The question is more how careful those operating these servers were careful with copyright questions when they were creating the servers in the first place. Most of those in the "alternate server community" don't really take issues of copyright very seriously and only pay lip-service to even dealing with reverse engineering in any proper sense of the term. The groups tend to have other "software piracy" attitudes, slogans, and remarks on boards that shows a reckless disregard to the law.
All it takes is to show some of that to a judge where it is a bunch of kids that are being rebels and not taking the law seriously to essentially throw the case to the plaintiff in situations like this. Even if many or even most of what they were doing was perfectly legal, skipping steps like trying to come up with a specification and having people implement that specification in a "clean room" are all very important. Perhaps these kids are getting a lesson as to why those very careful steps are done by companies who try to reverse engineer products legally. Even then, sometimes experienced companies make mistakes or encounter a judge who was ragged on by his wife (or husband) and in a sour mood simply decided to rule for the plaintiff anyway. Yes, it happens.
If this group was very careful about a clean-room design, simply monitored network traffic and then had a "virgin" team (somebody who had never played or used Blizzard's software at all) create and implement the design based upon the specification document derived from monitoring that network traffic.... they might have a much more clear-cut case about legal reverse engineering. Somehow I seriously doubt any of that happened, including even a more modest method outlined here about reverse engineering the traffic alone.
Raw statistics such as the "stats" of monsters aren't within the realm of copyright, but more complex behavior like AI models can be.
Still, the point is that those running these alternate servers aren't really being careful with copyright and tend to play fast and loose with "intellectual property" in all of its various flavors. I'm quite certain that most of these guys setting up these servers aren't doing a "clean room" design and have certainly looked at decompiled/disassembled code at one point or another and have made other mistakes that taint the copyright status of these servers.
If they've done a clean room design from a raw specification and otherwise all original content on the server side, there might be much less of a case. When the judge sees that there were numerous problems and that those involved didn't take copyright seriously, no wonder there have been outcomes like this.
The best comparison that can be used here is to compare and contrast Europe with China in the 1500's. China was arguably a super-power with vast resources and intimate knowledge of the sea with ships that sailed around Africa and perhaps even made it to Alaska... and a suggestion that perhaps they even made it to South America.
The problem with China was that it had a monolithic government and an emperor who in a fit of arbitrary whim burned the entire international shipping fleet for that country and forced them to wait out the next 500 years on ths sidelines of world history rather than making history with an expansion of Chinese culture and values throughout the world.
Europe, in part due to the fact that there wasn't just one country but rather hundreds of them, had the freedom to try new things and nobody telling them that world exploration was a useless task. Yes, there were a coupe of countries that were very xenophobic, but for the most part those countries were left behind in the expansion of global trade networks.
One relatively tiny country, England, arose to prominence in such a way that eventually they controlled more of the Earth's surface than any empire in the history of mankind.
As for the "rewards" that are in space....there are resources in space that would boggle the mind. Minerals that are easily accessible (once you actually get there) and energy resources that are essentially limitless. If modest effort would go into mining resources in space, almost all Earth-based mining could be discontinued and likely would be once resources started to flow from space due to economic considerations alone.
Getting into space is expensive right now partly as a myth (certain government bureaucrats in multiple countries want you to think it is expensive so they can keep their jobs) and partly because few people have really made the attempt to reduce the cost for space access. From a rocket fuel perspective, getting into orbit consumes roughly the same amount of fuel as flying from from New York or London to Sydney. That is something done by very ordinary people on a routine basis every day. There is no reason that spaceflight can't be at a comparable cost.
My point is that people should be given the freedom to choose to spend their own money going into space, and that there are far and away too many people in positions of government authority who are explicitly trying to stop that from happening. It is these people that need to be exposed... and my only advise for you if you think that investing in a space-based business is risk... don't invest in it. But why are you telling me that I can't invest in one of those businesses?
So about the US: I'm thinking perhaps the USA as a nation is the problem because it's simply too big? Perhaps democracy just doesn't scale well. (When that's said, I think the US would do well with proportional representation [2], since it would (ironically) reduce political power by spreading it wide, and also actually give voters real political alternatives knowing that their vote has a higher chance of influence than with first-past-the-post).
One of the things that keeps America going is that it is divided up into states and even smaller jurisdictional units. If you are comparing Europe to North America, you need to be thinking along the lines that USA== EU and individual states like Texas, California, and Florida == France, Germany, and Italy. Yes, I know Germany has "states" that are supposedly organized along the same lines as American states, but in terms of population and economic strength the comparison to the major EU members is much more appropriate.
As for proportional representation, what keeps that from happening is that there are too many "local" issues that get in the way of getting that to happen. In nearly every case where it has been proposed, American voters have turned the idea down. And yes, the idea has been proposed before. Most recently, the state of Colorado proposed to select its electoral votes for U.S. President on a proportional vote system.... and was soundly defeated. Selfish interests that were not based on the merits of the system also came into play, so it was unfortunate that it wasn't even tried.
Oh - I see. I'm glad he had his priorities straight. The entire sum of human existence shouldn't be forgotten for nothing, you know?
You say that like it's a bad thing.
You make that reply sound like it is good thing to see the elimination of the human species. If you really believe that, do your part and help the rest of us by going away.
I would argue one more: The entire U.S. federal budget wouldn't be enough to get a self-sustaining colony on Mars... presuming it would have to be done with tax dollars and managed by a federal agency. On this I would have to agree.
Shouldn't you at least let those who want to try to be given the chance to find out for themselves, however? Going into space costs so much because nobody has realistically tried or for that matter even been allowed to try to get up into space for a price much cheaper than has been done for the past 40 years. In fact, every government space agency attempt to get up into space only proves to be even more expensive on the next generation of vehicles. That doesn't sound like progress.
I'm just asking for the freedom to go into space and for you to either cheer or jeer for me when I make the attempt. It shouldn't require a new government bureaucracy to happen, but it should at least allow like-minded people to try.
As significant.... why do you matter? If you think your life has any meaning at all.... why would that also not apply to other people as well, including those living 100k years into the future?
I agree. Why should you have to pay tax dollars on this?
But at the same time, why should you prevent me through silly regulations (hint, ITAR... look it up if you like) and government policies that explicitly keep me from experimenting with or even attempting to build rockets on my own dime. The question isn't that somebody like you needs to be able to pay for me to go into space, but rather that there are people (perhaps you aren't one of them) that explicitly want to keep me down on this rock at gunpoint and will sabotage any efforts I make in regards to getting off of this rock.
Organizations like NASA are quickly becoming a relic of the past, where the money is merely a way to have a bunch of bureaucrats spin their wheels and keep some disenchanted aerospace engineers and munitions workers busy when a war isn't going on. I certainly wouldn't cry too hard if NASA was completely de-funded and disbanded by Congress.... as if they have been making any sort of relevant progress towards cost-effective spaceflight at any time over the past 40 years anyway. Doubling the NASA budget is only going to double the number of bureaucrats working in Houston, Texas. It isn't going to get anybody off of this rock in a meaningful way.
On the other hand, therearemanydifferentprivatespaceflightcompanieswithrealhardware that can get people into space. We don't need a government agency to get that accomplished. Yes, government grants are nice, but it isn't needed to get this task accomplished.
For myself, if government is going to get involved at all, I'd rather they simply give a "tax holiday" for all federal taxes (corporate and personal income taxes... and other kinds too) by companies directly engaged in putting equipment into space. It would certainly be far and away more cost effective than doubling the current NASA budget, and perhaps something would actually be flying beyond Low-Earth orbit too. I definitely think that such a move would cause private space investment to roar into life in a manner that has never been seen before. The loss in taxes would be minor, and I could argue that the taxes raised from support industries would by far and away more than make up for any "lost" tax receipts to such companies.... and certainly be quite a bit less than going through the appropriations meat-grinder of the U.S. Congress.
As a counter-argument, I don't see why we can't be good stewards to this planet AND move off-planet as a species at the same time. It is those who are framing the question as if there was only a bi-lateral approach to the problem the only solution with only the two options, saving the Earth or screwing up the universe, that I am asserting is a false postulate in the first place.
If anything, when people get into space they have to be paying attention to environmental issues in a much more fundamental fashion where every breath you take and every bit of food or water that you have can't be taken for granted. As it is, many of the tools that we have to both monitor the environment and to be able to cope with man-made environmental problems can be traced directly to spaceflight efforts and specifically human spaceflight efforts. There is much to be said to support space science investigations if you want to find some useful ways to save this planet.
I certainly don't want to regress back to a hunter-gatherer culture at the expense of a global genocide of 99.9% of the current human population. For those that advocate such a proposition, guess who I nominate as the first people to be eliminated? There can be better ways of living, and the future of "civilized" human society simply depends on gaining access to the resources in space to sustain our culture.
I would rather that a few asteroids get pulverized into dust to gain access to the raw elements in those asteroids than for a couple of mountain ranges to be wiped out on the Earth along with all of the habitats of the creatures that live on top of those mountains and the "downstream" pollution that results from such an act. Everything we need for an advanced civilization exists in space in quantities that completely dwarfs to an almost laughable extent anything we can find here on the Earth. Energy, water, basic minerals such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and more as well as "heavy" metals like gold, platinum, silver, iron, magnesium, copper, and everything else exist and in fact we have a pretty good idea where those things are even located at right now.
The question is if we as a species have the will to get up there, or more significantly are those who don't necessarily want to go up into space willing to give the freedom to those of us who want to get up into space and leave this planet behind? To me it is a basic issue of freedom, and in the long run by granting this freedom to travel into the heavens and beyond it will enrich the lives of everybody including those who choose to stay behind on the Earth too. At the moment, those who wish to stay fixed to the Earth seem to want to deny the freedom to move on.
I'm not asking for a government hand-out, and I would be willing to get into space with the resources I currently have or can acquire in my lifetime. What annoys me is that instead of either helping or acting in benign neglect, government policies and those who want to keep people on this planet are enacting policies and programs that keep people here and take what limited resources I have only to divert those resources to some "other good cause" that I don't necessarily agree with in the first place. That is tyranny and in the long run is going to be the death of the human species as a whole if it continues.
Thanks. My reference doc disappeared on me, as I should have made a local copy of the thing and forgot to do just that.
Launching that vehicle for a half billion dollars (taking into account range fees, spacecraft refurbishment, "standing army costs" and such) really makes you wonder what kind of Kool-aid that NASA is drinking with the Ares spacecraft.... where each launch was going to be roughly $1 billion each and only had the capacity of launching 4 astronauts at a time... with the "larger" vehicle costing about 4-10 times that cost.
I think they would stop being called "spacecraft" and move into the realm of a "spaceship". With a little bit of work and some engineering, you might even see some space-based drydocks and spaceships that could never be launched from nor land on the surface of the Earth, but instead are strictly designed and built for point to point locations entirely in orbit or at least off of planetary bodies. "Landing", what there would be, would be more "docking" than anything else.... like "docking" to a facility on Phobos.
There will still be a need for "landing craft" to get to and from planetary bodies, but in my opinion those vehicles ought to be relatively small and dedicated to the environment and engineering requirements for that body. I also see no reason to cart all of the mass of an Earth landing vehicle to Mars only to bring it back. Keep the Earth landing craft near the Earth, and Mars landing craft near Mars (if you can make them reusable).
Still, it is fun to speculate about what you could do with mass on the order of 150 tons, and consider that a whole bunch of heavy machinery is hauled around here point to point on the Earth in vehicles capable of transporting loads of that nature. The faring diameter for the Falcon XX launcher would also be on the order of the hull diameter for a 747 as well.
If anybody was serious about getting extra-terrestrial mining efforts going, I would think that such mass requirements would be routine for launches, and something that would be comparable in terms of logistics to mining in very remote areas that use air freight for moving in parts and supplies. At the moment, even if somebody had the money to pay for such launches there isn't a vehicle that could make the trip right now.
I'm sure if we develop that kind of lift capacity, or even get close enough that there's some confidence it *will* get developed, people will come up with all kinds of uses. For example, how many flights would it have taken to put the current mass of the ISS into orbit? How about it's complete design mass?
The total mass of the ISS is right now about 400 metric tons. @150 tons per trip, that would put the mass of the whole ISS up in three trips with room to spare. One module for habitation (& life support/logistics), one module for science, and a third module for power. If you used a Bigelow-style module for the habitation module, it could house about 30 astronauts (for the same mass) and the launch costs.... assuming about $5 billion as a high-ball estimate for this vehicle, would be about $15 billion. In other words, for less than 1/10th of the cost of the ISS they could put up a larger facility that does more in fewer launches and holds more astronauts doing far and away much more science. Heck, that is the operations cost alone for the ISS over the next decade.
And I'm really high-balling the costs here. Each Merlin-2 engine is quoted as costing about $50 million each, and the Falcon XX has somewhere between a dozen and 20 of these Merlin-2 engines (I don't see the specific figures right now on the design, but I know the 150 tons of lift is accurate). Tankage and configuration costs put it in the realm of between $1 billion and $5 billion to launch, or about the cost of a single Space Shuttle flight, give or take some fudge room and interpretation of how much it costs to launch a Shuttle.
It should be noted there were privately financed shuttle launches (not many, but they did happen and arguably subsidized).
From a pure accounting perspective, SpaceX has been a profitable enterprise now for several years. Some of this is more of following accounting rules and having to take income received as a form of profit, but they do have a cash flow and money is coming into the company from sources other than the U.S. Federal government. There are also several customers who are waiting for the deployment of the Falcon 1e and "certification" of the Falcon 9 rockets before they make commitments for flight.... and this includes groups like Bigelow Aerospace who certainly have the money to put into more flights. The loans that SpaceX has right now are for capital expenditures and expanding the business rather than to meet day to day expenses. Otherwise, those loans would be paid off by now.
Certainly the fiscal picture for SpaceX is much better than it was with Tesla, which has some serious cash flow problems that needed to be dealt with and having some house cleaning on the top management to get it back under control. Given his choice, I'm sure Elon Musk would have preferred to stick with SpaceX and not get distracted by Tesla. If anything, Musk's experience with Tesla is going to be very useful for SpaceX as well as it moves up into the larger tiers of major industrial manufacturing companies and the kinds of skills needed to run a company that size.
If SpaceX ever builds that Falcon XX rocket and launches it, at that point I think it would be safe to say that the Manned Spaceflight Office and for that matter the Johnson Space Center should be closed. Then again, I thought that Elon Musk was smoking something really good when he came up with the Falcon 5 design originally and I thought I would never see that vehicle fly. I guess he didn't.... he flew an even bigger one instead:)
There are applications for He3 beyond nuclear fusion, although I will admit that it is the "killer app" which makes He3 a viable commodity to be mined in large quantities.
In terms of mining huge quantities of rock for just a minor fraction of that ore being extracted for something useful, I would suggest that you try and read up on Copper mining techniques. While not measured in parts per million, the concentrations are in the low parts per thousand range, and involve the processing of millions of tons of rock and the literal moving of entire mountains to obtain this mineral. The technologies and ore quantities suggested here certainly have existing examples and techniques used here on the Earth for at least processing similar quantities of ore for relatively small quantities of final product extracted.
The trick is knowing what to do with that "1kg of the stuff" once you get it.
As for practical nuclear fusion, there have been some recent efforts along those lines including the Bussard Polywell Fusor that seems to hold some promise. Enough promise that it may happen within the decade if everything works out for the better. Unfortunately He3 is not being looked at as a primary fuel for various reasons and in fact Boron is being looked at more as a fuel source for those reactions... primarily due to radiation concerns from other types of fusion reactions. While not nearly as deadly as Plutonium fission reactors, a He3-He3 reaction does produce high energy neutrons that can pose a radiation hazard and can transmute some metals into radioactive isotopes that would require some significant mitigation issues for long-term use.
The world-wide market for He3 is minimal and certainly couldn't pay for a major mining expedition to the Moon. Yes, its cost is high due to the difficulty in finding and extracting it here on the Earth, but that doesn't mean that there will be markets for the stuff if you are able to ship it by the ton.
There are substances like Gold which does have a market for the materials if you could find say a house-sized nugget and somehow land it in a cost-effective manner. It might destroy the current gold bullion market if that happened, but even at 10% of the current price gold would have many people finding legitimate uses for the metal and it does have applications where economies of scale apply in a beneficial way. In other words, increasing the world supply of gold 10x would yield a market cap of the whole gold market (how much money is being spent to purchase gold) to be larger than is the case with current gold supplies.
That is not the case with He3. If you increased the global supply of that stuff 10x or 100x, He3 demand wouldn't increase that much more with a corresponding drop in price. This is called price elasticity. The He3 market is not that elastic. You certainly wouldn't want to bring stuff from the Moon with the only real application is to fill up balloons.
The Oberth effect presumes several things, including that you have a high delta-v engine, that you are in an elliptical orbit, and that your goal is to get to an even higher orbit where increased eccentricity in the orbital path is not really a problem. If you are using an engine design that has a continuous thrust engine (such as VASMIR, solar sails, and ion propulsion... to name a few), the Oberth effect isn't nearly so pronounced or even accurate in the description. It certainly doesn't help out in situations like trying to reach a Geo-synchronous orbit, but it can help in terms of trying to reach escape velocity or doing something like going to the Moon.
The largest problem with nuclear thermal rockets (especially fission-powered rockets) is the use of the word "nuclear", even if it is an accurate description. The hardcore anti-nuclear activists are so hard-nosed about having anything nuclear going into space that you must be prepared to have some of those activists on the thrust end of such a rocket. Not that I'd cry too hard if somebody was that stupid (with reasonable precautions so that folks who show up there know full well what is about to happen), but it is something to at least be prepared to deal with and has some pretty bad public relations aspects. If nuclear thrust rockets are ever going to be built on a large scale, the materials for those rockets are unfortunately going to have to be obtained from space-based resources and not from the Earth. I wish it were different, but that is current political reality even if I agree that nuclear rocketry is something that should be explored and used.
The Falcon X vehicle is essentially a Saturn V replacement vehicle (rated to lift more tonnage but with less fuel). The Falcon XX.... if you look over the specs it turns out that it has the same cargo capacity as a 747 that would be used for inter-continental transport.
I don't know what you think could be flown on one of those vehicles, but those are simply huge and would require some customers wanting to put some serious tonnage into orbit. I like this analogy with the Falcon XX:
If you man-rated the FalconXX, you could put every astronaut who has ever flown into space so far in the entire history of mankind, together all at once, on a single flight into orbit. Yes, that would include food for a couple of days and life support. The size of that vehicle is something that has never flown... ever.
As far as what kind of equipment you would want to fly into space that could also barely fit into the cargo area of a 747-cargo plane, that would be an interesting prospect by itself. That goes way beyond GEO satellites or even a Hubble replacement, but more along the lines of a monster spacecraft built by Bigelow that could hold a couple thousand people. I am still trying to get my head around how big that vehicle is and what kind of applications it would be used for.
It is more of 10% failure rate for early launches.... something that SpaceX seems to be able to get down, and where a 1% failure rate is considered "excellent". Saying that SpaceX has a 50% failure rate is being disingenuous so far as including acknowledged prototypes and an incredibly small statical sampling that has obvious biases from the samples being used to generate the rate indicated.
Still, I'd have to agree that a "Sigma 2" reliability rate is dismal and something that should be improved throughout the spaceflight industry. SpaceX claims that they will do better than this, but like all marketing claims it remains to be seen. They haven't had a failure since they got something to orbit. Unfortunately, SpaceX is still at the prototype stage with its current rockets and has retired the Falcon 1 with only one real operational flight. A 1 out of 1 statistical probability is not really a good measurement either.
The ULA vehicles (Atlas V and Delta IV) also have all "intellectual property" owned by the respective parent companies (Lock-Mart and Boeing) and have nobody else that needs to sign off on using those vehicles for commercial launches other than getting an ordinary launch permit and permission of the launch range officers (FAA and the USAF permission with regards to Cape Canaveral launches).
You are correct with the DOD contracts, which are fixed cost. The USAF did, however, help pay for the R&D on those vehicles mainly as a way to have something to ship up their payloads, but there was also some "skin" put into the game by those companies as well. It is this model that SpaceX is using for its own rocket development.
In spite of the perception, not much was transferred from ATK and the other Ares/Orion contractors to SpaceX or Orbital Science with the COTS programs... at least for this current fiscal year. Most of the hoopla is over what is going to be happening over the next couple of years, and the fact that Constellation is getting canceled.... with a bunch of fairy god-senators that are furious that their special pork projects are getting cut.
Still, I generally agree that those who are involved in the entrepreneurial space market (as opposed to government contract space market) are some men (and a few women) who deserve the accolades that have been sent their way. I personally think John Carmack is doing stuff perhaps a bit more interesting and in the long run going to be more innovative and original than what Elon Musk is doing, but his approach is also going to take quite a bit longer to happen.
The rockets that have been just announced by SpaceX, on the other hand, ramp up the dialog even more and promise to out-do even what NASA accomplished with the Apollo program. That "Falcon XX" spacecraft in particular is something that, if launched, is going to redefine the very term "spacecraft". Superlatives simply don't exist for a vehicle that size and goes way beyond "heavy lift vehicle".
I think more of Heinlein's D. Delos Harriman (warts and all), but I think you can find several other good comparisons. Harriman wasn't somebody that you would want to have babysitting your kids, but he certainly did some things in Heinlein's fiction that were impressive. Sort of how I feel about Musk too, for that matter.
I do wonder which would be more effective at a proper use of tax dollars: A massive increase in NASA's budget to something on the order of about $30 billion per year and a major push to Mars, or simply enacting a law that would remove all federal taxes (including corporate and personal income taxes) for individuals and companies who are directly engaged in the development of hardware and equipment that actually goes into space.
If for some reason a completely "tax holiday" were to be put onto companies developing spaceflight equipment, I'm quite certain that Wall Street would take notice and there would likely be far more money put into spaceflight (both robotic and manned) than NASA could ever dream. Furthermore, the tax receipts that the federal government would lose would be relatively minor in comparison, and I would argue would be less than the current outlays to NASA. Since it would still be private individuals putting their own money on the line instead of lining up to the government pork trench, the most cost effective and profitable approaches would also be used for nearly every design that would actually make it into orbit. Silly things like paper studies to nowhere would become a thing of the past.
If, after some time it becomes apparent that certain areas of industry may need a little bit of a boost due to capital requirements... perhaps a little bit of federal involvement could happen. But seriously, I am not convinced that would even be necessary under such a tax-free space investment environment. The capital necessary to do spaceflight is around, the question is mainly how is it going to be allocated and if it should go through the hands of a bunch of senators and congressmen first.
Given NASA's track record over the past 30 years in singularly failing to develop even a single useful manned spaceflight vehicle in spite of nearly a hundred billion dollars spent along those lines, almost anything would be better than the current approach. I'm not convinced that NASA could possibly be reformed in any meaningful way to do better. Still, wouldn't it be an amazing experiment to even maintain or slightly cut but not eliminate NASA's budget at current levels and do a tax holiday to see just what would come from this kind of activity? Eliminate ITAR restrictions on civilian commercial spaceflight, and it would be an almost ideal environment. The government is the problem, not the solution.
That sounds like some programmer who doesn't understand the problem domain in terms of the typesetting software.
Then again, typesetters are used to a pretty lousy user interface with processing steps that are designed to make the job easier for the machines with little or no consideration to the person who has to use the equipment. That makes for some very good job security as it is a PITA to have to learn the screwy codes and procedures to get everything to work, but still gets to the point that the software you are using here is buggy and not really doing its job correctly.
I call that a bug, not a feature, if you have to repeat the same step more than a couple of times.... ever. Certainly this is a common enough issue that "period space space" and "period space" ought to generally be considered the same thing. My personal habit is to use the "period space space" and I'll continue to use that for the next 40 years if I can get away with it. For myself, I also think it makes for easier reading, but that is irrelevant in this discussion.
So why are you buying that shiny new car in the first place? That sounds like your problem, not the lack of ability to get "credit" for the thing. If you are trying to "establish credit", perhaps that used junker of a car for a couple thousand dollars on a signatory loan would be a better kind of purchase anyway... even presuming you have a very good paying job at the same company and having been employed there for a decade or more.
Odds are very likely that if you have "good" credit, you are more likely to get in over your head as well.
Don't get caught up into this game. Good credit scores are much easier to obtain than repairing a bad credit score and recovering from a mountain of debt for purchases that aren't asset building in the first place. Generally an automobile loan is not a good move, unless you are a salesman trying to con somebody in the first place. If you have the surplus cash and a good income, that is one thing, and likely you will get the loan if you ask for it as well. A high paying job and longevity at the job are far more important things to worry about than a good credit score.
This is very horrible advise, and my advise to "young people" (aka somebody earning a minimum wage job and just starting out in life) to completely ignore this completely. Credit cards are not needed, and "credit" will be extended at the time you really need it in life... if it is needed at all.
Do, however, check your credit scores and get your "free annual credit report" to at least check up to see if some idiot is using your name and "identity". If that comes up as a complete blank, don't fret it either.
There are times that having a modest credit card does come in handy. "Judicious use and management" means that you find one that has a $0 annual fee (if you can find one) and making dang sure that you pay off the balance completely each month if at all possible. Still, it is possible to get by without one.
Do open a bank account and establish a relationship with a bank at some level.
The point here is that if you have a lack of a credit history, building "good credit scores" is much, much easier to accomplish than trying to repair a horrible credit score and paying off a mountain of debt due to jumping into the credit game far too early in life. If you are still living with Mom & Dad and don't need to pay for much in life, don't seek or get credit at all. Most kids going into college don't need credit cards either, certainly not most freshmen. College graduates? Perhaps or if you are married and having kids and dealing with stuff like rent, utility payments, groceries, and medical bills.
Advise to "young people" is to pay as much with cash as possible, mainly because it is far and away too tempting to "charge it" when you really don't have the resources to pay it off. When you run out of cash, it is easy to say "I can't buy that" and stick to your guns as you really don't have the money to be able to afford it.
When it comes to the time in your life when you need to get a mortgage or buy that commuter car that is absolutely necessary for transport to & from work (hopefully paying a good salary to justify that expense), if you are simply out of debt and have some money tucked into savings you will find that you can get the credit needed. By the time you get to that stage in your life, it is possible you may even have expense accounts and other ways to "build credit" that is rather painless.
All of this is presuming that the rapid expansion phase of the Big Bang is in fact reality and that the Big Bang theory is in fact the correct cosmological theory for the origin of the universe.
Mind you, I'm not disputing the conclusion here nor even that this is the prevailing theory for the universe, but there are some postulates and presumptions to your discussion here which are unstated. With those presumptions, you are correct.
I'll admit that discovering a "center" to the universe would create some very different theories about the origin of the universe and be some very real meat for perhaps a deeper understanding of how everything is put together. It might even be sufficient to find a level of mechanics that would "overthrow" Einstein's relativity equations with something else (likely more complex still).
It was the discovery that light traveled at the same speed in all directions from experiment that led to much of the current understanding of the universe and most current theories in cosmology and celestial mechanics. Science is advanced when experimental results show up that don't fit with current theories.
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The question is more how careful those operating these servers were careful with copyright questions when they were creating the servers in the first place. Most of those in the "alternate server community" don't really take issues of copyright very seriously and only pay lip-service to even dealing with reverse engineering in any proper sense of the term. The groups tend to have other "software piracy" attitudes, slogans, and remarks on boards that shows a reckless disregard to the law.
All it takes is to show some of that to a judge where it is a bunch of kids that are being rebels and not taking the law seriously to essentially throw the case to the plaintiff in situations like this. Even if many or even most of what they were doing was perfectly legal, skipping steps like trying to come up with a specification and having people implement that specification in a "clean room" are all very important. Perhaps these kids are getting a lesson as to why those very careful steps are done by companies who try to reverse engineer products legally. Even then, sometimes experienced companies make mistakes or encounter a judge who was ragged on by his wife (or husband) and in a sour mood simply decided to rule for the plaintiff anyway. Yes, it happens.
If this group was very careful about a clean-room design, simply monitored network traffic and then had a "virgin" team (somebody who had never played or used Blizzard's software at all) create and implement the design based upon the specification document derived from monitoring that network traffic.... they might have a much more clear-cut case about legal reverse engineering. Somehow I seriously doubt any of that happened, including even a more modest method outlined here about reverse engineering the traffic alone.
Raw statistics such as the "stats" of monsters aren't within the realm of copyright, but more complex behavior like AI models can be.
Still, the point is that those running these alternate servers aren't really being careful with copyright and tend to play fast and loose with "intellectual property" in all of its various flavors. I'm quite certain that most of these guys setting up these servers aren't doing a "clean room" design and have certainly looked at decompiled/disassembled code at one point or another and have made other mistakes that taint the copyright status of these servers.
If they've done a clean room design from a raw specification and otherwise all original content on the server side, there might be much less of a case. When the judge sees that there were numerous problems and that those involved didn't take copyright seriously, no wonder there have been outcomes like this.
The best comparison that can be used here is to compare and contrast Europe with China in the 1500's. China was arguably a super-power with vast resources and intimate knowledge of the sea with ships that sailed around Africa and perhaps even made it to Alaska... and a suggestion that perhaps they even made it to South America.
The problem with China was that it had a monolithic government and an emperor who in a fit of arbitrary whim burned the entire international shipping fleet for that country and forced them to wait out the next 500 years on ths sidelines of world history rather than making history with an expansion of Chinese culture and values throughout the world.
Europe, in part due to the fact that there wasn't just one country but rather hundreds of them, had the freedom to try new things and nobody telling them that world exploration was a useless task. Yes, there were a coupe of countries that were very xenophobic, but for the most part those countries were left behind in the expansion of global trade networks.
One relatively tiny country, England, arose to prominence in such a way that eventually they controlled more of the Earth's surface than any empire in the history of mankind.
As for the "rewards" that are in space....there are resources in space that would boggle the mind. Minerals that are easily accessible (once you actually get there) and energy resources that are essentially limitless. If modest effort would go into mining resources in space, almost all Earth-based mining could be discontinued and likely would be once resources started to flow from space due to economic considerations alone.
Getting into space is expensive right now partly as a myth (certain government bureaucrats in multiple countries want you to think it is expensive so they can keep their jobs) and partly because few people have really made the attempt to reduce the cost for space access. From a rocket fuel perspective, getting into orbit consumes roughly the same amount of fuel as flying from from New York or London to Sydney. That is something done by very ordinary people on a routine basis every day. There is no reason that spaceflight can't be at a comparable cost.
My point is that people should be given the freedom to choose to spend their own money going into space, and that there are far and away too many people in positions of government authority who are explicitly trying to stop that from happening. It is these people that need to be exposed... and my only advise for you if you think that investing in a space-based business is risk... don't invest in it. But why are you telling me that I can't invest in one of those businesses?
So about the US: I'm thinking perhaps the USA as a nation is the problem because it's simply too big? Perhaps democracy just doesn't scale well. (When that's said, I think the US would do well with proportional representation [2], since it would (ironically) reduce political power by spreading it wide, and also actually give voters real political alternatives knowing that their vote has a higher chance of influence than with first-past-the-post).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_model
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation
One of the things that keeps America going is that it is divided up into states and even smaller jurisdictional units. If you are comparing Europe to North America, you need to be thinking along the lines that USA== EU and individual states like Texas, California, and Florida == France, Germany, and Italy. Yes, I know Germany has "states" that are supposedly organized along the same lines as American states, but in terms of population and economic strength the comparison to the major EU members is much more appropriate.
As for proportional representation, what keeps that from happening is that there are too many "local" issues that get in the way of getting that to happen. In nearly every case where it has been proposed, American voters have turned the idea down. And yes, the idea has been proposed before. Most recently, the state of Colorado proposed to select its electoral votes for U.S. President on a proportional vote system.... and was soundly defeated. Selfish interests that were not based on the merits of the system also came into play, so it was unfortunate that it wasn't even tried.
Oh - I see. I'm glad he had his priorities straight. The entire sum of human existence shouldn't be forgotten for nothing, you know?
You say that like it's a bad thing.
You make that reply sound like it is good thing to see the elimination of the human species. If you really believe that, do your part and help the rest of us by going away.
I would argue one more: The entire U.S. federal budget wouldn't be enough to get a self-sustaining colony on Mars... presuming it would have to be done with tax dollars and managed by a federal agency. On this I would have to agree.
Shouldn't you at least let those who want to try to be given the chance to find out for themselves, however? Going into space costs so much because nobody has realistically tried or for that matter even been allowed to try to get up into space for a price much cheaper than has been done for the past 40 years. In fact, every government space agency attempt to get up into space only proves to be even more expensive on the next generation of vehicles. That doesn't sound like progress.
I'm just asking for the freedom to go into space and for you to either cheer or jeer for me when I make the attempt. It shouldn't require a new government bureaucracy to happen, but it should at least allow like-minded people to try.
And that would matter why exactly?
As significant.... why do you matter? If you think your life has any meaning at all.... why would that also not apply to other people as well, including those living 100k years into the future?
I agree. Why should you have to pay tax dollars on this?
But at the same time, why should you prevent me through silly regulations (hint, ITAR... look it up if you like) and government policies that explicitly keep me from experimenting with or even attempting to build rockets on my own dime. The question isn't that somebody like you needs to be able to pay for me to go into space, but rather that there are people (perhaps you aren't one of them) that explicitly want to keep me down on this rock at gunpoint and will sabotage any efforts I make in regards to getting off of this rock.
Organizations like NASA are quickly becoming a relic of the past, where the money is merely a way to have a bunch of bureaucrats spin their wheels and keep some disenchanted aerospace engineers and munitions workers busy when a war isn't going on. I certainly wouldn't cry too hard if NASA was completely de-funded and disbanded by Congress.... as if they have been making any sort of relevant progress towards cost-effective spaceflight at any time over the past 40 years anyway. Doubling the NASA budget is only going to double the number of bureaucrats working in Houston, Texas. It isn't going to get anybody off of this rock in a meaningful way.
On the other hand, there are many different private spaceflight companies with real hardware that can get people into space. We don't need a government agency to get that accomplished. Yes, government grants are nice, but it isn't needed to get this task accomplished.
For myself, if government is going to get involved at all, I'd rather they simply give a "tax holiday" for all federal taxes (corporate and personal income taxes... and other kinds too) by companies directly engaged in putting equipment into space. It would certainly be far and away more cost effective than doubling the current NASA budget, and perhaps something would actually be flying beyond Low-Earth orbit too. I definitely think that such a move would cause private space investment to roar into life in a manner that has never been seen before. The loss in taxes would be minor, and I could argue that the taxes raised from support industries would by far and away more than make up for any "lost" tax receipts to such companies.... and certainly be quite a bit less than going through the appropriations meat-grinder of the U.S. Congress.
As a counter-argument, I don't see why we can't be good stewards to this planet AND move off-planet as a species at the same time. It is those who are framing the question as if there was only a bi-lateral approach to the problem the only solution with only the two options, saving the Earth or screwing up the universe, that I am asserting is a false postulate in the first place.
If anything, when people get into space they have to be paying attention to environmental issues in a much more fundamental fashion where every breath you take and every bit of food or water that you have can't be taken for granted. As it is, many of the tools that we have to both monitor the environment and to be able to cope with man-made environmental problems can be traced directly to spaceflight efforts and specifically human spaceflight efforts. There is much to be said to support space science investigations if you want to find some useful ways to save this planet.
I certainly don't want to regress back to a hunter-gatherer culture at the expense of a global genocide of 99.9% of the current human population. For those that advocate such a proposition, guess who I nominate as the first people to be eliminated? There can be better ways of living, and the future of "civilized" human society simply depends on gaining access to the resources in space to sustain our culture.
I would rather that a few asteroids get pulverized into dust to gain access to the raw elements in those asteroids than for a couple of mountain ranges to be wiped out on the Earth along with all of the habitats of the creatures that live on top of those mountains and the "downstream" pollution that results from such an act. Everything we need for an advanced civilization exists in space in quantities that completely dwarfs to an almost laughable extent anything we can find here on the Earth. Energy, water, basic minerals such as carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen and more as well as "heavy" metals like gold, platinum, silver, iron, magnesium, copper, and everything else exist and in fact we have a pretty good idea where those things are even located at right now.
The question is if we as a species have the will to get up there, or more significantly are those who don't necessarily want to go up into space willing to give the freedom to those of us who want to get up into space and leave this planet behind? To me it is a basic issue of freedom, and in the long run by granting this freedom to travel into the heavens and beyond it will enrich the lives of everybody including those who choose to stay behind on the Earth too. At the moment, those who wish to stay fixed to the Earth seem to want to deny the freedom to move on.
I'm not asking for a government hand-out, and I would be willing to get into space with the resources I currently have or can acquire in my lifetime. What annoys me is that instead of either helping or acting in benign neglect, government policies and those who want to keep people on this planet are enacting policies and programs that keep people here and take what limited resources I have only to divert those resources to some "other good cause" that I don't necessarily agree with in the first place. That is tyranny and in the long run is going to be the death of the human species as a whole if it continues.
Thanks. My reference doc disappeared on me, as I should have made a local copy of the thing and forgot to do just that.
Launching that vehicle for a half billion dollars (taking into account range fees, spacecraft refurbishment, "standing army costs" and such) really makes you wonder what kind of Kool-aid that NASA is drinking with the Ares spacecraft.... where each launch was going to be roughly $1 billion each and only had the capacity of launching 4 astronauts at a time... with the "larger" vehicle costing about 4-10 times that cost.
I think they would stop being called "spacecraft" and move into the realm of a "spaceship". With a little bit of work and some engineering, you might even see some space-based drydocks and spaceships that could never be launched from nor land on the surface of the Earth, but instead are strictly designed and built for point to point locations entirely in orbit or at least off of planetary bodies. "Landing", what there would be, would be more "docking" than anything else.... like "docking" to a facility on Phobos.
There will still be a need for "landing craft" to get to and from planetary bodies, but in my opinion those vehicles ought to be relatively small and dedicated to the environment and engineering requirements for that body. I also see no reason to cart all of the mass of an Earth landing vehicle to Mars only to bring it back. Keep the Earth landing craft near the Earth, and Mars landing craft near Mars (if you can make them reusable).
Still, it is fun to speculate about what you could do with mass on the order of 150 tons, and consider that a whole bunch of heavy machinery is hauled around here point to point on the Earth in vehicles capable of transporting loads of that nature. The faring diameter for the Falcon XX launcher would also be on the order of the hull diameter for a 747 as well.
If anybody was serious about getting extra-terrestrial mining efforts going, I would think that such mass requirements would be routine for launches, and something that would be comparable in terms of logistics to mining in very remote areas that use air freight for moving in parts and supplies. At the moment, even if somebody had the money to pay for such launches there isn't a vehicle that could make the trip right now.
I'm sure if we develop that kind of lift capacity, or even get close enough that there's some confidence it *will* get developed, people will come up with all kinds of uses. For example, how many flights would it have taken to put the current mass of the ISS into orbit? How about it's complete design mass?
The total mass of the ISS is right now about 400 metric tons. @150 tons per trip, that would put the mass of the whole ISS up in three trips with room to spare. One module for habitation (& life support/logistics), one module for science, and a third module for power. If you used a Bigelow-style module for the habitation module, it could house about 30 astronauts (for the same mass) and the launch costs.... assuming about $5 billion as a high-ball estimate for this vehicle, would be about $15 billion. In other words, for less than 1/10th of the cost of the ISS they could put up a larger facility that does more in fewer launches and holds more astronauts doing far and away much more science. Heck, that is the operations cost alone for the ISS over the next decade.
And I'm really high-balling the costs here. Each Merlin-2 engine is quoted as costing about $50 million each, and the Falcon XX has somewhere between a dozen and 20 of these Merlin-2 engines (I don't see the specific figures right now on the design, but I know the 150 tons of lift is accurate). Tankage and configuration costs put it in the realm of between $1 billion and $5 billion to launch, or about the cost of a single Space Shuttle flight, give or take some fudge room and interpretation of how much it costs to launch a Shuttle.
It should be noted there were privately financed shuttle launches (not many, but they did happen and arguably subsidized).
From a pure accounting perspective, SpaceX has been a profitable enterprise now for several years. Some of this is more of following accounting rules and having to take income received as a form of profit, but they do have a cash flow and money is coming into the company from sources other than the U.S. Federal government. There are also several customers who are waiting for the deployment of the Falcon 1e and "certification" of the Falcon 9 rockets before they make commitments for flight.... and this includes groups like Bigelow Aerospace who certainly have the money to put into more flights. The loans that SpaceX has right now are for capital expenditures and expanding the business rather than to meet day to day expenses. Otherwise, those loans would be paid off by now.
Certainly the fiscal picture for SpaceX is much better than it was with Tesla, which has some serious cash flow problems that needed to be dealt with and having some house cleaning on the top management to get it back under control. Given his choice, I'm sure Elon Musk would have preferred to stick with SpaceX and not get distracted by Tesla. If anything, Musk's experience with Tesla is going to be very useful for SpaceX as well as it moves up into the larger tiers of major industrial manufacturing companies and the kinds of skills needed to run a company that size.
If SpaceX ever builds that Falcon XX rocket and launches it, at that point I think it would be safe to say that the Manned Spaceflight Office and for that matter the Johnson Space Center should be closed. Then again, I thought that Elon Musk was smoking something really good when he came up with the Falcon 5 design originally and I thought I would never see that vehicle fly. I guess he didn't.... he flew an even bigger one instead :)
There are applications for He3 beyond nuclear fusion, although I will admit that it is the "killer app" which makes He3 a viable commodity to be mined in large quantities.
In terms of mining huge quantities of rock for just a minor fraction of that ore being extracted for something useful, I would suggest that you try and read up on Copper mining techniques. While not measured in parts per million, the concentrations are in the low parts per thousand range, and involve the processing of millions of tons of rock and the literal moving of entire mountains to obtain this mineral. The technologies and ore quantities suggested here certainly have existing examples and techniques used here on the Earth for at least processing similar quantities of ore for relatively small quantities of final product extracted.
The trick is knowing what to do with that "1kg of the stuff" once you get it.
As for practical nuclear fusion, there have been some recent efforts along those lines including the Bussard Polywell Fusor that seems to hold some promise. Enough promise that it may happen within the decade if everything works out for the better. Unfortunately He3 is not being looked at as a primary fuel for various reasons and in fact Boron is being looked at more as a fuel source for those reactions... primarily due to radiation concerns from other types of fusion reactions. While not nearly as deadly as Plutonium fission reactors, a He3-He3 reaction does produce high energy neutrons that can pose a radiation hazard and can transmute some metals into radioactive isotopes that would require some significant mitigation issues for long-term use.
The world-wide market for He3 is minimal and certainly couldn't pay for a major mining expedition to the Moon. Yes, its cost is high due to the difficulty in finding and extracting it here on the Earth, but that doesn't mean that there will be markets for the stuff if you are able to ship it by the ton.
There are substances like Gold which does have a market for the materials if you could find say a house-sized nugget and somehow land it in a cost-effective manner. It might destroy the current gold bullion market if that happened, but even at 10% of the current price gold would have many people finding legitimate uses for the metal and it does have applications where economies of scale apply in a beneficial way. In other words, increasing the world supply of gold 10x would yield a market cap of the whole gold market (how much money is being spent to purchase gold) to be larger than is the case with current gold supplies.
That is not the case with He3. If you increased the global supply of that stuff 10x or 100x, He3 demand wouldn't increase that much more with a corresponding drop in price. This is called price elasticity. The He3 market is not that elastic. You certainly wouldn't want to bring stuff from the Moon with the only real application is to fill up balloons.
The Oberth effect presumes several things, including that you have a high delta-v engine, that you are in an elliptical orbit, and that your goal is to get to an even higher orbit where increased eccentricity in the orbital path is not really a problem. If you are using an engine design that has a continuous thrust engine (such as VASMIR, solar sails, and ion propulsion... to name a few), the Oberth effect isn't nearly so pronounced or even accurate in the description. It certainly doesn't help out in situations like trying to reach a Geo-synchronous orbit, but it can help in terms of trying to reach escape velocity or doing something like going to the Moon.
The largest problem with nuclear thermal rockets (especially fission-powered rockets) is the use of the word "nuclear", even if it is an accurate description. The hardcore anti-nuclear activists are so hard-nosed about having anything nuclear going into space that you must be prepared to have some of those activists on the thrust end of such a rocket. Not that I'd cry too hard if somebody was that stupid (with reasonable precautions so that folks who show up there know full well what is about to happen), but it is something to at least be prepared to deal with and has some pretty bad public relations aspects. If nuclear thrust rockets are ever going to be built on a large scale, the materials for those rockets are unfortunately going to have to be obtained from space-based resources and not from the Earth. I wish it were different, but that is current political reality even if I agree that nuclear rocketry is something that should be explored and used.
The Falcon X vehicle is essentially a Saturn V replacement vehicle (rated to lift more tonnage but with less fuel). The Falcon XX.... if you look over the specs it turns out that it has the same cargo capacity as a 747 that would be used for inter-continental transport.
I don't know what you think could be flown on one of those vehicles, but those are simply huge and would require some customers wanting to put some serious tonnage into orbit. I like this analogy with the Falcon XX:
If you man-rated the FalconXX, you could put every astronaut who has ever flown into space so far in the entire history of mankind, together all at once, on a single flight into orbit. Yes, that would include food for a couple of days and life support. The size of that vehicle is something that has never flown... ever.
As far as what kind of equipment you would want to fly into space that could also barely fit into the cargo area of a 747-cargo plane, that would be an interesting prospect by itself. That goes way beyond GEO satellites or even a Hubble replacement, but more along the lines of a monster spacecraft built by Bigelow that could hold a couple thousand people. I am still trying to get my head around how big that vehicle is and what kind of applications it would be used for.
It is more of 10% failure rate for early launches.... something that SpaceX seems to be able to get down, and where a 1% failure rate is considered "excellent". Saying that SpaceX has a 50% failure rate is being disingenuous so far as including acknowledged prototypes and an incredibly small statical sampling that has obvious biases from the samples being used to generate the rate indicated.
Still, I'd have to agree that a "Sigma 2" reliability rate is dismal and something that should be improved throughout the spaceflight industry. SpaceX claims that they will do better than this, but like all marketing claims it remains to be seen. They haven't had a failure since they got something to orbit. Unfortunately, SpaceX is still at the prototype stage with its current rockets and has retired the Falcon 1 with only one real operational flight. A 1 out of 1 statistical probability is not really a good measurement either.
The ULA vehicles (Atlas V and Delta IV) also have all "intellectual property" owned by the respective parent companies (Lock-Mart and Boeing) and have nobody else that needs to sign off on using those vehicles for commercial launches other than getting an ordinary launch permit and permission of the launch range officers (FAA and the USAF permission with regards to Cape Canaveral launches).
You are correct with the DOD contracts, which are fixed cost. The USAF did, however, help pay for the R&D on those vehicles mainly as a way to have something to ship up their payloads, but there was also some "skin" put into the game by those companies as well. It is this model that SpaceX is using for its own rocket development.
In spite of the perception, not much was transferred from ATK and the other Ares/Orion contractors to SpaceX or Orbital Science with the COTS programs... at least for this current fiscal year. Most of the hoopla is over what is going to be happening over the next couple of years, and the fact that Constellation is getting canceled.... with a bunch of fairy god-senators that are furious that their special pork projects are getting cut.
Still, I generally agree that those who are involved in the entrepreneurial space market (as opposed to government contract space market) are some men (and a few women) who deserve the accolades that have been sent their way. I personally think John Carmack is doing stuff perhaps a bit more interesting and in the long run going to be more innovative and original than what Elon Musk is doing, but his approach is also going to take quite a bit longer to happen.
The rockets that have been just announced by SpaceX, on the other hand, ramp up the dialog even more and promise to out-do even what NASA accomplished with the Apollo program. That "Falcon XX" spacecraft in particular is something that, if launched, is going to redefine the very term "spacecraft". Superlatives simply don't exist for a vehicle that size and goes way beyond "heavy lift vehicle".
I think more of Heinlein's D. Delos Harriman (warts and all), but I think you can find several other good comparisons. Harriman wasn't somebody that you would want to have babysitting your kids, but he certainly did some things in Heinlein's fiction that were impressive. Sort of how I feel about Musk too, for that matter.
I do wonder which would be more effective at a proper use of tax dollars: A massive increase in NASA's budget to something on the order of about $30 billion per year and a major push to Mars, or simply enacting a law that would remove all federal taxes (including corporate and personal income taxes) for individuals and companies who are directly engaged in the development of hardware and equipment that actually goes into space.
If for some reason a completely "tax holiday" were to be put onto companies developing spaceflight equipment, I'm quite certain that Wall Street would take notice and there would likely be far more money put into spaceflight (both robotic and manned) than NASA could ever dream. Furthermore, the tax receipts that the federal government would lose would be relatively minor in comparison, and I would argue would be less than the current outlays to NASA. Since it would still be private individuals putting their own money on the line instead of lining up to the government pork trench, the most cost effective and profitable approaches would also be used for nearly every design that would actually make it into orbit. Silly things like paper studies to nowhere would become a thing of the past.
If, after some time it becomes apparent that certain areas of industry may need a little bit of a boost due to capital requirements... perhaps a little bit of federal involvement could happen. But seriously, I am not convinced that would even be necessary under such a tax-free space investment environment. The capital necessary to do spaceflight is around, the question is mainly how is it going to be allocated and if it should go through the hands of a bunch of senators and congressmen first.
Given NASA's track record over the past 30 years in singularly failing to develop even a single useful manned spaceflight vehicle in spite of nearly a hundred billion dollars spent along those lines, almost anything would be better than the current approach. I'm not convinced that NASA could possibly be reformed in any meaningful way to do better. Still, wouldn't it be an amazing experiment to even maintain or slightly cut but not eliminate NASA's budget at current levels and do a tax holiday to see just what would come from this kind of activity? Eliminate ITAR restrictions on civilian commercial spaceflight, and it would be an almost ideal environment. The government is the problem, not the solution.
That sounds like some programmer who doesn't understand the problem domain in terms of the typesetting software.
Then again, typesetters are used to a pretty lousy user interface with processing steps that are designed to make the job easier for the machines with little or no consideration to the person who has to use the equipment. That makes for some very good job security as it is a PITA to have to learn the screwy codes and procedures to get everything to work, but still gets to the point that the software you are using here is buggy and not really doing its job correctly.
I call that a bug, not a feature, if you have to repeat the same step more than a couple of times.... ever. Certainly this is a common enough issue that "period space space" and "period space" ought to generally be considered the same thing. My personal habit is to use the "period space space" and I'll continue to use that for the next 40 years if I can get away with it. For myself, I also think it makes for easier reading, but that is irrelevant in this discussion.
So why are you buying that shiny new car in the first place? That sounds like your problem, not the lack of ability to get "credit" for the thing. If you are trying to "establish credit", perhaps that used junker of a car for a couple thousand dollars on a signatory loan would be a better kind of purchase anyway... even presuming you have a very good paying job at the same company and having been employed there for a decade or more.
Odds are very likely that if you have "good" credit, you are more likely to get in over your head as well.
Don't get caught up into this game. Good credit scores are much easier to obtain than repairing a bad credit score and recovering from a mountain of debt for purchases that aren't asset building in the first place. Generally an automobile loan is not a good move, unless you are a salesman trying to con somebody in the first place. If you have the surplus cash and a good income, that is one thing, and likely you will get the loan if you ask for it as well. A high paying job and longevity at the job are far more important things to worry about than a good credit score.
This is very horrible advise, and my advise to "young people" (aka somebody earning a minimum wage job and just starting out in life) to completely ignore this completely. Credit cards are not needed, and "credit" will be extended at the time you really need it in life... if it is needed at all.
Do, however, check your credit scores and get your "free annual credit report" to at least check up to see if some idiot is using your name and "identity". If that comes up as a complete blank, don't fret it either.
There are times that having a modest credit card does come in handy. "Judicious use and management" means that you find one that has a $0 annual fee (if you can find one) and making dang sure that you pay off the balance completely each month if at all possible. Still, it is possible to get by without one.
Do open a bank account and establish a relationship with a bank at some level.
The point here is that if you have a lack of a credit history, building "good credit scores" is much, much easier to accomplish than trying to repair a horrible credit score and paying off a mountain of debt due to jumping into the credit game far too early in life. If you are still living with Mom & Dad and don't need to pay for much in life, don't seek or get credit at all. Most kids going into college don't need credit cards either, certainly not most freshmen. College graduates? Perhaps or if you are married and having kids and dealing with stuff like rent, utility payments, groceries, and medical bills.
Advise to "young people" is to pay as much with cash as possible, mainly because it is far and away too tempting to "charge it" when you really don't have the resources to pay it off. When you run out of cash, it is easy to say "I can't buy that" and stick to your guns as you really don't have the money to be able to afford it.
When it comes to the time in your life when you need to get a mortgage or buy that commuter car that is absolutely necessary for transport to & from work (hopefully paying a good salary to justify that expense), if you are simply out of debt and have some money tucked into savings you will find that you can get the credit needed. By the time you get to that stage in your life, it is possible you may even have expense accounts and other ways to "build credit" that is rather painless.
All of this is presuming that the rapid expansion phase of the Big Bang is in fact reality and that the Big Bang theory is in fact the correct cosmological theory for the origin of the universe.
Mind you, I'm not disputing the conclusion here nor even that this is the prevailing theory for the universe, but there are some postulates and presumptions to your discussion here which are unstated. With those presumptions, you are correct.
I'll admit that discovering a "center" to the universe would create some very different theories about the origin of the universe and be some very real meat for perhaps a deeper understanding of how everything is put together. It might even be sufficient to find a level of mechanics that would "overthrow" Einstein's relativity equations with something else (likely more complex still).
It was the discovery that light traveled at the same speed in all directions from experiment that led to much of the current understanding of the universe and most current theories in cosmology and celestial mechanics. Science is advanced when experimental results show up that don't fit with current theories.