I think he was talking about this guy and of course a couple of otherguys. That last one in particular was largely noted as a radical and generally being an irritant, and later participated in yet another insurrection by moving to France.
I'd hardly call these guys the first American Terrorists either, but at least the shoe sort of fits, and they were certainly all guilty of treason... still a crime to this day in America that can result in capital punishment.
Either that or I'm missing something in the definition of a terrorist.
So suffice to say, we the people are screwed, unless EPIC, the ACLU, and other groups like them start getting some legal successes. With one exception: If the government tries to force you to quarter troops in your home, you can probably win that case.
Give it time..... just give it time. That may become the next "cost-cutting" measure to help reduced the federal debt.
If a soldier comes up to your house wielding an M-16 asking to be let in to spend the night, I don't think there is really much that you can do to stop them and dialing 9-1-1 isn't going to help out either. Your local police department also isn't going to be going up against a military unit under orders to do something the police department doesn't like. Good luck with that one.
I'd just hate to have an activist judge who believes in a "living constitution" to make a ruling on that issue on the off chance they would set aside that constitutional clause under the presumption of political expediency.
Your guy didn't win in 2000.... and that was over ten years ago. The protests were filed and it even went to the U.S. Supreme Court in spite of the fact that court didn't really even have jurisdiction over the matter. Of course the Al Gore supporters weren't about to let the real constitutional mechanism take care of the problem by letting the U.S. House of Representatives decide the outcome.
The election was close, which is why it became the fiasco that it became. It wasn't "beating Bush like a Gong", as had Florida been as clear cut as to the victor in the state as California was in that same election, it wouldn't have even been an issue.
Give it a rest.
BTW, I agree that Obama should be governing in the way that he said he would when he was campaigning... presuming that you could find some consistent thoughts among the various things he said he was going to do during that campaign. He at least did follow through with Health Care, in spite of the damage that did to the Democratic Party in this election in terms of lost seats.
An engine is a machine designed to convert energy into useful mechanical motion.
An engine is a machine designed to convert heat into useful mechanical motion.
Fixed it for ya!
I suppose that is true even for an electric motor, although the heat conversion is filters and perhaps even delayed a bit, even if it is solar powered, in which case the heat energy is even more remote and due to incandescence on another astronomical body. But no matter how removed from that heat, you are pretty much spot on correct.
Of course you could also say that an engine is designed to convert nuclear fusion into useful mechanical motion, as almost all forms of energy come from nuclear fusion at some point or another either currently or from the distant past.
The gearbox is even still there, but modified for only one set of transmission gears. Yes, the Roadster was supposed to have at least two sets of gears so it could in theory reach higher speeds, and I'm not entirely sure what the original top speed was supposed to be, but I think it was higher than the current 125 mph. Since this is well above the legal speed limit for any stretch of highway in America, it wasn't seen as a pressing concern for a production automobile trying to meet ordinary consumer demand.
This gearbox was also the major hang-up that nearly killed the Roadster and almost took out Telsa Motors as a company. It was also the final straw that got Martin Eberhard fired and kicked out of the company when the whole transmission endeavor was at least considered to be grossly mishandled by the Tesla board of directors. Lawsuits flew around for a while afterward and it got pretty ugly.
This blog entry by J.D. Straubel goes into the harry details about how the transmission and power train work, what some of the compromises they had to make to get it to work, and how it was brought "in-house" after being disasterously outsourced.
If you are worried about seeing your neighbors get sick, freeze to death in a high latitude climate, go hungry, or have one of many other social ills, you can always form a charity or some other group of like-minded people to help take care of these kind of problems. Most hospitals that I'm aware of started out precisely in that fashion where some concerned citizens put together their own money and helped to make a facility dedicated to healing the sick and making a better place for society.
The concept of a for-profit hospital is actually a relatively new phenomena, and to me exists only because of government regulations and "health mandates".
I am not about being compassionate, but I do object to having the force of law stealing money from widows & orphans at gunpoint so that people who are wealthy can get good health care.
The other advantage of making donations to a charity voluntary is that it keeps those charitable organizations from getting bloated and inefficient. Those charitable groups that are less efficient with their funds tend to go out of business, while successful ones can show what they are doing and are more likely to continue to receive donations.
An inefficient government bureaucracy will always stay inefficient except through tremendous deliberate action to clean up the mess, and usually even that isn't enough. Since their source of funding is guaranteed, there is no incentive to clean up waste, fraud, or even simply mismanagement of funds.
What surprises me here is that this guy didn't bother simply writing to Tesla asking them for the data format? While it has been changing, particularly in regards to the partnership with Toyota, Tesla Motors has typically been quite open about what they are doing and more than willing to work with the after market & car hacker crowd. They certainly are a small enough company that a simple letter (snail-mail) or very well formed e-mail to J.B. Straubel (the engineering head at Tesla and co-founder of the company... arguably having a better claim as co-founder than Elon Musk) simply asking for some of the details. If that approach was tried and failed, then I could see this being a big deal.
Some of the other automobile company, perhaps there would be a point to hacking the data format here, and some automobile manufacturers may have even deliberately obfuscated the data in some way to make hacking the information . But to me the first thing I would do is to simply ask for the format in the first place, and being a customer owning one of these vehicles is likely going to be enough to give credibility to the request. Somebody developing an after-market data massager is likely going to get some support too.
Besides, I think this data has been hacked already or there are documents about the data format floating around in other forums if you really wanted to look. I've heard about some other folks who've hacked into the data format to retrieve information about the light signals (brake lights, turn signals, hazards, etc.) which is contained in the data stream. There is likely much more "out there" if you simply asked in the proper forums.
It should be noted that the Tesla engine uses an alternating current motor instead of a direct current motor. In fact, that is why it is called "Tesla Motors" in in part that the original patent for the engine design being used on the Roadster was filed by none other than Nikola Tesla himself, where the RPMs on the motor are being regulated by the voltage frequency. It really is some cool tech, and part of their "secret sauce" that distinguishes what Tesla Motors is doing from some of the other electric vehicle manufacturers.
You are correct that there are a whole bunch of compromises that end up having to be made when trying to tweak performance on an electric automobile, which is why I find it annoying when I see people ripping on the Roadster when they don't have a clue about what went into its performance.
Going 120 mph max with a 0-60 in roughly 4 seconds certainly isn't the performance envelope of a golf cart.
The Roadster has a governor? I've never heard of such a thing. The main deal is that the RPMs in the engine start getting to insane levels turning the engine + drive train into a huge flywheel which takes increasingly larger amounts of energy (it increases geometrically, not linearly) to spin even faster. If that is a governor, then so be it, but removing THAT governor is simply removing the engine altogether.
The limiting factor is the current draw from the battery pack. Expand the battery pack, and you might go faster, but at the expense of killing your acceleration time due to additional weight.
I suppose you could hook up a Mr. Fusion or some other massive energy source that could kick the car into overdrive, but once you get past 88 mph you would be looking at temporal displacement when that happens too.
Who said anything about socialized health care? That is just the issue of the moment. I'm talking the whole of government stepping into your life and deciding every last thing that has to be done and when you can do it.
My proposition is that such government involvement in your life simply isn't needed, and that as a general principle you should be free to do whatever it is that you want to do as long as it isn't hurting others.
Governments do a pretty good job of acting as a referee to help resolve disputes and conflict between private individuals and to help keep other people and other governments from messing with me and those things I care about. But government can and ought to be limited, and it is this principle of very limited government that I am advocating here, not a complete elimination of government.
My original complaint here is that socialism and highly centralized governments are also a part of the problem, where I believe that many of the decisions regarding things of this nature can and ought to be made at a local level and not some super-national level. In a truly free society you would have perhaps some cities and more local governments be willing to enable socialism for its citizens, and neighboring governments that perhaps don't offer these same creature comforts. Freedom of movement can and ought to be a basic freedom.
I am also suggesting that socialism can only maintain itself and the support of its citizens through force of arms and enslavement if alternatives exist for people to freely go elsewhere. It is the effort to centralize governments and impose socialism from the top down against the will of those who would do something different which is the problem, not socialism in and of itself. You can go about living your religion as you see fit, but I don't believe such nonsense and want to opt-out. It is you and your socialist buddies who are preventing me from being able to leave or to do something different, and that power is being enforced at the point of a gun against my will. You really think that is desirable and welcome?
To me, you just defined socialism in all of its glory. It is a process where somebody else points a gun at your head telling you what to do, removing all notion of personal free will.
One of the problems that China is facing is that the current leadership sees themselves as the legitimate successors of the Chinese Emperors. In terms of corporate profiteering, a close study of the Chinese economy shows that the "People's Liberation Army" ends up with controlling interest in many of these enterprises. From this perspective, perhaps China is indeed a fascist country?
Either way, China is certainly a country that lacks freedom and has a strong central government that controls much of what its "subjects" are capable of doing.
The point is that you want less freedom. I find it amazing that you wish to become a slave under a tyrant. I hope you eventually get your wish fulfilled.
I sure don't want you to become my tyrant to enslave me, which is sort of the point. I am merely asking to be left out of that entirely. You are also the first person I've seen who is an avowed socialist who openly admits that socialism == less freedom.
Of course choice has a cost including time and money, although that is something I try in vain sometimes to explain even to committed libertarians and "tea party" guys too.
On the contrary, I am implying that such a place has existed in the past, but that those who are following libertarian principles are being ignored for various reasons.
The largest problem with libertarianism is that there isn't money to be made for politicians who espouse the concept. Note that this isn't the same for citizens who can indeed make money and prosper in such an environment, but for a politicians and even more so for a bureaucrat, there is money to be made by expanding government services.
Jerry Pournelle has famously talked about the "Iron Law of Bureaucracies", where essentially once an agency or organization is established, particularly a government agency, it will persist and take on seemingly a life of its own and will resist all attempts to cause that agency to cease to exist, even if the purpose of that agency is no longer relevant. Many politicians want to leave a legacy, and creating an agency or "project" is something that to them is important to leave behind. The problem is what to do with the legacy agencies that are left behind from all of the previous politicians who have come before.
About the only way to remove most bureaucracies is through war or violent revolution. Neither sounds like a pleasant alternative.
I should also note that for most of human history that people lived under tyranny, slavery (in all its various forms including serfdom), and strong social classes that were rigidly enforced to keep the bright ones from "moving up in the ranks". Something unusual happened more recently where that changed, where the slaves were able to deal with their would-be masters and tell them to go away. Unfortunately in most cases those countries simply substituted one form of tyranny for another.
In the countries where freedom prevailed, where there was a chance for an individual to do something without having a government telling them what to do and when to do it, those people prospered and acquired wealth. Unfortunately there are many who are jealous and would rather be in misery with poverty in common rather than allowing a few to succeed by their own merits. This is what I call liberty and freedom, something definitely lacking in today's world.
Assuming about $10k per pound (a rough guesstimate for what "low cost" launches to LEO would cost), how much would that make each chip? Could the crystals be grown in space and then brought to the Earth for subsequent processing, or would there be an advantage to building an actual chip fab itself in space?
I'm presuming that costs of building a mining facility on the Moon or an asteroid would be cost prohibitive conjecture too, but if substantial quantities of some minerals could be extracted from those places and sent to a manufacturing facility instead of lifting those minerals from the Earth, it seems like there would be additional potential cost savings that could develop here as well..
This certainly is a business proposition for commercialization of space I haven't heard about and sounds like something of value, although I've heard of other crystal growth in microgravity conditions that could be beneficial. I wonder what "gemstone" production like creating artificial diamonds, sapphires, or rubies would be like in space? A pure diamond that is the size of your fist would certainly have some significant intrinsic value and may have some applications that wouldn't be possible with the current sources coming from DeBeers.
NASA did not invent nor did the Apollo project even create the first practical integrated circuits. This said, one of the first major customers of the early chip production lines was NASA, and the Apollo Guidance Computer was one of the first devices that made extensive use of integrated circuits. At the time it was still a wash between discrete transistors or ICs, but the designers went with the chips instead.
Perhaps there was some benefit to the Apollo program in this regard, and it did give some early seed money to the chip fabricators to expand that has been useful since, but integrated circuits would have likely been developed without the Apollo program. Other "technologies" like Velcro and Teflon were also similarly developed well outside of the R&D research for the Apollo program, even though both were used extensively as they were well suited for space applications and have been tied to spaceflight.
There were technologies developed by NASA for the Apollo program that are unique, but they aren't the marquee kinds of technologies that often you hear about.
I don't think you've ever really studied the philosophies and principles of the founders of the American Republic if you believe anything that you are writing here. The references you are making here seem to be in relationship to America and not some other country at least.
The interstate commerce clause? That wasn't to impose government authority on businesses, but rather to pull authority from states to keep things like trade wars between states from happening. in the 1780's and 1790's there was a trade war between New York and New Jersey that very nearly resulted in a full scale armed conflict between those two states, and was very much on the mind of the authors of the U.S. Constitution when that clause was put in. Trade between states was something to be decided in Congress with more diplomatic discussions rather than at the point of a gun. The purpose of this clause is to limit government and to keep the government from intruding on our lives instead of reaching into our lives. I'd also call the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution to be the most abused part of that whole document where it has been perverted beyond anything ever intended when that clause was put in.
As for central economic planning, that was the furthest thing from their minds. It should be pointed out that central banking authorities within the U.S. economy were generally looked at with distrust, where the Bank of the United States was dissolved, more than once, because it was deemed to be unconstitutional. This is something I think Andrew Jackson got right, and it is sad that the inheritors of his political party so completely misunderstand this principle that they should be embarrassed. No where in the U.S. Constitution will you ever see something like "The Fed" mentioned, and the U.S. government's only authority is to regulate coinage of metals as a means to standardize an exchange medium. Again, it wasn't to control the lives of ordinary citizens.
In general, government seems to work best when it governs least, and as an occasionally necessary evil it can and should be done with caution and pushing decision making down to the most local level possible. Educational decisions are best made at the local school district level and IMHO even better at the individual school level. It is not something which should even be a federal responsibility, and having federal funds involved with education was a bad idea to begin with. It is a community issue where folks who want to attract citizens and businesses to an area will have well run schools and those who don't care will see their areas fall apart.
As for housing, people have been building homes since before the modern nation-state even existed. What possible benefit can come from federal government control and authority over housing construction? At the moment, it is one of the few things that the federal government has almost no authority at all over with the exception of "housing projects" that have all largely failed as well. I can't think of a single successful housing program or project operated by the federal government that can be deemed a success. Fanny Mae and Sally Mae? I suppose, but what do you think has caused the current recession/depression we are currently in? To me it is because the federal government had too much authority to act that exceeded its constitutional scope and failed to put the decision making on a local level. This is where the federal government screwed up, not where they are beneficial.
The way to limit private corporations is to encourage the development of more enterprise and to enforce anti-trust legislation that keeps the monster mega-corporations from being formed. Unfortunately the exact opposite is true where consolidation of authority is encouraged and the creation of smaller enterprises is far too often discouraged or even flat out prohibited as a matter of law. To me, the government is the problem, not the solution to constraining monster corporate abuse of authority.
If Somalia followed the principles of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, they would likely be one of the most prosperous nations on the Earth today. Too bad they and you don't know anything about these men.
Give an example of where you think "competition" enabled scientific progress.
Who were they competing against?
The most clear-cut example of competition that has enabled scientific progress that I can think of is the Ansari X-Prize. This was completely financed through private means and was a flat-out competition to see who would "win" ten million dollars that generated a whole bunch of interest from a variety of backgrounds.
The end result of this competition is a half-dozen companies from this competition who are still putting things together and making things happen with spaceflight that simply would never have been attempted through a government contract, and more significantly these organizations who are developing spaceflight on their own dime are also cutting costs for getting into space to such an embarrassing level that traditional procurement methods for spaceflight are now being dismissed.
The real winners from this "competition"? Scientists who now have a whole range of platforms for doing atmospheric studies that simply didn't exist before, where experiments that simply were too expensive to repeat and do on a regular basis are now being opened up due to the incredibly low cost from reusable vehicles capable of going into space.
You asked for an example, this is about as clear cut as it gets. The Google Lunar X-Prize may end up doing something similar and even more profound in terms of planetary exploration away from the Earth.
I could name many other examples including things that aren't contests necessarily that has enabled scientific progress, including many examples from the computer industry where I can document "intellectual property" laws are doing much more harm than good. Patent law as applied to computer software is especially horrible and a mis-application of government authority on something clearly not needed.
The one advantage that the Shuttle has together with the Buran but no other vehicle ever sent into space is the ability to bring substantial tonnage of equipment FROM space to the surface of the Earth. You can send stuff up on an ordinary disintegrating pyramid of aluminum and rocket fuel, but bringing it back down takes some extra effort.
Unfortunately the Shuttle was used so seldom to bring stuff back down that this is a capability which can mostly be ignored. It is also something that is now being lost with the retirement of the Space Shuttle.
The ISS was also an example of a modular approach to spaceship construction, and as a demonstrator project it does a pretty good job of that too. Unfortunately one of the advantages of a modular approach is that you can take advantage of economies of scale to mass-produce parts, and in the case of the ISS almost every part and module was unique in its construction and development. A production run of one doesn't really give you any sort of economy of scale.
As for the Constellation Program, it did what others are doing in terms of going into space for 5x-10x the cost using systems that are by design intended only to help key members of congress get re-elected through government spending to contractors who have donated to various political campaigns. I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the next great thing NASA has come up with to put people into space, but I simply don't get it. Besides, Constellation is mostly dead as well and likely won't be flying. The Ares-I-X test flight may be the only real piece of equipment to make it off the ground with that program, and that was mostly a joke.
Then again it could be argued that the $100 billion spent on building the ISS was a form of social welfare spending... it just went to congressional districts where the military-industrial complex was already well established and helped keep a couple of generations of geeks employed.
The layoffs from the end of the Apollo era, from a certain perspective, were instrumental in getting the microcomputer revolution started as there were a whole bunch of unemployed electrical engineers who were forced to live at starvation wages for a bunch of start-up companies. Had Jobs and Wozniak been employed by NASA or a NASA contractor on an effort to go to Mars (something Von Braun was hoping as the next step after going to the Moon), would they have put together the Apple computers? How different would the electronics industry be like today in such an environment?
It is hard to say, but I do look at the "downsizing" from all of the NASA projects over the past few years as something of a good thing that is ultimately going to be beneficial. It will stink for those who are down in the trenches doing stuff, just as it was something awful for those engineers formerly employed by NASA and NASA contractors in the 1970's. This $100 billion also represents a whole bunch of people who have been able to learn some very unique skills that are now released to apply those skills to other areas of society. It is going to be interesting to see what the long term benefit of this may be for America and the world as a whole.
Spending $100 billion on building a few nuclear aircraft carriers isn't going to have nearly the same sort of impact upon society, much less spending $100 billion on food stamps. If you disagree, try to explain why.
But this is Slashdot, where libertarian fuckwits mod the truth troll.
What more can one expect of people who think Henleins ideas had any connectionnwith reality.
They should have their own seperate country where they can drown in their own shit system.
If I could move to a country where a large number of people followed libertarian principles (at least a million or so people or about a half a percent of the population of America) simply to show the socialists what freedom from government really means, I'd move there in a heartbeat and take my whole family there tomorrow. The problem with socialists is that they want to force me at gunpoint to follow their beloved ideals and to deny me the chance to follow my own path instead, and to go so far as to point the guns as me to make sure I don't get the crazy idea to leave either.
Socialism has China, France, Greece, and many other places around the world to prosper and survive. Please, just give me one good place where libertarian principles can be at least permitted to work so I and others can show you just how far off the mark you are with such a crazy statement like this. Let me have that separate country. Once upon a time it was called America, but now America has become this crazy socialist utopia too. Where do I move to now, Mars perhaps? Certainly no place on the Earth.
Presuming that the ISS gets splashed and that a cheaper way of getting into space like Robert Bigelow's space stations were built that would cost mere millions to use (a few thousand dollars per day for rent for a long-term study that fits in a shoebox), would that change the mind of your fellow researchers?
It seems like for astrophysics in particular that the benefits of a manned laboratory are few, where even terrestrial observatories are becoming increasingly automated except for maintenance purposes. How many astronomers do you know that put their own eyes up to the eyepiece on the major telescopes any more, or are even capable of doing that?
About the only really significant space-based astrophysics program that would require astronauts (instead of being an occasional annoyance) would be to build a major observatory on the "far side" of the Moon, primarily as a radio telescope but other telescopes would be useful in that environment and it would be beneficial to scientific research in that regard. Unfortunately the ISS doesn't share those benefits that having 2km of rock acting as a shield from electromagnetic signals coming from the Earth. If you are going to dream, at least dream big. Almost everything else going up would seem to work better as a remote satellite, and certainly anything that could be thought up or realistically budgeted for space-based research in that field over the next couple of decades would want to avoid having astronauts as a general rule.
Not all space-based scientific endeavors are this way, but astrophysics seems particularly well suited to be without people. That is sort of the point of the ISS too, to do stuff that requires having people around to help keep things working.
If the Chinese follow the Apollo model for going to the Moon, I wish them a pile of luck and would be grateful to see China waste their billions of U.S. dollars they've acquired over the years on such a fruitless endeavor. It might help bring Chinese industry up to western standards to make the attempt, but the technologies needed for that effort have already been invented and are currently in use. They might find some scraps and crumbs left over that the Apollo engineers ignored, but it won't be the same thing.
As for China going to the Moon "soon", that makes me laugh. They haven't even made a successful in-orbit rendezvous yet, much less be able to achieve much of what both Russia and America were able to accomplish in the 1960's. Going to the Moon is going to be an order of magnitude higher difficulty than even this sort of modest accomplishment. China has the benefit of being able to see what others have done before them, but I seriously don't see China doing anything new or innovative in terms of spaceflight any time soon. A repeat of previous accomplishments, perhaps, and if they plant the Chinese flag next to Neil Armstrong's flag at the Sea of Tranquility while doing what amounts to be a weekend camping trip on the surface of the Moon, perhaps there is something to what China is doing in space. The first serious accident where a Chinese astronaut dies in space is going to be so humiliating for the Chinese government that they are also going to be risk averse to a degree that would make NASA blush.
I predict that Americans will be back on the surface of the Moon before the Chinese, and they will be private citizens who will be there instead of government employees. The Russians might beat America to return there as well (possibly as a private commercial effort by a Russian firm), but I'm not expecting the Chinese to leap ahead that fast. China has been able to get into space, but it is something where political rhetoric isn't sufficient to hand wave over what are real physical challenges and the cruel reality of physics.
The problem with the ISS is that it was never intended to really be a scientific research station in the first place. Yes, that was one of the stated goals, but its primary purpose was to serve as a "vehicle" for transferring engineering knowledge and skills from in-orbit construction tasks from the Soviet Union (yes, the USSR, not the current Russian Republic) developed through the Almaz program and later MIR to NASA. It was also intended to be a way to subsidize Russian spacecraft developers after the collapse of the Soviet Union so they wouldn't run off and show countries like North Korea and Iran how to build ICBMs capable of reaching America.
In this regard, $100 billion might have even been a bargain, and it is certainly true that American spaceflight companies as well as NASA has been able to pick up some substantial knowledge from the construction of the ISS.
Now the question as to if continued funding of the ISS is worth the expense is something more fitting to the question and on that point I'm not entirely sure. There are some international commitments that need to be maintained, and as a common meeting place in space for all spaceflight capable nations it might still serve a strong and useful purpose. As to if $4 billion per year on a space-based United Nations directorate is something useful is again arguable for debate and to me also seems to fall short on better ways to spend that kind of money even if that was the ultimate goal.
One thing that I do think the ISS has been able to prove at least some basic scientific research from is as a prototype for space-based solar power satellites. Unfortunately virtually none of the major proponents of space solar power sats care to use any of the research notes used for the construction and operation of the ISS, and never reference the ISS in terms of electrical power generated. Keep in mind that the ISS has a power generation capability in the 100 kilowatt range, which is roughly comparable to a neighborhood or small municipal power plant. If you want to understand some of the limitations to large scale electrical power generation in space, it would seem like the ISS would be the first place you would want to consult for this and related problems. They've had to solve these problems because this is not a paper study but a physical piece of operating equipment.
One other area of research that I'm hugely disappointed in with regards to the ISS is the study of sexual reproduction. I am not talking about sex in space between astronauts, but to understand the effects of gestational development of mammals in a microgravity environment. There have been several different species that have gone into space including several mice of both genders, and it would seem like something of significant importance to know ahead of time what would happen if a mammal was to conceive in space and produce babies, and what kind of long term consequences would happen to a baby in that environment. With mice, you could even conduct a multi-generational study in a relatively short period of time. At the moment, we simply don't even know what would happen and it looks like it will be using human babies as test subject to find out. I'm sure that would make PETA real proud too.
There have been many other network topologies, including several that were started and encouraged by for-profit corporations and some that even received widespread adoption at least initially much more so than TCP/IP.
What difference happened is that TCP/IP was one of the few really good network protocols that wasn't encumbered by "intellectual property" concerns, as it was nearly the only networking protocol that was completely open. It was this open nature, on top of the use of this protocol by university researchers studying network topologies that propelled "the internet" into what we have today.
One interesting "network" that perhaps could have been modified and updated to do much of what is done today with "the internet" was FidoNet, something surprisingly still in use even today although clearly a shadow of what it used to be. This network philosophy shares much with peer-to-peer networks and certainly would have had to be heavily adapted and morphed to do much of what "the internet" does today, but I would argue that it very well might have been the medium for communications around the world had TCP/IP not taken over and proven to be a much more robust form of communications. I'm using this as another example of open standards and how that has helped spread an idea quickly.
There are other protocols "below" and "above" TCP/IP as well that played substantially into the development of "the internet", but this is really the key part that made the rest work so well, together with the various abstraction layers to the standard networking model.... arguably as significant of an invention as even TCP/IP itself.
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I think he was talking about this guy and of course a couple of other guys. That last one in particular was largely noted as a radical and generally being an irritant, and later participated in yet another insurrection by moving to France.
I'd hardly call these guys the first American Terrorists either, but at least the shoe sort of fits, and they were certainly all guilty of treason... still a crime to this day in America that can result in capital punishment.
Either that or I'm missing something in the definition of a terrorist.
So suffice to say, we the people are screwed, unless EPIC, the ACLU, and other groups like them start getting some legal successes. With one exception: If the government tries to force you to quarter troops in your home, you can probably win that case.
Give it time..... just give it time. That may become the next "cost-cutting" measure to help reduced the federal debt.
If a soldier comes up to your house wielding an M-16 asking to be let in to spend the night, I don't think there is really much that you can do to stop them and dialing 9-1-1 isn't going to help out either. Your local police department also isn't going to be going up against a military unit under orders to do something the police department doesn't like. Good luck with that one.
I'd just hate to have an activist judge who believes in a "living constitution" to make a ruling on that issue on the off chance they would set aside that constitutional clause under the presumption of political expediency.
Your guy didn't win in 2000.... and that was over ten years ago. The protests were filed and it even went to the U.S. Supreme Court in spite of the fact that court didn't really even have jurisdiction over the matter. Of course the Al Gore supporters weren't about to let the real constitutional mechanism take care of the problem by letting the U.S. House of Representatives decide the outcome.
The election was close, which is why it became the fiasco that it became. It wasn't "beating Bush like a Gong", as had Florida been as clear cut as to the victor in the state as California was in that same election, it wouldn't have even been an issue.
Give it a rest.
BTW, I agree that Obama should be governing in the way that he said he would when he was campaigning... presuming that you could find some consistent thoughts among the various things he said he was going to do during that campaign. He at least did follow through with Health Care, in spite of the damage that did to the Democratic Party in this election in terms of lost seats.
An engine is a machine designed to convert energy into useful mechanical motion.
An engine is a machine designed to convert heat into useful mechanical motion.
Fixed it for ya!
I suppose that is true even for an electric motor, although the heat conversion is filters and perhaps even delayed a bit, even if it is solar powered, in which case the heat energy is even more remote and due to incandescence on another astronomical body. But no matter how removed from that heat, you are pretty much spot on correct.
Of course you could also say that an engine is designed to convert nuclear fusion into useful mechanical motion, as almost all forms of energy come from nuclear fusion at some point or another either currently or from the distant past.
The gearbox is even still there, but modified for only one set of transmission gears. Yes, the Roadster was supposed to have at least two sets of gears so it could in theory reach higher speeds, and I'm not entirely sure what the original top speed was supposed to be, but I think it was higher than the current 125 mph. Since this is well above the legal speed limit for any stretch of highway in America, it wasn't seen as a pressing concern for a production automobile trying to meet ordinary consumer demand.
This gearbox was also the major hang-up that nearly killed the Roadster and almost took out Telsa Motors as a company. It was also the final straw that got Martin Eberhard fired and kicked out of the company when the whole transmission endeavor was at least considered to be grossly mishandled by the Tesla board of directors. Lawsuits flew around for a while afterward and it got pretty ugly.
This blog entry by J.D. Straubel goes into the harry details about how the transmission and power train work, what some of the compromises they had to make to get it to work, and how it was brought "in-house" after being disasterously outsourced.
If you are worried about seeing your neighbors get sick, freeze to death in a high latitude climate, go hungry, or have one of many other social ills, you can always form a charity or some other group of like-minded people to help take care of these kind of problems. Most hospitals that I'm aware of started out precisely in that fashion where some concerned citizens put together their own money and helped to make a facility dedicated to healing the sick and making a better place for society.
The concept of a for-profit hospital is actually a relatively new phenomena, and to me exists only because of government regulations and "health mandates".
I am not about being compassionate, but I do object to having the force of law stealing money from widows & orphans at gunpoint so that people who are wealthy can get good health care.
The other advantage of making donations to a charity voluntary is that it keeps those charitable organizations from getting bloated and inefficient. Those charitable groups that are less efficient with their funds tend to go out of business, while successful ones can show what they are doing and are more likely to continue to receive donations.
An inefficient government bureaucracy will always stay inefficient except through tremendous deliberate action to clean up the mess, and usually even that isn't enough. Since their source of funding is guaranteed, there is no incentive to clean up waste, fraud, or even simply mismanagement of funds.
What surprises me here is that this guy didn't bother simply writing to Tesla asking them for the data format? While it has been changing, particularly in regards to the partnership with Toyota, Tesla Motors has typically been quite open about what they are doing and more than willing to work with the after market & car hacker crowd. They certainly are a small enough company that a simple letter (snail-mail) or very well formed e-mail to J.B. Straubel (the engineering head at Tesla and co-founder of the company... arguably having a better claim as co-founder than Elon Musk) simply asking for some of the details. If that approach was tried and failed, then I could see this being a big deal.
Some of the other automobile company, perhaps there would be a point to hacking the data format here, and some automobile manufacturers may have even deliberately obfuscated the data in some way to make hacking the information . But to me the first thing I would do is to simply ask for the format in the first place, and being a customer owning one of these vehicles is likely going to be enough to give credibility to the request. Somebody developing an after-market data massager is likely going to get some support too.
Besides, I think this data has been hacked already or there are documents about the data format floating around in other forums if you really wanted to look. I've heard about some other folks who've hacked into the data format to retrieve information about the light signals (brake lights, turn signals, hazards, etc.) which is contained in the data stream. There is likely much more "out there" if you simply asked in the proper forums.
Amen to that, brother! Sometimes people don't have a clue for what they are talking about, and this one takes the cake!
It should be noted that the Tesla engine uses an alternating current motor instead of a direct current motor. In fact, that is why it is called "Tesla Motors" in in part that the original patent for the engine design being used on the Roadster was filed by none other than Nikola Tesla himself, where the RPMs on the motor are being regulated by the voltage frequency. It really is some cool tech, and part of their "secret sauce" that distinguishes what Tesla Motors is doing from some of the other electric vehicle manufacturers.
You are correct that there are a whole bunch of compromises that end up having to be made when trying to tweak performance on an electric automobile, which is why I find it annoying when I see people ripping on the Roadster when they don't have a clue about what went into its performance.
Going 120 mph max with a 0-60 in roughly 4 seconds certainly isn't the performance envelope of a golf cart.
The Roadster has a governor? I've never heard of such a thing. The main deal is that the RPMs in the engine start getting to insane levels turning the engine + drive train into a huge flywheel which takes increasingly larger amounts of energy (it increases geometrically, not linearly) to spin even faster. If that is a governor, then so be it, but removing THAT governor is simply removing the engine altogether.
The limiting factor is the current draw from the battery pack. Expand the battery pack, and you might go faster, but at the expense of killing your acceleration time due to additional weight.
I suppose you could hook up a Mr. Fusion or some other massive energy source that could kick the car into overdrive, but once you get past 88 mph you would be looking at temporal displacement when that happens too.
Who said anything about socialized health care? That is just the issue of the moment. I'm talking the whole of government stepping into your life and deciding every last thing that has to be done and when you can do it.
My proposition is that such government involvement in your life simply isn't needed, and that as a general principle you should be free to do whatever it is that you want to do as long as it isn't hurting others.
Governments do a pretty good job of acting as a referee to help resolve disputes and conflict between private individuals and to help keep other people and other governments from messing with me and those things I care about. But government can and ought to be limited, and it is this principle of very limited government that I am advocating here, not a complete elimination of government.
My original complaint here is that socialism and highly centralized governments are also a part of the problem, where I believe that many of the decisions regarding things of this nature can and ought to be made at a local level and not some super-national level. In a truly free society you would have perhaps some cities and more local governments be willing to enable socialism for its citizens, and neighboring governments that perhaps don't offer these same creature comforts. Freedom of movement can and ought to be a basic freedom.
I am also suggesting that socialism can only maintain itself and the support of its citizens through force of arms and enslavement if alternatives exist for people to freely go elsewhere. It is the effort to centralize governments and impose socialism from the top down against the will of those who would do something different which is the problem, not socialism in and of itself. You can go about living your religion as you see fit, but I don't believe such nonsense and want to opt-out. It is you and your socialist buddies who are preventing me from being able to leave or to do something different, and that power is being enforced at the point of a gun against my will. You really think that is desirable and welcome?
To me, you just defined socialism in all of its glory. It is a process where somebody else points a gun at your head telling you what to do, removing all notion of personal free will.
One of the problems that China is facing is that the current leadership sees themselves as the legitimate successors of the Chinese Emperors. In terms of corporate profiteering, a close study of the Chinese economy shows that the "People's Liberation Army" ends up with controlling interest in many of these enterprises. From this perspective, perhaps China is indeed a fascist country?
Either way, China is certainly a country that lacks freedom and has a strong central government that controls much of what its "subjects" are capable of doing.
The point is that you want less freedom. I find it amazing that you wish to become a slave under a tyrant. I hope you eventually get your wish fulfilled.
I sure don't want you to become my tyrant to enslave me, which is sort of the point. I am merely asking to be left out of that entirely. You are also the first person I've seen who is an avowed socialist who openly admits that socialism == less freedom.
Of course choice has a cost including time and money, although that is something I try in vain sometimes to explain even to committed libertarians and "tea party" guys too.
On the contrary, I am implying that such a place has existed in the past, but that those who are following libertarian principles are being ignored for various reasons.
The largest problem with libertarianism is that there isn't money to be made for politicians who espouse the concept. Note that this isn't the same for citizens who can indeed make money and prosper in such an environment, but for a politicians and even more so for a bureaucrat, there is money to be made by expanding government services.
Jerry Pournelle has famously talked about the "Iron Law of Bureaucracies", where essentially once an agency or organization is established, particularly a government agency, it will persist and take on seemingly a life of its own and will resist all attempts to cause that agency to cease to exist, even if the purpose of that agency is no longer relevant. Many politicians want to leave a legacy, and creating an agency or "project" is something that to them is important to leave behind. The problem is what to do with the legacy agencies that are left behind from all of the previous politicians who have come before.
About the only way to remove most bureaucracies is through war or violent revolution. Neither sounds like a pleasant alternative.
I should also note that for most of human history that people lived under tyranny, slavery (in all its various forms including serfdom), and strong social classes that were rigidly enforced to keep the bright ones from "moving up in the ranks". Something unusual happened more recently where that changed, where the slaves were able to deal with their would-be masters and tell them to go away. Unfortunately in most cases those countries simply substituted one form of tyranny for another.
In the countries where freedom prevailed, where there was a chance for an individual to do something without having a government telling them what to do and when to do it, those people prospered and acquired wealth. Unfortunately there are many who are jealous and would rather be in misery with poverty in common rather than allowing a few to succeed by their own merits. This is what I call liberty and freedom, something definitely lacking in today's world.
Assuming about $10k per pound (a rough guesstimate for what "low cost" launches to LEO would cost), how much would that make each chip? Could the crystals be grown in space and then brought to the Earth for subsequent processing, or would there be an advantage to building an actual chip fab itself in space?
I'm presuming that costs of building a mining facility on the Moon or an asteroid would be cost prohibitive conjecture too, but if substantial quantities of some minerals could be extracted from those places and sent to a manufacturing facility instead of lifting those minerals from the Earth, it seems like there would be additional potential cost savings that could develop here as well..
This certainly is a business proposition for commercialization of space I haven't heard about and sounds like something of value, although I've heard of other crystal growth in microgravity conditions that could be beneficial. I wonder what "gemstone" production like creating artificial diamonds, sapphires, or rubies would be like in space? A pure diamond that is the size of your fist would certainly have some significant intrinsic value and may have some applications that wouldn't be possible with the current sources coming from DeBeers.
NASA did not invent nor did the Apollo project even create the first practical integrated circuits. This said, one of the first major customers of the early chip production lines was NASA, and the Apollo Guidance Computer was one of the first devices that made extensive use of integrated circuits. At the time it was still a wash between discrete transistors or ICs, but the designers went with the chips instead.
Perhaps there was some benefit to the Apollo program in this regard, and it did give some early seed money to the chip fabricators to expand that has been useful since, but integrated circuits would have likely been developed without the Apollo program. Other "technologies" like Velcro and Teflon were also similarly developed well outside of the R&D research for the Apollo program, even though both were used extensively as they were well suited for space applications and have been tied to spaceflight.
There were technologies developed by NASA for the Apollo program that are unique, but they aren't the marquee kinds of technologies that often you hear about.
I don't think you've ever really studied the philosophies and principles of the founders of the American Republic if you believe anything that you are writing here. The references you are making here seem to be in relationship to America and not some other country at least.
The interstate commerce clause? That wasn't to impose government authority on businesses, but rather to pull authority from states to keep things like trade wars between states from happening. in the 1780's and 1790's there was a trade war between New York and New Jersey that very nearly resulted in a full scale armed conflict between those two states, and was very much on the mind of the authors of the U.S. Constitution when that clause was put in. Trade between states was something to be decided in Congress with more diplomatic discussions rather than at the point of a gun. The purpose of this clause is to limit government and to keep the government from intruding on our lives instead of reaching into our lives. I'd also call the interstate commerce clause of the U.S. Constitution to be the most abused part of that whole document where it has been perverted beyond anything ever intended when that clause was put in.
As for central economic planning, that was the furthest thing from their minds. It should be pointed out that central banking authorities within the U.S. economy were generally looked at with distrust, where the Bank of the United States was dissolved, more than once, because it was deemed to be unconstitutional. This is something I think Andrew Jackson got right, and it is sad that the inheritors of his political party so completely misunderstand this principle that they should be embarrassed. No where in the U.S. Constitution will you ever see something like "The Fed" mentioned, and the U.S. government's only authority is to regulate coinage of metals as a means to standardize an exchange medium. Again, it wasn't to control the lives of ordinary citizens.
In general, government seems to work best when it governs least, and as an occasionally necessary evil it can and should be done with caution and pushing decision making down to the most local level possible. Educational decisions are best made at the local school district level and IMHO even better at the individual school level. It is not something which should even be a federal responsibility, and having federal funds involved with education was a bad idea to begin with. It is a community issue where folks who want to attract citizens and businesses to an area will have well run schools and those who don't care will see their areas fall apart.
As for housing, people have been building homes since before the modern nation-state even existed. What possible benefit can come from federal government control and authority over housing construction? At the moment, it is one of the few things that the federal government has almost no authority at all over with the exception of "housing projects" that have all largely failed as well. I can't think of a single successful housing program or project operated by the federal government that can be deemed a success. Fanny Mae and Sally Mae? I suppose, but what do you think has caused the current recession/depression we are currently in? To me it is because the federal government had too much authority to act that exceeded its constitutional scope and failed to put the decision making on a local level. This is where the federal government screwed up, not where they are beneficial.
The way to limit private corporations is to encourage the development of more enterprise and to enforce anti-trust legislation that keeps the monster mega-corporations from being formed. Unfortunately the exact opposite is true where consolidation of authority is encouraged and the creation of smaller enterprises is far too often discouraged or even flat out prohibited as a matter of law. To me, the government is the problem, not the solution to constraining monster corporate abuse of authority.
If Somalia followed the principles of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, they would likely be one of the most prosperous nations on the Earth today. Too bad they and you don't know anything about these men.
Give an example of where you think "competition" enabled scientific progress.
Who were they competing against?
The most clear-cut example of competition that has enabled scientific progress that I can think of is the Ansari X-Prize. This was completely financed through private means and was a flat-out competition to see who would "win" ten million dollars that generated a whole bunch of interest from a variety of backgrounds.
The end result of this competition is a half-dozen companies from this competition who are still putting things together and making things happen with spaceflight that simply would never have been attempted through a government contract, and more significantly these organizations who are developing spaceflight on their own dime are also cutting costs for getting into space to such an embarrassing level that traditional procurement methods for spaceflight are now being dismissed.
The real winners from this "competition"? Scientists who now have a whole range of platforms for doing atmospheric studies that simply didn't exist before, where experiments that simply were too expensive to repeat and do on a regular basis are now being opened up due to the incredibly low cost from reusable vehicles capable of going into space.
You asked for an example, this is about as clear cut as it gets. The Google Lunar X-Prize may end up doing something similar and even more profound in terms of planetary exploration away from the Earth.
I could name many other examples including things that aren't contests necessarily that has enabled scientific progress, including many examples from the computer industry where I can document "intellectual property" laws are doing much more harm than good. Patent law as applied to computer software is especially horrible and a mis-application of government authority on something clearly not needed.
The one advantage that the Shuttle has together with the Buran but no other vehicle ever sent into space is the ability to bring substantial tonnage of equipment FROM space to the surface of the Earth. You can send stuff up on an ordinary disintegrating pyramid of aluminum and rocket fuel, but bringing it back down takes some extra effort.
Unfortunately the Shuttle was used so seldom to bring stuff back down that this is a capability which can mostly be ignored. It is also something that is now being lost with the retirement of the Space Shuttle.
The ISS was also an example of a modular approach to spaceship construction, and as a demonstrator project it does a pretty good job of that too. Unfortunately one of the advantages of a modular approach is that you can take advantage of economies of scale to mass-produce parts, and in the case of the ISS almost every part and module was unique in its construction and development. A production run of one doesn't really give you any sort of economy of scale.
As for the Constellation Program, it did what others are doing in terms of going into space for 5x-10x the cost using systems that are by design intended only to help key members of congress get re-elected through government spending to contractors who have donated to various political campaigns. I wish I could be more enthusiastic about the next great thing NASA has come up with to put people into space, but I simply don't get it. Besides, Constellation is mostly dead as well and likely won't be flying. The Ares-I-X test flight may be the only real piece of equipment to make it off the ground with that program, and that was mostly a joke.
Then again it could be argued that the $100 billion spent on building the ISS was a form of social welfare spending... it just went to congressional districts where the military-industrial complex was already well established and helped keep a couple of generations of geeks employed.
The layoffs from the end of the Apollo era, from a certain perspective, were instrumental in getting the microcomputer revolution started as there were a whole bunch of unemployed electrical engineers who were forced to live at starvation wages for a bunch of start-up companies. Had Jobs and Wozniak been employed by NASA or a NASA contractor on an effort to go to Mars (something Von Braun was hoping as the next step after going to the Moon), would they have put together the Apple computers? How different would the electronics industry be like today in such an environment?
It is hard to say, but I do look at the "downsizing" from all of the NASA projects over the past few years as something of a good thing that is ultimately going to be beneficial. It will stink for those who are down in the trenches doing stuff, just as it was something awful for those engineers formerly employed by NASA and NASA contractors in the 1970's. This $100 billion also represents a whole bunch of people who have been able to learn some very unique skills that are now released to apply those skills to other areas of society. It is going to be interesting to see what the long term benefit of this may be for America and the world as a whole.
Spending $100 billion on building a few nuclear aircraft carriers isn't going to have nearly the same sort of impact upon society, much less spending $100 billion on food stamps. If you disagree, try to explain why.
Bad luck poster, you told the truth.
But this is Slashdot, where libertarian fuckwits mod the truth troll.
What more can one expect of people who think Henleins ideas had any connectionnwith reality.
They should have their own seperate country where they can drown in their own shit
system.
If I could move to a country where a large number of people followed libertarian principles (at least a million or so people or about a half a percent of the population of America) simply to show the socialists what freedom from government really means, I'd move there in a heartbeat and take my whole family there tomorrow. The problem with socialists is that they want to force me at gunpoint to follow their beloved ideals and to deny me the chance to follow my own path instead, and to go so far as to point the guns as me to make sure I don't get the crazy idea to leave either.
Socialism has China, France, Greece, and many other places around the world to prosper and survive. Please, just give me one good place where libertarian principles can be at least permitted to work so I and others can show you just how far off the mark you are with such a crazy statement like this. Let me have that separate country. Once upon a time it was called America, but now America has become this crazy socialist utopia too. Where do I move to now, Mars perhaps? Certainly no place on the Earth.
I'm curious....
Presuming that the ISS gets splashed and that a cheaper way of getting into space like Robert Bigelow's space stations were built that would cost mere millions to use (a few thousand dollars per day for rent for a long-term study that fits in a shoebox), would that change the mind of your fellow researchers?
It seems like for astrophysics in particular that the benefits of a manned laboratory are few, where even terrestrial observatories are becoming increasingly automated except for maintenance purposes. How many astronomers do you know that put their own eyes up to the eyepiece on the major telescopes any more, or are even capable of doing that?
About the only really significant space-based astrophysics program that would require astronauts (instead of being an occasional annoyance) would be to build a major observatory on the "far side" of the Moon, primarily as a radio telescope but other telescopes would be useful in that environment and it would be beneficial to scientific research in that regard. Unfortunately the ISS doesn't share those benefits that having 2km of rock acting as a shield from electromagnetic signals coming from the Earth. If you are going to dream, at least dream big. Almost everything else going up would seem to work better as a remote satellite, and certainly anything that could be thought up or realistically budgeted for space-based research in that field over the next couple of decades would want to avoid having astronauts as a general rule.
Not all space-based scientific endeavors are this way, but astrophysics seems particularly well suited to be without people. That is sort of the point of the ISS too, to do stuff that requires having people around to help keep things working.
If the Chinese follow the Apollo model for going to the Moon, I wish them a pile of luck and would be grateful to see China waste their billions of U.S. dollars they've acquired over the years on such a fruitless endeavor. It might help bring Chinese industry up to western standards to make the attempt, but the technologies needed for that effort have already been invented and are currently in use. They might find some scraps and crumbs left over that the Apollo engineers ignored, but it won't be the same thing.
As for China going to the Moon "soon", that makes me laugh. They haven't even made a successful in-orbit rendezvous yet, much less be able to achieve much of what both Russia and America were able to accomplish in the 1960's. Going to the Moon is going to be an order of magnitude higher difficulty than even this sort of modest accomplishment. China has the benefit of being able to see what others have done before them, but I seriously don't see China doing anything new or innovative in terms of spaceflight any time soon. A repeat of previous accomplishments, perhaps, and if they plant the Chinese flag next to Neil Armstrong's flag at the Sea of Tranquility while doing what amounts to be a weekend camping trip on the surface of the Moon, perhaps there is something to what China is doing in space. The first serious accident where a Chinese astronaut dies in space is going to be so humiliating for the Chinese government that they are also going to be risk averse to a degree that would make NASA blush.
I predict that Americans will be back on the surface of the Moon before the Chinese, and they will be private citizens who will be there instead of government employees. The Russians might beat America to return there as well (possibly as a private commercial effort by a Russian firm), but I'm not expecting the Chinese to leap ahead that fast. China has been able to get into space, but it is something where political rhetoric isn't sufficient to hand wave over what are real physical challenges and the cruel reality of physics.
The problem with the ISS is that it was never intended to really be a scientific research station in the first place. Yes, that was one of the stated goals, but its primary purpose was to serve as a "vehicle" for transferring engineering knowledge and skills from in-orbit construction tasks from the Soviet Union (yes, the USSR, not the current Russian Republic) developed through the Almaz program and later MIR to NASA. It was also intended to be a way to subsidize Russian spacecraft developers after the collapse of the Soviet Union so they wouldn't run off and show countries like North Korea and Iran how to build ICBMs capable of reaching America.
In this regard, $100 billion might have even been a bargain, and it is certainly true that American spaceflight companies as well as NASA has been able to pick up some substantial knowledge from the construction of the ISS.
Now the question as to if continued funding of the ISS is worth the expense is something more fitting to the question and on that point I'm not entirely sure. There are some international commitments that need to be maintained, and as a common meeting place in space for all spaceflight capable nations it might still serve a strong and useful purpose. As to if $4 billion per year on a space-based United Nations directorate is something useful is again arguable for debate and to me also seems to fall short on better ways to spend that kind of money even if that was the ultimate goal.
One thing that I do think the ISS has been able to prove at least some basic scientific research from is as a prototype for space-based solar power satellites. Unfortunately virtually none of the major proponents of space solar power sats care to use any of the research notes used for the construction and operation of the ISS, and never reference the ISS in terms of electrical power generated. Keep in mind that the ISS has a power generation capability in the 100 kilowatt range, which is roughly comparable to a neighborhood or small municipal power plant. If you want to understand some of the limitations to large scale electrical power generation in space, it would seem like the ISS would be the first place you would want to consult for this and related problems. They've had to solve these problems because this is not a paper study but a physical piece of operating equipment.
One other area of research that I'm hugely disappointed in with regards to the ISS is the study of sexual reproduction. I am not talking about sex in space between astronauts, but to understand the effects of gestational development of mammals in a microgravity environment. There have been several different species that have gone into space including several mice of both genders, and it would seem like something of significant importance to know ahead of time what would happen if a mammal was to conceive in space and produce babies, and what kind of long term consequences would happen to a baby in that environment. With mice, you could even conduct a multi-generational study in a relatively short period of time. At the moment, we simply don't even know what would happen and it looks like it will be using human babies as test subject to find out. I'm sure that would make PETA real proud too.
There have been many other network topologies, including several that were started and encouraged by for-profit corporations and some that even received widespread adoption at least initially much more so than TCP/IP.
What difference happened is that TCP/IP was one of the few really good network protocols that wasn't encumbered by "intellectual property" concerns, as it was nearly the only networking protocol that was completely open. It was this open nature, on top of the use of this protocol by university researchers studying network topologies that propelled "the internet" into what we have today.
One interesting "network" that perhaps could have been modified and updated to do much of what is done today with "the internet" was FidoNet, something surprisingly still in use even today although clearly a shadow of what it used to be. This network philosophy shares much with peer-to-peer networks and certainly would have had to be heavily adapted and morphed to do much of what "the internet" does today, but I would argue that it very well might have been the medium for communications around the world had TCP/IP not taken over and proven to be a much more robust form of communications. I'm using this as another example of open standards and how that has helped spread an idea quickly.
There are other protocols "below" and "above" TCP/IP as well that played substantially into the development of "the internet", but this is really the key part that made the rest work so well, together with the various abstraction layers to the standard networking model.... arguably as significant of an invention as even TCP/IP itself.