get killed in an auto accident, the next most senior Senator (whoever he is) would be the new Senate Majority Leader....
Umm, no. Pi has different values in non-Euclidean geometries, depending on the curvature of the surface used in the particular non-Euclidean geometry in question.
Yeah, it was pretty bad that W expanded the amount of federal money available for stem cell research.
Unlike his predecessor, ol' whatsisname, who forbade it entirely.
Well, no. Unless "eerily similar" means about the same shape. Note the picture in TFA. The controller was easily twice the size of the firearm in question.
I take it you're unaware that the NRA advocates that children be taught, when they see a gun, to
A) DON'T TOUCH IT!
B) GET AN ADULT.
In fact, they've been teaching that by way of their Eddy Eagle firearms safety training for kids since before most /.'ers were born.
The NRA has always been pretty fanatical about gun-safety, for children as well as adults. Anything you hear to the contrary is anti-gun propaganda.
I never had that talk with my daughter. Instead, I took her shooting one day. The noise was enough (even with hearing-protectors) to convince her that she didn't want to mess with the guns.
Plus the exploding watermelons helped a lot in graphically demonstrating what it was like to be on the receiving end....
What's the point of carrying a firearm with no round in the chamber? In any situation where you'll need a concealed handgun, having to take time to rack the slide will just get you killed.
Would that be like the grip safety that a Colt 1911 has? 99 years old, and the rest of the world is still playing catchup to it....
Well, no. TFA showed a picture of the wii controller and gun. They were both black, and pistol-shaped. The wii controller was considerably larger than the actual handgun in question - it looked to be a full-sized military handgun.
This is what bugs me. It's possible the mother noticed, but thought the kid had picked up the wii controller (assuming she wasn't terribly familiar with firearms, it's at least possible). Though the difference in size between the wii controller and the real gun should have been ringing alarm bells in her head.
rtfa. This occurred in Tennessee, and would only have been illegal if the father had been a previously convicted felon.
My 87 year old mother-in-law keeps a revolver and a pump-action shotgun for home-defense.
"Semi-automatic" isn't a scary phrase, the way the gun control loons would like to make you think. It just means that when you pull the trigger, the gun fires, then reloads and recocks itself for the next shot.
Note, by the way, that your average muzzle loader is much less safe than your average semi-auto - it's easier to accidently discharge (dropping one will usually work), and fires a much larger bullet.
Whatever makes you think a license was required to own a gun? This happened in Tennessee, and last time I was there (a few months ago, I have relatives who live there), no license was required for anything other than concealed carry. And there's no mention of a concealed carry license in TFA.
What I want to know is why the safety wasn't set on the gun.
I'm also vaguely curious as to what sort of shooting game the kid was playing that involved pointing the gun at himself....
Not unless the gun was modified a bit, or the three-year-old was a teeny little Hulk Hogan. Trigger pull on otc firearms is high enough that your average small child won't be firing it.
Because the actors are human, of course. Same reason most of the Star Trek aliens looked like humans with odd makeup.
It's called a pyramid scheme.
Useful clue: when someone offers you lots of money later if you'll give him lots of your money now, he's not your friend.
It's a real shame that nowhere in the modern education system do they teach you the fundamentals of the basic cons....
That would be nice.
It would be even nicer if we had any way of knowing whether the patients "who are receiving the treatment" are actually receiving the treatment....