"Jobs could have made the Mac open and given it slots but he closed it. MISTAKE."
That would make the Mac more expensive and less-reliable. Remember the IRQ nightmare of the PCs of the time? Remember the clock cards for the Apple II that didn't work with ProDOS? At that time, supporting stuff in the OS would increase its footprint and would not allow it to fit in a single 400K floppy. People with dual-core 64 bit processors and a gigabyte of RAM easily forget how hard it was to cram our software into machines that had barely enough memory to hold the icons of a modern GUI. Also, most hardware was not even supported by the OS itself (which was a different concept back then) - it was supported by the applications _we_ wrote. The idea behind the simplicity of the Mac was a departure from all this - a computer that just works.
Having to code to a single hardware combination that had most of what people put into their IIs and PCs (high-res, printer port, modem port, scsi - mac plus - and so on) made sense at that time and still does. The only thing I ever used the slot of my last laptop was to store the IR remote control inside it. Slots appeal to some groups. That's why there was a Mac II.
"Jobs could have let the clones continue and turned Apple into a software company and at that point in history may have knocked off MS and Windows 9x. But he killed the clones. MISTAKE."
Microsoft would kill Apple by porting Windows NT to the clones. They had NT for PowerPC since very early (I have used it myself). Letting the clones go on put Apple in a very hard position - making OSs for a small number of computers that could, anytime, get a port of Windows for them. Apple would never be a Microsoft and Microsoft would not even need to play dirty to crush them in this scenario. Apple always was, and still is, a hardware company.
And attacking Microsoft earlier would have increased the licensing costs of the Applesoft BASIC every Apple II relied upon and the Apple II was Apple's cash-cow until well into the Mac era. That's why Apple never released its version of BASIC for the Mac - because Microsoft had other ideas. Apple was, since early on, forced to play nice with MS.
"How can you bash MS for being to closed compared to Linux, yet love Apple, which is more closed then MS?"
Apple is more closed than MS? Well... No. NeXT based their OS on a well built Unix built on a very well regarded microkernel architecture. How hard it is to port software that runs on, say, Linux (or AIX, for that matter), to Windows? It's a lot harder than to port it to OSX. The reverse is even worse: porting from Windows to Unix used to be a nightmare - however, if you build your OSX software right, it's very easy to port its core to any other Unix. You won't be able to easily port the GUI part, but that's another matter. Lots of very serious developers work on OSX. I prefer Linux, but that's a matter of taste - they still build the sexiest computers.
And, come on, nobody can really love Microsoft. Not after all they did to the industry we grew into.
"Don't give me that they use BSD crap, they took that part, they didn't make it. What have they given back to the BSD community?"
User base. OSX being more BSD-like makes more users use and test software for BSD-ish Unixes. It gives me more reason to make sure the software I make runs on BSD-ish stuff. I keep some Solaris/SPARC and AIX/POWER boxes around for the same reasons (apart from being a computer collector, but it makes a good excuse to pay for them)
"Jobs could have made the iPhone open for software developers. MISTAKE."
Apple is doing this too. Wait till February or pay for an ADC membership. I bet there will be betas out before that.
Heck. As much as I prefer Linux, I am seriously considering buying a Mac just for this.
While you are not talking to me, as a proud geek I feel I should comment.
Microsoft will have to earn back the respect I had for them in the early 80s and then, again, in the early-to-mid 90s. While they make a lot of crappy software, their BASICs brought programming to the masses, VB brought GUI programming to the masses, SQL Server is (still) quite a respectable database and ASP helped me put a lot of applications out the door in a time when the only options seemed to be Perl and PHP and long before I had Python and Zope on my hands.
As for Red Hat, they never lost my respect. They did a lot of good stuff towards making Linux a very decent desktop and server OS. I may be wrong, but it seems they invented package management and that allowed me to rest in my apt-nirvana.
And Apple... Well... They gave us the Apple II, pointed the way to go with the Lisa, lost the way with OS7.5-8-9 and got back on track with the OSX/Jobs/NeXT deal. It's hard not to like them.
That number, as someone else pointed up, is taxes plus fines (huge ones) plus interest.
By not paying taxes, Cisco is able to compete at prices its competitors are unable to match, thus engaging in anti-competitive practices and driving its competition off the market.
There are plenty of ways to avoid paying import taxes (or paying less of them). One is to open up a local factory as the taxes on finished goods is a lot higher than on materials. I am sure the money they will end up paying could be much more cleverly invested.
"instead, it would strangle the import goods needed for business."
No. As I said earlier, it would allow Cisco's competition to actually compete.
And, I suppose, your suggestion is that we should evade taxes instead of creating pressure for more strict government expenditure laws and reduced taxes. It sure looks easier.
Evading taxes allows business to continue as usual despite having too heavy taxes. By masking the problem, it prevents it from being properly identified and solved. It's hard to credibly complain taxes are high if you don't really pay them.
I would correct you. Most people in Brazil do not pay any taxes at all except, perhaps, sales taxes. They are below the line of poverty that would allow government to track their money, so, making them pay is not worth the effort.
The problem I see is that since they also require public services, everyone that pays for them is paying double to get less return.
The fact the tax system is not fair is no reason to evade taxes. It's reason to get engaged in politics, something very few do and not always with the best intentions.
What your friend's father did 35 years ago was possible. Some kinds of tax evasion are still possible now, but, with the advance of computing technology, it is increasingly more difficult to do so.
What the folks at Cisco are being accused of doing is a massive effort to avoid paying a whole lot of import taxes. If you consider their competitors point-of-view, they are committing fraud in order to offer their products for prices their competitors can't match, driving them out of the market.
"Paying taxes isn't stupid if your government provides worthwhile services."
Just a thought: If you don't pay taxes, you can't wonder why the government doesn't have the money to provide worthwhile services.
Just on the line of "If you don't get involved in politics - some to the extent of not even bothering to vote - you can't complain much on who got elected"
Sun activity can explain variations in Earth temperature. So do greenhouse gases. Saying that one excludes the other or that there is only one dominant influence is rather shortsighted. Earth climate is not something as simple as most politicians want you to believe.
Millions, nay Tens of Millions of people give Microsoft and their products "the time of day." People who have no dogmas or political agendas when it comes to computing. People who just see a computer and its software as a tool to get their desired job done. And not just MBA or Administration types, but also millions of software developers and network administrators and such.
Usually people who also complain of insecurity, viruses and such things as if they were inevitable consequences of the use of computers and not the fault of their choice of software.
I don't think Windows is perfect
You are right on this one.
but I also don't think OSX is perfect
You are right on this one too, but OSX is a whole lot better than anything Windows for most of those same people who insist on punishing themselves with Windows.
nor do I think that Linux or any flavor of Unix is perfect.
Linux is, while not perfect, a whole lot better than Vista (or XP) at least for what I use my computer for.
And with regard to their "self serving" ways... many on slashdot are anti-business or at least anti-corporation. They adopt the FSF malarkey that all code should be given away free.
The FSF doesn't say code should be given away for free. It says you should give the code along any binaries because your users have the right to know what they are running and to modify it in any way they see fit. You can make them pay for their code.
I put food on my family's table by developing software and the notion that it should be given away free just misses the mark.
So do I, but I don't get pissed by it. Instead, I made it into an opportunity and a differential my clients love and pay for.
...and spend our days writing software that solves a problem that's already been solved on a Windows platform and then give it away for free just so we can say we fought the good fight.
Free software exists and solves many problems Windows already solved, but it exists to solve another problem Windows will never solve - to give the ability to people to share their software, to study how it's built and how it works and to modify it to solve their specific problems Microsoft will never solve.
Business is good for all of us. Economic success and security is good for America.
Economic success is good for the whole world. I am very happy not to pay Microsoft and to keep my money in the local economy instead of generating jobs in Redmond.
You can do as I did with my last laptop. I never booted it into Vista (I knew they would refuse to refund me, so I didn't bother to record there is no "I don't agree" button), but, instead, booted from a Ubuntu 7.04 CD and it worked flawlessly. It even got Compiz working in a couple minutes as to wow Windows vict^H^H^H^Husers.
Or you can do as my wife did - she went to an Apple store, bought the most beautiful computer she could afford and now she is very happy with her gorgeous laptop that just works, never locks up and is quite safe against the viruses that inundate our e-mail thanks to how Microsoft both dominates the market and develops their software.
Awarding damages is very useful to make a company to cease to commit certain acts that, while create some hassle for their victims, bring in huge amounts of money from those who decide not to fight them.
If I do something questionable that will reduce my profits in US$ 100, it's one thing, if I do something questionable that will turn my profits into a US$ 100 million loss, I probably won't even try.
"As long as the US continues its patchwork enforcement of laws based on outdated concepts of how people should and shouldn't live, we deserve to pay what amounts to a $100 billion annual Stupid Tax."
I never thought about it in that way, but such sanctions go a long way towards the goal of making stupidity painful.
If many people skilled in the arts take a couple months and several experiments and tests to find the same idea that happens to be the best way to solve a problem within a given technological framework, it cannot be said to be obvious. Were it that obvious, someone would have figured it out in minutes.
We don't know how long it took for the Reibers to figure it out or how much they invested in it. The same goes with the hard-disk makers - we don't know how many prototypes or technologies they scrapped before arriving at the same answers as the Reibers.
I am very happy something like this happens before a lot of countries enact laws allowing the patenting of software. This lawsuit will help demonstrate the threat IP-only companies pose to genuine innovators and the chilling effect their existence can have on the IT industry as a whole.
It's sad it will be the US IT industry that gets the most pain, but, in other countries, this "sacrifice" will allow life to go on and a case will be provided to show such stupid laws need to be completely avoided.
the US will, eventually, recover, _after_ a patent law reform. I hope this lawsuit helps with that.
If you _know_ about a patent you infringe, you may have to pay three times as much as if you can say you never saw it. This effectively forbids engineers to read patents and that, in turn, limits the value of patents as a tool to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Unless the research gets published in a journal, nobody that should see it will ever get to it.
If the Reibers actually did invent something that is non-obvious and used in hard-drives, I think a reasonable fee could be reached, perhaps, raising drive prices in the US by a couple cents and giving them plenty of rewards for their effort.
Not all patents are bad and the idea of patents is not completely without merit. There must be a way for the small company to defend their inventions from the huge ones while preventing the patent trolls from extorting a quick buck from those who are really inventing something.
Perhaps a monthly or yearly patent tax should be implemented - the more patents you have (fractions included), the more you pay. If it's done right (exponentially?) there will be an incentive to keep the practical ones while rendering submarine patents unpractical to keep submerged for long.
There could be a way to turn off the raster generator and then increase the reading speed a bit. However I doubt any video board designer ever considered such a corner case.
But, given the story that the machine is a server running an e-commerce website that, presumably, should be up most of the time, I would suggest buying a cheap entry level server from Dell with enough memory and just forgetting about it. Running a server on luck generally indicates someone will have to deal with an emergency migration one day or the other.
If they have to pay for rack space, a 1u rack unit would quickly pay for itself.
After R-ing TFA, I cannot avoid wondering how the environment changes the rules they observed. While I agree the general principle that less-used constructions may change faster, the environment in which a language exists changes around it and has a huge impact on the mechanisms that effect such change.
A thousand years ago, written language was much less present than it is today and remained so until about a couple centuries back. The greater the body of older written materials available or the older it is at any given time, the more "exposed" the constructs are and the slower they evolve. Also a factor is the recent arrival of recorded speech that could very well have an impact on how people speak and write for generations to come.
I will be interesting to watch how language continues to evolve in this environment.
Galileo was pretty much a "permanent" monitoring station, at least as far as space probes go. It was around Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 and gathered a whole lot of information. So is Cassini around Saturn and Mars has a good couple of them orbiting it.
That said, I agree it would be clever to design and assemble generic space probes with a generic instrument package and launch them towards some promising targets. If we can assemble a dozen of simple probes (or modular ones - i.e. inner solar system solar power module x deep space RTG power, custom instrument packages) instead of one twelve times more complex and launch them towards interesting targets it would give us a lot of coverage on a lot of other nearby objects for the same price (and in far less time). If something turns out to be more than an uninteresting lump of rock or ice, we could always send another probe with a custom instrument package. And, if the original one still has propellant on board, it could always be re-missioned to something else.
Maybe we could focus not on "Back to the Moon", "See Pluto" and "Probe Mars" specific projects and create a continuous exploration infrastructure that could serve us well for decades. If we focus too much on learning how to build a better spacecraft while building the spacecraft, the exploration becomes the least interesting thing in the project. If we focus more on the destination than on the vehicle, chances are we will get spacecrafts out to the launch pad on less time, within budget and more frequently than today. And by building more of them, launching more of them and testing more of them, we will end up learning just as much about how to build a better spacecraft.
This one-off custom-designed space probe business can become costly real quick.
Slashdot Mirror
"Jobs could have made the Mac open and given it slots but he closed it. MISTAKE."
That would make the Mac more expensive and less-reliable. Remember the IRQ nightmare of the PCs of the time? Remember the clock cards for the Apple II that didn't work with ProDOS? At that time, supporting stuff in the OS would increase its footprint and would not allow it to fit in a single 400K floppy. People with dual-core 64 bit processors and a gigabyte of RAM easily forget how hard it was to cram our software into machines that had barely enough memory to hold the icons of a modern GUI. Also, most hardware was not even supported by the OS itself (which was a different concept back then) - it was supported by the applications _we_ wrote. The idea behind the simplicity of the Mac was a departure from all this - a computer that just works.
Having to code to a single hardware combination that had most of what people put into their IIs and PCs (high-res, printer port, modem port, scsi - mac plus - and so on) made sense at that time and still does. The only thing I ever used the slot of my last laptop was to store the IR remote control inside it. Slots appeal to some groups. That's why there was a Mac II.
"Jobs could have let the clones continue and turned Apple into a software company and at that point in history may have knocked off MS and Windows 9x. But he killed the clones. MISTAKE."
Microsoft would kill Apple by porting Windows NT to the clones. They had NT for PowerPC since very early (I have used it myself). Letting the clones go on put Apple in a very hard position - making OSs for a small number of computers that could, anytime, get a port of Windows for them. Apple would never be a Microsoft and Microsoft would not even need to play dirty to crush them in this scenario. Apple always was, and still is, a hardware company.
And attacking Microsoft earlier would have increased the licensing costs of the Applesoft BASIC every Apple II relied upon and the Apple II was Apple's cash-cow until well into the Mac era. That's why Apple never released its version of BASIC for the Mac - because Microsoft had other ideas. Apple was, since early on, forced to play nice with MS.
"How can you bash MS for being to closed compared to Linux, yet love Apple, which is more closed then MS?"
Apple is more closed than MS? Well... No. NeXT based their OS on a well built Unix built on a very well regarded microkernel architecture. How hard it is to port software that runs on, say, Linux (or AIX, for that matter), to Windows? It's a lot harder than to port it to OSX. The reverse is even worse: porting from Windows to Unix used to be a nightmare - however, if you build your OSX software right, it's very easy to port its core to any other Unix. You won't be able to easily port the GUI part, but that's another matter. Lots of very serious developers work on OSX. I prefer Linux, but that's a matter of taste - they still build the sexiest computers.
And, come on, nobody can really love Microsoft. Not after all they did to the industry we grew into.
"Don't give me that they use BSD crap, they took that part, they didn't make it. What have they given back to the BSD community?"
User base. OSX being more BSD-like makes more users use and test software for BSD-ish Unixes. It gives me more reason to make sure the software I make runs on BSD-ish stuff. I keep some Solaris/SPARC and AIX/POWER boxes around for the same reasons (apart from being a computer collector, but it makes a good excuse to pay for them)
"Jobs could have made the iPhone open for software developers. MISTAKE."
Apple is doing this too. Wait till February or pay for an ADC membership. I bet there will be betas out before that.
Heck. As much as I prefer Linux, I am seriously considering buying a Mac just for this.
Finished documents are sent in PDF format. Internal documents are strictly ODF.
.doc when I absolutely need some MS vict^H^H^H^Huser to contribute to the document.
I only send a
And, even then, only when I can't make him/her install OpenOffice.
While you are not talking to me, as a proud geek I feel I should comment.
Microsoft will have to earn back the respect I had for them in the early 80s and then, again, in the early-to-mid 90s. While they make a lot of crappy software, their BASICs brought programming to the masses, VB brought GUI programming to the masses, SQL Server is (still) quite a respectable database and ASP helped me put a lot of applications out the door in a time when the only options seemed to be Perl and PHP and long before I had Python and Zope on my hands.
As for Red Hat, they never lost my respect. They did a lot of good stuff towards making Linux a very decent desktop and server OS. I may be wrong, but it seems they invented package management and that allowed me to rest in my apt-nirvana.
And Apple... Well... They gave us the Apple II, pointed the way to go with the Lisa, lost the way with OS7.5-8-9 and got back on track with the OSX/Jobs/NeXT deal. It's hard not to like them.
That number, as someone else pointed up, is taxes plus fines (huge ones) plus interest.
By not paying taxes, Cisco is able to compete at prices its competitors are unable to match, thus engaging in anti-competitive practices and driving its competition off the market.
There are plenty of ways to avoid paying import taxes (or paying less of them). One is to open up a local factory as the taxes on finished goods is a lot higher than on materials. I am sure the money they will end up paying could be much more cleverly invested.
"instead, it would strangle the import goods needed for business."
No. As I said earlier, it would allow Cisco's competition to actually compete.
And, I suppose, your suggestion is that we should evade taxes instead of creating pressure for more strict government expenditure laws and reduced taxes. It sure looks easier.
Evading taxes allows business to continue as usual despite having too heavy taxes. By masking the problem, it prevents it from being properly identified and solved. It's hard to credibly complain taxes are high if you don't really pay them.
I would correct you. Most people in Brazil do not pay any taxes at all except, perhaps, sales taxes. They are below the line of poverty that would allow government to track their money, so, making them pay is not worth the effort.
The problem I see is that since they also require public services, everyone that pays for them is paying double to get less return.
The fact the tax system is not fair is no reason to evade taxes. It's reason to get engaged in politics, something very few do and not always with the best intentions.
I am a Brazilian ./er, so I will comment.
What your friend's father did 35 years ago was possible. Some kinds of tax evasion are still possible now, but, with the advance of computing technology, it is increasingly more difficult to do so.
What the folks at Cisco are being accused of doing is a massive effort to avoid paying a whole lot of import taxes. If you consider their competitors point-of-view, they are committing fraud in order to offer their products for prices their competitors can't match, driving them out of the market.
Not pretty by any point-of-view.
"Paying taxes isn't stupid if your government provides worthwhile services."
Just a thought: If you don't pay taxes, you can't wonder why the government doesn't have the money to provide worthwhile services.
Just on the line of "If you don't get involved in politics - some to the extent of not even bothering to vote - you can't complain much on who got elected"
"Any businessman wanting to evade US$ 1.5 billion in taxes would have to be nuts to open an office there after this."
There. Corrected that for you.
False dichotomy alert.
Sun activity can explain variations in Earth temperature. So do greenhouse gases. Saying that one excludes the other or that there is only one dominant influence is rather shortsighted. Earth climate is not something as simple as most politicians want you to believe.
In these days when we wonder what can we do to reduce greenhouse gases and fight global warming, a little ice age can help.
;-)
Yet, we shouldn't forget the ice age won't last forever
Usually people who also complain of insecurity, viruses and such things as if they were inevitable consequences of the use of computers and not the fault of their choice of software.
I don't think Windows is perfectYou are right on this one.
but I also don't think OSX is perfectYou are right on this one too, but OSX is a whole lot better than anything Windows for most of those same people who insist on punishing themselves with Windows.
nor do I think that Linux or any flavor of Unix is perfect.Linux is, while not perfect, a whole lot better than Vista (or XP) at least for what I use my computer for.
And with regard to their "self serving" ways... many on slashdot are anti-business or at least anti-corporation. They adopt the FSF malarkey that all code should be given away free.The FSF doesn't say code should be given away for free. It says you should give the code along any binaries because your users have the right to know what they are running and to modify it in any way they see fit. You can make them pay for their code.
I put food on my family's table by developing software and the notion that it should be given away free just misses the mark.So do I, but I don't get pissed by it. Instead, I made it into an opportunity and a differential my clients love and pay for.
...and spend our days writing software that solves a problem that's already been solved on a Windows platform and then give it away for free just so we can say we fought the good fight.Free software exists and solves many problems Windows already solved, but it exists to solve another problem Windows will never solve - to give the ability to people to share their software, to study how it's built and how it works and to modify it to solve their specific problems Microsoft will never solve.
Business is good for all of us. Economic success and security is good for America.Economic success is good for the whole world. I am very happy not to pay Microsoft and to keep my money in the local economy instead of generating jobs in Redmond.
Or, more likely, in Bangalore.
"Are you honestly saying that anyone who thinks Vista is decent is a MS shrill?"
Either that or someone whose opinions on operating systems are worthless.
You can do as I did with my last laptop. I never booted it into Vista (I knew they would refuse to refund me, so I didn't bother to record there is no "I don't agree" button), but, instead, booted from a Ubuntu 7.04 CD and it worked flawlessly. It even got Compiz working in a couple minutes as to wow Windows vict^H^H^H^Husers.
Or you can do as my wife did - she went to an Apple store, bought the most beautiful computer she could afford and now she is very happy with her gorgeous laptop that just works, never locks up and is quite safe against the viruses that inundate our e-mail thanks to how Microsoft both dominates the market and develops their software.
Awarding damages is very useful to make a company to cease to commit certain acts that, while create some hassle for their victims, bring in huge amounts of money from those who decide not to fight them.
If I do something questionable that will reduce my profits in US$ 100, it's one thing, if I do something questionable that will turn my profits into a US$ 100 million loss, I probably won't even try.
It was pretty obvious (not subject to patents) they would not do it by themselves but by employing some expendable proxy.
If Acacia went after IBM instead of Red Hat, they would quite certainly go down. I hope Red Hat has pockets deep enough to crush them.
"As long as the US continues its patchwork enforcement of laws based on outdated concepts of how people should and shouldn't live, we deserve to pay what amounts to a $100 billion annual Stupid Tax."
I never thought about it in that way, but such sanctions go a long way towards the goal of making stupidity painful.
The WTO folks deserve some recognition for that.
If many people skilled in the arts take a couple months and several experiments and tests to find the same idea that happens to be the best way to solve a problem within a given technological framework, it cannot be said to be obvious. Were it that obvious, someone would have figured it out in minutes.
We don't know how long it took for the Reibers to figure it out or how much they invested in it. The same goes with the hard-disk makers - we don't know how many prototypes or technologies they scrapped before arriving at the same answers as the Reibers.
I am very happy something like this happens before a lot of countries enact laws allowing the patenting of software. This lawsuit will help demonstrate the threat IP-only companies pose to genuine innovators and the chilling effect their existence can have on the IT industry as a whole.
It's sad it will be the US IT industry that gets the most pain, but, in other countries, this "sacrifice" will allow life to go on and a case will be provided to show such stupid laws need to be completely avoided.
the US will, eventually, recover, _after_ a patent law reform. I hope this lawsuit helps with that.
If you _know_ about a patent you infringe, you may have to pay three times as much as if you can say you never saw it. This effectively forbids engineers to read patents and that, in turn, limits the value of patents as a tool to promote the progress of science and useful arts. Unless the research gets published in a journal, nobody that should see it will ever get to it.
If the Reibers actually did invent something that is non-obvious and used in hard-drives, I think a reasonable fee could be reached, perhaps, raising drive prices in the US by a couple cents and giving them plenty of rewards for their effort.
Not all patents are bad and the idea of patents is not completely without merit. There must be a way for the small company to defend their inventions from the huge ones while preventing the patent trolls from extorting a quick buck from those who are really inventing something.
Perhaps a monthly or yearly patent tax should be implemented - the more patents you have (fractions included), the more you pay. If it's done right (exponentially?) there will be an incentive to keep the practical ones while rendering submarine patents unpractical to keep submerged for long.
There could be a way to turn off the raster generator and then increase the reading speed a bit. However I doubt any video board designer ever considered such a corner case.
But, given the story that the machine is a server running an e-commerce website that, presumably, should be up most of the time, I would suggest buying a cheap entry level server from Dell with enough memory and just forgetting about it. Running a server on luck generally indicates someone will have to deal with an emergency migration one day or the other.
If they have to pay for rack space, a 1u rack unit would quickly pay for itself.
One Ichabaud is about 9200 baud, so, it's about 4 times faster if noise conditions allow.
After R-ing TFA, I cannot avoid wondering how the environment changes the rules they observed. While I agree the general principle that less-used constructions may change faster, the environment in which a language exists changes around it and has a huge impact on the mechanisms that effect such change.
A thousand years ago, written language was much less present than it is today and remained so until about a couple centuries back. The greater the body of older written materials available or the older it is at any given time, the more "exposed" the constructs are and the slower they evolve. Also a factor is the recent arrival of recorded speech that could very well have an impact on how people speak and write for generations to come.
I will be interesting to watch how language continues to evolve in this environment.
They probably will. It will just take a couple more billion years, so, be patient.
Galileo was pretty much a "permanent" monitoring station, at least as far as space probes go. It was around Jupiter from 1995 to 2003 and gathered a whole lot of information. So is Cassini around Saturn and Mars has a good couple of them orbiting it.
That said, I agree it would be clever to design and assemble generic space probes with a generic instrument package and launch them towards some promising targets. If we can assemble a dozen of simple probes (or modular ones - i.e. inner solar system solar power module x deep space RTG power, custom instrument packages) instead of one twelve times more complex and launch them towards interesting targets it would give us a lot of coverage on a lot of other nearby objects for the same price (and in far less time). If something turns out to be more than an uninteresting lump of rock or ice, we could always send another probe with a custom instrument package. And, if the original one still has propellant on board, it could always be re-missioned to something else.
Maybe we could focus not on "Back to the Moon", "See Pluto" and "Probe Mars" specific projects and create a continuous exploration infrastructure that could serve us well for decades. If we focus too much on learning how to build a better spacecraft while building the spacecraft, the exploration becomes the least interesting thing in the project. If we focus more on the destination than on the vehicle, chances are we will get spacecrafts out to the launch pad on less time, within budget and more frequently than today. And by building more of them, launching more of them and testing more of them, we will end up learning just as much about how to build a better spacecraft.
This one-off custom-designed space probe business can become costly real quick.