He (the skiddiot case) may need it, but no one can give him that under current law. So, you observe and wait.
To run with the analogy, if a cop sees a kid going down a row of cars testing door handles, he won't just run out and arrest him. The cop will wait until the kid comes across an unlocked door, rummages through the car, and takes something. Then the cop will arrest him. The cop waits because until the kid takes something, it's not a clear cut case. Sure, the kid is doing wrong, but the cop doesn't have enough ammo to really get him. Some people might take a "no harm, no foul" attitude.
If I was 12 and got caught doing something dumb like trying to log in as root like that, I'd just counter with the defense that I got the IP address wrong. "Oh, that waas your server? My buddies must have been playing a joke on me...he said that was his machine." I'd most likely get off, and walk away with a feeling that I was untouchable on the net. Wait until you actually have something to scare them with, then nail 'em.
1. I think you are confusing exploitation with overuse. These are distinct.
2. I do not restrict to other otganisms. It is just that these are the most readily affected.
3. Selection is any process by which the frequency of an allele is changed. Natural selection is just what it sounds like. Selective breeding is a process used by man to select for certain genes. Learn the terms if you plan to use them
4. This just illustrates a severe misunderstanding, on your part, of basic biology and the mechanisms of selection, natural and otherwise. You discuss what you obviously do not understand.
5. I think you misunderstand my thrust. Which is this: as for results, GM is the same as selective breeding. The difference is the timescale. The difference in timescale is the same as thed ifference between natural selection and selective breeding.
6. Have you read the reoptrts? Have you seen the experiemts? Do you knw what the observed effects are? Your analogy is flawed. Many people have put guns to their heads, pulled the trigger, and died. No one has planted a GM crop and had the dire consequences predicted, and these are studies done for nearly a decade.
This is almost laughable. How does one convert elemental oxygen into methane? Transmutation? I think you have CO2 confused with methane. Learn a little before you go off like that. There are thousands of organisms that digest hemoglobin. Like humans, for instance. And every bacterium that exists. I have an impaired imagination? Well, then, you come up with a single real scenario.
All of this avoids the big lie: that opponents of GM know anything at all about the technology they demonize. You have demonstrated a complete ignorance of basic biology, genetics, chemistry, and molecular biology. Learn these topics, then we can discuss it.
generate combinations that are tuned to live in harmony with their environment
That
s not really right. On an individual scale, natural selection does not seek harmony with the environment. Natural selection seeks nothing, and tunes to nothing except the amplification of oneself. Organisms do not seek to live in harmony with the environment, they seek to exploit it the best they can. The environment (i.e., the other organisms around it) counter this by trying to exploit each other in the same manner. This is natural selection. Selective breeding accelerates this process drastically.
Where a gene may provide a benefit that will increase its frequency over a period of several thousand years under the influence of natural selection, selective breeding can do it in a century or less. Selective breeding is far from a natural process. Selective breeding acts on one species, and accelerates the selection in that species for a given trait or set if traits. The surrounding species (the environment) do not experience the same increase in rate.Remember; I am not comparing GM to natural selection, but to selective breeding.
if breeding created a more hardy competitor, don't you think nature would have created it by now over the 4.5 billion years it's been at work?
This should be fairly obvious, but it has resulted in a hardier competitor. Many, many times. That's evolution. And simply stating that something is "flat out destructive" does not make it so. I'm not saying that GM is de facto safe, just that it's not by default unsafe, either. In fact, the resarch that has been done points to "safe".
Also, I can't think of a single mechanism other than improved hardiness that would cause an organism to be destructive. Otherwise, it wouldn't be able to compete with indigenous species and would be wiped out.
Natural methods create "fact-checked" documents while GM methods create self-replicating potential time bombs. Your understanding of the issue is very shallow.
Perhaps my understanding is simply shallow as well, but what do you mean by "fact-checked documents"? I honestly don't understand what you mean by that.
And how is the result of selective breeding not "self-replicating"? For that matter, what is the argument behind saying that a selectively bred organism is not a "potential time bomb"? You could easily accidentally create an unusually hardy organism through breeding selection that, if released, could wreack havoc.
I understand that you didn't overtly make the negative claims about selective breeding, but the implication is there.
tax = charge against a citizen's person or property or activity for the support of government. (Merriam has a similar definition)
Note the part about "for the support of the government". Insurance premiums do not support the government, AFAIK. Therefore, they are not a tax. They are government mandated, but it is not a tax. Calling it such is simple and transparent rhetoric.
Although you shouldn't be modded as flamebait, the complaint about the firewall is valid, as is the desire to have a warning. I think most people *on/.* would like to avoid ISP's like this. The parent didn't say they were evil, just that he'd like to avoid them
Who does he use in Houston that does that? I've used SBC DSL in the past, and now have Earthlink cable (TW's backbone). I have a real IP.
Well, my router has a real IP. I don't think there's anyone in town a lot cheaper than Earthlink, too. I've been very happy with them; he should look into switching, if possible,
'Old age' seems to be more of a triggered event than an accumulation of genetic damage.
A lot of researchers are starting to think that the actual molecular trigger is the DNA alterations, though. It is hypothesized that as telomeres reduce in length, the presentations of "old age" start to show. The idea is that if we can reduce the rate of degredation, we can reduce the rate of onset of old age.
You are correct: Cancer is unregulated cell growth. But from the article, this compound seems to check cell division in culture.
Aside from pie-in-the-sky ideas about putting someone on pause while a cure is developed, this mught be a great stopgap measure or combinatorial method if delivered locally.
Deliver the drug locally, so that it has an effective dose just in the tumor. Or use the developing tumor targeting strategies that are out there. This could halt or slow tumor growth while other treatments work on killing it off.
The drawback, of course, is that most anticancer drugs target tumors based on their rapid growth.
Re:commercialization of teenagers
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I wrote a letter to our principal, but I never heard anything back. They got their money; it doesn't matter what the student body thinks.
Make it matter. I know it sounds trite and cliche, but make it matter to them in an intelligent way.
Talk to your parents about it. Prepare what you want them to understand and present it to them, and have them bitch. If your parents don't care, take it to someone else (and really, even if you think they don't care, try them first, even if only as a practice run for pitching to people who do care). Go to another relative, sympathetic teacher, school board, city council, anyone. If you are in any kind of youth group (club, church, whatever) use the people there. Trust me, the people that volunteer with those groups would be overjoyed at the idea of helping you out with something like this. I work with teenagers, and I love helping them bitch about things they think are screwed up, even if I don't think it's important. It makes up for me not having the balls to do it when I was younger.
If you can't find a champion, do it yourself. Go to the city council, or the mayor, or the school board. Don't write a letter, and don't waste your time with an e-mail. Go see them. Walk into a city council or school board meeting and get up in front of them and talk. Most districts allow the general public to do this. The idea that elected people won't listen to you because you're a kid is bullshit. Championing the cause of teenagers who just want a good education is gold for an election campaign.
You have to put up with this crap all the time in the real world. You should be left without it at school. It's bullshit. Don't let people ignore you because you are young.
Checking the supplementary data, they did mass spec on the extracts. IT came out pretty pure, so I wouldn't think contamination would be much of an issue. If it doesn't show up on mass spec, there can't be much of it there.
As for the amyloid, there has been some recent work (referenced in the paper) stating that amyloid deposits on histology are not necessary for disease. This has made some people think that they are just another symptom. Personally, I think that the deposits are stil there, just far too small to be seen by gross histology. This (the seeded vs unseeded) data seems to support the idea that deposition of amyloid is needed for the disease to progress. We just may not be able to detect it with these methods. I don't know if immunogold has ever been done, but it might be worth a shot.
I know all about the space limitations, believe me. I hate them. You'd think that since you have to pay the publication costs, you could have more space.....(I know, I know. I'm really just bitching. I understand the reasoning)
The controls they omitted are pretty crucial, I think. Come on, no loading control on an immunoblot? That's pretty basic, and it doesn't take a lot of room. They could have easily scaled those images down slightly and done a cut & paste of a subsequent blot. They also skip around, using CD1 mice for some controls, then FVBs for another. I'm not accusing them of not doing the controls, I'm sure they did. They could have very easily omitted the FVB+extract data and sustituted CD1+extract. I know the reason they did it, I work on some immunology related stuff; we pick and chose models all the time. We get criticized for it, though. And justly so. When data gets that selective, I see little red flags.
It's interesting stuff, just not very conclusive. There is very little that is said definitively, even for the scientific world.
Actually, it's fairly common for experienced scientists to omit controls for many reasons. I did go over the paper, and I am used to going over papers like this critically. They did omit some controls (see my other post) that were pretty key, IMO.
Assuming that papers are published solely on merit is a bit naive. They are considered for timeliness, context, author, institution, and even current events. Especially in the top-teir journals like Science, Nature, and Cell. I have seen many papers in Science that I didn't think deserved to be there, based on the data shown. This is one of them.
Well, seeing as that it's in Science, it probably was reviewed. RML is a purifed prion preparation (made by Rocky Mountain Labs), and is a common positive control in prion studies. To the grandparent: the scientists that still dismiss prion disease are few and far between. The majority of the scientific community accepts the prion mechanism of transmission now. This was not the case a few years ago, but it's an accepted mechanism now.
All that said, I do think it's a bit of a stretch to call these "synthetic prions". I only skimmed the paper so far, but as far as I can tell, they state that these are only infectious in mice that already overexpress an aberrant protein (16 fold!) in the CNS.
The big thing that gets me is the lack of controls. This is a Science paper; where is the CD1 mouse infected with the 'synthetic prion'? My guess is that it didn't get disease, so they excluded the data. Fig 1C starts to show this a little, but still lacks proper controls. Here, they show that brain homogenate from 9949 mice hit with seeded protein can induce disease in normal (FVB) mice. They still don't do complete controls, though. Where is the homogenate + CD1 mouse? The FVB + vehicle mouse? Heck, where are the loading controls? Come on, a Science paper without loading controls???? It's not exactly the kind of thing that belongs in "unpublished data".
The positive side is that they seem to have confirmed the role of beta-rich regions in prion disease, and the importance of crystal/amyloid formation (which has been downplayed recently due to gross pathologic findings; this suggests that micro-plaques will also cause disease). Hammering out the structural domains responsible for disease is an important step.
I would say it's the capacity for learning, not the speed at which one does learn
You have a good point there. I'm probably a little biased on that point, because I can normally learn pretty fast. A better definition would probably be a combination of the two: capacity for learning and speed at which you can learn.
Ability is never of benefit until you use it. I'd still argue that intelligence is that capacity to learn, but if you're lazy you just never use that capacity. I think of intelligence, will, and motivation as three seperate but interacting traits. Will and motivation can be applied to areas that require only basal intelligence. (Must......resist......urge......to......randomly.......insult....)
Think physics: Energy is still energy regardless of whether or not it does any actual work. You're right; ability is meaningless if not used. Of course it will, like any other trait, atrophy with disuse.
You can't assume that the average adult has a lower level of intelligence. That "obvious" fact of yours is merely an opinion unless you have stats to back up such a statement. Is the average adult ignorant of many things?
This brings up an interesting point. There is certainly a perception among many people that people are less intelligent today than in the past. Perhaps what we really see is an increase in ignorance, not a drop in intelligence. And they are not the same thing. In fact, the increase in ignorance may merely be an artifact.
Today, there is much more known to humanity as a whole than there was 5 decades ago. This means that individuals have a lot more to be ignorant about. It's kind of a side effect of the information age. We can only learn so much, so fast, and we tend to focus on what is useful to us. For instance, I know a lot about molecular biology, because it is what I do for a living. As a result, the majority of people on/. are ignorant of molecular biology compared to me. However, I am ignorant of programming when compared to the majority of people on/. (Keep in mind that this says precisely squat about anyone's intelligence). Fifty years ago, you would be hard pressed to find people that knew what those two fields were. Today the average guy on the street can at least tell you something about them, at some level. Anyone that's been to college can probably carry on a conversation about the topics for a while (except, perhaps, for english majors*)
I have always considered intelligence to be a measure of how fast you can learn. If that holds true, and people today are as intelligent as the people of 50 years ago, there are going to be areas in which they were well-versed in which we are not (comparing people of the same age). We have had to sacrifice certain areas to learn new ones.
*Feel free to slam my grammar/punctuation/spelling now;)
And you'll get Tom Bombadil's song stuck in your head, as the reader sings all the songs.
I dunno, I think that would ruin it for me. I have a distinct tune for Tom's songs already in my head, and I doubt that the reader's would be different. This already happened with the characters. In the movie, Gandalf was pretty danged close to my mind's eye, as was Gimli, but Frodo was waaaaayyy off.
It wasn't as bad as it was for some other books. I loved Jurassic Park when I read it, and Malcolm was my favorite character. But I can't freakin' stand Jeff Goldblum. For some reason, he just annoys me. That, among other things, actually ruined Jurassic Park for me. I can still re-read LOTR though. And someday, I'll read Similarrion (something like that...never can recall exactly...)
You're right, SS1 probably isn't cut out for the task. It doesn't have the range to get any travel done; all the input it makes isn't enough to get "over the hump" to the orbital horizontal payoff. The White Knight would be able to give more downrange ability. However, according to rumor (and NeoThermic), there are SS2 & SS3 in the works, and SS3 at least will be orbital-capable. There's the payoff.
NeoThermic put up the confirmation (thanks!)
The "niche" comes in when you look at the price. Probably in the realm of $10k each way at first. Cost would come down, of course, but at first it would be niche.
The technician scenario above certainly makes sense, though. Hadn't thought of that one. I will now go seek markets where that scenario would apply, and become a highly skilled technician in that field.
Take a joke, man. I'm from Texas, so I take 10x as much crap about that as any Canadian. And most of that is not in good humor. I know a lot of Canadians, and they're not all that bad. For Canadians (JOKE AGAIN!!!!)
No mention of capitalistic exploit, such as mining of minerals; low-G manufacturing; etc.
I was talking with a friend a while back, who brought up a good point for Rutan's concept having a real commercial application : travel. Not tourist travel, but actual travel to other places.
Rutan apparently has an orbital vehicle on the drawing board that is a scaled up version of SS1 (rumor only, AFAIK). If something like this could be set up, it's about 2hr to anywhere in the world. Even for $10k, there are a lot of business travellers whose time is worth that much.
Think two hours from NYC to Sydney or Tokyo, compared to 17+ by passenger jet. It's a niche market, but there are people that travel very long distances like that who would like to be able to do it much faster, and are willing to pay a lot for the ability. They already purchase day-of-travel prices with first class tickets; how much is that from NYC to Tokyo?
The niche is small, but probably big enough to sustain a company or two. And that sounds kind of like the start of the airline industry, minus the government subsidy.
Slashdot Mirror
To run with the analogy, if a cop sees a kid going down a row of cars testing door handles, he won't just run out and arrest him. The cop will wait until the kid comes across an unlocked door, rummages through the car, and takes something. Then the cop will arrest him. The cop waits because until the kid takes something, it's not a clear cut case. Sure, the kid is doing wrong, but the cop doesn't have enough ammo to really get him. Some people might take a "no harm, no foul" attitude.
If I was 12 and got caught doing something dumb like trying to log in as root like that, I'd just counter with the defense that I got the IP address wrong. "Oh, that waas your server? My buddies must have been playing a joke on me...he said that was his machine." I'd most likely get off, and walk away with a feeling that I was untouchable on the net. Wait until you actually have something to scare them with, then nail 'em.
Point by point refutation of the arguments, and I get an ad hominem in return. Thank you for the intellectual stimulation up to this last post.
2. I do not restrict to other otganisms. It is just that these are the most readily affected.
3. Selection is any process by which the frequency of an allele is changed. Natural selection is just what it sounds like. Selective breeding is a process used by man to select for certain genes. Learn the terms if you plan to use them
4. This just illustrates a severe misunderstanding, on your part, of basic biology and the mechanisms of selection, natural and otherwise. You discuss what you obviously do not understand.
5. I think you misunderstand my thrust. Which is this: as for results, GM is the same as selective breeding. The difference is the timescale. The difference in timescale is the same as thed ifference between natural selection and selective breeding.
6. Have you read the reoptrts? Have you seen the experiemts? Do you knw what the observed effects are? Your analogy is flawed. Many people have put guns to their heads, pulled the trigger, and died. No one has planted a GM crop and had the dire consequences predicted, and these are studies done for nearly a decade.
This is almost laughable. How does one convert elemental oxygen into methane? Transmutation? I think you have CO2 confused with methane. Learn a little before you go off like that. There are thousands of organisms that digest hemoglobin. Like humans, for instance. And every bacterium that exists. I have an impaired imagination? Well, then, you come up with a single real scenario.
All of this avoids the big lie: that opponents of GM know anything at all about the technology they demonize. You have demonstrated a complete ignorance of basic biology, genetics, chemistry, and molecular biology. Learn these topics, then we can discuss it.
That s not really right. On an individual scale, natural selection does not seek harmony with the environment. Natural selection seeks nothing, and tunes to nothing except the amplification of oneself. Organisms do not seek to live in harmony with the environment, they seek to exploit it the best they can. The environment (i.e., the other organisms around it) counter this by trying to exploit each other in the same manner. This is natural selection. Selective breeding accelerates this process drastically.
Where a gene may provide a benefit that will increase its frequency over a period of several thousand years under the influence of natural selection, selective breeding can do it in a century or less. Selective breeding is far from a natural process. Selective breeding acts on one species, and accelerates the selection in that species for a given trait or set if traits. The surrounding species (the environment) do not experience the same increase in rate.Remember; I am not comparing GM to natural selection, but to selective breeding.
if breeding created a more hardy competitor, don't you think nature would have created it by now over the 4.5 billion years it's been at work?
This should be fairly obvious, but it has resulted in a hardier competitor. Many, many times. That's evolution. And simply stating that something is "flat out destructive" does not make it so. I'm not saying that GM is de facto safe, just that it's not by default unsafe, either. In fact, the resarch that has been done points to "safe".
Also, I can't think of a single mechanism other than improved hardiness that would cause an organism to be destructive. Otherwise, it wouldn't be able to compete with indigenous species and would be wiped out.
And how is the result of selective breeding not "self-replicating"? For that matter, what is the argument behind saying that a selectively bred organism is not a "potential time bomb"? You could easily accidentally create an unusually hardy organism through breeding selection that, if released, could wreack havoc.
I understand that you didn't overtly make the negative claims about selective breeding, but the implication is there.
Note the part about "for the support of the government". Insurance premiums do not support the government, AFAIK. Therefore, they are not a tax. They are government mandated, but it is not a tax. Calling it such is simple and transparent rhetoric.
Although you shouldn't be modded as flamebait, the complaint about the firewall is valid, as is the desire to have a warning. I think most people *on /.* would like to avoid ISP's like this. The parent didn't say they were evil, just that he'd like to avoid them
Well, my router has a real IP. I don't think there's anyone in town a lot cheaper than Earthlink, too. I've been very happy with them; he should look into switching, if possible,
A lot of researchers are starting to think that the actual molecular trigger is the DNA alterations, though. It is hypothesized that as telomeres reduce in length, the presentations of "old age" start to show. The idea is that if we can reduce the rate of degredation, we can reduce the rate of onset of old age.
Aside from pie-in-the-sky ideas about putting someone on pause while a cure is developed, this mught be a great stopgap measure or combinatorial method if delivered locally.
Deliver the drug locally, so that it has an effective dose just in the tumor. Or use the developing tumor targeting strategies that are out there. This could halt or slow tumor growth while other treatments work on killing it off.
The drawback, of course, is that most anticancer drugs target tumors based on their rapid growth.
Talk to your parents about it. Prepare what you want them to understand and present it to them, and have them bitch. If your parents don't care, take it to someone else (and really, even if you think they don't care, try them first, even if only as a practice run for pitching to people who do care). Go to another relative, sympathetic teacher, school board, city council, anyone. If you are in any kind of youth group (club, church, whatever) use the people there. Trust me, the people that volunteer with those groups would be overjoyed at the idea of helping you out with something like this. I work with teenagers, and I love helping them bitch about things they think are screwed up, even if I don't think it's important. It makes up for me not having the balls to do it when I was younger.
If you can't find a champion, do it yourself. Go to the city council, or the mayor, or the school board. Don't write a letter, and don't waste your time with an e-mail. Go see them. Walk into a city council or school board meeting and get up in front of them and talk. Most districts allow the general public to do this. The idea that elected people won't listen to you because you're a kid is bullshit. Championing the cause of teenagers who just want a good education is gold for an election campaign.
You have to put up with this crap all the time in the real world. You should be left without it at school. It's bullshit. Don't let people ignore you because you are young.
As for the amyloid, there has been some recent work (referenced in the paper) stating that amyloid deposits on histology are not necessary for disease. This has made some people think that they are just another symptom. Personally, I think that the deposits are stil there, just far too small to be seen by gross histology. This (the seeded vs unseeded) data seems to support the idea that deposition of amyloid is needed for the disease to progress. We just may not be able to detect it with these methods. I don't know if immunogold has ever been done, but it might be worth a shot.
The controls they omitted are pretty crucial, I think. Come on, no loading control on an immunoblot? That's pretty basic, and it doesn't take a lot of room. They could have easily scaled those images down slightly and done a cut & paste of a subsequent blot. They also skip around, using CD1 mice for some controls, then FVBs for another. I'm not accusing them of not doing the controls, I'm sure they did. They could have very easily omitted the FVB+extract data and sustituted CD1+extract. I know the reason they did it, I work on some immunology related stuff; we pick and chose models all the time. We get criticized for it, though. And justly so. When data gets that selective, I see little red flags.
It's interesting stuff, just not very conclusive. There is very little that is said definitively, even for the scientific world.
Assuming that papers are published solely on merit is a bit naive. They are considered for timeliness, context, author, institution, and even current events. Especially in the top-teir journals like Science, Nature, and Cell. I have seen many papers in Science that I didn't think deserved to be there, based on the data shown. This is one of them.
Well, seeing as that it's in Science, it probably was reviewed. RML is a purifed prion preparation (made by Rocky Mountain Labs), and is a common positive control in prion studies. To the grandparent: the scientists that still dismiss prion disease are few and far between. The majority of the scientific community accepts the prion mechanism of transmission now. This was not the case a few years ago, but it's an accepted mechanism now.
All that said, I do think it's a bit of a stretch to call these "synthetic prions". I only skimmed the paper so far, but as far as I can tell, they state that these are only infectious in mice that already overexpress an aberrant protein (16 fold!) in the CNS.
The big thing that gets me is the lack of controls. This is a Science paper; where is the CD1 mouse infected with the 'synthetic prion'? My guess is that it didn't get disease, so they excluded the data. Fig 1C starts to show this a little, but still lacks proper controls. Here, they show that brain homogenate from 9949 mice hit with seeded protein can induce disease in normal (FVB) mice. They still don't do complete controls, though. Where is the homogenate + CD1 mouse? The FVB + vehicle mouse? Heck, where are the loading controls? Come on, a Science paper without loading controls???? It's not exactly the kind of thing that belongs in "unpublished data".
The positive side is that they seem to have confirmed the role of beta-rich regions in prion disease, and the importance of crystal/amyloid formation (which has been downplayed recently due to gross pathologic findings; this suggests that micro-plaques will also cause disease). Hammering out the structural domains responsible for disease is an important step.
You have a good point there. I'm probably a little biased on that point, because I can normally learn pretty fast. A better definition would probably be a combination of the two: capacity for learning and speed at which you can learn.
Think physics: Energy is still energy regardless of whether or not it does any actual work. You're right; ability is meaningless if not used. Of course it will, like any other trait, atrophy with disuse.
Today, there is much more known to humanity as a whole than there was 5 decades ago. This means that individuals have a lot more to be ignorant about. It's kind of a side effect of the information age. We can only learn so much, so fast, and we tend to focus on what is useful to us. For instance, I know a lot about molecular biology, because it is what I do for a living. As a result, the majority of people on /. are ignorant of molecular biology compared to me. However, I am ignorant of programming when compared to the majority of people on /. (Keep in mind that this says precisely squat about anyone's intelligence). Fifty years ago, you would be hard pressed to find people that knew what those two fields were. Today the average guy on the street can at least tell you something about them, at some level. Anyone that's been to college can probably carry on a conversation about the topics for a while (except, perhaps, for english majors*)
I have always considered intelligence to be a measure of how fast you can learn. If that holds true, and people today are as intelligent as the people of 50 years ago, there are going to be areas in which they were well-versed in which we are not (comparing people of the same age). We have had to sacrifice certain areas to learn new ones.
*Feel free to slam my grammar/punctuation/spelling now ;)
I dunno, I think that would ruin it for me. I have a distinct tune for Tom's songs already in my head, and I doubt that the reader's would be different. This already happened with the characters. In the movie, Gandalf was pretty danged close to my mind's eye, as was Gimli, but Frodo was waaaaayyy off.
It wasn't as bad as it was for some other books. I loved Jurassic Park when I read it, and Malcolm was my favorite character. But I can't freakin' stand Jeff Goldblum. For some reason, he just annoys me. That, among other things, actually ruined Jurassic Park for me. I can still re-read LOTR though. And someday, I'll read Similarrion (something like that...never can recall exactly...)
You're right, SS1 probably isn't cut out for the task. It doesn't have the range to get any travel done; all the input it makes isn't enough to get "over the hump" to the orbital horizontal payoff. The White Knight would be able to give more downrange ability. However, according to rumor (and NeoThermic), there are SS2 & SS3 in the works, and SS3 at least will be orbital-capable. There's the payoff. NeoThermic put up the confirmation (thanks!)
The technician scenario above certainly makes sense, though. Hadn't thought of that one. I will now go seek markets where that scenario would apply, and become a highly skilled technician in that field.
Humor sucks? OK, *my* humor may suck, but humor in general certainly does not suck.
TAKE A JOKE, jeez. touchy, touchy.
Take a joke, man. I'm from Texas, so I take 10x as much crap about that as any Canadian. And most of that is not in good humor. I know a lot of Canadians, and they're not all that bad. For Canadians (JOKE AGAIN!!!!)
I was talking with a friend a while back, who brought up a good point for Rutan's concept having a real commercial application : travel. Not tourist travel, but actual travel to other places.
Rutan apparently has an orbital vehicle on the drawing board that is a scaled up version of SS1 (rumor only, AFAIK). If something like this could be set up, it's about 2hr to anywhere in the world. Even for $10k, there are a lot of business travellers whose time is worth that much.
Think two hours from NYC to Sydney or Tokyo, compared to 17+ by passenger jet. It's a niche market, but there are people that travel very long distances like that who would like to be able to do it much faster, and are willing to pay a lot for the ability. They already purchase day-of-travel prices with first class tickets; how much is that from NYC to Tokyo?
The niche is small, but probably big enough to sustain a company or two. And that sounds kind of like the start of the airline industry, minus the government subsidy.
Too bad they're Canadian, though.....