" No - the point is that much of the material can actually come from the moon rather than being shipped up from Earth at all."
So you're claiming that spacecraft parts just naturally occur on the moon? You can just step out of the airlock and pick up rocket engines and computers that are sitting there waiting for us?
Back in reality-land, raw materials are utterly worthless for spaceflight without factories to turn them into spaceships. Do you have any idea how much hardware and how many people are involved in going from rocks to spaceships? _ALL_ of that would have to be shipped to the moon, simply to avoid the cost of sending maybe a thousand tons of spaceship directly into orbit from Earth. That's insane.
"One minor sticking point: There are no fusion reactors at the moment."
But everyone knows that fusion reactors are only about twenty years away. I mean, they've been only twenty years away for about fifty years now, so it would be hard not to know that.
"Using a space station for interplanetary vehicle construction means that the vehicle, the station, the scaffolding, the blast shield in csae the fuel goes up, etc. all have to be hauled up from Earth, at huge cost."
Whereas using the moon for spacecraft construction means that millions of tons of hardware, supplies and thousands of people have to be shipped all the way to the moon at even huger cost, to build your spacecraft. And this is supposed to be better?
"Samples of moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions show large amounts of aluminum, titanium, and several other metallic elements that could be used to build spaceship components easily."
_Easily_? You can just fly up there and build a spaceship from moon rocks?
The original poster was wrong in claiming that there are no raw materials, but it's, frankly, idiotic to claim that we can build entire complex spacecraft on the moon more easily than we can launch them from Earth. The cost of sending a whole factory infrastructure and thousands of people to man it to the Moon would be immense: probably at least tens of trillions of dollars.
"We should prcatice setting up a manned installation on the moon first. It's the perfect technology testing area."
Except it's not. For one thing the moon has no significant atmosphere at all while Mars has a small atmosphere, and that's a major difference in itself. Equally, AFAIR Mars gravity is twice as high, so anything designed for use on the moon will be underengineered on Mars, while anything designed for use on Mars will be overengineered for the moon.
And what kind of fuel, exactly, are you going to manufacture on the moon from 'solar energy'? Most of the chemicals used in the kind of fuels a Mars flight would probably use (if it's not using a nuclear or solar-powered ion engine) _do not exist_ on the moon.
"What's needed is a serious long-term space station for interplanetary vehicle construction, industrial micro-gravity operations, and scientific research."
Three aims that are obviously incompatible: micro-gravity in particular needs sustained micro-gravity, and being attached to a shipyard is not a good way to achieve that.
Nor is a space station much of a benefit for long distance spaceflight, you'll do just as well to dock the pieces in orbit and forget the station. A reusable tug to collect the pieces from low orbit and deliver them to the right place would be beneficial on the other hand: no need to carry docking and maneuvering capability on every piece of your spacecraft, just fuel to refuel the tug, which can be carried seperately in the upper stage of the launch vehicle.
No, as I said, one was a 1.4 and the other is a 1.5. So the 1.4 is producing a little more power than it would otherwise, as I said... but taking an awful lot of extra complex equipment to do so. If the mechanically-controlled car breaks down it can probably be fixed with a few basic tools, when the computer-controlled car broke down it was towed.
"90% of all horsepower increase achievements have came from electronic and computerized engine management"
Yet my old fuel-injected, computerised 16-valve 1.4 liter saloon car produced 1 bhp less than my current 8-valve, carburettor, mechanical points 1.5 liter convertible, and not a lot of difference in fuel consumption either. Sure, that's probably 5-6 bhp more than it would have got with a carb and mechanical points, but that's an awful lot of complexity to throw in there to achieve it.
Plus, when bin Laden and his mates nuke London, I'll still be able to drive my car while the rest of the city is stationary. Hmm, OK, I guess that will be just like any other business day:).
Nah, use n of m secret sharing. Multiple people share files containing totally random numbers, but provided you have n of those files, you can extract the data that's hidden in them.
It would be interesting to see the RIAA go into court claiming that distributing files full of random numbers is copyright infringement.
Because P2P allows you to scale up nicely as more people download your legally distributable files, while centralised systems need more and more servers to handle the connections. Linux isos and game demos on Bittorrent are a good example.
I think the pr0n industry is smart enough to realise that if you stick a big URL logo on your videos then people who download pr0n they like from P2P services will often come (no pun intended) to the official site and pay money to download more. P2P is free advertising for them.
I'm sure there are quite a few pr0n fans who'd like something like this to guarantee that what they're downloading is what it's advertised as though:).
"No they won't. They find someone local, someone they already know, and they'll take your work and then that other someone will make money."
There speaks someone who's never had job offers because of the open source work they've done. Those of us who have received such offers know how stupid that statement is.
Uh, as far as I'm aware the average murderer in America spends about 8 years in prison. Are you really claiming that having 21 people call 911 is a worse crime than murdering someone?
Yes he's an idiot, and yes he deserves some kind of punishment, but sending him to jail for ten years as a "terrorist" would merely demonstrate to any rational people left in America that the US government has gone totally insane... if they didn't know that already.
"And if you want right-leaning propaganda, watch a TV network run by a big corporation, e.g. Sky/Fox News"
People pay their own money for Sky: no-one is forcing them to do so just because they have a TV, like the British Propaganda Corporation.
"Without public services there would be no balance."
If people _want_ a lefty TV station, they'll be able to pay for it out of their own pocket. If people don't want a lefty TV station, there won't be one.
Having a license fee makes the BBC totally dependant on government goodwill. It's no surprise that it has a perpetual left-wing slant, while kowtowing to the government in power when political needs demand.
If you want a left-leaning government propaganda station, how about you pay for it out of your own pocket and let other people watch whatever they want to watch?
"If it were funded through advertising we'd lose out - the output would be geared to mass markets (lowest common denominator) to attract advertisers"
"Noel's House Party", anyone?
I haven't watched much TV for three or four years because most of it was such utter crap, but when I did still watch TV the BBC shows were usually just as awful as most of the ITV shows. I still have nightmares where I'm strapped to a chair like the guy in 'Clockwork Orange' and forced to watch Saturday night TV for days without end.
Honestly, after not watching TV for years I really don't understand how people can do it.
This is Britain we're talking about: unless the crooks are breaking the speed limit driving to and from the ATM, the cops won't be interested. Speeding == $$$$, catching ATM crooks == hassle and paperwork.
"I work in software. I write software for a living, and I expect to get paid for it."
I write software for a living, and it's all given away free on our web site (and, as far as I'm aware, we make a profit too, it's not a bogus dot com).
Frankly, now that most software has been commoditised, expecting to get paid for writing commodity software that might be pirated or replaced by an open source equivalent is not a good career move. If you want to make money from software, then you need to be producing non-commodity software (as we do), or providing services rather than a CD full of binary code.
"They don't have you in the jury box in order to decide policy, they have you in the jury box to decide whether the accused is guilty of a crime"
Which is precisely why people should declare the defendant not guilty if they don't believe they've committed a crime. This is particularly true when a law is unconstitutional, which is true of probably at least 95% of Federal laws these days.
The reason politicos hate jury nullification is precisely because it makes idiotic laws like prohibition unenforcable. They're scared stiff of having their power destroyed by the people.
"I do believe that anonymity is probably required to achieve truly free speech. There are, after all, the Chinese dissidents to think of. But it also results in absolute freedom of speech, where you can say anything you want, anytime, consequence-free, which just doesn't work for me either."
Like it or not, you can't have free speech without true anonymity: if those Chinese dissidents don't have real anonyimity then the Chinese government can bust down their door and kill them. Either you support free speech with all the downsides that entails, or you support the oppression of dissidents, it's up to you.
"Maybe what's needed is pseudonymity, that is, a way to disconnect one's real identity from their identity in various contexts (i.e. as a Chinese dissident), but where they can be held accountable, at least to the extent of being silenced, in that other context."
That's just silly. Do you really think that a Chinese government that has the ability to break people's pseudonymity _won't_ do so when dissidents speak out against it? Anonymity that can be broken when someone breaks a thought-crime law is worthless, because it's precisely intended to prevent persecution for thought crimes.
"That said, when your trying to anticipate the next terrorist attack, it makes sense to look at the people who stand up and say "Hey, I liked that last terrorist attack, it was a great idea"."
Why? You think that professional terrorists are going to go around publically admitting that? A person who put up web sites proclaiming that bin Laden is the new Messiah is probably the _least_ likely to commit a terrorist attack: either they're not going to go anywhere near real terrorists to avoid being locked up, or they're too stupid to pull it off.
"I know as an American I have the right to stand up and say whatever ideals I hold"
And the right to be shipped off to a Federal "pound me in the ass" prison when the government decide those ideals are now illegal.
"What do I need anonymity for? If I took the effort to say it, I'm willing to stand for it, not hide in the shadows."
Frankly, you're being naive in the extreme. Have fun when a future government decides that your opinions are illegal or dangerous, googles for all your previous postings, and you find Feds at your door and discover you can no longer fly because you've been put on the 'No-Fly' list along with a number of prominent anti-war protestors. Not to mention that after you get sacked you can't get another job because your employers google for your old postings too. Nor can you leave the country to escape your persecution, because you're on the 'no admission' list for foreign visas.
Yes, it's a new restriction, and no, it's not a flaw in the GPL. Anyone who doesn't want to use the GPL can easily create their own modified version which does allow additional restrictions, and those who release code under the GPL generally do so _because_ they don't want additional restrictions placed on their work... certainly I do.
Really? In the license it says the attribution must be "in the same place and form as other third-party acknowledgments." So you're saying that, to a lawyer, that doesn't mean that if I list any third-party software on the box I have to list XFree86 too? While I'm not a lawyer, that would sure sound like "the same place and form as other third-part acknowledgements" to me.
"And "there might be GPL code" in XFree86 sounds an awful lot like SCO chargeing people for copyright violation because there might be some infringing code."
If they've used GPL code in XFree86 then they're stuck with the GPL license or removing the code. Those are their only two legal options.
Slashdot Mirror
" No - the point is that much of the material can actually come from the moon rather than being shipped up from Earth at all."
So you're claiming that spacecraft parts just naturally occur on the moon? You can just step out of the airlock and pick up rocket engines and computers that are sitting there waiting for us?
Back in reality-land, raw materials are utterly worthless for spaceflight without factories to turn them into spaceships. Do you have any idea how much hardware and how many people are involved in going from rocks to spaceships? _ALL_ of that would have to be shipped to the moon, simply to avoid the cost of sending maybe a thousand tons of spaceship directly into orbit from Earth. That's insane.
"One minor sticking point: There are no fusion reactors at the moment."
But everyone knows that fusion reactors are only about twenty years away. I mean, they've been only twenty years away for about fifty years now, so it would be hard not to know that.
"Using a space station for interplanetary vehicle construction means that the vehicle, the station, the scaffolding, the blast shield in csae the fuel goes up, etc. all have to be hauled up from Earth, at huge cost."
Whereas using the moon for spacecraft construction means that millions of tons of hardware, supplies and thousands of people have to be shipped all the way to the moon at even huger cost, to build your spacecraft. And this is supposed to be better?
"Samples of moon rocks brought back by the Apollo missions show large amounts of aluminum, titanium, and several other metallic elements that could be used to build spaceship components easily."
_Easily_? You can just fly up there and build a spaceship from moon rocks?
The original poster was wrong in claiming that there are no raw materials, but it's, frankly, idiotic to claim that we can build entire complex spacecraft on the moon more easily than we can launch them from Earth. The cost of sending a whole factory infrastructure and thousands of people to man it to the Moon would be immense: probably at least tens of trillions of dollars.
"We should prcatice setting up a manned installation on the moon first. It's the perfect technology testing area."
Except it's not. For one thing the moon has no significant atmosphere at all while Mars has a small atmosphere, and that's a major difference in itself. Equally, AFAIR Mars gravity is twice as high, so anything designed for use on the moon will be underengineered on Mars, while anything designed for use on Mars will be overengineered for the moon.
And what kind of fuel, exactly, are you going to manufacture on the moon from 'solar energy'? Most of the chemicals used in the kind of fuels a Mars flight would probably use (if it's not using a nuclear or solar-powered ion engine) _do not exist_ on the moon.
"What's needed is a serious long-term space station for interplanetary vehicle construction, industrial micro-gravity operations, and scientific research."
Three aims that are obviously incompatible: micro-gravity in particular needs sustained micro-gravity, and being attached to a shipyard is not a good way to achieve that.
Nor is a space station much of a benefit for long distance spaceflight, you'll do just as well to dock the pieces in orbit and forget the station. A reusable tug to collect the pieces from low orbit and deliver them to the right place would be beneficial on the other hand: no need to carry docking and maneuvering capability on every piece of your spacecraft, just fuel to refuel the tug, which can be carried seperately in the upper stage of the launch vehicle.
So less than 0.1% of the ISS budget goes to actual, real, useful science? Yeah, that sounds about right.
No, as I said, one was a 1.4 and the other is a 1.5. So the 1.4 is producing a little more power than it would otherwise, as I said... but taking an awful lot of extra complex equipment to do so. If the mechanically-controlled car breaks down it can probably be fixed with a few basic tools, when the computer-controlled car broke down it was towed.
"90% of all horsepower increase achievements have came from electronic and computerized engine management"
:).
Yet my old fuel-injected, computerised 16-valve 1.4 liter saloon car produced 1 bhp less than my current 8-valve, carburettor, mechanical points 1.5 liter convertible, and not a lot of difference in fuel consumption either. Sure, that's probably 5-6 bhp more than it would have got with a carb and mechanical points, but that's an awful lot of complexity to throw in there to achieve it.
Plus, when bin Laden and his mates nuke London, I'll still be able to drive my car while the rest of the city is stationary. Hmm, OK, I guess that will be just like any other business day
Nah, use n of m secret sharing. Multiple people share files containing totally random numbers, but provided you have n of those files, you can extract the data that's hidden in them.
It would be interesting to see the RIAA go into court claiming that distributing files full of random numbers is copyright infringement.
Because P2P allows you to scale up nicely as more people download your legally distributable files, while centralised systems need more and more servers to handle the connections. Linux isos and game demos on Bittorrent are a good example.
I think the pr0n industry is smart enough to realise that if you stick a big URL logo on your videos then people who download pr0n they like from P2P services will often come (no pun intended) to the official site and pay money to download more. P2P is free advertising for them.
:).
I'm sure there are quite a few pr0n fans who'd like something like this to guarantee that what they're downloading is what it's advertised as though
"No they won't. They find someone local, someone they already know, and they'll take your work and then that other someone will make money."
There speaks someone who's never had job offers because of the open source work they've done. Those of us who have received such offers know how stupid that statement is.
"Jail for 10 years should do the trick."
Uh, as far as I'm aware the average murderer in America spends about 8 years in prison. Are you really claiming that having 21 people call 911 is a worse crime than murdering someone?
Yes he's an idiot, and yes he deserves some kind of punishment, but sending him to jail for ten years as a "terrorist" would merely demonstrate to any rational people left in America that the US government has gone totally insane... if they didn't know that already.
"And if you want right-leaning propaganda, watch a TV network run by a big corporation, e.g. Sky/Fox News"
People pay their own money for Sky: no-one is forcing them to do so just because they have a TV, like the British Propaganda Corporation.
"Without public services there would be no balance."
If people _want_ a lefty TV station, they'll be able to pay for it out of their own pocket. If people don't want a lefty TV station, there won't be one.
What problem do you have with that?
"Having a fee gives the BBC some independence."
Having a license fee makes the BBC totally dependant on government goodwill. It's no surprise that it has a perpetual left-wing slant, while kowtowing to the government in power when political needs demand.
If you want a left-leaning government propaganda station, how about you pay for it out of your own pocket and let other people watch whatever they want to watch?
"If it were funded through advertising we'd lose out - the output would be geared to mass markets (lowest common denominator) to attract advertisers"
"Noel's House Party", anyone?
I haven't watched much TV for three or four years because most of it was such utter crap, but when I did still watch TV the BBC shows were usually just as awful as most of the ITV shows. I still have nightmares where I'm strapped to a chair like the guy in 'Clockwork Orange' and forced to watch Saturday night TV for days without end.
Honestly, after not watching TV for years I really don't understand how people can do it.
This is Britain we're talking about: unless the crooks are breaking the speed limit driving to and from the ATM, the cops won't be interested. Speeding == $$$$, catching ATM crooks == hassle and paperwork.
Of course the Constitution was intended to prevent the creation of a standing army in the first place...
"I work in software. I write software for a living, and I expect to get paid for it."
I write software for a living, and it's all given away free on our web site (and, as far as I'm aware, we make a profit too, it's not a bogus dot com).
Frankly, now that most software has been commoditised, expecting to get paid for writing commodity software that might be pirated or replaced by an open source equivalent is not a good career move. If you want to make money from software, then you need to be producing non-commodity software (as we do), or providing services rather than a CD full of binary code.
"They don't have you in the jury box in order to decide policy, they have you in the jury box to decide whether the accused is guilty of a crime"
Which is precisely why people should declare the defendant not guilty if they don't believe they've committed a crime. This is particularly true when a law is unconstitutional, which is true of probably at least 95% of Federal laws these days.
The reason politicos hate jury nullification is precisely because it makes idiotic laws like prohibition unenforcable. They're scared stiff of having their power destroyed by the people.
"I do believe that anonymity is probably required to achieve truly free speech. There are, after all, the Chinese dissidents to think of. But it also results in absolute freedom of speech, where you can say anything you want, anytime, consequence-free, which just doesn't work for me either."
Like it or not, you can't have free speech without true anonymity: if those Chinese dissidents don't have real anonyimity then the Chinese government can bust down their door and kill them. Either you support free speech with all the downsides that entails, or you support the oppression of dissidents, it's up to you.
"Maybe what's needed is pseudonymity, that is, a way to disconnect one's real identity from their identity in various contexts (i.e. as a Chinese dissident), but where they can be held accountable, at least to the extent of being silenced, in that other context."
That's just silly. Do you really think that a Chinese government that has the ability to break people's pseudonymity _won't_ do so when dissidents speak out against it? Anonymity that can be broken when someone breaks a thought-crime law is worthless, because it's precisely intended to prevent persecution for thought crimes.
"That said, when your trying to anticipate the next terrorist attack, it makes sense to look at the people who stand up and say "Hey, I liked that last terrorist attack, it was a great idea"."
Why? You think that professional terrorists are going to go around publically admitting that? A person who put up web sites proclaiming that bin Laden is the new Messiah is probably the _least_ likely to commit a terrorist attack: either they're not going to go anywhere near real terrorists to avoid being locked up, or they're too stupid to pull it off.
"I know as an American I have the right to stand up and say whatever ideals I hold"
And the right to be shipped off to a Federal "pound me in the ass" prison when the government decide those ideals are now illegal.
"What do I need anonymity for? If I took the effort to say it, I'm willing to stand for it, not hide in the shadows."
Frankly, you're being naive in the extreme. Have fun when a future government decides that your opinions are illegal or dangerous, googles for all your previous postings, and you find Feds at your door and discover you can no longer fly because you've been put on the 'No-Fly' list along with a number of prominent anti-war protestors. Not to mention that after you get sacked you can't get another job because your employers google for your old postings too. Nor can you leave the country to escape your persecution, because you're on the 'no admission' list for foreign visas.
Yes, it's a new restriction, and no, it's not a flaw in the GPL. Anyone who doesn't want to use the GPL can easily create their own modified version which does allow additional restrictions, and those who release code under the GPL generally do so _because_ they don't want additional restrictions placed on their work... certainly I do.
"Except it doesn't require it on the box."
Really? In the license it says the attribution must be "in the same place and form as other third-party acknowledgments." So you're saying that, to a lawyer, that doesn't mean that if I list any third-party software on the box I have to list XFree86 too? While I'm not a lawyer, that would sure sound like "the same place and form as other third-part acknowledgements" to me.
"And "there might be GPL code" in XFree86 sounds an awful lot like SCO chargeing people for copyright violation because there might be some infringing code."
If they've used GPL code in XFree86 then they're stuck with the GPL license or removing the code. Those are their only two legal options.