As such, the best interests of *ALL* nations, not just the US are taken into account.
Do you really believe that? Fact is, the best interests of the *UN itself* are taken into account. The UN is maneuvering to position itself as the One World Government. The best interests of any single nation, or group of nations, are only looked after occasionally, and then only as a PR exercise.
To start, the US owes the UN more money than any other country.
I'm actually not quite sure what our status is on payment of dues, but I can assure you that any unpaid amount is trivial in comparison to money owed us by other countries that we will never see. Not to mention that the dues should not be paid anyway, since our participation in this organization is in direct violation of our Constitution.
The headquarters are in the US, so all the bureaucratic jobs to to American citizens
Give me a break. Have you checked our population recently? The paltry few bureaucratic and clerical jobs we get by virtue of locating the headquarters in New York is hardly what I'd call relevant to our economy. Sheesh, you're really stretching on this one.
And, the US gets a veto power!!!
This is the one and only reason I can see for us to even maintain membership. And it still doesn't justify the surrender of part of our sovereignty to foreign influences.
Please, by all means, boot us out. Put the headquarters in London, Stockholm, Toronto, Johannesburg, or wherever. U.S. involvement in the UN is NOT in the best interest of our country, and I'll be throwing a huge party at my place the day our delegates stand up in front of the general assemply, flip everyone the bird, and announce "Screw you all, we're out of here!"
Placing an order over the Internet is treated exactly the same way as any other mail order transaction. If I purchase something from outside my state, there is no sales tax. When I buy my TRGPro in January, I'll have to pay sales tax since they are in my state. And I'll have to pay that sales tax regardless of whether I phone my order in, drive the two blocks down the street to pick it up in person, or place my order through the web.
When you get right down to it, e-commerce is nothing new. It's basically just mail-order, we've been doing it for years, I mean, how long ago did the first Sears & Roebuck catalog come out? Calling it e-commerce just means that you're using this "new fangled Internet thingie-jigger" to let the company know that you want them to send you something. It's still no different than picking up the phone and ordering something from the Sears catalog. Frankly, I can see no reasone whatsoever why they think there needs to be a special tax on the sale just because you place your order through a web form instead of a phone call. (No reason other than blatant governmental greed, anyway.)
as it stands, the majority of people who use the internet for shopping and e-commerce fall in to a middle to high income bracket,
I must take exception to this statement. I work my ass off for every last cent that I put into my pocket. Now, if I choose to work even harder, and as a result put more money in my pocket, why do I suddenly have LESS of a right to expect to be able to keep the money which I worked so hard to earn?
Funny, most of the people I've discussed the matter with (here in the U.S.) view the UN as a tool for coercing the U.S. into spending large amounts of our resources to aid the rest of the world, even when it is in direct opposition to our own interest.
Guess it all depends on which perspective you're looking at it from...
Then there are the judges. You didn;t vote for that guy who just made you pay an 'unfair' speeding ticket, did you.. Guess he shouldn't have any authority, eh?
Actually, while judges aren't elected INTO office, every time I vote, their names are on the ballot to be voted OUT OF office. So even though you didn't vote for the guy who made you pay the unfair speeding ticket, you WILL have an opportunity to vote against him.
This was my first impression, too. However, after more thought, I think the correct response is to be pissed that these bastards are even considering it in the first place.
Without repeating a bunch of details that can be found elsewhere, all of the info I've seen regarding the WTO has some pretty serious New World Order / One World Government overtones to it.
Additionally, (and I'm still researching this point, so don't go quoting me just yet) our obligations under the WTO would be in direct violation to our Constitution in several ways. I won't detail them yet since, like I said, I'm not done researching this yet.
I know I didn't really answer your question very well, but hopefully I've pointed you in the right direction to find the answers for yourself.
Just remember, this is politics, and the first rule of doing evil through political means is "Make it sound good on the surface." If you want to know why people are objecting, you need to dig beneath the surface and check out the details.
My GF enjoyed listening to her AM radio through one speaker
At least AM is mono.:) Heck, one time when I was in this girl's car a song came on which, due to the stereo separation, you could not hear any vocals coming from her radio! Still didn't bother her.
This was, by the way, the day I offered to fix it for her. Even offered to pay for the replacement speaker myself.:-) (She did, however, let me replace her AM radio with an AM/FM model. Not for sound quality, though, we just don't have any good AM radio stations here.:)
On the other hand, there's me. When I bought my amplifier for my home stereo, I took around 30 CD's into the store with me and spent almost an entire Saturday comparing different tracks on different amplifiers. You should have seen the dirty look I got from the salesman when I insisted on listening to *ONE* single drumbeat on every amp they had.:)
Man, I hope he got a good commission out of that sale.
You can already do this with existing technology, the only limitation is the drive space. You can get a nearly TV broadcast (not cable) quality movie in about 500 meg (MPG/ASF format) so you could get around 40 movies on a fairly cheap 20 gig drive.
Interesting. I might have to get started on that.:-)
It would still be much more convenient to extract the file from a DVD than to go through the whole capture / compress routine. Even on my Athlon 700, I'd bet that compressing 2 hours worth of TV quality video is going to be a time consuming process.
Be cool to have instant access to every Star Trek episode ever made, though.:-)
The whole point of DVD-audio and its competitors is to provide a higher-quality music format than CD. Some of the formats also want to provide more channels for surround-sound, or a new mastering format for recording studios.
The more I read and think about DVD-Audio, the more I wonder if these factors are the point of the technology, or simply the justification that will be offered to the consumer.
Seems to me that the real point of DVD-Audio might very well be to standardize on a format that more readily lends itself to encryption and copy-protection.
Or maybe my inner conspiracy theorist is acting up again.:)
I was pretty young at the time, so my memory of this is pretty hazy, but that's pretty much the exact scenario my fuzzy memory was trying to piece together.
Funny, it's not been until this year that I finally purchased a VCR that will actually skip commercials. It records them, scans the tape when it's done to mark them, then does an automatic FF during playback. It's time consuming and it still screws up and plays one every now and then though. And they could have been doing this the "Right Way" 20 years ago. Sheesh....
Actually, I *can* hear the difference between a CD and an MP3, but only on my home stereo system. And only if the house is quiet. I certainly can't tell a difference between the two on the crappy boombox on my desk at work, or on the factory stero in my car. I especially can't tell the difference on an average set of computer speakers, which is what (I'd guess) most.mp3's are still played through.
Since the large majority of my music listening is done while in my car, in my office, or in my house during a noisy party, the difference in quality between the two is pretty much meaningless to me.
4) what happens when audio legally purchased on dvd-audio becomes public domain? no one seems to be concerned about all these encryption schemes which potentially lock away information *forever*.
This is an excellent point, and one that I hadn't even thought of. Thank you for pointing this one out.
I have read that FAQ before, and iirc he posted just about the whole thing.
That may be the case in this instance. Most FAQ's are quite a bit larger.
Karma has become something that people aspire for here,
True enough, although I'm not sure I understand what the big deal is.
and I don't think that setting an precident where we get FAQs spammed to every thread is a great idea.
Entire FAQs, no. That wouldn't be good. But a relevant snippet from a FAQ, especially if it answers a question people are asking, is useful. It would also be useful if the person posting the relevant snippet would, in addition, provide a link to the entire FAQ for those with the time and inclination to digest the entire thing.
FAQs are usually well mirrored...
Yeah, but providing a list of 10 links to mirror sites would use nearly as much space as this guys post did anyway.
(oh, and to the dumbo who moderated my comment here up: you realize that if you agreed with me, you would have spent the point better moderating the previous post down.)
Good point. Especially since your post (and my response to it) was entirely off-topic.:-)
Anyway, not trying to start an argument, just pointing out the other side of the issue.
The reason for doing it is the same reason that when i was 10 and got a little Star Wars walking robot toy (I think it was star wars..probably wasn't) I grabbed a screw driver and opened it up and took all the gears out....cuz I wanted to see how it worked (never did get that damned thing back together...)
Isn't that justification enough?
For those who understood that explanation, there was no explanation necessary in the first place.
Unfortuneatly, the rest of the world will never understand that point of view no matter how much explaining you do.:-)
Did this type of hoopla occur over cassette tapes or CDs when they were new technology?
I don't recall much hoopla over cassettes, but I do have a vague, early-childhood memory of advertisers being bent out of shape when the VCR was introduced. Seems they were annoyed that people would be able to watch TV and skip commercials.
The sonic difference between 44.1kHz/16bit (CD) and 96kHz/24 bit (DVD) is very audible on good equipment.
Yes, but the *typical* consumer doesn't own the quality of equipment necessary to hear the difference. Heck, the typical consumer doesn't really care. Most "normal" people I know have a CD collection at home, but still listen to most of their music in the car, on the radio and on cassette. I know one girl who isn't the least bit bothered by listening to FM stereo in her car with only one working speaker. I offered to fix it for her, no charge, and she declined. These folks just want to hear a catchy tune, they could give a rat's ass whether or not they can hear the guitar player's finger sliding across the string.
I obviously can't prove it, but I strongly believe that CD audio caught on not because it produced better quality audio than cassettes (on consumer grade equipment, anyway), but because of the improved Fast Forward / Rewind speed. Except for that factor, DAT provided the same set of improvements over cassette, yet I don't recall seeing too many DAT players sold to average consumers.
In order to sell enough of these things to make them qualify as having "caught on", they need to provide enough advantage to convince Joe Average, not just a few elite audiophiles.
A few reasons why I, personally, think that posts like that DO deserve to be moderated up:
1.) It's useful and relevant information.
2.) It provides answers to questions that people have specifically asked during the course of this discussion.
3.) He just allowed me to read only the relevant portion of the FAQ and saved me the hassle of having to wade through the whole thing to find the info.
4.) You never know what type of a site the FAQ is hosted on. A great many sites become inaccessible soon after being linked to on Slashdot. By posting the info here, Slashdot bears the load and not some poor guy hosting a web site over a 56k modem.
Yeah, probably a poor choice of words, but not exactly for the reason I think you meant.
The problem is that ripping a DVD movie today is not a terribly useful thing to do. What would be the purpose? Burn it on another disc and give it to a friend? A second copy of the movie would cost less than blank DVD media. Archive it for backup purposes? Nah, cheaper to just replace a lost copy than invest that much cash in disk space.
But that's just today. In the future, I'd love to set up a multi-terrabyte movie jukebox in my basement. Add a web interface and a WebTV type box, and you have instant onscreen access to your entire movie collection without even getting up off the couch, just like I have with my music collection now. Very cool thought, and perfectly legal under fair use, just like my mp3 music collection is.
So, in the end, and when technology permits, I'd say that ripping DVD's will be a very useful thing to do....
I'll have to agree that, given high quality equipment, anolog recording produces superior sound to digital. It only makes sense, since music is analog to begin with, it can do nothing but lose quality in the conversion.
However, that argument relies on the assumption that you have access to very high quality equipment. As far as consumer grade equipment is concerned, I think CD audio provides better end results. If you want to purchase audio recordings in an anolog format today, you have one choice, the cassette. Playing a cassette on anything but high-end equipment produces a nasty hiss.
So, while you're technically right about analog producing better quality recordings than digital, the unfortunate reality is that in the consumer market (the guy who just wants to buy an album at Best Buy and listen to it) the current digital products offer a better result than the current analog products.
But this is primarily due to details of the particular implementations and don't mean a thing in the broader argument of analog vs. digital.
Unless we have a huge leap in space technology this will never be a solution to the population problem.
With current technology, you're absolutely correct. This is precisely the reason we need to get off of our collective asses and get to work on this stuff.
I'm all for cutting back the birth rate, I just happen to think that no matter how unlikely dirt cheap tranportation to Mars is, it is far more likely than getting people to significantly reduce the rate at which they procreate. (I could be, and hope that I am, wrong about that. We really do need to reduce the birth rate.)
Now, here's where it gets interesting...
Through the course of a manned mission to Mars program, one hurdle we will need to jump will be the problem of "How do we feed these guys once we get them there?" Whatever the eventual answer to that particular question is, I'm sure that an efficient means of producing nutritious food in an inhospitable environment will have tremendous implications for those of us who remain on Earth.
Less likely, but still not impossible....
During the course of the same project, another FAQ will be "How could we get these guys there faster?" This question won't (initially) get much funding, but people will be thinking about it. Someone may well come up with an answer. Not all technological advances come about through a gradual progression. Occasionally, there are big leaps, made by great minds. What would very high velocity space travel mean to us? It would make large-scale Mars colonization practical. It might allow us to send un-manned probes not to Jupiter, but to other stars.
Nobody knew exactly what benefits we would get from our trips to the moon. Yet, our world would be a much different place had we not gone. Do we really want to do without the unimagined benefits we would gain from going to Mars?
If each petition signer would contribute let's say US$10,000, they might be taken more seriously.
I've sent quite a bit more than that amount in to the federal government this year in the form of income tax. I strongly encourage them to apply my "donation" to this endeavor.
Slashdot Mirror
right wing: Yep.
:-)
isolationist: No, not really.
wacko: I don't think so, but it depends on who you ask.
As such, the best interests of *ALL* nations, not just the US are taken into account.
Do you really believe that? Fact is, the best interests of the *UN itself* are taken into account. The UN is maneuvering to position itself as the One World Government. The best interests of any single nation, or group of nations, are only looked after occasionally, and then only as a PR exercise.
To start, the US owes the UN more money than any other country.
I'm actually not quite sure what our status is on payment of dues, but I can assure you that any unpaid amount is trivial in comparison to money owed us by other countries that we will never see. Not to mention that the dues should not be paid anyway, since our participation in this organization is in direct violation of our Constitution.
The headquarters are in the US, so all the bureaucratic jobs to to American citizens
Give me a break. Have you checked our population recently? The paltry few bureaucratic and clerical jobs we get by virtue of locating the headquarters in New York is hardly what I'd call relevant to our economy. Sheesh, you're really stretching on this one.
And, the US gets a veto power!!!
This is the one and only reason I can see for us to even maintain membership. And it still doesn't justify the surrender of part of our sovereignty to foreign influences.
Please, by all means, boot us out. Put the headquarters in London, Stockholm, Toronto, Johannesburg, or wherever. U.S. involvement in the UN is NOT in the best interest of our country, and I'll be throwing a huge party at my place the day our delegates stand up in front of the general assemply, flip everyone the bird, and announce "Screw you all, we're out of here!"
Why should the internet be any different?
It shouldn't, and, as far as I know, it isn't.
Placing an order over the Internet is treated exactly the same way as any other mail order transaction. If I purchase something from outside my state, there is no sales tax. When I buy my TRGPro in January, I'll have to pay sales tax since they are in my state. And I'll have to pay that sales tax regardless of whether I phone my order in, drive the two blocks down the street to pick it up in person, or place my order through the web.
When you get right down to it, e-commerce is nothing new. It's basically just mail-order, we've been doing it for years, I mean, how long ago did the first Sears & Roebuck catalog come out? Calling it e-commerce just means that you're using this "new fangled Internet thingie-jigger" to let the company know that you want them to send you something. It's still no different than picking up the phone and ordering something from the Sears catalog. Frankly, I can see no reasone whatsoever why they think there needs to be a special tax on the sale just because you place your order through a web form instead of a phone call. (No reason other than blatant governmental greed, anyway.)
as it stands, the majority of people who use the internet for shopping and e-commerce fall in to a middle to high income bracket,
I must take exception to this statement. I work my ass off for every last cent that I put into my pocket. Now, if I choose to work even harder, and as a result put more money in my pocket, why do I suddenly have LESS of a right to expect to be able to keep the money which I worked so hard to earn?
Funny, most of the people I've discussed the matter with (here in the U.S.) view the UN as a tool for coercing the U.S. into spending large amounts of our resources to aid the rest of the world, even when it is in direct opposition to our own interest.
Guess it all depends on which perspective you're looking at it from...
Then there are the judges. You didn;t vote for that guy who just made you pay an 'unfair' speeding ticket, did you.. Guess he shouldn't have any authority, eh?
Actually, while judges aren't elected INTO office, every time I vote, their names are on the ballot to be voted OUT OF office. So even though you didn't vote for the guy who made you pay the unfair speeding ticket, you WILL have an opportunity to vote against him.
Thank God that they didn't put a tax on the net.
This was my first impression, too. However, after more thought, I think the correct response is to be pissed that these bastards are even considering it in the first place.
Without repeating a bunch of details that can be found elsewhere, all of the info I've seen regarding the WTO has some pretty serious New World Order / One World Government overtones to it.
Additionally, (and I'm still researching this point, so don't go quoting me just yet) our obligations under the WTO would be in direct violation to our Constitution in several ways. I won't detail them yet since, like I said, I'm not done researching this yet.
I know I didn't really answer your question very well, but hopefully I've pointed you in the right direction to find the answers for yourself.
Just remember, this is politics, and the first rule of doing evil through political means is "Make it sound good on the surface." If you want to know why people are objecting, you need to dig beneath the surface and check out the details.
While this sounds good on the surface, it doesn't go far enough. The ban on Internet taxation needs to be nothing less than permanent.
After a little thought, it is actually quite disheartening that they are still leaving the door open to reverse this position in the future.
Time to start a new 'net, one they can't touch.
My GF enjoyed listening to her AM radio through one speaker
:) Heck, one time when I was in this girl's car a song came on which, due to the stereo separation, you could not hear any vocals coming from her radio! Still didn't bother her.
:-) (She did, however, let me replace her AM radio with an AM/FM model. Not for sound quality, though, we just don't have any good AM radio stations here. :)
:)
At least AM is mono.
This was, by the way, the day I offered to fix it for her. Even offered to pay for the replacement speaker myself.
On the other hand, there's me. When I bought my amplifier for my home stereo, I took around 30 CD's into the store with me and spent almost an entire Saturday comparing different tracks on different amplifiers. You should have seen the dirty look I got from the salesman when I insisted on listening to *ONE* single drumbeat on every amp they had.
Man, I hope he got a good commission out of that sale.
You can already do this with existing technology, the only limitation is the drive space. You can get a nearly TV broadcast (not cable) quality movie in about 500 meg (MPG/ASF format) so you could get around 40 movies on a fairly cheap 20 gig drive.
:-)
:-)
Interesting. I might have to get started on that.
It would still be much more convenient to extract the file from a DVD than to go through the whole capture / compress routine. Even on my Athlon 700, I'd bet that compressing 2 hours worth of TV quality video is going to be a time consuming process.
Be cool to have instant access to every Star Trek episode ever made, though.
The whole point of DVD-audio and its competitors is to provide a higher-quality music format than CD. Some of the formats also want to provide more channels for surround-sound, or a new mastering format for recording studios.
:)
The more I read and think about DVD-Audio, the more I wonder if these factors are the point of the technology, or simply the justification that will be offered to the consumer.
Seems to me that the real point of DVD-Audio might very well be to standardize on a format that more readily lends itself to encryption and copy-protection.
Or maybe my inner conspiracy theorist is acting up again.
It'll be interesting to see what sort of marketing spin they come up with to make this sound like a desirable feature.
I was pretty young at the time, so my memory of this is pretty hazy, but that's pretty much the exact scenario my fuzzy memory was trying to piece together.
Funny, it's not been until this year that I finally purchased a VCR that will actually skip commercials. It records them, scans the tape when it's done to mark them, then does an automatic FF during playback. It's time consuming and it still screws up and plays one every now and then though. And they could have been doing this the "Right Way" 20 years ago. Sheesh....
Actually, I *can* hear the difference between a CD and an MP3, but only on my home stereo system. And only if the house is quiet. I certainly can't tell a difference between the two on the crappy boombox on my desk at work, or on the factory stero in my car. I especially can't tell the difference on an average set of computer speakers, which is what (I'd guess) most .mp3's are still played through.
Since the large majority of my music listening is done while in my car, in my office, or in my house during a noisy party, the difference in quality between the two is pretty much meaningless to me.
4) what happens when audio legally purchased on dvd-audio becomes public domain? no one seems to be concerned about all these encryption schemes which potentially lock away information *forever*.
This is an excellent point, and one that I hadn't even thought of. Thank you for pointing this one out.
I have read that FAQ before, and iirc he posted just about the whole thing.
:-)
That may be the case in this instance. Most FAQ's are quite a bit larger.
Karma has become something that people aspire for here,
True enough, although I'm not sure I understand what the big deal is.
and I don't think that setting an precident where we get FAQs spammed to every thread is a great idea.
Entire FAQs, no. That wouldn't be good. But a relevant snippet from a FAQ, especially if it answers a question people are asking, is useful. It would also be useful if the person posting the relevant snippet would, in addition, provide a link to the entire FAQ for those with the time and inclination to digest the entire thing.
FAQs are usually well mirrored...
Yeah, but providing a list of 10 links to mirror sites would use nearly as much space as this guys post did anyway.
(oh, and to the dumbo who moderated my comment here up: you realize that if you agreed with me, you would have spent the point better moderating the previous post down.)
Good point. Especially since your post (and my response to it) was entirely off-topic.
Anyway, not trying to start an argument, just pointing out the other side of the issue.
The reason for doing it is the same reason that when i was 10 and got a little Star Wars walking robot toy (I think it was star wars..probably wasn't) I grabbed a screw driver and opened it up and took all the gears out....cuz I wanted to see how it worked (never did get that damned thing back together...)
:-)
Isn't that justification enough?
For those who understood that explanation, there was no explanation necessary in the first place.
Unfortuneatly, the rest of the world will never understand that point of view no matter how much explaining you do.
Did this type of hoopla occur over cassette tapes or CDs when they were new technology?
I don't recall much hoopla over cassettes, but I do have a vague, early-childhood memory of advertisers being bent out of shape when the VCR was introduced. Seems they were annoyed that people would be able to watch TV and skip commercials.
The sonic difference between 44.1kHz/16bit (CD) and 96kHz/24 bit (DVD) is very audible on good equipment.
Yes, but the *typical* consumer doesn't own the quality of equipment necessary to hear the difference. Heck, the typical consumer doesn't really care. Most "normal" people I know have a CD collection at home, but still listen to most of their music in the car, on the radio and on cassette. I know one girl who isn't the least bit bothered by listening to FM stereo in her car with only one working speaker. I offered to fix it for her, no charge, and she declined. These folks just want to hear a catchy tune, they could give a rat's ass whether or not they can hear the guitar player's finger sliding across the string.
I obviously can't prove it, but I strongly believe that CD audio caught on not because it produced better quality audio than cassettes (on consumer grade equipment, anyway), but because of the improved Fast Forward / Rewind speed. Except for that factor, DAT provided the same set of improvements over cassette, yet I don't recall seeing too many DAT players sold to average consumers.
In order to sell enough of these things to make them qualify as having "caught on", they need to provide enough advantage to convince Joe Average, not just a few elite audiophiles.
A few reasons why I, personally, think that posts like that DO deserve to be moderated up:
1.) It's useful and relevant information.
2.) It provides answers to questions that people have specifically asked during the course of this discussion.
3.) He just allowed me to read only the relevant portion of the FAQ and saved me the hassle of having to wade through the whole thing to find the info.
4.) You never know what type of a site the FAQ is hosted on. A great many sites become inaccessible soon after being linked to on Slashdot. By posting the info here, Slashdot bears the load and not some poor guy hosting a web site over a 56k modem.
Just my thoughts on the matter....
Yeah, probably a poor choice of words, but not exactly for the reason I think you meant.
The problem is that ripping a DVD movie today is not a terribly useful thing to do. What would be the purpose? Burn it on another disc and give it to a friend? A second copy of the movie would cost less than blank DVD media. Archive it for backup purposes? Nah, cheaper to just replace a lost copy than invest that much cash in disk space.
But that's just today. In the future, I'd love to set up a multi-terrabyte movie jukebox in my basement. Add a web interface and a WebTV type box, and you have instant onscreen access to your entire movie collection without even getting up off the couch, just like I have with my music collection now. Very cool thought, and perfectly legal under fair use, just like my mp3 music collection is.
So, in the end, and when technology permits, I'd say that ripping DVD's will be a very useful thing to do....
I'll have to agree that, given high quality equipment, anolog recording produces superior sound to digital. It only makes sense, since music is analog to begin with, it can do nothing but lose quality in the conversion.
However, that argument relies on the assumption that you have access to very high quality equipment. As far as consumer grade equipment is concerned, I think CD audio provides better end results. If you want to purchase audio recordings in an anolog format today, you have one choice, the cassette. Playing a cassette on anything but high-end equipment produces a nasty hiss.
So, while you're technically right about analog producing better quality recordings than digital, the unfortunate reality is that in the consumer market (the guy who just wants to buy an album at Best Buy and listen to it) the current digital products offer a better result than the current analog products.
But this is primarily due to details of the particular implementations and don't mean a thing in the broader argument of analog vs. digital.
Unless we have a huge leap in space technology this will never be a solution to the population problem.
With current technology, you're absolutely correct. This is precisely the reason we need to get off of our collective asses and get to work on this stuff.
I'm all for cutting back the birth rate, I just happen to think that no matter how unlikely dirt cheap tranportation to Mars is, it is far more likely than getting people to significantly reduce the rate at which they procreate. (I could be, and hope that I am, wrong about that. We really do need to reduce the birth rate.)
Now, here's where it gets interesting...
Through the course of a manned mission to Mars program, one hurdle we will need to jump will be the problem of "How do we feed these guys once we get them there?" Whatever the eventual answer to that particular question is, I'm sure that an efficient means of producing nutritious food in an inhospitable environment will have tremendous implications for those of us who remain on Earth.
Less likely, but still not impossible....
During the course of the same project, another FAQ will be "How could we get these guys there faster?" This question won't (initially) get much funding, but people will be thinking about it. Someone may well come up with an answer. Not all technological advances come about through a gradual progression. Occasionally, there are big leaps, made by great minds. What would very high velocity space travel mean to us? It would make large-scale Mars colonization practical. It might allow us to send un-manned probes not to Jupiter, but to other stars.
Nobody knew exactly what benefits we would get from our trips to the moon. Yet, our world would be a much different place had we not gone. Do we really want to do without the unimagined benefits we would gain from going to Mars?
If each petition signer would contribute let's say US$10,000, they might be taken more seriously.
I've sent quite a bit more than that amount in to the federal government this year in the form of income tax. I strongly encourage them to apply my "donation" to this endeavor.