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  1. Re:This later vs ISS now? on Richard Branson Plans Orbital Spaceships For Virgin Galactic · · Score: 1

    There's a limited supply of seats to ISS and they cost tens of millions of dollars. A weekly flight to a Bigelow-style habitat for a few million would certainly seem like a better deal for most millionaires; for one thing you could take your mistress^H^H^H^Hwife along for the ride.

  2. Re:$200K ... Uh Oh. on Richard Branson Plans Orbital Spaceships For Virgin Galactic · · Score: 1

    They probably take Air Miles.

  3. Re:It's called a debit card on In Canada, a Government-Backed Electronic Currency · · Score: 1

    We already have electronic money, it's called a debit card

    And they require a bank account, require the receiver to have a merchant account of some kind, and often have high transaction fees for small payments.

  4. Re:Orbital pickup truck on Helium Depleted, Herschel Space Telescope Mission Ends · · Score: 1

    Don't you think they would have simply replaced it if it would have been cheaper?

    To be cheaper, they would have had to design it for replacement rather than refurbishment, and the shuttle was supposed to be so cheap that doing so would have been a dumb idea. In the real world each refurbishment mission turned out to cost well over a billion dollars, so building new Hubbles on a production line would almost certainly have been cheaper.

  5. Re:Do Canadian credit cards for sub $10? on In Canada, a Government-Backed Electronic Currency · · Score: 1

    Well, for one thing, it is anonymous by design.

    [citation needed]

    According to Wikipedia it passes card IDs around in payment messages, which doesn't look very anonymous to me.

  6. Re:What year is this? on Robots Help Manufacturing Recover Without Adding Jobs · · Score: 1

    We need to teach how to be creative, how to understand things, and use it for your medium.

    But if the government schools taught people to do that, they might not vote Demopublican. Which is why schooling continues to be based around industrial production skills in a post-industrial world.

    The last thing any modern government wants is to produce creative people who think for themselves.

  7. Re:Other than trading on Robots Help Manufacturing Recover Without Adding Jobs · · Score: 1

    How many factory owners do you think as much as lifted a hammer to build their factory? I'm guessing zero.

    How many factories do you think will get built without someone to pay for those people to build them?

  8. Re:Other than trading on Robots Help Manufacturing Recover Without Adding Jobs · · Score: 1

    Or luckier.

    Yes, that's always the left's excuse. People don't get rich because they produce something other people want, they get rich because they're just lucky.

    Odd, isn't it, that people who work harder also seem to be much luckier?

  9. Re:Other than trading on Robots Help Manufacturing Recover Without Adding Jobs · · Score: 1

    Socialism = Scandinavian countries, Communism = Stalin et al.

    Socialism = Britiain in the 1970s, where garbage rots in the street, electricity is a luxury, cars come off the production line at the government-run auto manufacturers pre-rusted, and the productive people flee as fast as they can find countries who will take them.

  10. Re:Terribly Exciting - 10 years ago on SpaceShipTwo Tests Its Rocket Engine and Goes Supersonic · · Score: 5, Informative

    SpaceX charge rather more than $200,000 per seat to fly into space. And there's a big difference between NASA 'man rating' and being safe enough to routinely fly tourists; if SS2 flew daily and was as 'man rated' as the shuttle, they'd kill everyone on board every two months.

  11. Re:Communism on Robots Help Manufacturing Recover Without Adding Jobs · · Score: 1

    To prevent over-consumption, everything will need to be rationed, all governments will become communist or a variation of and money will become 'resource credits' lest we all live in 3d printed, robot assembled mega yachts.

    Ah, we'll all be 'free'... to do whatever the government lets us do. Because the government is run by happy, fluffy philosopher kings who would never build mega-mega-yachts for themselves while the rest live in shacks.

    The naivety level in this thread is truly off the scale.

  12. Re:Other than trading on Robots Help Manufacturing Recover Without Adding Jobs · · Score: 1

    The humanity and compassion of socialism

    Ha-ha.

    Ha-ha-ha.

    You're killing me.

  13. Re:Other than trading on Robots Help Manufacturing Recover Without Adding Jobs · · Score: 1

    We're talking about a hypothetical future where all (or nearly all) manual labor is done by automated systems. Give the people who need to work 10x more than everyone else gets and I doubt they'll complain.

    So most people will sit at home doing nothing, and when they get bored they'll have babies. So the population will explode and use up resources faster and faster. What do you do when they run out?

    Oh, by "those who provide, create and actually work" you meant the people who own the factories... well... screw em.

    So you seize all the factories from the EVIL factory owners who built them. What do you do when you need new factories and there's no-one left to build them so you can seize more?

    The world is changing, letting a handful of people control 90% of the wealth is a bad idea.

    Uh, Pareto's Principle. A small minority have always controlled most of the wealth. It's the natural result of rewarding people for being better at what they do than others are.

    The idea that most of the work can be done by a small number of people while the rest do nothing but suck up vast amounts of resources is laughable to anyone who spends more than two minutes thinking about the real world consequences. Those resources are limited and the productive will always have much better things to do with them.

  14. Re:Why not Ubuntu? on $200 Intel Android Laptops Are Coming · · Score: 1

    Ubuntu on my netbook gets about 2/3 of the battery life Windows did. However, some of that is probably due to battery degradation.

  15. Re:bets? on $200 Intel Android Laptops Are Coming · · Score: 1

    Will NEVER happen. Microsoft will PAY manufacturers to take their OS, should they feel threatened. This is what happened with NetBooks, where XP was given away to stop the flood of cheap Linux netbooks.

    While that's true, there's only so long they can pay companies to install Windows when they're destroying their core market by pushing a tablet UI on desktops.

    Besides, who's going to buy a Windows ARM laptop if it doesn't run Windows programs? People would either return them or install a useful OS instead.

  16. Re:All ingredients for a spectacular fail on 2014: Planetary Resources To Launch Their First Satellites · · Score: 1

    Speaking of not being in your right mind... What possible use would raw minerals have in space?

    Uh, building stuff.

    We are just not a space-faring species.

    Yet.

    Which is why I said this is currently only of interest to billionaires with money to burn.

  17. Re:All ingredients for a spectacular fail on 2014: Planetary Resources To Launch Their First Satellites · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No-one in their right mind is going to mine asteroids in space and bring the materials down to Earth, unless you really do find Unobtainium out there. We'd be mining them in space to use the materials in space, which is why it doesn't make much sense today to anyone other than billionaires with money to burn, but probably will in a few decades.

    If we did really, really need asteroid resources on Earth, we'd just crash them in a remote area and mine them on the ground.

  18. Re:What a load of crap. on Why We'll Never Meet Aliens · · Score: 1

    if you aren't going to go much faster than light, it won't matter if you are in stasis or not.
    The distances are just too damn far.

    At 1% of the speed of light you can cross the galaxy in 10,000,000 years. That may well be less than the lifespan of an advanced alien.

    And if they've been able to upload from an organic body into a synthetic intelligence, they can travel much faster than that.

  19. Re:What a load of crap. on Why We'll Never Meet Aliens · · Score: 1

    Generational ship > cryo-stasis ship imho

    Life extension >> generation ship.

    Any species advanced enough to spend a ship from star to star at a few percent of the speed of light should be advanced enough to survive the trip.

  20. Re:So what? on NYC Police Comm'r: Privacy Is 'Off the Table' After Boston Bombs · · Score: 1

    Troll rating: 2/10. Must try harder to appear believable.

  21. Re:The Claim Is That There Could Be Prevention on NYC Police Comm'r: Privacy Is 'Off the Table' After Boston Bombs · · Score: 2

    I think they need to reevaluate what little benefit it would provide against the massive issues and rights violations it could cause system-wide.

    You're assuming that the massive issues and rights violations are an unintended consequence, rather than the goal.

    Obviously cops want to be able to sit in a nice warm control room with a bag of donuts all day watching people on cameras, rather than going out on the streets.

  22. Re:It's completely ideological. on Btrfs Is Getting There, But Not Quite Ready For Production · · Score: 1

    'Licensing crap' is legal, not ideological.

  23. Re:Yawn, yet another filesystem... on Btrfs Is Getting There, But Not Quite Ready For Production · · Score: 1

    99% of software doesn't need to call fsync() on a sanely designed filesystem. The most likely problem is software which calls fsync() regularly to work around ext4 retardeness then being run on ext3, or apps which use libraries like sqlite that call fsync() multiple times when updating the database.

    Certainly when I manually sync on my CentOS machine it takes several seconds to complete the writes to disk, so clearly the software I run there isn't calling fsync() much.

  24. Re:Loving the Haters on Ubuntu Releases 13.04, Sticks To 6-Month Release Rhythm · · Score: 1

    Second, ALL of the UI changes and tie-ins that people are complaining about are COMPLETELY OPTIONAL.

    Yeah, you can run XFCE instead.

    Buf if you're going to do that, why would you run Ubuntu, rather than a distro that comes with a sane UI in the first place?

  25. Re:We hate success! on Ubuntu Releases 13.04, Sticks To 6-Month Release Rhythm · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm not sure why this is modded 'insightful'.

    People used to love Ubuntu, because it was Linux that 'just worked'. It was only when Ubuntu pushed Unity and other such nonsense that we all started switching to saner distros and stopped recommending Ubuntu to our non-techie friends.