No, I'm not. If.com was a US domain name then companies outside America would not have a.com address. It's the universal domain for companies anywhere in the universe.
You do realize that we will globalize more, not less, than our parents..
No you won't.
The Age of Big Things is over. Western governments are mostly bankrupt. The EU and UN are jokes. I won't be at all surprised to see the US break into a number of individual states or small groupings of states over the next few decades.
That doesn't mean that you won't have Facebook friends in Wherethehellamiistan or buy ebooks from China, but it does mean that you won't be getting told what to do by bureaucrats thousands of miles away who have nothing in common with you. The future is local, not global.
And as we move off this planet into space, the laws of physics alone make centralisation impossible.
I hardly care about enforcing against piracy, but id like to point out that natonalism is very last-generation and will die with our parents.
I believe you have that backwards. Internationalism was our parents' thing with wonderful organisations like the EU and UN supposed to eliminate nationalism; now the younger generations are seeing the problems 'globalisation' brings and the EU is on the verge of collapse as Germans don't want to pay higher taxes so Greeks can retire early and spend the rest of their lives drinking at a beach-side cafe.
China does large roundabouts with traffic lights.:\
England does large roundabouts with traffic lights and a 60mph speed limit; which usually seems to be almost but not quite fast enough to get around without hitting any of the lights.
Falcon 9, according to current SpaceX numbers on their site, is ~$6000/kg, and Falcon 9 Heavy is over ~$2000/kg. The talk of less than $1000/kg is just that; talk.
According to Wikipedia, Reaction engines are claiming around $1000/kg for Skylon, and that's just talk too. Given that no hardware exists and they want over ten billion dollars to build one, those numbers are extremely dubious; I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it costs twice as much if it ever flies.
SpaceX, meanwhile, have actually built hardware with their own money and flown it into space.
I would like to have seen the ISS constructed without the Shuttle.
The ISS is a huge boondoggle which was built to give the shuttle boondoggle something to do after it turned out to be too dangerous and expensive to use for launching satellites.
A robotic craft to Mars could do so much more than a human could
Humans could do more in a week on Mars than the Mars Rovers have in years. Of course they'd cost far more, so you could probably launch a hundred rovers to a hundred different locations for the same price.
So you're not an early adopter for this technology, so what?
Electric cars are not some magical new technology that allows us to do things we couldn't previously do. Electric cars are nearly two centuries old and were rapidly abandoned when the internal combustion engine appeared because in comparison they totally sucked ass.
Electric cars still totally suck ass compared to ICE cars. We've just had a century or so to forget that so people like you can look at them and think they're something wonderfully new and cool.
Energy for AC and lights is not going to cut an electric car's mileage an more than it would cut a gasoline car's mileage.
A stationary gasoline car is producing power 'for free' because the engine is idling anyway. Doesn't much matter whether or not the lights or AC are on because if they're not the power is just wasted.
Projects that NASA has funded, both public and private, have resulted in pushing forward sciences. Like your cellphone, MP3 player, television, etc?
This must be one of the silliest posts I've ever seen here on Slashdot. You're seriously claiming that we wouldn't have cellphones and MP3 players if not for NASA?
You say "NASA monopoly" like there were any valid other options out there for the US. Sorry, but SpaceX's Dragon rocket is not going to be the end-all be-all answer to the US's space needs. It's a moderately-capable lifting rocket, but under no circumstances does it have, say, what is required to go to the moon, or mars, or anywhere but around our rock.
You can easily build a long-range spacecraft from components that can be launched on a Falcon-9, and it's just about capable of putting a Dragon capsule on a free-return lunar flyby trajectory if you want an exciting vacation. The Heavy variety could do a lot more.
The idea that you can't go anywhere other than Earth orbit unless you have a Saturn-V is just silly.
If somebody has a 40 mile total commute and buys this car because of the 50 mile range figure, I predict they are going to be sorely disappointed in a few years as the car sighs to a halt 5 miles from their house while coming back from work because the batteries are old and they were using the cabin heater. Measuring battery capacity is really quite difficult.
Or while they're stuck in a traffic jam in the rain at night with the AC on.
As you say, there's no such thing as a '50 mile battery' and you should probably assume that you'll actually get no more than half the claimed capacity in the worst conditions.
Slashdot Mirror
Without Shuttle, Hubble as it was launched would be known as an expensive boondoggle and no longer be operational.
Without the shuttle we could have launched a new Hubble every few years, because that would have cost less than the maintenance missions.
Surely giving all you personal information to Google is a privacy bug?
To call communism and socialism altruistic is a very long stretch
Demanding an end to private property is about as greedy as you can get.
'That is not your Ferrari, it is the People's Ferrari. Now give me the keys or else!'
Free market at its finest !
There's nothing 'free market' about patents.
Isn't a "private cloud" just another word for "stored offsite".
But much shinier.
But... But... But... Slashdot is hosted in the US!
You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs...
You are mistaken.
No, I'm not. If .com was a US domain name then companies outside America would not have a .com address. It's the universal domain for companies anywhere in the universe.
The US domain is .us.
You do realize that we will globalize more, not less, than our parents..
No you won't.
The Age of Big Things is over. Western governments are mostly bankrupt. The EU and UN are jokes. I won't be at all surprised to see the US break into a number of individual states or small groupings of states over the next few decades.
That doesn't mean that you won't have Facebook friends in Wherethehellamiistan or buy ebooks from China, but it does mean that you won't be getting told what to do by bureaucrats thousands of miles away who have nothing in common with you. The future is local, not global.
And as we move off this planet into space, the laws of physics alone make centralisation impossible.
I hardly care about enforcing against piracy, but id like to point out that natonalism is very last-generation and will die with our parents.
I believe you have that backwards. Internationalism was our parents' thing with wonderful organisations like the EU and UN supposed to eliminate nationalism; now the younger generations are seeing the problems 'globalisation' brings and the EU is on the verge of collapse as Germans don't want to pay higher taxes so Greeks can retire early and spend the rest of their lives drinking at a beach-side cafe.
Perhaps you should make a better parallel? In this case, the offenders have US domain names.
.com is not a US domain name. .us is a US domain name.
All they're really going to do is hasten the death of the centralised DNS system. Which isn't a bad thing.
Shame it's taken a bunch of law-breaking pirates to really demonstrate the flaws of such a system.
China does large roundabouts with traffic lights. :\
England does large roundabouts with traffic lights and a 60mph speed limit; which usually seems to be almost but not quite fast enough to get around without hitting any of the lights.
They care about slamming their ads in front of you, and hiding the actual cost of their services behind that "free" moniker.
And butt-raping any privacy you think you might still have.
Without global communication, running water, food that was safe to eat, and an epically large pile of medicine.
Because none of those things would have happened without patents.
I am quite sure there are a number of NASA inventions that simply would never have happened if not for NASA (e.g. memory foam).
Yeah, that definitely sounds like it was worth the hundreds of billions of dollars spent on NASA in the last few decades.
Falcon 9, according to current SpaceX numbers on their site, is ~$6000/kg, and Falcon 9 Heavy is over ~$2000/kg. The talk of less than $1000/kg is just that; talk.
According to Wikipedia, Reaction engines are claiming around $1000/kg for Skylon, and that's just talk too. Given that no hardware exists and they want over ten billion dollars to build one, those numbers are extremely dubious; I wouldn't be at all surprised to see it costs twice as much if it ever flies.
SpaceX, meanwhile, have actually built hardware with their own money and flown it into space.
Right, because those guys have no idea that such a government program could never achieve anything like, say, putting men on the moon.
Of course it could. But it will never reduce the cost enough for me to take a vacation to the Moon.
The first private moon landing will probably cost about 1% as much as the government version.
I would like to have seen the ISS constructed without the Shuttle.
The ISS is a huge boondoggle which was built to give the shuttle boondoggle something to do after it turned out to be too dangerous and expensive to use for launching satellites.
A robotic craft to Mars could do so much more than a human could
Humans could do more in a week on Mars than the Mars Rovers have in years. Of course they'd cost far more, so you could probably launch a hundred rovers to a hundred different locations for the same price.
So you're not an early adopter for this technology, so what?
Electric cars are not some magical new technology that allows us to do things we couldn't previously do. Electric cars are nearly two centuries old and were rapidly abandoned when the internal combustion engine appeared because in comparison they totally sucked ass.
Electric cars still totally suck ass compared to ICE cars. We've just had a century or so to forget that so people like you can look at them and think they're something wonderfully new and cool.
Energy for AC and lights is not going to cut an electric car's mileage an more than it would cut a gasoline car's mileage.
A stationary gasoline car is producing power 'for free' because the engine is idling anyway. Doesn't much matter whether or not the lights or AC are on because if they're not the power is just wasted.
Projects that NASA has funded, both public and private, have resulted in pushing forward sciences. Like your cellphone, MP3 player, television, etc?
This must be one of the silliest posts I've ever seen here on Slashdot. You're seriously claiming that we wouldn't have cellphones and MP3 players if not for NASA?
You say "NASA monopoly" like there were any valid other options out there for the US. Sorry, but SpaceX's Dragon rocket is not going to be the end-all be-all answer to the US's space needs. It's a moderately-capable lifting rocket, but under no circumstances does it have, say, what is required to go to the moon, or mars, or anywhere but around our rock.
You can easily build a long-range spacecraft from components that can be launched on a Falcon-9, and it's just about capable of putting a Dragon capsule on a free-return lunar flyby trajectory if you want an exciting vacation. The Heavy variety could do a lot more.
The idea that you can't go anywhere other than Earth orbit unless you have a Saturn-V is just silly.
$6k? Are you fucking kidding?
Yeah, I wouldn't pay more than $5k for an electric 'smart car' like this one.
If somebody has a 40 mile total commute and buys this car because of the 50 mile range figure, I predict they are going to be sorely disappointed in a few years as the car sighs to a halt 5 miles from their house while coming back from work because the batteries are old and they were using the cabin heater. Measuring battery capacity is really quite difficult.
Or while they're stuck in a traffic jam in the rain at night with the AC on.
As you say, there's no such thing as a '50 mile battery' and you should probably assume that you'll actually get no more than half the claimed capacity in the worst conditions.