You have accidentally boldfaced the wrong part of the US Constition. Let me help:
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries
When the USA was young (prior to 1860 basically), it could best promote progress by ignoring patents from other nations. If not for the patent-infringing development of factory technology in New England, the South would've won the War of Northern Aggression.
Can anyone comment on the possible ramifications of having all these large-scale commercial contributors using a tool that Linus & Co no longer use/have access to?
RTFA. Larry McVoy explains that the reason he's no longer giving Linux devs free copies of bitkeeper is because their needs are so different from what paying customers would want.
BK's advantage was in loosely-coupled projects, without the infrastructure for a central source repository. The only groups that really need that functionality are large open-source projects. Small open-source, or small-to-large commercial projects can afford (and prefer) their own main server.
On the other hand, moving away from bitkeeper expands the kinds of features Linux can accept. Previously, a networked filesystem with versioning metadata would've been a license violation. (Not that such would necessarily be a good idea for Linux, but it is now an option)
Just filter it.. this is basic cleanroom technology that has been perfected
All cleanroom systems rely on an overabundance of outside air to do their work. They are designed to be at a consistently higher air pressure than their surroundings, so that when breaches occur, material only blows outwards, not in. They also contaminate and "waste" a tremendous amount of air (and/or water) cleaning off visitors as they are about to enter.
The more critical goal of conserving the very limited supply of moonbase air is opposed by the less important (and less obvious) goal of preventing dust buildup inside the living/plant areas.
It's bad enough that Christian sects each claim to know what "true" Christianity means,
No, it's not bad, it's only expected. If you believe in something, then, well, you should BELIEVE in it. If a Catholic thinks he knows the only true path to salvation, then it logically follows that everyone else, including Protestants and Jews, is wrong and hell-bound.
For another example, the Quakers take the New Testament objection to even self-defensive violence literally. George W. Bush claims to follow the New Testament also, but he relishes violence, both defensive and punitive.
Their viewpoints are diametrically opposed, so it is impossible for both of them to be correct. One MUST be wrong (or, both could be wrong).
It goes beyond absurd when non-Christians feel they can make the judgement, too.
If you seriously believe that nobody should be able to question anyone else, then what are YOU doing writing this?
It goes beyond absurd when non-Christians feel they can make the judgement, too.
Attention: I am 65 meters tall. Don't believe it? Well, it is beyond absurd for you to judge me!
It goes beyond absurd when non-Christians feel they can make the judgement, too.
It is the height of hubris for a group to make dramatic pronouncements and then claim nobody else deserves to question their most blatant contradictions. If so-called Christians can't even decide whether or not they should follow their own "Golden Rule", why should anyone else take them seriously?
Make up your minds, guys: either violence is always wrong, or Jesus Christ was a liar, or the Bible is wrong. I call the Quakers "true Christians" because they make an effort to follow the most self-consistent of those three paths.
For example, they helped run the Underground Railroad freeing slaves and were instrumental in the creation of "conscientious objector" status, allowing pacificists to serve
Those are two excellent examples of a refusal to function in normal civilization. "Conscientious objection" means "won't lift a finger to hurt someone, even if he's about to kill me", which is equivalent to an invitation to "please, walk all over me".
They practiced (I use the past tense since there are so few left - they don't accept new members)
If anyone wanted to join, they could. But of course, nobody wants to join, for the aforementioned reasons that their actions seem insane to most.
You should really pursue more education before letting your ass do your talking.
Obviously, I knew every single factual thing you just posted. The facts, however, do not support your conclusions.
AC: Minna Daisuki basically means "Everyone (loves/really likes)"
True, but sentence order in Japanese is not the same as in English. Instead of "subject verb object", it is "subject object verb", or even "object subject verb", as each noun has a suffix telling which role it plays in the sentence. That suffix can be omitted, in which case the listener takes her best guess as to what role it plays. If you just say "Minna daisuki" by itself, that may be interpreted as "I love everyone", because that's more likely than "everyone loves me". (Test it yourself, such as by pasting words from it into Bablefish)
So, if the verb isn't at the end, its not really a grammatical Japanese sentence at all, and the true meaning is anyone's guess. It could just as easily mean "Katamari Damacy loves everyone"... or, it could be an intentional mimicry of English word order (as in "Everyone Loves Raymond")
I believe that electricity exists because I have observed that the world behaves as if it does, and have seen nothing to tell me otherwise.
I believe that God and Satan exist for the same reason.
What nice lines. I can conduct experiments to validate the former, or to invalidate the latter, at least for any definition of "God" concise enough to be useful. (Such as the usual "all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good").
However, the use of "God and Satan" in a single clause suggests an inclination towards the dualist heresy, a non-Biblical worldview which is somewhat more consistent with observed reality than the Christian dogma.
You realize that it's only belief when it's not proven?
You apparently used the word "belief" when "faith" was correct, leading to disputing , semantical replies. Faith is often defined as "belief without proof".
(Note that, in that light, the New Testament disciples, having witnessed miracles firsthand, have no need for faith. The question of how a benevolent God could be so unfair as to provide concrete proof to a handful of men and leave the rest of humanity to perish as "unwitnessed sinners" is at the core of one typical anti-theist argument)
I believe that since God cannot be proven, he must not make a difference since any difference would make it possible to prove/disprove his existence, no?
That is another of the standardized arguments against the existence of a God in the Christian-like pattern: Protestants and Catholics claim their faith provides benefits not only in the next world, but also in this one- yet if that were true, the universality of human greed would've spread the Gospels faster than any mere missionaries.
Translation: "I have no faith, so anyone who does is stupid."
I absolutely did not write that. I specifically said that they were "dishonest", and dishonesty is a crime of the intelligent. Moronic people are essentially incapable of lying- for to tell a lie, must say something false and know it is false. Otherwise, you are merely wrong (which often implies some stupidity).
If they were not dishonest and actually followed the beliefs they claim to support, they could not function in mainstream life, and would be as marginallized as any of the rare true Christians: Shakers and Quakers. (Not getting into the subject of whether Catholic monks qualify)
Practicing genuine Christianity is an invitation for everyone else to walk all over you.
Further translation: "I hate Christians."
I've never met a Christian, to my knowledge. I have noticed that the President of the USA calls himself a Christian, but this is a transparent lie. Just measure his response to a attack on his country to Jesus Christ's directive: "turn the other cheek".
AC: You roll stuff up using the least intuitive controls I've ever used.
Games require a certain amount of difficulty to be engaging and fun.
The classical example is Doom, a game about killing monsters. The easiest, intuitive interface would be to have a 2d overhead map where you can click on each monster to explode it with an orbital laser... but that way is slightly less entertaining.
AC: I mean, no one has ever done a ball rolling game before using just one directional control, obviously you need two.
Yeah, but somehow none of those make rolling even half as fun...
Alack, my evil half-brother, Minna Daisuki, has somehow survived our last confrontation and returned to bedevil me again! Shall I never be rid of that meddling do-gooder?
I hope that my role play as a cleric will give me a better perspective on religious experience and allow me to better understand the 95% of the population who believe in some form of religion.
Is that a troll? Anyway, it's futile to suppose that playing a "cleric" in an RPG will give you any insight on religosity. (At best, it will teach you to be a nurse or combat-medic)
Real-world religious belief is based on compartmentalized self-dishonesty: on repeating a known false belief, but only in those contexts where it doesn't matter. (If so-called "Christians" really believed in their scriptures, they would behave like the defunct Shaker cult, which excludes them from meaningful engagement in normal society).
But in the magic-packed world of any "fantasy" RPG, miracles are real. The beneficial effects of "faith" are scientifically measurable and testable: cut off your finger, hire a cleric, and be immediately whole again. Fantasy clerics are maintainers of the body, while the purview of a real religious practioner is the mind.
And, indeed, if only economics (and not governments) were in play, gasoline should be much cheaper than it is now---it's not as bad in U.S., but in Europe and Asia, more than half the gasoline price is tax.
If only economics were in play, then the USA government wouldn't blocked Saddam Hussein's 1990 attempt to conquer all the oil fields of the Middle East. The consolidation of all that supply under one seller would give us prices nearly twice what they are today.
Remember that all of the enormous spending the USA did for the 1990 and 2003 wars against Iraq were operations in defense of gasoline supply- effectively, a diversion of tax dollars into investment for the fuel companies.
You think GNOME/KDE think about shipping a product for a user?
Yes, they absolutely do. For proof, I point you to their debates few months ago about what the users want in their DE vs what the developers feel like putting in.
Analogous debates have never happened for Squeak, because it has no users.
Other than the right to determine distribution, that is.
By that brilliant line of reasoning, every single crime, misdeanor, and civil infringment is theft. Murder, rape, kidnapping, libel, slander- they all deprive the victim of some abstract intangible concept, therefore you think they are ALL theft.
That is tremendously useful for evaluating right and wrong. Hooray, there's only one kind of crime!
"Taking away a right" is a far different thing from ignoring it. If I trespass onto your lawn, I don't suddenly own your house, so I haven't "taken away" your property.
Likewise, trespassing on your copyright is different from somehow claiming that copyright for my own.
You, and others, forget that your "right" to make copies (fair use) is given to you with the same stroke of the pen that gave you the responsibility to respect the owner of that copyright.
Wrong. Nobody "gave" us the right to copy. It existed before any copyright laws were written. Those laws took most of that right away- and although they didn't remove 100% of it, they added nothing.
You, and others, forget that your "right" to make copies (fair use) is given to you with the same stroke of the pen that gave you the responsibility to respect the owner of that copyright.
That's equivalently logical to a mugger asking for thanks because he only took $300 and credit cards from your wallet, but was kind enough to leave your drivers license.
I'm slightly surprised the others in the office don't seem to play it - they are always playing battlefield vietnam
ET is completely free and standalone (not a patch to a commercial product or anything), and it is more popular than Battlefield Vietnam, with 3500 players at this instant, compared to 2300.
Of course, Counterstrike beats them both by far, with 61000 players tonight.
To say that the J2SE (or J2EE) plaforms suck because a particular J2ME implementation is slow is like saying that internal combustion engines suck because your go-kart can only go 15 mph.
You suggest it's a warrantless comparison, and that it's unfair to expect portable JVMs to run as well as desktop/server editions. That might be true if Sun's advertising for Java wasn't so based on a myth of universal compatibility.
Only if you're criticizing the idea (not the design, just the idea) should you blame NASA.
No, NASA was under fairly direct orders from the USA President at the time, Richard Nixon. The idea was handed down from above (just as it was for the Apollo program)
Voters, for whatever stupid reasons, like to have manned spaceflight. They get entertainment value from it. Even though they probably watch an average of 13 seconds of NASA footage annually, just the thought that the USA is world leader makes them warm & fuzzy inside.
So its profitable just like Star Wars III is- doesn't do anything good, but people like the idea enough to pay $10 from each of them.
Most important is keeping smart ex-soviet rocket scientists from heading to some evil country
If that's the goal, it's far from reaching it.
But anyway, that's not really important at all. Rockets are a poor method of striking the USA. Almost any payload can be delivered more cheaply, reliably, and secretly by a commando team than by an ICBM- especially for a cash-poor nation like NK.
Even though human beings have explored in less-than-comfortable vessels before, the kind of physical and mental isolation in space must be fairly unique, and I'd imagine it would be a huge pressure for anyone up there too long.
I can rent a few shipping containers for $800 and produce an equivalently isolated environment for your human subjects- all at a sliver of the cost, and with 98.5% less volunteer mortality!
True, but it is a fallacy to assume that building and maintaining the ISS does anything to improve our ability to build a functioning station. Instead, I claim that it is diverting funds from R&D investment prerequisite to even making the attempt.
The Space Station has taught us a lot, including:
First, there is no such thing as "The Space Station".
How to live in space
Space survival isn't especially difficult. We'd already deduced the needs on earth, and we'd already seen them tested on Mir. New data from the ISS: zero.
How we don't have a safe and reusable way to fly there yet
Even a back-of-envelope analsys of the Space Shuttle in 1971 could've proved that to the satisfaction of any rational observer.
If I drive my car off a bridge, that'll teach me that it won't fly. Even though that's something I should've been able to imagine on my own, at $50,000, it will have been a more cost-effective than the ISS.
BTW, NASA builds few of their craft. It's all the Boeings, the Lockheeds, the Orbital Sciences, etc, that do the construction. Blame them if you want to blame someone.
BTW, George W. Bush invades few of his targets. Its all the soldiers, marines, and sailors that do all the destruction. Blame them if you want to blame someone.
Of course, I'm sure you're ready to start citing companies who have been widely successful with orbital craft in the US (i.e., US labor costs, part costs, etc) for comparison to those funded by NASA. Right?
Like your chart earlier, this is an appeal to history. "The football team I joined won, so this proves they were the better team, not that I am an 8000 lb gorilla"
"The government backed something, and it got better results than the other choices. That means we MUST have made the right choice! It can't possibly be that the very existence of our tremendous investment is what pushed these companies over the edge, or that the total non-productivity of the majority of NASA's work in the past 20 years is what kept private industry out of the sector"
Slashdot Mirror
When the USA was young (prior to 1860 basically), it could best promote progress by ignoring patents from other nations. If not for the patent-infringing development of factory technology in New England, the South would've won the War of Northern Aggression.
Can anyone comment on the possible ramifications of having all these large-scale commercial contributors using a tool that Linus & Co no longer use/have access to?
RTFA. Larry McVoy explains that the reason he's no longer giving Linux devs free copies of bitkeeper is because their needs are so different from what paying customers would want.
BK's advantage was in loosely-coupled projects, without the infrastructure for a central source repository. The only groups that really need that functionality are large open-source projects. Small open-source, or small-to-large commercial projects can afford (and prefer) their own main server.
On the other hand, moving away from bitkeeper expands the kinds of features Linux can accept. Previously, a networked filesystem with versioning metadata would've been a license violation. (Not that such would necessarily be a good idea for Linux, but it is now an option)
Just filter it.. this is basic cleanroom technology that has been perfected
All cleanroom systems rely on an overabundance of outside air to do their work. They are designed to be at a consistently higher air pressure than their surroundings, so that when breaches occur, material only blows outwards, not in. They also contaminate and "waste" a tremendous amount of air (and/or water) cleaning off visitors as they are about to enter.
The more critical goal of conserving the very limited supply of moonbase air is opposed by the less important (and less obvious) goal of preventing dust buildup inside the living/plant areas.
It's bad enough that Christian sects each claim to know what "true" Christianity means,
No, it's not bad, it's only expected. If you believe in something, then, well, you should BELIEVE in it. If a Catholic thinks he knows the only true path to salvation, then it logically follows that everyone else, including Protestants and Jews, is wrong and hell-bound.
For another example, the Quakers take the New Testament objection to even self-defensive violence literally. George W. Bush claims to follow the New Testament also, but he relishes violence, both defensive and punitive.
Their viewpoints are diametrically opposed, so it is impossible for both of them to be correct. One MUST be wrong (or, both could be wrong).
It goes beyond absurd when non-Christians feel they can make the judgement, too.
If you seriously believe that nobody should be able to question anyone else, then what are YOU doing writing this?
It goes beyond absurd when non-Christians feel they can make the judgement, too.
Attention: I am 65 meters tall. Don't believe it? Well, it is beyond absurd for you to judge me!
It goes beyond absurd when non-Christians feel they can make the judgement, too.
It is the height of hubris for a group to make dramatic pronouncements and then claim nobody else deserves to question their most blatant contradictions. If so-called Christians can't even decide whether or not they should follow their own "Golden Rule", why should anyone else take them seriously?
Make up your minds, guys: either violence is always wrong, or Jesus Christ was a liar, or the Bible is wrong. I call the Quakers "true Christians" because they make an effort to follow the most self-consistent of those three paths.
For example, they helped run the Underground Railroad freeing slaves and were instrumental in the creation of "conscientious objector" status, allowing pacificists to serve
Those are two excellent examples of a refusal to function in normal civilization. "Conscientious objection" means "won't lift a finger to hurt someone, even if he's about to kill me", which is equivalent to an invitation to "please, walk all over me".
They practiced (I use the past tense since there are so few left - they don't accept new members)
If anyone wanted to join, they could. But of course, nobody wants to join, for the aforementioned reasons that their actions seem insane to most.
You should really pursue more education before letting your ass do your talking.
Obviously, I knew every single factual thing you just posted. The facts, however, do not support your conclusions.
AC: Minna Daisuki basically means "Everyone (loves/really likes)"
True, but sentence order in Japanese is not the same as in English. Instead of "subject verb object", it is "subject object verb", or even "object subject verb", as each noun has a suffix telling which role it plays in the sentence. That suffix can be omitted, in which case the listener takes her best guess as to what role it plays. If you just say "Minna daisuki" by itself, that may be interpreted as "I love everyone", because that's more likely than "everyone loves me". (Test it yourself, such as by pasting words from it into Bablefish)
So, if the verb isn't at the end, its not really a grammatical Japanese sentence at all, and the true meaning is anyone's guess. It could just as easily mean "Katamari Damacy loves everyone"... or, it could be an intentional mimicry of English word order (as in "Everyone Loves Raymond")
I believe that electricity exists because I have observed that the world behaves as if it does, and have seen nothing to tell me otherwise.
I believe that God and Satan exist for the same reason.
What nice lines. I can conduct experiments to validate the former, or to invalidate the latter, at least for any definition of "God" concise enough to be useful. (Such as the usual "all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-good").
However, the use of "God and Satan" in a single clause suggests an inclination towards the dualist heresy, a non-Biblical worldview which is somewhat more consistent with observed reality than the Christian dogma.
You realize that it's only belief when it's not proven?
You apparently used the word "belief" when "faith" was correct, leading to disputing , semantical replies. Faith is often defined as "belief without proof".
(Note that, in that light, the New Testament disciples, having witnessed miracles firsthand, have no need for faith. The question of how a benevolent God could be so unfair as to provide concrete proof to a handful of men and leave the rest of humanity to perish as "unwitnessed sinners" is at the core of one typical anti-theist argument)
I believe that since God cannot be proven, he must not make a difference since any difference would make it possible to prove/disprove his existence, no?
That is another of the standardized arguments against the existence of a God in the Christian-like pattern: Protestants and Catholics claim their faith provides benefits not only in the next world, but also in this one- yet if that were true, the universality of human greed would've spread the Gospels faster than any mere missionaries.
Translation: "I have no faith, so anyone who does is stupid."
I absolutely did not write that. I specifically said that they were "dishonest", and dishonesty is a crime of the intelligent. Moronic people are essentially incapable of lying- for to tell a lie, must say something false and know it is false. Otherwise, you are merely wrong (which often implies some stupidity).
If they were not dishonest and actually followed the beliefs they claim to support, they could not function in mainstream life, and would be as marginallized as any of the rare true Christians: Shakers and Quakers. (Not getting into the subject of whether Catholic monks qualify)
Practicing genuine Christianity is an invitation for everyone else to walk all over you.
Further translation: "I hate Christians."
I've never met a Christian, to my knowledge. I have noticed that the President of the USA calls himself a Christian, but this is a transparent lie. Just measure his response to a attack on his country to Jesus Christ's directive: "turn the other cheek".
AC: You roll stuff up using the least intuitive controls I've ever used.
Games require a certain amount of difficulty to be engaging and fun.
The classical example is Doom, a game about killing monsters. The easiest, intuitive interface would be to have a 2d overhead map where you can click on each monster to explode it with an orbital laser... but that way is slightly less entertaining.
AC: I mean, no one has ever done a ball rolling game before using just one directional control, obviously you need two.
Yeah, but somehow none of those make rolling even half as fun...
Alack, my evil half-brother, Minna Daisuki, has somehow survived our last confrontation and returned to bedevil me again! Shall I never be rid of that meddling do-gooder?
I hope that my role play as a cleric will give me a better perspective on religious experience and allow me to better understand the 95% of the population who believe in some form of religion.
Is that a troll? Anyway, it's futile to suppose that playing a "cleric" in an RPG will give you any insight on religosity. (At best, it will teach you to be a nurse or combat-medic)
Real-world religious belief is based on compartmentalized self-dishonesty: on repeating a known false belief, but only in those contexts where it doesn't matter. (If so-called "Christians" really believed in their scriptures, they would behave like the defunct Shaker cult, which excludes them from meaningful engagement in normal society).
But in the magic-packed world of any "fantasy" RPG, miracles are real. The beneficial effects of "faith" are scientifically measurable and testable: cut off your finger, hire a cleric, and be immediately whole again. Fantasy clerics are maintainers of the body, while the purview of a real religious practioner is the mind.
And, indeed, if only economics (and not governments) were in play, gasoline should be much cheaper than it is now---it's not as bad in U.S., but in Europe and Asia, more than half the gasoline price is tax.
If only economics were in play, then the USA government wouldn't blocked Saddam Hussein's 1990 attempt to conquer all the oil fields of the Middle East. The consolidation of all that supply under one seller would give us prices nearly twice what they are today.
Remember that all of the enormous spending the USA did for the 1990 and 2003 wars against Iraq were operations in defense of gasoline supply- effectively, a diversion of tax dollars into investment for the fuel companies.
You think GNOME/KDE think about shipping a product for a user?
Yes, they absolutely do. For proof, I point you to their debates few months ago about what the users want in their DE vs what the developers feel like putting in.
Analogous debates have never happened for Squeak, because it has no users.
Other than the right to determine distribution, that is.
By that brilliant line of reasoning, every single crime, misdeanor, and civil infringment is theft. Murder, rape, kidnapping, libel, slander- they all deprive the victim of some abstract intangible concept, therefore you think they are ALL theft.
That is tremendously useful for evaluating right and wrong. Hooray, there's only one kind of crime!
Taking away the right of the copyright owner
"Taking away a right" is a far different thing from ignoring it. If I trespass onto your lawn, I don't suddenly own your house, so I haven't "taken away" your property.
Likewise, trespassing on your copyright is different from somehow claiming that copyright for my own.
You, and others, forget that your "right" to make copies (fair use) is given to you with the same stroke of the pen that gave you the responsibility to respect the owner of that copyright.
Wrong. Nobody "gave" us the right to copy. It existed before any copyright laws were written. Those laws took most of that right away- and although they didn't remove 100% of it, they added nothing.
You, and others, forget that your "right" to make copies (fair use) is given to you with the same stroke of the pen that gave you the responsibility to respect the owner of that copyright.
That's equivalently logical to a mugger asking for thanks because he only took $300 and credit cards from your wallet, but was kind enough to leave your drivers license.
I'm slightly surprised the others in the office don't seem to play it - they are always playing battlefield vietnam
ET is completely free and standalone (not a patch to a commercial product or anything), and it is more popular than Battlefield Vietnam, with 3500 players at this instant, compared to 2300.
Of course, Counterstrike beats them both by far, with 61000 players tonight.
To say that the J2SE (or J2EE) plaforms suck because a particular J2ME implementation is slow is like saying that internal combustion engines suck because your go-kart can only go 15 mph.
You suggest it's a warrantless comparison, and that it's unfair to expect portable JVMs to run as well as desktop/server editions. That might be true if Sun's advertising for Java wasn't so based on a myth of universal compatibility.
"Write Once, Run Anywhere" propaganda is a lie.
Only if you're criticizing the idea (not the design, just the idea) should you blame NASA.
No, NASA was under fairly direct orders from the USA President at the time, Richard Nixon. The idea was handed down from above (just as it was for the Apollo program)
AC: Not exploding and killing people: priceless
Exploding and STILL not killing people: $100,000,000.
And it makes $0 a year.
No, it earns tax dollars from voters.
Voters, for whatever stupid reasons, like to have manned spaceflight. They get entertainment value from it. Even though they probably watch an average of 13 seconds of NASA footage annually, just the thought that the USA is world leader makes them warm & fuzzy inside.
So its profitable just like Star Wars III is- doesn't do anything good, but people like the idea enough to pay $10 from each of them.
Most important is keeping smart ex-soviet rocket scientists from heading to some evil country
If that's the goal, it's far from reaching it.
But anyway, that's not really important at all. Rockets are a poor method of striking the USA. Almost any payload can be delivered more cheaply, reliably, and secretly by a commando team than by an ICBM- especially for a cash-poor nation like NK.
Even though human beings have explored in less-than-comfortable vessels before, the kind of physical and mental isolation in space must be fairly unique, and I'd imagine it would be a huge pressure for anyone up there too long.
I can rent a few shipping containers for $800 and produce an equivalently isolated environment for your human subjects- all at a sliver of the cost, and with 98.5% less volunteer mortality!
If we cannot build and maintain a space station,
True, but it is a fallacy to assume that building and maintaining the ISS does anything to improve our ability to build a functioning station. Instead, I claim that it is diverting funds from R&D investment prerequisite to even making the attempt.
The Space Station has taught us a lot, including:
First, there is no such thing as "The Space Station".
How to live in space
Space survival isn't especially difficult. We'd already deduced the needs on earth, and we'd already seen them tested on Mir. New data from the ISS: zero.
How we don't have a safe and reusable way to fly there yet
Even a back-of-envelope analsys of the Space Shuttle in 1971 could've proved that to the satisfaction of any rational observer.
If I drive my car off a bridge, that'll teach me that it won't fly. Even though that's something I should've been able to imagine on my own, at $50,000, it will have been a more cost-effective than the ISS.
BTW, NASA builds few of their craft. It's all the Boeings, the Lockheeds, the Orbital Sciences, etc, that do the construction. Blame them if you want to blame someone.
BTW, George W. Bush invades few of his targets. Its all the soldiers, marines, and sailors that do all the destruction. Blame them if you want to blame someone.
Of course, I'm sure you're ready to start citing companies who have been widely successful with orbital craft in the US (i.e., US labor costs, part costs, etc) for comparison to those funded by NASA. Right?
Like your chart earlier, this is an appeal to history. "The football team I joined won, so this proves they were the better team, not that I am an 8000 lb gorilla"
"The government backed something, and it got better results than the other choices. That means we MUST have made the right choice! It can't possibly be that the very existence of our tremendous investment is what pushed these companies over the edge, or that the total non-productivity of the majority of NASA's work in the past 20 years is what kept private industry out of the sector"