The "needed application" for solar sails is clearly going to be the transportation of bulk goods across interplanetary distances. So far there is no real pressing need for anything like this to happen, as there aren't human settlements anywhere other than on the Earth (and a very expensive ISS that is falling apart).
Here on the Earth, this is a major logistical issue, and one of the things that many transportation companies engage in regularly. Indeed, it has been argued that transporation of bulk goods is perhaps the most profitable sort of transportation type that you can get. And it is very predictable (for the most part). Very low labor costs and huge scalability savings (you can move 1 million barrels of oil across the ocean for about the same amount of money as you can 1,000 barrels... discounting the up front infrastructe costs to begin with). If you want to move tons of refined metals from an asteroid to LEO, solar sails are the way to go.
In short, this is not something that neither NASA nor the DoD is going to be messing with, as they are usually working with handcrafted specialized spacecraft that often the propusion system is one of the minor costs to begin with. Outer Solar System missions require other techniques than pure chemical rockets, but by now this is old hat with gravity assist "slingshots" used by Voyager, Gallileo, and Cassini missions. It would be hard to argue that solar sails would have worked much better than doing a grand tour to increase velocity, and the failure risks for using an unproven technology would have made up for any marginal gain.
Where I think that nuclear rockets will be a huge advantage is when we start to do regular Earth/Mars passenger traffic... which is where chemical rockets totally break down in terms of effeciency and the ability to get somebody there and back quickly and safely.
Nuclear rockets will then be capable of being the primary power drive for actual spaceships... where the exaust will actually shield the occupants against some of the radiation hazards commonly found in interplanetary space. And it will allow transits that are much faster... on the order of a couple of months to even a couple of weeks to travel between Earth and Mars.
Bulk materials transfer will probably occur with these solar sails manned by robotic guidance systems, but that is a different story anyway, and different needs when it isn't so critical that the items get delivered in a short amount of time and can handle larger doses of cosmic radiation.
BTW, the Biosphere II project did reveal a whole bunch of issues if you want to build a closed environment capable of self-sustained ecologies. NASA has done some smaller scale projects, however, that seem to work quite a bit better when they are not fighting chemical reactions from concrete or other materials that are more typical of Earth-bound construction.
While I think that you may be correct in the sense of the general direction that it seems that the USA is going, I have a little bit more faith in the individual citizens of the USA in regarding sacred the basic freedoms in the Bill of Rights.
For the most part, the general public has been giving the MPAA and RIAA a pass on their PR campaign so far, mainly because they have been on the right side of the law. Their interpretation of the law leaves a little bit of room for doubt, but people who make illegal copies of movies and music really should be punished. And the large-scale entertainment pirates should be the major focus of these attacks in general.
The chink in their armor now is how they are going after P2P sharing software users. This will eventually backfire on them as there are legitimate uses of this technology and eventually they will be dragging some powerful individuals into court (congressmen and judges themselves) that simply won't put up with that sort of abuse. The role that indy entertainment producers play is also going to be a huge deal, as the traditional entertainment companies are increasingly becoming detached from ordinary people who buy their products.
The whole thing with "Homeland Security" is also going to backfire on both the Democrats as well as the Republicans.
The real solution to this is to get somewhere else in the world that offers more freedoms than can be found in the USA. That I find to be difficult, but at least there is a real possibility in the EU, as well as Russia (if they can get their act together). The ultimate irony in the world would be if Russia would have to step up security patrols in the Bering Sea in order to stop the flow of illegal aliens from America. Or that Siberia would be a preferable place to live than Nebraska.
This is a big deal in the sense that it can be used as legal precedence against the FCC from ever going after the computer industry again in general over data standards, except as specifically authorized by congress.
That means that they can't prohibit Ogg Vorbis audio streams, or assert any control over internet protocols (which presumably could be used to care "broadcast content" in a studio to transmitter link). There are many other implications that had this succeeded would have actually broadened the power of the FCC. As it is, they only have control of the EM broadcast bands and then only over equipment in the USA that directly touches those frequencies. This could even be argued that they only have direct approval authority of those components that mess with communications frequencies.
The other thing is that in order to get congress to grant approval of something like this, it has to get approval of 219 differnt people with their own agendas (that is... 1/2 of congress, plus the President), and that is a lot harder than merely 2 out of a panel of 3 judges. It is also a longer process as it has to go through congressional committee hearings, floor debates in two legislative bodies, and the whole 9 yards to get a bill to become law.
Let's just hope it doesn't get tacked onto some Homeland Security appropriations bill... which is where it would slip through congress without even a thought.
I am going to continue to "whine" and complain that it is indeed NASA that is continuing to block access to space for us mere mortals.
The #1 blame about the current sad shape of the space industry is primarily from how poorly the International Space Station has been managed from the beginning. As it is right now, Skylab had almost as much working space for a substantial fraction of the cost of what it has taken to get the ISS going. And requiring manned spaceflight for the lanuch of each piece of the ISS has also further added to the problems of that project, not to mention the absolutely huge cost overruns and near constant delays in trying to get anything sent up.
There is no way that I or any of my kids are going to go into space using government-owned spacecraft (unless it is a minor miracle which I'm not counting on). And the U.S. Congress simply does not have the will to expand NASA to become a major manned space exploration agency to be spending at least proportionally what was spent back in the 1960's. Shy of a bunch of Vulcans landing in Montana, I don't see that changing either.
It will only be by permitting ordinary folks to take their own risks to go into space that this will become a reality. The situation for spacecraft construction is at a similar level of technological competance as trans-oceanic shipbuilding was back in the 17th Century. And survival to travel to the Moon or Mars is much more reliable than it was for those old ship to travel between London and Boston. In about the same amount of time to travel to Mars with current technology as well.
Don't worry... I'm not insulted too much by being confused as a Christian when I claim to be a Mormon.
From the tone of the conversations here on/., you would think that Mormons are fruitcakes that are ready to drink Koolaide from Jim Jones.
While the religious differences between mainstream Protestant Christianity and Mormonism are fairly substantial (enough I claim it to be two different religions altogether), I also understand the complaints about the religious attitude mucking up the content.
BTW, I would say the differences are similar or even a little more pronounced than between Sunni and Shia Muslums.
For my own viewpoint, one of the best SciFi movies ever made was "Contact" starring Jodi Foster. It was also an incredible improvement over the book, which IMHO is a pile of political activism and dribble that I expected better from a professional scientist like Carl Sagan. The book was fair on science but poor on the English and character development.
Occasionally you see some good SF come around and an attempt to make it into a movie, but it is a difficult task. Most good SF authors have some section of their book where a narrator of some sort (sometimes written into the dialog of the characters, but often simply described by a narrator or an entry in "Encyclopedia Galactica") where the hard science is explained. To a reader this is good background material, but in a movie this is either very boring or slows down the flow of the movie to the point that it has to be cut out and removed.
The only person I've seen to successfully put in a "galactic guide" entry into film was Douglas Adams... in part because HHGG is humorous and these entries had a life of their own as another character on screen. Even then, it only worked because the guide was the focus of the entire production. (I'm speaking about the TV series BTW... as I have yet to see the movie. I hope they've captured at least some of the guide in the movie in a somewhat similar fashion).
The other problem with producing SF into film is that the people who make movies in Hollywood (or Baliwood) simply are not SF fans to start with. You get some people like George Lucas or Robert Rodriguez that are familar with SciFi movies done in the past, but aren't exactly fans of classic SF books like Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, or Bradbury. The movie "I, Robot" starring Will Smith is a good example of SciFi taking over done by SciFi fans and not the hard SF fans... particularly where the shortcuts were made to make the movie flow.
Price fixing where you sell at a loss to gain market share in a specific region is illegal. If, however, you do it across the whole chain or throughout your company it is not illegal... well maybe.
Yes, however the laws are pretty vague. And subject to quite a bit of a subjective view from a judge.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act is usually the basis to begin this sort of prosecution, and was written (with subsequent anti-trust laws) to counter the practices of Standard Oil when John D. Rockefeller was president of that company. In that case Standard Oil deliberately dropped its price to below production costs, and also established preferential shipping rates from railroads that were not even possible from its competitors. The Anti-Trust break-up of Standard Oil is often cited as legal precedence to go after other companies doing similar practices.
The Anti-Trust actions against AT&T, as well as Microsoft were also done under similar legslation. You note M$ vs. Netscape, and yes there was some legal activity over the whole practice in regards to web browser activity... and the fat lady hasn't yet to sing on this case either.
Specifically in regards to groceries (I don't know as much as I should on this), the state of Wisconsin does not permit below cost pricing of food products, and criminal charges can be made against the store management if it can be demonstrated that the cost to purchase the food is more than what they are selling it for. It can, however, be sold exactly at cost.
It is all a matter of degree and intent. If the purpose of lowering prices is to establish yourself in the market, that is different than if you are trying to drive out competition. The trick also is that it is often difficult to prove that you are lowering prices due to predetory practices instead of simply being a better competetor and reducing costs to sell the product. You can also play games with distribution centers, and in the case of a place like Wal-Mart (who has their own distribution network) they practice preferential rate demands from their suppliers and transportation providers. Wal-Mart also has a team of lawyers who do nothing but fight anti-trust lawsuits as well.
Price fixing laws are also there to help protect the consumer to provide a stable market, not just keep artificially high prices. Two or more parties is not necessary in all cases... or it only has to involve two or more officers of the same company for that barrier to be crossed.
In short, if you are thinking of doing a business model that deliberately sets prices below costs of production without a long-term outlook of cutting production costs to make a profit even at the price you are setting, I would be wary of legal action. I am also suggesting that in this case the same laws may also be used against some open source groups.
If you are producing software, however, as a 501(c) non-profit charity (with letter from the IRS to your tax-exempt status), I think it would be incredibly difficult for anti-trust lawsuits to work against free/open source software developers. Granting copyright ownership to the FSF would work just fine in a situation like this, or the Debian Foundation... or for that matter become your own non-profit foundation (although that does cost some more money). It is also rarely the intent of a F/OSS application to deliberately drive out the competition, and would be obvious if then the free software were marketed heavily with conventional advertising deliberately targeting competitors (problems for Firefox, however?)
I think there are much bigger fish to fry than F/OSS developers, and the political backlash that would fall on state attorney generals (or federal procecutors) that went after these developers would be huge... perhaps enough to persuade them to drop the case.
The communist governments that have been opposed by most Americans is not the pure Marxism, but rather the organized political speak of Lenninism/Stalinism that was designed specifically to ferment and encourage political revolution along the lines of the Soviet Union. Many political parties around the world have been directly or indirectly financed and supported (through leadership training and advisors) by the traditional communist powers (Russia, China, and Cuba).
The one problem I see with the Star Trek economic system is that there is no real system for allocation of scarce resource (land, dilithium crystals, labor, and anti-matter). Roddenberry tends to gloss over this, as to most trek writers. It does seem as though basic needs like a basic shelter, food, clothing, and medical resources are widely available and so plentiful that there is no real need to deny them to anybody.
I've heard it said that there are really several basic economic systems:
Capitalistic - Where the markets are freely available and a free-for-all access to commoddities results in (hopefully) equal access to these commodities. The problem here is that not everybody has the same access to these resources, nor are the markets really truly open, but at least the attempt to do so is there. This usually ends up with a strongly democratic component to the overall governance of the society following this economic system.
Command Economies (usually termed Communist, but also includes Monarchies and other strong central governments). This is where a central group of people deliberately plan what the future of their organization (country) is going to be like in the future and resources are allocated by antisipated needs. In this format, budgets and competitor action forecasts are critical, and espionage (and counter espionage) is also very important to the leaders at the top because any little secret plan, once revealed, can force the change of plans from the central group. Most corporate businesses operate using this model. Most governments in the world also operate under this model (including to a large degree the USA... for good or ill)
Feudalism Quite uncommon now, but a very common system used in the past with some remarkable success, and still used in the business world to a smaller degree. Similar to command economies, but there is a heirarchy of multiple organizations that act as independent units... often against each other in competition for the same resources. Anciently it was fairly common for petty nobles and minor provences to go to war against each other, with only rarely the king stepping in and stopping the mess to keep the whole kingdom from getting out of hand. The largest problem with this type of organization is that it is difficult to organize for national goals, and Balkanization of the kingdom is a very real threat. A modern example of a business organization using this method is Proctor and Gamble, with its subsidiary units having a very large degree of autonomy.
Corporatism (also Facism and Nazism) Litterally, a state of coporations. Similar to Feudalism, but done along the lines of industries rather than geographical regions. In terms of raw economic growth and development this is one of the most effective and efficient political organizations. The largest problem with this political organization is that geographic growth also becomes highly important, usually resulting in wars of agression (aka WWII). Monopolies not only happen but are actively encouraged by this form of government.
Gift Cultures This is sometimes termed "ideal communism" and what communists claim to have as the indended goal of their political system (although has never happened in practice). Practical examples include the polynesian societies prior to European colonization to that region and to an extent the native Americans in the Mid-West region of North America during the 1700's and early 1800's. The basic premise is that basi
In this regard, you are correct. The "legislative intent" of most price fixing legislation is to prevent a monopolistic group (or cartel like OPEC) from artificially raising prices of a commodity.
Notable examples include Standard Oil circa 1920, and the artificial inflation of silver in the 1980's (that nearly killed the photographic film industry and is still part of the problems with the film companies compounded with digital photography now).
The problem is that such legislation is often overly broad, and judges usually take legislative intent with a grain of salt (even though I think that is a poor judge that does not take into account what the law was written to protect or stop).
There are some price-fixing laws that stop people from charging below-cost prices. For example, a common practice in grocery stores is to drop the price of some items, like a can of corn, to a very low price in order to draw customers into their store. This is under the theory that the customer will buy that item, and the store will make up the cost of that item by the purchases of the other items they also buy (like the meat or eggs that you bought with the corn). In an extreme case (and this has been documented to happen in grocery stores... and other businesses as well) a chain of stores will drop the price of all of their products (at some stores) to below cost in order to drive out competition on the philosophy that eventually you can raise prices once the cometition has gone out of business. This sort of practice is generally illegal.
I am assuming that it is with this sort of price fixing that the suite will follow, and it is even a part of what Richard Stallman was intending, where competition from free software would drive out in many situations propritary solutions. The problem here is that it would be hard to prove that GPL'd software would raise their prices afterward when the competition is dead.
a plea for the worst sort of Republican judicial activism in the Utah courts
I think you got many facts of this case mixed up in terms of how this is playing out.
First of all, this isn't being tried in Utah state courts, but rather in Federal district court that just happens to be in Utah (and the HQ of Caldera...ummm SCO). So these are being tried by judges that were appointed by administrations prior to Bush II.
Also, in direct line of appeals is the Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, Colorado, who is anything but concervative or Republican. They are particularly known for bitch slapping Mormon conservative values and telling the state of Utah where to shove it. That may change in time, but for the moment Denver is almost as liberal as San Francisco as far as judicial activism is concerned.
The state courts, on the other hand, are a little bit different, but even then there are comparatively few complaints from even hard-core liberals regarding their (the judicial) opinions other than in a general sense that they hate Republicans and can't stand the 80% domination of the Republican party in the state legislature (enough to veto-proof legislation even with a democratic governor, which hasn't been here for 30 years.)
I do agree with you sentiment regarding copyright, and SCO doesn't have a prayer to proceed with this case. I wouldn't short SCO stock now, however, because it may be too hard to cover it in the future with anything. IBM is able to be incredibly patient, and is giving SCO all of the rope they need to hang themselves with.
Where this will get ugly is if a hard connection between SCO and Microsoft is ever found (quite likely) and Microsoft becomes the fall guy to a suite by shareholders of SCO. Or if IBM goes after Microsoft on a counter suite over liability due to the rotting corpse of SCO. One can only wish.
First of all, keep in mind that the FCC is counting on having a bunch of "converter boxes" that will migrate from HDTV to NTSC. Grandma with the old TV will simply have to buy a converter box when the change happens. MPEG-Video to NTSC converters are quite common, and chip sets in the range of about $10 per chip if you know your sources. I would imagine converters going for about $50 each at retail outlets.
I will say, however, that I can get and tweak a weak NTSC signal much better than a weak digital signal. The nice thing about analog signals is that they degrade "gracefully". That is, they get gradually more and more snow until finally you simply can't watch anything from that station. Digital signals are all-or-nothing propositions. Either you get the video frame (or audio frame), or you don't. When something screws up the digital video frame, it either drops out (causing the previous frame to be repeated with most broadcast quality equipment) or you see digital artifacting, which I personally find hideous. I would rather have snow than the artifacting. When a digital signal is poor, it is particularly annoying to be watching, and you also lose information. At least with analog transmissions your mind can filter out the noise to understand what is said.
I did a little more "research" on the subject, and it appears as though yes, the Shuttle and the ISS do use sea-level atmosphereic pressure.
I would like to know why, however. This seems a little bit bizzare to me, and a huge waste of energy to loft up nitrogen. And it also seems to complicate EVA's, where apparently they do reduce gas pressures in spacesuits to only O2 partial pressures, which results in astronauts having to go through a decompression step to remove the nitrogen from their blood. In other words, an astronaut can't simply put on the suit in an emergency and hop outside in a hurry... it has to be a deliberate act and takes hours just to prepare for.
The supposed reason for this is two-fold:
Fire Retardant - the nitrogen acts as a barrier to help lower the potential for fires to break out.
Equipment Coolant - just like here on the earth, electronic equipment needs to cool down, and air cooled equipment doesn't have to be redesigned for lower air pressures if they are operated in a shuttle
Frankly, I think these are covers for something else, or just sloppy engineering on the part of the NASA contractors building the equipment for the shuttles. It is probabally more along the lines of the fact that some piece of equipment started to fail when tested in the vacuum chambers that NASA has, so some bureacratic decision back elsewhen during the design of the shuttle was to add the few pounds of nitrogen to compensate for what would be at the time a few million dollars of cost overruns on the shuttle. Typical of the entire shuttle program, and reminds me of some engineering decisions I've been unfortunately involved with myself.
Since the ISS is never intended to be a stepping stone to other space activities (like going to the moon), they just don't care. I guarentee that any settlement on the moon is going to have little to no nitrogen at first.
This is interesting, and I'd like to see a little more information about this.
First of all, you certainly don't want to have sea-level pressure of oxygen in any environment. This is precisely what caused the problem for the Apollo I spacecraft that killed three astronauts on the launchpad due to fire. If that much oxygen were in space you would have a hard time keeping things from simply erupting into flame spontaneously. In addition, your lungs only need a partial-pressure of oxygen equal to the altitude that you are normally used to (let's say sea-level pressure for now).
And don't tell me that the remainder of the atmospheric pressure in the ISS is CO2. That would also be toxic, and is precisely the reason why there was so much panic during Apollo XIII. Your body can only tolerate so much CO2 before you pass out, even if there is plenty of oxygen. This problem can be partially compensated by a higher oxygen content, but that will only go so far as explained above.
The air that you normally breath is also composed of a large amount of nitrogen. This makes up almost 80% of ground-level air. While useful for many application, and needed by plants and nitrogen fixing bacteria, this is not normally something that is a critical chemical or gas used for life support in space, except for what is found in protien bars and chicken dinners. Humans can survive indefinitely without breathing nitrogen, so why bring it up? Weight is so critical in spaceflight that I can't imagine why inert gasses (Nitrogen and Argon) would be used unless specifically a part of a science experiment that called specifically for those gasses to be used.
While I will admit that while on the ground the Shuttle uses a cabin at sea-level pressures, I just can't see how it would be justified to bring up all that extra "stuff" in the form of compressed air when all you need is some liquid oxygen to make a viable environment for the astronauts.
Of course, I may be wrong about this, and there may be some convective heat reasons to add the extra gasses into the environment, but it seems silly. I know the Apollo spacecraft only used the partial pressure of oxygen except during launch and landing.
The problem I see from rumors like this is that they tend to totally dismiss the brilliance of some very hard working engineers who came up with this technology in the first place.
The first integrated chip devices where incredibly crude, and they were also the result of some very real pressures in the electronics industry to move away from the fragile vacuum tube-based electronic components. Keep in mind that many tubes only had an average failure time (MTF) of about 10 to 20 years. When computers were built using tube like this, that meant on average the computer would crash once per day due to a bad tube burning out or some other problem. Sometimes early computer researchers would be glad to have the computer run for just a couple of hours before it failed. A typical transistor on a CPU chip now can last thousands or millions of years on average, due to IC technology.
I have been involved with too many of these engineers who help to design some of this cool stuff that often we take for granted, and the fact is that many of them are just plain brilliant. To claim that they got help from extra terrestrials is just pure bulls*** that is trying to discredit some amazing insight and many years of very hard work to get some of these products into the hands of ordinary people.
The only real extra-terrestrial being that I've ever heard given credit for anything developed by these folks is simply God, and that depends on your point of view at that. And that is only a small group of these engineers.
But what happens when, for example, all the out-of-town people get speeding traps, but they don't ticket the people living there? Or they constantly arrest black people holding beers in public for 'public drunkenness', and mysteriously ignore white people?
That should, by statue, common law practice (or even by constutitional ammendment... if this is done properly) be also nullified. The point here is that the law is being abused and not applied "commonly", which was the original intention of common law in the first place. I.E. that all laws would apply in common to all.
Also, in the case of applying a law to blacks and not to whites, that is clear racial discrimination where there already is substantial precedent regarding the unenforcability of such laws, which is a strong point to be used in defending against such abuses. Other civil rights legislation can be used against police officer who engage in such behavior, which is why that is so seldom done now except in real small (population) counties or by ignorant police officers waiting to lose their badge. A community trying to do such a stupid thing now is begging for a lawsuit from either the ACLU or the NAACP (or both) that will likly bankrupt the community.
As far as going after out of town folks, one thing most communities try to avoid, avoid, avoid is some very negative PR that suggests they have tried to scalp tourists. In some states this got so out of hand (notably Missouri) that the state legislature stepped in to solve the problem. It seems that while one small town might not give a damn about tourists, there are several neighboring communities that do, and usually have more in terms of population (and hence votes in the state legislature) to get their way.
In the Missouri case, the state legislature forced all traffic fines to be put into the state general fund, with reimbursements going back to the communities on a per capita basis. Small towns of 100 people and 30 police officers ended up essentially going broke when the new revenue system came into effect (they only got funding based on the population of 100 people and not the 10,000 traffic ticket they pulled in each month). This is a much longer process, but these speed traps are going away. It is also largely because of these speed traps that many small communities ended up dying as interstate highways were built, again because interstate highway standards were written specifically in a way that such speed traps could never be put into place.
There are solutions to these problems, but it takes some creative thinking on how to get around them. And a good meme to deal with them.
So where do you draw the line on what gets enforced and what doesn't?
I think that the SCOTUS screwed up royally with the anti-soddomy laws in Texas when they ruled that they were unconstitutional.
IMHO, what should have been the ruling (and the same net effect, but a much broader interpretation) was that laws that are not actively enforced, and consistantly enforced for all citizens become in effect nullified. In other words, if the executive branch of government refused to enforce a given law and can't prove that the law has been enforced for a given period of time, it has in essence said that the law no longer exists.
So silly laws like the prohibition of minors to attend movie theaters on weekdays, or the serving of soda drinks on Sunday, or even the consumption of food in a public place (illegal in some cities) should be declared as unenforcable due to their lack of enforcement in the past. That way some arab-american serving soda drinks can't be thrown into jail on trumped up charges of violating this law while they think of some silly terrorist act he might have committed but can't prove yet.
This can and should apply to copyright laws as well (the point of this whole thread). Too bad this isn't a part of American common law tradition.
I absolutely hate this attitude. This come particularly from police officers and (worse yet) prosecutors. I know they have to think of the law often in this context, but there are times you have to look at the situation and use some better judgement regarding what gets enforced and what doesn't.
Besides, if you are going to suggest that all police officers enforce each and every law that governs the juristiction that they are living in, you would find that everybody would be in jail. It is litterally impossible to go through normal daily life without breaking some sort of stupid and pathetic law. The trick to living is that you try to keep these laws that you break down to petty crimes and things that otherwise are not getting into the face of other people. And things that normally the police don't enforce (like minor jaywalking or forgetting to put on your seat belt when you drive).
In addition, what a police officer should (in a democracy) suggest is "if you don't like the law, don't yell at me. Take this up with your (city counselman/state legislator/congressman)" If you really think it is ugly, run for public office. Surprisingly, you might just win and have to do something about it, or at least scare the person who ended up defeating you that they have to address the issue before they lose constituant support.
One of the "cool" bits of DNA lore include his slashdot interview This is an absolutely priceless bit of history for/. itself, and goes on to show what typical interviews of DNA were like.
If you can get ahold of the radio scripts (compiled into book form), there is also a bit of an autobiography of DNA included in them, as well as some biographical information that is floating around on various web sites. h2g2.com also has some information about DNA as well. As has been pointed out, there are also several biographies of this man's life available on Amazon.
Well, yes the 9600 baud modem was outdated hardware.
I did have a 14,400 modem that I usually used at 9600 baud... sometime even 4800 baud if the phone lines were bad to do web surfing on though. And yes, this was in the very, very early days of the web when you could get a lot more information from Gopher.
9600 wasn't really as much of a blip as you think, however. This is pretty much the maximum baud rate that you can use to send over a telephone line using simple serial data transmission techniques that were common prior to 9600 baud modems (like 2400 or even 300 baud modems common in the 1970's) Anything that is of higher bandwidth requires sending multiple bits simultaneously with additional error correction techniques.
The point here is that using a program like Lynx is something that you can use browse at very low bandwidth, mainly because it doesn't do any sort of graphical rendering.
And the question I had was not arguing about the particular equipment anyway, it was how this software compared to Lynx, and pointing out that software like this has been around since practically the very beginnning of the web.
I've been having a hard time even knowing where to begin with this post.
Robots are not the answer, and the necessary artificial intelligence to get robots to do all of the cool things you are suggesting is going to be several centuries away. Sure, there have been some rather spectacular robotic missions to the outer planets (like Cassini or Voyager), but keep in mind these all had huge teams of people on the Earth working usually 24/7 trying to keep these going and had incredible costs associated with them... usually on the order of $1 billion or more for each mission. This is simply out of the question for realistic and practical robotic mineral extraction from asteroids.
Also, when you get to a production environment (as opposed to exploration missions) there are other factors that come into play where you simply are going to have to have a flesh and blood person on hand to get "dirty" and pound on stuff to get it to work correctly. On site human judgement, together with being able to send instructions without having to come up with the computer programming necessary to accomplish a totally new task never thought of before, are going to make having real people on the ground where the dirt is being pushed around. And that means you also have to have all of the related facilities necessary to keep people alive.
In addition, I feel like we need to have HUMAN colonization of space, not robotic. There is something twisted and wrong to assume that people are no longer needed as life moves into space. There are some individuals that seem to hate humanity as a whole, and would prefer mass genocide of most of the peoples of this Earth (excepting themselves and close family members or friends that think the way they do). I disagree completely and feel there needs to be a place for humanity among the rest of the stars of this galaxy. The first step is simply getting up there and going to places like the Moon or Mars.
Importantly, you can go to the Moon with a relatively small group of people (5-20 or so to start with) to make a completely self-sufficient community. That is the critical factor, and something that simply can't be done with an O'Neil colony. Yes, you can get minerals from asteroids, but you have to get to the asteroids in the first place. That is not as easy as it seems, and the Moon is considerably easier to get to.
If the Earth had a moon the size of Phobos, it would be a different story. BTW, Mars has a moon the size of Phobos, where you can extract minerals effeciently without having to worry (too much) about getting out of the gravity well. Of course, if you are going all the way to Mars to get those resources, why not also put some people down on that planet to do some poking around. And with a group already pounding the dirt down there they will have to be self-sufficient as well.
We aren't "gods" with the ability to manipulate orbits of planetary objects and put them where convient. I think the task that you have glossed over is substantially more difficult than you can possibly imagine in terms of mineral extraction, and will require an incredible amount of human labor in order to get the stuff done. Most of the current space program that has existed so far has been done relatively hidden from view where only a few astronauts who are hyper specialists (most with PhD's) represent teams of thousands not seen. In the future what you are going to see is rather than this huge group of people staying on the Earth to keep operations going in space, that army of people necessary to keep space exploration going will have to move up into space as well. That is the real challenge, and is going to fundimentally change the way living in space is going to be perceived.
I know I am coming from an American perspective on this, in part because this is mostly how the area that I live in right now was built and created, through exactly this sort of colonization process. I am only a few generations from the very first inhabitants to this area I'
I know this is a late reply to your comment, but I want to tackle this comment and put in some replies before it gets archived.
RE: older homes and moving them. You will never see a home that is more than a century old, particularly one that was "stick built" or with masonry be brought down a super highway (autobahn or interstate) at 90 mph. Instead, it will be on special trucks, often "built" on site under the home, and rarely will it even get above about 5 mph... usually less. It is more than just speed and time. The point I was trying to make is that if you are going to be moving homes around all over the place, they have to be built to do that, and that includes a "space station".
While the ISS might eventually be brought up to a geo-sync orbit (or L-5 as a museum piece), the process of doing that would be the space equivalent of moving a lighthouse down the road a couple of miles. If it weren't so big most people involved with it would simply prefer to let it deorbit and crash into the ocean (as happened to Mir and Skylab). The difficulty involved (to answer your question here) is that while low acceleration may be possible to move something from L-5, unless it was built to be moved it would take an incredibly large amount of time to move, and require specialized labor of a magnitude that doing so wouldn't be worth it unless it was a historic artifact worthy in its own right and essentially priceless. This is while older homes are moved at all, and is an incredibly expensive process.
As far as projections into the future, I don't see any fancy machines being built in the next 10 years that are substantially different than anything currently being built. Indeed, space is a frontier, which means that the big concern is that the technology base is actually going to be lower than where people are coming from. If you are going to somewhere else in the solar system, you will find that very low-tech approaches will have to be found to get a colony established. Things like horses will be common as they can self-replicate, and with a technology base that was common 1000 years ago. The problem here is that people will have to relearn how to establish industries that are taken for granted now due to mass scale industrialization, like how to sheer wool and spin it into thread. You will see bizzare things like a horse carriage with a GPS reciever, but that will be the nature of going into new worlds. And a common theme for most good SF authors.
There is no way that you can plop down everything to Mars needed to re-create a 21st century 1st world city in one single shot. The problem with the L-5 colony groups is that they assume that a Manhattan or Apollo scale project can be mounted to help build the space station, and unfortunately there just isn't a national will to spend the economic resources necessary to put something like that together (unless you have some sort of SF type doomsday issue like a black hole swallowing up the sun).
In the case of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke was heavily involved with the writing of the script, and the book was always something that was to be done indepently.
That, and Mr. Clarke (like DNA) were already well established book authors before the movies were in production.
This movie did at least have a rough draft of a script from DNA, which at least gave some directions as to where he wanted this project to go. The thing that I have been most impressed with DNA was that he totally understood the concept that the medium changes the message, and that each adaptation to a new medium can substantially change the product.
I hope that when (not if....this is also something inevitable due to the fact that the movie is being produced and soon to be released by a major Hollywood studio) the DVD version of this movie comes out that it does not become a lame MPEG copy of the movie with a bunch of boring stuff thrown on as "extras". I think DNA would have relished the DVD medium as something entirely different and worthy of its own interpretation of the Hitchhiker story. I don't think that will happen, however.
After hearing about all of the "cool" stuff this is doing, I was wondering just what was the difference between this vs. web browsing via Lynx or some other low graphic-intensive application?
I don't do it lately, but back when 9600 baud modem connections were still considered state-of-the-art (or at least typical for a computer geek/college student trying to get some sort of net access), I routinely did web browsing via Lynx. I could even do reasonable access at 4800 baud... which would work even with pure analog telephone lines and switching equipment that could be commonly found in 3rd world countries (or rural America back in the 1980's... as was my case).
Essentially, this seems like more of a return to the old rather than something truly new and remarkable.
Just reading about how this movie was made would make me think that a "making of..." documentary about this movie would be almost as entertaining as the movie itself.
In short, DNA could very likely be a character in his own book. Or conversely, his own life was so bizzare that in many ways the books (not just the Hitchhiker trilogy) mirror his own life. The more I read about DNA's life experiences, the more facinating I find him to be.
I found this bit to be almost priceless from the Telegraph story: (to pharaphrase) The producers of this movie are "two men working from a barge named Polly, moored on the Regent's Canal in an unfashionable part of Islington, north London."
I don't think DNA could have done better for a new book opening scene.
Slashdot Mirror
The "needed application" for solar sails is clearly going to be the transportation of bulk goods across interplanetary distances. So far there is no real pressing need for anything like this to happen, as there aren't human settlements anywhere other than on the Earth (and a very expensive ISS that is falling apart).
Here on the Earth, this is a major logistical issue, and one of the things that many transportation companies engage in regularly. Indeed, it has been argued that transporation of bulk goods is perhaps the most profitable sort of transportation type that you can get. And it is very predictable (for the most part). Very low labor costs and huge scalability savings (you can move 1 million barrels of oil across the ocean for about the same amount of money as you can 1,000 barrels... discounting the up front infrastructe costs to begin with). If you want to move tons of refined metals from an asteroid to LEO, solar sails are the way to go.
In short, this is not something that neither NASA nor the DoD is going to be messing with, as they are usually working with handcrafted specialized spacecraft that often the propusion system is one of the minor costs to begin with. Outer Solar System missions require other techniques than pure chemical rockets, but by now this is old hat with gravity assist "slingshots" used by Voyager, Gallileo, and Cassini missions. It would be hard to argue that solar sails would have worked much better than doing a grand tour to increase velocity, and the failure risks for using an unproven technology would have made up for any marginal gain.
Where I think that nuclear rockets will be a huge advantage is when we start to do regular Earth/Mars passenger traffic... which is where chemical rockets totally break down in terms of effeciency and the ability to get somebody there and back quickly and safely.
Nuclear rockets will then be capable of being the primary power drive for actual spaceships... where the exaust will actually shield the occupants against some of the radiation hazards commonly found in interplanetary space. And it will allow transits that are much faster... on the order of a couple of months to even a couple of weeks to travel between Earth and Mars.
Bulk materials transfer will probably occur with these solar sails manned by robotic guidance systems, but that is a different story anyway, and different needs when it isn't so critical that the items get delivered in a short amount of time and can handle larger doses of cosmic radiation.
BTW, the Biosphere II project did reveal a whole bunch of issues if you want to build a closed environment capable of self-sustained ecologies. NASA has done some smaller scale projects, however, that seem to work quite a bit better when they are not fighting chemical reactions from concrete or other materials that are more typical of Earth-bound construction.
While I think that you may be correct in the sense of the general direction that it seems that the USA is going, I have a little bit more faith in the individual citizens of the USA in regarding sacred the basic freedoms in the Bill of Rights.
For the most part, the general public has been giving the MPAA and RIAA a pass on their PR campaign so far, mainly because they have been on the right side of the law. Their interpretation of the law leaves a little bit of room for doubt, but people who make illegal copies of movies and music really should be punished. And the large-scale entertainment pirates should be the major focus of these attacks in general.
The chink in their armor now is how they are going after P2P sharing software users. This will eventually backfire on them as there are legitimate uses of this technology and eventually they will be dragging some powerful individuals into court (congressmen and judges themselves) that simply won't put up with that sort of abuse. The role that indy entertainment producers play is also going to be a huge deal, as the traditional entertainment companies are increasingly becoming detached from ordinary people who buy their products.
The whole thing with "Homeland Security" is also going to backfire on both the Democrats as well as the Republicans.
The real solution to this is to get somewhere else in the world that offers more freedoms than can be found in the USA. That I find to be difficult, but at least there is a real possibility in the EU, as well as Russia (if they can get their act together). The ultimate irony in the world would be if Russia would have to step up security patrols in the Bering Sea in order to stop the flow of illegal aliens from America. Or that Siberia would be a preferable place to live than Nebraska.
This is a big deal in the sense that it can be used as legal precedence against the FCC from ever going after the computer industry again in general over data standards, except as specifically authorized by congress.
That means that they can't prohibit Ogg Vorbis audio streams, or assert any control over internet protocols (which presumably could be used to care "broadcast content" in a studio to transmitter link). There are many other implications that had this succeeded would have actually broadened the power of the FCC. As it is, they only have control of the EM broadcast bands and then only over equipment in the USA that directly touches those frequencies. This could even be argued that they only have direct approval authority of those components that mess with communications frequencies.
The other thing is that in order to get congress to grant approval of something like this, it has to get approval of 219 differnt people with their own agendas (that is... 1/2 of congress, plus the President), and that is a lot harder than merely 2 out of a panel of 3 judges. It is also a longer process as it has to go through congressional committee hearings, floor debates in two legislative bodies, and the whole 9 yards to get a bill to become law.
Let's just hope it doesn't get tacked onto some Homeland Security appropriations bill... which is where it would slip through congress without even a thought.
I am going to continue to "whine" and complain that it is indeed NASA that is continuing to block access to space for us mere mortals.
The #1 blame about the current sad shape of the space industry is primarily from how poorly the International Space Station has been managed from the beginning. As it is right now, Skylab had almost as much working space for a substantial fraction of the cost of what it has taken to get the ISS going. And requiring manned spaceflight for the lanuch of each piece of the ISS has also further added to the problems of that project, not to mention the absolutely huge cost overruns and near constant delays in trying to get anything sent up.
There is no way that I or any of my kids are going to go into space using government-owned spacecraft (unless it is a minor miracle which I'm not counting on). And the U.S. Congress simply does not have the will to expand NASA to become a major manned space exploration agency to be spending at least proportionally what was spent back in the 1960's. Shy of a bunch of Vulcans landing in Montana, I don't see that changing either.
It will only be by permitting ordinary folks to take their own risks to go into space that this will become a reality. The situation for spacecraft construction is at a similar level of technological competance as trans-oceanic shipbuilding was back in the 17th Century. And survival to travel to the Moon or Mars is much more reliable than it was for those old ship to travel between London and Boston. In about the same amount of time to travel to Mars with current technology as well.
Don't worry... I'm not insulted too much by being confused as a Christian when I claim to be a Mormon.
/., you would think that Mormons are fruitcakes that are ready to drink Koolaide from Jim Jones.
From the tone of the conversations here on
While the religious differences between mainstream Protestant Christianity and Mormonism are fairly substantial (enough I claim it to be two different religions altogether), I also understand the complaints about the religious attitude mucking up the content.
BTW, I would say the differences are similar or even a little more pronounced than between Sunni and Shia Muslums.
For my own viewpoint, one of the best SciFi movies ever made was "Contact" starring Jodi Foster. It was also an incredible improvement over the book, which IMHO is a pile of political activism and dribble that I expected better from a professional scientist like Carl Sagan. The book was fair on science but poor on the English and character development.
Occasionally you see some good SF come around and an attempt to make it into a movie, but it is a difficult task. Most good SF authors have some section of their book where a narrator of some sort (sometimes written into the dialog of the characters, but often simply described by a narrator or an entry in "Encyclopedia Galactica") where the hard science is explained. To a reader this is good background material, but in a movie this is either very boring or slows down the flow of the movie to the point that it has to be cut out and removed.
The only person I've seen to successfully put in a "galactic guide" entry into film was Douglas Adams... in part because HHGG is humorous and these entries had a life of their own as another character on screen. Even then, it only worked because the guide was the focus of the entire production. (I'm speaking about the TV series BTW... as I have yet to see the movie. I hope they've captured at least some of the guide in the movie in a somewhat similar fashion).
The other problem with producing SF into film is that the people who make movies in Hollywood (or Baliwood) simply are not SF fans to start with. You get some people like George Lucas or Robert Rodriguez that are familar with SciFi movies done in the past, but aren't exactly fans of classic SF books like Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, or Bradbury. The movie "I, Robot" starring Will Smith is a good example of SciFi taking over done by SciFi fans and not the hard SF fans... particularly where the shortcuts were made to make the movie flow.
Price fixing where you sell at a loss to gain market share in a specific region is illegal. If, however, you do it across the whole chain or throughout your company it is not illegal... well maybe.
Yes, however the laws are pretty vague. And subject to quite a bit of a subjective view from a judge.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act is usually the basis to begin this sort of prosecution, and was written (with subsequent anti-trust laws) to counter the practices of Standard Oil when John D. Rockefeller was president of that company. In that case Standard Oil deliberately dropped its price to below production costs, and also established preferential shipping rates from railroads that were not even possible from its competitors. The Anti-Trust break-up of Standard Oil is often cited as legal precedence to go after other companies doing similar practices.
The Anti-Trust actions against AT&T, as well as Microsoft were also done under similar legslation. You note M$ vs. Netscape, and yes there was some legal activity over the whole practice in regards to web browser activity... and the fat lady hasn't yet to sing on this case either.
Specifically in regards to groceries (I don't know as much as I should on this), the state of Wisconsin does not permit below cost pricing of food products, and criminal charges can be made against the store management if it can be demonstrated that the cost to purchase the food is more than what they are selling it for. It can, however, be sold exactly at cost.
It is all a matter of degree and intent. If the purpose of lowering prices is to establish yourself in the market, that is different than if you are trying to drive out competition. The trick also is that it is often difficult to prove that you are lowering prices due to predetory practices instead of simply being a better competetor and reducing costs to sell the product. You can also play games with distribution centers, and in the case of a place like Wal-Mart (who has their own distribution network) they practice preferential rate demands from their suppliers and transportation providers. Wal-Mart also has a team of lawyers who do nothing but fight anti-trust lawsuits as well.
Price fixing laws are also there to help protect the consumer to provide a stable market, not just keep artificially high prices. Two or more parties is not necessary in all cases... or it only has to involve two or more officers of the same company for that barrier to be crossed.
In short, if you are thinking of doing a business model that deliberately sets prices below costs of production without a long-term outlook of cutting production costs to make a profit even at the price you are setting, I would be wary of legal action. I am also suggesting that in this case the same laws may also be used against some open source groups.
If you are producing software, however, as a 501(c) non-profit charity (with letter from the IRS to your tax-exempt status), I think it would be incredibly difficult for anti-trust lawsuits to work against free/open source software developers. Granting copyright ownership to the FSF would work just fine in a situation like this, or the Debian Foundation... or for that matter become your own non-profit foundation (although that does cost some more money). It is also rarely the intent of a F/OSS application to deliberately drive out the competition, and would be obvious if then the free software were marketed heavily with conventional advertising deliberately targeting competitors (problems for Firefox, however?)
I think there are much bigger fish to fry than F/OSS developers, and the political backlash that would fall on state attorney generals (or federal procecutors) that went after these developers would be huge... perhaps enough to persuade them to drop the case.
The one problem I see with the Star Trek economic system is that there is no real system for allocation of scarce resource (land, dilithium crystals, labor, and anti-matter). Roddenberry tends to gloss over this, as to most trek writers. It does seem as though basic needs like a basic shelter, food, clothing, and medical resources are widely available and so plentiful that there is no real need to deny them to anybody.
I've heard it said that there are really several basic economic systems:
In this regard, you are correct. The "legislative intent" of most price fixing legislation is to prevent a monopolistic group (or cartel like OPEC) from artificially raising prices of a commodity.
Notable examples include Standard Oil circa 1920, and the artificial inflation of silver in the 1980's (that nearly killed the photographic film industry and is still part of the problems with the film companies compounded with digital photography now).
The problem is that such legislation is often overly broad, and judges usually take legislative intent with a grain of salt (even though I think that is a poor judge that does not take into account what the law was written to protect or stop).
There are some price-fixing laws that stop people from charging below-cost prices. For example, a common practice in grocery stores is to drop the price of some items, like a can of corn, to a very low price in order to draw customers into their store. This is under the theory that the customer will buy that item, and the store will make up the cost of that item by the purchases of the other items they also buy (like the meat or eggs that you bought with the corn). In an extreme case (and this has been documented to happen in grocery stores... and other businesses as well) a chain of stores will drop the price of all of their products (at some stores) to below cost in order to drive out competition on the philosophy that eventually you can raise prices once the cometition has gone out of business. This sort of practice is generally illegal.
I am assuming that it is with this sort of price fixing that the suite will follow, and it is even a part of what Richard Stallman was intending, where competition from free software would drive out in many situations propritary solutions. The problem here is that it would be hard to prove that GPL'd software would raise their prices afterward when the competition is dead.
I think you got many facts of this case mixed up in terms of how this is playing out.
First of all, this isn't being tried in Utah state courts, but rather in Federal district court that just happens to be in Utah (and the HQ of Caldera...ummm SCO). So these are being tried by judges that were appointed by administrations prior to Bush II.
Also, in direct line of appeals is the Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, Colorado, who is anything but concervative or Republican. They are particularly known for bitch slapping Mormon conservative values and telling the state of Utah where to shove it. That may change in time, but for the moment Denver is almost as liberal as San Francisco as far as judicial activism is concerned.
The state courts, on the other hand, are a little bit different, but even then there are comparatively few complaints from even hard-core liberals regarding their (the judicial) opinions other than in a general sense that they hate Republicans and can't stand the 80% domination of the Republican party in the state legislature (enough to veto-proof legislation even with a democratic governor, which hasn't been here for 30 years.)
I do agree with you sentiment regarding copyright, and SCO doesn't have a prayer to proceed with this case. I wouldn't short SCO stock now, however, because it may be too hard to cover it in the future with anything. IBM is able to be incredibly patient, and is giving SCO all of the rope they need to hang themselves with.
Where this will get ugly is if a hard connection between SCO and Microsoft is ever found (quite likely) and Microsoft becomes the fall guy to a suite by shareholders of SCO. Or if IBM goes after Microsoft on a counter suite over liability due to the rotting corpse of SCO. One can only wish.
First of all, keep in mind that the FCC is counting on having a bunch of "converter boxes" that will migrate from HDTV to NTSC. Grandma with the old TV will simply have to buy a converter box when the change happens. MPEG-Video to NTSC converters are quite common, and chip sets in the range of about $10 per chip if you know your sources. I would imagine converters going for about $50 each at retail outlets.
I will say, however, that I can get and tweak a weak NTSC signal much better than a weak digital signal. The nice thing about analog signals is that they degrade "gracefully". That is, they get gradually more and more snow until finally you simply can't watch anything from that station. Digital signals are all-or-nothing propositions. Either you get the video frame (or audio frame), or you don't. When something screws up the digital video frame, it either drops out (causing the previous frame to be repeated with most broadcast quality equipment) or you see digital artifacting, which I personally find hideous. I would rather have snow than the artifacting. When a digital signal is poor, it is particularly annoying to be watching, and you also lose information. At least with analog transmissions your mind can filter out the noise to understand what is said.
I would like to know why, however. This seems a little bit bizzare to me, and a huge waste of energy to loft up nitrogen. And it also seems to complicate EVA's, where apparently they do reduce gas pressures in spacesuits to only O2 partial pressures, which results in astronauts having to go through a decompression step to remove the nitrogen from their blood. In other words, an astronaut can't simply put on the suit in an emergency and hop outside in a hurry... it has to be a deliberate act and takes hours just to prepare for.
The supposed reason for this is two-fold:
Frankly, I think these are covers for something else, or just sloppy engineering on the part of the NASA contractors building the equipment for the shuttles. It is probabally more along the lines of the fact that some piece of equipment started to fail when tested in the vacuum chambers that NASA has, so some bureacratic decision back elsewhen during the design of the shuttle was to add the few pounds of nitrogen to compensate for what would be at the time a few million dollars of cost overruns on the shuttle. Typical of the entire shuttle program, and reminds me of some engineering decisions I've been unfortunately involved with myself.
Since the ISS is never intended to be a stepping stone to other space activities (like going to the moon), they just don't care. I guarentee that any settlement on the moon is going to have little to no nitrogen at first.
This is interesting, and I'd like to see a little more information about this.
First of all, you certainly don't want to have sea-level pressure of oxygen in any environment. This is precisely what caused the problem for the Apollo I spacecraft that killed three astronauts on the launchpad due to fire. If that much oxygen were in space you would have a hard time keeping things from simply erupting into flame spontaneously. In addition, your lungs only need a partial-pressure of oxygen equal to the altitude that you are normally used to (let's say sea-level pressure for now).
And don't tell me that the remainder of the atmospheric pressure in the ISS is CO2. That would also be toxic, and is precisely the reason why there was so much panic during Apollo XIII. Your body can only tolerate so much CO2 before you pass out, even if there is plenty of oxygen. This problem can be partially compensated by a higher oxygen content, but that will only go so far as explained above.
The air that you normally breath is also composed of a large amount of nitrogen. This makes up almost 80% of ground-level air. While useful for many application, and needed by plants and nitrogen fixing bacteria, this is not normally something that is a critical chemical or gas used for life support in space, except for what is found in protien bars and chicken dinners. Humans can survive indefinitely without breathing nitrogen, so why bring it up? Weight is so critical in spaceflight that I can't imagine why inert gasses (Nitrogen and Argon) would be used unless specifically a part of a science experiment that called specifically for those gasses to be used.
While I will admit that while on the ground the Shuttle uses a cabin at sea-level pressures, I just can't see how it would be justified to bring up all that extra "stuff" in the form of compressed air when all you need is some liquid oxygen to make a viable environment for the astronauts.
Of course, I may be wrong about this, and there may be some convective heat reasons to add the extra gasses into the environment, but it seems silly. I know the Apollo spacecraft only used the partial pressure of oxygen except during launch and landing.
The problem I see from rumors like this is that they tend to totally dismiss the brilliance of some very hard working engineers who came up with this technology in the first place.
The first integrated chip devices where incredibly crude, and they were also the result of some very real pressures in the electronics industry to move away from the fragile vacuum tube-based electronic components. Keep in mind that many tubes only had an average failure time (MTF) of about 10 to 20 years. When computers were built using tube like this, that meant on average the computer would crash once per day due to a bad tube burning out or some other problem. Sometimes early computer researchers would be glad to have the computer run for just a couple of hours before it failed. A typical transistor on a CPU chip now can last thousands or millions of years on average, due to IC technology.
I have been involved with too many of these engineers who help to design some of this cool stuff that often we take for granted, and the fact is that many of them are just plain brilliant. To claim that they got help from extra terrestrials is just pure bulls*** that is trying to discredit some amazing insight and many years of very hard work to get some of these products into the hands of ordinary people.
The only real extra-terrestrial being that I've ever heard given credit for anything developed by these folks is simply God, and that depends on your point of view at that. And that is only a small group of these engineers.
That should, by statue, common law practice (or even by constutitional ammendment... if this is done properly) be also nullified. The point here is that the law is being abused and not applied "commonly", which was the original intention of common law in the first place. I.E. that all laws would apply in common to all.
Also, in the case of applying a law to blacks and not to whites, that is clear racial discrimination where there already is substantial precedent regarding the unenforcability of such laws, which is a strong point to be used in defending against such abuses. Other civil rights legislation can be used against police officer who engage in such behavior, which is why that is so seldom done now except in real small (population) counties or by ignorant police officers waiting to lose their badge. A community trying to do such a stupid thing now is begging for a lawsuit from either the ACLU or the NAACP (or both) that will likly bankrupt the community.
As far as going after out of town folks, one thing most communities try to avoid, avoid, avoid is some very negative PR that suggests they have tried to scalp tourists. In some states this got so out of hand (notably Missouri) that the state legislature stepped in to solve the problem. It seems that while one small town might not give a damn about tourists, there are several neighboring communities that do, and usually have more in terms of population (and hence votes in the state legislature) to get their way.
In the Missouri case, the state legislature forced all traffic fines to be put into the state general fund, with reimbursements going back to the communities on a per capita basis. Small towns of 100 people and 30 police officers ended up essentially going broke when the new revenue system came into effect (they only got funding based on the population of 100 people and not the 10,000 traffic ticket they pulled in each month). This is a much longer process, but these speed traps are going away. It is also largely because of these speed traps that many small communities ended up dying as interstate highways were built, again because interstate highway standards were written specifically in a way that such speed traps could never be put into place.
There are solutions to these problems, but it takes some creative thinking on how to get around them. And a good meme to deal with them.
So where do you draw the line on what gets enforced and what doesn't?
I think that the SCOTUS screwed up royally with the anti-soddomy laws in Texas when they ruled that they were unconstitutional.
IMHO, what should have been the ruling (and the same net effect, but a much broader interpretation) was that laws that are not actively enforced, and consistantly enforced for all citizens become in effect nullified. In other words, if the executive branch of government refused to enforce a given law and can't prove that the law has been enforced for a given period of time, it has in essence said that the law no longer exists.
So silly laws like the prohibition of minors to attend movie theaters on weekdays, or the serving of soda drinks on Sunday, or even the consumption of food in a public place (illegal in some cities) should be declared as unenforcable due to their lack of enforcement in the past. That way some arab-american serving soda drinks can't be thrown into jail on trumped up charges of violating this law while they think of some silly terrorist act he might have committed but can't prove yet.
This can and should apply to copyright laws as well (the point of this whole thread). Too bad this isn't a part of American common law tradition.
I absolutely hate this attitude. This come particularly from police officers and (worse yet) prosecutors. I know they have to think of the law often in this context, but there are times you have to look at the situation and use some better judgement regarding what gets enforced and what doesn't.
Besides, if you are going to suggest that all police officers enforce each and every law that governs the juristiction that they are living in, you would find that everybody would be in jail. It is litterally impossible to go through normal daily life without breaking some sort of stupid and pathetic law. The trick to living is that you try to keep these laws that you break down to petty crimes and things that otherwise are not getting into the face of other people. And things that normally the police don't enforce (like minor jaywalking or forgetting to put on your seat belt when you drive).
In addition, what a police officer should (in a democracy) suggest is "if you don't like the law, don't yell at me. Take this up with your (city counselman/state legislator/congressman)" If you really think it is ugly, run for public office. Surprisingly, you might just win and have to do something about it, or at least scare the person who ended up defeating you that they have to address the issue before they lose constituant support.
One of the "cool" bits of DNA lore include his slashdot interview This is an absolutely priceless bit of history for /. itself, and goes on to show what typical interviews of DNA were like.
If you can get ahold of the radio scripts (compiled into book form), there is also a bit of an autobiography of DNA included in them, as well as some biographical information that is floating around on various web sites. h2g2.com also has some information about DNA as well. As has been pointed out, there are also several biographies of this man's life available on Amazon.
Well, yes the 9600 baud modem was outdated hardware.
I did have a 14,400 modem that I usually used at 9600 baud... sometime even 4800 baud if the phone lines were bad to do web surfing on though. And yes, this was in the very, very early days of the web when you could get a lot more information from Gopher.
9600 wasn't really as much of a blip as you think, however. This is pretty much the maximum baud rate that you can use to send over a telephone line using simple serial data transmission techniques that were common prior to 9600 baud modems (like 2400 or even 300 baud modems common in the 1970's) Anything that is of higher bandwidth requires sending multiple bits simultaneously with additional error correction techniques.
The point here is that using a program like Lynx is something that you can use browse at very low bandwidth, mainly because it doesn't do any sort of graphical rendering.
And the question I had was not arguing about the particular equipment anyway, it was how this software compared to Lynx, and pointing out that software like this has been around since practically the very beginnning of the web.
I've been having a hard time even knowing where to begin with this post.
Robots are not the answer, and the necessary artificial intelligence to get robots to do all of the cool things you are suggesting is going to be several centuries away. Sure, there have been some rather spectacular robotic missions to the outer planets (like Cassini or Voyager), but keep in mind these all had huge teams of people on the Earth working usually 24/7 trying to keep these going and had incredible costs associated with them... usually on the order of $1 billion or more for each mission. This is simply out of the question for realistic and practical robotic mineral extraction from asteroids.
Also, when you get to a production environment (as opposed to exploration missions) there are other factors that come into play where you simply are going to have to have a flesh and blood person on hand to get "dirty" and pound on stuff to get it to work correctly. On site human judgement, together with being able to send instructions without having to come up with the computer programming necessary to accomplish a totally new task never thought of before, are going to make having real people on the ground where the dirt is being pushed around. And that means you also have to have all of the related facilities necessary to keep people alive.
In addition, I feel like we need to have HUMAN colonization of space, not robotic. There is something twisted and wrong to assume that people are no longer needed as life moves into space. There are some individuals that seem to hate humanity as a whole, and would prefer mass genocide of most of the peoples of this Earth (excepting themselves and close family members or friends that think the way they do). I disagree completely and feel there needs to be a place for humanity among the rest of the stars of this galaxy. The first step is simply getting up there and going to places like the Moon or Mars.
Importantly, you can go to the Moon with a relatively small group of people (5-20 or so to start with) to make a completely self-sufficient community. That is the critical factor, and something that simply can't be done with an O'Neil colony. Yes, you can get minerals from asteroids, but you have to get to the asteroids in the first place. That is not as easy as it seems, and the Moon is considerably easier to get to.
If the Earth had a moon the size of Phobos, it would be a different story. BTW, Mars has a moon the size of Phobos, where you can extract minerals effeciently without having to worry (too much) about getting out of the gravity well. Of course, if you are going all the way to Mars to get those resources, why not also put some people down on that planet to do some poking around. And with a group already pounding the dirt down there they will have to be self-sufficient as well.
We aren't "gods" with the ability to manipulate orbits of planetary objects and put them where convient. I think the task that you have glossed over is substantially more difficult than you can possibly imagine in terms of mineral extraction, and will require an incredible amount of human labor in order to get the stuff done. Most of the current space program that has existed so far has been done relatively hidden from view where only a few astronauts who are hyper specialists (most with PhD's) represent teams of thousands not seen. In the future what you are going to see is rather than this huge group of people staying on the Earth to keep operations going in space, that army of people necessary to keep space exploration going will have to move up into space as well. That is the real challenge, and is going to fundimentally change the way living in space is going to be perceived.
I know I am coming from an American perspective on this, in part because this is mostly how the area that I live in right now was built and created, through exactly this sort of colonization process. I am only a few generations from the very first inhabitants to this area I'
I know this is a late reply to your comment, but I want to tackle this comment and put in some replies before it gets archived.
RE: older homes and moving them. You will never see a home that is more than a century old, particularly one that was "stick built" or with masonry be brought down a super highway (autobahn or interstate) at 90 mph. Instead, it will be on special trucks, often "built" on site under the home, and rarely will it even get above about 5 mph... usually less. It is more than just speed and time. The point I was trying to make is that if you are going to be moving homes around all over the place, they have to be built to do that, and that includes a "space station".
While the ISS might eventually be brought up to a geo-sync orbit (or L-5 as a museum piece), the process of doing that would be the space equivalent of moving a lighthouse down the road a couple of miles. If it weren't so big most people involved with it would simply prefer to let it deorbit and crash into the ocean (as happened to Mir and Skylab). The difficulty involved (to answer your question here) is that while low acceleration may be possible to move something from L-5, unless it was built to be moved it would take an incredibly large amount of time to move, and require specialized labor of a magnitude that doing so wouldn't be worth it unless it was a historic artifact worthy in its own right and essentially priceless. This is while older homes are moved at all, and is an incredibly expensive process.
As far as projections into the future, I don't see any fancy machines being built in the next 10 years that are substantially different than anything currently being built. Indeed, space is a frontier, which means that the big concern is that the technology base is actually going to be lower than where people are coming from. If you are going to somewhere else in the solar system, you will find that very low-tech approaches will have to be found to get a colony established. Things like horses will be common as they can self-replicate, and with a technology base that was common 1000 years ago. The problem here is that people will have to relearn how to establish industries that are taken for granted now due to mass scale industrialization, like how to sheer wool and spin it into thread. You will see bizzare things like a horse carriage with a GPS reciever, but that will be the nature of going into new worlds. And a common theme for most good SF authors.
There is no way that you can plop down everything to Mars needed to re-create a 21st century 1st world city in one single shot. The problem with the L-5 colony groups is that they assume that a Manhattan or Apollo scale project can be mounted to help build the space station, and unfortunately there just isn't a national will to spend the economic resources necessary to put something like that together (unless you have some sort of SF type doomsday issue like a black hole swallowing up the sun).
In the case of 2001, Arthur C. Clarke was heavily involved with the writing of the script, and the book was always something that was to be done indepently.
That, and Mr. Clarke (like DNA) were already well established book authors before the movies were in production.
This movie did at least have a rough draft of a script from DNA, which at least gave some directions as to where he wanted this project to go. The thing that I have been most impressed with DNA was that he totally understood the concept that the medium changes the message, and that each adaptation to a new medium can substantially change the product.
I hope that when (not if....this is also something inevitable due to the fact that the movie is being produced and soon to be released by a major Hollywood studio) the DVD version of this movie comes out that it does not become a lame MPEG copy of the movie with a bunch of boring stuff thrown on as "extras". I think DNA would have relished the DVD medium as something entirely different and worthy of its own interpretation of the Hitchhiker story. I don't think that will happen, however.
After hearing about all of the "cool" stuff this is doing, I was wondering just what was the difference between this vs. web browsing via Lynx or some other low graphic-intensive application?
I don't do it lately, but back when 9600 baud modem connections were still considered state-of-the-art (or at least typical for a computer geek/college student trying to get some sort of net access), I routinely did web browsing via Lynx. I could even do reasonable access at 4800 baud... which would work even with pure analog telephone lines and switching equipment that could be commonly found in 3rd world countries (or rural America back in the 1980's... as was my case).
Essentially, this seems like more of a return to the old rather than something truly new and remarkable.
In short, what is the difference?
Just reading about how this movie was made would make me think that a "making of..." documentary about this movie would be almost as entertaining as the movie itself.
In short, DNA could very likely be a character in his own book. Or conversely, his own life was so bizzare that in many ways the books (not just the Hitchhiker trilogy) mirror his own life. The more I read about DNA's life experiences, the more facinating I find him to be.
I found this bit to be almost priceless from the Telegraph story: (to pharaphrase) The producers of this movie are "two men working from a barge named Polly, moored on the Regent's Canal in an unfashionable part of Islington, north London."
I don't think DNA could have done better for a new book opening scene.