Of the approximately 5 million terabytes of information out in the world... the vast majority of it can probably be labeled worthless. Focusing on some of the world's great libraries should accomplish the task of disseminating 95 percent of what people want to know and dispense with more than a few terabytes of bunkem.
In "The Nurture Assumption," Judith Rich Harris attacks the assumption that family values have a strong impact on school-age children. What matters to children is their peer group. Surround them with a bunch of dumb-punks and your kid is more likely to end up a dumb-punk whether or not you surround them with computers and stacks of encylopedias.
This means, as many other posters are saying, that you have to create school environments where the children themselves value education.
A few ways to do this...
(1) Remove disruptive kids for the sake of the class, rather than forcing the class to endure disruption for the sake of the disrupter. http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/figlio/sue.pdf
(2) Stop holding kids back. Doing so means the slow and disruptive become the older and larger role models for the grade behind them. If a kid can't cut it in a regular school with kids his own age, that kid needs to be sent elsewhere.
(3) Don't tolerate racial stereotyping. The surest way to churn out dumb black kids is to teach them that black kids are dumb. (And no, that doesn't mean blowing smoke up their ass in an indulgent attempts to boost their self-esteem).
So Jon Stokes' "inside information" is from a guy who doesn't work with Intel, Apple or IBM and a five year old article?
As to Overshoot's comments, no.
The 970 wasn't intended to be a "custom processor chip." Had IBM hit its performance targets, it would have had ample alternative outlets for the 970. The great speculation was that IBM would push its own line of inexpensive 970 based Linux servers. But IBM wasn't up to the task.
And the suggestion that Apple isn't flush with cash? Again, no. Apple's sitting on a mountain of it.
Finally, Apple, no matter how egotistical its corporate culture may be, would never think itself large enough to bully Intel for volume discounts.
No, the reason Apple has switched is because marketing told it to stop fighting the dominate paradigm. When the Macintosh runs on the same base hardware as everyone else, marketing can concentrate on the OS and sundry applications. Sure, Intel *probably* sweetened the offer knowing that Apple's cutting edge design would reflect well on it. And the Apple premium will probably justify selling top of the line chips, forcing Dell and the like to buy premium chips for marketing purposes.
The only thing surprising about the decision to go with Intel is the fact that Apple thinks it technologically and commercially feasible to run on multiple architectures. Once Apple became convinced of their ability to do so, the decision made itself.
With the old way $699 got you the development environment on Mac and Windows, plus deployment on any JVM.
With the new way, the $129 purchase of Tiger gets you a development license, while the $499 purchase of Tiger Server adds deployment tools and license.
I saw nothing in the fine print would prevent deployment on non-Apple products. Apple still says Webobjects "[d]eploys to virtually any J2EE server or the WebObjects J2SE application server." So... $499 allows deployment to a server of your choosing, whether it's the bundled Tiger server or something else.
In short, it looks to me like Apple has cut the cost of deploying WebObjects from $699 to $499 and thrown in Tiger Server to boot. If I've read the fine print correctly, that's not free, but it's also not bad.
Re:I hate college
on
Defining Google
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Suppose you're trying to hire 25 decent programmers. To assist you, your staff has arranged two stacks of resumes. Stack one contains 1000 resumes of people with B.S. degrees. Stack two contains 1000 resumes of people without college degrees. If you had to pick 50 people at random to interview, would you choose them from stack one or stack two? It seems the folks at Google, who know a thing or two about search algorithms, have decided to spend their time interviewing from stack one.
As much as I love my mother, the cost of administering her PC-- whether in terms of my time or her money-- is outrageous. The value of a secure, stable computing platform was pushing me towards purchasing her a Powermac. If the $499 Mac shows up, I'll skip the Powermac. Instead, I'll buy her the new box and use the savings to buy myself Apple's Remote Desktop software.
...as many as 50 percent of the IT operational jobs in the U.S. could disappear over the next two decades because of improvements in data center technologies.
To put this in perspective, imagine someone predicting the rise of the commercial internet, the dotcom bubble and its bust... all in 1984.
It should be noted that the settlement terms have not been released. We don't know what promises Ed Black has made to Microsoft, or vice-versa.
Perhaps Mr. Black has promised to sing Microsoft's sweet praises, but that need not be the case. Microsoft may have silenced a critic...or simply bankrolled an opponent. At this point, we don't know.
Compare Hubble to the U.S. military's "Keyhole" spy scopes on which Hubble was based. Keyhole satellites, which are every bit as sophisticated as Hubble, are far, far less expensive. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that its expensive to make a satellite astronaut serviceable.
Ditching "serviceable" telescopes doesn't have to diminish the ablity of the telescopes. Indeed by following the path of planned obsolecense, NASA could launch an improved SBT every 5 years, instead of every 20, like Hubble.
There's a third choice outside of genetic engineering or natural selection... Intentional-selection from random genetic variation.
Essentially, an impoverished peasant farmer is growing coca to sell to some narco-lords. A plane flies low over his 1,000 coca plants and devastates his crop with glyphosate. A few plants- perhaps.5%- struggle, survive and produce seed. Our peasant re-plants with those seeds.
Months later, another plane flies low over his coca and again devastates his crop with glyphosate. This time, 10% of his plants struggle, survive and produce seed. Our peasant chooses the strongest plants and re-plants with those seeds.
Months later, another plane flies low over his coca and again devastates his crop with glyphosate. This time, 50% of his plants survive and produce seed. Our peasant chooses the strongest plants and re-plants with those seeds.
Months later, another plane flies low over his coca and again sprays his crop with glyphosate. This time, 95% of his plants survive and produce seed. Our peasant chooses the strongest plants and re-plants with those seeds.
Months later, another plane flies low over his coca and again sprays his crop with glyphosate. This time, our peasant farmer gives the pilot the finger, but his crop is undamaged. Now, instead of selling coca, he lets his plants go to seed and sells his glyphosphate resistant variety to his neighbors.
It's not "natural selection"... it's intentional-selection-- and it's what farmers have been doing for millenia.
Raskin sounds like a techno-Luddite; longing for an era when "networking", for most, meant plugging in a printer.
What personal computers are expected to do today-and what they were expected to do in 1984, is extrordinary. Setting up a computer to communicate through internal networks, external networks, firewalls, adminstering multiple users, root accounts, etc... is pretty damn complicated for anyone w/a day job outside IT.
If setting up a program requires understanding and entering a dozen different parameters, the interface is probably the least of your worries. In this area, Apple, at least, has shown it's aware of the problem by implementing technologies like Rendezvous- a far superior solution than Wizards and Setup Assistants.
All I wish for in a UI are consistent rules that I can learn and generalize from regardless of the program I'm working with. Apple and Mac developers- traditionally- have been better at "sticking to the script." The aglomeration of Mac and NeXT screwed that up, but each version of 10.x.x has improved consistency.
Initiate DDOS campaign intended to temporarily cripple company Y and drive its stock price down.
Cover at the depressed price.
Profit.
Certainly the SEC would look askance at short-sales before a coordinated DDOS attack, but if a nebulous entity in Eastern Europe is doing the dirty work while a nebulous entity in East-Asia is doing the shorting, it could be extremely difficult to prove a connection.
No this isn't a recommendation or some novel idea. In fact, I'm certain that organized crime is well ahead of us in the nefarious schemes department.
First, I'm sure nobody wants to "kill" word. What would be nice is to simply reduce it's strangle-hold on the market.
Second, the key to Microsoft's stranglehold is clearly.doc compatibility. OO has good.doc compatibility, but then who would send their boss a critical memo that got 2% of the formatting wrong?
The way to break.doc's strangle-hold is for corporations and government agencies to establish and adopt a completely open word-processing standard. Call it something like Universal Text Exchange (or whatever acronym isn't taken.).ute needn't necessarily be "complete". But it could shoot for 95% of.doc's bell's and whistles. Next, corporations and government agencies would require that any used word-processor be capable of reading and writing.ute. Third, corporations would next require routine documents to saved in and distributed in.ute. Finally, work would immediately begin on.ut2
There are any number of existing text formats that could serve as a base for.ute. They just need to be opened up (if they aren't already) and (here's the tricky part) embraced and demanded by corporations and governments.
Christopher Hitchens, of Vanity Fair, wrote an excellent piece on Fahrenheit 9/11. The thing is, I was left wondering if we'd seen the same movie. I highly recommend seeing the movie before blindly accepting the comments of pundits.
As for its factual accuracy...I'm SURE there are mistakes. But then I'm willing to assert no documentary, article or book written didn't contain SOME mistake. To look only to and for the errors is to miss the forest for the trees.
In any event, anyone seeing the movie will be most moved or swayed by the direct interviews of real people. If you, as an Iraqi, saw your 4 year old's face blown off, could you ever accept that America was your liberator? Or would your anger lead you directly into the arms of the radical anti-American insurrgents/terrorists.?
I supported AND support the war in Iraq. (Saddam was evil). For me, however, the documentary emphasized the true price paid by American soldiers, their families and innocent Iraqi's- a price seriously underplayed by mainstream media. I hope history will justify the price.
Judge: State your business. Prosecutor: Your honor, we seek a warrant to search the home of J.Q. Public for terrorist related materials. Judge: Grounds? Prosecutor: Your honor, Mr. Public scored an 87 on the Matrix. Judge: And why did he score an 87? Prosecutor: Um..., national security interests prevent me from divulging the complete basis for his score. I can say that he got a speeding ticket in '03 and has a mustache. Judge: Well, I'm sure we can assume the underlying data is correct, was duly entered and processed by an impeccably accurate algorithm, yes? Prosecutor: (purses lips and nods). Judge: This court finding probable cause to issue said warrant, it is hereby done and ordered.
If you're raising kids and want them to turn out "right", read Judith Harris' book "The Nurture Assumption."
Essentially kids would rather follow their peers off a cliff then listen to your preaching (no matter how right you are). You can give a child all the "opportunities" in the world and they won't mean shit if their friends tell them its uncool. So it's as easy to "mold" your child as it is to push a wet noodle.
What you can do is make sure your kid is surrounded by "good" kids. If he/she gets caught up in the wrong crowd, change schools or move. If your child is motivated to excel, he will, regardless of crappy teachers, crumbling schools and lack of funding.
Monopolies abuse power because they can. As a capitalist pig, I know the only thing that keeps OTHER capitalist pigs in check is competition. Without genuine alternatives, monopolistic abuses will be picked up by the next corporation. 'Dissappearing' Microsoft does nothing to ensure that a competitive market will emerge.
What I'd like to see is 3 or more desktop alternatives with 25 percent market share but no company having more than 50 percent market share.
In short, I use OSX, but still want the option of Windows.
I use KDE on Linux, but still want the option of GNOME.
According to lawyers I spoke with, company's [sic] that haven't been sued don't altruistically seek declaratory judgments absolving them of wrongdoing because "enough is enough." They do it because they see a looming risk as a material threat to their business.
Not quite. If companies only brought lawsuits when they they faced "a material threat to their business," then we'd have a whole bunch of unemployed lawyers. For Red Hat, SCO is a pest, not a "material threat," and its worth something to get rid of a pest.
It's also shrewd for Red Hat to sue SCO. After all, Red Hat could have left it too IBM and Novell to fight the battle for them. Red Hat, however, knows lawsuits and SCO are all about the Benjamins. By joining the fray, Red Hat forces SCO to hire even more high-priced lawyers.
Ultimately, Berlind may be right about Red Hat being a canary in the Linux coal mine, but with its stock price up 200% in the past year, its singing quite nicely.
1. Report bug to Chinese military.
2. Get promoted.
I'm not singling out the Chinese...this particular hole just happens to have been discovered by a "Chinese researcher."
The point is that the vast majority of the world owes no allegiance to Microsoft or IE users. Some of those people have strong reasons for discovering holes and developing exploits. Those are the people who most concern me...not the researcher/hacker who reports a bug without giving Microsoft advance notice.
The article claims network effects will tend to create a single network of shared music files...assuming that's true (and I don't believe it) why should Google- which isn't even in the p2p game- end up the dominant p2p provider.
Hubble is basically a modified "Keyhole" class military satellite... But Hubble costs a lot more...Why? Because it was built to be serviced by people. As Richard Muller said in Technology Review:
"True, Hubble was defective, and required repair by Shuttle astronauts. But the military loses its spy telescopes too, and its response is to launch a replacement. Launching two completely new Hubble telescopes--the original and a replacement, with neither qualified for human servicing (and therefore cheaper)-- would arguably have been less expensive in the long run.
http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_muller 021003.asp?p=2
Essentially, the Shuttle was built on the premise of servicing satellites. And Hubble was built to justify that premise. But the cost is enormous when compared to building satellites that aren't intended to be serviced.
Hubble, which is already old as dirt, should be allowed to fall. In its place, NASA should design and launch a cheaper, unservicable, Keyhole based telescope. This new space telescope would be simply the first of a series- NASA would build and have ready a new space telescope when the previous one croaked. Not only would this still be cheaper than building Hubbles in the long run...it would also allow incremental technological improvements to be made with each new satelite.
Why do laws have to be so complicated? Because no rule set can easily fit the complexity of life. Take for example the basic rule "thou shalt not kill." Now start thinking of qualifications. It's ok to kill in self-defense. What if I honestly but mistakenly thought it was in self-defense? What if I was drunk? What if he murdered my wife and child? What if I'm a paid assasin? What if I "kill" a brain dead person? What if I hand a loaded gun to an angry 5 year old child?
People want life to be simple and elegant. It's not that way...
I'd like to see Shirky address the cost of information and its effect upon "star" power. People can only invest so much time in determining what's important, relevant or interesting. A shortcut to determining what's important, relevant or interesting is to follow the crowd. This is true even though it frequently yields imperfect results.
Suppose you wanted to choose 10 interesting weblogs to read each day out of a total of 10,000. One way of choosing those 10 would be to randomly select a weblog, read it, and then judge for yourself if it's worthy. But a better way to find 10 interesting blogs is to start with the most trafficked blog and work your way down... Popularity may not be conclusive, but it does convey information.
Slashdot Mirror
Of the approximately 5 million terabytes of information out in the world... the vast majority of it can probably be labeled worthless. Focusing on some of the world's great libraries should accomplish the task of disseminating 95 percent of what people want to know and dispense with more than a few terabytes of bunkem.
Sure it's a file system. In fact it's a file system about a file system. But wait for WinFS+. That's a file system about a file system about NTfs.
This means, as many other posters are saying, that you have to create school environments where the children themselves value education.
A few ways to do this...
(1) Remove disruptive kids for the sake of the class, rather than forcing the class to endure disruption for the sake of the disrupter. http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/figlio/sue.pdf
(2) Stop holding kids back. Doing so means the slow and disruptive become the older and larger role models for the grade behind them. If a kid can't cut it in a regular school with kids his own age, that kid needs to be sent elsewhere.
(3) Don't tolerate racial stereotyping. The surest way to churn out dumb black kids is to teach them that black kids are dumb. (And no, that doesn't mean blowing smoke up their ass in an indulgent attempts to boost their self-esteem).
As to Overshoot's comments, no.
The 970 wasn't intended to be a "custom processor chip." Had IBM hit its performance targets, it would have had ample alternative outlets for the 970. The great speculation was that IBM would push its own line of inexpensive 970 based Linux servers. But IBM wasn't up to the task.
And the suggestion that Apple isn't flush with cash? Again, no. Apple's sitting on a mountain of it.
Finally, Apple, no matter how egotistical its corporate culture may be, would never think itself large enough to bully Intel for volume discounts.
No, the reason Apple has switched is because marketing told it to stop fighting the dominate paradigm. When the Macintosh runs on the same base hardware as everyone else, marketing can concentrate on the OS and sundry applications. Sure, Intel *probably* sweetened the offer knowing that Apple's cutting edge design would reflect well on it. And the Apple premium will probably justify selling top of the line chips, forcing Dell and the like to buy premium chips for marketing purposes.
The only thing surprising about the decision to go with Intel is the fact that Apple thinks it technologically and commercially feasible to run on multiple architectures. Once Apple became convinced of their ability to do so, the decision made itself.
I saw nothing in the fine print would prevent deployment on non-Apple products. Apple still says Webobjects "[d]eploys to virtually any J2EE server or the WebObjects J2SE application server." So... $499 allows deployment to a server of your choosing, whether it's the bundled Tiger server or something else.
In short, it looks to me like Apple has cut the cost of deploying WebObjects from $699 to $499 and thrown in Tiger Server to boot. If I've read the fine print correctly, that's not free, but it's also not bad.
As much as I love my mother, the cost of administering her PC-- whether in terms of my time or her money-- is outrageous. The value of a secure, stable computing platform was pushing me towards purchasing her a Powermac. If the $499 Mac shows up, I'll skip the Powermac. Instead, I'll buy her the new box and use the savings to buy myself Apple's Remote Desktop software.
It should be noted that the settlement terms have not been released. We don't know what promises Ed Black has made to Microsoft, or vice-versa.
Perhaps Mr. Black has promised to sing Microsoft's sweet praises, but that need not be the case. Microsoft may have silenced a critic...or simply bankrolled an opponent. At this point, we don't know.
Compare Hubble to the U.S. military's "Keyhole" spy scopes on which Hubble was based. Keyhole satellites, which are every bit as sophisticated as Hubble, are far, far less expensive. There are many reasons for this, but one of them is that its expensive to make a satellite astronaut serviceable.
Ditching "serviceable" telescopes doesn't have to diminish the ablity of the telescopes. Indeed by following the path of planned obsolecense, NASA could launch an improved SBT every 5 years, instead of every 20, like Hubble.
There's a third choice outside of genetic engineering or natural selection... Intentional-selection from random genetic variation.
.5%- struggle, survive and produce seed. Our peasant re-plants with those seeds.
Essentially, an impoverished peasant farmer is growing coca to sell to some narco-lords. A plane flies low over his 1,000 coca plants and devastates his crop with glyphosate. A few plants- perhaps
Months later, another plane flies low over his coca and again devastates his crop with glyphosate. This time, 10% of his plants struggle, survive and produce seed. Our peasant chooses the strongest plants and re-plants with those seeds.
Months later, another plane flies low over his coca and again devastates his crop with glyphosate. This time, 50% of his plants survive and produce seed. Our peasant chooses the strongest plants and re-plants with those seeds.
Months later, another plane flies low over his coca and again sprays his crop with glyphosate. This time, 95% of his plants survive and produce seed. Our peasant chooses the strongest plants and re-plants with those seeds.
Months later, another plane flies low over his coca and again sprays his crop with glyphosate. This time, our peasant farmer gives the pilot the finger, but his crop is undamaged. Now, instead of selling coca, he lets his plants go to seed and sells his glyphosphate resistant variety to his neighbors.
It's not "natural selection"... it's intentional-selection-- and it's what farmers have been doing for millenia.
What personal computers are expected to do today-and what they were expected to do in 1984, is extrordinary. Setting up a computer to communicate through internal networks, external networks, firewalls, adminstering multiple users, root accounts, etc... is pretty damn complicated for anyone w/a day job outside IT.
If setting up a program requires understanding and entering a dozen different parameters, the interface is probably the least of your worries. In this area, Apple, at least, has shown it's aware of the problem by implementing technologies like Rendezvous- a far superior solution than Wizards and Setup Assistants.
All I wish for in a UI are consistent rules that I can learn and generalize from regardless of the program I'm working with. Apple and Mac developers- traditionally- have been better at "sticking to the script." The aglomeration of Mac and NeXT screwed that up, but each version of 10.x.x has improved consistency.
- Short company Y.
- Initiate DDOS campaign intended to temporarily cripple company Y and drive its stock price down.
- Cover at the depressed price.
- Profit.
Certainly the SEC would look askance at short-sales before a coordinated DDOS attack, but if a nebulous entity in Eastern Europe is doing the dirty work while a nebulous entity in East-Asia is doing the shorting, it could be extremely difficult to prove a connection.No this isn't a recommendation or some novel idea. In fact, I'm certain that organized crime is well ahead of us in the nefarious schemes department.
First, I'm sure nobody wants to "kill" word. What would be nice is to simply reduce it's strangle-hold on the market. Second, the key to Microsoft's stranglehold is clearly .doc compatibility. OO has good .doc compatibility, but then who would send their boss a critical memo that got 2% of the formatting wrong?
The way to break .doc's strangle-hold is for corporations and government agencies to establish and adopt a completely open word-processing standard. Call it something like Universal Text Exchange (or whatever acronym isn't taken.) .ute needn't necessarily be "complete". But it could shoot for 95% of .doc's bell's and whistles. Next, corporations and government agencies would require that any used word-processor be capable of reading and writing .ute. Third, corporations would next require routine documents to saved in and distributed in .ute. Finally, work would immediately begin on .ut2
There are any number of existing text formats that could serve as a base for .ute. They just need to be opened up (if they aren't already) and (here's the tricky part) embraced and demanded by corporations and governments.
Agreed... But imagine the look on some snot-nosed punk if you DID turn his bad-boy bass into ABBA's greatest hits.
As for its factual accuracy...I'm SURE there are mistakes. But then I'm willing to assert no documentary, article or book written didn't contain SOME mistake. To look only to and for the errors is to miss the forest for the trees.
In any event, anyone seeing the movie will be most moved or swayed by the direct interviews of real people. If you, as an Iraqi, saw your 4 year old's face blown off, could you ever accept that America was your liberator? Or would your anger lead you directly into the arms of the radical anti-American insurrgents/terrorists.? I supported AND support the war in Iraq. (Saddam was evil). For me, however, the documentary emphasized the true price paid by American soldiers, their families and innocent Iraqi's- a price seriously underplayed by mainstream media. I hope history will justify the price.
Now watch this golf shot.
Judge: State your business.
Prosecutor: Your honor, we seek a warrant to search the home of J.Q. Public for terrorist related materials.
Judge: Grounds?
Prosecutor: Your honor, Mr. Public scored an 87 on the Matrix.
Judge: And why did he score an 87?
Prosecutor: Um..., national security interests prevent me from divulging the complete basis for his score. I can say that he got a speeding ticket in '03 and has a mustache.
Judge: Well, I'm sure we can assume the underlying data is correct, was duly entered and processed by an impeccably accurate algorithm, yes?
Prosecutor: (purses lips and nods).
Judge: This court finding probable cause to issue said warrant, it is hereby done and ordered.
Essentially kids would rather follow their peers off a cliff then listen to your preaching (no matter how right you are). You can give a child all the "opportunities" in the world and they won't mean shit if their friends tell them its uncool. So it's as easy to "mold" your child as it is to push a wet noodle.
What you can do is make sure your kid is surrounded by "good" kids. If he/she gets caught up in the wrong crowd, change schools or move. If your child is motivated to excel, he will, regardless of crappy teachers, crumbling schools and lack of funding.
What I'd like to see is 3 or more desktop alternatives with 25 percent market share but no company having more than 50 percent market share.
In short, I use OSX, but still want the option of Windows. I use KDE on Linux, but still want the option of GNOME.
It's also shrewd for Red Hat to sue SCO. After all, Red Hat could have left it too IBM and Novell to fight the battle for them. Red Hat, however, knows lawsuits and SCO are all about the Benjamins. By joining the fray, Red Hat forces SCO to hire even more high-priced lawyers.
Ultimately, Berlind may be right about Red Hat being a canary in the Linux coal mine, but with its stock price up 200% in the past year, its singing quite nicely.
1. Report bug to Chinese military.
2. Get promoted.
I'm not singling out the Chinese...this particular hole just happens to have been discovered by a "Chinese researcher."
The point is that the vast majority of the world owes no allegiance to Microsoft or IE users. Some of those people have strong reasons for discovering holes and developing exploits. Those are the people who most concern me...not the researcher/hacker who reports a bug without giving Microsoft advance notice.
The article claims network effects will tend to create a single network of shared music files...assuming that's true (and I don't believe it) why should Google- which isn't even in the p2p game- end up the dominant p2p provider.
Hubble is basically a modified "Keyhole" class military satellite... But Hubble costs a lot more...Why? Because it was built to be serviced by people. As Richard Muller said in Technology Review: "True, Hubble was defective, and required repair by Shuttle astronauts. But the military loses its spy telescopes too, and its response is to launch a replacement. Launching two completely new Hubble telescopes--the original and a replacement, with neither qualified for human servicing (and therefore cheaper)-- would arguably have been less expensive in the long run. http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_muller 021003.asp?p=2
Essentially, the Shuttle was built on the premise of servicing satellites. And Hubble was built to justify that premise. But the cost is enormous when compared to building satellites that aren't intended to be serviced.
Hubble, which is already old as dirt, should be allowed to fall. In its place, NASA should design and launch a cheaper, unservicable, Keyhole based telescope. This new space telescope would be simply the first of a series- NASA would build and have ready a new space telescope when the previous one croaked. Not only would this still be cheaper than building Hubbles in the long run...it would also allow incremental technological improvements to be made with each new satelite.
Why do laws have to be so complicated? Because no rule set can easily fit the complexity of life. Take for example the basic rule "thou shalt not kill." Now start thinking of qualifications. It's ok to kill in self-defense. What if I honestly but mistakenly thought it was in self-defense? What if I was drunk? What if he murdered my wife and child? What if I'm a paid assasin? What if I "kill" a brain dead person? What if I hand a loaded gun to an angry 5 year old child? People want life to be simple and elegant. It's not that way...
I'd like to see Shirky address the cost of information and its effect upon "star" power. People can only invest so much time in determining what's important, relevant or interesting. A shortcut to determining what's important, relevant or interesting is to follow the crowd. This is true even though it frequently yields imperfect results. Suppose you wanted to choose 10 interesting weblogs to read each day out of a total of 10,000. One way of choosing those 10 would be to randomly select a weblog, read it, and then judge for yourself if it's worthy. But a better way to find 10 interesting blogs is to start with the most trafficked blog and work your way down... Popularity may not be conclusive, but it does convey information.