Because when they want to cut NASA's budget again, cancelling contracts with private companies is much easier than laying off tens of thousands of government employees.
anyone who thinks that private enterprise can deliver a man-rated system in the near future is delusional.
So you're seriously claiming that a private company can't build a system which kills its crew less often than every fifty flights? Because based on the shuttle's record, 'only' killing the crew 2% of the time is what 'man rating' means to NASA.
And before you respond, you might like to consider that Delta already has about a 98% success rate over the last twenty years and so far capsules with escape rockets have a 100% success rate in saving the crew. Stick a capsule on a Delta with an escape rocket and you're already more 'man-rated' than the shuttle (and yes, I do know you would need some minor mods to ensure that the capsule could escape safely at all points during the flight).
What made NASA so successful in the 1960s and 1970s was that there was a clear objective: put a man on the moon.
I disagree. That 'clear objective' led to a system totally designed to meet that objective which was cancelled even before the last man walked on the Moon... the objective was achieved, but nothing lasting was left behind.
NASA's work in the aeronautical realm doesn't seem to have many 'clear objectives', but it's almost certainly been far more beneficial in the long term than anything they've done in manned spaceflight. If government has any role in manned spaceflight it should be in researching new technology that will have long-term benefits, not sending burrowcrats to Mars on a one-off spacecraft that will never fly again.
Though admittedly there are probably plenty of burrowcrats who'd be better off on Mars if we could just ensure they'd never get back.
Does this imply that continually electing right wing governors and the like has a little bitty teenie weenie something to do with economies falling into the toilet? Could it be?
I believe you'll find it's bloated government spending that's bankrupt California. And I'd hardly call Arnie 'right wing', except perhaps by Hollywood's standards.
They're not: they're putting extra instructions on-board which help implement AES more efficiently. They may also allow you to implement other algorithms more efficiently, though I haven't looked at them in enough detail to be sure.
I thought AES was relatively fast as encryption algorithms go.
That still doesn't make it fast at an absolute level. Particularly when you're doing full-disk encryption with user account encryption on top and IPSEC on all your network connections.
It can be done, Apple did it, without recompiling 3rd party software.
Apple were moving from slower RISC CPUs to faster x86 CPUs: RISC emulation/dynamic recompilation is easy compared to emulating x86 CISC software on a slower RISC chip.
NT ran on other architectures before, and there was a time when running x86 on an Alpha was as simply as starting the software and letting the system software handle porting it to the new processor architecture.
And it sucked unless your application spent most of its time inside Windows rather than doing anything at all CPU-intensive.
Getting decent performance out of emulation typically requires about 10x the CPU performance you're trying to emulate, so only a maniac would try to emulate a modern x86 CPU on an ARM.
Likewise, Microsoft could decide at any time to embrace ARM by porting Windows 7 to the architecture and making a thunk layer for existing CE apps, just like NT for x86 has a "WOWExec" thunk layer for 16-bit Windows apps and NT for x86-64 (XP 64, Vista 64, 7 64) has a "WOW64" thunk layer for Win32 apps.
But what would be the point when there are no applications for ARM Windows 7?
The only reason I use Windows on any of my computers is to run closed-source applications that only run on Windows; and they won't run on ARM Windows. Eventually companies might start selling ARM versions of their software, but that will take a long time unless Microsoft force them to.
Sure, Microsoft could release ARM versions of Word, etc, but if all you can run on your netbook is IE, Word and Powerpoint, why not run Linux instead?
There's no good reason to make them so inconvenient that one must pay a toll, or have no security whatsoever against passive snooping.
So when Joe Haxor manages to use a cheap DNS exploit to point www.mybank.com to his web server and then hands out a self-signed certificate 'proving' it's www.mybank.com, you really think that not having a padlock icon on the window will stop Joe Average from handing over their passwords and thereby all their money?
That's a bloody great huge reason why any self-signed certificate should require Joe Average to click through six different 'I'm sure that I'm sure that this site is really the one that I want to give my password to' rather than just pretend that it's OK.
Of course it's also true that there are now so many CAs that it's only a matter of time before 'Haxor Security Inc' starts issuing 'trusted' fake certificates for www.mybank.com.
I couldn't disagree more. The private sector has yet to put a man on the moon after 40 years of the government having done so, and they also have shown no interest for mars.
The private sector will be quite happy to put you on the Moon if you're willing to give them $100,000,000,000 to do so.
Otherwise, what exactly would be the point of a company spending all that money just to send someone there to plant a flag and bring back some rocks?
If the free market works, though, prevailing prices should relate to cost in the long run, since the equilibrium price of a competitive market is cost plus a reasonable profit ("reasonable profit" being the minimum profit needed to keep suppliers from exiting the business).
And a government-mandated monopoly on distribution (aka 'copyright') is about as far from a free market as you can get short of having the government itself distribute all the books. The whole point of copyright is to maintain profits above free market levels.
What I don't understand is how I can figure this out, but a CHP officer kills his family in a 100mph crash from the same sort of problem? Yes, he got going that fast, without ever thinking about just turning the damn thing off.
Uh, these stupid push-button starter gadgets are designed to prevent you from accidentally turning them off because that would be 'dangerous'. In this case I believe you have to hold the button in for a few seconds to turn off the engine, and if you just got in the car and don't realise then you might well assume that the starter is broken too.
So as I understand it the problem was not just a hardware/software fault, but a hardware/software fault combined with user-unfriendly non-standard design which made the normal responses far more difficult than they should have been.
But you're eventually going to come across situations where you're going to need your own heavy lifters. And you won't have any design/engineering talent left in that sector.
Most things that can be done with a heavy lifter can also be done by splitting what you're delivering into smaller payloads. It's unlikely to be as efficient since at a minimum you'll need extra hardware to connect those payloads together, but if it costs less than the billions spent on building a heavy lifter and maintaining the launch capability, then it's a better choice. Indeed, given that a heavy lifter that flies once or twice a year is likely to be significantly less reliable than a small launcher that flies hundreds of times a year, there are strong arguments for launching your payload in small chunks rather than putting it all one one launcher which has a much greater chance of blowing up.
And right now, the market for heavy lift (say 100 tons plus to LEO) is approximately zero: very few people who would like to put that much payload into orbit in one go can afford the couple of billion dollars a launch would probably cost (Saturn V, for example, was over $2 billion a launch in today's money).
Try again. Wikipedia (optimistically) puts the current incremental cost of a Shuttle launch at about $60 million. There have been over 100 launches since Challenger. In other words, we have spent at least $6,000,000,000 -- six billion dollars -- on shuttle flights since NASA's incompetence was put on display for the world.
Using variable costs is silly when the annual fixed cost of the shuttle program is several billion dollars. In reality, NASA have probably spent over a hundred billion dollars on shuttle flights since Challenger, the greatest achievement of which is to build a spam can in orbit which the US government plans to drop into the ocean in a few years.
Just imagine if that $100,000,000,000 had been spent on developing a low-cost spaceflight capability instead.
Right now there's no money to be made from flights to the Moon or Mars so no company is going to spend the money to do so; but the cost of spaceflight is dropping and sooner or later there will be an economic case for both, even if only as a 'holiday of a lifetime' for rich bankers.
In the meantime, if there's no economic case for business to go there, why do you think that spending billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to put a few burrowcrats on the Moon is a good idea? They'll be about as useful as ISS (i.e. hardly at all) and cost even more.
And this is a possible answer to the Fermi paradox. Well, after you accept that interstellar travel is not economically feasible.
Except no-one in their right mind would accept that. The cost of an interstellar colonisation flight would be small compared to the value of another solar system, and the cost of not expanding to other solar systems would be the death of our species.
Given that any alien race who chose to expand could colonise the entire galaxy in under ten million years without even trying hard (or a hundred million years without trying at all, just by tourists on a random walk), the answer to the Fermi Paradox is simple: there aren't any... if they existed, they'd be about as hard to spot as technological life in Manhattan.
Yes this standard can be extended quite far, but as long as we draw a line at the required physical bugging of private property, I'm okay with it.
Which merely means that by the time they do decide that they're going to install cameras in your house, you won't be able to do anything to stop them.
Opposing a slippery slope is much easier at the top than at the bottom where it's approaching with the momentum of a thirty-ton truck with a rocket on the back.
UNR works better than a default install on a netbook with a small screen; the biggest issue I've found so far is that it forces dialog boxes to full screen and they often don't like it... they're still usable but look really ugly.
If it turned out the moon were solid gold, and we could go there and bring it back a ton at a time, it still wouldn't be cost-effectice to go get it. It really does cost that much to go into space.
But returning a ton of stuff from space can be quite cheap. Returning gold from the moon could be cost-effective, if you were willing to spend quite a few billion dollars building a mass-driver to launch it to Earth, and facilities to build simple lifting bodies to land it safely.
That said, if you were to return enough gold to justify such an investment, the price of gold might drop too low to justify the cost:).
Of course in this case even if you could build a mass-driver on one of Neptune's moons that was accurate enough to launch payload to Earth, that would cost far less than getting the diamonds out of Neptune in the first place.
Those damn Liberal Commies... Uhh.. Wait.. Ummm.......
Commies have generally spent more time fighting each other than the people who are supposedly their enemies. Stalin may have been a psychopath, but it's a safe bet that more than a few of the people he stabbed in the back were planning to stab him in the back if he hadn't acted first.
Why are writers and creators of media singled out for loosing everything upon their deaths?
You're not. Anything you physically own before you die will be passed on to your family (local laws permitting), just like any other person on the planet... house, money, car, copies of your books, porn mags, etc.
The real question should be: why are writers and creators singled out for _EXTRA_ rights which aren't given to anyone else? If I die, my kids won't be able to go to my boss and demand that he continues to pay them my salary, why should writers be any different?
Well, we could start with securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries to promote the progress of science and useful arts. And then after a few years it would go into the public domain and someone could cut all the mind-numbingly boring parts out of 'The Dispossessed' and release a version that's worth reading... no, actually, that's probably impossible. They could at least stick more sex and explosions in there, I guess.
Slashdot Mirror
Why the sudden love for private industry?
Because when they want to cut NASA's budget again, cancelling contracts with private companies is much easier than laying off tens of thousands of government employees.
anyone who thinks that private enterprise can deliver a man-rated system in the near future is delusional.
So you're seriously claiming that a private company can't build a system which kills its crew less often than every fifty flights? Because based on the shuttle's record, 'only' killing the crew 2% of the time is what 'man rating' means to NASA.
And before you respond, you might like to consider that Delta already has about a 98% success rate over the last twenty years and so far capsules with escape rockets have a 100% success rate in saving the crew. Stick a capsule on a Delta with an escape rocket and you're already more 'man-rated' than the shuttle (and yes, I do know you would need some minor mods to ensure that the capsule could escape safely at all points during the flight).
What made NASA so successful in the 1960s and 1970s was that there was a clear objective: put a man on the moon.
I disagree. That 'clear objective' led to a system totally designed to meet that objective which was cancelled even before the last man walked on the Moon... the objective was achieved, but nothing lasting was left behind.
NASA's work in the aeronautical realm doesn't seem to have many 'clear objectives', but it's almost certainly been far more beneficial in the long term than anything they've done in manned spaceflight. If government has any role in manned spaceflight it should be in researching new technology that will have long-term benefits, not sending burrowcrats to Mars on a one-off spacecraft that will never fly again.
Though admittedly there are probably plenty of burrowcrats who'd be better off on Mars if we could just ensure they'd never get back.
But of course, Arnold is RINO. Even when the party of personal responsibility is in power, they are not personally responsible.
Arnie married into the _Kennedies_, for Bob's sake.
Does this imply that continually electing right wing governors and the like has a little bitty teenie weenie something to do with economies falling into the toilet? Could it be?
I believe you'll find it's bloated government spending that's bankrupt California. And I'd hardly call Arnie 'right wing', except perhaps by Hollywood's standards.
Why put AES on-board?
They're not: they're putting extra instructions on-board which help implement AES more efficiently. They may also allow you to implement other algorithms more efficiently, though I haven't looked at them in enough detail to be sure.
I thought AES was relatively fast as encryption algorithms go.
That still doesn't make it fast at an absolute level. Particularly when you're doing full-disk encryption with user account encryption on top and IPSEC on all your network connections.
It can be done, Apple did it, without recompiling 3rd party software.
Apple were moving from slower RISC CPUs to faster x86 CPUs: RISC emulation/dynamic recompilation is easy compared to emulating x86 CISC software on a slower RISC chip.
NT ran on other architectures before, and there was a time when running x86 on an Alpha was as simply as starting the software and letting the system software handle porting it to the new processor architecture.
And it sucked unless your application spent most of its time inside Windows rather than doing anything at all CPU-intensive.
Getting decent performance out of emulation typically requires about 10x the CPU performance you're trying to emulate, so only a maniac would try to emulate a modern x86 CPU on an ARM.
Likewise, Microsoft could decide at any time to embrace ARM by porting Windows 7 to the architecture and making a thunk layer for existing CE apps, just like NT for x86 has a "WOWExec" thunk layer for 16-bit Windows apps and NT for x86-64 (XP 64, Vista 64, 7 64) has a "WOW64" thunk layer for Win32 apps.
But what would be the point when there are no applications for ARM Windows 7?
The only reason I use Windows on any of my computers is to run closed-source applications that only run on Windows; and they won't run on ARM Windows. Eventually companies might start selling ARM versions of their software, but that will take a long time unless Microsoft force them to.
Sure, Microsoft could release ARM versions of Word, etc, but if all you can run on your netbook is IE, Word and Powerpoint, why not run Linux instead?
There's no good reason to make them so inconvenient that one must pay a toll, or have no security whatsoever against passive snooping.
So when Joe Haxor manages to use a cheap DNS exploit to point www.mybank.com to his web server and then hands out a self-signed certificate 'proving' it's www.mybank.com, you really think that not having a padlock icon on the window will stop Joe Average from handing over their passwords and thereby all their money?
That's a bloody great huge reason why any self-signed certificate should require Joe Average to click through six different 'I'm sure that I'm sure that this site is really the one that I want to give my password to' rather than just pretend that it's OK.
Of course it's also true that there are now so many CAs that it's only a matter of time before 'Haxor Security Inc' starts issuing 'trusted' fake certificates for www.mybank.com.
I couldn't disagree more. The private sector has yet to put a man on the moon after 40 years of the government having done so, and they also have shown no interest for mars.
The private sector will be quite happy to put you on the Moon if you're willing to give them $100,000,000,000 to do so.
Otherwise, what exactly would be the point of a company spending all that money just to send someone there to plant a flag and bring back some rocks?
If the free market works, though, prevailing prices should relate to cost in the long run, since the equilibrium price of a competitive market is cost plus a reasonable profit ("reasonable profit" being the minimum profit needed to keep suppliers from exiting the business).
And a government-mandated monopoly on distribution (aka 'copyright') is about as far from a free market as you can get short of having the government itself distribute all the books. The whole point of copyright is to maintain profits above free market levels.
What I don't understand is how I can figure this out, but a CHP officer kills his family in a 100mph crash from the same sort of problem? Yes, he got going that fast, without ever thinking about just turning the damn thing off.
Uh, these stupid push-button starter gadgets are designed to prevent you from accidentally turning them off because that would be 'dangerous'. In this case I believe you have to hold the button in for a few seconds to turn off the engine, and if you just got in the car and don't realise then you might well assume that the starter is broken too.
So as I understand it the problem was not just a hardware/software fault, but a hardware/software fault combined with user-unfriendly non-standard design which made the normal responses far more difficult than they should have been.
But you're eventually going to come across situations where you're going to need your own heavy lifters. And you won't have any design/engineering talent left in that sector.
Most things that can be done with a heavy lifter can also be done by splitting what you're delivering into smaller payloads. It's unlikely to be as efficient since at a minimum you'll need extra hardware to connect those payloads together, but if it costs less than the billions spent on building a heavy lifter and maintaining the launch capability, then it's a better choice. Indeed, given that a heavy lifter that flies once or twice a year is likely to be significantly less reliable than a small launcher that flies hundreds of times a year, there are strong arguments for launching your payload in small chunks rather than putting it all one one launcher which has a much greater chance of blowing up.
And right now, the market for heavy lift (say 100 tons plus to LEO) is approximately zero: very few people who would like to put that much payload into orbit in one go can afford the couple of billion dollars a launch would probably cost (Saturn V, for example, was over $2 billion a launch in today's money).
Try again. Wikipedia (optimistically) puts the current incremental cost of a Shuttle launch at about $60 million. There have been over 100 launches since Challenger. In other words, we have spent at least $6,000,000,000 -- six billion dollars -- on shuttle flights since NASA's incompetence was put on display for the world.
Using variable costs is silly when the annual fixed cost of the shuttle program is several billion dollars. In reality, NASA have probably spent over a hundred billion dollars on shuttle flights since Challenger, the greatest achievement of which is to build a spam can in orbit which the US government plans to drop into the ocean in a few years.
Just imagine if that $100,000,000,000 had been spent on developing a low-cost spaceflight capability instead.
What would the incentive be?
Making money?
Right now there's no money to be made from flights to the Moon or Mars so no company is going to spend the money to do so; but the cost of spaceflight is dropping and sooner or later there will be an economic case for both, even if only as a 'holiday of a lifetime' for rich bankers.
In the meantime, if there's no economic case for business to go there, why do you think that spending billions of dollars of taxpayers' money to put a few burrowcrats on the Moon is a good idea? They'll be about as useful as ISS (i.e. hardly at all) and cost even more.
And this is a possible answer to the Fermi paradox. Well, after you accept that interstellar travel is not economically feasible.
Except no-one in their right mind would accept that. The cost of an interstellar colonisation flight would be small compared to the value of another solar system, and the cost of not expanding to other solar systems would be the death of our species.
Given that any alien race who chose to expand could colonise the entire galaxy in under ten million years without even trying hard (or a hundred million years without trying at all, just by tourists on a random walk), the answer to the Fermi Paradox is simple: there aren't any... if they existed, they'd be about as hard to spot as technological life in Manhattan.
Yes this standard can be extended quite far, but as long as we draw a line at the required physical bugging of private property, I'm okay with it.
Which merely means that by the time they do decide that they're going to install cameras in your house, you won't be able to do anything to stop them.
Opposing a slippery slope is much easier at the top than at the bottom where it's approaching with the momentum of a thirty-ton truck with a rocket on the back.
Why not arm them while we are at it, after all its for the children.
Indeed. Evil Britons won't try sneaking recyclables into their garbage bin when they know there may be a Hellfire missile pointing their way.
UNR works better than a default install on a netbook with a small screen; the biggest issue I've found so far is that it forces dialog boxes to full screen and they often don't like it... they're still usable but look really ugly.
If it turned out the moon were solid gold, and we could go there and bring it back a ton at a time, it still wouldn't be cost-effectice to go get it. It really does cost that much to go into space.
But returning a ton of stuff from space can be quite cheap. Returning gold from the moon could be cost-effective, if you were willing to spend quite a few billion dollars building a mass-driver to launch it to Earth, and facilities to build simple lifting bodies to land it safely.
That said, if you were to return enough gold to justify such an investment, the price of gold might drop too low to justify the cost :).
Of course in this case even if you could build a mass-driver on one of Neptune's moons that was accurate enough to launch payload to Earth, that would cost far less than getting the diamonds out of Neptune in the first place.
Those damn Liberal Commies... Uhh.. Wait.. Ummm.......
Commies have generally spent more time fighting each other than the people who are supposedly their enemies. Stalin may have been a psychopath, but it's a safe bet that more than a few of the people he stabbed in the back were planning to stab him in the back if he hadn't acted first.
Why should a book be any different?
Yes, that was my question. I was hoping to get an answer.
(Of course if you meant a physical book, it is no different from any other physical property you leave to your family.)
Neither I nor LeGuin have advocated perpetual extensions, only the author's rights, so I don't see why you bring it up.
Have you asked the copyright owners of 'South Park' for permission to call yourself 'MrHanky'?
Why are writers and creators of media singled out for loosing everything upon their deaths?
You're not. Anything you physically own before you die will be passed on to your family (local laws permitting), just like any other person on the planet... house, money, car, copies of your books, porn mags, etc.
The real question should be: why are writers and creators singled out for _EXTRA_ rights which aren't given to anyone else? If I die, my kids won't be able to go to my boss and demand that he continues to pay them my salary, why should writers be any different?
And what's your alternative?
Well, we could start with securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries to promote the progress of science and useful arts. And then after a few years it would go into the public domain and someone could cut all the mind-numbingly boring parts out of 'The Dispossessed' and release a version that's worth reading... no, actually, that's probably impossible. They could at least stick more sex and explosions in there, I guess.